by Anne Edwards
At 12:15 a distant cheering could be heard inside the chapel as the bridegroom’s cortege arrived. The Queen’s State Trumpeters played a ringing fanfare from their silver clarions, and the Gentlemen-at-Arms entered, followed by the Lord Chamberlain, who, walking backwards, conducted the Queen, still supported by the Grand Duke, to her appointed place. Another flourish of trumpets was sounded, and Princess May, flanked by her father and her brother Prince Dolly, entered—her train being borne by her ten bridesmaids.
Queen Victoria noted in her journal that day, “Dear May looked so pretty & quiet and dignified. She was vy. simply & prettily dressed—& wore her mother’s veil lace. The bridesmaids looked vy. sweet in white satin, with a little pink & red rose on the shoulder & some small bows of the same on the shoes ... Georgie gave his answers distinctly ... while May, though quite self-possessed, spoke vy. low.”
But it is Lady Geraldine Somerset’s journal for July 6, 1893, that reveals the true spirit of the day:
“May’s Wedding Day! The greatest success ever seen or heard of! not a hitch from first to last, nor an if or a but!! everything went absolutely a souhait! first of all it was the most heavenly day ever could be—such a summer’s day as you get solely and only in England—not the heavy oppressive atmosphere of yesterday, but the most brilliant glorious really tropical sunshine with tropical heat,—yet with it, mercifully, [breezes] from time to time refreshed one and recovered one! quite perfection ... The town was alive!! swarms everywhere! ... Piccadilly was beautifully decorated; but anything to equal the loveliness of St. James’s Street I never saw—it was like a bower from end to end ... garlands of green across and between the Venetians masts with bracelets of flowers suspended from them, too pretty.
“I went to the Household Pew in the Chapel Royal ... It was all so admirably arranged I think everybody in the Chapel could see well! The first to enter the Chapel was the Queen followed by P[rincess] M[ary Adelaide] who drove in the Queen’s carriage from Buckingham Palace!! will her head be still on her shoulder tomorrow! I believe it will have expanded and blown to the moon! The Princess of Wales looked more lovely— than ever! none can approach her! but I was sorry for her today. May with the Duke of York standing at the Altar!! and for the Princess what pain.”
After the ceremonies the Royal guests returned to Buckingham Palace, where the newlyweds signed the register in the Bow Saloon overlooking the gardens.* Princess May signed first, “Victoria Mary of Teck”; the Duke next, “George”; and then the Queen’s signature, followed by those of over a hundred Royalties, Court officers, ministers, clergy, peers; and for the Government Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Asquith; filling four pages of the Queen’s special volume reserved by her for Royal marriages and christenings.
At luncheon in the state dining room amid the portraits of former monarchs of Great Britain, the bride and bridegroom sat on one side of the Queen, with the Danish King and Queen on the other. The royalties were seated according to rank, which meant that the Tecks were at another table. Princess Mary Adelaide’s finest moment had come and gone.
At 5:00 P.M., the bridal couple left Buckingham Palace for the “Royal Transit” through London to Liverpool Street Station, where they were then to embark for their honeymoon at Sandringham, a curious choice in light of Prince Eddy’s death there such a short time before. “Rather unlucky and sad,” even the Queen commented. But the newly married couple were radiant as they waved to the crowds lining their route. The Duke of York had changed from his uniform to a frock coat and top hat, and the new Duchess of York wore a soft white Irish poplin gown trimmed with gold braid, a cape and bonnet to match.
Describing the departure of the newlyweds from the palace, Lady Geraldine Somerset wrote: “... We saw her [the bride] and the Duke of York get into the carriage, receive the shower of slippers and drive au pas round the Quadrangle amid cheers and as they passed under the portico we rushed into the bedroom and from the balcony saw the Prince [of Wales], the Duke of Edinbro [Edinburgh], the Duke of Cambridge and all the Princes standing round the grandes grilles of the outer railing and as the Duke and Duchess of York drove into the Mall shower them with rice! Then they drove along the Mall with the magnificent Blues amid ringing cheers.”
Standing with the Queen on the central balcony to see them off, Princess Mary Adelaide and the Duke of Teck both dissolved into tears and “sobbed bitterly” when Auld Lang Syne was played “... a horrid moment,” the Queen records.
