A Brief History of the House of Windsor

by Michael Paterson

  George had been weary of life. A reign that had begun in political turmoil had become no easier with the passing years. He had presided over the most devastating war in the nation’s history, the worst industrial unrest, the upheaval of the suffragette movement and the granting of votes to women, as well as the restructuring of the empire. Yet his greatest worry was the unsuitability of his eldest son to take over his position. ‘When I am gone,’ he had said, ‘the boy will ruin himself within twelve months’ – a prediction that was to come true in even less time than that. He died knowing that he had succeeded in doing his duty. He had been a very good king – conscientious, impartial, and highly popular. He had set an edifying moral example and was leaving the monarchy stronger than he had found it. And yet his successor was likely to throw away everything he had achieved. Small wonder that he said: ‘I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children and that nothing will stand between Bertie and Lillibet and the throne.’ His wife would have the satisfaction of knowing, if he would not, that that was precisely how fate would arrange matters.

  Historians, put off by his outward manner, have often considered him unworthy of serious study. As a result of his early training and inclination he was always to seem like a naval officer, ruling the country as if it were a battleship. Harold Nicolson wrote that the king had the intellectual capacities of a railway porter, yet admitted that this was a strength, for he was the common man writ large. His prejudices reflected those of many of his ordinary subjects.

  Yet he was far more than the caricatured dullard of popular myth. He had a sensitivity that was not seen by everyone. He also possessed a sense of humour that was often delightful, as when he spoke to Sir Leslie Hoare, the Foreign Secretary, who had just returned from Paris after negotiating the Hoare–Laval Pact. George quipped: ‘You know what they’re all saying? No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris.’ The king later grumbled that: ‘The fellow didn’t even laugh.’

  He was brusque with his sons, but tender with his granddaughter Elizabeth. Though to describe him as conservative would be the mildest of understatements, he was sympathetic toward the poor, and to those who were living on strike pay during the events of May 1926. His concern, expressed in private, was sincere. Morally, he was beyond reproach. His wife had expected to be his sister-in-law, a somewhat awkward start for any romance, yet he and Queen Mary remained happily married for forty-three years. He was ideally suited by temperament to be the Father of the Nation. His old-fashioned outlook – expressed in the fact that he wore a Victorian beard throughout an emphatically clean-shaven era – increased his air of gravitas in a time of rapid change. To his own surprise as well as that of many of his subjects, he enjoyed a genuine rapport with Ramsay MacDonald, his Labour premier, as well as with other socialists. He was self-evidently decent and well-meaning, to an extent that was unexpected by some of them. He was to write in his diary, in January 1924: ‘Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour government.’ Much the same as he did himself, was the answer. Yet he accommodated this significant shift in the attitudes of the British electorate, and by doing so he succeeded in becoming a credible modern sovereign, rather than a reactionary stuck in the pre-war world. This tribute – entirely sincere and undoubtedly accurate – was paid him by the Labour leader (and later prime minister) Clement Attlee: ‘He knew and understood his people and the age in which they lived, and progressed with them.’

  While he could approach political and international issues with tolerance and good judgement and even vision, his views on the details of social behaviour were more narrow and often more pungent. There is something endearing about his determination not to let standards slip and to hold back the tide of modernity that was lapping at the Palace walls. Like his father, who even held views on the appropriate costume in which to visit an art gallery, George believed that clothes summed up a man – or woman. He forbade the queen to shorten her skirts in the twenties, despite the fact that this was by then universal practice even for middle-aged women. He was once so irritated at seeing ladies in short skirts strolling past the walls of Windsor Castle that he yelled at them through a window. He insisted that all women among his family or their staff must have gloves with them at all times, and that ladies must not appear twice in the same dress either at Ascot or at house parties he attended. He despised his eldest son’s habit of wearing trousers with turn-ups. ‘Are you expecting a flood?’ he would enquire sarcastically whenever the young man entered the room. His own trousers looked even more outlandish, for he wore them with the creases at the sides and not at front and back. He once spotted his Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham, coming up the Mall in plain tweeds rather than in a suit, and berated him for appearing in London in ‘ratcatcher’ clothes.

  It was not only in sartorial matters that his views were inflexible. He had opinions on all aspects of behaviour. (He was to send a telegram to his second son, Bertie, that read: ‘Do not embrace me in public, and when you kiss your mother, take your hat off.’) When David went to Glasgow to open a trade exhibition, George wrote in surprise: ‘I’ve never heard of a gentleman going to Scotland in January.’ He had set views too on the proper dignity necessary for public ceremonial – on one occasion the Bandmaster of a Guards regiment included, in the repertoire that was offered during Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace, a tune from a current musical comedy. Minutes later, a footman appeared from inside and approached him with a salver. The note upon it simply said: ‘His Majesty does not know what tune you have been playing but it is never, never to be played again.’

