Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  The possible effect those three years of Mary Peters’s obsessive care had on small David’s future relationships with women, as well as whether the little Prince was ever sexually abused, has been the subject of much public discussion. Whatever the extent of Mary Peters’s abuse of the child, that it continued for almost three years without the Yorks’ knowledge is shocking. For everyone in the Household appears to have had doubts about Mary Peters’s stability and her treatment of little David.

  Yet all the blame cannot be placed on Princess May. The Duke of York did not like babies and little boys any more than his wife did. York Cottage was small and cramped, and sound carried, and the Prince was often heard calling out in irritation to Lala Bill, “Can’t you stop that child from crying?”

  A girl, Princess Victoria Alexandra Alice Mary (Mary to her family) was born to Princess May on April 25, 1897, only seventeen months after Bertie’s birth. Princess May was pleased to have a daughter—but she had no more to do with this new baby than with her sons. Helene Bricka was enlisted to join the Household to supervise the boys, and Lala Bill took on the care of the infant Princess. By the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which was only two months after the birth of her third child, Princess May was slim and ready to step back into the public limelight.

  Footnotes

  *Named for Prince Eddy, although Queen Victoria was to say that his name was Albert, not Edward.

  *The Tsarevitch Nicholas and Princess Alix were soon to become Tsar and Tsarina (Empress) Alexandra of Russia. Princess Alix was to be one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters who were carriers of haemophilia, and had she married into the British Royal line could have jeopardized its future. Princess Ena, future Queen of Spain, was another haemophilia carrier. Three of her four sons were afflicted with the dread disease, and one was mute.

  *The fortress church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

  †The Grand Duchess Elizabeth (Ella) (1864–1918), wife of Grand Duke Serge, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Kaiser Wilhelm had always been in love with Ella, and when her life was in danger in 1918, he begged her to leave Russia and join him. She refused and was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks.

  *Charlotte Bill (1867–1963).

  EIGHT

  The day of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, June 22, 1897,* was dazzlingly bright. “Queen’s weather,” the English called it, and no one was surprised that the sun, after an overcast morning, finally blazed high in the heavens. After all, were not the English now God’s Chosen People destined to go forth in the world to do His will? And how symbolic that the young heir of York was called David!

  England! What shall men say of thee,

  Before whose feet the worlds divide?

  The Earth, a brittle globe of glass,

  Lies in the hollow of thy hand,

  said Oscar Wilde, who had just been released from Reading Gaol.

  In a sense, the English had been chosen. They had reached their apogee. Imperialism had become habit. Forty million strong, they had overflowed their shores and sailed across the world to plant their ideas, culture, and language. Having escaped the social upheavals that now shook Europe, having produced an imperial elite whose true vocation was Empire, and possessing a monarchy of semidivine nature, they believed they were as well fitted as any nation to govern one quarter of the world.

  No other period of British history had been so theatrical as the last half of the nineteenth century, set-piece after set-piece appearing with wonderful precision, triumph and tragedy alternating to the greatest effect. And through the years the Empire grew mightier. To England and the world the indomitable old Queen symbolised the true might of that empire, unchanging, unwavering, bowing to no man.

  The Queen’s route had been thronged with celebrants since the previous night, when Big Ben sounded the last stroke of twelve and a peal of bells throughout London had proclaimed Diamond Jubilee Day. The crowds that filled the miles of streets and squares along the route answered with ringing cheers, and cries of “God Save the Queen” could be heard above blaring horns and cornets. On the streets, buskers entertained with mouth organs and concertinas. Inside the music halls, which were kept open specially until 2:00 A.M., every popular ditty was greeted by vociferous shouts and cheers. Everywhere hawkers vended fruit. The illuminations that decorated public buildings and store fronts remained lighted until dawn. And street stalls, where coffee, hot potatoes, and confections were on sale, did a brisk trade throughout the night.

