Authors: Dennis Friedman
P
RINCE
G
EORGE WAS
grief-stricken at the death of his father. ‘I have lost my best friend & the best of fathers,’ he wrote. ‘I never had a word with him in my life. I am heart-broken and overwhelmed with grief but God will help me in my great responsibilities & darling May will be my comfort as she had always been.’ His addendum that ‘We’ve seen enough of the intrigue and meddling of certain ladies’ was a clear enough reference to his late father’s paramours, but when he went on to say that ‘I’m not interested in any wife, except my own’ the meaning was unclear, and it was difficult to know for whom the words were intended. If they were meant to reassure Princess May they were superfluous. Whatever the Prince’s faults infidelity was not one of them. That he needed his wife now more than ever was confirmed by the above diary entry. If he was reassuring himself that as a red-blooded male he would have to resist the impulse to stray, such reassurance was more the result of wishful thinking than of reality. It is possible that he was addressing Queen Alexandra to whom he was still inappropriately attached, telling her that unlike her late husband her son would never be unfaithful to her. It was not long, however, before Queen Alexandra was to put his faithfulness to her to the test.
On Monday 9 May 1910, three days after the death of King Edward VII, the accession of King George V was proclaimed by Garter King-of-Arms from the balcony of Friary Court, St James’s Palace. ‘That the high and mighty Prince George Frederick Ernest Albert is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become our only lawful right Liege Lord; George V by the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, to whom we acknowledge all
faith and obedience, with all hearty and humble affection, beseeching God, by whom Kings and Queens do reign, to bless the Royal Prince George the Fifth with long and happy years to reign over us.’
Princess May became not only the Queen Consort of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the seas but Empress of India. Her own ambitions, and those of her late mother Princess Adelaide Duchess of Teck, were fulfilled at last.
On 20 May 1910, after three days lying in state in Westminster Hall, King Edward VII’s remains were taken to Windsor Castle and the coffin placed in the vault below the Prince Albert Memorial Chapel. At the funeral Queen Alexandra, accompanied by her sister Marie Feodorovna, the Dowager Empress of Russia, insisted on standing at the foot of her husband’s coffin. Although this may well have been the custom in St Petersburg it was certainly not the custom at the Court of St James. Queen Mary, relegated to an inferior position, deemed it unseemly to invoke protocol and challenge her mother-in-law’s presumptuous action.
The as yet uncrowned King George V had no difficulty in accepting that there were two women in his life. Ever since Queen Alexandra had presented him and Princess May with York Cottage as a wedding present, his mother and his bride had vied with each other for his attention. It was inevitable that his attachment to his mother would persist into his adult life and he probably thought it entirely appropriate that it should be so. It was equally inevitable that his devotion to her would transfer itself on to all those who, from the nursery onwards, had selflessly served his needs. Among these were his nursery attendant and valet Charles Fuller, his tutor Mr Dalton, Edward Bacon (who helped him with his stamps), his Private Secretary Sir Arthur Bigge and various others, the chief of whom was Princess May, on whom he depended.
Queen Mary would have been happier with her maternal role towards her not-yet-grown-up husband had she been given a free hand to manage both it and their home without interference. She realized that Queen Alexandra’s primary motive in giving them the cottage at Sandringham was to keep her son close by. When the time came for the Queen Dowager
(as Queen Alexandra was now known) to move out of Buckingham Palace, in order to make room for the new incumbents, problems arose. She was as reluctant to move back to Marlborough House as in 1901, on the death of Queen Victoria, she had been to move from her home at Marlborough House to Buckingham Palace. There was no question of her not moving, but she refused to give her daughter-in-law the satisfaction of knowing when the move was to take place. She felt that only at Sandringham could she take comfort in familiar surroundings. The house had been built for her by her late husband King Edward VII, and she remained there until her death in 1925.
