by Edna Healey
So the network of the royal family stretched across countries and the explosion in Sarajevo ricocheted throughout Europe, dislodging many of their relations from their palaces.
The family ties of the King and Queen with Germany caused great difficulties during the war. There arose in Britain a xenophobic anti-German frenzy, threatening the monarchy itself. Such attacks deeply hurt the King, whose patriotism was deeply felt. When the novelist H. G. Wells attacked the royal family as ‘an alien and uninspiring court’, the King barked, ‘I may be uninspiring but I’ll be damned if I am an alien.’31
The hostility to all things German finished the career of Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, who was born a German and still retained his thick German accent. It did not matter that he had been a British citizen since he was fourteen, nor that he had served with distinction all his adult life in the British Navy, nor that he had married a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The dogs of war snapped at his heels until he felt he had to resign.
So virulent did the attacks on anything German become that in the end the King had to renounce all ‘German degrees, styles, dignities, titles, honours and appellations’. In 1917 a proclamation was issued: henceforward the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was to become the House of Windsor. His Serene Highness, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was created Marquess of Milford Haven and his younger son became Lord Louis Mountbatten. Similarly the Duke of Teck, Queen Mary’s brother, took the family name of his grandmother and became Marquess of Cambridge, and his younger brother was made the Earl of Athlone.
It was necessary for the King to stress that if there was any conflict between his loyalty to his country and the members of his foreign family, his country would always win. Fortunately the new name, George of Windsor, had a fine ring. But there was to be an agonizing conflict of loyalties in 1917, when the Tsar of Russia was deposed by the Russian revolutionaries. The Tsar and his family wanted to take refuge in England: after all, Louis Philippe, King of France, and Emperor Napoleon III had retired and died here. But King George V had to make a cruel decision: the Tsar and his family were not welcome in Britain. They remained in Russia and, as is well known, were assassinated.
The King has often been condemned for this rejection of his own cousins. But it must be remembered that when the King made the decision, the Tsar and his family were not in any immediate danger: the Bolsheviks had not yet taken power. It must also be borne in mind that the British throne itself had been much under attack in recent years. Strong and articulate republican voices had been heard in Parliament; virulent articles appeared in the press. The King could not now give support to what was seen as a corrupt, reactionary regime. With a vision of certain demonstrations and turbulence before him, the King felt he had no option. He had to make it clear that the stability of his own country was of paramount importance to him.
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Throughout the war, and the tumults and stress of the coming years, Queen Mary’s work for the preservation of the nation’s heritage was not only a labour of love but also an escape to order and beauty in a world that was increasingly dangerous and unstable.
Even during the war some major alterations were made in the Palace. On 8 September 1914 The Times reported that
the beginning of extensive interior decoration work at the palace has been hastened by the Queen’s desire … to give employment to a class of workmen who will be the first to feel the pinch of retrenchment owing to the war. Alterations include a large quantity of parquet flooring specially made by Messrs. Howard of Berners St., a class of work hitherto much in the hands of German makers.32
In 1913 Charles Allom, director of the family firm of White Allom, ‘Decorative artists to the King and Queen’, wrote a long memorandum on their work in Buckingham Palace under the personal direction of Queen Mary. He describes in detail the Queen’s years of careful work at the Palace.
It may be well at once to record that Her Majesty takes unusual care in requiring her orders to be carried out as far as possible by British workpeople, and this has helped immensely in the development and discovery of quite unexpected ability in many branches of industrial art.
To mention a few such industries, one at once thinks of goldsmiths, metal workers, enamellers, frame-makers, cabinet-makers, decorators, fan-makers, pottery and china makers, painters, carpet and silk weavers, and others.
On small tables or in cabinets about her apartments, may be seen innumerable examples of the Queen’s patronage.
Wherever and whenever an industry has been known to need help by reason of slackness of trade or other causes, Her Majesty has spent much of her time and private money to assist the unemployed, and develop the draughtsmen and craftsmen in the studios, not only by placing orders and taking great personal interest in the work of design, but by lending old works from which to copy or obtain inspiration and knowledge.
He praised the Queen’s
very exceptional sense of order, and though years may elapse from the time a thing is neatly put away for possible future use, she remembers exactly where to find it when occasion requires its production. This is the result of a wonderful memory and quite exceptional powers of orderliness and accuracy. Once her attention and interest is given to an art or craft, she rapidly acquires a detailed knowledge of it, in consequence of the ease with which she follows and understands its technical side, and the rapidity with which she acquires knowledge, either by inspection during process of making, or through her reference Library.
He admired her reorganization of rooms according to their period and her search for valuable old furniture in the ‘darkness of the Palace stores’.
He described her rooms in detail, including, for example, ‘Her Majesty’s Bed and Dressing Rooms’:
These rooms are in general colour remarkably similar to Her Majesty’s Marlborough House suite, and her choice of colour and power of grouping and arranging her furniture, and the very large numbers of personal miniatures, photographs, objets d’art and flowers, with which one associates her surroundings, gives them an unusually bright and cheerful appearance.
