Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  Prince George was unable to relax the bonds of discipline even when in India. Strict rules had been left that each of the four older children was to write the parents individually on alternate weeks. David and Bertie, however, got their schedules confused, and their father wrote in reproof to Bertie from Delhi, “David ought to have written last week and you ought to have written to me this week. I don’t know how the confusion has come.” And to Mr. Hansell he added, “The two boys ought to write the Princess and I each week alternately so that they both write each week.” It never occurred to him that such inflexibility might take the spontaneity out of his children’s correspondence.

  Toward the middle of the tour, a British political upheaval meant that the children saw less and less of their grandparents. Following a split in the Conservative Party over tariff protection, the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, was forced to resign.*

  The Prince and Princess of Wales arrived home the first of May, only to learn that Ena, Prince George’s cousin, his Aunt Beatrice’s daughter (the same Ena whom Princess May had entertained as a child at Balmoral when she had gone to see the Queen about marrying Prince Eddy), was to be married on May 21 to Alfonso XIII, King of Spain. (“So Ena is to become Spanish Queen! A Battenberg, good gracious!” Aunt Augusta had written, never having thought very highly of Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter’s deceased husband, Henry of Battenberg.) Queen Alexandra was in mourning for the death of her father. Therefore, Princess May and Prince George were to represent the Crown at the wedding in Madrid as the King’s personal representatives. Princess May had only three weeks to refurbish her wardrobe and “swot up,” as the children called it, on Spanish history. Her activities left very little time to give to six small children whom she had not seen since the previous October.

  The demands for her maternal attention nearly overwhelmed Princess May. Bertie’s stuttering was worse than ever, and he was thin and pale. He still wore the braces on his legs at night, slept fitfully, and was not doing well in his studies. Princess Mary had had to be removed from her brothers’ classrooms because she was a “disturbing influence.” David had just been found to suffer some deafness in one ear, a condition that was feared could be related to Queen Alexandra’s hearing disability.† Harry had unaccountable fits of crying, as well as spates of nervous giggling. Georgie cried whenever he was brought into the presence of his mother, and the baby John, though eleven months old, was not sitting up as his nursemaids thought he should. Dealing with these problems could be postponed until after Madrid was Princess May’s attitude, and in the weeks before her departure she saw her children sparingly.

  However, on May 26, 1906, she celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday. Birthdays were important events in the family calendar, but their parents’ birthdays invariably confronted the children “with an agonising problem.” They were expected, according to family custom, to render happy-birthday greetings with a poem each had committed to memory. Under Mr. Hansell, they had to memorise and practise reciting excerpts from Shakespeare or Tennyson until word-perfect, and then they were further obliged to copy them out “with painful care on long sheets of white paper, which were then tied together with bright-coloured ribbons. Directly after breakfast on these birthdays we would bear the compositions to the person celebrating. Mary, Bertie and I [David] would advance in turn, each nervously recite his or her poem, and then, with a bow, present the copy.”

  On this day, the children, all impeccably groomed, filed into the sitting room. Mary recited some verses from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and acquitted herself well. Then came Bertie, who had been given Goethe’s stirring ballad Der Sänger to say in German. English was difficult enough for Bertie to manage in public, and after he stuttered unmercifully for a few minutes, David stepped forward to recite Thomas Wolsey’s farewell from Shakespeare’s Henry the Eighth. A bit of tittering was heard when he spoke the line, “Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,” but there was not a sound in the crowded room at York Cottage when, in a voice far more mature than that of a boy of twelve, he recited,

  O how wretched

  Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours;

  There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,

  That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin

  More pangs and fears than wars or women have;

  And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer

  Never to hope again.

  Lala Bill, who was holding Prince John, stifled a small shuddery sigh as the boy who would be king ended,

  Had I but serv’d my God with half the Zeal

  I serv’d my King, he would not in mine age

  Have left me naked to mine enemies.

  That same evening, Princess May and Prince George left for London on the first leg of their journey to Spain for the wedding of Princess Ena to King Alfonso XIII.

