Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  * * *

  The King and Queen were to travel to India on the Medina.* The latest addition to the Peninsular and Oriental Fleet, the Medina was built of steel, weighed 13 tons, and could accommodate 750 passengers. The Royal party consisted of twenty-four Court and family members, which included Queen Mary’s brother Dolly, Duke of Teck since his father’s death. David had hoped he might be allowed to join his parents, but his father prescribed that he should remain in Great Britain to prepare himself for his entrance at Oxford. On November 11, 1911—a black, forbidding day—David, disappointed though he was, travelled to Portsmouth with his younger brother, Georgie, to see their father and mother embark.

  A luncheon party was given aboard the Medina for the large gathering of relatives, government officials, and foreign diplomats who had accompanied the King and Queen to Portsmouth. Queen Alexandra’s frail appearance was a shock to everyone. At half-past two, the well-wishers prepared to leave. Queen Mary supported Motherdear as she led her to the gangway. Almost the very moment that the Medina was eased from the quay by her three tugs, the storm that had been threatening all day broke with particular violence. Queen Mary hurried inside for protective cover from the gale-force winds, but the King stood on the bridge. “I shall never forget that moment,” he wrote his mother almost immediately, “when I saw you waving from the window of the railway carriage as we slowly steamed away from you into the wind & rain.”

  The last sight that Queen Mary had of the British shore was the bunting that decorated the ships of the home fleet lined up in the port and a “mushroom bank of shining wet umbrellas.”

  For five days, Queen Mary was unable to leave her cabin as the Medina lurched and rolled its way through heavy storms. Even King George, who had never been known to be seasick, was ill, as was most of the crew. Finally, once they had left Gibraltar and were in warmer and smoother waters, the journey became more pleasant. A Marine band played at eleven in the morning, after lunch, at dinner, and later in the after-saloon on deck. The men held sports competitions, and Queen Mary reread a good deal of Kipling and a prodigious number of volumes on various Indian subjects.

  On December 2, a suffocatingly hot day, the sea like burnished brass, the Medina landed at the Apollo Bander, Bombay. The King and Queen stepped onto Indian soil to the sound of 101 guns. The crowds of people waiting for hours in the intense heat of the brightly decorated streets cheered lustily upon seeing the King but were not sure what to make of Queen Mary. For her first public appearance in India she had chosen a gown of yellow-flowered chiffon, slashed by the royal blue of the Garter ribbon, and on top of her tousled hairdo she wore a platelike straw hat heaped with artificial roses to match her dress. Tousle and hat added an alarming eight to ten inches to her height and caused her to tower over King George in his white uniform of the Admiral of the Fleet.

  Their reception in Bombay had been impressive. Four days later, en route for Delhi, the Imperial train had taken them past one wayside station after the other bedecked in gay bunting, smothered in brilliant fuchsia bougainvillea, and crowded with dark men in snowy-white turbans and women swathed in gaudy sarees of “vivid pink or turquoise blue or acid green.” Yet nothing had prepared them for the grandeur and splendour of their official entry into Delhi through the Gate of the Elephants, its great stone namesakes guarding its arched portals.

  “It was a wonderful sight,” Queen Mary wrote Aunt Augusta. “George rode and I followed in a carriage with the Mistress of the Robes & Lord Durham—Very grand & I felt proud to take part in so interesting & historical an event,just the kind of thing which appeals to my feelings of tradition—you will understand.”

  However, King George wrote his mother that “there were crowds but they were not particularly demonstrative.” The trip’s historian, Mr. John Fortescue, attributed the chill of this reception to the King’s having entered Delhi on a horse and not an elephant, as was customary for Royal visitors to do. And since his uniform was not much grander than Lord Hardinger’s or Lord Crewe’s, he was not recognised.

