A Brief History of the House of Windsor (5 page)

The marriage of Prince William of Wales and Catherine Middleton in April 2011 appears to have secured the future of the British throne for, at the least, half a century to come. So much about this young man and woman – their casual meeting, their on-again, off-again courtship, the relative ordinariness of their tastes, their friends, and above all their desire to live as unassuming a life as possible – is perfectly in tune with modern attitudes and expectations. They are seen as finding their own way in life, and as having the ability to relate to their future subjects without formality or unease. All evidence suggests that their popularity will continue to grow and that they will be highly successful sovereigns thirty years from now.

In this they are simply the latest in a series of personalities to have benefited the monarchy, for the Windsors have, throughout their short history, been fortunate in those who have led and belonged to it.

There is more to the House of Windsor than its sovereigns; those who have married into it have also made immense
contributions to its success. Queen Mary, wife of George V, was a minor princess who became the most regal of queens – but confessed at the end of her life that she would have loved to have had some ordinary experiences. Her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was the strong-willed wife of George VI. She put her formidable energies to work in supporting her shy and diffident husband and in preparing her daughter to rule. Her superb ability to relate to people in all circumstances, particularly amid the hardships of war, made the monarchy more accessible and more universally well regarded than it had previously been. It was this Queen Elizabeth who, more than anyone else, created the concept of royalty that is familiar to us today.

Prince Philip, scion of a minor and unstable royal house, was seen as alien and unsuitable when he married the heir to the British throne. Yet he brought to the role of consort enormous energy and intelligence, and – through his interest in technology, sports and conservation – succeeded in making the monarchy more modern and relevant. His outspokenness has entertained – or horrified – his wife’s subjects for over sixty years.

Another charismatic young woman, who turned out to share Queen Elizabeth’s innate ability with people, married into the family in 1981. Diana Spencer brought to royalty a glamour that was at first very welcome. The tragedy of her subsequent life was to provide the monarchy’s greatest challenge since the abdication crisis, yet she created for her sons a legacy of public sympathy and goodwill that bodes well for the future. Kate Middleton, a genuinely ordinary member of the British upper-middle class, has already demonstrated a personal charisma that is winning her more and more admirers and has shown that an ancient institution can still successfully absorb outsiders.

And what of the younger generations of Windsors? The queen’s children grew up at a time when royals were having to compete on equal terms with their subjects, in education,
in sports, in the armed forces and in employment. Some of these new experiences were decidedly painful, for them and for the country, yet lessons were learned and the adjustment has in general been a happy one. In the space of a single generation of royal youth it has come to seem unremarkable that they attend school (albeit private ones), go on to a provincial university, plan a career, have exposure to – and make friends with – people of all backgrounds. This has been standard practice for decades among other European monarchies, whose children have long been educated locally. The process has surely now gone as far as it can – there must be some distance left between royalty and everyone else, because they must remain an abstract national symbol, and one that reflects the nation’s better qualities. This is guaranteed by the homes in which they live, the vehicles in which they travel, the possessions and collections at their family’s disposal, the duties they perform and the deference of those who surround them. Informality and ordinariness have probably gone as far as they can go without letting too much ‘daylight in on magic’ (to quote Walter Bagehot’s famous phrase). The result is, perhaps, a royal family that is better adjusted, more comfortable with its people, and more genuinely popular with them, than ever before.

‘I am only a very ordinary sort of fellow.’

George V, on the occasion of his Silver Jubilee, 1935

Like his son and namesake after him, George V had never expected to be king. He was a second son, and his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, was the one who received the training for kingship, at least to a relative degree. The boys were born less than a year and a half apart, Albert Victor (at Queen Victoria’s request he was named after both his grandparents, but was known to the family as ‘Eddy’) in January 1864 and George Frederick Ernest Albert on 3 June 1865. Their father, the Prince of Wales, was not entrusted by the queen with any role in affairs of state and therefore his sons, although they were respectively second and third in line to the throne, did not grow up to be familiar with political or constitutional issues, or with any sense of impending responsibility.

