Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  At the sight of the Queen in her brilliant tiara made entirely of diamonds,* an audible murmur was heard. Her deep purple velvet robes, six yards long, were lined with ermine dotted with ermine tails; and her gown of white satin was thickly embroidered with gold, as were her gloves and shoes. What made her magnificent coronation robes even more spectacular was the indescribable majesty with which she wore them. Breaking precedent, she had decided not to wear any order that would detract from the drama of the rich purple and shimmering gold of her costume.

  The first thing Queen Mary saw on her entrance was the deep blue Worcester carpet stretching along the vista to the carved platform on which were massed the orchestra and trumpeters led by the scarlet-robed conductor Sir Frederick Bridges. On either side of the carpet a wide border of soft blue grey ran up to the edge of the partitions, three feet in height, that walled off the seats from the Abbey floors. The partitions were hung with silver brocade embossed with patterns in royal blue. Behind them, row upon row, tier upon tier, ascended the seats, their straight pale-blue lines merging exquisitely with the sombre grey of the walls and arches.

  Queen Mary kept her eyes trained straight ahead and did not raise them to the sudden burst of sound from the organ and choir as they began the anthem, “I was glad when they said unto me, we will go into the house of the Lord”; nor did she lower them to exchange glances with her eldest son as she approached his chair. But when the Westminster boys flung out their greeting, “Vivat Regina Maria! Vivat, vivat, vivat!” she paused almost imperceptibly before continuing. Moments later, the King’s procession entered the Abbey, and even the grandeur of Queen Mary’s entrance was surpassed.

  The King’s procession was even grander and longer than the Queen’s. Finally, the King, in his crimson robe of state with an ermine cape over his shoulders and the Cap of Maintenance on his head, appeared, flanked by twenty gentlemen-in-arms, his train borne by eight scarlet-costumed pages. Following the King were the high officers of the Household. The procession was closed by twenty Yeomen of the Guard. A hushed awe fell over the audience. The magnificence of the King and Queen’s processions massed together now before the thrones and altar was almost too much for anyone pair of eyes to take in. The Vivats of the Westminster boys broke the silence, and the service began.

  The coronation ceremony—a tissue of medieval mysticism and chivalry, feudalism, ecclesiasticism, and politics—falls into four successive phases, each of which possesses historical symbolism: the Recognition, the Oath, the Anointing and Crowning, and the Homage of the Lords. The King noted later that it was “most beautiful ... grand, yet simple & most dignified & went without a hitch ... May looked so lovely.” And Queen Mary wrote her Aunt Augusta later, “To me, who love tradition and the past, & who am English from top to toe, the service was a very real solemn thing & appealed to my feelings more than I can express—everything was most perfectly & reverently done—” Yet one reservation was to disturb her greatly. A special phrase had been introduced into the service to cover what the Archbishop considered to be a deficiency in the new Queen Consort’s royal heritage, the morganatic status of the Duke of Teck. He prayed that “by the powerful and mild influence of her piety and virtue she may adorn the dignity which she hath obtained.” The Archbishop’s words intimated that her paternal ancestry was not Royal. Before the day was ended, she was determined to correct this unfair slur, for the King and Queen were second cousins once removed.

  David saw the coronation through boyish eyes. “All the relatives & people were most civil & bowed to me as they passed. Then Mama & Papa came in & the ceremony commenced. There was the recognition, the anointing & then the Crowning of Papa & then I put on my coronet with the peers. Then I had to go & do hommage [sic] to Papa at his throne & I was very nervous.” With difficulty in keeping his unaccustomed sword carefully to one side, David knelt at his father’s feet and swore, “I, Edward, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship, and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.”

  “It reminded me so much of when I did the same thing to beloved Papa,” King George wrote in his diary that night, “he did it so well ... I nearly broke down.”

  “Then Mama was crowned,” David continues in his diary. “We got into our cariage, [sic] & had a long drive back. My Coronet felt very heavy as we had to bow to people as we went along.”

