Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  Throughout August, the Deeside was cold and grey—“unwinning.” Breakfast was at eight, bedtime early. The Queen knitted in the evenings. “Not a sign of ‘bridge,’” Esher notes, recalling King Edward’s tenure. After dinner, the King allowed people to sit while he was standing. (King Edward had not permitted this, nor had he allowed his guests and Household to leave before both he and Queen Alexandra had gone to bed—usually sometime after midnight.) On one evening of such domesticity, “the King sat on the sofa talking with me until bedtime,” Esher writes. “Everything is very ‘easy.’ That does not imply license—only the perfect ease of English homelife.”

  What came out of “a week of intimate talk with the King and Queen” was King George’s hope “to do for the Empire what King Edward did for the peace of Europe.” The King also confided to Esher that he proposed to attend the Indian Durbar in January 1911,* and be crowned as Emperor of India at Delhi as well as to visit every Dominion—bold projects that Lord Esher thought would bring him opposition from his Ministers.

  The most difficult task Queen Mary had to face at this time was to define what were the Queen Consort’s duties without anything official to fall back on. The position of Queen Consort (which was “no bed of roses,” she wrote Aunt Augusta on August 10) was “so to speak, whatever you felt inclined, or had the ability to make it.” Queen Charlotte, Queen Caroline, and Queen Adelaide (all of whom were German) had failed to make much impression upon the consciousness of the people. Queen Alexandra had concentrated on being decorative and generous. These traits had earned her the love of her husband’s subjects but had not added any more to the Monarchy than had Queen Charlotte’s devotion to her many children. But Queen Mary had one consuming passion that ruled her life, something her predecessors did not possess, and it dictated her interpretation of her role as Queen Consort. As James Pope-Hennessy stresses, “Her passion was for the British Monarch.

  “The fact that the new King-Emperor was her husband and cousin—the ‘Georgie’ she had known since childhood—in no way diminished in her eyes the lofty solitary splendour that invested the person of the Monarch,” he adds.

  From the moment they had stood side by side in “the boys’ room” at Marlborough House and heard George proclaimed King across the Court at St. James’s, a change in Queen Mary’s attitude toward her husband was noted by just about everyone who attended them. Princess May had never been the least bit afraid of her husband, nor had she been hesitant in speaking her mind to him. But as Queen Mary, “she would no longer contradict him even in the family circle, she would no longer protest save in private or by letter when he was unfair to one or other of his sons ... She believed that all should defer to the King’s slightest wish, and she made herself into a living example of her creed,” writes james Pope-Hennessy.

  Sublimating herself to her ideal of the British Crown in such an absolute way forced Queen Mary to exert a spectacular amount of self-control. The people close to her were surprised by the dramatic change in her personality. Her nature became at once imperious and benevolent, a combination that filled people with much awe in her presence. “I used to be rather shy,” she later wrote beside a passage in the proofs of john Gore’s Personal Memoir of George V, which she read and annotated thirty years later, “but after the King succeeded & when one shared the central figure with the King this feeling vanished.” And she adds, “You all go on as if I had been stutteringly shy! but I can assure you I wasn’t as bad as that.”

  In retrospect, Queen Mary had not been really shy at any point in her life. She was, however, a reserved person who was in tremendous control of her public demeanor. She had the wisdom to know when she should and should not set herself forward. Before her engagement to Prince Eddy, she had practised for hours on end before a mirror the small Royal smile that she wore on every state or Royal occasion thereafter. She was never heard to laugh in public. Unlike Queen Alexandra and most other Royal women of her acquaintance who had married men destined to be monarchs, Queen Mary had not been born or raised with any Royal aspiration. Only as a grown woman who had suffered many humiliations had her Royal future been set, and she had studied every proper nuance that would be expected of her so that she would not fail in her duty.