George may have been the second son, but he was far more suited by nature to be king than his brother was. Though
somewhat spoiled by his mother, who was devoted to him, he had none of Eddy’s languid and unfocused nature. What he did have were good manners and a sense of duty that developed early and became so overriding that it guided his every action for the rest of his life. He was expected to make a career in the Navy – despite the fact that his grandmother thought this an unsound idea – and was ideally suited to the Service. He had a genuine ability in seamanship that would have made him extremely able in command of a vessel. He also excelled in mathematics, a highly important skill in such a technical profession.

At the age of twelve he performed impressively in the entrance exam for midshipmen and then undertook, together with his tutor and brother, a series of three voyages that gave him valuable experience of the Navy, the British Empire and the wider world. By the time he became king he would have travelled more widely than any of his predecessors. While overseas he paid formal calls on rulers and governors, and thus his time in the Navy was in no sense an escape from protocol – or from education, for lessons continued on board.

George probably received a finer education through this process than he could have gained anywhere else. He responded to the sights and sounds and experiences, and to the instruction he received, in exactly the way his elders had hoped he would. Naval discipline had stamped out a previous tendency toward self-indulgence. His inherent abilities as a seaman had been honed by practice to make him a thoroughly professional officer who would have been a credit to any ship and who could, in other circumstances, have enjoyed a successful career. His patriotism, greatly enhanced by his tour of British overseas territories and by the respect with which a grandson of the Queen Empress was received, was to become the hallmark of his character. As his biographer Harold Nicolson was to write: ‘Not being an intellectual he was never variable: he remained uniform throughout his life.’

A tutor, John Dalton, had been appointed to teach both the
princes, though he was not to have exclusive charge of them for long. As was normal for young men of their era with exalted future roles, the regime they endured was strict and the curriculum crowded and demanding, including as it did not only ‘book learning’ but, by way of exercise, military drill. Dalton quickly came to realize that neither of his charges was naturally academic, and Eddy in particular had an attention span of discouraging brevity. While he has been seen by some historians as slow-witted to the point of virtual imbecility, others have suggested that he suffered from mild epilepsy and that his inattention was perhaps characteristic of children born prematurely (he had arrived two months earlier than expected). George was more intelligent, less indolent, more amenable to instruction and to reason, and more aware of the dignity of his position. He was also absolutely devoted to his father, and wanted above all to earn his approval.

Though it has been suggested that their tutor was a dull and conventional man who could have gained more of a response from the boys had he been more flexible, they in fact had a happy childhood that was not spoiled by an excess of discipline or deadening rote learning. Their father believed that the Royal Navy would provide them with the best preparation for life, and it was possible for them to go into the Senior Service at a very young age (Eddy was thirteen and George twelve). Because they worked best whilst together, they stayed together in the Service. Instead of learning about the world through geography lessons in a schoolroom, they would see it for themselves. Rather than receiving their education entirely from tutors in a ‘class’ that consisted only of themselves, they would have the company of boys their own age, a largely random collection of youngsters with whom they would live on equal terms and whose respect they would have to earn through their ability to carry out the same tasks. It was, for the time, a remarkably democratic upbringing and it gave them common ground with their grandmother’s people in a way that very few other experiences could have done.

Their naval careers began at Dartmouth. This training facility – later renamed Britannia Royal Naval College – is today a substantial and imposing collection of buildings overlooking Dartmouth harbour in Devon. At that time it was a fifty-year-old wooden warship – HMS
Britannia
, a veteran of the Crimea – moored in the same harbour, aboard which aspiring officers received instruction. It was as cramped and claustrophobic as being at sea. Dalton joined the ship with his two charges, for he had been appointed chaplain. He would continue to supervise the progress of one or both of them for many years to come.

