A Brief History of the House of Windsor (7 page)

Just as George and May defied the stereotype of an arranged marriage by being genuinely in love, they were to do so also by being affectionate parents in an age when the aristocracy was renowned for keeping its children at a distance. The Yorks had, of course, a staff of nurses and governesses to deal with the more mundane chores of looking after their offspring, but both were very fond of them and the duke, in particular, loved to bathe them or sit them on his knee (‘I make a very good lap,’ he boasted). As his children grew, he took to marching them round the estate for exercise.

Once his father succeeded to the throne, George, now Duke of Cornwall and York and, from November 1901, Prince of Wales, began to train in earnest for the task he might expect to inherit before many more years had passed, for King Edward was over sixty and given to both heavy smoking and overeating. Because Edward had been denied the chance to learn about kingship while his mother was alive, he was intent on leaving his own successor better informed. As soon as he succeeded, he had George’s desk placed beside his own at Windsor and the two of them often worked together, examining the contents of dispatch boxes and discussing the procedures for getting through a sovereign’s paperwork. As well as administration, George continued to learn more about the public side of royal duty.

He went, on his father’s behalf, on a tour of the Empire. His task was to thank the Dominions for their support in the Boer War, and he visited all of them: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa itself, Canada and Newfoundland. He was
very good at the protocol and formality that went with his duties. Vintage film of him in Canada, handing out medals to a seemingly endless line of recipients, shows him ramrod-straight throughout. He cut an equally impressive figure when opening the first Australian Parliament. He had mastered the art – essential for members of his family or ‘profession’ – of standing for long hours without looking either tired or bored. If he did not look bored, however, neither did he look happy. He very rarely smiled in public. ‘We sailors never smile when on duty,’ he said. (This was an attitude that would also often characterize his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, during official engagements.) George made speeches fluently and well, and he actually sounded English, for he had not inherited his father’s Germanic accent. Had he done so, it would no doubt have proved another grave disadvantage once the Great War had broken out.

He made another tour – of India – in 1905–6, gaining personal insight into the British Empire’s most important overseas territory. Curiously, one of his most marked impressions was of indignation at the treatment of educated Indians by the British rulers. In this he was both right – the later universal understanding of racism had not of course yet become manifest – and prescient. For some generations the British had been providing education of a high standard to Indians. This meant that many thousands of talented, intelligent and ambitious local men aspired to better themselves and to take a hand in governing their country. There were no avenues to enable them to do so, or to make best use of the training they had received. Within a generation it would be these men who would spearhead the movement for independence from Britain. They had nothing to gain by keeping the connection, and George could see this.

His father sought to ensure that George was gaining equally useful experience for his future role at home. A major reason for Edward’s own youthful dissipation had been that he had no constitutional function to fulfil. Pleasure-seeking
had therefore become his chief purpose in life. This was a not uncommon experience for those waiting their turn to fill the thrones of Europe. The Italian monarchy, for instance, believed that pertinent knowledge should not be provided until the prince actually succeeded. (‘Here in the House of Savoy we rule one at a time!’) The result was a dysfunctional dynasty, of which Italians would rid themselves by plebiscite after less than a century of rule.

George’s working relationship with his father, who instead of formal training for his role had at least had a lifetime of observing the monarchy at close quarters, gave him considerable wisdom. When Edward died, in May 1910, after more than nine years on the throne, his son would write that: ‘I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers. I never had a [cross] word with him in my life. I am heart-broken and overwhelmed with grief but God will help me in my responsibilities and darling May will be my comfort as she has always been. May God give me strength and guidance in the heavy task that has befallen me.’ Though these private sentiments were not of course known to his subjects at the time, they demonstrate to posterity that his was a deeply fulfilling marriage.

