Authors: Dennis Friedman
Prince George, whose career as a naval officer had been interrupted at first by his own illness and later by the death of his brother, found comfort both in the isolation and the companionship of life at sea. Having relinquished his command of the
Melampus
in January 1892, a year later he returned to naval duties as Captain and continued to climb the career ladder. From 1893, until he retired from the Navy in 1901, he commanded the
Crescent
finally being promoted to Rear-Admiral.
Soon after the death of Prince Eddy Prince George became increasingly interested in the welfare and comfort of his sailors. He knew how it felt to be away at sea, sometimes for months at a time, separated from home and from family. Sensitive also to the financial hardship experienced by some naval pensioners, he suggested that should their circumstances become such that they would have to ‘come on the rates’ they should be properly cared for at the Haslar Hospital in Gosport. He had no difficulty in identifying with the impoverished. His hand was held out to them as he would have wished his own father’s hand to have been held out to him, even though his own poverty was emotional rather than financial. In a speech made at the opening of an institute at Great Yarmouth for the benefit of sailors, he stressed his appreciation of the benefactors who had made such an institution possible. ‘Who appreciated me?’ he might have asked himself. ‘Where was my benefactor when I most needed him?’ Prince George seldom let pass an opportunity when he did not emphasize the importance of both the Merchant Marine and the Royal Navy to the people of England. He was proud of all those who served their country at sea. None the less, despite his promotions, his status as a high-ranking naval officer and the growing appreciation by the country of his virtues, Prince George’s sense of low self-esteem persisted.
N
O ONE COULD
have been more devastated than the 24-year-old Princess May of Teck when she bade farewell to her dying Prince on 14 January 1892. Only a few weeks had passed since she had been summoned by Queen Victoria to Balmoral Castle to be considered as a bride for her cousin Eddy, Duke of Clarence. Despite the straitened circumstances that faced Princess May’s family, and her realization that by marrying the Duke of Clarence she would be securing the family fortunes, she had been reluctant at first to accept Queen Victoria’s offer. In the weeks that intervened, however, she slowly began to take an interest in Prince Eddy and found herself attracted to his physical and emotional frailty. Although, at twenty-eight, her husband-to-be was older than she, she felt protective and almost motherly towards him. What Prince Eddy needed, however, was not the smothering love given to him by Princess Alexandra but a ‘mother’ who cared sufficiently for him to allow him to develop into an adult. Realizing that other women found Prince Eddy attractive, Princess May soon began to revise her childhood perception of him as aggressive and dull. She was encouraged in this by her parents, who were quick to see the marriage as the answer to their financial difficulties.
Princess May’s mother, Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, was the granddaughter of King George III and first cousin to Queen Victoria. She was ash-blonde, blue-eyed, of a cheerful disposition and, at seventeen stone, grossly but happily overweight (at the time obesity was associated with prosperity). While Princess Mary Adelaide did not feel prosperous, she was, none the less, extravagant and charitable, and she was loved by her children. Princess May’s father, Francis, Duke of Teck, a direct descendent of King George II, was an impecunious army officer who had resigned from
the Austrian Army to marry Princess Mary Adelaide. If he thought that his marriage would put an end to his financial troubles he was mistaken. Princess Mary Adelaide’s circumstances were as straitened as his.
Fortunately, Queen Victoria, who was fond of her impoverished cousin, made the south wing of Kensington Palace available to the couple while they awaited the birth of their first child. On 26 May 1867 Victoria Mary Augusta Louisa Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes was born and was thereafter always referred to as May, after the month of her birth. It was not until 1910, when her husband, Prince George, ascended the throne of England, that she reverted to her given name and allowed herself to be designated Queen Mary. Because the 33-year-old Princess Mary Adelaide had been considered by medical opinion to be too old and too fat to give birth, it was thought that she might experience some difficulty during her confinement. Fortunately this was not the case, and during the next seven years she was to have three more children, all of them boys.
