Authors: Dennis Friedman
Brought up by surrogates, the King was separated from his mother at the age of twelve, neglected by his unfaithful father and bullied as a cadet in the Royal Navy, an institution rife, according to Winston Churchill, with ‘rum, buggery and the lash’. It is hardly surprising that he withdrew into himself, was unable to relate to women, loathed socializing, was terrified of public speaking (he declared the State Opening of Parliament ‘the most terrible ordeal I have ever gone through’), communicated both with his beloved mother and his adored wife mainly by letter and communed silently with his unique collection of postage stamps, the majority of which bore his own head. Neat, precise and orderly, he was obsessed with time (he kept the clocks in Buckingham Palace half an hour fast) and when at home followed a ritual that never varied.
The King was passionate about horses and field sports and was a countryman at heart. He was never more relaxed than when killing birds and animals in the woods and meadows of the Sandringham estate or deer-stalking
on the Scottish moors with a flask of whisky for warmth. Having spent most of his life in ships’ cabins, he preferred the tiny, cramped overcrowded rooms of York Cottage, his first marital home, to the splendour of Buckingham Palace.
At the beginning of King George V’s reign, peace and prosperity were taken for granted, although the democratically elected government represented the interests of the landowners and the wealthy industrialists, rather than those of the lumpenproletariat whose voice was yet to be heard. Twenty-six years later, by the end of his reign, the King had witnessed the bungled handling and futile losses of the Great War in which a generation of young men had been exhorted – both by himself and his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II (now his enemy) – to lay down their lives for ‘King and Country’, had interfered impotently in the debate over Irish Home Rule, seen the gradual move towards Independence in India and watched, appalled, as women struggled for emancipation at home. In the face of these reversals of the established order with which he was unable to cope, the King, heavily dependent on his mother, his beloved brother Eddy, his tutors, his valet and his dominant wife, clung to his unhappy past. He became immobilized in a time warp, and was, anachronistically, perhaps the last of the eminent Victorians.
So traumatized was he by his unhappy childhood that the basically kind, faithful, good-natured King George unwittingly passed on to his older son David (Duke of Windsor) and his younger son Bertie (King George VI) the crippling axiom of ‘duty before love’ which had been so rigorously instilled into him. He was inclined to suppress his sons’ emotions and was unable to express his own warm feelings until, old and sick, he played nursery games with his granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, whom he used to allow to ride upon his back. David was so terrified of his father that he had been known to faint when summoned to the King’s study, and Bertie was not only a lifelong sufferer from chronic indigestion but, as a result of his rigid upbringing, was afflicted with a stammer.
Naïve yet grandiose, timid yet aggressive, weighed down by his oppressive sense of duty, King George V was a pivotal figure between the
hypocrisy and repression of the Victorian era and the damaging ‘kiss and tell’ of today’s liberated royals. Is the real King George V the tormented man – who concealed his true self first behind his mother’s skirts and later beneath the robes of state and the braids and epaulettes of his naval uniform – or the right-minded monarch whose misguided attempts to make ‘men’of his sons David (King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor) and Bertie (King George VI) sowed the seeds not only of their unhappiness but of the catastrophic misalliance of Prince Charles and Princess Diana?
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3 J
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1865 the birth of Prince George, the second son of Princess Alexandra and Prince Edward the heir apparent, was welcomed unreservedly by the people of Great Britain. He was christened George Frederick Ernest Albert at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 7 July 1865 and was henceforward known as ‘Georgie’ within the family. In the year of the Prince’s birth, the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston died – to be eventually succeeded by William Ewart Gladstone – and Karl Marx published
Das Kapital,
which was destined to alter the fundamental perceptions of the individual and the state. A few years earlier (1859) Darwin had sown the seeds of radical change with
The Origin of Species
which laid the foundation of modern evolutionary theory. During the course of King George V’s life, industrialization and new technology, the decline of the British Empire and an unprecedented war contributed to the transformation not only of the material world but also to the transformation of the old moral order.