The ceilings and cornices of these apartments, as well as the doors, remain exactly as they were left by Queen Alexandra, though the rooms have now been papered with a moiré paper of grey white bordered by an ornamental design of roses and a gilt moulding, which brings the walls into harmony with the rose coloured curtains and pale green grey carpet. The walls are mainly hung with interesting family portraits in water colour.
He was particularly impressed by her structural alteration of her Bedroom.
The room has been structurally altered by throwing the private service corridor into it, and this has led to the occurrence of an unusual feature. The fireplace is left in the centre of the wall, (the openings in which are supported by columns) which was pierced to open up the corridor now utilised for a long range of wardrobes.
Queen Mary needed space for her great collection of exquisite gowns.
To her Boudoir she had brought her light blue silk wall coverings from Marlborough House and the
soft colour that enables it to blend charmingly with the furniture and many cabinets, which contain hundreds of small objets d’art, interesting souvenirs and mementos of many journeys and visits. Collections and purchases of works, representing all phases of the industrial arts in which Her Majesty takes so great an interest are here assembled, yet the colouring of the room, with its curtains of blue silk like the walls and a carpet of soft brown bordered with camel colour on which is a pale blue rose and green design, brings the floor into harmony with the walls and furniture.
Her Boudoir, like all her rooms, was filled with ‘beautiful flowers – frequently carnations’.
Next to the Boudoir, the Green Room contained her collection of jade, caskets, jewels, miniatures, ‘a very fine collection of biscuit china in an ormolu cabinet … and two copies of an old Louis XVI commode’. She had brought the green silk curtains and carpet from Marlborough House.
Quee
n Mary must have been delighted to find a souvenir of the forgotten, beautiful Hungarian countess, her grandfather’s morganatic wife. She discovered
some old lengths of very beautiful brocaded silk of European Chinese design, dating from the early part of the 18th century. The silk came from St. Georgy in Transylvania, the home of the Queen’s paternal Grandmother, Countess Claudine Rhedey, wife of Duke Alexander of Württemberg.
The walls have been panelled to frame this brocade, and lacquer mouldings and stiles as well as doors and mantelpiece were made in keeping.
The carpet, specially designed and woven in grey wool, is in keeping with the brocaded wall panels, the ground colour of which has been copied for the curtains, the design of which is reproduced from an old key pattern damask. The curtain valance and architraves are of special interest.
For this room the Queen collected ‘very choice old pieces of lacquer work’ found in the Palace and elsewhere.
There is a beautiful Chinese lantern in the room, of 18th century enamel work; in its enamelled metal frame some most picturesque panels of painted glass are displayed; from it hang some beautiful pendants of silk linked together with enamelled panels; the prevailing colour of the silk is celadon green. This harmonises perfectly with the room, and adds to its Chinese atmosphere.
In the Chinese Chippendale Room
The panels of the walls are filled in with wallpaper of very fine design, the blocks for which were specially cut by Her Majesty’s wish, from an old piece of silk in the Chinese taste, which was itself reproduced to form the curtains of the room, and to cover some of the furniture.
Some of the chairs came from the Pavilion at Brighton, designed for the Pavilion when Nash restored and added to it in 1820 and 1821…
Two prominent features of this room are the organ case which has been turned into a bookcase, and the beautiful bookcases, which originally held the barrels for the organ, the design for which may be seen in Pyne’s book …
The furniture has been covered in some instances with pieces of Chinese silk from some old Mandarin’s robes formerly in the Pavilion, and in other cases in the same Chinese Chippendale design silk as has been used for the walls and curtains …
At each side of the fireplace are exceptionally fine examples of the Chinese style of painting on glass, which were found in the Palace store room; these have been reframed simply by the Queen’s order, and will always remain extremely interesting examples of this work, in which the Brighton Pavilion collection was once so strong …
The chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling was designed for Her Majesty by her decorative artist, and is quite unique as an example of modern work designed in the feeling of Chinese Chippendale; the centre lights are screened with old Chinese paintings, and in the niches at the bases of the branches, stand small old Chinese porcelain figures.
This room may be said to have received its interest from the fact that its main features are old fragments which Her Majesty has had restored and developed.33
It may seem surprising to those who remember the Blitz in the Second World War that in 1914 a new glass roof should have been made for the Picture Gallery. But in 1914 the action was across the Channel, and the threat came in the trenches, not from the air. Only at the end of the war did the Zeppelin bring a foretaste of the future.
In 1914 the problem of the Picture Gallery was regarded as most urgent. Just as Nash’s roof of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton had leaked, so did his glass roof of the Buckingham Palace Gallery. The delicately engraved glass was beautiful and ‘the hammer beams with pendant arches and seventeen little saucer domes’ were graceful, but, once again, Nash had put beauty before practicality. The pictures had not even been properly lit. So in 1914 a new glass roof was built, with a deep frieze decorated with elegant plaster swags, which were echoed in the carved wooden doorcases in the style of Grinling Gibbons, which replaced Nash’s white scagliola. Did Queen Mary know that Gibbons, the supreme master of the art of carving, had been introduced to Lord Arlington by John Evelyn in the reign of Charles II and had worked in the house on the site of Buckingham Palace? It is possible: the Queen, who loved history, would have been delighted to salute the old craftsman, but she must have regretted the loss of Nash’s elegant engraved glass.