Following training, the two princes and their tutor transferred to another RN vessel, HMS
Bacchante
, and made three voyages round the world, which took them away for several years (1879–82). They sailed the Mediterranean, visiting Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Aden. They also went ashore in South Africa, Ceylon, Singapore, Japan and Australia, the Falkland Islands, South America and the United States. While in Japan, both of them visited a tattoo parlour and George was, for the rest of his life, to bear on his arm the design of a dragon in red and blue ink. When they returned, their grandmother was horrified to find that neither boy could speak French or German, the latter an outright necessity given their overwhelming preponderance of teutonic relations. They studied these languages for a time but in neither case with conspicuous success, despite spending an interlude at Heidelberg. Whatever the charms of this town – the ‘Oxford of Germany’ – George considered it ‘beastly dull’ in comparison with the places he had seen on his travels, and he hated German, considering it ‘a rotten language, which I find very difficult’.

He might have been influenced here by more than mere personal disinclination. Though so many of his relations were German, the relative to whom he was closest – his mother – hated the country. A daughter of the king of Denmark, she would never forgive the Prussians for their war of 1864
against her people. The German states – they were not yet at the time a united nation – had, under Bismarck’s leadership, aggressively seized territory from a small and peaceful nation. Princess Alexandra’s vehemence can be seen in a statement she wrote after her son had been appointed honorary colonel of a Prussian regiment: ‘My Georgie boy has become a real, live, filthy, blue-coated, Pickelhaube German soldier!’ (A
pickelhaube
was the brass-and-leather spiked helmet ubiquitous throughout the German armies.) If he had good reason to inherit a dislike of Germany and its language, he had no such excuse for his failure to master French. He managed to communicate in that language, but with the Englishman’s perverse pride in speaking it very badly.

George enjoyed his period of naval service immensely. One of those straightforward personalities who recognize at once the path he wishes to follow in life, he took to the sea and the camaraderie of the wardroom with genuine enthusiasm. He had the habit of instant obedience, and would be characterized all his life by an absolute respect for those above him – just as he expected similar reverence from those below. His period of naval service was to last for fourteen years, from 1877 to 1892, when the death of his brother meant that he was called to another type of duty. He was successful in professional exams, gaining qualifications in seamanship, gunnery and torpedoes – achievements that his exalted position alone could not have won for him. The Navy gave him a quarterdeck view of the world that would stay with him for the rest of his life – a bluff, blunt, to-the-point manner that would include fo’c’sle language, paroxysms of anger and loud expressions of impatience with those who failed to match up to his expectations. Deeply conservative by nature and entirely at home in this hierarchical, no-nonsense world, the Navy made him a man of absolutely decided views, which he saw no reason ever to change. Unlike his grandmother, who never travelled outside Europe and who thus never saw the worldwide empire over which she presided, George had first-hand experience
of the lives of her overseas subjects. It was ironic that, having spent his early life roaming the world, he would come to hate foreign travel. Once he became king he would make only one significant trip outside his realms – a Mediterranean cruise – and even that was undertaken only on doctor’s orders. He did not want to go, and no doubt would have given vent to one of his outbursts when advised to take the trip.

Delighted at being lower in the order of succession than Eddy, George had expected to spend his life as a serving officer. He was given one of the most agreeable postings in the Service – to Malta, where he was under the command of his uncle, the Duke of Edinburgh. (Sixty years later another Duke of Edinburgh would also serve there in the Royal Navy, and his wife would spend a very pleasant interlude on the island before becoming queen.) George was handsome and personable (his only faults, perhaps, his knock knees and the bulging blue eyes he had inherited from his grandmother), and he developed an affection for his uncle’s daughter, Marie. She was a spirited girl with both intelligence and a fine sense of humour. They were distant enough relations for a marriage to be possible, but her mother did not want him for a son-in-law. The Duchess of Edinburgh was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II. Haughty by nature, she had never taken to living in England, and disliked her husband’s family. She discouraged the match, and her formidable personality was an obstacle that could not be surmounted. Ironically, in that she considered the British royal family too pro-German, she was to marry Marie to a member of Prussia’s ruling house, the Hohenzollerns, which had been invited to occupy the throne of Romania. As queen of that country, Marie would exert influence to ensure that it fought on the Allied side in the Great War. Her children would subsequently marry so extensively into neighbouring royal families that she would earn the sobriquet ‘the Mother-in-Law of the Balkans’.