Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  A month after the visit to Cowes, Princess May learned she could expect her first child that following June. Suddenly she was the recipient of “all sort of fuss and precautions of all kinds & sorts,” attention she did not enjoy. Nor did she find any sense of satisfaction or pride in her swollen body, which kept her from all her exciting new activities.

  Besides the cottage at Sandringham, the Yorks had been given a wing of St. James’s Palace. They named their new quarters York House, an uncomfortable accommodation consisting of seventy-five small, virtually sunless rooms without architectural interest.

  By spring, Princess May was more or less confined to their new home (which Prince George was now calling an “unhealthy and beastly” place). In the afternoons, she would have tea on a satin sofa in the Red Drawing Room, “a coverlet of white satin, embroidered with May blossoms, over her legs.” The room was panelled in crimson brocade, and through the windows one could see “nothing but grimy London walls.” Much depressed by her confinement, her inactivity, and the old red brick and gloom of York House itself, she convinced her husband and the Queen that it would be better if she could have the baby at White Lodge. She moved back into her old room and converted several others for her husband’s convenience, but unfortunately these last weeks of her confinement proved a tremendous strain on the already tenuous relationship between the Duke of York and his mother-in-law—he did not appreciate her flamboyant nature—and tempers flared.

  The waiting amidst such tense conditions came to an end at ten o’clock in the evening of June 23, 1894, when a son, eventually christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David,* but called David by his family and intimate friends throughout his life, was born. A tent was quickly set up on the lawn of White Lodge, and in this a book was placed in which callers were made to sign their names. The first day fifteen hundred people came to pay their respects. Princess May was never more exhilarated, and from Aunt Augusta came the excited acknowledgement of this “great Historical Event.”

  “Are you not beside yourself? I am! and long to squeeze everybody who comes in my way. Bruere [her dresser] was the first, who got a hug, such as she never had before, then followed old Hueber, howling ... in Church people winked at me and loudly congratulated me; on Parade I was received with ‘God Save the Queen’ when, of course, I howled. Oh, it is so delightful! ... I came to my room yesterday morning, saw a telegram laying, but thinking it came from Fritz first read my Prayers quietly, then opened it, read ‘George’ good Heavens! I could hardly read on and there it was ‘a son, both doing well!’ Down I went—mentally—on my knees, tears of gratitude and happiness flowing, streaming, and the hugging followed ... oh, I longed to telegraph all over the world!!”

  Aunt Augusta, at the age of seventy-one, was full of vigour—both of mind and body—and as sharp-tongued as ever. Only three years younger than her cousin, the Queen, they had both lived in the first half of the nineteenth century and from those decades had taken her philosophy. Though she had been Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz for many years, she never let the people forget that she was first and before all else an English Princess. The social leader of the Grand Duchy, she liked giving dinner parties and attending the opera in state. Her household was modelled on stern Victorian lines, and members of her family later claimed “she was such an old skin-flint that even at a thoroughly advanced age—[fifteen years hence]—she refused to have rubber tyres fitted to the wheels of her carriage and rattled along over the cobblestones on iron rims.” She came to London several months each year and spent much of the time with Princess May, whom she had helped to dress and educate as a young woman. To her niece’s horror, the Grand Duchess would go shopping alone, stopping her carriage some distance from a shop and walking to it, giving as alias the name of one of her servants when making a purchase, certain that she would not be recognised and would thereby obtain things much more cheaply. Not one to mince her words, she had always been critical of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and only her more compelling displeasure with Princess Alexandra, whom she considered unpleasantly strong-willed, kept her from being outspoken against the escapades of the Prince of Wales.

  On June 27, the Queen, with a huge entourage which included the Tsarevitch Nicholas and his bride-to-be, the Queen’s granddaughter, Princess Alix of Hesse,* arrived at White Lodge to see the new Prince and was welcomed by a beaming, “twittering” Princess Mary Adelaide. The Queen concurred that “the Baby, who is a vy fine strong Boy,” was “a pretty Child.” Four weeks later, the Queen returned for the christening of the infant Prince.