  Shortly before 6:00 A.M., the vestry carts arrived to gravel the roadways freshly, a custom, according to the Daily Telegraph, “... which prevailed [since] the good old days of Sam Pepys.” By ten o’clock, the sun pierced sharply through the clouds. Less than an hour later, when the Royal procession formed in front of the Palace, uniforms, carriages, medals, and sabres filled the streets with a mass of blazing colours.

  The procession was headed by a cavalcade of officers, military attachés, and representatives of all the Courts of Europe, followed by the Kaiser’s regiments and a deputation from the First Prussian Dragoon Guards. The most brilliant group of all the soldiery were the officers of the Imperial Service troops from India, swarthy, mostly bearded men wearing a rare collection of wondrously twisted turbans in bright colours trimmed in gold. Their tunics (or “Kirtas”) were scarlet and peacock blue and jade green, laced and interlaced with gold or silver, broadly and vividly sashed. Many also wore massive gold earrings with enormous stones. The Fijians, their hair trained upward and dyed a bright red, followed. And after them came all the regiments of Britain and her Empire: Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Africans, the Zaptiehs from Cyprus, the Dyaks from Borneo. The crowds shouted its enthusiasm as each exotic regiment filed past. Their cheers rose to thunderous proportion and made even the saluting guns in St. James’s Park barely audible as the Queen’s carriage followed the troops.

  Though nearing her eightieth year and exposed to uncommon heat and great strain, Queen Victoria still projected an animated figure to her cheering admirers. Her customary black-silk moiré dress was embroidered for the occasion with silver emblems of her reign. A wreath of white acacia and an aigrette of diamonds trimmed her black-lace bonnet. Attended by her marshals, clerics, and statesmen, she sat in her ornate, opened, gilded carriage drawn by eight of the Royal stable’s finest cream-coloured horses ridden by elaborately uniformed postillions with scarlet-coated footmen walking at their sides. Her white-lace parasol, which she used to protect herself from the hot sun, bobbed up and down as the carriage made its way slowly along the Jubilee route. Beside her sat the Princess of Wales, elegantly costumed in mauve from her flower-bedecked bonnet to her satin shoes. The Prince of Wales, astride a magnificent black horse and resplendent in his field marshal’s uniform, rode by their side. Princess May, in a dress of sky-blue, feathery clouds piled high on her hat, rode with Prince George. The rest of the Royal Family, including the children (David became so nauseous from sun and motion that he had to be transferred to an ambulance to relieve himself surreptitiously of his breakfast), rode in carriages behind the Queen’s. The journey was a tedious three-hour procession through London and its outskirts, and most members of the Royal Family were exhausted at its end. Yet the Queen looked more radiant than she had in years.

  For the Princess of Wales, the Jubilee celebrations were overshadowed by anxiety for her brother, the King of Greece, George I. Hostilities had erupted between Turkey and Greece on April 17, after Turkey had been urged on by Kaiser Wilhelm II. King George of Greece had sent frenzied telegrams to his sister begging her to enlist the Queen’s aid, but Princess Alexandra was powerless. A week before the Jubilee, the Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting, Marie Mallet, wrote her husband, “The Princess of Wales came down last night in an awful stew about Greece, imploring the Queen to do something to stop the war and stay the hand of the triumphant Turks ... We live for nothing but the Jubilee and seem to ignore the doings of the world in general, and we snort at the Greek question.”

/>   Princess May also suffered from anxiety during the Jubilee. Her mother had been seriously ill and was operated upon for the removal of kidney stones on April 27. Nonetheless, Princess Mary Adelaide insisted upon being present in the Jubilee procession. A few days earlier, she had been wheeled about the grounds of Buckingham Palace in a chair for the Queen’s garden party and the next night had attended the famous bal costume given by the Duchess of Devonshire, appearing in the character of the Electress Sophia. Lord Esher, slim and debonair in a costume from 1628—black velvet trimmed with beads and a ruff—his balding head exposed and his moustache waxed and curled, did what he could to bring guests to her so that she would not overexert herself. But the heat and the strain of Jubilee Week were too much for Princess Mary Adelaide to bear in her weakened condition. She spent a fortnight at York Cottage immediately following. A clergyman came to call upon her. Her grandson David was seated on her lap. “You will pray for him, won’t you?” she asked with concern, adding, “He will indeed need your prayers.” Then, kissing the small child who one day would be a troubled King, she said, “This kind gentleman will pray for you, dear.”

