Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  For David to become King meant that his beloved grandpapa would have to die, and his father, whose love he was never sure of, would be dead as well—a fairly scary thought for a sensitive boy. At twelve, he was as jumpy as he had been as a toddler, pulling constantly at his tie, smiling nervously at inapt times; and he remained as insecure—holding on overpossessively to childhood treasures, looking to Lala Bill and his grandmother for the love and attention he did not get from Princess May.

  Denied mother love as a child, David was to seek it for the rest of his life. But Princess May was only partly responsible for the severe emotional problems suffered by her children, and especially her sons. Prince George was an overbearingly dominating father, and his excessive authority had damaging effects. Whether Princess May or Prince George was more to blame for the children’s shortcomings and insecurities is not easy to assess. But the combination was formidable, and there were other difficult aspects of the children’s lives. For one thing, they were lonely because of the isolation imposed upon them by virtue of their father’s position, and for another because of the absence of the close association with children their own ages. Occasionally Mr. Hansell would escort the Princes to Sandringham’s village school, where the local boys would be forced to play a game of football with them. These events were painful for both David and Bertie, the former because the village boys treated him with a kind of uncomfortable awe (“Here, Sir, you can have the ball if you. like,” was one remembered comment by a ten-year-old village lad), and the latter because he was too terrified to speak at all for fear of revealing his stutter. When David was nine, his mother had organised a dancing class with twenty or thirty children of people she knew. But the enterprise failed, having none of the spontaneity that had been hoped for.

  In 1906, the six Royal children, their parents, and the Household were a closed society. Even in this, David’s exalted destiny gave him dominance over his siblings. The three oldest formed a triumvirate. With Finch in attendance, they bicycled to the nearby village of Dersingham, where they bought sweets or watched the trains at Wolverton Station. David was always the leader, Bertie and Mary crouched over their handlebars racing along behind him.

  Their walled-in life was relieved only during those short periods when they were at York Cottage and their grandparents were in the Big House. November 9 was the King’s birthday, and he always celebrated it at Sandringham. Excitement ran high for the children as they watched the small army of servants arrive several days before this, followed by the arrival of the Royal chef, M. Menager. Then came the horses and carts of the royal tradesmen, bringing “two hundred shoulders of mutton or two hundred and fifty joints of beef,” along with huge quantities of fruits and vegetables, and delicacies such as prawns, oysters, Italian truffles, and the enormous hot-house grapes grown by the gardeners at Windsor Castle and brought down to Sandringham solely for use as garnishing. Hundreds of sugar loaves (weighing fourteen pounds each) and at least a hundred pounds of a special Turkish coffee were delivered. The King had dispensed with the services of the Indians of his mother’s Household staff and taken on an Egyptian coffee-maker, whose only task was to brew and serve coffee for Royal guests after dinner.

  The King liked the splendour of “la Bonne cuisine,” but at Sandringham, he served a lot of good English cooking. Without fail, Sunday’s dinner would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with plain roast potatoes and horseradish sauce.

  At twilight the evening of the King’s birthday, Sandringham would itself spring to life with “a bonfire blaze of lights.” The children waited for the sound of the clatter of horses’ hoofs on the driveway, which heralded the arrival of their grandparents and their many guests, each with his or her own valet or personal maid. A gala dinner was held the first night, and early the next day the fields and coverts resounded to the fusillades of Sandringham’s Royal shooting party. Sometimes David and Bertie were allowed to follow their grandfather as he shot and be a part of all the excitement of the competition to see who could bring down the largest number of birds. By dusk, the day’s kill might total two thousand pheasants.

  A hamper luncheon for all the guns and their ladies would be laid out in a big tent near the woods. Footmen swept the site clean, then laid down straw. The party, usually no less than forty people, would eat at long wooden tables covered with the finest cloth and plate, and David and Bertie thought there was nothing as grand or wonderful as when they were asked by their grandfather to join the shooting party at these luncheons. Outside the tent would be spread the morning’s bag, and if the King had had a good day’s shooting, the party would be in high spirits.

