Royal Babylon (31 page)

In 1917, Imperial Russia was torn apart by revolution, and three centuries of Romanov rule were ended when Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother Michael. The younger Romanov sensibly declined the Crown unless it was formally offered to him by an elected assembly, but events swiftly overtook him when the Bolsheviks suddenly seized power. Shortly after the abdication, Russia's provisional government inquired whether Britain was willing to receive Nicholas and the imperial family. George V immediately agreed to let them settle in Britain. The proposal was approved by Prime Minister Lloyd George and the British government, and asylum was offered.

It was at this point that the natural royal instinct for survival at all costs took over. If there was one thing that could wholly concentrate the King's limited faculties it was the threat of republicanism. The presence of the ex-Czar in Britain, his palace advisers persuaded him, would be resented by the public and could undermine the monarchy. George V very quickly changed his mind about saving his cousin.

The King had a problem: asylum had already been offered to the Romanovs, and he was desperate to distance himself from what could be seen as a cowardly U-turn. However, he found a way out by letting his government do the dirty work for him. From that point on, the King repeatedly begged Lloyd George to rescind the offer and leave the Russian royals to their fate, thus denying his cousin's family their only chance of escape. In July 1918 the Czar, his wife and their five children were taken to Ekaterinburg and ruthlessly eliminated. In effect, George V had passed a death sentence on his near relatives rather than risk damage to his own popularity.

The real threat to the King's own skin was slight. Precedents set under far more difficult circumstances had made England the traditional bolt-hole for unwanted monarchs and their families for centuries. “The much more serious threat of imported revolution from France did not prevent Britain from giving sanctuary to the detested Bourbon Louis XVIII. The British government even paid the throneless French King
£
7,000 a year pocket money to allow him to establish a pseudo court in Buckinghamshire. When Napoleon was defeated, Louis was amused to receive an invitation to Carlton House to meet the Prince Regent, who had hitherto been too scared to acknowledge the Frenchman's existence. As recently as 1910, the
remnants of the Portuguese royal family, including the last ruling Portuguese King, Manuel II, had also followed the well-worn path to retirement in England after King Carlos and his brother Prince Louis Filipe were cut down by republican assassins.

Despite his own involvement in the refusal of asylum for the Czar, George V later compounded this naked act of self-preservation by allowing his Prime Minister to take the blame for his cousin's death. For decades afterward, the British royal family allowed everyone to believe that Lloyd George denied the Romanovs asylum in England, and that he was therefore partly to blame for Nicholas II's assassination. In fact, Lloyd George had no part in it at all. He saw the King's failure to save the lives of his cousins as a private family matter; in the end he had simply done as George had asked.

Until the truth about George V's betrayal was publicly disclosed fifty years after his death—when government papers, scrutinized for the first time in 1986, confirmed it beyond doubt—the Windsors allowed Lloyd George's name to be abused every time the subject of the Romanovs arose. Lord Louis Mountbatten in particular lied extensively and often about how the King had gallantly striven to rescue Nicholas from the Bolsheviks, only to be thwarted by his evil Prime Minister. The Windsors also exploited the Czar's demise for their own personal gain when Queen Mary took to snapping up Russian royal-family jewelry at bargain prices. In 1933 she paid
£
60,000 (about
£
2 million today) to buy the jewels of the Empress Marie Feodorovna, the mother of her husband's dead cousin Nicholas.

         

King George V has always been regarded as a limited but virtuous King, more interested in philately than philandery, his private life held up as a shining example that today's royals cannot match. But this aspect of his public persona was a sham. George V was not the first British king for nearly a century without a mistress, but he was the first to keep it a secret. According to his authorized biographer, Kenneth Rose, as a young man he used to visit “high-class tarts,” and in his early twenties he kept one mistress at Southsea, while sharing another with his bisexual brother Eddie (Albert) in St. John's Wood, London. There were also alarmingly persistent stories concerning his alleged bigamy. It was widely rumored that as a young man George had secretly married the daughter of a British naval officer, Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, in Malta. As the years passed, these rumors refused to go away. A newspaper called the
Liberator
, published in France but freely circulated in England, featured an article written by E. F. Mylius under the headline “Sanctified Bigamy.”