There seemed no more stable symbol of the old world than the British Crown. Queen Victoria, Prince George’s grandmother, was both the world’s mightiest sovereign and the incarnation of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant values to which she believed she owed her enormous prosperity. For Queen Victoria, however, the year 1865 and the birth of Prince George did little to relieve her deep mourning for her husband Prince Albert, who had died four years earlier. For the young Princess Alexandra and Prince Edward, however, Prince George’s arrival enhanced what was thought to be a felicitous marriage. Their influence on the personality of a monarch who was to see Britain through radical social changes and world upheavals cannot be in any doubt. They passed on the well-intentioned, if
not always well-thought-out, parenting they had themselves experienced.
In the early nineteenth century Britain’s Royal Family (the precursor of the present House of Windsor) was, in common with other upper-class families, concerned more with instilling the virtues of correctness and discipline into their children and with suppressing their spontaneous feelings than with allowing them to develop at their own pace in a secure and loving environment. The system of child-rearing to which King George V and his parents were exposed was less impressed with the psychological welfare of children, about which little was then known, than with preserving the image of the Royal Family, that inflexible monolith currently known as the ‘Firm’. The ‘Firm’s’ members are expected to carry out functions such as attendance at ceremonial and social occasions and to behave in such a way as not to bring other (particularly more senior) members of it into disrepute.
The rigid and often sadistic upbringing to which King George V’s father, Edward Prince of Wales, was exposed throws light on the behaviour of his son. As a child, the Prince of Wales rebelled helplessly against ‘blind’ authority. As an adult, he contested the morality thrust upon him before he was ready for it. As a parent, he was destined to dump his rage, his lack of self-assurance and the unresolved anxieties of his childhood on to his second son, the future King George V. King Edward VII’s eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, died at the age of twenty-six, leaving the stage to his younger brother Prince George. It was to be several generations before the bewildering, exploitive, overdisciplined and intimidating upbringing to which both father and son were subjected would be regarded as anything other than normal.
Edward Prince of Wales, who was the second of Queen Victoria’s nine children, was born to a fanfare of trumpets. Much was expected of him, not only by his mother but also by her subjects. The Queen, whose first baby was Victoria the Princess Royal, was overjoyed when she gave birth to a son. Prince Edward was the first male heir to be born to a reigning sovereign for seventy-nine years. He was also Queen Victoria’s only male blood relative, since her father, the Duke of Kent, had died from
pneumonia when Princess Victoria was only eight months old.
If Queen Victoria was expecting the infant, Prince Albert Edward, named after her father the Duke of Kent, to compensate her for his loss, she was disappointed. Prince Edward was unaware that his mother’s approval was dependent upon his being a replica either of her father or of her husband Prince Albert, and he behaved like any other child. He soon discovered, however, that this was not what was expected of him. As a child and, later, as an adult, Queen Victoria had been dependent on elderly, wise and worldly men for advice and support. Prince Edward hardly came into this category and it was not long before his mother transferred the resentment she felt towards her father for leaving her on to her infant son.
The novelty of motherhood soon passed for Queen Victoria, but despite finding pregnancy disagreeable she had nine children. She would not have realized that being pregnant represented more a need to convert Prince Albert into a father than to produce children. The demands of her infants (other than those of her daughter whom she regarded as an extension of herself) were largely ignored. Shortly after Prince Edward’s birth Queen Victoria wrote to her Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians: ‘You will understand
how
fervent my prayers are and I am [sure]
everybody’s
must be, to see him resemble his angelic dearest father in
every, every
respect, both in body and mind. Oh! My dearest Uncle, I am sure if you knew
how
happy, how blessed I feel, and how
proud
I feel in possessing
such
a perfect being as my husband, as he is, and if you think you have been instrumental in bringing about this union, it must gladden your heart! How happy I should be to see our child grow up
just
like him!’ It was not long before Prince Edward found these expectations difficult, if not impossible, to live up to. Not having herself benefited from the presence of a father, Queen Victoria envied her children for possessing one.