  The family might have been overwhelmed with happiness at the birth of her son, but from the outset Princess May found motherhood and infants more than she could tolerate. Nursing the child was repugnant to her, the child’s cries terrifying, the odours distressing. But at this time, the English nanny reigned supreme in all upper-class households, and their charges saw their parents perhaps once, seldom twice, a day in circumstances that were stiff and formal.

  Mary Peters had been hired as a nanny before the baby’s birth. Her excellent references stated that she had worked for a member of Princess May’s Lady-in-Waiting Lady Eva Dugdale’s family. She had been an orphan and, at twenty-seven, was approaching spinsterhood. With great relief, Princess May consigned the child into the care of this incredibly autocratic personality (a trait not undesirable in a nanny of that time). Mary Peters devoted herself entirely to her small charge, and though some indication of her growing instability might have been gleaned when she refused to take a day off and became unnaturally possessive of the baby in her care, staff problems were never brought to Princess May’s attention.

  Shortly after the christening, Princess May moved back to York House, but to the Duke of York’s irritation, his mother-in-law came with her and the child. Princess May now had to contend with a serious situation that was growing worse between her husband and her mother.

  The rooms of York House were strung together by narrow ill-lit passages interrupted by unexpected flights of steps. At night, these passages were treacherous. After returning from York House one evening, Princess Mary Adelaide wrote her daughter, “I know how distressed you will be when you learn that I fell down that horridly dangerous step from the night nursery into the passage, tout de mon long arriving on my hands and knees (I fear mon ecriture se’en resent!)”

  “She might have been killed, and Peters, who heard the fall, nearly died of fright as when she ran up to Mama she found her lying quite still and thought she was dead,” Princess May wrote her husband in a curt note and to which he replied, “There is a very good electric light at the top of the stairs and it ought to have been turned on.”

  Several cliques comprised London Society. The Marlborough House Set was one; then there were the “Incorruptibles,” those reactionary, ancient families who looked upon the Prince of Wales’s circle as vulgar; and the “Intellectuals” (or “Souls”), who spun in orbit around their sun, Arthur Balfour, Lord Salisbury’s nephew. No matter which group one belonged to, the daily routine was much the same. At ten one would parade in St. James’s Park: if part of the Marlborough Set, on horseback and at a gallop; the “Incorruptibles” in an open carriage; while the “Intellectuals” strolled on foot. This same fixed outing occurred between tea and dinner. A witness of the period recalled that unless dying, no one remained home. “Splendid equipage filled the streets. Ladies driving in their victorias drawn by smart, high-stepping cobs with a ‘tiger’ sitting very straight with folded arms beside the coachman on the box, excited approving masculine gazes as they passed under club windows. Gentlemen sighed and told each other, ‘What a pretty thing it was to see a lovely woman drive in London behind a well-matched pair.’” Down another street came trotting the Royal Horse Guards in blue tunics and white breeches on black horses with bridles and halter-chains shining and jingling. Tall silhouettes of hansom cabs carried the well-known profiles of statesmen and clubmen on their round of vis
its to the great houses and to the clubs in Pall Mall and St. james’s.

  If one could stand the pace a gala dinner could be attended every night, followed by the opera, reigned over that season by Mme. Melba, and balls that seldom ended before 3:00 A.M. The women, led by the style-setters of the day—Lady Warwick and Lady de Grey—shimmered with diamonds and floated from dinner to opera to ball in a diaphanous cloud of tulle escorted by the gentlemen in white tie and tails. Footmen wore their finest livery. Everyone wanted to be on the guest lists for the dances given by the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Londonderry, the two arbiters of society. Lillie Langtry, as beautiful as she had been during her early glory as the mistress of the Prince of Wales, was back in the Marlborough House Set. Conversation invariably returned to the unsuccessful libel action Oscar Wilde had brought against the Marquess of Queensberry and the sensational trial that spring, which found the scandalous Wilde—whose play, The Importance of Being Earnest, was the success of the season—guilty of homosexual charges and committed to serve time at Reading Gaol.