  Interestingly, in his emphatic, dogmatic views, George resembled no one so much as his German cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II who was equally given to making pronouncements on any and every subject. Once he had dismissed the French Impressionists with the statement: ‘Unless a painting meets a set of criteria set by me, it cannot be considered art.’ George might have said something similar, if he had had sufficient interest in art in the first place. His view of literature was equally forthright: ‘People who write books ought to be shut up.’ He was equally unimpressed with music, recording in his diary after a visit to Covent Garden: ‘We saw Fidelio, and damned dull it was.’ Nor did he enjoy a game to which his son David was addicted, writing that: ‘Golf always makes me so damned angry!’ His expressed opinions, though reflecting genuine convictions, often sound utterly comical today. His view of homosexuals, for instance: ‘But I thought men like that shot themselves!’ sounds as quaint as his comment on the General Strike: ‘It was a rotten way to run a revolution. I could have done it better myself.’ And the notion of the king in league with those seeking to overthrow the established order was not as far-fetched as it might seem, for he told one Labour politician: ‘I tell you, Mr Wheatley, that if I had to live in conditions like that, I would be a revolutionary myself.’ He argued that working men could not be expected to keep a family on the wages they were paid.

  His pronouncements on many subjects suggest those of some roguish, favourite uncle: sometimes flippant, often reactionary, frequently predictable, but surprisingly sensitive and sensible, and carrying an unmistakable decency. One observer, George Lansbury, called him ‘a short-tempered, narrow-minded, out-of-date Tory’. So he was. The surprise was not that he held reactionary views but that he was capable besides of such empathy and ability to see other viewpoints. He was also more self-aware than others perhaps realized. He knew that he was not an exciting personality, and preferred it that way. When H. G. Wells famously criticized Britain’s ‘alien and uninspiring Court’, George retorted: ‘I may be uninspiring, but I’m damned if I’m an alien.’

  His thoughts on serious issues, however, command respect. Visiting after the Great War a military cemetery in France, he said, with an eloquence that was almost Churchillian: ‘I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace on earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of
silent witnesses to the desolation of war.’ And in 1935 he told Lloyd George: ‘I will not have another war. If there is another and we are threatened with being brought into it, I will go to Trafalgar Square and wave a red flag myself sooner than allow this country to be brought in.’ Despite a penchant for colourful language, George read the Bible every day and was more than a purely nominal Christian. The side of his nature, and his behaviour, that gave rise to his noblest acts and utterances was a reflection of that.

  He lived to celebrate his Silver Jubilee, in May 1935, though he was to die eight months later. He was genuinely surprised – and not a little moved – by the reception he received as he drove through the streets of London. A modest and reserved man who was well aware that he was perceived as dull, he had not previously realized the extent to which his subjects derived reassurance from this. His personification of the old-fashioned virtues had won him immense public respect, as had his genuine sympathy with the less fortunate of his people. His oft-quoted statement at the jubilee that: ‘I had no idea they felt like that about me. I am beginning to think they must really like me for myself’, suggests an endearing diffidence on both sides.

  George did not fit into the post-war world. Yet ironically it was he who had made the monarchy adapt to the style of the new era. He passionately hated the changes in appearance and behaviour of women in the 1920s. They now smoked in public, wore breeches to ride (and no longer sat side-saddle), shortened their hair and their skirts, drank cocktails, drove about in motor cars, and wore make-up. It is difficult to appreciate, from the perspective of our times, just how completely the way of life of all classes changed as a result of the Great War. Social conventions that had been accepted for generations were suddenly thrown overboard. Showing deference to one’s betters was out of fashion, the class structure having been dealt a serious blow by the democracy of the trenches and the success of socialism in Russia. Church-going was out of style; respect for ‘the Establishment’ – after the fortunes made by war-profiteers and the subsequent ennoblement of many of them – greatly diminished. Nothing seemed certain or stable any longer or worthy of respect. The bewilderment of men of the king’s generation was summed up by a fictitious near contemporary – Soames Forsyte – in John Galsworthy’s epic Forsyte Saga, who surveys with apprehension and disapproval the new era: ‘A democratic England – dishevelled, hurried, noisy, and seemingly without an apex . . . Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish! . . . Manners, flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio . . . Nothing ever again firm and coherent to look up to . . . And when those Labour chaps got power – if they ever did – the worst was yet to come!’

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  EDWARD VIII, ‘DAVID’, JANUARY–DECEMBER 1936

  ‘I know there is nothing kingly about me, but I have tried to mix with the people and make them think I was one of them.’

  King Edward VIII to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

  ‘From his childhood onwards this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers. In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour of the world and probably rumours of a morganatic marriage alliance will follow, and the end of it will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’

  The man who said this was James Kier Hardie. In this summing up of the future king’s likely career, Hardie was uncannily accurate. There were to be three tours for the new king rather than one, and the morganatic marriage was not connected with either of them. Nevertheless the country would indeed ‘be called upon to pay the bill’, and the monarchy might well not have survived the experience. This second sovereign of the House of Windsor would come to the throne at the age of forty-one. His reign would last less than eleven months.