The Royal train steamed into Wolferton (the station for Sandringham) at 7:55, three minutes early. After an official greeting, the newlyweds, in a victoria drawn by two of the Prince of Wales’s finest Hungarian horses, drove through the gates of Sandringham, where Princess May would honeymoon as the Duchess of York, wife of the second heir to the Throne.
Before long, Princess May realised that the family she had married into was a closely guarded clique that excluded newcomers. This was particularly true of her mother-in-law and her three sisters-in-law. Nor were they interested in music, literature, or science as she was, or curious about foreign courts where none of their family reigned. Not only was Princess May on a higher plane intellectually than her in-laws, but she enjoyed an entirely different manner of life. She had far more serious notions of woman’s place in society and very strong ideas of the responsibilities of the women in the Royal Family. To have to “follow the shooters, watch the killing, however faultless, to take always a cheerful appreciative part in man-made, man-valued amusements” greatly nettled her. She did so, but at a high cost in the sacrifice of her liberal ambitions and in her relationship with her mother-in-law.
Since she was living in cramped quarters almost in Princess Alexandra’s garden and with a total lack of privacy, everything she did was duly reported, discussed, and most times discouraged or censored by the Princess of Wales. A crisis occurred when she rearranged the furniture in her sitting room, another when she planted a small garden without permission. Everything had to be referred to the Big House. She realised that she was being treated with an element of distrust, which made it impossible for her to follow her natural inclinations. Such worthwhile desires as helping to increase the well-being of Sandringham’s poor families had to be put aside to wait until the Princess of Wales found time to extend her own benevolent hand.
Princess May’s new home had begun life as a cottage to accommodate male guests who came to shoot at Sandringham, which had always been too small to use as a Royal residence. Located a hundred yards from the main house, “Bachelor’s Cottage” was conceived as a strictly masculine dwelling. Princess Alexandra contributed little to its design or decor, but she did make sure that it was hidden from the view of the main house. This was achieved by concealing it behind laurels and rhododendrons, which soon became dense thicket. Bachelor’s Cottage, thus camouflaged and shadowed, was dreary and dark. The exterior was built of local brown stone and ludicrously adorned with imitation Tudor beams, which gave the façade the look of a toy gingerbread house. Fumed oak, Doulton tiles, and stained-glass fanlights were profusely used in the interior. The Prince of Wales changed its name to York Cottage on presentation as a wedding gift to his son, who he knew loved Sandringham—but he never considered Princess May’s wishes in this gesture.
Not only dark and ill heated, York Cottage had exceedingly primitive plumbing and a sparsity of bathrooms. Except for the Yorks’ bedrooms and dressing rooms, all other bedrooms were almost cubical. The Duke of York was once to comment that the accommodations were so spare that he supposed “the servants must sleep in the trees.” The house’s most imposing feature was a handsome fireplace with a dark wood overmantel in the entry hall. The narrow winding staircase ascended from this reception area. Close to this was “a tiny snuggery” that was to serve as Prince George’s smoking room, library, and gun room. The windows in here were blocked by heavy shrubberies, and the walls, rendering the room even darker, were covered by coarse red cloth, the kind used at the time for French Army trousers. Across the entry h
all and curtained by gold-velvet portieres was the “still tinier” drawing room, which had a patent coal grate for a fireplace. The whole ambiance was homely, dark, and crowded, and none of the furnishings—an upright piano, a few cosy chairs, a pretty table or two, numerous potted palms, and far too many knick-knacks—gave the room even an illusion of style. The dining room which adjoined the drawing room was the largest downstairs room, but Princess May had brought with her from White Lodge her considerable collection of pet birds, and so a section of the room had been made into a large aviary.
Not even a hall separated the dining room from the kitchen. “This too, is absurdly small,” the Lady’s Pictorial reported after being given a tour of the cottage, “the ranges, gas-stove, and table almost entirely filling it before the cook and his assistant enter.” A new wing had been built to accommodate the male servants, extending from the kitchen and over the old outer buildings which had been storerooms. The upstairs contained accommodations for the women servants,* two guest rooms “very plainly furnished with light-wood articles and flowered chintzes,” and at the head of the narrow front staircase the Yorks’ suite consisting of a pleasant bedroom with a dressing room of the most limited dimensions on either side. In each of these was a bath, no elaborate marbled silver-fitted arrangement, but a very plain affair, without, indeed, a “shower” attached. Two narrow brass bedsteads placed together beneath a gauzy canopy, wardrobes of satin-wood, and a pair of small chairs furnished the bedroom. Its prettiest feature was a bay window from which the sea was visible.