  Princess Mary Adelaide had instilled in her daughter not only a love for beautiful clothes and lavish jewels, but the necessity of Royal women to wear them well. Queen Mary, because of her long, graceful neck, her height, her bearing, and her instinctive flair for elegance, had always been able to display an extraordinary quantity of jewels on her person. Now she had “serious jewels to display.” Within a year of King George’s succession, photographs of Queen Mary proliferated in newspapers and magazines around the world. In all of them, her jewels and gowns were dazzling. In one, she is wearing a blazing diamond crown, a collar of rows of diamonds, another large diamond necklace below that, a diamond stomacher, the Koh-i-noor, the Star of Africa, lesser South African Stars, the Garter, two family orders, and the Crown of India.

  The astounding manner in which she could wear so many glittering gems at one time and the curious poodle hairstyle that she had never altered gave the new Queen Consort an appearance that made her uniquely recognisable not only to the British public but to the world. King George was supposedly the one who insisted his wife keep her coiffure because he wanted her “to grow old looking exactly as she had looked when they had first become engaged.” But, in fact, King George had never been interested in clothes or jewels. Much more probable is the idea that Princess May, who had designed the coiffure, had found a certain security and courage in looking “different,” and that she still drew strength from the reliability of her appearance. Though masquerade balls had been tremendously popular for years, and even her mother had adored getting dressed in a costume, Princess May had disliked such affairs intensely, and, in her husband’s reign, the bal masque suffered a quick demise from which it never recovered.

  In the same way that Princess Mary Adelaide’s huge figure had made her instantly identifiable in public, so did Queen Mary’s poodle hairstyle single her out. The inimitable toque was a natural evolution—for when a hat was required and the hairstyle not on display, she could still be recognised across the vast space of a palace courtyard merely by the uniqueness of her silhouette. The new Queen’s ability to take the stage she had been given and her instant popularity did not improve her relationship with the old Queen, who became more quarrelsome with each passing day.

  After the funeral and before Kaiser Wilhelm had returned to Germany, he saw the problem his cousin, England’s new King, was having in removing his mother from Buckingham Palace, and he took it upon himself to try to persuade Queen Alexandra to move. He stressed the love his aunt had always had for Marlborough House, and how much more comfortable and less lonely she would be if she returned there. As she smiled patiently, her eyes fastened upon his lips when he spoke, Kaiser Wilhelm thought he had convinced her of what she must do. But when he had finished, she remarked sweetly, “Willy dear, you know that you always speak rather indistinctly; I am afraid I have not understood a single word you are saying.”

  Six months after Edward’s death, the situation still had not been resolved. Drastic action was called for, and with Queen Alexandra at Sandringham (as was the King), Queen Mary travelled up to London and moved her family into temporary quarters in Buckingham Palace. “It is rather strange & lonely here without you & the children & I feel rather lost,” she wrote her husband. “Oh! how I regret our dear beloved Marl Hse. the most perfect of all houses & so compact. Here everything is so straggly, such distances to go & so fatiguing.”

  Rather unsympathetically, the King replied, “I am sure the rooms are very comfortable. The distances are great but it is good exercise for you as you never walk a yard in London.” Aunt Augusta, however, was more understanding. “I so understand your disliking the change of abode. Your saying ‘here one can never find anyone’ so well describes the discomfort of a bigger palace.”
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br />   Buckingham Palace required over three hundred servants. Its innumerable windowless, narrow corridors were hung with a seemingly inexhaustible number of sombre Royal portraits and grim battle scenes. The cavernous Throne Room with its crystal chandeliers now converted to electricity, the ballroom, the state rooms, the many dining rooms ranged from vast to enormous. There were endless picture galleries, reception rooms, sitting rooms, nests of suites, bedrooms—six hundred rooms in all—and an equal number of corridors, landings, and staircases, all strung together with blood-red carpeting and designed to form four sides of an inner courtyard. Her new home was certainly not gemütlich, a word Queen Mary often used to describe Marlborough House. After quickly deciding on her decorative schemes, Queen Mary returned to Sandringham to spend Christmas at York Cottage with her family, assured by her husband that his mother had issued orders for her possessions to be moved to Marlborough House.

