Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (75 page)

Most dramatically, he dumped centuries of German dynastic history, culture and family connection by renaming the royal family the ‘House of Windsor’. His German relatives were stripped of their British honours and titles. And those who remained in Britain were given new, British-sounding names as well, so that, for instance, the Battenbergs became the Mountbattens.

Here the very deficiencies of George’s education helped. Speaking only English (probably the first king to do so since before the Conquest), he identified himself solely with England and the empire. In other circumstances, his insularity and Little Englandism would have been a disadvantage; now they became an asset. The novelist and radical H.G. Wells might denounce ‘an alien and uninspiring court’; George was able to reply, truthfully, ‘I may be uninspiring but I’ll be damned if I’m an alien!’ Neither his polyglot father and grandmother, both of whom spoke English with a slight though unmistakable German accent, could have got away with that.

Next George used a wholesale remodelling of the honours system to accommodate the renewed Windsor monarchy to the new social forces that had emerged in the war years and just before, such as women, socialism and the vast growth of both the civil and the armed services. The key step was the establishment of the Order of the British Empire. The ancient orders of chivalry, such as the Garter and the Thistle, were deliberately exclusive, in both size and rank. And they were wholly male. The Order of the British Empire, on the other hand, was designed to be as large and inclusive as possible and to honour women as well as men.

The first investiture was equally revolutionary. It took place not in the plush and gilt interiors of Buckingham Palace, but in the open air, at Glasgow Rangers’ football stadium at Ibrox Park in September 1917. Here the star of the show was Miss Lizzie Robertson, who wowed the 70,000-strong crowd by turning up in her natty khaki overalls to receive the Medal of the British Empire, ‘For devotion to duty in a national projectile factory’.

The original insignia of the order featured a figure of Britannia in the centre. But, after their deaths, it was replaced by the twin profiles of the founders of the order, King George V and Queen Mary. It would be hard to think of a more fitting memorial to the ‘People’s King’, as contemporaries already called him.

Also founded at the same time was another consciously ‘democratic’ order, the Companions of Honour. This conferred no title of rank or special precedence and was aimed at those new powers in the land such as the trade union bosses and Labour mayors who professed a wholesome socialist contempt for such outmoded trappings of class and wealth. Prominent among the original seventeen Companions were the leaders of the Metal Workers, the Railwaymen and the Transport Unions.

But it soon became clear that the Palace had been wrong to take the socialists’ levelling pretensions seriously. For it turned out that the new aristocracy of labour was every bit as keen on badges and baubles, knighthoods and peerages, as the old aristocracy of birth and wealth. The result was a remarkable trade-off. ‘We are all socialists now,’ declared the
Darlington Northern Star
after the sweeping changes of 1917. But it should also have added: ‘We are all royalists now’ – even trade unionists, socialists and suffragettes.

Most ‘socialist’ of all, perhaps, was George’s treatment of his Russian cousin, the dethroned Nicholas II. The Russians had been Britain’s allies against Germany. Nevertheless, tsarism was profoundly unpopular with Liberal and Labour politicians, who rejoiced at its fall. And George let this fact, rather than family ties or sentiment, govern his behaviour. He vetoed any offer of refuge to the imperial family, leaving them instead to their grisly fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks, after they seized power in the second, more extreme revolution of October 1917. Subsequently the king wept crocodile tears. Or perhaps he had simply suffered a convenient amnesia.

But there was more to the reinvention of the British monarchy in 1917 than a remarkable, and remarkably successful, heading off of the threat of Red Revolution. The monarchy had long been a welfare monarchy, honouring, and thereby encouraging, the charitable donations which in the days before the welfare state had financed healthcare, education and poor relief. Now, as the state, under the impulse of socialism, was starting to take over these areas, it shifted to become a service monarchy, rewarding those who did that bit more in their jobs and communities. It was committed to the ethos of public service, of which it saw itself as the apex and exemplar. It was not socialist, far from it. But it did believe that ‘there was such a thing as society’. Which is why, from that day to this, it has tended to be more comfortable with Labour and wet Tory governments, rather than high and dry Thatcherite ones.

