Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  For Princess May, the trip to India promised a grateful surcease from nursery problems and unpleasant confrontations with her mother-in-law. More than that, it presented an opportunity to shine alone in a country where she believed majesty was viewed with awe by its people, and she prepared for the long journey with enthusiasm that India would be a great and wondrous adventure.

  Footnotes

  *Walter B. Bagehot (1826–77), economist and author of The English Constitution, (1867).

  *Sir Henry Keppel (1809–1904), Admiral of the Fleet.

  *Carl Fabergé was the favourite jeweler of the Russian Imperial family. Queen Alexandra was the sister of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna and introduced Fabergé’s work to her husband. Because of this the Royal Family owns a huge collection of this great jeweler’s masterwork.

  *Hon. (Elizabeth) Charlotte Knollys (1835–1930). Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Alexandra (1870–1925).

  *Princess Maud married Prince Charles of Denmark in 1896. Later he became King Haakon of Norway and Princess Maud his Queen Consort.

  *These consisted of a magnificent set of matched emeralds—tiara, earrings, necklace, stomacher, brooch, bracelets, and ring—originally owned by Princess Mary Adelaide’s mother, the Duchess of Cambridge.

  *Princess Margaret (1862–1920), daughter of Queen Victoria’s son Arthur, Duke of Connaught, and Louise, Princess of Prussia. Prince George had attended the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Conn aught in 1879 (when he was only fourteen), which had also taken place at Windsor.

  *A misconception about Princess May’s literary interest arose because James Pope-Hennessy mentioned in a passing reference in his book, Queen Mary, that Princess May had not read Tolstoy or Dostoevski until late in life and was over fifty when she saw her first production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This last seems to have been a matter of oversight on her part, for it was a work she knew. And since she did not read Russian, she waited until the Dostoevski and Tolstoy novels were translated into English by Maud.

  *The Duke of Windsor was to become so proficient with a crochet needle that at the beginning of World War II, when attached to a British mission with the French Army and obliged to make long motor trips through the zone of operations, he crocheted to kill time. He was “understandably discreet” about the products of his hobby (which were sent to a charity for the French Army when complete), for, as he wrote later, “It would hardly have done for the story to get around that a Major General in the British Army had been seen bowling along the roads behind the Maginot Line crocheting.”

  TWELVE

  “Fancy you ‘Miss May’ on an Elephant! I can hardly see you perched up there!” Queen Alexandra replied to a letter written from India by her daughter-in-law in December 1905. During a visit she had made to Egypt in 1869 with her husband, the Queen had not only ridden camels and been photographed on one’s humpy back, but had smoked a huqqah and had eaten with her fingers among the ladies of Khedive Ismael’s harem, an exotic experience she had mentioned many times to Princess May.

  The Queen was still smouldering under the hurt of not being chosen to go to India, and, pointed though the thrust might have been, there were many in the Court who would have agreed with the Queen that riding on an elephant’s back was an unlikely occupation for the Princess of Wales. The younger woman was now more stately and imposing than her years suggested. Her bearing was so marvellously regal that she could wear a startling quantity of superb jewels. Her demeanor was stiff, often intimidating. However, in India, Princess May’s deeper romantic fantasies caught her unawares. “Lovely India, beautiful India,” she was heard to murmur like some incantation, and those in her Household who travelled with her noticed that she was “quite different in India.”

  The land of the British Raj stirred Princess May’s emotions as nothing else in her life had done. She was dazzled and more than a little in love with the mystery and adventure of this exotic and strange world. Princess May, despite the fact that it was unpleasantly hot and very little sea breeze blew, was intoxicated with India’s charm from the first moment that the battleship H.M.S. Renown entered the sullen green waters of the Bay of Bombay. She was to see India mainly from an English viewpoint, and therefore the romantic illusion was to remain throughout the tour and for many years to come. The more realistic side of India was seen by Prince George, and with growing concern over the Indian image of the British as conquerors. The trip, therefore, worked miracles in tearing Prince George out of his political complacency. He was shocked to learn in Bombay that Indians were not allowed as members of British clubs in any of the larger cities, and disturbed that there was so little social exchange between the British and the Indians. With much more maturity than he exercised on the tour of the Ophir, Prince George now observed India as a conquered country ruled by England, but separated by two social worlds.

