by Theo Aronson
3
Of the many ways in which King Edward VII differed from Queen Victoria, one of the most valuable was in his treatment of his heir. From the very start of his reign, the King ensured that his only son, the thirty-five-year-old Duke of York, was closely involved in the workings of the monarchy. And not only did the King initiate him politically, he encouraged him, he sympathized with him, he drew him out. Unlike his worldly father, Prince George was a shy and self-doubting young man; it is greatly to the father's credit that the son's personality was not permanently undermined by the contrast between them. The Duke of York could so easily have become even less confident than he was; instead, the King's warm and tactful handling brought out the best in him.
'My room opens out of Papa's and is on the ground floor,' wrote the Duke proudly from Windsor to his wife, Princess May, in 1901, 'then I have got a writing table next to his in his sitting room, he wished it so. Sidney is now doing boxes while I am writing this. Fancy that being possible in dear Grandmama's time; anyhow it shows that Papa and I are on good terms with each other.'
They were indeed. The King not only understood his son, he loved him dearly, while the Duke of York was no less devoted to his father. In later life, when speaking of his relationship with his father, King George V's voice was quite likely to break and his blue eyes to spill with tears.
Evidence of these strong emotional family ties was provided when, in March 1901, the Duke and Duchess of York set off from England to open the Australian Federal Parliament. At a farewell luncheon aboard the Ophir at Portsmouth, Queen Alexandra and her unmarried daughter, Princess Victoria, cried throughout the meal, while the King could scarcely propose the toast for sobbing. The Duke of York, no less upset, only just managed to reply before he and Princess May hurried down to their cabins for 'a good cry'.
Despite this melancholy start, the Australian tour was a great success. Prince George gained more confidence and Princess May, away from the brittle gaiety of King Edward's circle, blossomed into a charming, assured and attractive personality. The cruise on the Ophir did not, however, permanently cure her shyness; back in England, in November 1901, Princess May proved as reserved as before.
Just a week after his return from Australia, Prince George was proclaimed Prince of Wales. The King had delayed conferring this title on the grounds that it was still too closely associated, in the public mind, with himself. Queen Alexandra, too, was loath to relinquish the title by which she had been known for almost forty years. She proved even less amenable when it came to giving up her home, Marlborough House. At first, in her wayward fashion, she would not hear of moving to Buckingham Palace at all. That, she assured Prince George, would finish her. 'All my happiness and sorrow were here, very nearly all you children were born here, all the reminiscences of my whole life are here, and I feel as if by taking me away a cord will be torn in my heart which can never be mended again.'
None the less, the King finally prevailed upon her to make the move and Prince George, Princess May and their four children moved into a redecorated Marlborough House.
The first great state occasion which the couple attended as Prince and Princess of Wales was the State Opening of Parliament in January 1902. The second was to be the Coronation. A date had been set for 26 June 1902. By the middle of that month the streets of London were hung with red and gold and almost every boat train was delivering yet another foreign prince or colonial deputation. In superb weather carriage processions clattered to and from the stations and all day visitors from the provinces surged through the decorated streets.
One thing only rendered the prospect less than perfect: a rumour that the King was not very well. He seemed tired, depressed and irritable; he looked more bloated than ever. On 16 June he was too ill to attend the ceremonial review at Aldershot; the next day he could not take part in the drive from Windsor to Ascot. On 23 June he drove, in agonizing pain, through cheering crowds from Paddington Station to Buckingham Palace, but was unable to attend the banquet and reception that evening. By now his doctors had diagnosed appendicitis but the King was proving an extraordinarily difficult patient. He would not hear of a postponement of the Coronation. He swore that he would go through with the ceremony even if it killed him.
This show of determination was all very well but by now the chances were that, unless he were operated on immediately, he would be dead before he reached the Abbey. And as the operation for appendicitis, in 1902, was still an extremely dangerous one, there was a strong possibility that he would die anyway. However, an operation was at length agreed upon and the Coronation postponed.
The operation, performed on 24 June, was a complete success. The King, who on the second day was sitting up in bed smoking a cigar, made a rapid recovery and spent three weeks convalescing aboard his yacht off Cowes. A new date for the Coronation was set for 9 August by which time, unfortunately, the majority of foreign royalties had already left London. The ceremony was none the less spectacular for that. The crowds were enthusiastic; the decorations were superb; the processions were magnificent. Within the Abbey itself there were one or two inevitable, but minor, mishaps. Princess Beatrice dropped her prayer book and sent a wealth of gold plate clattering across the flagstones; the Duchess of Devonshire tripped over her train and fell headlong down some steps, thereby losing her coronet but not, fortunately, her red wig. The Marchioness of Londonderry, having decided to repair to the lavatory before facing the lengthy ceremony, remained there for such a long time that a queue of fidgeting peeresses outside the door became increasingly alarmed. They became distinctly more so when they heard the Marchioness calling out for a pair of forceps. What could she be doing? Emerging, triumphant if dishevelled, the Marchioness explained that while bending to adjust her train, her tiara had gone clattering into the pan. She had needed the forceps to retrieve it.
