Royal Babylon (29 page)

The Windsors

         

         

         

THE CULT OF
the monarchy as upholders of British morality was Prince Albert's invention, but the British royal family didn't fully become identified with solid middle-class family values until the arrival of the two great royal icons of the early twentieth century, King George V and Queen Mary. There are few figures in the British royal family whose public images are so sharply—or, as it transpires, so misleadingly—defined.

George V became King by default in 1910 because his elder brother, Albert Victor, had long since died of pneumonia, to the great relief of many. The new King was far from gifted. Robert Lacey noted:

         

As his official biographer felt compelled to admit, King George V was distinguished “by no exercise of social gifts, by no personal magnetism, by no intellectual powers. He was neither a wit nor a brilliant raconteur, neither well-read nor well-educated, and he made no great contribution to enlightened social converse. He lacked intellectual curiosity and only late in life acquired some measure of artistic taste.” He was, in other words, exactly like most of his subjects. He discovered a new job for modern kings and queens to do—representation.

         

In truth, the King's lifestyle was one that few of his subjects would have been able to identify with, unless you happened to be a superrich country squire. George's day was one long shooting party punctuated by visits to his stamp album and by his fanatical obsession with royal etiquette. He saw his job as an irritating intrusion into his private life. He hated anything to do with matters of state, especially the business of opening a new Parliament, even though all that was required of him was once a year to read aloud a few words prepared for him by a speech-writer.

George V was, like George III, a royal paradox. He was pathologically resistant to change, yet it was during his reign that many of the rituals we associate with the modern British royal family were invented. He and his wife were the first King and Queen to trade on the comfortable myth of the royal family as stalwarts of marital fidelity and the middle-class values of hearth and home. George V was the first British sovereign to recognize that the royal family needed to be popular to survive. He was the first King to hire a public-relations officer, the first to make use
of the talking cinema newsreel, the first to make use of the Christmas radio broadcast to the nation, and the first to insist that his relatives do something to make themselves look slightly more useful to help justify their gilded existences. It was George V who gave the royal family its modern name, the House of Windsor. However, the new name and the new image, like nearly everything else about George V, was largely based on falsehood and crippling hypocrisy.

George V was not a shrewd and manipulative image maker; in fact he was largely incapable of planning anything. In contrast to his grandmother Queen Victoria, who strove to exert political influence in the tradition of Elizabeth I, and his father, Edward VII, who aspired to manipulate the balance of power in Europe, George's ambitions were humble. The King was happy to have his opinions on all matters of state formed for him by his palace “think tank,” an inner circle of personal assistants and civil servants. But he was a particularly attentive listener when it came to matters concerning his own self-preservation.

He was a desperately poor scholar. Before he could pass the exam to become a cadet aboard
Britannica
, the navy had to fiddle it by lowering the minimum entrance standard. He was the only senior member of a European royal family unable to speak a second language with any degree of fluency. Although he spoke English with a slight German accent, he couldn't actually speak German, the mother tongue of his father, his grandparents and his wife. The British Consul-General in Berlin wrote in 1913: “It is hardly credible that George cannot speak a solitary word of German, and his French is atrocious.”

His lifelong hobby was stamp collecting. When a British representative in the Middle East heard of a suspected case of
smallpox in the local printing works, he was worried in case the royal tongue became contaminated and had 400 stamps boiled in a saucepan before dispatching them to London. A courtier innocently inquired at breakfast one morning, “Did your Royal Highness read that some damned fool has just paid one thousand four hundred and fifty pounds for a single stamp?” George replied, “I was the damned fool.”

Like his father before him, George V had no time for the arts and wore his ignorance like a badge. His favorite opera was
La Bohème
“because it is the shortest.” His social gaffes were legion. On one of his rare and grudging trips to an art exhibition, when he found himself before a French Impressionist painting, he shouted to his wife across the gallery, “Here's something to make you laugh, May.” (Queen Mary was called May by her family.) He once confided to the director of the National Gallery, “I tell you what, Turner was mad. My grandmother always said so.” The King's small talk was loud and cheerfully witless. He greeted Charles Lindbergh, who had just become the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, by asking him, “What did you do about peeing?” In 1935 the King met the author John Buchan and told him how much he enjoyed reading his books, especially
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. Later, Queen Mary took Buchan aside and confided, “The king does not get much time for reading but when he does I'm afraid he reads the most awful rubbish.” (George VI inherited his father's cheerful ignorance of art. He once saw the paintings of John Piper, who was known mainly for his storm scenes, and stammered, “Pity you had such bloody awful weather.”)

One of King George V's gallant contributions to the war effort was an alcohol ban in Buckingham Palace, although it was quietly understood when he took the pledge that it did not
apply to the King himself. His choleric temper and ruddy face belied the official palace line that he drank very little. Prayers were said in the East End of London for Queen Mary and her children, “begging the protection of heaven on their unhappy drunkard's home.” The Palace had to instruct the Dean of Norwich to publicly refute the allegations of alcoholism. The Dean did as he was required and the rumors died down.