  A curious dichotomy did exist. The English were “coddled by dark servants in flaring turbans,” their children in swaddling clothes cared for by ayahs. But English women avidly devoured their late issues of the Lady’s Pictorial and copied the newest English and French patterns, while the Indian women wore their gossamer sarees. And whereas the better-educated Indian men discussed the rise of Gandhi and the Congress Party, Englishmen followed Parliament’s disputes in month-old, dog-eared copies of the Times or the Illustrated London News and argued about happenings thousands of miles away. Except for the odd occasion, the British dined on the cuisine and foods of their distant homeland, and the men were never to be found without a coat and tie even in the most torrid weather, or the women without their feathered and flowered hats and lacy parasols. They frequently attended lavish parties and receptions because, as one grande dame of the period claimed: “Everyone with any standing had a ballroom at least 80 feet long.” At smaller dinner parties of forty or fifty people, there was a servant for each guest. But at most gatherings both small or grand, few Indians were to be counted, and these few were either government officials or representatives of the British Raj. An attitude of racial superiority abounded. A state visit by the Heir Apparent and his wife would, it was hoped, help bridge that chasm, for the British knew how great was the Indians’ respect for the Monarchy.

  Princess May had read all the relevant books she could in the few months preceding their departure, learning a good deal about the Hindu, Mohammedan, and Buddhist religions and memorising several greetings in Indian dialects. She had also spent an extravagant amount on clothes. “In all the papers I see accounts of your dresses,” her husband commented a few weeks before they sailed. And Aunt Augusta, in her usual caustic tone, chided as she wished the Princess bon voyage: “Your Dresses amuse me to read about, so many too! and who is to pay? The one for the tiger hunt gave me the shivers!”

  They arrived in Bombay on November 9, 1905, and were received by the outgoing Viceroy, Lord Curzon, and by Lord Lamington, Governor of Bombay, whose guests they had been in Australia five years earlier. In an historic quarrel, Curzon had clashed with Kitchener over the degree to which the civil government should control the Indian Army. Having lost, Curzon was obliged to resign, but welcoming the Prince and Princess of Wales to India was one of his last official duties.*

  According to one historian, Curzon had been “out of his time—in some ways too soon, in others too late.” He had “dared” to approach the civilisation of India with its 400 million people (one-fifth of the world’s population at that time) “with a respect rare among the pig-stickers and box wallahs, and tried to convince the Indians themselves that they should not simply wish to be brown Britons.” He championed Indian crafts: wood-works, enamels, carpets, potteries, and lovely silks. He devoted himself to Indian archaeology, restored the Taj Mahal to its original perfection, cherished the half-buried glories of Fetehpur-Sekri and the exquisite Pearl Mosque in the fort at Lahore. He also revived the moribund Department of Antiquities and gave to the British Raj in India—“just in time”—a scholarly distinction.

  Curzon, who had impres
sed Princess May at the coronation, was a man of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he was a forthright imperialist; on the other, a man who deplored the fact that the vast majority—even of educated Englishmen in India—“regarded the Indians as less than fully human.”

  From the time of their arrival in India, the Royal couple were protected from the true plight of the Indian people. After Bombay, they were to visit Ajmere, but because famine and plague had taken the lives of thousands there, the Royal party was redirected to Indore, which they reached on November 16. They were greeted by a youthful maharajah, splendid in scarlet and gold, and the maharani, who looked like “a little bundle of lilac silk crowned with diamonds, the position of her eyes indicated by two holes veiled with gauze.” Princess May managed a simple conversation in Indian dialect with the tiny maharani, a feat that won her the instant approval of the maharaja’s court at Indore. She also quickly discovered that the Indian woman was regarded as little more than a chattel by the Indian man. This so dismayed and disturbed her that she frequently brought the subject to Prince George’s attention, and when, toward the end of the Royal tour, Prince George was to have a conversation with the President of the Indian Congress Party about it, her strong influence is in evidence.