According to Mylius, George had indeed married Miss Culme-Seymour in 1890, and his young wife had borne him several children. As soon as the Duke of Clarence died and George unexpectedly found himself in line for the throne, George cruelly abandoned his wife and children and entered into a bigamous relationship with the daughter of the Duke of Teck, later Queen Mary. Mylius was arrested and sued for libel. He was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. But, although George's honor was apparently vindicated, Mylius was unrepentant and repeated the story a year later in a new pamphlet published in America entitled “The Morganatic Marriage of George V.”

         

In times of crisis the British royal family has required a steady supply of younger brothers to fall back on. When the impotent playboy George IV failed to produce an heir, his inadequate brother William was promoted to King. When Edward VIII was exposed as the black sheep of the 1930s, his reluctant and desperately unprepared brother “Bertie” was required to fill his shoes. But for George V, a generation before, was reserved the rawest deal of all. Not only was he expected to replace his elder brother as heir to the throne: he was also required to marry his deceased brother's fiancée.
The Times
solemnly expressed the hope that “a union rooted in painful memories may prove happy beyond the common lot.” It was anything but, although George V and Queen Mary were to spend the rest of their lives successfully presenting to the world an image of domesticated matrimonial contentment.

George V's subjects would have been shocked indeed had they known that their King's regular trips to Bognor and other seaside resorts on the South Coast, according to A. N. Wilson, were discreetly arranged for him so that he could seek brief refuge from his wife with prostitutes.

Queen Mary, known to her family as “May,” was born into the House of Teck, one of Germany's more impoverished minor royal dynasties. Her brother Frank was kicked out of Wellington School for assaulting his headmaster and spent the rest of his life as a reckless gambler, rarely out of debt. In 1895 he found himself owing
£
1,000 to an Irish bookmaker, and attempted to get himself out of his predicament by pledging
£
10,000 he didn't have on a ten-to-one-on “cert” in order to win just
£
1,000.
Fortunately, his brother-in-law George and several other members of the British royal family found the money to bail him out. Frank's punishment was exile to India. When his mother died, he embarrassed the family yet again by lavishing all of the Teck family jewels on his very elderly mistress. He died unmarried in 1910.

Queen Mary herself was a walking metaphor for the moribund institution she represented. She showed nothing of herself; she gave nothing away. Her image, including a dress sense that was already dated when she was a young woman, was frozen in time. Her personality was a well-kept secret. The court diarist “Chips” Channon noted that having a conversation with her was “like talking to St. Paul's Cathedral.” Prime Minister Asquith agreed: making conversation with her, he complained, was much harder work than a debate in the House of Commons.

Like Queen Victoria before her, Queen Mary was a grasping and predatory collector of jewelry. Although she spent her entire reign trying to present an image of down-to-earth middle-class respectability, she would cover her monolithic frame with an ostentatious display of gems at every opportunity. At the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm II's daughter in Berlin in 1913, she simultaneously wore nine diamond necklaces, six diamond brooches, two diamond bracelets and diamond earrings.

         

The economy of the House of Windsor was based on their ability to beg for money faster than they could spend it. They did this by periodically pretending they were broke. When George IV, an obscenely extravagant Prince of Wales, was asked to trim his
running costs after blowing
£
49,000 on soft furnishings and
£
17,000 in a day on trinkets, he huffily sacked his servants, pawned his jewelry, closed up his London palace and flounced off to Brighton with his mistress. Before Prince Albert left Coburg he swore, “I shall never cease to be a true German,” then persistently sent begging letters to Her Majesty's Government for more British money. His eldest son wrote an anonymous letter to
The Times
recommending that that fine fellow the Prince of Wales deserved much more money from the Civil List. Thanks to Queen Victoria's cunning and a succession of deferential governments who virtually absolved the royal family of all taxes, by the time her grandson arrived on the throne the Windsors were—second only, perhaps, to the Romanovs—the wealthiest royal family in the world. Yet George V once threatened that if he didn't receive more money he would have to go to open Parliament in a taxi cab. Prince Philip continued the tradition in 1969 when he complained that things were getting so tight he might have to give up playing polo, and again in 1995 when he bemoaned the impending loss of the royal yacht.

