Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  “No, but that’s a very different thing,” the King had answered.

  The truth was that Princess May understood their content better than did Prince George, and, as had always been her habit, she would discuss things with him in a manner that increased his perception. The King’s respect for Princess May’s intelligence did not help the relationship between the Queen and her daughter-in-law. Nothing could be kept secret in the Court, and Queen Alexandra learned quickly that Princess May had been accorded this special privilege. Her animosity toward her daughter-in-law increased, even though she herself was not the least bit interested in seeing the contents of the King’s boxes.

  Princess May had become a threat to the vain Queen Alexandra since the day she had become the Princess of Wales. Also, the younger woman had matured, narrowing the generation gap between them and placing Princess May in a more competitive position with her mother-in-law. Harshly critical of Queen Alexandra to those close to her, she doubled her own efforts in presenting herself as the most dedicated, intelligent, and industrious of the female members of the Royal Family. Had she been less of her own person, she might have enjoyed a better relationship with her mother-in-law. Princess May displayed a rigid nature that was unwilling to bend.

  Few nations were without conflicts—ambitious leaders, dynastic squabbles, severe economic problems—that could easily explode into violence. The most direct threat was Kaiser Wilhelm of the German Empire, whose military power was growing at a startling pace. Britain had to look for allies, and she quickly made agreements and alliances with Japan, France, and finally—in 1907—with Russia. Meantime, the military potential of the dominions was enlisted. An Imperial General Staff was established, and Winston Churchill devised a scheme “for an Imperial Squadron of warships from all the major colonies, to be based upon Gibraltar and sent wherever it was needed.”

  The King had suddenly taken on his sovereignty with great drive and urgency. He spent hours each day over the dispatches and communiqués in his leather boxes, in meetings with his Ministers, and in consultation with his secretaries. Prince George did not share the burden of the nation’s problems. Despite being allowed access to the dispatches, he and his father never discussed state problems. Not that Prince George appeared concerned, being content to spend his days working with his collection of stamps or in shooting.

  In 1903, Princess May’s youngest brother, Alge, married Princess Alice, the King’s niece and Prince George’s first cousin. Nothing could have pleased Princess May more. Alge was her favourite brother, and as Princess Alice was the King’s favourite niece, the alliance further bound her own relationship to the Wales family. Princess Alice, slight and delicate with wonderfully soft-curling dark hair and shining brown eyes, was a bright young woman, and her “Uncle Bertie” enjoyed having her at shooting parties at Sandringham. At one party, Princess Alice confessed to Mrs. Keppel: “Much as I love him I find it difficult when sitting next to him at a table not to be distracted by his habit of fiddling with his cutlery and I also find it almost impossible to keep up a consecutive conversation with him.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Mrs. Keppel replied. “We all experience that trouble. He likes to join in general conversation injecting remarks at intervals, but he prefers to listen to others rather than talk himself. Often he starts a discussion, but as soon as he can get others involved in it he is content to listen and make occasional comments.”

  Alge’s marriage to Princess Alice greatly helped Princess May’s self-esteem. Since her mother’s death, she had set herself up as matriarch of the Teck family. Her older brother, Dolly, after acquitting himself well in the Boer War, returned to England, married Lady Margaret Grosvenor, and had recently been appointed Military Secretary at the War Office. But Princess May’s third brother, the good-looking and irresponsible Frank whom Princess Maud had once loved,* had never ceased being a humiliation to his sister. Princess Alice recalled that “from boyhood Frank had been a family problem. He had been expelled from Wellington College for throwing his housemaster over a hedge to win a bet. All through his life he was an incorrigible gambler. Frank’s gambling became more and more a vice with each year.” And much as she lectured and warned that she would no longer come to Frank’s aid, Princess May kept on doing so, fearing that if she did not, public knowledge of his way of life would discredit the Teck name. In the spring of 1904, thirty-five and still unmarried, Frank lost ten thousand pounds to a professional gambler who threatened scandal if the loss was not made good. At this time, Princess May also learned that Frank had become entangled with an older married woman and had given her some of Princess Mary Adelaide’s jewels, which, in fact, had been bequeathed to Princess May.*

  Princess May—“the most unlikely princess in the realm.” Circa 1891.