Princess May had as her own staff dresser Tatry, a French woman who had worked at White Lodge, and Lady Eva Greville, her lady-in-waiting. Lady Eva slept in one of the rabbit-warren of tiny rooms over the kitchen, where all the sounds and smells came up through the thin floors. Close to mealtimes the house always had the odour of cooking throughout it. On one occasion, Lady Eva sent down word that “if the footmen cleaning the silver did not object to her overhearing their conversation, she for her part, had no objection to overhearing it.”
York Cottage’s proximity to her in-laws, not its many inconveniences and irredeemable ugliness, created the most difficulty for Princess May. Less than a year after she arrived there as a bride, she wrote in her journal, “I sometimes think that just after we were married we were not left alone enough and this led to many little rubs which might have been avoided.”
Life at Sandringham revolved around the Princess of Wales. Her three daughters had been so eclipsed by their mother’s strong personality that they were deadly dull, lethargic, and childlike. Worse, they resented their sister-in-law’s intellect, position, and accessibility to their mother. Princess Louise was Prince George’s only married sister. The other two lived at home and spent much of their time at Sandringham. The elder, Princess Victoria (Toria), was “delicate, hypochondriacal, and already slightly embittered.” Her childhood friendship toward Princess May had disappeared now that the girl was a married woman while she remained a spinster and, in the words of a close member of the family, little more than “a glorified maid to her mother.” In fact, Princess Alexandra kept a bell by her side and rang it when she wanted to summon Toria to fetch something for her or to help wind some knitting wool. Princess Maud, the youngest of the daughters, was less sharp-tongued toward her new sister-in-law, but she was a “grumbler,” always bewailing her grievances, her paramount complaint being that her mother was doing nothing to find her a husband. Princess Maud, who was then aged twenty-four, was quite right. The Princess of Wales showed no desire that her younger daughters should marry and dismissed all suitors on what was at times quite insubstantial grounds. “It really is not wise to leave the fate of these dear girls dan[s] la vague for much longer,” the Empress Frederick wrote to her sister-in-law, Princess Alexandra, in early 1894.
Had the Duke of York not been second heir to the Throne, his mother might not have encouraged him to marry either. She had always turned to her children for the attention she felt she had been deprived of by their father’s philandering. Princess May was not as malleable as her daughters, or her son, for that matter. Thus, for the new bride, her early months of marriage were a painful time.
For a start, the Duke of York (with his mother’s help and without Princess May’s knowledge) had furnished York Cottage entirely before his bride’s arrival at Sandringham, and the finished rooms jarred Princess May’s own good taste. She insisted on redoing the sitting room in yellow and white—colours more pleasing to her than its original browns and tans—and though this request was granted, her mother-in-law was most indignant about it. Without announcing herself, Princess Alexandra would drop by at breakfast or teatime whenever she wished, her two daughters at her elbows and her many dogs cavorting at her heels. Resentment began to mount from these insensitive beginnings.
There was another disturbing element in Princess May’s new life: her realisation of the limitations of the man she had married. Nothing in the Duke of York’s past had prepared him for his new responsibilities. One of his biographers, John Gore, wrote, “His planned education ended just where and when it should seriously have begun. He was ... below the educational and perhaps intellectual standard of the ordinary public school-educated country squire.” Princess May, who had been better educated in English, English history, and constitutional history, believed that she had to do something to repair these gaps.
Her husband was not terribly keen on books, and so Princess May began a lifelong habit of reading to him, pausing often to comment or to explain. This last was observed by several close members of the family, one of whom snidely commented that “May appears to be educating Georgie.” But though she could help her husband broaden his interests, keep somewhat abreast of political happenings, and learn to speak German and French better, she could not supercede his mother’s place in his life or overcome the habits of a pampered lifetime.