  A vast canvas city, covering forty-five square miles and housing a quarter of a million people, had been set up for the Durbar on the wide marshy plains beside the Jumna River. Many of these tents were magnificent and belonged to the majarajas and their suites. But the most luxurious of all accommodations had been constructed for the King-Emperor and his Consort. Six great lavish tents had been raised and connected to form the Royal apartments. Queen Mary’s bedroom and boudoir were lined with vieux-rose silk, heavy with embroideries and carpeted with priceless Oriental rugs. The King’s private rooms glittered with gold cloth and jewelled and gold vessels. The Royal suite also had a drawing room, an anteroom, an office, and a dining room that connected with the state reception tents.

  Ceremonies, processions, and tournaments filled the five days immediately preceding the coronation Durbar. Later, Queen Mary commented regretfully to Lord Esher that she saw no Indian women in private audience and that none of the Rajputs she visited admitted her into their intimate interiors. Queen Mary did receive a deputation of Indian ladies headed by the Maharani of Patiala, who presented her with “a large square of emeralds of historic interest, engraved and set in diamonds, and a necklace and pendant of emeralds, set in rosettes of diamonds.” The Maharani then read a short message of homage, in which she explained that it would be a mistake “to suppose that simply because the women of India live in purdah, that they are strangers to that mighty process of evolution which manifests itself beyond the limits of its four walls.”

  Much of the emotion toward the inferior position of Indian women that she had felt in her last visit to India welled up in Queen Mary at this time, and she replied that she felt “increasing solicitude for those who live ‘within the walls.’ ” Then she added rather eloquently in words of her own and from an address she had written, “The jewel you have given me will ever be very precious to my eyes and whenever I wear it, though thousands of miles of land and sea separate us, my thoughts will fly to the homes of India, and create again and again this happy meeting and recall the tender love your hearts have yielded me. Your jewel shall pass to future generations as an Imperial heir-loom, and always stand as a token of the first meeting of an English Queen with the ladies of India.”

  Before leaving England, Queen Mary had prevailed upon Lord Esher to speak with the King about her being given the Order of the Star of India, which she desperately wanted to wear on the bodice of her gown at the Durbar. King George was initially opposed to the idea, but a few days before the Durbar, he changed his mind and presented it to her “in a regular little installation,” and she was tremendously pleased.

  The Durbar took place on December 12 at noon, with a relentless midday sun beating down on the two concentric amphitheatres—the larger one constructed to accommodate a hundred thousand spectators, and the smaller and grander one the princes, rulers, and notables of the Indian Empire. The two amphitheatres were joined by a dais two hundred feet wide. In the very centre of this construction was a series of marble step-like platforms. On the top stood two solid-silver thrones encased in gold, placed upon a cloth-of-gold carpet and beneath a golden cupola sixty-eight feet from the ground, which assured that the Royal couple would be seen by all.

  A great crisis arose just before the King and Queen, in their heavy Imperial robes of velvet and ermine, were to leave their camp for the arena, seated side-by-side in an open-top state barouche. Two veteran chuprassi, dressed in scarlet and gold, had been chosen to hold the cumbrous Imperial state umbrellas over the heads of the Royal couple to protect them from the murderous sun. However, the umbrellas proved too heavy for the old men to carry. A very rickety awning made of flexible bamboo canes and gold-and-silver cloth was hastily concocted over the carriage and wired on to its sides. As Their Majesties drove into the arena—their arrival heralded by a salute of 101 guns—the whole thing wobbled horribly. The strange beauty of the Durbar ceremony more than made up for this poor beginning.


  The following day, King George wrote his mother that the Durbar “was the most wonderful & beautiful sight I have ever seen & one I shall remember all my life. We wore our robes & I the new crown made for the occasion. May had her best tiara on... I can only say it was most magnificent, the clothes & colours were marvellous... I had six pages & May had four to carryall our robes, they were either young Maharajas or sons of Maharajas & all wore beautiful clothes of white & gold with gold turbans & they did look nice.”