  Horrified by the commonness of all this, yet aware that she must act, Princess May went to the King. The payment of the gambling debt was arranged, and to guard against further embarrassments of this kind, King Edward decreed Frank should return to India to rejoin the regiment in which he had served during the Boer War. To Princess May’s further consternation, Frank sent in his resignation to the Army and refused to leave England. The awful dilemma of the Princess of Wales’s brother was to hang over her head for some time to come.

  In April 1904, the Prince and Princess of Wales made a glowing state visit to the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and were received at Vienna with a rigid protocol long abandoned in England. Dinner at the Hapsburgs’ Court was formal, beginning at five in the afternoon. A Court ball, nothing like those held at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor Castle, followed at 8:30 P.M. “My goodness! This Court is stiff” Prince George wrote in his diary that night.

  In the same months, Prince George and Princess May travelled to Stuttgart to invest Princess May’s cousin, William II, King of Württemberg, with the Order of the Garter. Onkle Willie and Tante Charlotte, as Princess May called the King and Queen of Württemberg, were sympathetic and easygoing people. “Their ample figures betrayed the justice they did to their four full meals a day.” After an enormous lunch, Onkle Willie and Tante Charlotte took their visitors on a leisurely drive through the suburbs of Stuttgart in an open victoria, and Onkle Willie quickly fell asleep, only to receive “a swift jab of the Queen’s elbow to acknowledge the salute of one of his soldiers and to straighten his hat that kept sliding rakishly to one side of his head.”

  Württemberg received the Prince and Princess of Wales with much enthusiasm. Princess May’s family connections might have added to the general excitement. Yet everywhere she and Prince George went, they were popular. Even at home, and despite Queen Alexandra’s great beauty and the love and devotion she claimed from the people, it was Princess May who always received the greatest ovation at the opera or during a public appearance. Her bearing was a combination of the military and the regal, and her appearance had a startling effect and left a deep and lasting impression. Never bowing to current fashion (she still wore her hair in a “poodle fringe”), she was as dependable as Big Ben and seldom cancelled an engagement. Before the public or in private, she had the talent to say the right thing, no matter how difficult the occasion.

  A certain uneasiness in her manner could occasionally be seen—a flicker of nervousness in her eyes at odd moments, an uncontrollable little twitch at the side of her mouth in times of stress, and the flutter of her hand to her throat when unsure. These small indications of her human frailty endeared her more strongly to the public and to the Court. Her “shyness” was often discussed in the press in a flattering way, and it greatly mitigated the austere posture she could and did affect.

  Away from England, she was at her most confident. At home there were always worrisome things—Frank, of course, and the older children. David was such a “jumpy” child, Bertie was both shy and moody, and she simply could not find a way to win over her one small daughter.

  Princess May had a strong distaste for all the processes of childbirth. Pregnancy depressed
her. “Of course it is a great bore to me & requires a great deal of patience to bear it, but this is alas the penalty of being a woman!” she wrote her husband during the soggy, rainy summer of 1905. Her mental outlook was not eased when her Aunt Augusta wrote, upon hearing she was soon to have a sixth child, “The pleasure I always have in receiving your dear letters was rather marred by the secret imparted to me!” Aunt Augusta thought the bearing of six children disgustingly common. Due to give birth in July, Princess May was forced to remain at York Cottage during May and June. Prince George went there whenever he could steal time from his public duties representing the Crown at various functions—but his wife felt resentful that she could not attend with him the festivities of the King of Spain’s official visit, which culminated in a gala performance at the opera. Nor could she be at the wedding in June at Windsor of her husband’s first cousin, Princess Margaret of Connaught,* to Crown Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden, which was to be the Royal Family’s most festive gathering of the year.

