A Brief History of the House of Windsor (8 page)

With his sensitive nature and his highly developed sense of duty, he did this effectively and well. He also set an important example. At the outbreak of war his cousin Nicholas had imposed Prohibition on Russia. In 1915 George was persuaded, reluctantly, to take the more modest step of declaring that the royal cellars would be sealed for the duration of the war
– a move that was aimed at encouraging workers in the munitions industry to follow suit. They were forbidden to drink, on safety grounds. (George in fact thought the gesture pointless and irritating, describing Lloyd George’s suggestion as ‘a scurvy trick’.) The whole country was aware of the king’s abnegation, though it was rumoured he was secretly taking glasses of port regardless. Whatever happened in private, his sense of duty was such that he refused alcohol in public even on occasions such as visits to the Front. He made several such journeys, dressed in Field Marshal’s uniform, to inspect the armies, tour the rear areas, confer with Generals. Though as usual surrounded by formalities, he enjoyed the more relaxed atmosphere in France and Flanders. He was flattered by the welcome he received, and gratified that he was sharing the same environment, if not the same dangers, as the fighting men. Hordes of them would follow him about, which he liked. It was on one such visit in October 1915, however, that a sudden burst of cheering frightened his horse, which reared up and then fell on him. The injury was excruciating – his pelvis had broken in two places. It was badly diagnosed, and never properly healed.

In a time of national hardship, the royal family had to be seen to be doing their job, but also to be living as modestly as possible. It had never previously been necessary for the monarchy to seem so ostentatiously ordinary, though this would be something that they would continue to do throughout the coming generations. The king was photographed in shirtsleeves, tending a vegetable plot in the grounds at Windsor. For much of the war, German U-boats attempted to starve out Britain by sinking shipping around its coast and thus preventing the importing of foodstuffs. With agricultural estates at their disposal at Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral, the royal family were unlikely to suffer hardship, but the gesture was made and recorded and noticed. While politicians, press and public blamed the war’s reverses on the generals and called for their removal, the king publicly maintained
loyalty to them. This was most conspicuous in the case of Sir Douglas Haig, who fell from favour as a result of the disastrous losses suffered on the Western Front. Royalty could not indulge itself in the luxury of criticism or disapproval, at least in public.

The king was known to hold humane views on the treatment of prisoners. A fair man in private and in public, he had, as we have seen, created for himself the role of peacemaker and moderator with regard to the domestic politics of the United Kingdom. He showed a similar attitude toward the national enemy. (‘Intern me first!’ he had cried when the locking up of enemy nationals had first been mooted.) From the moment that German troops invaded Belgium, Britain was awash with refugees who told blood-curdling stories of teutonic barbarity. Civilians had been taken hostage and executed, women had been routinely violated. Much of this was later found to have been exaggerated, but in a climate of wartime hysteria no outrage seemed implausible to the British public. Once the submarines of the German Fleet attempted to starve the country by sinking shipping, public outrage reached a new pitch. George opposed the demand for summary reprisals against captured submariners, and no doubt held the same view toward any airship crews that managed to survive after being shot down. Never by a single remark in public or in private did the king endorse the call for examples to be made of captured Germans. Though sensitive enough to weep over both public outrages and personal slights, he expressed no vindictive or draconian views on the enemy.

As a former naval officer, the king naturally took a detailed interest in the conduct of the war at sea, but this was to be predominantly a land conflict. The British government dispatched its small Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium where, with the armies of those countries, it stopped in its tracks the advance of the enemy The pre-emptive Schlieffen Plan had not worked. The German armies were stuck on the River Marne, east of the French capital, and the war reached
a stalemate. With each side unable to push back the other, they dug in where they stood, creating a trench system that ultimately ran all the way from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, and which would remain substantially unaltered for over four years. The Royal Navy, though it saw action in the South Atlantic, did not play a major role in the conflict nearer to home.