Not all royals were complete spendthrifts. Although life in his day at Sandringham was royally extravagant, George V could also be very miserly. He filled his home with cheap reproduction furniture. When his old mother, Queen Alexandra, impulsively sent out gifts to friends and deserving causes, the King sent out servants to retrieve them. His expensive sporting life on the fields of Sandringham was a world apart from the plight of the people who helped sustain his hobby. The wages he paid to his estate workers—about fourteen shillings a week—caused a scandal in Norfolk.

Unlike other European monarchs and heads of state, the British royal family do not surrender gifts, including jewelry,
given to them on state occasions. This has provided a situation that they have been able to exploit many times over. Edward VII and George V made trips to India that were no more than excuses to shoot tigers and take advantage of the natural generosity of their Indian subjects, thus increasing their personal wealth. For the Delhi Durbar in the winter of 1911, at which King George and Queen Mary were to be crowned Emperor and Empress of India, the Crown jeweler was commissioned to make a new crown at the cost of
£
60,000. The people of India paid for it, but they never even got to see it, because it has been stored away in the Tower of London ever since. The Indian Princes, true to form, showered the British royal couple with gems. The King and Queen were very coy about disclosing the contents of their haul and even today the jewelry they were able to stash away from their Delhi trip is one of the royal family's best-kept secrets.

         

A republican would argue that all royal property is theft, but Queen Mary has the unique distinction of being the only known royal kleptomaniac. Apart from her obsession with jewelry, she was a prolific collector of anything associated with her dynasty, especially ornaments, family portraits and miniatures. The Queen had little notion of good taste and during her reign she amassed a huge and eccentric private collection. However, what made this one quite different from other royal collections were the dubious and often criminal methods she employed to put it together.

Whenever Queen Mary wanted to make an addition to her haul of expensive bric-a-brac, her first tactic was to fall back on
the royal tradition of browbeating the owners into freely handing over their possessions. This she did with a well-honed technique that involved staring long and hard at the item that took her fancy, while sighing aloud, “I am caressing it with my eyes.” Inevitably, the embarrassed donor, unwilling to offend with a refusal, would be cowed into submission. Soon, word got around the stately homes of Britain and her impromptu visits to wealthy friends were generally preceded by a panicked hiding of anything she might take a shine to. When it finally dawned on Queen Mary that she had been rumbled, she took to turning up uninvited.

Her next tactic was less subtle. She stole things. If she found an ornament small enough, she would slip it into her handbag. In her biography of Queen Mary,
Matriarch
, Anne Edwards records that on her frequent visits to London's antique dealers “the Queen was prone to take what she wanted and they would go without payment.” Edwards notes, “This led to a story that Queen Mary was a kleptomaniac, an accusation never substantiated and thoroughly untrue.” While it is correct to point out that taking things without paying for them doesn't necessarily make her a kleptomaniac, there does appear to be quite a good case for calling Queen Mary a common thief.

Buckingham Palace became aware of Queen Mary's problem when some of her victims complained about the thefts, and the Queen's ladies-in-waiting were quietly instructed to keep a close eye on her. From then on her stolen goods were usually retrieved by an aide and mailed back to the original owner with a covering letter explaining that there had been a “mistake.” Inevitably, stories about Queen Mary's compulsive thieving leaked out from time to time. The Palace, obliged to come up with some sort of explanation, lamely expressed it as
her natural keenness to save anything worthwhile for the nation.