  Besides her most distinctive and “best tiara” (in the centre of its fifteen interlaced circles of diamonds hung a large cabochon emerald which could be interchanged for fifteen magnificent drop pearls), the badge of the Star of India was suspended from a ribbon across her bodice. She wore the dazzling jewels given her by the ladies of India, as well as the famous emeralds that had once belonged to her grandmother, the Duchess of Cambridge. This suite of jewels consisted of the perfectly matched emeralds in her tiara, a diamond-and-emerald necklace with two drops of uneven lengths—one a large pear-shaped emerald and the other a marquise diamond cut from the Cullinan—emerald-and-diamond earrings, two bracelets, a brooch with an emerald of immense size and superb quality, and an elaborate stomacher also of emeralds and diamonds. “Mama’s emeralds appearing there amused and pleased me,” her Aunt Augusta wrote. “What would she have said to her grandchild’s Imperial Glory?”

  On December 16, after ten days in Delhi, King George went off for a fortnight to shoot in Nepal, and Queen Mary travelled to Agra and toured Rajputana. They were thus separated for Christmas, a fact that did not disturb the Queen greatly since her schedule was filled with many interesting activities—but did distress the King. On December 22 he wrote her from his shooting camp in Nepal, “Each year I feel we become more & more necessary to one another & our lives become more & more wrapt up in each other’s. And I am sure that I love you more each year & am simply devoted to you & loathe being separated from you even for a day.” He added that he was “very proud of being your husband & feel that our coming here to India as the first Emperor & Empress has certainly proved itself to be what I always predicted, a great success & one which will have far-reaching effects & I trust lasting effects throughout this great Empire.”

  On December 29 each of them travelled to Bankepore, where their trains were shunted together. The Queen was then escorted through the cars to meet her husband, and they disembarked together to greet the crowds that had been waiting since the previous night for a glimpse of the Royal couple. From Bankepore they went to Calcutta (“too European for my taste,” Queen Mary wrote Aunt Augusta), and then to Bombay, where the Medina was waiting to take them on their homeward journey.

  As King George read his farewell speech, he broke down and began to cry. “I simply couldn’t help it,” he wrote his mother. “It flashed across my mind that I would never see India again and the thought was too much for me.”

  And en route home from Malta, he wrote her: “What joy that there are only 9 more days before we meet! I shall then feel proud that our historical visit to India has been accomplished, successfully, I hope, & that I have done my duty before God & this great Empire & last but not least, that I have gained the approval of my beloved Motherdear.”

  King George’s relationship to his mother remained that of the obedient and adoring son. He never chastised her for her tardiness or other small foibles. She simply refused to address her letters to him, “to the King,” which was proper, and still called him “Georgie.” “Characteristically feminine,” he remarked of this. In church he could be seen interrupting his own concentration to find the correct page for her in the prayer book. Her mother-in-law’s lack of reverence for the Monarch was always a source of great irritation to Queen Mary, but she held her silence.

  Footnotes

  * A reference to the 1901 Durbar when Lord Kitchener was in India. It was not attended by the Monarch.

  *On board the Medina in the Royal party were Lord Crewe; Lord Stamfordham (Arthur Bigge); Sir Edward Henry, Chief of the Metropolitan Police; Sir James Dunlop Smith, political officer; Lord and Lady Shaftesbury; the Duke of Teck; Lord Durham; Lord Annaly; Sir Derek Keppel; Captain Godfrey Faussett; Sir Charles Cust; Lord Charles Fitzmaurice; Major Clive Wigram; Sir Havelock Charles; Mr. John Fortescue, historian; and Mr. Jacomb Hood, official artist. The Medina carried 32 officers, 360 petty officers and ratings, and 210 Marines, all under the command of Admiral Sir Colin Keppel, with Captain Chatfield as his flag captain.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Great Coal Strike of 1912 that greeted King George and Queen Mary on their return from India brought industry to an alarming standstill. The miners were demanding a minimum wage of five shillings a day for men and two shillings a day for boys. Negotiations broke down four weeks after the start of the strike, and Prime Minister Asquith, using unprecedented dictatorial powers, forced acceptance of the Minimum Wages Bill over the protests of Parliament. The King gave it his Royal Assent a fortnight later.

