Royal Babylon (30 page)

His son George II was a similarly reluctant Briton, but was at least careful to play down his origins in public, once announcing in thick, guttural tones, “I have not one drop of
blood in my veins that is not English.” Later, however, Prince Albert would pronounce, “Every part of my being is German,” and Edward VIII boasted in the 1930s, “I have not one drop of blood in my veins which is not German.”

If Princess Diana had made it to the throne she would have been the first Englishwoman to sit there since Catherine Parr. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 was designed to keep the British royal family German. The architect of the legislation, King George III, was also desperate, nevertheless, to be known for his pro-British sentiments, a situation eloquently put when he pronounced from his throne, “Born unt educated in zis country, I glory in ze name of Briton.” In private conversation with his wife, however, he always spoke German, and once admitted, “My heart will never forget that it pulses with German blood.”

Invariably, the British royals took German wives. George II's grandmother thought that a native mistress might improve his English, which he spoke inadequately throughout his life, but his Queen was very German. George II's prospective daughter-in-law, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Coburg, arrived in England in 1736 without a single word of English at her command. She had been assured by her mother that this would not be a problem because the Hanoverians had ruled England for twenty years and surely everyone by now would speak German. From the moment that George III's new German bride, Queen Charlotte, said, “Ich will,” she struggled to converse with any of her subjects, although in time she acquired a competent grasp of English. King William IV's German wife, Queen Adelaide, couldn't speak a word of English, and the order of service at her wedding had to be written in phonetics for her.

By the time of Queen Victoria's reign, the British had become so used to generations of foreign royals that the line between German and English royalty had become blurred. Prince Albert was perceived as patently German—indeed he was open and unambiguous about his loyalty to his fatherland. Yet his wife, although regarded as essentially British, was no less a German than he was. Both of her parents were German and they spent the early part of their married lives in Germany, even though they were living on an income granted to them by the English Parliament. Victoria's mother couldn't speak a word of English when she was first married and had to make public speeches from phonetic scripts prepared for her. Victoria and Albert disliked London and chose to live at Balmoral because it reminded them of the north German countryside. Victoria often insisted that her family wrote and even conversed in German. Their son Edward VII spoke English with a German accent, which became much more pronounced when he lost his temper.

In fact, George V's wife, Queen Mary, was the first Consort for over 400 years to speak English as a first language, but she was 100 percent German and took pride in her pure Hanoverian descent, always quick to point out that her family was not tainted by any of Prince Albert's inferior Saxe-Coburg blood. Yet Queen Mary wasn't in the least bit embarrassed to claim in her German accent that she was “English from top to toe,” the oft-repeated claim of foreign royals living at the expense of British taxpayers.

When George V delivered his first Christmas Day radio broadcast, many of his subjects were bemused to find that he also spoke with a slight German accent. Today that slight
German accent has been so subtly assimilated into the dialect of the British royal family and so widely imitated by the establishment that it has long been accepted as an exclusive variant of received pronunciation.

         

The slumbering conundrum of the royal family's nationality was brought suddenly to life in 1914 when the start of World War I saw an outbreak of xenophobia. German traders in the East End had their shops looted and their goods destroyed. People refused to drink German wine and kicked dachshunds in the street. The press hinted at a fifth column at work, and anyone with a German-sounding name was interned without trial. Betrayed by his ancestry and his strong accent, Lord Louis Mountbatten's father, Admiral Prince Louis von Battenberg, although a naturalized Briton, was hounded by the popular press and forced to resign. The war also invited people to look long and hard at their “British” royalty.

It was left to George V's palace counselors to point out to him that he and his family were more German than the Kaiser. Ever since the marriage of Victoria to Prince Albert, the royal family had reigned in the stoutly Teutonic name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In 1917 it became a bigger embarrassment when German Gotha airplanes began to bomb London. The royal family were naturally only too eager to distance themselves from their German cousins. There was nothing like a World War or the Civil List to bring out the English in them. It was agreed that George V and his family should undergo a
swift rebranding exercise and adopt a name more “naturally English.” The King considered restyling his dynasty the House of Wipper, then the House of Wettin, before settling for the House of Windsor.