The prelude to war had been characterized by a massive, mutual increase in naval strength – an arms race – in which Britain and Germany had found themselves virtually equal by 1914 in the number of modern Dreadnought-class battleships they possessed. When hostilities broke out the German China Squadron was destroyed in battle off the Falkland Islands at the end of 1914 while another battleship was penned into an East African river estuary until it rusted away. The British Royal Navy commanded the North Sea, and imposed a blockade on the Baltic that at once affected the supply of foodstuffs and raw materials to Germany. The majority of German warships were in harbour in Kiel or Wilhelms-haven, and it would not be until two years into the conflict that they would venture out into battle. The resulting encounter, the Battle of Jutland, fought in May 1916, was indecisive but, though both sides claimed success, it was the Germans whose fleet remained trapped in the Baltic for the rest of the war. The remainder of the German Navy, scattered around the world, was able to do little except mount raids to harass the enemy and tie up resources.

On land, the stalemate on the Western Front was to endure, despite periodic attempts to break through the German lines. The most important of these offensives, along the River Somme in France in July 1916, was touted at the time in the Allied press as a victory, though it represented insignificant gains for the loss of over 600,000 men. The Germans attempted a major offensive against the French fortress of Verdun. This was probably the most horrific fighting of the war, with both sides suffering massive casualties, but the Germans failed
completely to capture the defences. Cavalry, the most prestigious arm of service in European armies, was largely useless in this type of warfare, and its replacement – the tank, introduced in 1917 – failed to make more than initial headway. The ‘Central Powers’ – Germany and its allies – held firm in this war of attrition despite crippling shortages of food and raw materials at home. When Russia experienced the February Revolutions of 1917 and pulled out of the war in December of that year, German troops could be transferred to the west. With this surplus of men, the enemy launched an offensive in March the following year that drove the Allies back more than thirty miles and might, had they been more fortunate, have reached Paris, which they came close enough (seventy-five miles) to bombard. America had entered the war, however, and in April began to deploy in the European theatre of conflict.

George bowed to pressure from public opinion. He agreed, as we have seen, to change his family name, and did so by Royal Proclamation. (On hearing the new name of the British royal house, his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, remarked drily that he looked forward to attending a production of Shakespeare’s
The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
.) Though George personally regarded it as ‘petty and undignified’ to waste legislative time on the confiscation of titles, this was carried out through the Titles Deprivation Act of 1919. Among those who lost their positions in the British aristocracy were Prince Ernst August of Hanover, who was also known as Duke of Cumberland, and Prince Carl Eduard, who as well as being Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was also Duke of Albany. Similarly, British titles were granted to British relatives who had had to give up their German ones. The Battenberg family were created Marquesses of Milford Haven.

However, the king would not allow a witch-hunt to be conducted. He refused point-blank to let the names of the German kaiser and crown prince be deleted from the Army List, where they continued to appear as honorary colonels of regiments. (To this day one unit, the King’s Royal Hussars,
continues to wear the black eagle of Prussia as its cap badge.) He was also unwilling to countenance the removal from the stalls in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, of the brass plates inscribed with the names of sovereigns who were now in the enemy camp – even though the banners carrying their coats-of-arms were taken down. The plates were, he considered, ‘historical records’ which should not be destroyed simply because of the feeling of the moment.

There were more serious issues to consider, however. Some sovereigns had begun to suffer loss and harm during the fighting. Queen Marie of Romania, for instance, once the object of George’s affection, had championed the Allied cause in her country. As one of the Entente powers, it had been invaded and devastated by the enemy, both the Germans and the Bulgarians. After revolution erupted in Russia in February 1917, the tsar had been forced to abdicate, to be replaced by a moderate Provisional Government that committed itself to keeping Russia in the war (vital as a counterweight to the Western Front). Partly because of this, further upheavals that autumn had replaced the Provisional Government with Bolshevism. The country’s new rulers proceeded to get out of the war, on any terms whatever, as soon as it could be managed. They also imposed on members of the imperial family a more stringent confinement than the house arrest they had previously suffered.