  On Saturday, October 23, Princess May spent a week at White Lodge with her failing mother. The doctors now concurred that Princess Mary Adelaide was suffering from a malignancy. A second operation was performed only two days after the first, but she was too weak to rally. After forty-eight hours she died without ever regaining full consciousness.

  At the Duke of Teck’s urgent request, the Princess of Wales was summoned and arrived at White Lodge to find “... everyone plunged in the most terrible grief—[Duke of Teck] poor man heart-broken utterly crushed,” she wrote the Grand Duchess Augusta, Princess Mary Adelaide’s sister, “poor darling May & her two brothers,* calm but in perfect despair—Uncle George [Duke of Cambridge] very much upset—Bertie [Prince of Wales] was also there having come up from Newmarket with the former —Sister Louise [Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll] also there ... & poor dear Geraldine [Somerset] was there—& so nice & feeling—We had a long talk together. Darling May who so far bears up wonderfully well took me upstairs at once into Mary’s room! Where she was lying in her last long sleep. She looked so beautiful calm & peaceful with such a happy expression on her dear face.” Lady Geraldine Somerset had remained the constant hypocrite to the end.

  Lord Esher was asked to make the funeral arrangements. He found the vault where Princess Mary Adelaide, as a descendant of George III, was to be buried in a deplorable state.

  “The partition between this vault and that in which Henry VIII, Charles I and Jane Seymour were buried is bricked up,” he recorded. “But I saw an old man who was present as a boy when George IV opened the vault and the coffin of Charles I. This man told me that when the lid was removed, King Charles’s face seemed that of a living man, absolutely perfect. In a few minutes, exposed to the air, it fell to pieces. There was a piece of black ribbon to hide the severance of the head from the body.”

  Lord Esher did what he could to have the vault made respectable, and at noon on Wednesday, November 3, wind and rain thrashing mournfully against the stained-glass windows, Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, was buried in the Royal Vault at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, with the Queen present and the Prince of Wales standing beside her bier. Princess May maintained her composure throughout the long service, bearing it with control. Princess Alexandra’s loud sobbing was prompted as much by memories of Prince Eddy as by the death of Princess Mary Adelaide.

  Within a few days of his wife’s funeral, the Duke of Teck’s once-erect form was bowed with grief, and the handsome face bore visible traces of mental anguish. Having leaned upon Princess Mary Adelaide during all the years of their marriage, he was never able to recover from her death. “I dread to think how we can live without her,” Princess May wrote Aunt Augusta. “For Papa it is cruel & his sad state makes it so much worse. He was so dependent on Mama for everything & God knows what he will do.”

  The Duke of Teck’s mental condition caused his daughter great alarm. He was, for the two years until his own death, to live in seclusion at White Lodge, looked after by a resident doctor and a series of male nurses. Princess May’s first few visits so unbalanced him that she did not return.

  Her parents’ deaths fortified—rather than depleted—Princess May’s strength. She also reached the zenith of her attractiveness during this period. “She was quite superb in white and many diamonds on Monday night and made quite a little sensation coming down into the dimly lighted Concert room by the staircase at the side of the stage [at Windsor] with the footlights shining upon her brightly as she followed the Queen into the room,” the Empress Frederick wrote her daughter, Crown Princess Sophie of Greece. However, Princess May still wore a “towsel & fringe like a thick sponge over [her] forehead” (a wig front was attached to her own hair for this fashion).

