Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  The uncanny resemblance of the two cousins often caused people to confuse them when they were together, as happened at George’s wedding, when Nicholas was congratulated on his nuptials and George was asked about events in Russia. The confusion seemed to delight the normally dour Queen Victoria. There was “no end of funny mistakes,” she remarked gaily, “the one being taken for the other!”

  When they weren’t with each other, Georgie and Nicky kept in constant contact. Nicholas, who inherited the Russian throne in 1894 after the death of Alexander III, wrote a touching letter to his cousin when George’s father, Edward VII, died in 1910: “Just a few lines to tell you how deeply I feel for you the terrible loss you and England have sustained. I know alas! by experience what it costs one. There you are with your heart bleeding and aching, but at the same time duty imposes itself and people & affairs come up and tear you away from your sorrow. It is difficult to realize that your beloved Father has been taken away. The awful rapidity with which it all happened! How I would have liked to have come now & be near you!”

  The same letter also illustrated how closely intertwined family relationships were with national interests. Georgie and Nicky were now both sovereigns, after all.

  I beg you dearest Georgie to continue our old friendship and to show my country the same interest as your dear Father did from the day he came to the throne. No one did so much in trying to bring our two countries closer together than Him. The first steps have brought good results. Let us strive and work in the same direction. From our talks in days past & from your letters I remember your opinion was the same. I assure you that the sad death of your Father has provoked throughout the whole of Russia a feeling of sincere grief & of warmest sympathy toward your people. God bless you my dear old Georgie! My thoughts are always near you.

  With much love to you & dearest May,

  ever your devoted friend,

  Nicky.

  King George and Tsar Nicholas were bonded even more closely, politically and personally, as they faced their common cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II in World War I. The German emperor had always been a troublemaker in the family, alienating his English relatives by his monstrous treatment of his mother (Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, Vicky) and unsettling them with his belligerent saber-rattling. “Oh he is mad and a conceited ass,” Georgie’s mother wrote to him about the kaiser—“who also says that Papa [Edward VII] and Grandmama [Victoria] don’t treat him with proper respect as the Emperor of old and mighty Germany. But my hope is that pride will have a fall some day and won’t we rejoice then!”

  Willy, as the emperor was known in the family, was jealous of the friendship between Georgie and Nicky, and came to believe that they were plotting against him. His paranoia was particularly apparent at the wedding of his daughter, Victoria Louise, in 1913. King George recalled that every time he and Nicholas tried to have a conversation, the kaiser was lurking about with his ear “glued to the keyhole.” Wilhelm, for his part, believed that the king and tsar had planned the destruction of Germany at the wedding. His former chancellor Bernhard von Bülow recorded the Kaiser’s rant: “History showed no greater perfidy.… God would punish them some day!… The Tsar’s ingratitude was revolting: he had always been the Tsar’s close friend. As for ‘Georgie,’ all the emperor had to say was that Queen Victoria, their grandmother, must have turned in her grave at the spectacle of her English grandson flinging down the gauntlet to the German.”

  The nuances of the British Constitution and the constraints on the monarch were clearly lost on the kaiser, who believed that his cousin actually had the power to declare war. Ultimately, none of the three monarchs, Georgie, Nicky, or Willy, would have much control over the great conflagration that would consume Europe and knock two of them off their thrones. As war approached, Tsar Nicholas wrote to King George: “We both have serious and grave times before us and my earnest prayer is that both our countries may meet them with calm and trust in Divine Providence, God bless and protect you, Georgie.” The two cousins would remain closely united, at least for a time.

  “My dear Nicky,” King George wrote from Windsor Castle on August 8, 1915,

  I feel most deeply for you in the very anxious days through which you are now passing, when your army has been compelled to retire on account of the lack of ammunition and rifles, in spite of the splendid and most gallant way [they] are fighting against our most powerful enemy.… I can assure you that in England we are now straining every nerve to produce the required ammunition and guns and also rifles and are sending the troops of our new armies to the front as fast as we possibly can. England has made up her mind to fight this awful war out to an end, whatever our sacrifices may be, our very existence is at stake. I am so glad to see by your letter that Russia also means to fight to the end and I know France is of the same opinion. God bless you my dear Nicky,

  Ever your devoted cousin and friend,

  Georgie.

  Despite his protestations otherwise, Georgie’s devotion had its limits, as Nicky was soon to learn. A succession of crushing losses and severe wartime deprivations contributed to a revolution in Russia that forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. “Events of last week have deeply distressed me,” King George telegraphed his cousin. “My thoughts are constantly with you and I shall always remain your true and devoted friend, as you know I have been in the past.” The message never reached the fallen emperor, which was probably just as well, given how empty Georgie’s sentiments proved to be.

  The provisional government established in Russia in the wake of the revolution was eager to protect the ex-tsar and his family from the more radical Soviet faction, which was braying for Nicholas’s blood. Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador in Russia, reported to London that the provisional government was “most anxious to get the Emperor out of Russia as soon as possible,” and was seeking asylum for him in Britain. Buchanan was authorized to extend the invitation, which seemed to settle the matter—until King George stepped in.