  On July 6, Prince George joined his wife at York Cottage to await the birth of their newest child. On the twelfth, after an unduly difficult labour, a fifth son, Prince John Charles Francis, was born. Princess May was indeed supplying her husband with a regiment. For eight days after the birth, Sir John Williams, the doctor in attendance, remained at the cottage. “A charming man. I shall miss him very much,” Prince George recorded of the doctor’s departure. Princess May had made her usual rapid recovery, but the tiny Prince had had respiratory problems.

  The new Prince had been named for Prince George’s second brother, a child who had lived only long enough to be christened. (He was buried at Sandringham a short distance from York Cottage in a grave marked with a white cross inscribed: “Suffer little children to come unto Me.”) For Lala Bill the name was a bad omen. Lala Bill had become a fixture in the Wales nursery since Mary Peters’s departure. She had been head nurse to each child born since Mary. David, who was most attached to her, resented the time she had to devote to each newborn in the household.

  Except for the three months of the year that their parents spent at Sandringham, the children saw little of them. York Cottage was considered to be home, where life fell into a more domestic pattern. Mother and children seldom met until four in the afternoon, when the youngsters would appear in the drawing room for tea, “freshly scrubbed and with hair combed.” Tea was their last meal in the day and usually consisted of muffins, jam, and milk. Comfortable enough for three or four people, with five noisy children and their nannies, the room was crowded. As soon as tea was served, Prince George would stride off alone to the library, “where he would remain occupied with his stamp collection, already becoming quite famous, or his correspondence, or entering into his book which game and how many he had shot, or reading The Times,” while Princess May, with one of her ladies-in-waiting at the piano, would sing folk songs, among them such American favourites as “Old Black Joe,” “Swanee River,” “The Camptown Races,” and “Oh, My Darling Clementine.”

  The children would then return to their rooms until an hour before their bedtime, when they would be marched single-file into their mother’s boudoir to sit in their own special small chairs around the sofa upon which she would be reclining in her negligee before getting dressed for dinner. Standing a discreet distance away were the nursery staff, poised to remove from their mother’s presence anyone of the five who misbehaved. Princess May read and talked to the children in her soft, clipped voice that never sluffed a vowel or dropped a consonant. She liked to discuss with them some of her cultural interests in literature, art, and opera, and share with them her prodigious knowledge of Royal history.

  Princess May, who had long admired Shakespeare and knew the Histories exceptionally well, would recite long, complicated passages from memory.* In time, the children were terrified of reciting Shakespeare to her because she would always catch them out on any mistakes, no matter how small. She was remarkably well read in English, French, and German literature, both classic and contemporary, and had a prejudice against reading a book in a language other than its original. She reread Flaubert and Hugo in French, and Goethe and Schiller in German. When she read the Maud translations of Tolstoy’s works in the 1920s, they made a deep impression upon her. To the children, she read not only Dickens and Kipling, Shakespeare and Tennyson, but also foreign works, even though the children could not understand them.

  Her boudoir was a cozy place overflowing with personal treasures; to the children she would identify all the people in the photographs and miniatures she kept around her, and she would also explain the background of her various momentoes, gifts given to her on her tours and by family members—a jewelled Fabergé Easter egg from Nicholas II and an antique inlaid ebony-and-mother-of-pearl fan from Queen Ena of Spain among them. Being of a practical nature, she insisted that small hands should never be idle. Each child was given a wooden ring with upright brass pegs, and while she entertained her children, they would loop wool yarn around each peg to form, by means of a succession of crochet stitches, a comforter five feet in length earmarked for one of their mother’s many charities. David was the most agile crocheter in the group.*

  If Princess May was distant with her children, teaching, explaining, and sermonising instead of sharing, she was most conscious of her own position and of her children’s futures as Royalty. She did not share Prince George’s fondness for sport (from partridge shooting to deer stalking to fishing), and she was a bad sailor where boats were his special passion. For his part, he lacked enthusiasm for the arts or any history other than Great Britain’s. Still, they did forbear with exceptional grace each other’s hobbies and interests, and were inveterate creatures of habit.

