George seemed oblivious of his family’s treatment of his wife, just as he was of how dull and monotonous Sandringham and his sporting life must have been to her. Shooting and horse-racing bored her, sailing made her sick. Upper-class wives, however, were expected to fall in line with their husbands’ pursuits, and so she followed the shooters, day after day, smiling enthusiastically. He had no time for her interests—literature and art—and possessed an upper-class philistine contempt for people he thought too clever, referring to them as “eyebrows.” “Sometimes,”67 George’s earliest authorized biographer admitted, “the Duchess’s intellectual life there may have been starved and her energies atrophied in those early years.” Nor would he consider moving to somewhere larger and further away from his family. When in 1901 she proposed they move to Houghton Hall, a nearby Norfolk estate, he vetoed it, egged on by his mother.
May never complained. She had committed herself utterly to accommodating her husband and future king, to boosting his confidence and to demonstrating her devotion to the monarchy. This was, more or less, what was expected. As one biographer of a more recent English princess—Diana—has written, upper-class women of her caste were trained for “a life of68 low emotional expectations and husbands who were not focused on being attentive.” May “sacrificed everything69 to his needs and to the preservation of his peace of mind, thinking of him before she thought of anyone else, her children, and, of course, herself, included,” wrote her biographer James Pope-Hennessy. “… She believed that all should defer to the King’s slightest wish, and she made herself into a living example of her creed … Inwardly it required a constant and dramatic exercise of imagination, foresight and self-control.” Her devotion and abasement, and her insistence that everyone else in the household act the same way, did indeed build George’s confidence.
It also encouraged an already well-established royal habit of behaving like an autocrat within one’s own household. At York Cottage the clocks were all set half an hour fast, because of George’s obsession with punctuality. The head of the household was never contradicted, questioned or criticized. “King George V70 hated all insincerity and flattery, but after a time he got so accustomed to people agreeing with him that he resented the candid friend business,” recalled Fritz Ponsonby, one of the royal family’s longest-serving private secretaries, whose plain speaking was accepted—though not without irritation—by both the queen and Edward. “No one ever71 contradicts him; no subjects are aired but those which they [royals] choose for themselves, and the merest commonplaces from royal lips are listened to as if they were oracles,” the writer Augustus Hare observed when he met George in the mid-1890s. He wondered how George could bear the dullness of the conversation. George took to expressing his opinions and political views—the views of a high Tory Norfolk squire—loudly and at length to anyone who would listen. “Just a little bit72 too outspoken,” the secretary of the Viceroy of India noted when he met George in 1905. George had taken an intense dislike to the previous incumbent, Lord Curzon, and couldn’t stop himself from letting everyone know.
May’s submissiveness encouraged George to treat her badly too. “Off the record,”73 the Duke of Windsor told his mother’s biographer, “my father had a most horrible temper. He was foully rude to my mother. Why, I’ve seen her leave the table because he was so rude to her, and we children would follow her out.” Within his own castle, George was quick to anger. A barking temper and often expressed exasperation became two of his most marked characteristics. The anger may have derived from his difficulty in expressing his tenderer feelings; and perhaps because his whole existence was overshadowed by a constant low-level anxiety, uncertainty and dread of the future—that one day he would have to be king. This fed a latent sense of self-pity. Did it also, perhaps, express a tiny, unsayable twinge of disappointment in George about his marriage? A feeling that his irreproachably correct, utterly self-controlled, admirably devoted wife was a little unreachable, even cold; that her deepest attachment was to the monarchy itself, rather than to him? Consciously, George believed utterly in his own uxoriousness. In December 1901 the shocking news came that George’s cousin Victoria Melita, or “Ducky,” had left Alix’s brother Ernst—a union the late queen had bullied them into—for Nicholas’s cousin Kirill. George wrote to Nicholas, “I did not think74 they were at all happy together, but I never thought it would come to this; I am very sorry as I like them both. You and I, thank God, are both so happy with our wives and children, that we can’t understand this sort of thing.”
On May, the marriage had a constraining effect. Three years after the wedding, Marie Mallet, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, wrote in her diary that she hoped “Princess May will75 not be too shy to speak to me. She looks pale and thin as if she longed for sympathy but was too shy to seek it.” A year later she observed, “Princess May is very76 stiff. I am sure she means to be kind but in her case it is often necessary to take the will for the deed.” May’s old friend Mabell, Countess of Airlie, felt that a “hard crust of77 inhibition” had “gradually closed over her, hiding the warmth and tenderness of her own personality.” Away from George, David felt, “she was a different78 person.”