The Dowager Queen also seemed to be reluctant to hand over some of the Crown jewels to which she had become attached and which were now due to the Queen Consort. The fact that she eventually both handed them back and moved out of the Palace did little to reduce Queen Mary’s frustration. She was anxious to get on with redecorating Buckingham Palace in a style more suited to her own tastes than those of her mother-in-law. In a letter to her Aunt Augusta, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Mary wrote of her irritations at the delay: ‘the odd part is that the person causing the delay & trouble remains supremely unconscious as to the inconvenience it is causing, such a funny state of things & everyone seems afraid to speak’. The ‘everyone’ who was afraid to speak was presumably King George, who, torn between his loyalty to his wife and his loyalty to his mother, shut his eyes to the problem in the hope that it would go away. There is certainly no evidence that he discussed his wife’s feelings with his mother, deciding, probably wisely, to stay out of a conflict in which there could be no winners. Queen Mary had an ally in Mademoiselle Bricka. In a letter to her old governess some months before the Coronation, she wrote: ‘Life is
too
fatiguing for me, I have
too
much to do, to think of, I am getting worn out and people bother one so, I am sick of the everlasting begging for favours of all kinds!’
When the time came for Queen Mary to redecorate Buckingham Palace there were more problems. She did not care for Queen Alexandra’s furniture and began to replace it with heirlooms – which had been stored
away and not seen since the days of King George IV and King William IV – as well as rehanging pictures and changing rugs and brocades. Bearing in mind that the palace was a not particularly well-designed home of six hundred rooms, many of which were uninhabitable and hardly suited for any purpose, this was no mean task. For the first time in her married life Queen Mary was given the opportunity to put her house in order. She could not wait to do so. When she was a child her parents had had no home of their own, and when she married Prince George York Cottage was furnished by Princess Alexandra, aided and abetted by Prince George.
King George was looking forward to the Coronation which would confirm him and Queen Mary officially in a role that had been ceremonially proclaimed but not yet publicly acclaimed by his peers and his eagerly awaiting subjects. The Dowager Queen was dreading the royal rite of passage, a reminder that less than ten years earlier her own regal status at the side of her husband had been confirmed. Queen Mary, more than anyone, sensed the anguish her mother-in-law was suffering and feared that some incident would trigger a breakdown and ruin the day for them all. Aware that the Dowager Queen and her daughter, Princess Victoria, had never liked her, she feared that they might well conspire out of jealousy to undermine the role she was creating for herself and behind which she was to shelter for the remainder of her life. Queen Alexandra was becoming seriously depressed. Her inability to give up her past – revealed by her reluctance to prepare herself for the move to her ‘new’ home – was due as much to depression as it was to a more or less unconscious wish to sabotage her daughter-in-law’s Coronation. She was tearful, dwelt on the past and felt ‘hopeless’ and ‘helpless’. She became preoccupied again with the death of her beloved son Eddy nineteen years earlier and reminded her family that following the death of his father Eddy should rightfully have been King. She had conveniently ‘forgotten’ that her eldest son was ill-educated and virtually illiterate, vague and unintelligent and the subject of a homosexual scandal of which his younger brother seemed to be ignorant. Prince George’s abhorrence of same-sex relationships had caused him once to comment that he thought people like that shot themselves.
The country had been spared a homosexual King and seemed not displeased that a brother whose homophobic views seemed unnecessarily vehement was to take his place. The family breathed a sigh of relief when the Dowager Queen declared she was too ill to attend the Coronation service.
Queen Mary was relieved that she would not have to cope with her mother-in-law on a day she saw as ‘hers’. She had still to contend with interference from another source. King George’s conservatism, which had developed into a controlling urge to preserve the
status quo,
made clear his views about contemporary dress. The fashions of the late Victorian era, which were good enough for his parents, were not only good enough for him but also for his wife. His insistence that Queen Mary dress in the same
passé
style as Queen Alexandra set a new vogue. Following a state visit to France just before the outbreak of war in 1914 a newspaper reported that the Queen had a wonderful success, the Paris mob went mad about her, and it was rumoured that her out-of-date hats and early Victorian gowns would become next year’s fashions’. This prediction may have been made tongue in cheek but, had it not been for the war, what was intended as satire might well have come about.
The socially anxious and self-conscious hide beneath uniforms and uniformity. George V convinced himself that it was his knock-knees which no tailor was able to disguise that had made him emotionally vulnerable since childhood rather than his pathological attachment to his mother. To his chagrin his son Bertie also suffered from knock-knees. The effort which he had made to cure his son’s defect – notwithstanding the pain caused by keeping a child in leg braces day and night and the tears which resulted – was as much a reflection of his anxiety about his own appearance as it was for the well-being of his son.