  The monarchy in Britain was in a precarious position during the war, and George V was particularly sensitive to the implications. It was in the midst of anti-German fervor, when his own patriotism was questioned, that he changed the royal family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the very English Windsor.† And with a rise in republicanism, he worried about his government’s offer of sanctuary to Russia’s royal family—“a gesture,” wrote the king’s biographer Kenneth Rose, “that would have identified him with Tsarist autocracy and imperiled his own repute as a constitutional monarch.” Survival was the king’s paramount concern in 1917, which may explain his vigorous campaign to revoke the offer of asylum to cousin Nicky.

  “Every day, the King is becoming more concerned about the question of the Emperor and Empress coming to this country,” wrote George’s private secretary, Arthur Bigge, to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour.

  His Majesty receives letters from people in all classes of life, known or unknown to him, saying how much the matter is being discussed, not only in clubs, but by working men, and that Labour members in the House of Commons are expressing adverse opinions to the proposal. As you know, from the first the King has thought the presence of the Imperial Family (especially of the Empress) in this country would raise all sorts of difficulties, and I feel sure that you appreciate how awkward it will be for our Royal Family, who are closely connected both with the Emperor and the Empress. You probably also are aware that the subject has become more or less public property, and that people are either assuming that it has been initiated by the King, or deprecating the very unfair position in which His Majesty will be placed if the arrangement is carried out. The King desires me to ask you whether after consulting the Prime Minister, Sir George Buchanan should not be communicated with, with a view to approaching the Russian Government to make some other plan for the future residence of their Imperial Majesties.

  Georgie eventually got his way, while Nicky and his family remained prisoners in Russia and were subsequently slaughtered
by the Bolsheviks in 1918. “It was a foul murder,” the king recorded in his diary. “I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and a thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.”

  * Alexandra was the daughter of Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice, which made her George V’s first cousin.

  † It was the king’s private secretary, Arthur Bigge, Lord Stamfordham, who suggested the new name, after the castle and its unmistakable connections to the ancient English monarchy. On July 17, 1917, the Privy Council announced the change, along with the royal family’s renunciation of all “German degrees, styles, dignitaries, titles, honours, and appellations.”

  31

  Edward VIII (1936):

  An Abdication of Duty

  He was not really interested in anything at all.

  —ALAN “TOMMY” LASCELLES

  Edward VIII came to the throne as a beloved prince in 1936, having succeeded his father, George V. Before the year was through, however, Edward abdicated to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Warfield Simpson—a woman considered by the government to be thoroughly unsuitable as queen. Edward was never crowned, and the throne passed to his younger brother, who became King George VI.

  He was Britain’s fair-haired prince, heir to an empire and adored by the masses dazzled by his youth and charm. Yet beneath that brilliant exterior lurked the heart of a lightweight. “If only the British public knew what a weak, powerless misery their press-made national hero was,” the future king Edward VIII said of himself, “they would have a nasty shock and be not only disappointed but damned angry too.” After he ascended the throne in 1936, Edward’s staggering self-absorption would nearly destroy the monarchy and lead to a life of utter vacuity. Still, some call his the love story of the twentieth century.

  Duty was always an afterthought to Edward, something to be considered only when it didn’t interfere with his personal desires and indulgences. A sense of responsibility requires a solid core, and that Edward always lacked. He was “like the child in the fairy story who was given everything in the world but they forgot his soul,” said Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, who served as Edward’s assistant private secretary when he was Prince of Wales. “He had no spiritual or aesthetic side at all. He did not know beauty when he saw it and even the beauty of women was only apparent to him when they were the sort of women who excited his particular passions.… He was not really interested in anything at all.” Except, perhaps, sex.

  “I can’t raise much enthusiasm over … anything except women!!” the prince recorded in his diary. It was a perfectly normal preoccupation for a young man, but Edward’s fixation had an unsavory twist. He was possessed by “the sexual perversion of self-abasement,” according to Ulick Alexander, a courtier close to him. Freda Dudley Ward, one of Edward’s married mistresses, agreed. “I could have dominated him if I had wanted to. I could have done anything with him! Love bewitched him. He made himself the slave of whomever he loved and became totally dependent on her. It was his nature; he was a masochist. He liked being humbled, degraded. He begged for it!”

  Edward found the perfect dominatrix in Wallis Warfield Simpson, a grasping social climber and something of a shrew. “God, that woman’s a bitch,” exclaimed the prince’s friend Edward “Fruity” Metcalfe. “She’ll play hell with him before long.” It was an inferno Edward entered gladly. Unfortunately, being abused and degraded by Mrs. Simpson left little room for his royal responsibilities, and people in the palace began to question if he was really fit to inherit the crown. Not the least of these was Edward’s own father, George V. “After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months,” the king reportedly said to his prime minister. It was a pronouncement that proved sadly prescient.