  Christmas at Sandringham was “Dickens in a Cartier setting.” Each year A Christmas Carol was reread in the sonorous voice of the boys’ tutor, Mr. Hansell. On Christmas Eve, Princess May conducted the children in carol singing as everyone crowded about the piano in the sitting room. Directly after, the Prince and Princess of Wales escorted their family to the coach house at the stables to watch the distribution of bounty to the employees at Sandringham. On long tables covered with white tablecloths were laid “scores of bloody joints of beef, one for each family, and each tagged with the name of the recipient. Outside in the stable yard, waiting their turn, were the game-keepers, gardeners, foresters and stable hands, or their wives—in all some three hundred people.” The King and Queen with the Wales family sat just inside, near the door of the coach house, “and as the employees walked out with their meat, the men touching their caps and the women making a quick bob of a curtsy, the King wished each a Happy Christmas.”

  The children were forced to wait many agonising hours before they were able to exchange and open their gifts, for at Sandringham procedures moved along prescribed lines. Once the estate workers were presented with their Christmas tokens, the children piled into Prince George’s horse-drawn omnibus—usually used for transporting the servants—and rode up to the Big House, where the household and the guests for the Christmas holidays were gathered and waiting in the saloon. Not long after, a gong sounded, heralding the approach of Santa Claus himself. An instant later a tall, hooded figure in full regalia—flowing white beard, red coat, black patent-leather boots, a bulging bag over his shoulder, appeared. The fact that they knew this resplendent impersonator to be one of the upper servants in no way diminished the children’s joy over his arrival. After bowing to the King and Queen, “who would greet him jovially, Santa Claus led the company out of the Saloon toward the Ballroom. The double doors flew open before his advance, revealing in the centre of the room a fir tree from the woods, tall enough to touch the ceiling, festooned with tinsel, tinted glass balls, patches of cotton in imitation of snow, and ablaze with candles.”

  The children were always the last to receive their gifts from their grandparents and then permitted to be the first to open all their other packages. The wait was endless, as the hour was already later than they
stayed up to on other nights of the year. Still, they managed, as most children would, to honk and pedal their way on their new toy motors through the sea of wrapping paper that covered the ballroom floor.

  For months the children looked forward to Christmas at Sandringham. During the rest of the year their parents were either busy or surrounded by private secretaries, equerries, and Ladies-in-Waiting. The nursery and tutoring staff formed a solid wall between the children and their parents. And with David, Princess May had less time than with her other children, as his teaching schedule was more arduous. In the rare moments that they had alone, they discussed English history and visited galleries that specialised in English artists.

  When her older son was only two years old, Princess May wrote to her husband, “I really believe he begins to like me, at least he is most civil to me.” Civil best describes Princess May’s attitude toward her children and theirs to her. She had been blind to David’s great need for maternal affection, unaware during the first three years of his life that Mary Peters had so abused him. Bertie’s severe emotional problems irritated rather than alarmed her. Mary’s desperately poor school record simply brought recriminations to the child and her teachers that they did not recognise the responsibility of being a Royal Princess.

  Therefore, with mixed emotions, the children accepted the news that their parents would be leaving in October for India, and would be gone for Christmas and Easter as well (they would be away for a total of eight months). During that period their grandparents would once again be in charge. Bertie felt the least sad over the news of their planned absence, for his fondest memories were of the time his parents had been gone during the equally long tour on the ophir. Now, of course, his dear grandpapa was King. Bertie understood what that meant, but with the hope that only childhood fantasy can nurture, he was confident—as he wished his parents an awkward farewell—that his life would become whole again, that he would stop stuttering and being so frightened of always doing the wrong thing.