  Princess May was greatly admired, but the Yorks were never a part of any of these circles. The Duke of York did not approve of his father’s set, and he was hardly inclined toward the Intellectuals. He preferred to dine with Princess May and their Household or to join his mother and sisters for tea than to attend any gala occasion. Not a good conversationalist, he did possess an amazing memory. He did not have a particularly inquiring mind, and his two consuming hobbies were shooting and stamp collecting.

  Still, the Duke of York was not unhappy with his life but was content with the dullness of duties that did not draw too harshly upon his energies. He was also far more accustomed to the uncritical praise and effusive endearments showered upon him by his mother and sisters than by society. He soon grew to admire the candor possessed by his wife and to trust her opinions and decisions. Increasingly, his great dependency upon his mother transferred to Princess May, a fact that did not help the relationship between the two women.

  The London social season of 1895 was especially brilliant, but as Princess May was carrying her second child at the time, she entered into few of the frivolities. Though the Yorks attended Ascot, Princess May was highly intolerant of racing and gambling. Not so her mother, who wrote to her son Alge, in India, “Tuesday we had a delightful day at the races [Ascot]! Glorious weather! A very fine procession up the course! 12 Psses and in all 20 royalties filling 5 carriages ... Uncle Wales won 2 races and we all won our money! I cried with excitement at his first victory with Persimmon, and cheered when Florizel 2 won him Her My’s Gold Vase.”

  Princess May admitted to her brother, “There have been a good many foreign royalties over in England this summer which has given éclat to the season.” Still, she was not inclined either to write or indulge in gossip, as did the ladies surrounding Princess Alexandra and the smart set who were part of the Prince of Wales’s social circle. She was aware of her father-in-law’s strong liaison with Mrs. George Keppel, and that Alice Keppel had joined the Prince of Wales openly at Cowes that year, an act that “could not be easy for Motherdear,” she wrote Aunt Augusta, without further comment than that. “Before her scandal sits dumb,” a contemporary of Princess May wrote of her perceptively, adding, “she has a quiet but inflexible power of silencing everything which seems likely to approach ill-natured gossip. I am filled with admiration for the dignified simplicity & singlemindedness, & the high sense of duty ... which will be the very salvation of England some day.”

  The business of government and empire was carried on during the season, but scant attention was paid to it by the Prince of Wales set. The Kaiser arrived with his mother, the Empress Frederick, early in August for the Royal Regatta at Cowes and at this social event crossed swords in conversations with Lord Salisbury (then in the second month of his new term of office).

  The Queen remained an outsider to all the cliques of society. Amazingly alert for her years and in good health, she still refused to include the Prince of Wales in governmental matters or to give him some responsible post. This same exclusion was exercised toward the Duke of York. Except for the business of being on show, neither father nor son had much to do, other than attending a “function every few weeks at Lancaster or at Liverpool or at Halifax or at Brighton,” and attendance at Royal funerals and weddings. Neither man was accorded access to official documents or Cabinet papers. Except for an occasional social meeting with leading politicians, the Duke of York’s knowledge of the government would not have been more extensive than that of any man who read the Times each morning. The Prince of Wales, though exercising some small initiative in state matters, continued to stave off boredom with society galas, gambling, and the company of Alice Keppel; the Duke of York in gardening, his stamp collection, and shooting.

  In November 1895, with Princess May in her ninth month, the Duke of York accompanied his parents to Russia to attend the funeral in Saint Petersburg of Tsar Alexander III (Princess Alexandra’s brother-in-law) and the wedding of the new Tsar Nicholas II to Princess Alix of Hesse. To the Princess of Wales, the first meeting with her widowed sister was “unspeakable agony.” She remained by the Empress’s side throughout the nineteen days of funeral ceremonies, even sleeping by night in her bedroom. For years, her sister, the Empress Maria, and her brother-in-law, Tsar Alexander III, had been her closest confidants, the ones to whom she would run when life in England became too difficult. The death of the powerful Tsar, only forty-nine, had been a shock to her as well as to all of Europe’s Royalties, sixty-one of whom—each with an entourage—were housed in the magnificent marble palaces of the Tsar’s city.