  Prince George had met the young King of Spain when he had made a Royal tour of Great Britain, intent on selecting a suitable bride from the numerous British Royal Princesses. That had been the previous June, and at a Buckingham Palace gala where Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso had sung. The youthful Spanish ruler had been overwhelmed by the grandeur of the occasion. But seeing King Alfonso in his own land where he was greatly revered was another matter.

  Ena had grown into a fine young woman, and Princess May, who had known her since she was a small child, had a special fondness for her. A good-natured girl with beautiful dark eyes and a lovely fair complexion, she laughed easily but had a bit too much of “the common touch” for Aunt Augusta. “Did you see that ridiculous Photo of them all, laughing, Beatrice leaning down over the young lovers spreading her arms out like an Eagle,” she wrote her niece shortly after Ena’s engagement had been announced, “too funny & not Royal!”

  King Alfonso XIII was twenty years old, his bride only a year his junior. Because his father had died six months before his birth,* he had grown up under the guardianship of his mother, Queen Maria Christina. A slight young man with a pompous stiff posture and a head that was too small for his neck and body, nonetheless he had a military air and a protective attitude toward women that was quite attractive. A great deal of speculation was offered as to what Queen Victoria would have said about her granddaughter’s alliance with a Catholic whose background was always being questioned in Royal circles. His grandmother, Queen Isobella II, had said after her unsuccessful wedding night with her King Consort (and cousin, Framçois de Asis), “What can I say about a man who wore more lace than I did?” Still, Isobella had had eight children, though it was rumoured “not necessarily by the King Consort.”

  The “train de luxe” that Princess May and Prince George took from Paris to the Spanish frontier town of Irún was one of two carrying most of the European Royal families to the wedding in Madrid. The weather had been unseasonably hot and dry, and the dust and dirt inside the carriages were intolerable. Late at night at the unlit wayside station in Irún, everyone had to get out to change trains. The Prince and Princess of Wales disembarked with their entourage, which included Prince Dolly of Teck and his wife, as well as numerous chamberlains, equerries, ladies-in-waiting, dressers, and footmen. All stood about in the dark, not quite knowing what to do, for no arrangements had been made for the hour’s wait between connections. The Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia and his suite were most vociferous about this inconvenience, and Princess Marie of Erbach-Schönberg bustled from one group of Royalties to the other, considerably distressed.*

  Finally, they were all packed into one long Spanish train with a great deal of confusion, as rank and precedence had not been taken into account. The new accommodations were crowded and “insufferably hot. At midnight all the visiting Royals met in the dining car,” recorded Princess Marie of Erbach-Schönberg, “to refresh ourselves with cooling drinks.”

  At 3:00 P.M. the next day, the train at last reached its destination, and the fatigued passengers were transferred to carriages to form a long procession through the factory section of
Madrid, uphill “through ornamental gardens and, by way of splendid wrought-iron gates, into the great courtyard” of the Palacio Real, which dominated the town “like a colossus.” Troops of soldiers lined the drive, and the trumpets and drums of the massed bands played the appropriate national anthem so loudly as each carriageload of Royalties was discharged that it was almost impossible to hear the greetings of the Spanish officials.

  Unlike many of the Royal guests who were accommodated in other palaces and in the palatial homes of grandees, Princess May and Prince George were lodged in cathedral-high apartments in the Palacio Real itself. Their quarters were guarded by halberdiers with pikes, who, as the Royal couple approached, would present arms and pass from one to another the cry, “Arriba Princessa! Arriba Principe!”

  The morning of the wedding, May 31, 1906, was stifling hot. At 9:15, the royal visitors gathered in the great courtyard of the Palacio Real where nineteen state coaches waited, each drawn by six white or six black horses wearing flaring pink and orange ostrich plumes.* This procession then wound its way slowly through narrow streets made almost impassable by the crowds and the troops that tried to keep order. The wedding was at the ancient Gothic Church of San Jeronimo.