The era over which Edward VII had presided as king was not one of complacency. In Britain the advance of socialism was obvious in the presence – and increasing numbers – of Labour Members in the House of Commons (the Party had been founded in 1900). The suffragettes, although one can understand their frustration and their cause, left an ugly scar on the Edwardian age through acts of public vandalism. It was a time of militant labour unrest, strike chaos, confrontations with police and with soldiers. Struggling to pay the massive costs involved in the arms race against Germany while simultaneously financing a huge and innovative programme of social reform, the Liberal government imposed punitive taxes on land and income that drove the aristocracy to fury. The ‘People’s Budget’, rejected once by the House
of Lords but passed after a general election had returned the Liberals to power, served to emphasize that the era which had begun on 1 January 1901 would be known to history as ‘the century of the common man’.

Internationally these were extremely dangerous years for monarchies. With the rise of anarchism – a pointless, violence-for-its-own-sake creed that sanctioned acts of murder against heads of state – the crowned heads of Europe paid a heavy toll. There were no attacks on the British royal family in Britain itself – an indication of their people’s comparative moderation and hatred of extremes – though an attempt had been made to kill King Edward in Brussels in 1900, and George witnessed for himself the agonies undergone by his fellow sovereigns while attending the marriage of his cousin, Princess Ena, to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. On the way to the wedding ceremony through the streets of Madrid in May 1906, a bomb was thrown from the crowd. It failed to kill any royals, but the death-toll included a number of their servants as well as members of the public. The bride’s dress was spattered with blood.

George’s coronation was held in June 1911 and was followed by a Durbar in India, to acknowledge him as emperor. He used the occasion to announce that the capital would move from Calcutta to a designated site at New Delhi. The vast red sandstone complex, planned and built by the English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, would prove to be by far the greatest architectural legacy of George’s reign, though it would represent British power for an extremely short time.

As king during a time of unpleasant social and political upheaval, George saw his principal role as that of peacemaker between warring factions. He deplored extremes of any sort. Though he disliked the suffragettes for the violence of their protests, he was genuinely horrified by the force-feeding to which hunger-striking members of the movement were subjected in prison. While unsympathetic toward those who caused industrial unrest, he sought nevertheless to promote
compromise between management and labour. He also saw it as vital to encourage moderation between the opposing factions in Ireland. He and his wife, now known by her regnal name of Queen Mary, went on a series of visits to the various regions of Britain so that their people could have some sense of personal contact with them, a significant populist gesture that would become habitual with their descendants.

While British society was riven by the bitterest class conflict within living memory, the United Kingdom was in imminent danger of disintegration over the issue of Home Rule for Ireland, which Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government was hoping to push through during 1912. The threat of rule from Dublin rather than London was enough to cause Irish Protestants to form a paramilitary organization – the Ulster Volunteer Force – which stockpiled arms and trained its members to use them. The nationalists in the southern counties made similar arrangements, and civil war became increasingly likely. While posterity knows that the United Kingdom could survive the division of Ireland and the loss of its twenty-six southern counties, contemporary opinion could not view without alarm the notion that a country that was the centre of a worldwide empire would itself be torn asunder. This was the gravest problem imaginable for a British government.

George’s solution was to summon a conference at Buckingham Palace to hear the grievances on both sides. By now it was the summer of 1914 – negotiations began on 21 July. The king would have been hoping for a mutual display of goodwill and compromise but the gathering lasted only three days, for suddenly Ireland was not the most serious difficulty on the horizon. Within a fortnight of the delegates gathering at the Palace, old Europe – the social and political order that had lasted for much of the nineteenth century – would start to unravel.