         

Shooting was George V's sole accomplishment: he was an ecological disaster made flesh. He slaughtered animals with a zeal that far exceeded the social demands of his day. He acquired the killing habit from his father, and his first shotgun at the age of twelve. From that day on he organized his life around the shooting calendar. George V's idea of a good day was to blast away at comatose birds with his twelve-bore shotgun until he was ankle deep in spent cartridges. His targets were usually pheasants, partridges, woodcock, snipe and duck, mostly hand-reared, tame and barely mobile. The shoots were designed so that the killing was ridiculously easy. The King wasn't in the least embarrassed about wiping out scores of driven birds, most of which, according to a shooting companion, were “ridiculous in their slow flight.” Nor, unlike his father, was George in need of such easy targets. Endless target practice had made him one of the best shots in the world. While British troops were being shot in droves by the Boers in 1899, the royal shooting party was busy exterminating about 12,000 pheasants in Norfolk.

Throughout World War I he continued to shoot at Sandringham, excusing it as his patriotic contribution to the nation's food supplies. During his reign, more than 20,000 head of game were mowed down on the fields of Sandringham each year, not counting the hundreds of shoots he was invited to attend. In a single December day, George and his friends killed 4,000 pheasants; the King personally killed about a thousand. Even some of his guests were shocked by the scale of the carnage. Lord Lincolnshire wrote: “Can this terrific slaughter possibly last much longer?”

Winston Churchill was an appreciative hunting guest but he winced at the King's slaughterhouse tactics. “I shot three and could have shot more,” he told his wife later, “but refrained, not wishing to become a butcher.” One day the King was heard to observe to his eldest son, as the pair waded through heaps of spent cartridges, “Perhaps we went a little far today.” On his trip to Nepal, in less than a fortnight he personally killed twenty-one tigers, eight rhino and one bear. The shoots were managed so that none had any chance of escape. “A record,” the King gloated later, “and one I think will be hard to beat.”

One of George V's fellow big-game hunters was the Indian Maharaja Jay Singh of Alwar. Although the Maharaja was a notorious pedophile and a part-time psychopath, he was the King's personal friend and his guest at Buckingham Palace in 1931. The Maharaja also liked to play polo. One day in 1933 he had a bad game and decided to blame his horse, which had stumbled and thrown him. As an audience of British V.I.P.'s watched, the Maharajah poured a can of petrol over the polo pony and set fire to it. The King may not have been aware that
his friend also liked to use live babies and elderly widows as tiger bait.

In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the King wouldn't tolerate any suggestion that he was cruel to animals. In his defense he would point to his much loved pet parrot. To George this was proof enough that he was an animal lover. To everyone else it was merely proof that he hadn't yet taken to shooting parrots.

His son George VI was also a compulsive shot, indulging his hobby almost every day of the week. In 1924 he and the Queen Mother went on a four-month big-game shooting holiday in Africa, and with her Rigby rifle she shot a variety of wild animals, including rhinoceros, buffalo, waterbuck, antelope, Kenyan hartebeest, steinbuck, water-hog and jackal. In Uganda her husband shot an elephant whose tusks weighed ninety pounds each. “It was very lucky,” he said later, “as there are not many very big ones left.” When Britain declared war on Germany he expressed concern that the crisis might interfere with the Balmoral grouse season.

         

George V was a xenophobe, albeit a very confused one. “Abroad is awful,” he once said. “I know. I have been.” He particularly hated Naples, noting that the harbor was full of dead dogs. But, for a German living in England, where exactly was “abroad”? Although he had centuries of undeniably German ancestry and not the slightest trace of English blood, he liked to pretend that he was wholly English. Others, including Lloyd George, were not fooled. Before visiting the Palace
in 1915, the Prime Minister remarked to his secretary, “I wonder what my little German friend has got to say to me.” Later on during World War I, the King explained to Asquith that his cousin Prince Albert was “not really fighting on the side of the Germans,” but had only been “put in charge of a camp of English prisoners.” “A nice distinction,” Asquith observed.

When the King heard about H. G. Wells's comment that the royal family was “uninspiring and alien,” he was indignant. “I may be uninspiring,” George snarled, “but I'm damned if I'm alien.” He had presumably forgotten that he was currently honorary colonel of a German regiment, and that he and most of his family were German to the marrow.

Since the Battle of Hastings, England has been ruled by six families, none of them English. Queen Elizabeth II claims descent from William the Conqueror, but then, statistically, so do most of the inhabitants of Western Europe. Indeed, ever since they arrived from Hanover, Britain's current solidly German royal family have made few concessions to their adopted country. King George I, born on and buried in German soil, showed barely disguised contempt for his new homeland and would scurry back to Hanover whenever the opportunity arose. A myth arose that George I couldn't speak a word of English. In fact his English was good enough for him to communicate with his ministers, and it improved as his reign progressed: the point was that for most of the time he didn't consider it necessary. Conversation with his English courtiers was not a problem anyway because the language spoken in court was French.