  Christmas at Sandringham was not the gay occasion of former years. No other Royal home contained as much of the dead King’s spirit. His absence—the first Christmas in half a century he was not there—gave an eerie quality to the holiday. Each time a door blew open or slammed shut, the Household fully expected King Edward’s ghost to appear roaring with laughter, as in life.

  Only a few guests had been invited, whereas in King Edward’s tenure, the house and grounds were bustling with dancers, bridge players, hunters with their horses and dogs, and many servants. Gottlieb’s Viennese Orchestra had not been engaged, but since Queen Mary had struck up a recent friendship with the opera singer, Nellie Melba, the diva arrived and sang for the disconsolate Royal Family and their Household.

  The move of Prince John with Lala Bill to Wood Farm, Wolferton, two miles to the west on the Sandringham estate, caused spirits to be lower than ever at York Cottage that Christmas. John’s epileptic fits had become more frequent and intense. A decision, therefore, had been made that his presence with his parents and brothers and sister—now that they were the Royal Family—was an undesirable image. Thereafter, John remained segregated from his family. Georgie, who was nine, was the most affected by his brother’s absence. He went to see John every day, as did Queen Alexandra and Mr. Hansell. But the other members of the family and Household found it too heart-wrenching a task. Queen Mary’s emotion toward John’s disablement is hard to assess. No mention of John was made in any of her correspondence—not even to Helene Bricka or her Aunt Augusta, to whom she might have confided her fears, guilts, or unhappiness with considerable intimacy and ease. Nor did she appear to have discussed John with any of her ladies-in-waiting or family members such as her brothers and their wives. Her overt acceptance and avoidance of the situation set the tone for those close to the Royal Family. Lala Bill dedicated her life to the child, and he appeared to those who saw him to be happier than he had been living with his family. But if John’s segregation added a further note of unhappiness to the holiday gathering, Bertie’s presence created a tense and difficult situation.

  On his return to Osborne after the summer holiday at Balmoral, Bertie’s schoolwork had not improved, and as the examinations approached in December before the Christmas holiday, “there was considerable perturbation at Osborne, not only as to how Prince Albert would do in them but what the effect would be, if he did badly, upon the King, his father. No uncertain starter on the eve of a great race was watched with greater care and anxiety than that lavished by Mr. Watt [his tutor] on his unpredictable pupil,” his biographer, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, informs us. Mr. Watt worked with Bertie up until the eve of the examinations. The results were still calamitous. Bertie’s final position in his last term at Osborne was sixty-eighth out of sixty-eight.

  “I am so afraid that P[rince] A[lbert] has gone a mucker,” Mr. Watt wrote to Mr. Hansell, to whom he sent frequent reports of his pupil’s progress. “He has been quite off his head with the excitement of getting home for the last few days, and unfortunately as these were the days of the examination he had come quite to grief ... I am afraid Their Majesties will be very disappointed and I can well understand it.”

  Without Royal intervention, Bertie could not have passed into the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth where he would go after the holidays, for as well as placing last in his class, he had failed mathematics and engineering, the Navy’s two most important prerequisites. He spent the Christmas holiday studying practically from sunrise to sunrise. The best that could be said of such long hours and hard work was that they kept him out of the pathway of his parents’ fury.

  David, on the other hand, had done surprisingly well in his term at Dartmouth. He was quieter, more mature, and during the holiday he and his mother became closer than previously. At the same time, her attitude toward him was more reverential. When he returned to Dartmouth, she wrote him letters that reflected more of an adult exchange than her former maternal notes.

  “Well, at last me voila,” she wrote him on February 26, 1911, from Buckingham Palace, “writing to you from my new rooms which we took possession of last Wedy.” The same day she confided to her Aunt Augusta, “I feel more at home now, glad that this great eruption is at an end and that one can begin to turn one’s thoughts to other things, tho’ I confess much is left still to do in the Palace as so much has been removed & must be replaced—I am trying to rehang the pictures in the various rooms, according to family date, etc., not an easy task when one has miles of corridors to cover to find anything—however, I hope to do it in time if my legs hold out.”