The King, looking slimmer for his illness and his corsets, played his part with great dignity and obvious enjoyment. He had felt, he assured someone afterwards, not the slightest fatigue. 'Marvellous, isn't it?' he exclaimed. The Queen, in a dress of golden Indian gauze, shimmering with diamonds and pearls, and trailing a richly embroidered, ermine-lined violet velvet train, looked radiant. As the crown was placed on her towering false coiffure, the peeresses, in a graceful, simultaneous movement, placed their coronets on their own heads. Of all the impressive scenes in the Abbey that day, this was the one which most impressed the King. 'Their white arms arching over their heads,' he afterwards said, had resembled 'a scene from a beautiful ballet.'
Amidst scenes of gratifying acclamation, the newly crowned King and Queen drove back to Buckingham Palace. Here Queen Alexandra took off her dazzling crown and, much to the delight of her Greek nephews, allowed them to try it on.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
'An Invincible Joie de Vivre'
1
Of all King Edward VII's nieces, the one who would come to resemble him most in his lust for life and his sense of royal showmanship was Princess Marie of Romania. It is not surprising that she was amongst those royalties who had managed to remain in London for the postponed Coronation. Not for the world would she have missed this particular piece of pageantry. With her husband, the pliant Crown Prince Ferdinand, in tow, Missy of Romania flung herself into the round of Coronation festivities. She was determined to make the most of her temporary escape from the petty tyrannies of der Onkel – King Carol of Romania. To her, this Coronation summer was all enchantment.
It was during these opening years of the century that Marie of Romania began developing into a personality in her own right; to gain her reputation for frivolity, flirtatiousness, wilfulness and theatricality. She was in her late twenties by now, with her looks in full flower. 'I thought Missy a dream of beauty,' the Empress Frederick had written a year or two before her death, 'I have seldom seen so lovely a creature, so graceful and with such complexion and hair. She is a perfect picture.' Of those ravishing blond looks, no one was more conscious than Missy herself. 'I fe
lt all eyes following me, male as well as female,' runs one typical observation, 'and it was not a disagreeable sensation.'
It certainly was not. Marie found the contemplation of her beauty a highly agreeable sensation. Once, when one of her nephews asked for her portrait, the gratified Marie summoned a lady-in-waiting to bring over a silver salver piled high with photographs of herself. Slowly, one by one, she scrutinized them. For each, she had an appreciative comment: 'This one is divine'; 'The beauty of that profile'; 'The nobility of that pose'; 'Oh! those eyes!'
To make certain that her beauty did not pass unnoticed, Marie let slip no opportunity of drawing attention to herself. She dressed in the showiest fashion – in black tricorn hats, in red shoes strapped à la grecque, up to the ankle, in diaphanous, lavishly embroidered gowns. At a ball at Devonshire House during Coronation summer, the train of her gauzy white dress was so long that it wrapped itself round the waltzing figure of her cousin, Crown Princess Sophie of Greece, and brought her crashing to the ground. The incident could hardly have improved the always edgy relationship between the two of them. To the unpretentious Sophie, the flamboyant Marie was anathema. 'If that woman doesn't leave tomorrow,' she once threatened a few hours after Missy's arrival in Athens, 'I will kick her out of the palace myself.'
From having always dressed fashionably, if somewhat daringly, Marie gradually developed a style of her own that had very little to do with fashion. She affected a bizarre, picturesque, self-consciously romantic way of dressing: she moved in a cloud of veils, cloaks and trailing draperies. 'I had an imaginative and daring mind . . .' she assures us, 'and adopted my own ways and style, regardless of criticism, rather dangerously indifferent to anything but my passion for beauty.'
She adored being photographed in her outré costumes. Sometimes it would be in a flowing chiffon dress amidst the part-Byzantine, part-Art Nouveau splendours of her palace at Cotroceni, outside Bucharest. At others it would be in Romanian national costume in the woods around the country palaces at Sinaia. Yet again it would be on horseback, in the red tunic, black braid and gold buttons of her hussar uniform, against the vast plains of her adopted country.
'The Crown Princess of Romania outshone all the other Princesses in beauty and grace,' wrote one of the guests at a garden party at Buckingham Palace that season, 'clad in a Byzantine-looking gown with an immense cross of jewels as only ornament.'
Hand in hand with this exotic appearance went what Missy called 'a profound and invincible joie de vivre' but which others tended to give less complimentary names. Having come to appreciate the particular qualities of Romania, Marie began to enjoy herself. She discovered that Bucharest was not nearly as dull as she had once imagined, and there was a magic about the Balkan countryside that set her always vivid imagination aflame. She visited gypsy encampments, she organized lavish picnics, she gave spectacular balls, she joined the late afternoon parade on the 'Chaussee' in the capital. She was never happier than when out riding. In her specially designed riding habit she was forever galloping across the landscape. The reluctant King Carol had been induced to create her honorary chief of a cavalry regiment and she carried out her military duties with characteristic zest. Her regiment, she says, adored her.