  “I have been reading your speech at Benares,” Prince George began, “in which you said it would be better for India if the Indians had a much larger part in the administration. I have now been travelling for some months in India, seeing vast crowds of Indians in many parts of the continent, and I have never seen a happier-looking people, and I understand the look in the eyes of the Indians. Would the people of India be happier if you ran the country?”

  “No, sir,” President Gokhale replied, “I do not say they would be happier, but they would have more self-respect.”

  “That may be,” Prince George snapped back, “but I cannot see how there can be real self-respect while the Indians treat their women as they do now,” and he was caught glancing over at Princess May for her approval.

  When home in England, Prince George was in daily contact with both his mother and his sister Toria. This habit was continued in India, where he would write the women in his family a running account of his and Princess May’s daily experiences.

  Queen Alexandra’s special affection was for Bertie and for the baby John, but she wrote Prince George, “Dear David, grown and such a sturdy, manly-looking little fellow, and little Mary also grown a good deal and sweet Bertie my particular friend.” Five-year-old Henry (whom his family called Harry) she had nicknamed “little Bobs” because he had a noticeable lisp that caused him to transpose “w’s” for “r’s” so that he pronounced his family name “Hawee,” and because his godfather was Lord Roberts. The Queen usually spoiled the children to excess, playing games with them, romping with the younger ones, acting out charades, giving them full run of Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace, but this time they were left with their tutors and nurses for long periods. Through it all, however, she never forgot her pique at not having been allowed to go to India. “I do envy you dreadfully and never shall cease regretting having been left behind,” she wrote her son. And to her daughter-in-law she added, “I am glad you sometimes think of old me and how I would have enjoyed it all!” The Queen also reminded Prince George and Princess May that “darling Eddy” had loved India so. Not that they had to be reminded, for whenever possible Prince George took Princess May to places in India where Eddy had been before.

  “I must say that although we had very hard work, our stay in Calcutta was a great success politically,” he informed the King. “Our visit too was most opportune, as the feeling was very strong against the government owing to the partition of Bengal and it made them think of something else and the Bengalis certainly showed their loyalty to the Throne in a most unmistakeable manner.”

  Prince George was as sensitive to the problem of caste as he was to the plight of the Indian women. “No doubt,” he wrote in his diary, “the Natives are better treated by us than in the past, but I could not help being struck by the way in which all salutations by the Natives were disregarded by the persons to whom they were given. Evidently we are too much inclined to look upon them as a conquered and down-trodden race and the Native, who is becoming more and more educated, realises this. I could not help noticing that the general bearing of the European towards the Native was to say the least unsympathetic. In fact not the same as that of superiors to inferiors at home.”

  Sir Walter Lawrence, formerly a member of Lord Curzon’s staff, wrote that the Prince and Princess of Wales both found the use of the word “Natives” offensive to them and that the Prince was “convinced that the Ruling Chiefs should no longer be treated as schoolboys.” Still, Prince George did use the word in his diary, whereas, if it had disturbed him so greatly, he might easily have substituted the words “the Indian people.”

  In each city they visited, the Royal couple were entertained in a lavish style unequaled in their own Court or in any other they had visited. When Sir Walter Lawrence had agreed to join the tour as Chief of Staff, he did so with the condition that the Prince and Princess of Wales accept no gifts from the Indian princes, an act that he felt sure could be misread by the Indian politicians. Perhaps because of this, each maharajah attempted to outdo the last. Princess May was at her elegant best at these gala receptions and garden parties, but Prince George was always happier setting aside ceremonial formality and talking to people individually. His personality was better suited to tiger hunts and yacht trips and small dinners than to ceremony. Men understood his frankness and were not offended as women were by his loud laugh and occasional explosive comments. Men also appreciated his talent as a crack shot and his endurance on a hunt.

