by Anne Edwards
No more did the Big House light up at Christmas. House parties were a part of the past. Queen Alexandra lived a cloistered life with her three companions and two or three members of her small Court, although she was well cared for by a Household staff of about forty-five persons. Occasionally, she motored to London to visit some of her old friends. But Marlborough House, which she had once so loved, had become depressing to her.
On one of these excursions into London, she went to see Lady Geraldine Somerset, who was now an “intimidating old lady, armed with an enormous ear trumpet edged with a black silk fringe, who lived in a small house on Upper Brook Street, each room of which resembled a tent made of faded photographs.” Lady Geraldine, in her eighties and thought to be on her deathbed, managed to raise herself up when Queen Alexandra entered and said loudly, “Go way, Ma’am, I am too old and ugly for you to see me.” Queen Alexandra, who was even more hard of hearing than her old friend, misunderstood and, turning to Charlotte Knollys, who had accompanied her, said, “That is too much! She said I am too old and too ugly!” and marched angrily out of the room. Charlotte Knollys attempted to make amends with Lady Geraldine and then to assure Queen Alexandra that the old woman had not insulted her. Queen Alexandra refused to believe that she had not heard correctly. Lady Geraldine died a few weeks later, but Queen Alexandra remained so angry that she did not attend the funeral.
While his father was in India, David, with Georgie as spectator, would go shooting at Sandringham—a sport David had not shared previously with King George. On January 11, 1912, he wrote the King:
I love shooting more than anything else, & it was very kind of you to allow me to shoot so much here while you were away. I have had some splendid practise, & feel that my shooting has very much improved. It is the small days that give one far more practise than the big ones. One can take one’s time & shoot much better ...*
The King, who was strict in the handling of firearms, answered with a piece of doggerel entitled, “A Father’s Advice,” which he insisted David memorise.
If a sportsman true you’d be
Listen carefully to me;
Never, never let your gun
Pointed be at anyone;
That it might unloaded be
Matters not the least to me.
You may hit or you may miss,
But at all times think of this:
All the game birds ever bred
Won’t pay for one man dead.
Forty years later, David could still recite the first and last verses. In the sport of shooting, father and son had a shared interest that would bring them—for a short span of time, at least—closer together after the Royal couple returned from India.
In April, the Titanic was sunk with great loss of life. That same month, the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in Parliament moved Ireland precariously close to civil war. Ulster had set up a provisional government under Sir Edward Carson,* and the probability of the Army being drawn in was ever present. Ulster was a hotbed of divided passions. The six Protestant counties were “resolved to resist by force any attempt to coerce them into union with Southern Ireland, and they found many stalwart allies in the British Parliament.”
The tension of the long months since their return from India was given a short respite when Queen Mary decided to travel to Strelitz to celebrate Aunt Augusta’s ninetieth birthday with her. “I should come incognito & want no fuss whatsoever,” she wrote the Grand Duchess, “let it be a visit from a very devoted niece to her very dear aunt. I ... only hope your answer in your next letter will be ‘yes.’ ”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Aunt Augusta wrote back.
Queen Mary disembarked at Neu-strelitz railway station with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Princess Mary, early on an August morning. “Aunt is wonderful, looks rather thinner & is rather deaf but otherwise unaltered,” Queen Mary wrote King George. Dressed in black, a black poke bonnet ornamented with a tuft of white feathers and secured with velvet strings beneath her chin, the diminutive elderly woman walked out on a strip of red carpet to greet her niece, who bowed her head to kiss her aunt. There were tears in Queen Mary’s eyes, and she was far less controlled at this meeting than her aunt. A film camera recorded the emotional meeting, and one is instantly struck by the queenliness of Aunt Augusta’s demeanour, and one thinks of a meeting between Princess May and Queen Victoria so many years before.
Her week in Neu-strelitz was a pleasant interlude for Queen Mary. To her amazement, Aunt Augusta dared a motor ride for the first time and regaled her niece with stories of the family. “Queen and yet May,” Aunt Augusta pronounced after her departure. Both feared—because of the older woman’s age—this might be the last time they would meet, but neither made the departure a sad affair.
