Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  Everywhere in Germany pictures of the ex-Kaiser were removed from walls, and almost all German Royalties were in general flight, fearing imprisonment or assassination. Wilhelm, his wife, and his eldest son had taken refuge in Arnhem, a port on the lower Rhine in East Netherlands. There were two attempts on the life of Wilhelm’s brother, Prince Henry, and two of Prince Henry’s daughters were wounded by gunshot.

  Peace had come at II :00 A.M. the morning of November 11. As the news spread throughout London, the feeling of relief was “indescribably intense.” By nightfall, in a pouring rain, an excited, shouting crowd of nearly 100,000 people was stamping and cheering beneath the brightly lit balcony at Buckingham Palace, whose own gaslights were gleaming. Every few hours the King and Queen would appear, and the shouts would reach a deafening crescendo.

  “A day full of emotion and thankfulness—tinged with regret at the many lives who have fallen in this ghastly war,” Queen Mary wrote in her diary the night of the Armistice.

  The war had come to an end, but with an awesome loss of lives. The British Empire had lost 767,000 men; France, 1,383,000; the United States, 81,000; Italy, 564,000; Germany, 1,686,000; and Russia, 1,700,000. At least 1,000,000 men were missing in action, and over 12,000,000 had suffered serious injury; many maimed, blinded, or mentally unbalanced. The prospect of peace was going to require great courage. Kingdoms had toppled. Nations were bankrupt. Millions of survivors had to be fed and rehabilitated. Values had to be closely examined, and, as Lady Cynthia Asquith wrote poignantly, “One will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the War.”

  All of Queen Mary and King George’s German relations had lost their titles and rights. Aunt Augusta’s grandson, the young Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had shot himself. “Onkle Willie” Württemberg had abdicated, and the family of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s Consort, ruled no longer in Coburg. The current Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was, in fact, doubly related to Queen Mary. He was the brother of her sister-in-law, Princess Alice, and King George’s first cousin, his father having been King Edward’s brother Leopold.

  The Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was a tragic example of the Royal Family’s divided loyalties during the war. As an Eton schoolboy of fifteen, having inherited the title upon his father’s early death, Queen Victoria had insisted the boy, who had never been out of Britain, be sent to Germany to prepare to reign in his duchy. Now he had been stripped of all his British and German lands and titles, and was persona non grata in both countries.

  “It has all been very wonderful and gratifying that after all these 4 years of ghastly warfare the people did crowd here to us the moment they knew the War was practically over,”* Queen Mary wrote to Harry, who had just entered his first year at Dartmouth.

  Still, the Monarchy was not as stable in 1918 as it had been at the beginning of the war. It was imperative (so claimed Lord Cromer) for “no stone to be left un turned in the endeavour to consolidate the position of the Crown. The Crown is the link of Empire and its fate is inseparable from that of all British possessions.”

  The Prince of Wales’s popularity was a great asset. Bertie, although terrified of aeroplanes, had been transferred from his beloved Navy to the Royal Air Force in Cambrai, in the north of France (but at least with the compensating comfort of his good friend, Lieutenant Commander Grieg, being transferred with him); and David was in Mons at the end of the war. The King did not feel that either of his sons should return until the armies were demobilised. Cautiously, Queen Mary wrote the King: “I think David ought to return home before very long, as he must help us in these difficult days; he is quite ready to do anything we want, for I had some capital talks with him while he was here and he was most sensible.”

  Christmas was to pass before the Prince of Wales returned to England. He was greeted everywhere he went as a hero, his popularity at its height. For the rest of the year (1919), he was kept constantly before the public, his speeches always sounding a personal note that brought him more and more admirers. In May, at his admission to the Freedom of the City of London at Guildhall, he confided, “I shall never forget my period of service overseas. In those four years I mixed with men. In those four years I found my manhood.” Despite the awful sight of charred battlefields littered with “blood-stained shreds of khaki & tartan, the ground grey with corpses [and] mired horses struggling as they drowned in shellholes,” the Prince of Wales’s letters and his appearance still bore the smooth cheek of boyhood. Bertie, on the other hand, had matured quite noticeably. The King’s next decision, to have Bertie, not David, accompany the Belgian Royal Family into Brussels (a great honour), was to have the unpleasant effect of alienating his older son just that little bit more, and of creating an insidious sense of competition between the two brothers.