The Romanovs were George’s cousins, and the relationship between them had been close. The two men were three years apart in age, and of a similar physical appearance. In the manner of royalty in those days, the families met in various countries and on a number of occasions, both official and informal. The last had been in 1913 when they attended, both wearing German military uniform, the wedding of the kaiser’s daughter. Nicholas, his wife, four daughters and son were now in considerable danger. Apart from being George’s relations they had been allies through the difficult years of war. He offered them asylum in Britain.

He came to rue this decision, however. The Russian Revolution had encouraged socialists in other countries to dream of similar success. This was especially the case if the overthrow of government would lead to abandoning the war at once. Not since the French Revolution had there been such a direct, implacable and serious threat to monarchical rule. Among the British working class there was open admiration for Russia’s new government (the tsars, autocratic and despotic, had featured in British demonology since at least the time of the Crimean War). Although the prime minister, David Lloyd George, was sympathetic to the plight of Nicholas and his family, George reconsidered his invitation. It might jeopardize the security of his own throne if he made a show of supporting an absolute monarch. Afterwards it was widely assumed for decades that the prime minister, a Liberal who had no reason to favour autocrats, was the one who was against helping them. The papers of the king’s private secretary, however, suggest that it was with George himself that the final decision lay. The offer of asylum was quietly withdrawn. The tsar and his family, imprisoned in the Urals and treated with increasing harshness, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918.

In view of this, it may be assumed that the king regretted the failure of his own or any other government to protect Russia’s imperial family. This has proved to be the darkest stain on his reign, and he has never been forgiven by Russian monarchists. He did not at any rate allow personal doubts to stand in the way of rescuing other royals in danger. He sent a warship, HMS
Marlborough
, to the Crimea to evacuate the tsar’s mother and sister. He had the Royal Navy rescue another royal family – the Greeks – when they lost popularity and had to flee (with them was their infant son Philip, who would later marry King George’s granddaughter).

After four years, the Central Powers could no longer sustain the burden of war. The first to crack, and to seek peace talks without reference to the others, had been Austria in 1917,
though nothing came of this. The following year – on 29 September 1918 – Bulgaria made a separate peace with the Allies. Turkey followed on 30 October, and then Austria–Hungary, the nation which had begun it all, on 3 November. The patriarchal emperor, Franz Joseph I, who had reigned since 1848, had died in 1916. His successor, Emperor Karl I, was young and inexperienced. Though willing to do whatever he could to keep the throne – including approaching the enemy behind the kaiser’s back – it was already too late. His armies had been defeated and his realms were disintegrating. Since the war had begun, parts of this empire, notably Hungary and the Czech lands, had been of questionable loyalty. Now that the state was heading for defeat their long-held desire for separation and independence could neither be ignored nor prevented. This was not a violent revolution after the manner of Russia’s; the imperial family merely lost their lands and possessions, and were expelled from the country. In this case George V ensured the safe conduct from Austria of Emperor Karl and his dependants by sending his personal representative, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lisle Strutt, to see them to exile in Switzerland.

The overall peace settlement was to be founded, at America’s desire, on the notion of ‘self-determination’, which meant that subject nations would be encouraged to break away. There was no wish to see Europe clustered into power-blocks as it had been four years earlier. American animosity to the principle of monarchy was also influential. That form of government had failed to keep the peace in Europe, and indeed the rivalries and conflicting claims of the dynasties were likely to be a source of conflict in the future if they were left in positions of power. The era has been seen as one in which thrones were swept away, and of course a great many were, but it is worth remembering that not all countries lost their monarchs – Italy and Romania, for instance, did not because they had both been on the Allied side. Two countries even
became
monarchies in the post-war settlement: Albania and the newly
formed Yugoslavia. In the volatile Balkans it was considered possible that the presence of a sovereign would bring stability by providing newly formed nations with a source of pride and national unity on which to build. In the event, neither new monarchy survived for more than a generation.