Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens (18 page)

W
ith the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Britain entered a new era. For many it was an age of unbridled pleasure. The restraints the old queen had symbolised were now thrown off in an access of exuberant recreation.

No one epitomised this new mood better than the new king, Edward VII, despite his 60 years of age. His obvious enjoyment of the good things in life – enormous cigars, racehorses and attractive women – set the tone of social life across the classes.

The first motorcars were being driven, music halls were packed with loud audiences around Piccadilly Circus. The invention of the radio and wind-up gramophones brought stirring patriotic songs by Elgar into Edwardian parlours. And throughout the country the earliest images on celluloid flickered across new cinema screens. The King himself was the first monarch to win the Derby.

Despite a sense of fun that Edward brought to the court, he was also capable of diplomacy and a certain amount of work – despite the academic laziness he exhibited as a youth.

Indeed he had long shed his early playboy image to pursue peace. His visits to France were well received and paved the way for the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Astute and perceptive, Edward was one of the few monarchs in Europe who could foresee the coming storm clouds that would burst into world war.

G
eorge V was unfortunate in having to lead his country through the First World War. He was doubly unfortunate to have German ancestry and relatives in the enemy camp.

When anti-German feelings were running at their highest in 1917, George decided enough was enough. Great fondness he might have had for his cousin Wilhelm II, but duty to the nation came first. In a momentous act that brought greater change to the monarchy than at any time since the Glorious Revolution, the King made two radical revisions.

George V enjoyed taking the helm aboard his favourite royal yacht, Britannia

Firstly he renamed the dynasty ‘Windsor’, thus symbolically removing their attachment to the German Hanover. By the same token any aristocrats with Germanic names were required to change theirs, for example Battenberg to Mountbatten.

The second alteration to the monarchy was still more radical. Not only did George change the name, he dropped the Hanoverian custom that marriage partners should have aristocratic status. From now on British monarchs were free to marry whoever they liked, as long as they were not Catholic or divorced.

In one stroke George had both anglicised and broadened the monarchy. A royal wedding would now become a marriage of love, not a political affair, and the royal family would be taken as a model of family life. This, as future generations would discover, was a mistaken ideal.

The king himself was therefore the last English monarch to have an arranged marriage. His mother, Queen Victoria, decided he should marry Princess May of Teck (later known as Queen Mary), who had been engaged to George’s elder brother Eddy before he died prematurely. Fortunately it turned out to be a good match.

George himself found developments happening in British society hard to accept, and more than a little worrying. The royal family had suffered great shock at the violent overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917, in which George’s cousin, Tsar Nicholas II and his family, had perished. Now civil unrest was afflicting his country. The working class movement and the General Strike of 1926, the demand for equality from the Suffragettes, some even going on hunger strike, another dying when she hurled herself at the king’s horse in the Epsom Derby, and not to mention the first Labour Government – these were all elements of a new political order at odds with the King’s own traditional culture.

George V was an old-fashioned stickler for routine and ritual. He always went to bed at 11.10 pm, demanded his sons wore morning dress when visiting him, and expected the servants to ensure no furniture was ever an inch out of its correct position. At his favourite residence of Sandringham in Norfolk, the clocks were all set half an hour fast to ensure he could never be late.

It was from here that George broadcast his historic first Christmas message in 1932. It was a great publicity coup. For the first time in British history the monarch could wish his subjects a Merry Christmas.

D
ashing and debonair, Edward Prince of Wales, eldest son of George V and heir apparent, was regarded by society as the most eligible bachelor in the world. The Prince toured the British Empire at the end of the First World War and joined Europe’s high society. He even set new trends in fashion with his trouser zip-fly, the Windsor knot in his tie, plus-fours on the golf course, and wearing no shirt on the beach.

It was a time of new found freedom, having spent his childhood restrained by the strict conventions and hallowed traditions observed by his parents. Parties, nightclubs, casinos and weekends in the country were meat and drink to Edward, and he had a string of affairs, often with married women. In short, Edward relished the carefree life which had been denied him as a child.

But with it also came a dislike of duty which he found ‘bothersome’. It became clear that while this man lapped up the adulation of crowds, he felt uncomfortable in any formal situation, disliking, for example, speaking in public.

When Edward first met the American Mrs Simpson in 1931 she seemed to make little impact on him. But a year later, after being invited to dinner with the Simpsons (she and her second husband), he fell hopelessly in love with Wallis. Quite rapidly he fell under her spell in an infatuation that seemed to deprive him of most independent decision-making. The Prince’s equerry wrote in 1934, ‘Edward has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog’.