  The war years and the horror Queen Mary had seen (perhaps more than any other woman who was not in the nursing profession), the murders at Ekaterinburg, the fall of so many empires had marked her. She was fifty-one, resentful of the passage of her youth; her hair was grey, her body more matronly. Yet age and difficult times had not altered her proud carriage. Indeed, her presence had taken on an aura of ultimate queenliness that neither the stolid Victoria nor the vain Alexandra had possessed.

  Footnotes

  *Edward III (1312–77), King of England (1327–77). Only fifteen when crowned, the real power for his first three years as King was exercised by his mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger de Mortimer, 1st Earl of March. In 1330, the King executed a coup and seized the reins of government, putting Mortimer to death and forcing his mother into retirement. The French Hundred Years War and the Scottish Wars dominated his reign, as did the emergence of the Commons as a distinct and powerful group within Parliament. Edward III could easily have been the model for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

  *The third of Queen Victoria’s Battenberg grandchildren, Prince Maurice, had been killed in action in France.

  †Sir Charles Hardinge (1858–1944). Created Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, 1910. Minister in Tehran, Ambassador at Saint Petersburg and Paris, Viceroy of India, and for many years Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. During the reign of King Edward VII, he always accompanied the King on his official visits abroad, a duty usually performed by the Secretary of State.

  *Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960), eldest daughter of the lith Earl of Wemyss. She married Herbert Asquith (1881–1947), second son of Prime Minister Asquith.

  †Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower (d. 1930), eldest daughter of the 4th Duke of Sutherland. She married in 1919 Lord Ednam, later 3rd Earl of Dudley.

  *Mrs. Freda Dudley Ward (1894–1983), Winifred May, elder daughter of Colonel C. W. Birkin. In 1913, she married William Dudley Ward, divorcing him in 1932. In 1937, she married the Marques de Casa Maury. This marriage was dissolved in 1954, but she remained the Marquesa de Casa Maury until her death.

  *This led to a story that still proliferates that Queen Mary was a kleptomaniac, an accusation never substantiated and thoroughly untrue.

  *Besides the Royal Family who were cousins, and the children and grandchildren of Queen Victoria, who were also cousins, Queen Alexandra was Nicholas and Alexandra’s aunt; and the Russian Empress’s eldest sister, Victoria, was Lord Louis Mountbatten’s mother.

  † As late as 1970, after the publication of Nicholas and Alexandra, the Duke of Windsor was to tell Robert Massie, the author, that he had been unduly harsh on his father and that King George had indeed tried everything possible but failed.

  *Spa is near Liège, in East Belgium, where in 1920 the Allies accepted a German scheme for paying reparations.

  *Max (Maximilian), Prince of Baden (1867–1929), a Liberal who thought he could save the Monarchy in Germany by forcing Wilhelm II to abdicate.

  †Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), President of the German Republic 1919–1925.

  *There were nine reigning families in Europe at this time—the Wattins (Belgiums), Oldenburgs (Denmark and Norway
), Liechtensteins (Liechtenstein), Nassaus (Luxembourg), Grimaldis (Monaco), Orange-Nassaus (Netherlands), Bourbons (Spain), Bernadottes (Sweden), and Windsors (Great Britain). None of the current ruling monarchies truly wield power. Hypothetically, Queen Elizabeth would have to sign her own death warrant should Parliament and the courts vote yea on the issue. But the House of Windsor, of all of Europe’s surviving reigning royal families, still embodies the royal mystique and commands more celebrity than any other monarch, president, politician, author, or film actor. To the world, the House of Windsor gives Great Britain a glittering aura that has been extremely prestigious for that country. And the monarchy remains and seems likely to perpetuate itself for generations to come because of this, and because—as Winston Churchill once remarked—“The monarchy is so extraordinarily useful. When Britain wins a battle she shouts, ‘God save the Queen’; when she loses, she votes down the Prime Minister.”

  *The final peace was signed June 28, 1919.