  “The service in the church was very fine, the music and singing splendid,” Prince George wrote in his diary that day, “it lasted from 11 to 1. Alfonso and Ena were married at 12. She looked very well [although she was overdressed, in Princess May’s opinion, her gown too covered in ruffles and lace] and went through a trying ordeal with a great dignity.”

  The Prince and Princess of Wales left the church in procession to return to the Palace for a bridal luncheon. They rode in the third coach from the rear. Immediately behind them came the coach bearing Princess Beatrice and Queen Maria Christina. This was followed by the empty cache de respeto (the spare coach that tradition dictated), and finally, the golden-crowned coach in which King Alfonso and the new Queen Ena rode alone. “Just before our carriage reached the Palace,” Prince George records in his diary, “we heard a loud report & thought it was the first gun salute.”

  They were on a narrow street, the Calle Mayer, close to the Italian Embassy and only two hundred yards from the palace. The driver of the coach in which the Prince and Princess of Wales were riding continued without altering speed. Not until they were once again in the courtyard of the Palacio Real did they discover what had happened. The bride and groom—clothes blood-streaked and in disarray—stepped from the coche de respeto amidst a great deal of shouting and crying and confusion. An anarchist, Mateo Moral, had thrown a bomb from the upstairs window of Number 88 Calle Mayer just as the bridal coach passed below. The bomb burst between the lead horses and the front of the carriage, killing the driver and about twenty spectators, including the Marquesa Torloso and her niece who were standing on the balcony of Number 88 (directly below where the assassin had thrown the bomb). The windows of the bridal coach had been smashed; glass, debris, and fragments of uniforms flew into the coach; and blood was everywhere. It so happened that the British Ambassador, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, was watching the procession with officers of the 16th Lancers from a nearby balcony when the tragedy occurred. Along with his regiment officers, Sir Maurice rushed out of the house; the men positioned themselves as a barricade around the damaged vehicle and helped Queen Ena and King Alfonso descend. Miraculously, neither was seriously hurt. Queen Ena’s wedding dress had been slashed by flying glass, but its many layers of whalebone and fabric and its heavily embroidered and jeweled decoration had saved her being cut. Bride and groom had been swiftly transferred into the empty coche de respeto and escorted the short remaining distance to the palace by Sir Maurice’s British guard.

  Queen Ena was safely inside the locked gates of her new home when she was heard to cry, “I saw a man without any legs! I saw a man without any legs!” At which point, she and her husband broke down and sobbed. Princess Beatrice fluttered about in a state of near-hysteria until she was finally assured that her daughter had not been injured, but she was dazed and unable to control her emotion during the bridal luncheon that followed at 3:00 P.M. Prince George proposed a toast—“not easy after the emotions caused by this terrible affair”—to the newlyweds’ health. Luncheon was a dreadful ordeal with everyone politely picking at the food and conversation strained.

  “We can only thank God that the anarchist did not get into the church,” Princess May wrote her Aunt Augusta, “in which case we must all have been blown up! Nothing could have been braver than the young couple were, but what a beginning for her ... I saw the Coach ... still with blood on the wheels & behind where the footmen were standing.”

  Despite the tragedy, the following evening’s gala banquet and reception for five thousand guests went ahead as planned. “Very hot affair & tiring,” wrote Prince George in his diary, “much talking bowing & clicking of spurs ... we walked through the rooms the heat was awful & every window shut. Had some supper & walked back through the rooms, smell even worse.”

  The Prince and Princess of Wales were still in Madrid on June 3. “My birthday (41). The Palace Madrid,” his diary entry reads for that day. “A man in a village close to Madrid yesterday evening shot a Garde Civile and then shot himself. He has been identified as the swine that threw the bomb.”