“Next year!” Queen Mary waved to her aunt as she boarded her train for Calais.
“God grant this hope may come true,” Aunt Augusta called back.
Strelitz was, of course, in Germany, and though King George and Queen Mary did not share King Edward and Queen Alexandra’s great animosity to Kaiser Wilhelm, his country now threatened the peace of Europe. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, tried to dissuade the King and Queen from travelling there, fearing that France and Russia could take such a trip as a formal affirmation of Britain’s friendship with Germany. The guns of war were already cocked. The Balkans were in bloody combat. The King of Greece—Queen Alexandra’s brother—was assassinated at Salonica in March of 1913, and the following month a failed attempt was made on the life of the Kaiser and of the Grand Duke of Baden. But the King and Queen could not be made to refuse an invitation to the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter, Victoria Louise, to their cousin, Ernest, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, who was Queen Alexandra’s nephew.* Aunt Augusta was not well enough to travel to the wedding, even though the distance was not great, so plans were made for King George and Queen Mary to visit with her briefly on their way home.
Although the trip to Berlin was not a state visit, Kaiser Wilhelm arranged a grand display of pomp and ceremony to greet the King and Queen of England appropriately. Despite their dislike of Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra came to the wedding, as did all the other Royal cousins and aunts and uncles then reigning in foreign lands.
The highlight of the wedding was the Fackeltanz, an historic dance performed solely at German royal weddings. Only Royal Highnesses could take part in it, while everyone else (1,200 people in this instance) stood watching. The bride began the dance by making a low curtsy to her father, the Kaiser, and then, preceded by pages bearing lighted candles in glowing silver candelabra, they danced in a circle around the entire ballroom. The bride curtsied and danced with King George, then the Tsar, and so on until she had danced with all the visiting Kings and Royal Princes as well.
None of the Royalties gathered for this Götterdämmerung of the kings and queens of Europe realised that this was to be the last assemblage of the “royal mob.” Within five years, all except the King and Queen of England would be assassinated, deposed, exiled, “or living in impoverished retirement.” But for this one week in May, the countryside of Germany never more lavish with bloom, they gorged themselves at “Willy’s” colossal banquets and were treated daily to his great military parades.
On the twenty-seventh, the Kaiser and the King motored down to Potsdam to review the garrison. Queen Mary and the Empress Augusta Victoria [Wilhelm’s Consort] followed with their suites. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, who had accompanied the King and Queen to Berlin and was included in this parade, was amazed to find that the only two wearing British uniforms on the field were Kaiser Wilhelm, in an English field marshal’s uniform, and himself. (King George wore a German uniform for the occasion.)
“I had some talk with the Emperor on the subject of aeroplanes and dirigibles,” Ponsonby reports, “which he said would undoubtedly play a great part in future warfare. The King and the Emperor then rode out, followed by [General] Loewenfeldt and myself. We came straight to the para
de ground ... It was a magnificent sight, and of course we saw the pick of the German Army.
“The Emperor left his place with the King and went past the head of the Guards. The way he managed his horse was certainly wonderful. His left arm was a deformity and absolutely powerless. Usually when he rode he held the reins in his right hand. When he rode past, however, it was necessary for him to hold a sword in his right hand and the reins in his left. The horse was therefore practically left to itself ... He [Kaiser Wilhelm] saluted with a magnificent sweep of the sword and then cantered slowly around to join the King.”
Queen Mary, who feared horses, could not but wonder at the courage it took for the Kaiser to trust his life so casually to one. However, the Kaiser’s horse had been trained in this manoeuvre every morning for three months. Ponsonby said of the magnificent animal he was given that it was “more like a motor-car than a horse. It was so perfectly trained that by touching the reins you could make it do anything.” The Kaiser’s horse had to work independently, with no guiding hand whatsoever.