The Gallery walls were hung with new sober green damask chosen by the Queen. She and the King both disliked gold: she had complained to Lady Airlie that there had been a surfeit of ‘gilt and orchids’ at the Palace in the time of Edward VII. She had admired the old design of a damask at Welbeck Abbey, the Duke of Portland’s country seat, and copied it. It was an excellent foil for the superb paintings, now rehung with the advice of Sir Lionel Cust. The new arrangement created ‘a perfectly symmetrical hang’34 in the tradition of Palace rooms since the sixteenth century.
The Queen paid special attention to the room behind the Balcony known as the Centre Room. It was one of the first rooms she rearranged in 1911. It was described in detail at this time.
The furniture and fittings of this room were formerly in Brighton Pavilion or Carlton House …
The two finely carved Carrara marble mantels, richly mounted with ormolu, &Chinese figures mounted in niches in the jambs, with the grates & richly mounted fenders and dogs were formerly in Brighton Pavilion.
On these mantels are two rare clocks by Vulliamy and candelabra, the one on the right on entering is a striking clock in an ormolu case carried on the back of a beautiful model of a bull in bronze, with a female figure on each side & surmounted by an ormolu figure with sprays of flowers, the whole mounted on a green base containing a bird organ. Vulliamy 1817. This clock formerly stood in the Library at Brighton Pavilion …
In 1923 the Queen supervised its redecoration, and as the memorandum notes,
This Room was re-decorated by Messrs White Allom & Co.
Three pairs of new green silk Curtains, the applied Chinese design embroidered panels were made from old silk found in the Stores.
Three new pelmets & three pair of rope holders.
Six panels of yellow Chinese embroidered silk, found in Stores.
Three new giltwood cornice poles with carved dragon ends.
Six giltwood banner poles with carved dragon ends.
Five panels of white lacquer as fitted in doors & overdoor, found in Stores.
Three new, native wood oblong tables, one fitted with a panel of white lacquer, found in Stores.
Four new, reeded wood pedestals.
A bamboo tray top Table was placed here.
The furniture was cleaned and re-upholstered in Chinese silk, from old silk found in Stores.
Two Chinese State junks, were transferred from the Principal Corridor.
The China was re-arranged.
The Carpet was cleaned.35
But, after the charismatic Edward VII and the magical beauty of Queen Alexandra, King George V and Queen Mary seemed a dull pair indeed. The King, gruff and unsmiling, moved stiffly through his noble duties. To his critics he would rap, ‘a sailor does not smile on duty’. 36
Queen Mary was equally unbending, a formidable figure in her singularly outdated clothes. Talking to her, the diarist Chips Channon remarked, was ‘like addressing a cathedral’. In fact, Queen Mary would have liked to follow the fashion suitable for wartime and shorten her skirts, but the King frowned on such a sartorial revolution. Mabell, Countess of Airlie, remembered,
Having been gifted with perfect legs, she [Queen Mary] once tentatively suggested to me in the nineteen-twenties that we might both shorten our skirts by a modest two or three inches but we lacked the courage to do it until eventually I volunteered to be the guinea pig. I appeared at Windsor one day in a slightly shorter dress than usual, the plan being that if His Majesty made no unfavourable comment the Queen would follow my example.
The next morning she had to report failure. The King on being asked whether he had liked Lady Airlie’s new dress had replied decisively, ‘No I didn’t. It was too short.’ So I had
my hem let down with all speed and the Queen remained faithful to her long full skirts.37
Had it not been for the First World War they might well have remained remote, unbending figures, frozen in outmoded costume and ceremonial in a somewhat forbidding Palace. But the war drew them out, giving them the chance to meet their people at work and at home, and to show their genuine concern and humanity. The Queen’s unchanging style, with her toques and long skirts, became reassuring – a symbol of stability in a shaken world. Ordinary women, visited by the Queen in their kitchens, were surprised and warmed by her understanding of their problems. As she toured the hospitals, her eagle eye missed no detail and her advice was always common-sense and practical. It was not enough to bring sympathy to the limbless; the Queen realized howimportant it was to give wounded men their independence. So she encouraged research into rehabilitation and took particular interest in the workshops at Roehampton and Brighton where artificial limbs were made.
During the war the sheer hard work and dedication to duty of the King and Queen became appreciated. When the King went to the battlefront in France, the soldiers who met him in the trenches were glad of his undemonstrative sympathy. His courage was tested when, on 28 October 1915, he was thrown from his horse while visiting men of the Royal Flying Corps near the village of Hesdigneul. His horse had been trained to accept the gunfire and drumbeats, but not cheering men. It reared up like a rocket and came over on top of the King. He was taken back to England in great pain and was later discovered to have broken a bone in his pelvis, from which he never completely recovered. The accident did not improve his notoriously short temper.
As for the Queen, there were times when even her phenomenal energy flagged, for her programme was punishing. During the King’s convalescence she took his place at many of his engagements as well. On 8 November 1915, for example, she inspected the troops on Salisbury Plain.