  The visit to Spain did not end until June 7, when the Prince and Princess returned to Marlborough House by way of Paris. The wedding trip had been a gruelling experience. For the first time, Princess May realised how vulnerable Royalty was to the schemes of terrorists, anarchists, and madmen. They arrived home on June 10 and then, only six days later, sailed on the Royal Yacht Victoria & Albert to Norway for the coronation of King Haakon and Prince George’s sister, Queen Maud.* The nine-year-old Princess Mary accompanied her parents, although her two older brothers, as Heirs to the Throne, were not permitted to travel out of the country with their father.

  “So Maud is sitting on her very unsafe throne—to say the least of it,” Aunt Augusta wrote Princess May, “he making speeches, poor fellow, thanking the revolutionary Norwegians for having elected him ... no, really, it is all too odd ... ‘Motherdear’ will not like it either, besides they have but one peaky Boy* ... A revolutionary Coronation! such a farce, I don’t like your being there for it looks like sanctioning all that nasty Revolution ... How can a future K & Q of E go to Witness a Coronation ‘par la grace du People et de la Revolution!!!’ Makes me sick & I should say, you, too!” To which Princess May replied, “The whole thing seems curious but we live in very modern days.”

  On July 6, their thirteenth wedding anniversary, Princess May and Prince George arrived home from Norway. They had missed David’s twelfth birthday on June 23 and incorporated it, as well as Toria’s birthday, into their own celebration. From his grandfather, David received a diamond stickpin of Persimmon, King Edward’s Derby winner, complete with jewelled jockey; from his father, a silver watch; and from his mother, a prayer book. The young boy was, thought Lord Esher, beginning to grow more like the “old family every day. He has the mouth and expression of Queen Charlotte,”† and would in a few months, like his father before him, be sent away from home to join the Navy.

  The decision was unfortunate, for distance and hostility were created between father and son that would always remain to alienate one from the other.

  Footnotes

  *The Royal itinerary which Curzon had supervised was as follows: Bombay, Indore, jaipur, Lahore, Peshawar, Delhi, Agra, Gwalior, Lucknow, Calcutta, Rangoon, Mandalay, Madras, Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, Bengares, Gwalior again, Quetta, and Karachi. A full account of the journey is given in The Royal Tour of India, by Sir Stanley Reed.

  *Arthur Balfour (created Earl of Balfour, 1922) was replaced by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

  †He was to have some deafness in his ear thereafter.

  *King Alfonso XII (1857–1885) died at the age of twenty-eight.

  *Born Princess Marie of Battenberg, an aunt of the bride.

  * A question
remains as to the number of state coaches used in the procession to the wedding. Prince George records in his diary entry of May 31, 1906, that there were nineteen, while Princess Marie Erbach-Schönberg claims the number was forty. Forty carriages had been necessary to take the Royalties and their entourages from the station to the Palacio Real.

  *King Haakon of Norway was formerly Prince Charles of Denmark (also called Carl), a young man thought singularly without prospects when he married Princess Maud, the Prince of Wales’s sister. But when Norway dissolved its union with Sweden in 1905, the throne was offered to him after the people of Norway voted four to one in favor of a monarchy. Prince Charles accepted with alacrity, renounced his Danish nationality, and assumed the name Haakon, after the early Norse kings of Norway. Haakon was Norway’s first independent king in 600 years. He ruled for fifty-two years. Haakon proved a brave king, resisting Hitler and contributing by his courage to the German dictator’s final defeat.

  *That peaky boy, who was two years old at the time, was to become King Olav V and grew to resemble the Norsemen of his father’s adopted country.

  †Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Consort of George III, mother of George IV and William IV.

  THIRTEEN

  The idea of one day becoming King was terrifying to young David. He was always asking Lala Bill not to discuss his future, and Lord Esher also noted his reticence. Esher records a significant incident in 1904, when David was ten and Bertie eight. He was looking after the children, who were at Windsor with their grandparents, and recorded being “walked off my legs and pulled off them by the children. The youngest is the most riotous. The eldest, a sort of head nurse. It is queer looking through a weekly paper and coming to a picture of the eldest with the label ‘our future King.’ Prince Albert at once drew attention to it—but the elder hastily brushed his brother’s finger away and turned the page.”