The young woman who once said, “Imagine me in the place of honour beside William,” though Queen of England, was still impressed by her husband’s cousin and flattered by his lavish gifts and floral offerings. The truth was that Queen Mary found Kaiser Wilhelm an exciting and stimulating man.
Queen Mary’s appearance at the wedding service was perhaps the most splendid she had yet achieved. “A lady [in attendance there] told me, she never saw anything like your magnificent Dresses and Diamonds, and your regal appearance, the Wedding toilette surpassing all!” Aunt Augusta wrote. And dazzling she must have been in a gown of India cloth-of-gold, embroidered with a woven design of flowers in gold. On her head was the tiara she had worn to the Durbar—this time exchanging the emerald drops for pearls. For necklaces, she wore a diamond collar and Queen Victoria’s diamond necklace beneath this with the Star of Africa as a pendant. Her corsage of white flowers—sent to her by the Kaiser—was decorated with diamond bows, pearl drops, and the “smaller South African pendant,” which was approximately thirty-three carats.
By December 1913, rumbles of war had spread across the whole of Europe, but in England they were silenced by the Irish question, which, for the British, completely overshadowed everything else that year. “King George was fully prepared,” Harold Nicolson reports, “if such were the desire of the two nations, that Home Rule should be accorded the Irish. He believed that, if the problems were handled with tact and generosity, Ireland would become a friendly and contented Dominion, cooperating with other Dominions in joint allegiance to the Crown. What he dreaded was the tension between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland ... might cause lasting damage to our Parliamentary tradition, involve the Crown in an odious constitutional dilemma and, at a time of serious international disorder, weaken the country by internal dissension and even expose it to the disaster of civil war.”
Lengthy memoranda made their way between King George and Prime Minister Asquith. Gravely fearing civil war, the King wrote the Prime Minister in September, “... it behooves us all to withhold no efforts to avert those threatening events which would inevitably outrage humanity and lower the British name in the mind of the whole civilised world.”
Queen Mary was already suffering great humiliation on the Irish question. She and the King were planning a trip to Paris that next spring, and she confessed to Aunt Augusta, “How I hate having to go there when matters are so unsettled here; especially as one feels so acutely how England has fallen in prestige abroad. I really feel so ashamed I shld prefer to hide—certainly not to have to smile & make oneself agreeable when one’s heart is not in it, for then nobody gives one the credit for having a heart or feeling things in these days—It seems to me that ‘finesse’ has gone out of the world, that indescribable something which, was born in one & which was inherited thro’ generations.”
The Christmas holidays spent at Sandringham, as always, brought the Royal Family a short surcease from their troubles, although Bertie’s absence was sorely felt. Bertie had received his appointment as a midshipman, “the lowest form of Marine life,”* on September 15 and was attached to the 19,250-ton battleship H.M.S. Collingwood. On October 28, H.M.S. Collingwood, with the First Battle Squadron, sailed from Devonport to join in manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, and later to cruise in Egyptian and Aegean waters. While at sea, Bertie celebrated his eighteenth birthday.
“My 18th birthday & I’m allowed to smoke,” he wrote in his diary. In recognition of this new emancipation, his mother had sent him a cigarette case, which Bertie received when his ship docked at Toulon. On Christmas Day, H.M.S. Collingwood rode at anchor in Gibraltar Harbour.
Bertie did not share his father’s great love for the sea. He even disliked yachting. Like his mother, he fought “a continual battle against seasickness.” Nonetheless, Bertie was certain that he would make a career as a naval officer.* Wheeler-Bennett states that “his ultimate ambition at this stage of his life was to have his own independent command and to rise, as his father had done, to the rank of Captain on the active list.”