The European war that was about to begin would be by far the most significant event of George’s reign. It started with
the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian nationalists. Though war had been likely for several years, no one had expected it to start in such an obscure corner of the Continent, and over a matter that seemed at first to have been resolved when Serbia offered an apology. The Habsburgs were one of the few European dynasties with which the British throne had no family connections. Nor was their empire in competition with Britain in any naval or military sphere. Now, because of an internal quarrel within their territory, most of Europe was to be caught up in an Armageddon that would dwarf in size and slaughter any conflict seen before. Because Austria mobilized, Russia did so too. With Russia facing the Austrians, its ally Germany came to its aid. But Germany’s plans for a European war assumed that France – which wanted revenge for the
last
European war – would strike at its western border. France must therefore be treated as an enemy and invaded before it could attack. To deal with this threat while avoiding incurring heavy casualties meant invading the country through its ‘back door’, by crossing through neutral Belgium. Britain, which did not want Germany gaining control of the Channel ports, had guaranteed (by a treaty of 1839) to come to Belgium’s aid in such a circumstance. An ultimatum to the German government, demanding withdrawal from Belgium by midnight of 4 August 1914, went unanswered. The war began as British clocks struck eleven on that warm summer night.

George was a cousin of two of the combatants – the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. Could his intervention halt the juggernaut before it ran out of control? The answer was no. Tsar Nicholas had already failed to have the cause of conflict – the Sarajevo assassination – referred to the International Court at The Hague. The mood among the General Staffs was too belligerent for a last-minute climbdown, and no one at the time had any reason to expect a protracted war. Recent European conflicts had been short: the wars fought
by Prussia in the 1860s against Denmark and Austria had lasted a matter of a few weeks, while the Franco-Prussian conflict had taken ten months. It was assumed that, with the vast armies and the destructive weaponry available, this new outbreak of hostilities would be a short and violent clash that would bring some decisive result within months at most. The German and Austrian governments even welcomed war as a means of combating left-wing tendencies (the Social Democratic Party) or separatism at home.

For the British government, the outbreak of war diverted attention from the pressing matter of Ireland (many thousands of Irishmen, especially among loyalist Ulstermen, enlisted at once). George gave his consent the following month to a Bill granting Irish Home Rule – no other solution was possible in the end – but it carried the proviso that it would not be enacted until after the war. The issue was shelved for the time being – or so it was assumed. For years it had been received wisdom that a European war would come. Some crisis would provoke it, the spark would be lit and the conflagration begin. It was, however, disappointing that the cause should prove to be events in a small and obscure Balkan country. ‘God grant that we may not have a European war thrust upon us, and for such a stupid reason too, no, I don’t mean stupid, but to have to go to war on account of tiresome Serbia beggars belief,’ Queen Mary wrote to her aunt, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, at the end of July.

The king was naturally grieved by the division of Europe into warring camps that put many of his relatives on the other side. It had always been assumed that the network of relationships among the royal houses would make war between them an impossibility. Though these connections had been important, they were no more than window-dressing, however. The Parliaments or General Staffs that actually ran the different countries could act with no more than nominal reference to them. Even Tsar Nicholas, in theory an autocrat who could take a binding decision to involve his country in
the war, was sensitive to public opinion, which was largely in favour of assisting Serbia against the perceived bullying of neighbouring rival powers. The mob-mentality that rapidly grew up throughout Europe was astonishing in view of what was actually to happen. For young Frenchmen, in particular, the outbreak promised an opportunity to wrest back from Germany the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost in the Franco-Prussian War. For almost fifty years schoolchildren had been brought up to hate the country that had stolen this territory from their forefathers. Many gave thanks that they had been born at the right time in history to take part in such a national crusade.

No British sovereign before this had presided over an era of total war. The situation was without precedent, with the country under attack, the mobilization of the entire civilian world necessary to support the war effort, and the need always to work with allies, who could be difficult. George had to make up his role as war-monarch as he went along. He certainly looked the part, and was to feature often in patriotic publications. Though others would naturally be associated with the conflict – Prime Ministers Asquith and Lloyd George, the Cabinet Minister Winston Churchill, Generals French, Kitchener and Haig – the king, who alone among them remained constantly at the head of affairs, became a potent symbol for his armies and his people. His function in the war was, like that of any constitutional sovereign, to be a rallying point for the nation, to attend public events in uniform as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, to encourage his people through a relentless programme of visits, inspections, speeches, messages.