  Queen Mary took the plight of the miners during this period “very much to heart” and wrote Aunt Augusta: “If only one could act, but like this one feels so impotent, & all this time our blessed & beloved country is in a state of stagnation & misery—Most people seem to go on as if everything were in a normal state, but we feel the whole thing too much to take it lightly.”

  The sudden revolt of factory workers and miners against disgraceful living conditions, long working hours, and low wages gathered momentum. Rapid social changes were occurring, bringing grave danger to the status quo. Politicians were out of touch with the things that really mattered, but the King and Queen were doing what they could to redress the balance by giving the people greater access to the Monarch. Queen Mary took tea with a miner’s wife in South Wales, and together the Royal couple visited the mines of stricken Yorkshire, the railway works at Crewe, and the potteries of the “five towns” nearby. To a public that could recall the grand, open landaus of Queen Alexandra and King Edward, the human touch of King George and Queen Mary was “a revelation.”

  Fully aware of the discretion required in the Consort of a constitutional monarch, Queen Mary never revealed her political feelings in public. But she did make them known to her husband, and in the coal-strike crisis she adamantly blamed the Government. “I think you are a little hard on the Gov’t,” he chided her in a letter. “They have really been doing all they can to find a solution to this most serious state of affairs.” She answered on a conciliatory note: “You scold me for blaming the Gov’t, well, I do think the unrest is due to their extraordinary tactics in encouraging Socialism all these years & in pandering to the Labour Party; but I do quite agree that Gov’t has behaved splendidly the past week in averting what might have been a national disaster.”

  Her husband quickly wrote to assure her: “I quite understand what you mean when you say you blame the Gov’t about the strikes, yes no doubt through their very stupid & unwise speeches last year they have done much to put class against class, but now that the strikes [have] begun you admit they have behaved well, that is what I mean to say.”

  No sooner had the coal strike been settled than the railways struck. And while all this was going on, the London suffragettes had been conducting a relentless campaign of smashing plate-glass and other windows with hammers concealed in their muffs. Despite her intense feeling about women’s rights, Queen Mary could not sympathise with the suffragettes. “Those horrid Suffragettes burnt down the little tea house (modern) close to the Pagoda in Kew Gardens,” she wrote Aunt Augusta, adding in a later letter, “There seems no end to their iniquities.”

  “Can these females not be shut up on some island?” Aunt Augusta asked in reply.

  When the King and Queen returned from India, Mr. Hansell was still in charge of the Prince of Wales’s education. But with his new status and title, and after four years in Naval College and time at sea, David no longer stood for being ordered about “in quite the same way as before.”

  Bertie an
d Harry were both away at school and came back only for the Christmas holidays. John was, of course, living in his cottage with Lala Bill. That left David and Georgie at York Cottage. Although Georgie was eight and a half years his brother’s junior, he was surprisingly mature, and the two boys were most compatible. They laughed at the same things, and Georgie, only ten years of age at the time, was intelligent and had an understanding nature. David was able to confide many things to his younger brother that he had not been able to say to anyone else, certainly not to Bertie, to whom he felt more protector than confidant. In the six weeks that they were alone at York Cottage, David and Georgie became close friends.

  The two brothers would go together in the evenings up to the Big House to see their grandmother and play patience or do jigsaw puzzles with her. David noted that suddenly she seemed “quite an old lady.” Queen Alexandra still retained the delicately chiseled features and the grace of manner that had made her such a beauty in her youth. She did not often leave Sandringham and lived there with her daughter, Toria (who was now more subservient to her mother than ever); her old devoted friend and inseparable companion, Charlotte Knollys; and the elderly Sir Dighton Probyn, V.C., who was her Comptroller. To David, Sir Dighton, “with his white beard flowing over his chest,” was a heroic personage for having once led a famous Indian cavalry regiment called Probyn’s Horses during the Indian mutiny. Old now and dedicated with respectful adoration to “the Beloved Lady,” as he affectionately referred to Queen Alexandra, he did not have the same bravura in the field of finance as he had had on the battlefield and was unable to control her extravagant gifts to charities and supplicants.