  Looking pale and bereaved, Princess Alexandra stood by her sister’s side at midnight on the first night of her arrival in the light of flickering torches. Both women wept as the Tsar’s coffin was carried over the threshold of his own home by his relatives and then borne on the shoulders of his faithful Cossacks to the little church on top of a neighbouring hill. Since the Tsar had died in Livadia, the coffin had first to go by ship to Moscow and then overland to Saint Petersburg.

  “Every day, after lunch, we had another service at the Church,”* the Duke of York wrote Princess May from Saint Petersburg. “After the service, we all went up to [the] coffin which was open and kissed the Holy Picture which he holds in his hand. It gave me a shock when I saw his dear face so close to mine when I stooped down.”

  The wedding of Princess Alix, now Alexandra Fyodorovna, Empress of all the Russias, took place on November 26, one week after the funeral. The new Tsarina wrote her sister:† “One day in deepest mourning lamenting a beloved one, the next in smartest clothes being married. There cannot be a greater contrast, but it drew us more together, if possible.”

  Victoria’s granddaughter Alix, the young woman who had refused to marry Prince Eddy, “looked too wonderfully lovely,” the Duke of York wrote Princess May. “I must say I never saw two people more in love with each other or happier than they are. I told them both that I could not wish them more than that they should be as happy as you and I are together. Was that right?”

  * * *

  “A boy!!! What a joy!!!” Princess Mary Adelaide wrote to her son Prince Alge, who was still in India. On December 14, 1895 (unfortunately the anniversary of the deaths of the Prince Consort in 1861 and of the Queen’s second daughter Alice, Tsarina Alexandra’s mother, in 1878), the Yorks’ second son, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George (known ever after to his family as “Bertie”) was born at York Cottage. “Dear Grandmama we propose with your permission to call him Albert after dear Grandpapa,” the Duke of York wrote the Queen, hoping to appease her distress at the baby’s inadvertent and sad choice of a day to enter this world. “He could hardly have been called by any other name,” she commented. However, Princess Mary Adelaide, who had not been fond of the Prince Consort, had the final prophetic word. “George will be his last name and we hope some day may supplant the less favoured one!” she wrote to her second son, Frank, who was on
his way to India to join his brother Alge’s regiment.

  The new baby was given over to Mary Peters and an additional nurse. Princess May was no more maternal toward her second child than toward her first, seeing her sons perhaps twice a day. Although quite happy to give Nanny Peters full authority, she was distressed that David, the older, cried when handed over to her. She seldom ever ventured into the nursery. Had she, she could not have helped but been alarmed at the Dickensian atmosphere that prevailed. Mary Peters was suffering severe mental problems, and no one in the nursery dared to touch or talk to David for fear of her reprisals towards the child or them. Nor was anyone courageous enough to tell Princess May that her second son was being underfed and neglected because Peters resented his presence.

  Then, in autumn of 1896, Princess May became pregnant for the third time. A gentle Cockney woman, Lala Bill,* was engaged as a second nanny. She discovered to her horror that three-year-old David was covered with bruises and learned that Peters would pinch him or twist his arm nastily before handing him over to his mother, so that he would cry loudly and be handed directly back to her. The same bruising treatment was applied to the child whenever he approached a nursemaid. Little Bertie was being dealt with in a cold, brusque manner and was terrified of everything. Peters, she was told, had not had a day away from David in all the time she had been caring for him. Lala Bill gathered up her courage and told Lady Eva Dugdale, who in turn immediately reported the situation to Princess May. Peters was fired that very day. At first she refused to leave but was gone by nightfall. A week later, she was in hospital, having suffered a complete nervous breakdown from which she would never recover.