  In King Edward’s household, both guests and staff ate meat three times a day, and whatever was left over after dinner would be given to the poor villagers who (at both Windsor and Sandringham) waited at the kitchen doors. Evening menus in the country were much more elaborate than the luncheons. One dinner menu in 1906 at Sandringham consisted of cold consommé, salmon cutlets, stuffed ortolons (small Egyptian birds which were the King’s favourites), lamb in champagne, duck, chicken casserole, salad, asparagus in sauce mousseline, and four desserts and a savoury, including Pêehes à la Reine Alexandra (a slight variation on Pêehes Melba, using a red currant sauce in place of raspberries).

  After tea if Bertie and David had done their homework, they were allowed to run up the hill to the Big House to say good night to their grandparents. It was a memorable time for them; they were being given carte blanche to a different world. But they had to remember their father’s rule that they must be back at York Cottage by seven o’clock. The boys kept an “anxious eye” on the ornate clock on the mantelpiece of the saloon. Their grandparents were impervious to the situation and did not hurry their return. These good-night excursions, therefore, which began so happily often would end in the library with their father upbraiding them for disobeying his orders.

  David adored his grandfather, and his dearest wish was to grow up to be exactly like him. He never ceased to wonder how his father and grandfather could be such opposites; the one so stiff and the other so warm. King Edward’s bellowy voice, his hearty laugh, the arm that swooped about David and clamped him to the big, robust body were reassuring. The skipped generation released all inhibitions in the King, who as a young father had not been loving, gentle, or tolerant with his own two sons. However, since the coronation, the King’s relationship to Prince George had been most devoted, and as each year passed the two men became even closer. Mrs. Keppel may have been responsible for some of the King’s tolerance of Prince George’s stodgy personality, since she never ceased to speak well of the younger man.

  When his grandfather left Sandringham at the end of the season, David would sit by the small window in the narrow classroom on the ground floor of York Cottage, straining to hear the departing carriages and fourgons on the gravel drive. He would remain listening until there was no sound at all—and always at that moment he experienced a fear that perhaps the Big House would never again flare up with light and he would never again see his exciting grandpapa.

  In 1907, the average age for entering the Royal Naval College was thirteen. At the time of his entrance examinations in February, David was twelve and a half, but, unlike the boys he would soon join, he had never attended school. At the possible risk of losing his job, Mr. Hansell had repeatedly warned Prince George that if his elder son were ever to hold his own at the Naval College, he should be sent to a good preparatory school first. Prince George’s naive answer had been, “The Navy will teach David all that he needs to know.” The five educationally ineffectual years under Mr. Hansell’s tutelage, the circumstances of his birth, and the sheltered upbringing in his close-knit household had not prepared the young Prince for the outer world.

  Of Mr. Hansell’s teaching, his student was later to say, “I am appalled to discover how little I really learned. If Mr. Hansell harboured strong views about anything, he was careful to conceal them. Although I was in his care on and off for more tha
n 12 years, I am today unable to recall anything brilliant or original that he ever said.” And then he adds, “The British constitutional monarch must, indeed, stand aloof from and above politics. As a device for preserving the Crown as a symbol of national unity while divesting it from abhorrent forms of absolutism it is a remarkable example of the British genius for accommodation. But one effect of this system, which is perhaps not so well understood by the public, is the handicap imposed upon a British Prince, who, while obliged to live and work within one of the most intensely political societies on earth, is expected to remain not merely above party and faction, but apolitical!”

  In view of this, the choice of Mr. Hansell was, perhaps, all for the best. To have placed a Prince in the direct line of succession under the tutelage of a teacher of strong convictions might have created future conflicts for both the Prince and the British constitutional system.* But Mr. Hansell’s weak personality and the cloistered atmosphere in which he taught were in total opposition to any necessary preparation David required to become a Naval cadet.