If the problems of her marriage were great, at least the power and position it brought to Princess May more than compensated. Her first taste of her new glory came only a few weeks after her wedding when, on July 31, she and the Duke of York joined his parents and sisters for a two-week holiday at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, perhaps the most famous of all yachting centres, as the guests of the Queen at Osborne House.
The bitterness of the past could at last be packed away. The two years of exile in Florence could be forgotten, along with all the unpleasant creditors and the Royal critics who had treated the Tecks in a condescending manner. Princess May was now her own person. Her new identity, Duchess of York, was an open sesame to the same world that had once closed its portals to her, and the holiday at Osborne was her grand entrance into the Royal corridors of power.
Footnotes
*Grand Duke Ernest Louis V of Hesse-Darmstadt (1868–1937), eldest son of Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Alice, and also Princess Alix of Hesse’s brother.
*The Royal signatures on the register were preceded by Edward Cantuar, Archbishop of Canterbury. Then came Victoria Mary of Teck (Princess May, Duchess of York), George (Duke of York), Victoria R.I. (the Queen), Albert Edward P. (Prince of Wales), Alexandra (Princess of Wales), Teck (Duke of Teck), Mary Adelaide (Duchess of Teck), Christian R. (King of Denmark), Louise (Queen of Denmark), Nicholas (Tsarevitch of Russia), Ernest Louis (Grand Duke of Hesse), Frederick (Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz), Alfred (Duke of Edinburgh), Marie (Duchess of Edinburgh), Arthur (Duke of Connaught), Louise Margaret (Duchess of Connaught), Helena (Princess of Schleswig-Holstein), Louise (Princess, Duchess of Argyll), Beatrice (Princess of Battenberg), Henry (Prince of Battenberg), Henry (Prince of Prussia), Irene (Princess of Prussia), Louise (Duchess of Fife), Fife (Duke of Fife), George (Prince of Denmark), Philip (Prince of Saxe-Coburg).
*These rooms were later converted to the nursery, schoolroom, and boys’ room.
SEVEN
Osborne was magnificent in summertime with its great magnolias and fragrant jasmine dappling the Italianate terrace. Long soft shadows of oak an
d chestnut flowed like cool water across the lawns that stretched to the turquoise sea, dotted with the white sails of the fishing boats on the Solent. The grounds were rich with contrasts: the fresh green fields and turf, the masses of evergreens, the beach and the verdant woods, the rolling lawns and scented shrubs and the startling blue of the surf.
Although the Queen and the newlyweds remained at Osborne House, most of the Royal Family lived aboard their yachts while at Cowes: the Prince and Princess of Wales, with Toria and Maud, on their yacht Osborne; Kaiser Wilhelm and his suite housed on the imperial German yacht Hohenzollern.
The Kaiser’s presence posed difficulties, for the Prince of Wales could barely tolerate his nephew and the Princess found him insufferably arrogant. The Kaiser, however, was devoted to his grandmother, the Queen. Princess May liked “William” and was flattered by his attention to her the first night at Osborne when all the Royal guests were dining in the new and splendid Indian Room. “I sat next to William, who made himself most agreeable,” she wrote in her diary. “Fancy me, little me, sitting next to William, the place of honour!!! It seemed so strange ... I talked my best German.”
And with girlish enthusiasm, she wrote her mother that she wore her “white broche satin low with the Iveagh’s tiara, Gdmama’s necklace, the Kennington bow in front of the bodice & the Warwicks’ sun on the side. I wish you had seen me.”
Wilhelm was the son of Empress Frederick, the Queen’s eldest and most imperious daughter. Injured in a difficult breech birth, he had a withered arm twelve inches shorter than the other. He also had the habit of slipping the hand of his crippled arm into the pocket of his uniform, which meant his elbow would protrude at a curious angle. His deformity had warped his personality. He identified strongly with Napoleon, and with his pocketed hand and strutting gait a certain resemblance could be detected. The Queen felt great pity for her deformed grandson, and even when he was most irritating, arrogant, and quarrelsome, she never forgot the circumstances of his birth. Princess May was apparently not distressed by his difficult personality. He was the Kaiser and the power of a leading nation, which was enough for him to gain and hold her respect.