In her later letters, many of them to her Uncle Leopold, the Queen rarely mentioned Prince Edward. When she did, she robbed him of his identity by merely referring to him as ‘the boy’. She was more enthusiastic about her firstborn, Princess Victoria, her dearest ‘Pussy’ and on
10 January 1843 she wrote to her Uncle Leopold, her mother’s brother: ‘She is very well and such an amusement to us, that I can’t bear to move without her; she is
so
funny and speaks so well, and in French also, she knows almost everything.’ Seven months later, she commented admiringly: ‘We find Pussette amazingly advanced in intellect, but alas! also in naughtiness.’ Prince Albert made no secret of the fact that Pussy was also his favourite child and, despite the arrival on the scene of her brother Prince Edward, she remained so.
At the age of twenty Queen Victoria, who was insufficiently confident of her ability to cope with new situations on her own, depended heavily on the support and kindness of her uncle. She also leaned on the advice of a dogmatic and fashionable German doctor, Baron Stockmar, who had befriended her uncle Leopold after his wife had died in childbirth. Dr Stockmar made himself indispensable to Prince Albert (a nephew of King Leopold) and after his marriage to Queen Victoria managed little by little to extend his influence over the British monarchy.
Queen Victoria first met Baron Stockmar when she was eighteen years old. He commented that he found her ‘unintelligent and unattractive’. When he discovered that he was able to influence the Queen and to dictate techniques of parenting that were to affect the British Royal Family for five generations he changed his tune. Like Rasputin he became the power behind the throne and, after Prince Albert’s marriage to his cousin Queen Victoria, the mentor to the English Court itself. The Baron’s aim was to restore the monarchy to the moral high ground it had lost as the result of the sexual promiscuity of some of Queen Victoria’s uncles, the brothers of her late father the Duke of Kent. Focusing his efforts on moulding Prince Edward into a model of morality, Stockmar laid the foundations for the hypocrisy which became the
sine qua non
of the Victorian era. He persuaded Prince Edward’s parents that it was important to suppress their son’s spontaneity and to instil in him a fear of his father and his teachers. Stockmar’s interference was responsible for Prince Edward’s later rebellious attitude to the social mores of his mother’s puritanical court.
In Prince Albert’s own childhood there also had been no question of
‘unconditional’ love. He had been only four years old when his mother, Princess Saxe-Coburg-Altenburg, was banished from the Court of Coburg for having a liaison with the Court Chamberlain and was forbidden to see her son again. Prince Albert’s adult life was presumably overshadowed by this ‘disgraceful’ affair, and he was clearly not disposed to tolerate similar behaviour in his son. To have lost his mother because of her love for a man – other than himself (or his father) – when his closeness to her was fundamental would have left him not only motherless but also with a permanent curiosity about the sexual activities of those closest to him.
The Baron’s was not a lone voice. In nineteenth-century Germany Dr D.G.M. Schreber’s book on child-rearing methods was the nursery bible. Schreber was a popular physician and pedagogue whose advice to parents was to crush the spirit of their children before they reached the age of four so that they would remain for ever compliant. One hundred and fifty years later such recommendations would have attracted the attention of the social services. Although extreme, Schreber’s attitudes were not entirely alien to Victorian parents to whom four-hourly feeds for babies, discipline and control, obedience, respect for elders and the injunction to be seen and not heard were regarded as essential. This child-rearing pattern was far removed from that of the late twentieth century when feeding on demand, the minimum of rules and few restrictions have become, for many, synonymous with love.
As an infant Prince Edward was much admired by his mother’s subjects. This was manifest in his travels around the British Isles with his governess Lady Lyttelton, the eldest daughter of the second Earl Spencer, whom the Queen had appointed to look after him. Prince Edward was growing up to be quiet and dreamy and often seemed lost in a fantasy world, possibly because the real world did not provide the love and attention to which every child is entitled. A nervous boy, he was unable to bond with a mother whose own views on child-rearing were overruled by those of the ever-present Baron Stockmar. The Prince found great comfort, however, in the hands-on mothering of Lady Lyttleton who loved and protected him and also, whenever the royal entourage toured the country, in
the admiration of the people. The seeds of love and attention were sown not in the arms of a loving and attentive mother but in the arms of a surrogate. They were later to germinate when, as a young adult, Prince Edward demonstrated an insatiable need for stimulating input from women. This need forced him into a life-style that distracted him from attending to the needs of his wife and children.