  Princess May was fast displaying the grandeur and majesty that were to be synonymous with her name when she became Queen Consort. This premature queenliness did not help her already strained relations with her mother-in-law, but it did please the Queen and assured her that she had been right in her choice of a wife for Prince George. Frequent invitations from the Queen (to her mother-in-law’s extreme irritation) were more forthcoming to Princess May than to Princess Alexandra. In 1896, she spent a month with Queen Victoria at Osborne, eight days at Windsor Castle, six days at Balmoral, made four visits to Buckingham Palace and another four visits to Balmoral, during which she stayed at nearby Mar Lodge. The following year she joined the Queen (who travelled “incognito” as the Comtesse de Balmoral) on her last yearly migration to the Hotel Excelsior Regina at Cimiez near Nice. The Royal Entourage of over thirty people rode in the Queen’s Train Special, its interior elegantly upholstered and tasselled in dove blue, soft rose, and pearl grey. Both of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting took ill with fevers and colds during the trip, and Princess May accompanied the Queen on daily excursions.

  “I drove with Gdmama to Villefranche,” she wrote to her husband who had remained in England. “You would have laughed at me sitting with Gdmama’s purse in my hand giving one franc pieces to throw to the beggars, some such awful sights too, with horrible disfigurements!” And the next day she wrote him, “At 4 I drove with Gdmama ... & she talked very kindly of you & said she was so glad we got on so well together as in these days it was such an example to others!”

  These drives were never simple because the Queen’s Chasseurs d’Afrique thundered behind the Royal carriage and people crowded the streets. A side entrance of the hotel had been set apart exclusively for the Queen’s use. Her sitting-room walls of red brocade were hung with pictures lent during her stay by Nice’s top art dealer. Picnics were held on the high slopes of the Corniche above Cimiez—a relief only for the Queen’s Scottish gillie who trailed the Royal carriage on foot up the steep hills. Despite being served by the Indians on fine china and eating at comfortable tables and in comfortable chairs, luncheon alfresco in the South of France in the month of April was a chilly affair.

  Impeccable care was given to each small detail of the installation of the Court at the Hotel Excelsior Regina. The Queen’s writing paper was identical to that used at Windsor and Balmoral, except that beneath the embossed Crown was printed, “Hotel Regina, Cimiez.” At half-past eight, she would come into the drawing room of her suite leaning on the arm of one of her Indian servants (who wore native costume and a gold-striped turban) and greet her dinner guests as they stood lined up uneasily. Dinner—as at Windsor—was served punctually at 9: 15 in a room containing full-length coronation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. After dinner, the guests were shepherded back into the drawing room, where each in turn would be permitted a short conversation with the Queen. No one was allowed to sit until the Queen, as was her custom, retired precisely at eleven o’clock.

  Now past eighty, Queen Victoria’s failing eyesight created grave constitutional problems, for she could no longer keep abreast of
affairs that were the Sovereign’s prerogative. To further complicate this difficulty, she refused to take Sir Frederick (Fritz) Ponsonby,* her Assistant Private Secretary, into her confidence. All communiqués to the Queen were read to her by her daughter, Princess Beatrice. “The result is that the most absurd mistakes occur and the Queen is not even au courant with the ordinary topics of the present day,” Sir Frederick wrote his mother in August 1898. “There is [also] the danger of the Q[ueen]’s letting go almost entirely the control of things which should be kept under the immediate supervision of the sovereign.” Though nearly blind, the Queen’s faculties remained sharp, “... Her memory ... wonderful, her shrewdness of discrimination as strong as ever ...” and her power to move her people obdurate.

  The Queen had just returned from a visit to Ireland. On the way home, her yacht was caught in a particularly rough sea and the boat was harshly buffeted. Never a good sailor, she became violently seasick and summoned her private physician, who was in attendance. “Go up at once,” she ordered, “and give the Admiral my compliments and tell him the thing must not occur again.” Obviously her autocratic personality had not been humbled by age.

  The long reign of Queen Victoria, which had given the British such a sense of “organic permanence,” was nearing its close, and with the end in sight came a need for the Empire to bolster its strength to confront the inevitable changeover. In the beginning, the South African war, declared on October 11, 1899, had been expected to strengthen the Empire and to be over by Christmas. Instead, it lasted 33 months, cost over £100 million and at least 50,000 lives, and was the most humiliating war the British had fought in a hundred years.