  “My heart goes out to the Prince of Wales tonight as he will mind so terribly being King,” wrote the diarist Henry “Chips” Channon as King George V labored with his last breaths. “His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and unimaginative nature can bear.” Edward’s solution was to simply ignore his duties as king and focus instead entirely on Mrs. Simpson. Yes, she was married, but her husband, awed by royalty, graciously stepped aside. It was a lucrative exchange for Wallis, dripping in the diamonds Edward lavished upon her. “For her, money and material possessions were of inestimable importance,” wrote Edward’s biographer Philip Ziegler; “she hungered for them and greeted every new acquisition as an incentive to grasp for more.” And all she had to offer in return was the contempt and domination the king seemed to crave. His equerry John Aird noted Wallis’s effect on Edward early in their relationship: He “has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog.”

  Like any good pet, the king immediately stopped whatever he was doing to respond to Wallis’s call. “If he cancelled a dinner at the last moment the chances were that she had expressed a wish to see him,” wrote Ziegler; “if he was two hours late for Lord Cromer it was almost certain he had been visiting her. Nothing mattered to him so much as the gratification of her wishes and the performance of her instructions.” Naturally this all-consuming devotion to his mistress caused grave concerns among those closest to Edward. “I did not think the King was normal,” recalled his private secretary, Clive Wigram, “and this view was shared by my colleagues at Buckingham Palace. He might any day develop into a George III, and it was imperative to pass the Regency Bill as soon as possible, so that if necessary he could be certified.”

  Disconcertment quickly gave way to horror when King Edward made it clear that he wanted to marry his mistress. Queen Wallis! It was an unthinkable prospect; the people would never stand for a twice-divorced American in such a role. Edward was insistent, however. His chronic unwillingness to sacrifice his personal desires for the public role he was born to fulfill now resulted in an unprecedented crisis for the monarchy. In the end, the king chose to abandon the crown rather than serve, as he put it in his abdication speech, “without the help and support of the woman I love.”

  It seemed so romantic on the surface—the gallant king sacrificing everything for his one true love. But Tommy Lascelles, who knew Edward all too well, dismissed such sentiment as “moonshine.” The truth was that Edward never really wanted to be king and resented the many impositions of the role. Furthermore, Wallis was hardly the first woman with whom he fell madly in love. “There was always a grande affaire and, coincidentally, as I know to my cost, an unbroken series of petites affaires, contracted and consummated in whatever highways and byways of the Empire he was traversing at the moment,” wrote Lascelles. “Mrs S. was no isolated phenomenon, but merely the current figure in an arithmetical progression that had been robustly maintained for nearly 20 years.”

  Far from a fairy-tale ending, the years following Edward’s abdication were passed in a life of excessive indolence and frivolity, interrupted only by a series of embarrassing gaffes and petty squabbles with his family. King George VI, who succeeded his brother, once remarked in frustration that other British monarchs came to the throne after their predecessors were dead. “Mine is not only alive,” he said, “but very much so!”

  The abdication had caused extreme stress within the royal family, particularly for King George, a painfully shy man who had been forced to fill the void left by his brother (see Chapter 32). Edward, who was titled the Duke of Windsor after stepping down, was far too selfish to recognize the agony his actions had caused. He spent considerable energy harassing the new king about his finances and, even more fervently, about official recognition of his wife with the title “Her Royal Highness.”

  Edward had blatantly lied about his wealth, pleading near poverty during the negotiations that preceded his abdication, while he was really worth many millions. Now he insisted that his brother honor the terms of the settlement, in which the new king promised to pay him twenty-five thousand [pounds] a year. Wallis, after all, expected to live in grand style. “You were under great strain [at the time of the settlement] and I am not seeking
to reproach you or anyone,” George wrote after discovering that he had been duped. “But the fact remains that I was completely misled.” Though Edward got his money in the end, the title for his wife was another matter indeed.

  Wallis wanted “the extra chic,” as she called it, of the HRH designation, and badgered Edward incessantly to fight for it. “I loathe being undignified,” she complained, “and also of joining the countless titles that roam around Europe meaning nothing.” When Wallis was unhappy, the duke was miserable. Thus the HRH issue became an obsession that drove a permanent wedge between him and his family. George VI was adamant on the issue, as was his mother, Queen Mary. It was a simple equation in their view. If Wallis was deemed unsuitable to be queen, prompting the abdication, then surely she was no more suited to be a member of the royal family. “Is she a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she had done in this country; and would the country understand it if she became one automatically on marriage?” the king asked. “I and my family and Queen Mary all feel that it would be a great mistake to acknowledge Mrs. Simpson as a suitable person to become Royal. The Monarchy has been degraded quite enough already.”

  It was for this reason that the family also refused to attend the wedding, or even to receive Wallis. To do so, they believed, would send the wrong message. “I simply hate having to tell you this,” the king wrote his brother, explaining why no members of the family would be present at the wedding; “but you must realize that in spite of the affection which of course there still is towards you personally, the vast majority of people in this country are undoubtedly as strongly as ever opposed to a marriage which caused a King of England to renounce the throne. You know that none of us in the family liked it, and were any of them now, after a few months’ interval, to come out and, so to speak, help you get married, I know that it would be regarded by everybody as condoning all that has happened; it would place us all in an impossibly false position and would be harmful to the Monarchy.”