Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  In response to the change of name, Victoria’s grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm, joked that he was looking forward to seeing Shakespeare’s excellent comedy The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when he came to England after the war.

  Louis Battenberg, who was still smarting from having to resign as First Sea Lord, managed to negotiate that he should be made Marquess of Milford Haven and took a sneaky, clever revenge. While the King renamed his family Windsor, the Battenbergs merely dropped the ‘berg’ part of their name. In German, ‘berg’ means mountain or mount, so the Battenbergs became the ‘Mountbattens’.

  Being obliged to drop the family name proved another blow to the already depressed Louis Battenberg. He also faced financial problems and had to sell his homes in both Britain and Germany. In 1921 he complained of feeling unwell and his wife persuaded him to rest in a room they had booked in the annexe of the Royal Military and Naval Club. Victoria called a doctor, who prescribed some medication. It is typical that she did not send a servant but went out to fill the prescription at a nearby pharmacist’s. When she came back, her husband was dead. It made her very bitter. This compounded the tragedy she had faced in 1918 when she learned that the Bolsheviks had killed her beloved sister, Ella, even though she had taken to doing good works for the poor.

  Alice’s mother comforted herself in thinking Ella’s faith would have made her meet death without fear. But Alice would be devastated. Victoria said: ‘The misery poor Alicky will have suffered will not have touched Ella’s soul.’ When Ella’s body was found, she was holding a cross of cypress wood. Alice herself faced death: she had to shelter in the palace cellars when the French bombed Athens (1916–17). During the chaos, the King of Greece found himself homeless and a Jewish property magnate, Haimaki Cohen, gave him a house for his family. The King was grateful and told Cohen he only had to ask for help should he need it. Alice would remernber that promise. In June 1917, she and other members of the Greek royal family were forced into exile, the first of many dislocations.

  George V, who had done nothing to help Louis Battenberg, was worried that the Russian Revolution would provoke even more hostility towards the royals, so he also did nothing to help his cousin the Tsar in his hour of need and refused to grant him asylum. The irony is that Lenin was a pragmatist and would probably have been quite prepared to let the Tsar sail out of St Petersburg on a British warship.

  Six days before the end of the war, David wrote to his father that ‘there seems to be a regular epidemic of revolution and abdications’ which threatened monarchies, but he thought the British one by far the ‘most solid’. After agreeing with his father’s view that the survival of the monarchy required keeping ‘in the closest possible touch with the people’, he promised always to keep that in mind and signed himself ‘your most devoted son’. He was devoted but was also, as his father saw it, delinquent, especially in his love life. The whole family now had to cope with a tragedy they may well have been half hoping for.

  In the early hours of 18 January 1919, Queen Mary wrote in her diary:

  Lalla Bill telephoned from Wood Farm, Wolferton, that our poor darling Johnnie had died suddenly after one of his attacks. The news gave me a great shock, though for the little boy’s restless soul, death came as a great release. I brought the news to George & we motored down to Wood Farm. Found poor Lalla very resigned but heartbroken. Little Johnnie looked very peaceful lying there. For him it is a great release as his malady was becoming worse as he grew older and 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 slept quietly, no pain, no struggle, just peace for the poor little troubled spirit, which had been a great anxiety for us for many years ever since he was four.

  The words are eloquent, but George and Mary had excluded their sick son and left him very much to the servants. When John was buried on 21 January 1919, the Queen wrote: ‘We thanked all Johnnie’s servants, who have been so good and faithful to him.’ Some days later she added, ‘Miss the dear child very much indeed.’ She told George, ‘The first break in the family circle is hard to bear but people have been so kind & sympathetic & this has helped us much.’ The Queen gave Winifred Thomas a number of John’s books, with the inscription: ‘In memory of our dear little Prince’.

  In The King’s Story, David mentions his epileptic brother only in relation to his death. After the war, David resumed what his father saw as his distressing fast and frivolous life. It was some consolation that the stammering son seemed capable of something that had not occurred to a senior royal since Victoria met Albert: falling madly in love.

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  The Queen Mother and Woodrow Wilson

  In spite of his neurotic troubles and his duodenal ulcer, Prince George had had a decent war, though he only saw active service for less than two years. In February 1918, he became Officer in Charge of Boys at the Royal Naval Air Services training establishment at Cranwell. He was the first member of the royal family to be certified as a fully qualified pilot, which must have pleased his father, given his minor obsession with wings. When George tried to get permission to fly solo, Lt Col Birley, who was the head of the RAF Medical Services, was asked to assess him. Birley concluded the Prince had too many psychological problems to be in the air on his own. It was clear that he needed help, more help than even the ever-present Louis Greig could give.

  The cycle of reaction now recurred. George V, who had been pushed into marriage with Mary of Teck by Queen Victoria, decided to allow his own sons freedom to marry. In 1920, George met Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the youngest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, for the first time since they were children. She came from a distinguished Scottish family and could count Robert the Bruce among her ancestors, as well as the butler’s great-grandson, Henry VII. Technically, however, she was a commoner and had been brought up outside court circles.

  Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons had a rather free childhood in Scotland. She saw a great deal of her parents and her mother breastfed all her children, which was still rare among the upper classes. Elizabeth’s father adored her. She and her youngest brother, David, were known as ‘the two Benjamins’ and smoked illicit cigarettes in the Flea House, the attic of a ruined building, which was their ‘blissful retreat’. Their nurse couldn’t find them there and they amassed ‘a regular store of forbidden delicacies acquired by devious means: beer, oranges, sugar, sweets, slabs of Chocolat Menier, matches and packets of Woodbines’. The children smoked on the stairs, and from a turret once poured cold water on unsuspecting guests. They also painted the lower rungs of a ladder with white paint without, of course, telling the painter, standing several rungs above. When his white footprints covered the whole lawn, they loved it. They were spoilt rotten, it could be said.

  Elizabeth did not go to school but had a series of governesses. During World War I, she became an auxiliary nurse and treated wounded soldiers. She was part of a very active social circle and ‘dated’, as we would put it now, a number of dashing young men. George fell in love with her but she did not return his feelings. He proposed to her; she was flattered but she did not accept. The remarkable thing was how well he handled her rejection, given his many neurotic problems. It seems unlikely he did that without help.

  George was very depressed by Elizabeth’s rejection, as he told John Davidson, the Prime Minister’s private secretary, but he did not give up. He proposed another time and, again, she asked him to forgive her, but she could not accept. The King and Queen were quite happy for him to marry Elizabeth, but less so when they realised he was pursuing a young woman who just wanted him to be ‘a wonderful friend’. It was undignified for the King’s son to chase after a girl who did not want him. For perhaps the only time in his life, George deceived his parents and promised to give up trying to persuade Elizabeth to become his wife. He was far too much in love with her, however, to do that.

  The reason that has been usually given for Elizabeth’s hesitation is
that she realised, if she married George, she would become part of the royal family and her life would be very much constrained. There was more to it, however: she was also aware of George’s many problems and she had many other suitors who neither stammered nor lost their temper. She said later that she had been very tempted to marry one of them, James Stuart.

  But George was persistent and he proposed yet again. Elizabeth’s mother made a comment that reveals the Prince was seen at the very least as extremely needy. He would be ‘made or marred’ by his choice of wife. Biographers have failed to explain how George, who was shy and lacking in self-confidence, managed both to keep his temper in check when he was rejected and summon up the strength to continue his pursuit. One explanation is that he had been in some sort of therapy, as many upper-class men and women were at the time.

  By 1920, few British psychiatrists had been knighted. One of those few was James Crichton-Browne, who had the peculiar job of looking after usually rich patients, who were wards of Chancery. Another high-society psychiatrist was Maurice Craig, who, before the 1914 war, was often consulted when young people came back from skiing in Switzerland. Craig noted ‘a few weeks of winter sports’ left them ‘in a highly exhausted state’. Lionel Logue, who is presented in The King’s Speech as the therapist who saved George VI, never received a knighthood, but Craig did.

  Craig wrote Nerve Exhaustion, in which he discussed the problems of shell shock, as well as the best ways to treat children prone to violent outbursts of temper and who stammered. ‘The writer attaches great importance to any hyper sensitivity that a child may be born with or accentuated as a result or illness, zymotic disease,’ he said, adding that ‘fear and dread are the most powerful influences on the child’s mind.’ He also suggested as therapeutic techniques breathing in a more relaxed way, which we know the future George VI practised. As I have argued, one of the curious results of Freud’s growing fame and the awareness of shell shock was that many upper-class individuals saw analysts. William Bullitt, the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, was one of Freud’s patients, as was Princess Marie Bonaparte. For Prince George to seek help in these circumstances would not be so strange, especially as his parents consulted nerve doctors for his brother John. Maurice Craig, unlike Treves, Greig or Logue, has been airbrushed out of Prince George’s history.

  George accepted Elizabeth’s many rejections between 1921 and 1923 with good grace. If he had lost his temper, as he was apt to do when frustrated, then she would have been put off but somehow he managed to control himself. Elizabeth finally changed her mind after an odd episode where newspapers reported that she was going to marry George’s brother, David. Once she told George she would marry him, her fears that life would never be normal again were immediately realised as reporters surrounded her home but she had been touched by his kindness over the years when she had refused him.

  Elizabeth and George were married in April 1923. A year after they returned from a five-month tour of Africa, Elizabeth had her first child, the current Queen. Four years later, in 1930, she gave birth to a second daughter, Margaret.

  The family moved to a fine, but not especially spacious house at 145 Piccadilly. The house next door, 144 Piccadilly, hit the headlines in 1969. It was the scene of a famous squat and the aim of the squatters was to prevent the building from being pulled down to make way for a luxury hotel (they failed). The house at 145 Piccadilly was far less grand and it was there that Queen Elizabeth II spent her childhood.

  Before describing what we know about the current Queen’s early years, I want to look briefly at the childhood of President Woodrow Wilson, who had brought America into World War I and contributed so much to the defeat of Kaiser Wilhelm. Freud wrote more about Wilson’s early years than those of any of his other patients. His book (Woodrow Wilson, only published in 1967) emphasises the problems that a difficult childhood can cause. It is also relevant as there is a link between its completion and the royal family.