The monarchy had become a moral one. And it was morality, in its vulgar sense of sexual behaviour, which was to carry it both to its peak and its depths.

IV

The ‘family monarchy’ was also a product of the year of transformation of 1917. For the last 200 years the Hanoverians had continued the German practice of marrying only into fellow-German princely families. Now George altered the rules to decree that his children could marry Englishmen and women. ‘This was an historic day,’ he wrote in his diary. It was. A German dynasty had become an English family – even, perhaps, the representative Great British Family.

Here again George’s deeply conventional character meant that the role fitted like a glove – and much more comfortably than his crown. At his father’s coronation, Edward’s collection of mistresses, past and present, had been given special accommodation, known irreverently as the ‘Loose Box’. George, in contrast, had the most blameless personal life of any king since George III in the eighteenth century.

But for the family monarchy to establish itself also depended on the next generation. Here the prospects were mixed. George V had two older sons: David Edward, prince of Wales, born in 1894, and Albert George, duke of York, who followed a year later. Despite the closeness of their ages, they turned out to be very different in character.

David Edward took after his grandparents: he inherited Queen Alexandra’s blond-haired and blue-eyed good looks and King Edward’s temperament. He was intelligent, curious, a good linguist and a natural charmer. But he was also contrary, found it difficult to concentrate and reverted to the Hanoverian norm by getting on badly with his father.

Albert George, on the other hand, was a slower, dimmer version of his father. He passed sixty-eighth out of sixty-nine in his final school exams, was knock-kneed and cursed with a dreadful stammer. But he had application, stamina and at the age of seventeen became a convinced Christian. The two brothers, in short, were the hare and the tortoise.

Especially with women. David Edward acquired a
maîtresse en titre
even before the end of the First World War. But there was no sign of a wife. Two years later, in 1920, Albert George encountered Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. But Elizabeth was in no hurry and Albert George, inexperienced and justifiably afraid of rejection, hesitated. Not till 1922 and at what was rumoured to be the third attempt was his proposal accepted.

Elizabeth, daughter of an earl and cousin of a duke, was exactly the kind of spouse that George had envisaged for his children when he changed the royal marriage rules in 1917. The king was delighted, and his letter of congratulation to his son ended: ‘I feel that we have always got on very well together (very different to dear David)’. The marriage thus neatly squared the circle. It was socially acceptable, as the king required; it was also rooted in romantic love, as the post-war popular mood demanded.

The popular mood also demanded that the wedding be turned into a public spectacle. It took place at Westminster Abbey on 26 April 1923, the first of a royal prince to be held there since the Middle Ages, and the sermon was preached by Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of York. The great Victorian archbishops had been outstanding intellectuals. Lang instead was a courtier and committee man, with a view of Christianity in which the monarchy, rather than the cross, stood centre-stage as the symbol of the nation’s faith.

George had already turned the monarchy into a monarchy of duty. Now Lang and his ilk added a new responsibility to the already overburdened royal shoulders: to have, or at least to appear to have, a perfect marriage: ‘You cannot resolve that [your marriage] shall be happy,’ his sermon warned the couple in a solemn admonition, ‘you can and will resolve that it shall be noble.’ Or, in less elevated language: you will stick together come what may and never, ever divorce.

Pressure had been mounting since the turn of the nineteenth century to liberalize England’s highly restrictive divorce laws. But the opposition to reform was also strong. It had been led by Lang despite his own (probably non-practising) homosexuality in the name of the defence of Christian marriage; now, with his marriage sermon, he enlisted the family monarchy as a powerful ally in his campaign.

As it happened, the Yorks were happy. At least, George was: his marriage ‘transformed him, and was the turning point of his life’. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1926, and another, Margaret Rose, four years later. The result was an idyllic family life which, despite the trappings of wealth and royalty, the press contrived to present as ‘normal’.

But Albert George was the second son. Meanwhile, the elder, David Edward, carried out a series of spectacularly successful tours of the empire – Canada, Australia and India – and the United States. He glad-handed, defied protocol and flaunted his sex appeal. The crowds went wild and he became the first royal star of the new mass media of the cinema, radio and the illustrated press. He was a celebrity and a royal rebel. But did he have a cause? Or was it mere self-indulgence?