When his father died in January 1936, Edward succeded as king in what must have been a reluctant state of mind. He was hardly ever seen without Mrs Simpson on his arm. The affair with this woman, who had subsequently divorced her second husband, was common knowledge but generated a nervous silence in public. The press voluntarily kept out of their affairs.

Though Edward was at liberty to marry a commoner if he so wished, the Church of England refused to bless the marriage of divorcees. Therefore Mrs Simpson could not become queen, yet Edward as king was ‘Supreme Governor of the Church of England’. The dilemma was his.

Finally pressure mounted in December that year when Bishop Blunt of Bradford made public comment on the king’s ‘need for grace’. This came at the end of a year when much had happened to affect world politics: Hitler had marched into the Rhineland, Mussolini’s troops had conquered Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War had broken out. Britain now needed strong leadership, not dithering. It was Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, who forced Edward’s hand. In an unprecedented move, Edward VIII put his own private life before his duty to the nation, and abdicated.

It must have been a huge relief for him, and Mrs Simpson. Immediately Edward went into ‘exile’ abroad, never to return. The couple married the following year.

Quite how much Edward was influenced by Mrs Simpson, who undoubtedly was a forceful character, has led to some claiming she was a German spy charged with the task of endearing the former king to side with Hitler. In 1937, the couple famously visited the Fuhrer and found much to admire in his social reforms. Edward is said to have even given the Nazi salute to Hitler. Clearly there was a propaganda opportunity for the Nazis if Edward could fall into partnership with Germany as a puppet-king in the waiting. His brother Albert, now the new king as George VI, ensured no such banner should be flown in England, and the ex-king found himself permanently banished to the political wilderness.

T
he life of George VI is a story of two halves. His early life was one of subjugation. Having an elder brother as glamorous as Edward VIII who set the world alight was always going to put Albert Frederick Arthur George in the shadows. But a lack of intelligence and chronic sickness compounded a sense of inferiority, which was not helped by being given the nickname, Bertie (he was only named Albert because his birthday fell on the anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria’s consort).

George developed a stammer and became heavily addicted to cigarettes and alcohol, which only undermined his health. But the Prince of York made it into the navy despite coming bottom in the college entrance exams. A determination to come up to the mark in the First World War was constantly checked by seasickness and bouts of gastritis (a legacy from his childhood due to poor diet and negligence at the hands of his nurse). In the crucial Battle of Jutland in 1916 – the year when he had a duodenal ulcer diagnosed – the Prince managed to salvage some pride by leaving his sickbed to fight in the gun turret of HMS Collingwood.

This single act of heroism marked a threshold in the Prince’s life: he had proved to himself he was more capable than he imagined. In a letter to his brother, Bertie revealed, ‘When I was on top of the turret, I never felt any fear of shells or anything else.’

George VI never felt so at ease as when he was on duty in the navy

But this achievement was as nothing compared to what was asked of him in 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated, leaving the crown to Bertie. The nation drew its breath and prayed. ‘I never wanted this to happen. I’m only a naval officer, it’s the only thing I know about,’ he confided to his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten on the first night of his reign.

Never expected to be king, the Prince of York was completely unprepared for the job, having never handled a state document in his life. Yet, the courage he summoned at Jutland he could summon again. The first thing he did was dispense with that humiliating nickname. Instead he chose his last Christian name, George, in a gesture of continuity with his father after the disastrous failure of his brother. With medical assistance the new king mastered his embarrassing stammer and within a few years of his accession had endeared the public to him.

Perhaps the greatest boon to his self-esteem came from the devotion and support of his wife Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, to whom he was married in a genuine union of love. Together they faced the challenges posed by another world war. To show moral support for their embattled subjects, the royal family remained in London during the thunderous air raids of the Blitz. Two bombs landed on Buckingham Palace, exploding just 30 metres from the King – the queen consort famously remarked to a policeman the next day, ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face’.

The King and queen restricted themselves to the same regime of rationing as their fellow citizens had to follow. Day after day during the early years of the war, when England had her back to the wall, the couple tried to keep up morale by visiting bombed out areas of the East End and evacuees sheltering in the London Underground.

Come VE Day, the outcome was a triumph for both nation and king. Alongside his people, George VI had stood the test of character, and in recognition of the many instances of civilian heroism he introduced the George Cross and Medal. The King had undoubtedly had a good war. He was fortunate too in having a good leader in Winston Churchill who could do most of the talking. But in George VI, Britain can justly claim to have had a king who got the measure of being a monarch in a modern state. Alas, poor health dogged him to the end. George died of arterial disease and lung cancer in 1952, aged 56.