  The President and his father

  The idea of writing about Wilson came about because one of Freud’s other patients, William Bullitt, had worked for the President, as had Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays. Freud insisted they find out as much as possible about Woodrow Wilson’s childhood. Bernays and Bullitt had access to many intimate details; it was history, written by formidably privileged insiders.

  Wilson was in the grip of powerful unconscious forces, Freud and Bullitt argued. He would not have agreed to the French and British demands during the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles after World War I had he been analysed. As he had never been treated, the wily monsters Lloyd George and Clemenceau ran rings round him.

  Woodrow Wilson’s father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a Presbyterian minister who had high hopes for his son, even when Woodrow was just four months old and, presumably, in nappies. ‘That baby is dignified enough to be Moderator of the General Assembly,’ his father boasted. Wilson’s father was physically very affectionate: he liked to chase his son in the garden, catch him and give him a great hug. Even as adults, the two men kissed whenever they met. But the relationship was inevitably unequal – the son was the passive one and that passivity would later haunt him. Freud and Bullitt had no doubt that Wilson’s love for his father went too far: ‘He not only expresses his love and admiration for his father but also removes his father by incorporating his father in himself as if by an act of cannibalism. Thenceforth he is himself the great admired father.’ American Presidents have been accused of many things, but only Wilson has been accused of cannibalism, I believe.

  Wilson only rebelled against his father once: he did not go into the Ministry but into academia. After a minor breakdown, he went to teach politics at Princeton. In 1895, Wilson’s father came to live with his son. The result: Woodrow Wilson broke down, this time completely. The reasons were purely Oedipal, argued Freud and Bullitt. Wilson could not allow himself to express any hostility to his father, but, in his unexplored unconscious, he was a boy with an unresolved Oedipal complex, who wanted to ‘annihilate the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson’.

  Despite these problems, Wilson became the President of Princeton in June 1902. Eight months later, his father died. Freud and Bullitt sneered, ‘After his father’s death his [Woodrow’s] addiction to speech making which was already excessive grew to fantastic proportions.’ One of the pleasures of the book is its bitchy tone. They carped: ‘The Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, who incidentally is not to be recommended as a model for fathers, had made his son love him so deeply and submissively that the flood of passivity he had aroused could be satisfied by no other man or activity.’

  When the 1914 broke out, Wilson proclaimed the neutrality of the United States. His adviser, Colonel House, wrote on 10 November 1915 that Wilson must use all his skills and the resources of America to achieve a lasting peace. House added: ‘This is the part I think that you are destined to play in this world tragedy and it is the noblest part that has ever come to a son of man.’ Freud and Bullitt commented that Woodrow Wilson in his unanalysed unconscious seized on the phrase ‘son of man’. He longed to be the bringer of peace on earth because he identified with God and his feminine side identified with Christ.

  When the President came to Paris in March 1919, he was seen as a saviour but wilted when faced by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Confronted by strong men, ‘the deep underlying femininity of his nature began to control him and he discovered he did not want to fight them with force. He wanted to preach sermons to them.’

  Clemenceau and Lloyd George repeatedly exploited the President’s vulnerability, but the unanalysed President lacked the insight to see this. Wilson even told his aides that the problem was that Clemenceau had ‘a feminine mind’. In fact, nothing ‘less feminine than Clemenceau’s refusal to be swept off his feet by Wilson’s oratory could be imagined’, Freud and Bullitt sniped. Instead of using the power of America to impose a fair peace, the President compromised and let the French and British impose drastic condition
s on the defeated Germans. Not surprisingly, Wilson’s failure of nerve triggered another ‘nervous’ collapse. When he recovered, he referred to the Treaty as a ‘99 per cent insurance against war’. Few predictions have turned out to be so wrong.

  The writing of the psychobiography had verve, wit and urgency. After years of wrangling, Freud and Bullitt agreed the final text in the garden of Marie Bonaparte’s house. A few years earlier, Philip had played in that garden when his mother, Alice, had to be put in an asylum. There are indeed connections between Freud and the British royal family.

  Secrecy and the problems of the present

  Princess Alice’s son, Prince Philip, is still alive. So is the Queen. Dealing with the living requires more tact than dealing with the long dead. As I quoted R. D. Laing at the start of this book, every mother and every father has had his own experiences of being parented so it is not just unkind to be judgemental, but also foolish. In families of schizophrenics, Laing said, there was sometimes a desperate need to keep up appearances. For the royal family, this has been an important motivation.

  After the ‘dissipations’ of Prince Eddy, Prince George’s need for endless medical help, Prince John’s epilepsy, the madness of Princess Alice and the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the royal family became convinced of the need to protect its privacy. No current royal has written as honestly about their childhood as Queen Victoria did. In 1950, Marion Crawford, the Queen’s devoted governess, said there was ‘a royal conspiracy of silence on so many uncomfortable things’. But what was uncomfortable and unmentionable seventy-five years ago is familiar now.