  Perhaps with a twinge of disappointment, women were surprised at the great dissimilarity between Prince George and his father. He did not have the roving eye and ate little, being fussy where food was concerned. He was a strong churchman. Whether in the train or on the road, on Sunday he would always pull up at eleven o’clock when a service, sometimes in a tent, sometimes in a convenient house near the railway, was held. On board ship, church services were conducted daily.

  The Royal party went from Jaipur to Gryna, to Peshawar, through the Khyber Pass as far as Lundi Kotal, then on to the slopes of the Himalayas to Jammu, then to Delhi and Agra and into Gwalior for Christmas, sometimes sleeping on their special luxurious train, at other times enjoying the hospitality of some Indian prince or English governor. And all through it, Princess May moved as though “in a dream.” On a few occasions, she walked incognito about the side streets of some big city, looking at the mud dwellings of the poor and making purchases in the shops. The people might not have known she was the Princess of Wales, yet with her jewels and fine clothes and her large entourage, they were certainly aware that she was of a high social caste.

  She wrote a running travelogue of the journey to her Aunt Augusta. “The Maharani with native chiefs met us at the station on Saty & we drove her thro’ rows of fine looking retainers, some in old armour, a wonderful scene,” she wrote from Udaipur. “We are now staying with the nice Maharaja of Bikanir,” she informed her Aunt from Gujner, “we especially admired his fine camel corps.” At Lundi Kotal, “48 massed bands played” and the Maharaja of Gwalior “showed us his jewels which are really magnificent.” From Karachi, where they were finally to depart India, after 9,000 miles of railway travel, she wrote Aunt Augusta, “We steamed away about 6 our band playing ‘for Auld Lang Syne’ which was most upsetting. We went on to the bridge & watched dear beautiful India vanish from our sight.”

  What is glaringly apparent in Princess May’s correspondence during her trip to India was the loosening of most of her maternal ties (however slight) to her children. She sent them romantic picture postcards but surprisingly few letters, and even in correspondence to the Queen she did not reveal any great emotion in being separated from her six children—one a baby of only a few months—for over half a year. Shortly af
ter Christmas, she received a letter written on copybook paper in her third son’s six-year-old studied hand. “I thank you very much for the Indian toys, Auntie Toria gave me a drum and a trumpet, Granny gave me a motor torpedo boat and a basket full of chocolate, Aunt Louise sent a box of pencils. Lord Farquhar sent a nice box of soldiers with tents, both red and green. Did you like the snow drops that Georgie and I sent you. I worked very well on my lessons yesterday. With much love from Harry,” he concluded, allocating six circular kisses labelled “P” for Papa and six more labelled “M” for Mama.

  “Darling Harry,” his mother wrote back on a postcard, “Papa & I thank you for your 2 long letters which were very nicely written, also for the little snowdrops you & Georgie sent. There are no flowers like them in this country. Love from Mama.” No special kisses, no anecdotes told for the little boy’s pleasure were included in her notes to her children. Nor did she admit missing her children, or comment on being parted from them at Christmas.

  Princess May was looked upon by those close to her as “very cold and stiff and very unmaternal.” She dealt with her children almost as if they belonged to someone else. Both David and Harry were to claim that they could not recall ever being alone with their mother during any part of their childhood or adolescence. A Lady-in-Waiting or a servant or a private secretary was always present. The King, on the other hand, often spent time alone with his grandchildren.

  One story told is that a tailor’s assistant called at York House with a suit to be fitted for David, but upon hearing voices in the nursery where she had been directed, waited outside the room. The little Prince, who was fond of the woman, rushed out to her. “Come in,” he said, “there’s nobody here. Nobody that matters, only Grandpa!” The children had as a comparison reprimands in their father’s study with no outsider present. Perverse as it might seem, the young Princes recalled these lone moments with their father with a certain warmth.