What Bertie enjoyed most about the Navy was the feeling of camaraderie that existed between his contemporaries and himself. He was known as “Mr. Johnson” for practical reasons (although everyone knew he was Prince Albert), and he was given not even the slightest privilege. He shared the flat outside the gunroom with fifteen other young sailors, stored his clothes in a sea chest and slept in a hammock slung above it, and stowed away in the morning. Nowhere could he be alone. He stood watch, toiled in the coal-black hold of a dirty collier, and ate bread and cheese and onions and beer along with his mates. He was treated with rigid discipline by his superiors; the junior sub-lieutenant whom he trailed after when off duty became “a bloody tyrant” without complaint on his part. This masochistic tendency—which David shared-followed both brothers into their middle years.
Since David had confessed liking shooting to his father, King George had included him that Christmas in what he called “small days” at Sandringham—where they would shoot together in the coverts and heathland and the marshes on the shore of the wash. Each spot had its name—Wain Hill, Cat’s Bottom, Folly Hang, Ugly Dale—and these days spent together were to be the fondest memories David had of his father. He was not able to discuss anything of a personal nature with him, but a closeness formed in the sharing of the intricacies of the sport. The invitation to accompany his father to Hall Barn in Buckinghamshire, the home of Lord Burnham (proprietor of the Daily Telegraph), on December 18 was the first big shoot that David attended. This was a sumptuous affair with close to a hundred hunters engaged to drive or flush the birds toward the group. A day’s bag of two thousand head was not uncommon.
“We were six hours in the field,” David was later to recall, “and the show of birds was fantastic. My father was deadly that day and used three guns. He had an individual, stylized way of shooting—left arm extended straight along the barrel, both eyes open. An onlooker reported that at one stand he saw my father bring down thirty-nine pheasants before missing one. Young and unused to firing so many shells, as I was, my left arm ached from lifting my gun, my shoulder from the recoil, and I was deaf and stunned from the banging ... When in the late afternoon the carnage stopped, almost 4,000 pheasants had been killed. The bright, limp carcasses were laid out in rows of 100; the whole place was littered with feathers and empty shells. My father had shot over 1,000 birds; I had even passed the 300 mark. He was proud of the way he had shot that day, but I think that the scale of the bag troubled even his conscience; for ... he remarked, ‘Perhaps we went a little too far today, David.’ ”
On a shoot, King George “was in his element.” Stimulated by the bracing air and hard exercise and on the alert for a flushed bird, he would put aside the cares of state. He would also laugh and joke, and David was thus to see a lighter side of his father. Killing on the scale of Lord Burnham’s shoot, however, was intensely distasteful to the young man, who deemed i
t senseless. His father must have sensed his displeasure. He did not include him on many other shoots, and the intimacy shared on “small days” was quickly to become only memory. Too soon father and son would be parted by a war for which neither they nor their country was prepared.
In April 1914, Queen Mary and King George departed London for their long-planned state journey to Paris.* “Of course I wanted to go to Vienna first but Sir Edward Grey will not hear of it!” Queen Mary wrote Aunt Augusta. The Paris trip had been set in motion by Sir Edward Grey shortly after the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter, to assure French President Poincaré and the French people that England’s sympathies would not be with Germany in case of a war between the countries. Unless, of course, the neutrality of Belgium was violated by the French.
The King and Queen of England’s visit to Paris in April could well have been one of the major events that was propelling Germany, and therefore all of Europe, into a war. It came at the time that England had begun Naval talks with Russia, and Germany feared being encircled by Russia and France. Russia would not be a sophisticated enemy, but she did have overwhelming numbers of men to serve in her Army. Combining that force with England’s Navy was a formidable threat. Germany’s work on the widening of the Kiel Canal, permitting her new dreadnoughts direct access from the North Sea to the Baltic, was greatly accelerated. By June 1, the Kiel Canal was completed, and German Field Marshal Moltke said to Baron Eckhardstein, “We are ready, and the sooner the better for us.”
France and Britain were also sharpening their readiness. Working jointly by the time of the King and Queen’s trip to Paris in April, the French and British General Staffs were completed. The number of French railroad cars to be allocated, the assignments of interpreters, the preparation of codes and ciphers, and the forage of horses as well were expected to be completed by July.