In 1935 George V celebrated his Silver Jubilee. The king-emperor, now almost seventy, was worried about the effort and expense. But the coalition national government, formed to cope with the depression, was keen for a demonstration of national unity in the face of threats at home and especially abroad from the rising dictatorships of Germany and Italy.

On 6 May the king, queen and their children processed to St Paul’s for a service of thanksgiving. The painting of the event shows a scene of almost Byzantine rigidity. Only two figures break rank: David Edward, who transfixes the spectator with an imperious stare, and Elizabeth, duchess of York, who simpers, Madonna-like, over her two little daughters. ‘We all went away’, the British prime minister remembered, ‘feeling that we had taken part in something very much like a Holy Communion.’

Monarchy was no longer simply in alliance with religion; it had become a religion. It had also become a substitute at once calmer, saner and more decent for the virulent nationalisms of Continental Europe.

But on 20 January 1936, only six months after his jubilee, George V died at Sandringham. Once heralds had proclaimed the death of kings. Now it was the BBC.

The British Broadcasting Corporation was less than ten years old. It had been established by royal charter in 1927 and given a monopoly of the new medium of radio. Its first director general was John Reith. Like his friend Lang, Reith was an ambitious, driven, sexually ambiguous Scot who was determined to use the BBC to inculcate a morally cohesive society. Also like Lang, Reith saw the monarchy as central to his campaign. The result was an alliance between the monarchy and the corporation almost as close and important as that between the crown and the Church of England.

George made the first Christmas broadcast from Sandringham on 25 December 1932; he broadcast again for the jubilee three years later – ‘I am speaking to the children above all. Remember, children, the king is speaking to you.’ Now radio would announce his death to Britain and the empire. At just gone midnight on the 20th, Reith himself read the final bulletin: ‘Death came peacefully to the king at 11.55 p.m.’ The next day Reith altered the text of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s broadcast to the nation, ‘bringing in the moral authority, honour and dignity of the throne’.

But as one tradition was invented, another was undone. At midnight on the 20th also, King Edward VIII, as he now was, ordered the clocks at Sandringham, kept half an hour fast since Edward VII’s time, to be put back to the right time. Lang, who by this time had succeeded as archbishop of Canterbury, reacted as though the new king had committed sacrilege. ‘I wonder what other customs will be put back also?’ he demanded.

The answer was legion, for Edward delighted in treading on establishment toes and ruffling retainers’ feathers. He wanted substantial cuts in the coronation service; he was most reluctant to move into Buckingham Palace; he made slashing reductions in the staff and running costs at Sandringham and Balmoral; he walked in the street; broke convention by insisting that his left profile appear on postage stamps; and said ‘something must be done’ about the unemployed. But all this was more an attitude than a serious programme of modernization.

Edward was serious about one thing, however: Wallis Simpson.

V

Wallis Simpson, born in 1896, and the impoverished descendant of two distinguished Southern families, was a classic woman on the make: hard-edged, firm-jawed, acquisitive and with a certain brittle style. ‘You can never be too rich or too thin,’ she is supposed to have said. She was also the most disruptive force in the twentieth-century British monarchy before the advent of Princess Diana.

David Edward had first met Wallis in 1931 and had quickly decided that, since ‘to him she was the perfect woman’, she was his natural sexual and intellectual partner in life. But there were obstacles. She was American, divorced and presently remarried to an American businessman resident in London. It would have been difficult to think of anyone further from his family’s or the establishment’s idea of a queen.

Edward was used to getting his own way. But, as prince of Wales, he had done so by breaking the rules. Now, as king, he would have to change them. This would have been difficult, though perhaps not impossible. He was popular and there was an embryonic ‘King’s Party’ with Winston Churchill himself as its leader. But, instead of exploiting these advantages, Edward, Micawber-like, merely waited for something to turn up. And, whether out of embarrassment or calculation, the establishment, led by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, played a similar waiting game. As did the British press, which threw a veil of silence over the affair.