The last name was suggested by Lord Stamfordham when he learned that Edward III had been known as Edward of Windsor. The change was not confined to the King's immediate family. Collateral branches of royal family were also de-Germanized. The von Battenbergs became the consumer-friendly Mountbattens, and Queen Mary's family, the Tecks, became Cambridges. The King's first cousins, the Coburgs, far too obviously from the wrong side of the Seigfreid line for comfort, were ostracized completely. Thereafter, the true identity of the British royal family was officially suppressed.

The royal name changes were not a lightly taken decision, because in most royal circles, especially German, heraldry was more important than life and death. Many minor “British” royal personages regarded the move as a dreadful betrayal of their true German roots and were furious that their ancient family names had been changed to silly made-up Anglo-Saxon ones simply because of the King's cowardice. Royal relatives abroad were similarly scandalized. The Bavarian Count Albrecht von Montgelas observed gravely, “The royal tradition died on that day .  .  . when, for a mere war, King George V changed his name.” George's cousin Kaiser Wilhelm joked that he was looking forward to a performance of
The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
(Another version of this anecdote has it that he said he was looking forward to
The Merry Wives of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
)

Ironically, while the British royal family was being criticized for its German origins, the Kaiser was being berated at home for being too English. He was accused of having too many English ideas, and was criticized for his English habits, even his many English clothes. The Kaiser was popularly believed, quite wrongly, to be half-English, because his mother was a daughter of Queen Victoria. Yet the Kaiser's mother didn't have a drop of English blood in her veins: she was pure German stock, half-Hanoverian, half-Coburg.

As a first cousin of King George V, the Kaiser's attitude toward his British family connections was schizophrenic. It was in the Kaiser's arms that Queen Victoria eventually died, and when he appeared on the streets of London for her funeral he was heartily cheered as “one of ours.” However, he loathed his uncle Edward VII, and treated his British-born mother very badly. When war loomed he became rabidly anti-British. Yet most of the time he liked to play at being a British aristocrat. He told Theodore Roosevelt in 1911, “I adore England.” Dressed up in his tweed suits or racing his yacht at Cowes, he certainly looked the part. When Wilhelm was exiled to Doorn in Holland after the war, his life became essentially that of the archetypal English country squire. Young German officers who made the pilgrimage to his home were confused to find their ex-Kaiser surrounded by the works of P. G. Wodehouse and sipping cups of imported English tea.

The British royal family never forgot that the Kaiser was family, and sent him congratulatory telegrams when he reached his eightieth birthday. When Hitler's army marched on Holland, Wilhelm was even offered sanctuary in England. The Kaiser refused because he was too proud to accept charity from former war enemies.

The business of embarrassing German relations was an issue that would return to haunt the British royal family many times. Queen Elizabeth II's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, ostensibly a member of the former Greek royal family, is seven-eighths German with a dash of Dane. When the blue-eyed and blond Prince Philip proposed to the young Princess Elizabeth in 1946, King George VI was worried that his daughter marrying a German so soon after World War II would be hugely resented by the British public. He ordered them to delay the engagement until she was twenty-one the following year.

Prince Philip brought with him a few other problems. His brother-in-law, Prince Christopher of Hesse, for example. Prince Christopher, married to Philip's sister Sophie shortly after her sixteenth birthday, was a high-ranking Nazi. Originally head of Goering's secret phone-tapping service—the forerunner of the Gestapo—he went on to join the Luftwaffe. Prince Christopher died in a plane crash in 1943 while on a top-secret Nazi assignment. (The Palace prefers a different, “official” version of his death in which this hitherto active and very enthusiastic Nazi was killed for bravely denouncing the Third Reich.) Prince Christopher's brother, Philip of Hesse, was Obergruppenführer in the SS and a personal friend of Herman Goering. Another of the Duke of Edinburgh's sisters was also married to a German army officer. None of Prince Philip's sisters received an invitation to his wedding.