George’s autocracy also extended to the treatment of his six children: five boys—the youngest, John, an epileptic who died at thirteen—and one girl, Mary, all born between 1894 and 1905. The eldest, David, the future Edward VIII, was born during Nicholas’s visit to England in 1894, and the tsar became his godfather. The second, Albert, the future George VI, came a year later. Having been damaged by his own parents’ indulgent neglectfulness, George duly damaged his own children. He was strict, bullying and impatient. He found it as hard to show tenderness to them as he did to his wife. “He retained a gruff blue-water approach to all human situations,” David wrote. “I have often felt that despite his undoubted affection for all of us, my father preferred children in the abstract.” He expected them to behave like adults—or rather, well-trained sailors: punctual, clean and always obedient—while giving them a second-rate education almost identical to his own. And like his father, he frightened them; a summons to the library for lateness, dirty hands, making a noise or wriggling in church was terrifying. “No words that I was ever to hear could be so disconcerting to the spirit,”79 David recalled. Albert developed a stammer which was not improved by his father’s habit of shouting “Get it out”80 at him as he struggled to speak. There is something genuinely sad in George’s claim that his favourite book was Wrong on Both Sides, described by his biographer Harold Nicolson as a “revolting” Lord Fauntleroy–esque story about a strict aristocratic father and his son who love each other but can’t express it because of pride. “Such a lovely book, I always cry over it,”81 George wrote.
May also found it difficult to connect with her children, at least when they were small. After David was born, she seemed disinclined to hold him and left for St. Moritz not long after, while George went to Cowes. It might have been her natural reserve, or post-natal depression, or her insistence that George always come first, or the aristocratic habits of the time, whereby children were bundled off to nursemaids and nannies and barely ever encountered on their own, but she found it hard to get close to her children and hated being pregnant. It took her three years to realize that one nanny was routinely abusing her two eldest boys. “The tragedy was82 that neither had any understanding of a child’s mind,” May’s friend Mabell, Countess of Airlie, admitted. “They had not succeeded in making their children happy.” It was no wonder that for the children, trips to their grandparents, Edward and Alexandra—who seemed “bathed in perpetual83 sunlight,” and spoilt and indulged them in the big house—were like “being given an open-sesame to a totally different world.”
John, the youngest, epileptic and probably autistic, was eventually sent to live separately with his own staff in a cottage on the Sandringham estate called Wood Farm. Children like him were often regarded as an embarrassment to their families, though his life may well have
been much freer than his siblings’. The queen ensured that her last-born was looked after by a devoted nurse; he had space, wonderful toys and local children to play with. Her diary suggests she felt tenderness for her child, but, apart from her, the family seems to have cut themselves off from him. George never referred to him, though he was president of the National Society for the Promoting of the Employment of Epileptics. For a long time John didn’t appear on Windsor family trees, and when he died in 1919, aged thirteen, David told his then mistress Frida Dudley Ward that he greatly resented having to go into mourning: “He was more of84 an animal than anything else.”
There were more similarities between George and Nicholas than their looks. They were both shy men who loved the life of the country gentleman, and were happiest when massacring a few thousand birds a week on enormous estates. Both felt most comfortable with the simple patriotic codes of the military; like Nicholas, George would display an instinctive dislike for the ambiguities and grey areas of realpolitik. Both preferred their families and domestic life to court society. Both were aesthetically blind, though nothing in Nicholas’s homes quite ranked with the sheer ugliness of York Cottage. Both were addicted to routine: Nicholas would arrive for tea at precisely the same moment every day; George liked to know exactly what he was doing at every moment in the day, and hated any disruption to his timetable. Both felt an intense uneasiness at change of almost any sort. Even their politics weren’t far from each other: George had a noisy line after 1900 in violent denunciations of Socialists, the Liberal Party, and in particular the radical Liberal David Lloyd George, whose political platform was founded on improving the lives of the poorest and taking pot shots at inherited, unthinking privilege. Inasmuch as George thought about the tsarist system, he seemed to feel sympathy for his cousin, who he told the German ambassador in 1900, “was reliable, but85 his power was constantly being undermined by subversive powers.” Both felt deeply anxious about their role in the world and tried to dull their worries with familiarities and routines. Both were in many respects lamentably out of touch with the world around them. And both found it impossible to see beyond public shows of loyalty and flattering words.
When, in September 1897, George made a rare public visit on behalf of his grandmother to Ireland—the first by a member of the royal family in over eighty years—he was met by cheering orderly crowds, even in the Catholic parts of Londonderry. The whole event had been carefully choreographed. George never saw, for example, the poorest parts of Dublin, which had some of the worst slums in Europe. He was told repeatedly that the visit had been a “remarkable success.” “The devotion to your person you have inspired is not only a result gratifying to yourself,” Lord Salisbury, whose party was determined not to grant Ireland Home Rule, told him, “… but it will have a most valuable effect upon public feeling in Ireland and may do much to restore the loyalty which during the last half century has been so much shaken in many districts.”86 The visit made absolutely no difference to Irish politics. It left George, however, with a false impression of the state of Ireland, and a mistaken faith in the significance of cheering crowds, the power of royal pageantry, and the magic of his own presence. Likewise, Nicholas could persuade himself that a few minutes of experiencing the hysterical cheering of his subjects told him more about their loyalty and the state of the nation than any ministerial report. And for Wilhelm the addictive reassurance of a cheering crowd would still his unquenchable thirst for affirmation and popularity—and lull him into saying anything that came into his head.