Princess May was born in the same room, in the same bed and almost on the same day of the year as Queen Victoria had been forty-six years earlier (24 May 1819). Perhaps her destiny had already been decided for her. Although at the time Queen Victoria took very little notice of her cousin Princess Mary Adelaide’s baby, years later, after Princess May had married her grandson Prince George, she expressed herself to be particularly fond of her. In May 1896 she wrote: ‘I like to feel your birthday is so near mine, that you were born in the same House as I was & that you bear my name. It is very curious that it should be so.’
Princess May’s mother was pleased with her first child. She had been born at full term and was strong and healthy. As Princess May grew older she quickly became self-sufficient. This led to her being mildly exploited by her doting but gregarious mother, who was delighted when her daughter accepted some responsibility for mothering her three younger brothers, a chore with which Princess May herself was possibly less delighted. Princess May’s birth was somewhat overshadowed by the almost simultaneous birth of two other grandchildren to Queen Victoria in the spring of 1867. Her daughter-in-law, Princess Alexandra, had given
birth to Princess Louise, and the Queen’s fifth daughter, Princess Helena (who had married Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein), had produced a son, Prince Christian Victor. Princess May was almost a year old when Queen Victoria wrote in her journal that ‘Mary T’s baby’ seemed ‘a dear merry healthy child’ but mitigated her praise of the baby by going on to write, ‘but not as handsome as she ought to be’.
Princess May grew up in a household in which money was chronically short. Her father’s financial vagueness and her mother’s extravagance led to the family becoming increasingly impoverished. Children are generally unaware of financial hardship unless it is constantly referred to. Princess Mary Adelaide complained frequently that she had nothing suitable to wear for the various drawing-rooms she was expected to attend as a member of the Royal Family, and Princess May must have found this puzzling since her mother was renowned for her lavish stylishness. As she grew older she could not help comparing the grandeur of Sandringham and Windsor with her own relatively simple home, Cambridge Cottage at Kew Green. Her impression that there was some material lack in her home life, despite not being entirely true, would have been emphasized during her visits to her maternal grandmother Princess Augusta of Hesse, Duchess of Cambridge.
Like her daughter, Princess Mary Adelaide’s mother was a large and stately lady, with a pronounced German accent. Unlike Princess Mary Adelaide, however, she was in no way extravagant either in manner or in clothes. As Princess May was later to recall, her grandmother was rather mean and none of her grandchildren enjoyed taking afternoon tea at the Duchess’s rooms at St James’s Palace. It was not only the ‘stingy teas’ of buns and rusks that she recalled. In an exchange of letters to her Aunt Augusta, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in 1909 she wrote: ‘I still meet older people sometimes who knew dear Grandmama & invariably talk so nicely of her. I wish I had been older to appreciate her properly, but in spite of her great kindness to us we were always rather afraid of her’ (Pope-Hennessy, 1959). Aunt Augusta replied that she wished: ‘You had been able really to know Grandmama; as it was you could not get in real
contact with her, besides she looked and could be rather severe, with her firm old notions and principles, though her heart ever was full of love for all her belongings.’
Princess May was happy to be one of her grandmother’s ‘belongings’ and, as an adult, felt deprived of those ‘afternoon teas’ of her childhood. The ‘stingy teas’, which at the time she experienced as being of little value, none the less symbolized a love freely given and later in life became confused with other tea parties and other small gifts which were either on offer or hers simply for the asking. Princess May’s passion for collecting trinkets caused her to ‘forget’ that when, as Queen Mary, she admired the baubles of her friends they were unable to refuse to give them to her. Her more fabled jewellery, however, came to her as the result of the deaths of family members to whom she had been particularly close. Princess Mary Adelaide died intestate in 1897, and her jewellery came into the possession of Princess May’s least favourite brother, the feckless, gambling Prince Frank, who claimed that before she died his mother had given it to him. Prince Frank gave it all to Ellen Constance Kilmorey, the wife of the Earl of Kilmorey, who was thought to have been his mistress. When the 39-year-old Prince died unexpectedly from pleurisy in October 1910, after a minor operation on his nose, Queen Mary, who had the right to do so but who was the first monarch to exercise that right, had his will ‘sealed’. No one would ever be allowed access to it. Her reasons for doing so can only be guessed at. Since that time all royal wills have been sealed. On Prince Frank’s death Queen Mary requested the repossession of the family jewels from her brother’s mistress and within a few days all were returned, including eight large cabochon emeralds fashioned into a necklace. These gems, together with those presented to her on her twenty-first birthday by her family and later by the Maharajahs and Princes at the Coronation Durbar in 1911, made up the bulk of her collection. The exhibitionistic Queen Mary did not hide away her finery as the secretive and withholding King George was to hide away his stamps but displayed them on all public occasions. When dining at home alone with the King, she often wore not only a great deal of jewellery but also her tiara.