  The entry in King George’s diary concludes, “We left Westminster Abbey at 2.15 (having arrived there before 11.0) with our Crowns on and sceptres in our hands. This time we drove by the Mall, St. James’ Street & Piccadilly, crowds enormous & decorations very pretty. On reaching B.P. [Buckingham Palace] just before 3.0 May & I went out on the balcony to show ourselves to the people. Downey photographed us in our robes with Crowns on.* Had some lunch with guests here. Worked all afternoon with Bigge & others answering telegrams & letters of which I have had hundreds.† Such a large crowd collected in front of the Palace that I went out on the balcony again. Our guests dined with us at 8.30.‡ May and I showed ourselves again to the people. Wrote & read. Rather tired. Bed at 11.45. Beautiful illuminations everywhere.”

  Despite the happy events of the coronation week, Queen Mary was sufficiently angered by the Archbishop’s slur against her father’s lineage that she took whatever free time she had to laboriously complete the Teck genealogy and to present a copy to College of Arms.

  David’s seventeenth birthday was June 23, and the Royal Family celebrated with all their visiting Royal guests, most of whom were related, which meant that David received more presents than he had ever seen in his life. A fortnight later on a sweltering summer day in July, within the vast grey ruin of Carnavon Castle and before some 10,000 people, with Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, “mellifluously proclaiming” his titles, David was invested as Prince of Wales by his father. A coronet cap as a token of principality was placed on his head, the gold rod of government given to him to hold, and the gold ring of responsibility slipped onto his middle finger. King George then led his son through an archway to one of the towers of the battlements and presented him to the people of Wales. “Half-fainting of heat & nervousness,” David repeated a few Welsh sentences that began, “Mar a gan yw Cymru i gyd,” “All Wales is a sea of song,” taught to him by Lloyd George with the counsel, “All Welshmen will love you for that.”

  But when the excitement and magnificence of the coronation festivities were over and his investiture complete, David realised that he had made “a painful discovery about myself. It was that, while I was prepared to fulfill my role in all this pomp & ritual, I recoiled from anything that tended to set me up as a person requiring homage. Even if my father was now beginning to remind me of the obligations of my position, had he not been at pains to give me a strict and unaffected upbringing? And if my association with the village boys at Sandringham and the cadets of the Naval Colleges had done anything for me it was to make me desperately anxious to be treated exactly like any other boy of my age!”

  However, David was unrealistic to think that he might have been treated as any other boy his age. He was the Prince of Wales, Heir-Apparent to the Throne. Still, the idea that he would one day be King was as terrifying to him now as when he was a child. He desperately wanted to play the common man and not the prince, for he was sure that true happiness was reserved only for the common lot.

  King George did not know, or even suspect, that the son he had just invested as Prince of Wales might one day place the Monarchy in much greater jeopardy than the current constitutional crisis and his secret pledge to Asquith placed it. Or that it would be his second son, that knobbly-kneed boy who was the last in his class, who could not speak without stammering painfully and was not being prepared for the role of King, who would be forced to save the Throne for the family.

  Footnotes

  *Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector (self-styled) of Britain’s short period of Commonwealth (1653-1660), which fol
lowed on the heels of the execution of Charles I.

  †The Restoration took place in 1660, upsetting Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

  ‡Charles I (see earlier note).

  *The Prince of Wales at the time of King George’s coronation was 17, 5′4” tall, and weighed 7 stone, 8 pounds (106 pounds).

  *This was replaced later in the service by the even more splendid Coronation Crown with the Koh-i-noor at its centre and above and below the Stars of Africa.

  *Downey, Royal photographer.

  †Sir Arthur Bigge (1849-1931), Lord Stamfordham, Private Secretary to King George from 1901 to 1931. From 1896 to 1901, he had been Queen Victoria’s Private and Principal Secretary as well.

  †Visiting Royalty and family members were present at this dinner.