  He had never been without the company of his siblings. This had helped allay the consuming fear of the dark he had suffered since the days of Mary Peters’s nannyship. David leaned strongly toward his mother’s love of languages and the arts—subjects not included in the education of a Naval cadet. But his father loved the sea and ships, and would hear of no other training for his elder son than the Royal Navy.

  For three days David struggled with test papers at a narrow wood desk in a public examination hall in London, along with a hundred other hopeful applicants (the first time he had ever been in a public situation without members of his family or his own staff). He was one of sixty-seven boys who passed into the Navy. His father personally supervised the fitting of his blue jacket with its brass buttons and cadet’s white collar tab and Naval cap, and then—on a May day of unseasonable wind and rain, and to David’s surprise—accompanied him on the train from London to Portsmouth to begin his Navy life. Despite all his determined effort to be brave on his departure from Marlborough House, the young boy was unable to control his tears as he said goodbye to Bertie and Mary. He clung to Lala Bill an inordinately long time and burst out crying again when Finch—who had tended his every need for almost thirteen years—handed him his packed dressing case.

  Father and son rode in the Royal train along the seacoast, Prince George in splendid good humour as he recounted stories of his own early Naval life. In Portsmouth, they transferred to the Admiralty yacht for the short journey across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, where the Royal Naval College had been established at Osborne. (Shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, King Edward had given his mother’s home to the nation.) Ironically, David, for the next two years of his life, was to live in a collection of prefabricated buildings grouped around the old Osborne House stables, which had been converted into a mess hall and classrooms opening into the stable yard. The construction of new buildings had not yet begun. The flimsy structures used for the dormitories in which the cadets slept had in six years so deteriorated that holes could be kicked in the outer walls with very little effort and no injury. The greatest problem in these Spartan, uncomfortable quarters was to keep warm. From the service and luxury of his different homes, David’s orbit of living now shrank “to a hard iron bed and a black-and-white sea chest” at its foot that contained all his possessions. Thirty boys occupied each barren hut. Reveille was at six o’clock in summer and six-thirty in winter, proclaimed on a “blaring bugle.” Moments later, the cadet captain would rout the sleepy boys out of their beds “with one peremptory pull of the gong above his bunk.” Three minutes were allowed for prayers said on bony knees on a cold, hard floor. Then a gong would peal twice and everyone would run to the long trough at the far end of the hut, where they were expected to brush their teeth in one minute. The boys were then given ten minutes to use one of the two toilets and to return to their beds and make them. The gong sounded three times, the signal that they must strip off their nightclothes and fold them away, and, naked and shivering, be herded to the end of the dormitory, where they had to plunge into icy water for a communal bath in a green-tiled pool.

  Rather than helping him, David’s princely position made him the instant target for ragging by other cadets, a situation for which he was not prepared. After a week he was given the nickname of Sardine because “he’s too puny to be a Wale[s].” Not one boy in his quarters befriended him. His Royal parentage, his restrained personality and well-trained manners, and the fact that he had never attended a school branded him a “freak” and placed him—perversely—in a position of contempt, especially where the older boys were concerned. For the first weeks at Osborne, David observed the traditions of ragging that the college set for new boys; he stepped into the gutter when senior cadets passed him on the street and scurried out of common rooms when they appeared at the door. When one day he raised a faint protest and sauntered, not hurried, from the room, one of the boys grabbed him and said, “You are the Prince, are you? Well, learn to respect your seniors.” He was then made to stand at attention while one of them poured a bottle of red ink over his head, turning his golden hair scarlet before it dripped down his neck and ruined one of the few white shirts he possessed. “A moment later,” he was to recall, “the bugle sounded off quarters, and the seniors dashed away to fall in their ranks leaving me in a terrifying dilemma. I couldn’t go to quarters dripping red ink—that would have been telling on the seniors—but, if I missed quarters, I was for the Commander’s Report the next morning.” He chose the latter, slinking away “under the cover of darkness” to wash the ink from his hair as best he could and to get a clean shirt out of his sea chest. For being late to quarters, he was sentenced to spend his leisure hours for the next three days “alternately going round the stable yard at the double carrying a rod across the back of my shoulders and facing the paint work for an hour at a time in the seamanship room.”