  He was born on 23 June 1894, and burdened with a plethora of Christian names that included a reference to every patron saint in the British Isles: Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. He would become known to his family and to intimates by the last of these. His arrival represented the first time in British history that four generations of the royal family had been alive at once, and he was repeatedly photographed with his elders throughout his early childhood. Queen Victoria was extremely fond of him (though afterwards he would scarcely remember her, as she died when he was six), and he was probably rather spoiled. At any rate he developed a sense of entitlement and self-importance – entirely understandable in a position such as his – that was, however, somehow never to be balanced by any notions of duty and obligation, and this would be his lifelong problem. He would expect to receive all the trappings that went with his position – the deference and the loyalty and service of others – yet it did not occur to him that these had to be earned, or that in return he owed his subjects willing service and an ability always to put duty above personal feelings.

  He was apparently mistreated in childhood by a nurse, who habitually twisted his arm when he was about to enter his parents’ drawing-room, as a means of ensuring good behaviour – a practice not unusual among Victorian nannies. He also suffered a childhood attack of mumps, which would cause him to believe in future years that he was infertile.

  Despite this, his upbringing as one of six siblings was affectionate and relatively relaxed by the standards both of royalty and the Victorian era. His childhood home was the same small, uncomfortable house – York Cottage – that his parents had occupied since their marriage. He and his brothers were given lessons in a schoolroom there, and somewhat absurdly he was designated ‘head boy’ of a form that consisted of only four pupils. At fifteen he followed his father’s course of education by going into the Royal Navy and attending Dartmouth, though by this time it had been transferred ashore to become the imposing academy it is today. Joining the Navy required greater commitment than service in the Army would have done. At that time there were still fashionable regiments in which, when slightly older, he could have idled his time away (as his uncle the Duke of Clarence had done), whereas the Navy was a technical Service that required concentrated hard work and genuine ability. It would grant no favours to members of his family, and he would have to earn respect through aptitude alone. On the other hand it could be assumed that he would not, like many of his contemporaries, make a career there, and indeed this quickly became clear. The year after he arrived at Dartmouth his ultimate destiny advanced a significant step closer when his father became king. David was now heir-assumptive, Prince of Wales, and would soon be invested as such.

  The Investiture of a Prince of Wales had not previously had any impact on the Principality, because it was carried out at Court in London. In 1911, however, the Home Secretary happened to be the Welshman Lloyd George, and this time the arrangements were to be different. He had persuaded the king to hold the ceremony in Wales itself, and the setting agreed upon was the castle at Caernarfon. The prince could be presented to the people, just as the first such prince had been by King Edward III almost six hundred years earlier. David, who would never see the point of state ceremony, did not undergo the experience willingly, and especially disliked the neo-Tudor costume (a ‘preposterous rig’ he called it) that he was obliged to wear. In a curious foretaste of the rest of the century in which he would live, the teenager argued with his parents about the clothes he was expected to wear on a formal occasion. Nevertheless he learned to say a few words in Welsh, and to sound sincere when taking the oath. The ceremony, in effect a tradition invented for the occasion, was acclaimed as a success both in Wales and throughout the empire – a solemn occasion, aspects of which could be shared by the public through photography and film, that brought the royal family closer to their people. It would be a harbinger of the more accessible and inclusive monarchy that was to become the norm within a few generations.

  David was to gain great popularity under the title of Prince of Wales. A small, rail-thin man with a face that was described as looking like that of ‘a wistful choirboy’, he was handsome, well-dressed, and
charming when he wanted to be. After his spell in the Navy he had attended Magdalen College, Oxford (he was to describe this as ‘a dreary chore’), the snobbish Master of which naturally regarded him as a considerable catch, socially if not academically. ‘Bookish he will never be,’ lamented his tutor, and with good reason. Under the pseudonym Lord Chester, the Prince of Wales then travelled the Continent to learn something of the places in which he had relatives.

  The prince was anything but thoughtful or intellectual. As has been seen, his father was no intellectual either, yet King George possessed a sense of duty that his son would never have. George also had a thoughtful and sensitive nature beneath an often frightening exterior. This enabled him to understand and empathize with others, and to achieve flashes of great wisdom and insight. David lacked any of these qualities. Inherently selfish, he never understood the notion of being a servant of his people, and saw no reason to exert himself in situations that did not arouse his interest, or for which he did not feel in the mood. His tastes never developed beyond mildly strenuous sports or puerile parlour games, and he made no attempt to grasp important issues. Nor did he make any secret of his hatred of official occasions. (‘What bally rot these state visits are!’ he had said as a young man. ‘A waste of time, money and energy.’) His outspoken and indiscreet views, which caused embarrassment both to his family and to courtiers, made it obvious that he was simply not suited by temperament to be king. Priding himself on the ease with which he could charm an audience and indeed win over an entire country, he came to think himself more important than the office he would ultimately hold. When one newspaper commented that his easy manner had ‘silenced criticism of the monarchy for current lifetimes’, it surely uttered one of recent history’s greatest misjudgements.