  SEVENTEEN

  With Queen Mary as Consort, the ultra-fashionables of King Edward’s Court were not often seen in the Royal circle, which was now considerably more select. Their friends were old and tried. Queen Mary’s confidantes were women like Lady Airlie, whom she had known from childhood; her brothers and their wives; and as she had a fervent interest in history, architecture, and design, representatives from those fields. She set immediately upon the task of learning as much as she could about the homes she now occupied and was determined from the very beginning of King George’s reign to restore them to the time of their apogee. The country had more or less thought of Queen Alexandra as a charming appendage to King Edward. Their Monarch’s powerful and charismatic personality had roused the people’s sense of allegiance toward the Monarchy, whereby the public seldom thought of King George without Queen Mary.

  Together they represented the ideal family. There were press photographs of King George riding through Windsor Park with his eldest four sons, and Queen Mary at Army reviews or garden parties accompanied most often by David and Bertie and Mary, and seldom without King George somewhere in the background. The sight of her with umbrella and huge hat in the daytime and tiara and ropes of pearls and jewels in the evening was etched in the public’s memory. In 1910, at the age of forty-three, she already had the distinctive look of a royal matriarch, a quality possessed by Queen Victoria, but not by Queen Alexandra.

  In the year since he had become King, George had not yet established between himself and his subjects the same bond of camaraderie that his father had manufactured almost without an effort. Still, the aristocracy felt that under his reign they would once again come into their own and that the Court, while some-what stiffer than during King Edward’s time, was—as one contemporary wrote—“more English, and less under the influence of Germans, Jews, and capitalists and that the King’s ‘set’ is one for which no Englishman had to apologize.” One of the great arts of Royalty is to be liked by those who never come—and are never likely to come—into personal contact with the sovereign, those grey, undistinguished masses who watch and judge him from a distance, and whose opinions are swayed or determined by a thousand trivial things. Popularity for a King is much more important among those he does not know than among those he does.

  King Edward’s strength had been his astonishing gift for attracting the affections of the multitudes who had never heard him speak a single word or had come within twenty yards of his magnetic presence. King George had ascended the Throne with none of his father’s bonhomie, his air of being at home and enjoying himself wherever he was, his all-around cosmopolitan experience, or his prolonged social training. In fact, King George had a way of looking bored even when a subject or a person interested him. He preferred a quiet life by his own fireplace with his wife to society and ceremony; he was a domesticated man, really, of a straightforward, downright temperament, rather naive and immature, bluff and voluble in speech, with “a boisterously British and liberal sense of humour.” Certainly not a man of the world, he was somewhat uncomfortable at finding himself the central figure on public occasions. This is most probably responsible for his encouraging Queen Mary to accompany him whenever possible and his obvious pleasure that she had inadvertently garnered centre stage. A contemporary notes that King George put up with the ceremony “not because he likes it, but because he knows it to be his duty, and with an uneasy feeling that all the time he is not doing himself justice or striking quite the right note of graciousness.” Queen Mary, on the other hand, was at her best on ceremonial occasions and struck not only the right note of graciousness but set the standard for the future of the women in the Royal Family.

  King George’s greatest fear was not that his subjects might find him lacking in the confidence and charm so associated with his father, but that when his pledge to Asquith became public knowledge he might be irreparably humiliated before his people. After David’s investiture as Prince of Wales on July 13, 1911, the King travelled to Holyrood, in Scotland, for a holiday. When he returned to London, the moment of truth had arrived. At 11:00 P.M. on the single hottest August 10 in English history (the thermometer had registered 100 degrees), the King’s secretary, Arthur Bigge, returned from the House of Lords with the good news. To the King’s great relief, the Parliament bill to create new peers had been defeated.

  Six days later he wrote to Bigge, “It is impossible to pat the Opposition on the back, but I am indeed grateful for what they have done & saved me from humiliation which I should never have survived. If the creation had taken place, I should not have been the same person again.”

  In September, Sir Edward Grey remarked to Winston Churchill, “What a remarkable year this has been: the heat, the strikes, and now the foreign situation.”