The Tecks were known as the Royal Family’s poor relations. From time to time – and usually after Princess Mary Adelaide had been more than usually importunate – Queen Victoria would help them out financially. When Princess May was eighteen the Queen provided the Tecks with a grace and favour home in Richmond Park. Previously they had spent two years in Florence, both to escape their creditors and because it was thought cheaper to live in Italy. Although Princess May made good use of the time spent in Italy by familiarizing herself with the art and literature of the region, she never forgot what she considered to be a humiliating reminder of a poverty she was unable to understand. In moving to Florence she had left behind the palatial life-style led by the rest of her family. In Italy the paintings of the Italian Renaissance hung in museums. In England many of her relatives had paintings equally good on their walls. The seeds of envy, sown in early childhood, would have been strongly reinforced in one who was surrounded by affluence at which she could only look but in which she was not allowed to share. By the age of sixteen Princess May was aware that education and knowledge, unlike material wealth, were assets immune to bankruptcy.
A year later, on her seventeenth birthday, she began to take a somewhat different view. In a letter to her eldest brother Adolphus (‘Dolly’) listing her birthday presents she writes: ‘Mama gave me her carbuncle & diamond star earrings, 2 little bracelets with pearl clasps, & a plain pair of earrings …’ She ends her list with ‘Gdmama £2’. Clearly Princess Mary Adelaide, extravagant in every aspect of her life, was as magnanimous with her gifts to her daughter as her own mother had been parsimonious. Princess May’s birthday list was significant for its omissions. None of her Wales cousins, nor their mother Princess Alexandra, nor her godmother Queen Victoria gave her anything at all. Out of sight and out of mind, as far as the rest of her family was concerned, Princess May may have resolved that in future, whenever the opportunity arose, she would demonstrate that she was a valued recipient of gifts by wearing several items of jewellery simultaneously on public occasions. On 27 February 1892, seven years later, and this time on the ‘wedding day’ that never was, ‘Uncle
Wales and Motherdear’ presented Princess May with a present which had been intended for her. It was a
rivière
of diamonds, together with a dressing bag that Prince Eddy was to have given his bride.
Princess May’s parents had wisely engaged Mademoiselle Hélène Bricka, an Alsatian governess and companion who became close to the Princess and was someone in whom she was able to confide. Writing to her former governess just before her marriage to Prince George, Princess May complained about her parents: ‘I read as much as possible. But my hands are full, my father pulls me one way, my mother the other, it is good not to become selfish but sometimes I grumble at my life, at the waste of time, at the
petitesse de la vie
when one feels capable of greater things.’ Princess May’s hopes of achieving ‘greater things’ died with Prince Eddy. His death came as a shock not only to his fiancée but also to her mother, Princess Mary Adelaide. They both had every reason to mourn him, just as had Prince George who immediately wrote to his grandmother telling her that ‘no two brothers could have loved each other more than we did. Alas! it is only now that I have found out how deeply I did love him; & I remember with pain nearly every hard word & little quarrel I ever had with him & I long to ask his forgiveness, but, alas, it is too late now.’
Guilt and self-reproach came easily to Prince George. Brought up with his conscience at full stretch, terrified of offending his beloved mother, his tutor and, later, his senior officers, he was ready to blame himself for events for which he could not be held responsible. The demands of a harsh conscience can never be fully satisfied. When Prince George at last ceased to punish himself, it was because by then he had children on to whom he was able to shift the blame for his own real or imagined misdeeds.