  Punishment was meted out cruelly at the college. That same term, Mervyn Alexander-Sinclair, the son of one of the two Commanders of the school, was in David’s class. Mervyn suffered from chronic tardiness and was sentenced for this misdemeanor by his father to “six official cuts” with a bamboo rod, clearly an extreme and harsh punishment. A Naval doctor was called to be in attendance. But even more inhumane than the severity of the sentence was the fact that the beating was carried out in the presence of all the cadets, fallen into two ranks and made to stand at attention while the boy was strapped to a gymnasium “horse” and the cuts administered by a sturdy physical-training petty officer. The offender was so severely beaten that he spent a fortnight in the school sick bay and his father was relieved of duty shortly after the incident. But the atmosphere of Osborne, which had once meant exciting days at Cowes and marvellous family get-togethers for David, had taken on a Dickensian quality.

  David suffered nightmares that he fought desperately to conceal, and he often went hungry, for princely training had made him unable to eat as fast as the rules demanded and leftovers were stealthily commandeered by seniors. Once, he was so ravenous that he took the chance of severe punishment by feigning sickness, hoping he might get some food to eat in sick bay. Luckily for him, the matron—though she admonished him for his deception—took him into her kitchen and “with true Irish sympathy” prepared for him a sumptuous tea of buttered eggs, fresh bread, and jam.

  His fears almost reached their limits when one day he saw a group of seniors advancing on him in an empty classroom where he had returned to retrieve a forgotten book. They cornered him by the window and pushed his head through and then, guillotine fashion and with accompanying jeers and realistic sounds, banged the window down on his neck, “a crude reminder of the sad fate of Charles I and the British capacity to deal with Royalty who displeased.” His neck bruised and pain searing through his head, he still waited until the seniors’ retreating footsteps had died away before crying out, finally attracting a sympathetic passerby who released him,
“fortunately” with his head intact.

  None of this did he write his parents. Nor did he confide his unhappiness to them when he came home to York Cottage for Christmas of 1907, bringing with him his school report in a sealed envelope. He handed it straightaway to his father, who apparently did not read it that day. But “the next morning Finch appeared with a long face and a chilling summons to the Library.” He had received a bad report—which he had not expected. After a harsh lecture, Prince George announced that he had engaged a master from Osborne, one of the boy’s most tyrannical teachers, to work with him during the holidays, and as an added punishment, his hours at the Big House were curtailed.

  With imponderable logic, Prince George had decided that the Navy was the best education for his elder son, despite his lack of aptitude or love for the sea. He insisted, with equal determination, Bertie should follow that career. Christmas 1907, Bertie was told that in a year he was also to enter the Royal Naval College. Because he was terribly weak in mathematics, a tutor was brought in to prepare him for his examinations. Despair overwhelmed him; the subject was simply too difficult for him, and ultimately he dissolved into tears of frustration.

  “You must ... remember now you are nearly 12 years old and ought no longer to behave like a little child of 6,” his father wrote Bertie, at the same time warning his tutor, “you must be very strict and make him stick to it and do many papers.”

  On November 5, 1908, Bertie took his oral examination, which was a painful experience. He stammered so badly the board agreed that “he was the most shy and nervous candidate ever to come before them.” Still, he managed to survive the ordeal without breaking down or backing off. A month later he took the written examination and passed in all subjects most credibly except for geometry, “where he seems to have been below average.” January 15, 1909, Bertie followed David to Osborne, but because of school tradition, the brothers were not allowed to associate or talk.