  “Why,” said Winston, “you’ve forgotten the Parliament Bill,” and a friend who recorded the conversation added, “And so he had and so had everybody.”

  Queen Mary had kept her silence on the issue of the Parliament Bill but, as soon as the crisis was over, appeared as frequently as possible in public with the King. As always, her presence enhanced his image. Together, they represented everything right and proper and English.

  Since his tour of India six years before as the Prince of Wales, King George had been harbouring an idea that the Sovereign should visit that great empire. “I am convinced that were it possible for me, accompanied by the Queen, to go to India & hold a Coronation Durbar at Delhi, where we should meet all the Princes, officials & vast number of the People, the greatest benefits would accrue to the Country at large,” he wrote Lord Morley, Secretary of State for India, on September 8, 1910. “I also trust & believe that if the proposed visit could be made known sometime before, it would tend to allay unrest & I am sorry to say, seditious spirit which unfortunately exists in some parts of India.”

  Lord Esher had been right in suspecting the King would have some trouble with his Ministers in carrying out this scheme, for Lord Morley’s reply on September 12, 1910, had been tactful, but not too receptive to the proposal. “The cost of such a proceeding with all the grandeur of it, wd be great, and wd presumably have to be borne by India. Apart from the general body of Indian taxpayers, the Princes and ruling Chiefs wd no doubt be eager to demonstrate their loyalty on the scale of splendour natural for such an occasion and this splendour would be very costly as the last Durbar only too abundantly proved.* Again stress may be laid on embarrassments that might arise to public business at home, from the absence of the Sovereign from home for so long a time and at such immense distance.”

  The Government was against the outlay of the huge sums that the trip would cost and thought unwise such an extravagant display as a coronation Durbar at a time when so many sections of India were suffering famine. Also, anti-British revolutionary movements in India had grown considerably in the past five years, and security risks were to be considered.

  Despite these reservations, two months later the proposal was submitted to the Cabinet. On November 8, 1910, they agreed that the King and Queen should visit India, but they did so “not without a certain amount of criticism, and with a strong expression of opinion that the decision was not to be taken as precluding the discussion a
t a later stage of how the expenses were to be borne,” Prime Minister Asquith’s secretary informed the King through Lord Knollys.

  Solutions to the most serious problems of the King’s proposal took the entire coronation year. The first was King George’s original idea to be crowned at Delhi, which would present an awkward precedent for the King’s successors. “To be crowned” implied a second coronation and would necessarily have to include a religious service of consecration “unfitting for a ceremony attended by so many Moslems and Hindus.” A decision was finally reached that the King appear “wearing his crown and receive the homage of the Princes and rulers seated upon his throne.” Of serious consequence was the resultant problem of the crown itself.

  The law prohibited the King’s crown being removed from the country. Therefore, an entirely new crown had to be made, and some provision had to be decided upon for its final repository. This issue created a great deal of debate. First thoughts were that the crown should be preserved at Delhi. But the more cautious feared its very existence in the centre of India would prove “an irresistible temptation to potential usurpers.” This quandary was resolved by deciding the crown should be brought back and housed in the Tower of London directly after the Durbar.

  Of equal concern was the problem of the gifts to and from the people and their Indian rulers that, according to immemorial custom, would have to be proportionate to the event. A King-Emperor’s visit would be considered of the greatest magnitude. Such boons as the usual remission from taxes and penal sentences would not nearly suffice. A gift of a crore of rupees (then £666,666) from Great Britain to India was proposed by the Viceroy and unanimously rejected by the Cabinet. An alternative proposal was submitted that two boons not involving a gift of money be proclaimed at the Durbar. Lord Curzon’s “unintentional but grievous mistake” in partitioning Bengal should be reversed, and the capital should be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. The Cabinet agreed to those proposals reluctantly, for they were fearful they might not be popular choices in India and could lead to considerable controversy, which would place the King in an awkward situation of giving a gift that was not wanted by the majority of Indians.