  TWENTY-TWO

  If ever there was a person ill suited to a decade, it was Queen Mary to the twenties. Yet she sailed through them with Nelsonian perseverance. Now the mother of four marriageable offspring,* she considered it her duty to King and Country to see that they chose their life partners wisely.

  Prince John had died in his sleep on Saturday, January 18, 1919. “At 5:30,” Queen Mary recorded in her diary, “Lala Bill telephoned me from Wood Farm, Wolferton, that our poor darling little Johnnie had passed away suddenly after one of his [epileptic] attacks. The news gave me a great shock, tho’ for the poor little boy’s restless soul, death came as a great release. I broke the news to George & we motored down to Wood Farm. Found poor Lala very resigned but heartbroken.” And to an old friend,† she wrote, “... as his malady was becoming worse as he grew older ... he has thus been spared much suffering. I cannot say how grateful we feel to God for having taken him in such a peaceful way, he just slipt quietly into his heavenly home, no pain, no struggle, just peace for the poor little troubled spirit which has been a great anxiety to us for many years, ever since he was four years old—”

  The cause of death (his final attack had resulted in fatal heart damage) or Prince John’s epilepsy and retardation were not reported in his obituaries. Nor was there any explanation of why he should have been at Wood Farm, Wolferton, and not at one of the Royal residences.

  For Queen Alexandra, little Prince John’s death was another great sadness to survive. She lingered at his small grave after his quiet funeral at Sandringham, heavily veiled and supported by Charlotte Knollys and Sir Dighton Probyn, long after Queen Mary had departed. According to one contemporary observer, Queen Alexandra was now “an old lady of ghostly and tenuous beauty.” Another describes her during an audience at Marlborough House as a “mummied thing, the bird-like head cocked on one side, not artfully but by disease, the red-rimmed eyes, the enamelled face, which the famous smile scissored across all angular and heart-rending.” “The ghosts of all her lovely airs” remained; “the little graces, the once effective sway and movement of the figure ...” Still, the image is one of wizened age —(“Her bony fingers, clashing in the tunnel of their rings, fiddled with albums, penholders, photographs, toys upon the table ...”)—which becomes more and more terrible, when one recalls how much youth and beauty were prized by Queen Alexandra.

  The word “enamelled” was again used in describing her face by author Beverly Nicols, who writes that as a child he asked his mother how Queen Alexandra could smile if she “enamelled” her face. His mother replied gravely, “She does not smile. If she did, she would crack.”

  “Enamelled” or not, Queen Alexandra appeared at the wedding on April 21, 1920, of Harold Macmillan and Lady Dorothy Cavendish (daughter of the Duke of Devonshire). A guest noted that there were “roses flaming all too brightly on her parched skin.”

  A rash of marriages between the members of English and Scottish nobility followed the Macmillan wedding. No longer was it considered out of the question for an alliance to take place between a peer’s son or daughter and a commoner, as long as the latter came from a well-connected family. This held true for all members of the Royal Family except the Prince of Wales. In the direct aftermath of the war, the British public would have expressed great anger at the idea of the King’s children marrying anyone of German origin. Queen Mary could not help but wonder what would have been the result if one of her sons had been married to the Kaiser’s daughter, or Princess Mary to one of his sons. Family feeling would have been rent asunder, and she and King George would have been powerless to help their children.

  Princess Mary celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday on April 25, 1921. She bore a great resemblance to her Aunt Toria, and although she possessed a sense of humour, she had an otherwise colourless personality. Nevertheless, Princess Mary was her father’s favourite, and he was not too pleased when Queen Mary introduced the subject of a possible husband for her. Most suggestions ended in his curt dismissal; not so the name of Henry, Viscount Lascelles,* eldest son of the 5th Earl of Harewood. The Court referred to Lord Lascelles as “poor Henry” because a decade earlier he had been hopelessly in love with Vita Sackville-West and had lost her to Harold Nicolson. “Poor Henry” was fifteen years Princess Mary’s senior; looked like a “dismal bloodhound”; and, except for his air of the rejected suitor, was an altogether unromantic figure. He did have a personal fortune of over £3 million, owned vast lands, was a connoisseur of fine paintings, and would one day succeed, as the 6th Earl of Harewood, to Harewood House near Leeds. The match was thus encouraged. Lord Lascelles became a frequent guest at Balmoral during the summer of 1921 and in November stayed in one of the small, draughty rooms at York Cottage.