  In March, she wrote to Aunt Augusta, “I really am beginning to like our new rooms & to feel more at home in them, they certainly have turned out pretty & are not as full of things as Motherdear had them.”

  Anticipating trouble with his mother over his wife’s decorations, King George wrote placatingly to Queen Alexandra, “I expect you will think May’s rooms rather empty, but then you have so many more things than she has.” And indeed he was wise to prepare for his mother’s displeasure, for a day later from Sandringham, Alexandra wrote her daughter-in-law that she had heard of the alterations to the Royal suite at Buckingham Palace. “Our dear old rooms,” she wrote, underscoring the possessive pronoun. “I shall indeed be very curious & anxious to see them & how you have arranged it all. Yes the sitting room with its nice & pretty bow window is certainly very cold & draughty in the winter—particularly where my writing table stood—I wonder where you have put yours—& the lovely bedroom with its pretty arches—which I hear you have removed,* how is that arranged—”

  With Lady Eva Dugdale and her husband to help her in the final arrangement of her possessions, Queen Mary had been able to make the move in Buckingham Palace from their temporary quarters to their permanent rooms in a matter of three weeks. She had devised a decorating scheme whereby each room was devoted to a particular date and style of furniture. Especially effective had been the final result of the Chinese Chippendale room. To her great satisfaction, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, after a tour of the new rooms, decided upon an exhibit that would display the museum’s furniture and porcelain collections in the same manner as she had displayed hers.

  But Queen Mary was far from pleased with the results of her redecorating. The palace would still require much renovation to bring it up to her standards of good taste and design. Except for the scrubbing of the front façade of the east wing when King Edward took over the palace and the minor redecoration carried out at that time, little had been done either to renovate or to modernise Buckingham Palace since the death of Prince Albert.

  Queen Mary’s work had taken her into the many storerooms of the palace, where numerous great treasures—silks, brocades, furniture, rugs, and paintings—had been housed since George III and William IV’s occupancy, and she resolved that sometime in the future she would renovate the palace and restore some of these family heirlooms.

  After the gemütlich life-style of Marlborough House and the cramped quarters of York Cottage, Buckingham Palace was like living in an antiquated museum
. One man worked a full day, every day, to wind the three hundred clocks in the palace, and six full-time florists arranged and watered the floral bouquets that brightened the rooms. Over two hundred thousand electric light bulbs needed constant replacement, and the palace post office had a dozen postmen who made their rounds along the palace corridors, handling about fifteen hundred letters daily, thousands on special occasions or in the event of an illness in the Royal Family. There was also a telegraph and telegraphers, a telephone switchboard and numerous operators, and a palace police station with a large detail of security men.

  Queen Mary was determined that one day she would make this awesome establishment into a comfortable home for her family and a Royal residence of which the nation could be proud. She enjoyed the Opening of Parliament on February 6, 1911 (especially since Queen Alexandra had returned “the little Crown”).* Then her attention turned toward the date of the coronation, June 22, 1911, which, she wrote her brother Alge, “will be a great ordeal & we are dreading it as you can imagine.”

  In a short time, Queen Mary and King George would be officially crowned. The closer that day approached, the more of “a pitiable figure” Alexandra became—“hopeless & helpless.” Languishing in her grief with her widowed sister and her spinster daughter at Sandringham, she now turned her painful thoughts back to her dead son, Prince Eddy, who, she reminded her family, should rightfully have been King after his father’s death. No one could be quite sure of how she would react under the strain of the coronation. A sigh of relief greeted the decision that she would not attend the service. The public was told that she had a persistent cough and that the long service might be a strain on her health. Such an unusual palace announcement was so rare that press and public alike (while sending satchels of reassuring good wishes) speculated morbidly as to the seriousness of her illness, a situation that placed a small cloud over the excitement of the coming coronation.