The modern world, however, was encroaching on the walls the monarchs had built around themselves in insistent and increasingly direct ways, most particularly in the form of the press and public opinion. By the mid-1890s newspapers all over Europe suddenly seemed more politicized, more engaged by international affairs, more aware of themselves as organs of public opinion, and much more aggressive. The shift was partly predicated on cheaper production processes, which meant cheaper papers; partly on governments’ acknowledgement of how powerful the press and public opinion could be; and partly on rising literacy rates. Even Queen Victoria was paying attention. The British newspapers had long salivated over her eldest son’s involvement in a series of scandals (though they were careful never to mention his mistresses explicitly). In 1895 the queen had been upset by the hostility of the Russian press; in 1896 she wrote of the Kruger telegram, “I wish that the newspapers87 in both countries could be restrained from writing with such bitterness and violence.” Reading the world’s press now led her to wonder why “we are so actively88 hated by other countries.”
Nicholas and Wilhelm both tried to dismiss the increasing power of public opinion and the press, but were increasingly obliged to acknowledge it. Wilhelm liked to claim that he was immune to public opinion; in fact he was obsessed by and utterly susceptible to it. A critical news story could send him into paroxysms of fury or dejection. A flattering article about him in the English papers would inspire a burst of love for “dear old” England, demands for alliances, and enthusiastic midnight visits to the British ambassador. Wilhelm’s entourage and his chancellors exploited his susceptibility to the press—and his habit of never reading all the way through a paper. Both kept discomforting things from him and presented him with a cocktail of selected press cuttings from home and abroad to keep him on-message. Nicholas, whose father had referred to newspaper editors as “swine” and “half-wits,”89 insisted the Russian press had no consequence; references to Russian public opinion made him angry.90 He admitted, however, to reading a German, French, English and Russian newspaper each day—even though he said he didn’t believe what he read because he knew “how they are made.91 Some Jew or other sits there making it his business to stir up the passions of different peoples against each other and the people, who mostly have no political opinion of their own, are guided by what they read.”
What all three monarchs were convinced of was that what foreign newspapers said about one was an accurate measure of how one was regarded abroad. Rising nationalism and chauvinism across Europe meant that coverage was more often unfriendly than not. Just who the press spoke for, however, was another matter. For Wilhelm and Nicholas it was obvious that the press was the mouthpiece of its government. That was, after all, how the press functioned in their countries. The Russian press—such as it was (Sergei Witte told a British diplomat in 1897 that “he doubted if92 100,000 people in all Russia read the newspapers or cared what they wrote”)—was the most heavily controlled and censored in the world. Nicholas told a German visitor in 1895 that he would “never set the Russian93 press free as long as I live. The Russian press shall write only what I want … and my will alone shall prevail throughout the country.” The German government’s control of its press was a byword. In 1899 Joseph Chamberlain told the German chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, “that in Germany94 there is no such thing as public opinion. The German people had only the emotions which its Government required it to have.” Large parts of the press were either controlled or subsidized by the government. The Kölnische Zeitung reflected the views of the German Foreign Office; the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was the creature of the government and the kaiser. Many other papers took subsidies and ran articles fed to them by the government, and would even print the bowdlerized versions of the kaiser’s speeches that the government sent them, or excise the embarrassing bits themselves. (Though, even more embarrassingly, their omissions were often printed in the Austrian papers.) The effect could be considerable. Two weeks before a visit from Edward in 1902, Wilhelm demanded that the German press put out only pro-English articles, and it was pretty much so.
In Britain it was different. The independent press had a much longer history, and literacy rates were high. By the 1890s successful British papers had circulations95 much larger than their European counterparts, large enough not to need or want government subsidies, and possessed an intense self-consciousness about their importance as the cornerstones of liberal democracy. No ma
tter how often British statesmen assured foreigners that they did not control the press, when British papers attacked Germany or Russia, they were regarded as carrying the force of the government’s antipathy. The Times, which was almost universally seen abroad as the semi-official organ of the government, often diverged embarrassingly from the official line. The British Foreign Office cringed at its accounts of Russian brutality in Manchuria, and frequently asked the paper to tone down its coverage. It almost invariably refused, or swapped direct firsthand reportage for an equally critical editorial. Wilhelm took British press criticism of Germany personally, and couldn’t resist seeing his English relatives’—especially his uncle’s—hands in it, consistently overinflating the British royal family’s influence. It was a sign of how successfully the queen had come to be seen as a disinterested force in British politics that in 1898 she managed to persuade the editors of the major papers to tone down their anti-German coverage. Even so, her intervention lasted only a few months. By 1900, the new tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mail, with the unheard-of circulation of 1 million copies a day, would be putting out a message that was unashamedly populist, emotive, aggressively imperialist, even xenophobic—and quite beyond the control of any government. It would identify Germany as Britain’s key enemy well before the British government did. Salisbury, who loathed it, despite its Conservative affiliations—he called it the paper “for those who could96 read but could not think”—could see it spoke powerfully to and for a new strident and sometimes ugly strand of public opinion.98
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