The Coronation of King George V and Queen Mary, which took place on 22 June 1911, was on a grand scale. Eight thousand people attended the ceremony in Westminster Abbey and many thousands more lined the streets of London to cheer first the Queen’s procession and then the King’s procession as they entered the Abbey. Thousands more well-wishers stood
outside Buckingham Palace as, after the ceremony, the newly crowned King and Queen appeared repeatedly on the balcony before their subjects. The seventeen-year-old David, shortly to be invested as Prince of Wales in Caernarvon Castle and now heir to the throne, summed up in his diary, in terms all the more revealing for what was omitted, the events of the day.
Buckingham Palace, London June 22 1911. Papa and Mama’s Coronation day. Papa rated me a midshipman – I breakfasted early & saw Mama & Papa at 9.00 & then dressed in my Garter clothes and robe, & left in a state carriage at 10.00 with Mary & the brothers. We arrived in the Abbey at 10.30 & then walked up the Nave & Choir to my seat in front of the peers. All the relatives & people were most civil & bowed to me as they passed. Then Mama & Papa came in & the ceremony commenced. There was the recognition, the anointing and then the crowning of Papa, and then I put on my coronet with the peers. Then I had to go & do homage to Papa at his throne, & I was very nervous …
This is an account of the most eventful day in the lives of two people, one who had not wanted to be King and the other who wanted nothing more than to be Queen.
The entry in the King’s diary was even less emotional than his son’s:
We left Westminster Abbey at 2.15 (having arrived there before 11.0) with our Crowns on and our sceptres in our hands. This time we drove by the Mall, St James’ Street & Piccadilly, crowds enormous & decorations very pretty. On reaching B.P. [Buckingham Palace] just before 3.0 May & I went out on the balcony to show ourselves to the people. Downey photographed us in our robes with Crowns on. Had some lunch with guests here. Worked all afternoon with Bigge & others answering telegrams & letters of which I have had hundreds. Such a large crowd collected in front of the Palace that I went out on the balcony again. Our guests dined with us at 8.30. May and I showed ourselves again to the people. Wrote & read. Rather tired. Bed at 11.45. Beautiful illuminations everywhere.
And so with comments reminiscent of an entry in a ship’s log, the couple’s longest day came to an end.
Barely had the Coronation been concluded than preparations began for the ceremony to be repeated in India. This was not so much for the benefit of the people of India as for King George, who, now no stranger to pageantry, was looking forward to a Durbar at which he could crown himself Emperor of India. His fascination with India had begun during his first visit in the winter of 1905–6. With his overwhelming self-consciousness temporarily assuaged by the success of the events of 22 June, he was encouraged to seek further reassurance from the people of India that he was their Emperor in fact as well as in name. He convinced himself that his visit to a country in the midst of nationalist fervour would somehow ‘allay unrest’, as he put it to Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, in a letter dated 8 September 1910. ‘I am sorry to say [the] seditious spirit unfortunately exists in some parts of India.’ Perhaps he recalled a similar optimism on his part when, following his visit to Ireland in 1897, he had convinced himself that the friendly accord between its people and the Crown which he had fostered would somehow resolve the political issues of the day.
Lord Morley was understandably reluctant to give consent to such a financially, and perhaps politically, costly venture. Four days later, in a letter to the King, the Secretary of State tactfully pointed out that the cost of the visit would have to be borne by the Indian tax-payer and that the absence of the Sovereign might cause some embarrassment to business at home. He went on to congratulate the King on his strong sense of ‘Imperial duty’ and the ‘sympathetic, almost passionate, interest taken in the people of India that inspire[s] the present proposal in Your Majesty’s mind’. Two months later the Cabinet reluctantly agreed to the visit but only after it had closely considered the cost of its many implications. Since it was forbidden for the crown worn at the Coronation to be taken out of the country, this necessitated the making of a special Imperial Crown, which was undertaken by Garrard, the Crown Jeweller. The second Coronation, however, to which the King had been looking forward, was
not possible. The Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out that because many of the guests at the ceremony would be Muslims and Hindus the Christian service of consecration, deemed essential by the Archbishop, would be inappropriate. It was therefore decided that the King should appear at the Durbar already wearing the new crown. The so-called ‘boons’ expected – which usually took the form of remissions of prison sentences or reductions in taxes, together with a proposed cash gift to further academic research – were considered too costly by the Cabinet. It was decided, again reluctantly, that it would be less expensive for the King’s visit to mark the remove of the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi, thus reversing the controversial partition of Bengal introduced by Lord Curzon in 1905 which provoked the enmity of the Bengalis and was described as Lord Curzon’s ‘unintentional but grievous mistake’.