  Queen Mary was resting in her room dressed in an embroidered kimono and talking to Prince Alge, who was visiting for the weekend, when during Lord Lascelles’s visit in November Princess Mary burst in and said breathlessly, “Mama, I must speak with you,” and proceeded to tell her mother and uncle of Lord Lascelles’s proposal. “Please ask Papa’s permission now,” the young woman pleaded.

  Queen Mary glanced at her kimono and demurred, “I can’t go like this.”

  Her daughter pressed on, and finally Queen Mary, in kimono and slippers, Mary in close pursuit, marched down the stairs and knocked at the door of King George’s study. “I don’t know what the pages must have thought of me dressed like that,” she confided to the family at dinner. The King confessed that he had been a bit startled as well.

  David was twenty-five, the bachelor Prince Charming, and all eyes were on him. At galas and at sporting events, he was always photographed with a different debutante. Gossip had it that beautiful Florence Mills, the black star of Blackbirds, was his mistress. But to his parents’ distraction, he was privately seeing Freda Dudley Ward to the exclusion of all other young women. With Freda—small, fun-loving, and somewhat domineering—he could relax. He was often referred to by the King’s Ministers as “The Little Man.” Yet his name evoked the ultimate in glamour. He was thought to be a bit “wild.” Lord Stamfordham suggested he be sent abroad as the Empire’s Ambassador-at-Large, and in 1919 he began what would be a decade of travelling by touring Newfoundland, Canada, and the United States, where he paid a dutiful call on President Wilson before getting down to the business of enjoying himself.

  American women fell instantly in love with him, surprised that he was not arrogant and remote, but a smiling, appealing young man who dissolved the distance Americans believed lay between Royalty and just plain folk. “Hats off,” the American magazine Vanity Fair said, “to the indestructible Dancing Drinking Tumbling Kissing Walking Talking—but not Marrying—Idol of the British Empire.”

  He was called back to England by the King, who told him, “The war has made it possible for you to mix with all manner of people ... But don’t think that this means you can now act like other people. You must always remember your position and who you are.”

  But who exactly was he?

 
; “The idea that my birth and title should somehow or other set me apart from or above other people struck me as wrong,” he wrote of his feelings at the time. “If the leveling process of the Royal Naval College, Oxford University, or the democracy of the battlefield had taught me anything, it was, firstly, that my desires and interests were much the same as those of other people, and secondly, that however hard I tried, my capacity was somehow not appreciably above the standards demanded by the fiercely competitive world outside the palace walls ... I wanted no part of ... [the] advantages attached to a position that shelters one from the consequences of one’s shortcomings ... I was in unconscious rebellion against my position.”

  “The Monarchy must always retain an element of mystery,” Sir Frederick Ponsonby, then King George’s Keeper of the Privy Purse, advised him. “A Prince should not show himself too much. The Monarchy must remain on a pedestal.”

  The Prince of Wales chose to ignore Ponsonby’s advice. His relationship with Freda Dudley Ward became more indiscreet. They danced together at social gatherings, attended races, spent weekends at country houses, and attended private parties. Freda Dudley Ward was married to Lord Esher’s nephew, who was a Liberal Whip. “Be like Mrs. Keppel,” Lord Esher warned her, “be discreet.” But by 1920 the’ Prince of Wales was “madly, passionately, abjectly in love with [Mrs. Dudley Ward].” He visited her daily at five o’clock when in London, remaining to dine or to take her out to dinner, if not to a friend’s home then to the Embassy Club, which was his favourite nightclub. Located in the basement of an elegant Bond Street building, it hardly earned the title of “Little Buckingham Palace,” which he gave it. The guests who frequented the Embassy were mostly “upper crust” and knew that the Prince and his lady should be left quite alone. After a public engagement, he would return to Freda Dudley Ward’s home late in the evening, despite the fact that Mr. Dudley Ward and their two children remained in residence.