When the young Princess Elizabeth got engaged it was decided that Philip's surname, Schelswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, would have to be anglicized in the time-honored tradition, since it sounded too much like Borussia Munchen-Gladbach's back four to be passed off as typically British. The Duke of Edinburgh's Uncle Dickie, Mountbatten, revealed
himself to be an old-fashioned, scheming royal matchmaker in the mold of Queen Victoria's Uncle Leopold. He saw an opportunity of aggrandizing his family name by establishing a Mountbatten on the British throne, and persuaded his nephew to adopt his surname. The ease with which he was able to do so, and the close physical resemblance, inevitably led to speculation that Prince Philip might in fact be his illegitimate son.

As it turned out, Mountbatten was wasting his time, because the Queen flatly refused to drop the name Windsor. The legitimacy of her decision is questionable. Queen Victoria, a daughter of the House of Hanover and born with the surname Guelph, set a precedent when she took the name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha upon her marriage to Albert. Arguably, Queen Elizabeth II should have taken her husband's name. Logically therefore, Britain should now be celebrating the reign of neither the House of Mountbatten nor Windsor, but the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

The royal-family disinformation service was even less convincing in a more recent case of Nazi skeletons in the family wardrobe. In 1977 the Queen's cousin Prince Michael of Kent was married to a Catholic divorcée, Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, who was eventually forced to admit that her father had also been a member of the SS, albeit only, according to a heroic Palace statement, “an honorary member.” The royal family knew all about the Nazi connection long before Princess Michael was married into their family, and there was therefore no possibility that she herself was unaware of her father's position. When the news broke, however, the Palace announced that it had come as a terrible shock to all concerned, especially to Princess Michael herself.

Britain is not alone when it comes to unfortunate German connections. The nearest thing that the current Dutch royal family have had to a full-blown media scandal occurred in 1966, when Queen Beatrix, then heir to the throne, wedded a German diplomat, Claus von Amsberg, who had served in the Wehrmacht during the war and been a card-carrying member of the Hitler Youth. This was a particularly insensitive marriage considering that a little over twenty years earlier the Germans had invaded Holland, bombed Rotterdam and forced the Dutch royal family to flee overseas. The wedding ceremony was boycotted by about half the invited officials and there were violent protests outside; orange swastikas were daubed over the palace walls.

After World War I, against a backdrop of desperate economic hardship, George V found that his fake British coat of arms was still not quite enough to make the former House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha entirely palatable to the public. The King was warned by his advisers that, although his family were now less obviously alien, they still needed to make themselves more conspicuous if they wanted to be loved.

George responded by throwing himself and his family into a frenzied round of visits to industrial areas, thus inventing the royal tradition of factory tours. It was a revolution in royal behavior. The provinces of the United Kingdom, especially the industrial north of England, were completely uncharted territory for them. No Hanoverian monarch until George IV had ever bothered to set foot in Wales, Scotland or Ireland. Queen Victoria never troubled the royal transport system unless there was the prospect of someone showering her with jewelry. She often refused to even greet visiting heads of state, let alone
show her face to her subjects. To George V's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who normally only left the safety of his St. James's bachelor pad for the nightclub or the gaming table, Walsall and Wolverhampton would have seemed like Mars.

         

George V was ample proof that the royal family, over and above any notions of being representative of duty, dignity and decency, was and always had been in the extremely practical business of retaining its position of privilege. After disowning the German part of his heredity, George V turned his back on another close part of his family. He shared an apparent firm friendship and an uncanny physical resemblance with another first cousin, the Russian Emperor Nicholas II. The King's affection for his “dear Nicky” did not extend to saving his cousin's life when it was clearly within his power to do so.