Nor, it seems, were her soldiers the only ones in whom she inspired such devotion. 'I was too vital, too magnetic also, not to attract friendship . . .' she protests, 'wherever I went, I carried with me this air of enjoying life, everything was interest and stimulation for me, so I quite naturally also stimulated those with whom I came in contact.' That she saw herself as a femme fatale there is no question. One of her most difficult tasks, she sighs, was to keep her clouds of admirers at bay. She discovered that the best way of dealing with some ardent, lovesick young officer was to pretend that she did not in the least understand what he was trying to tell her. That, she says, soon took the wind out of his sails.
It was hardly surprising that this indiscreet, high-spirited and unconventional granddaughter of Queen Victoria was soon the talk of Europe. Her aunt, the Empress Frederick, once claimed that the 'beautiful and gifted' Missy was like a butterfly who, 'instead of hovering over the flowers, burns her pretty wings by going rather near the fire!' Missy herself always (and not without a touch of pride) claimed that her reputation for fast living was greatly exaggerated. 'The wildly, worldly life that I have been supposed to live is a legend invented by those who vaguely heard rumours about my fine clothes and so-called eccentricities. For I was 'la Princesse Lointaine', living in a country near the Rising Sun; this fired the imagination, as the moment a woman is spoken of as "pretty" people want to know all about her, she excites interest more than anything else and gossip would have it that I was tremendously gay . . . .'
There was certainly some justification for this gossip: Marie was living in one of the gayest capitals in Europe. Romanians were fond of referring to Bucharest as the Paris of the East, and if the city was no match for Paris in some things, it was more than a match in others. Its atmosphere was notoriously licentious. A French education, says one tight-lipped Englishman, gave Romanians 'an external French veneer which concealed their natural Oriental characteristics'. Morals were loose, divorce was easy, extra-marital affairs commonplace. Princess Marie would have had to have been exceptionally strong-minded not to have fallen for the attractions of this free-and-easy existence. Her cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, went so far as to debar 'that English harlot' from his court.
About her domestic life there was nothing very exciting. Her husband Nando remained, as the Empress Frederick once put it, 'as unprepossessing as ever': a dull, diffident creature, completely under the thumb of his uncle, King Carol. The King even insisted on choosing the governess for their children; a woman who lost no time in reporting to King Carol that Princess Marie was having an affair with a 'dark-eyed lieutenant'. Whether or not she was, one does not know, but the King warned Marie to have nothing more to do with the man. The indignant Missy insisted that the tale-bearing governess be dismissed. This King Carol refused to do and Marie promptly quitted the country. She made for Coburg. Not until she received news of a near-fatal illness of her eldest son did she return to Romania.
By the year 1902, Missy and Nando had three children (they were to have six in all): Carol, Elizabeth and Marie. Missy was a devoted and, of course, highly emotional mother. Because she had suffered under the restrictive régimes of her own mother – the autocratic Princess Marie of Edinburgh – and of King Carol, Marie tended to be too indulgent with her own children. Her eldest son, Carol, would one day become the controversial King Carol II of Romania. Her second child, Elizabeth, would marry the eldest son of Princess Sophie and so become Queen of the Hellenes. The third child Marie, known as Mignon, would one day become the Queen of Yugoslavia.
Between Marie and her husband's aunt, the Queen of Romania, there was very little rapport. Indeed, one suspects that the poet-queen, Carmen Sylva, now returned from exile, resented the presence of this younger and hardly less exotic creature. 'Ach lieb Kindchen,' the Queen would exclaim, pressing the younger woman to her bosom in an extravagant gesture. 'Sit down here at my feet and listen, darling.' Yet the Queen's fulsomely expressed affection never prevented her from a ruthless interference in the upbringing and education of Marie's children. Missy claims that she often went to bed in tears because of the Queen's meddling in the affairs of her household.
Returned from exile, Carmen Sylva had once more resumed her pose as 'the soul of poetry, the Muse, the inspirer'. In her flowing, shapeless, vaguely medieval clothes, she presided over a court of young people – aspiring painters, poets and writers – to whom she would hold forth in her high-flown way, regardless of whether or not they understood what she was saying. 'Nothing,' says Marie, 'was ever taken calmly, everything had to be rapturous, tragic, excessive or extravagantly comic.'
The Queen was always full of hare-brained schemes and new enthusiasms. She was forever championing imagined geniuses or encouraging ill-matched lovers. She dreamed
of building a great white city where all the blind of the world would congregate, listening to music and learning crafts. On the end of the pier at the entrance to the Romanian port of Constanza on the Black Sea, she built herself a quaint little wooden house. At dead of night, with her white robes and long silver hair streaming in the wind, the poet-queen would stand on her balcony, waving a long white scarf at the passing ships. Through a megaphone, and above the screeching of the gulls, this ghostly figure would call out poetically phrased greetings and blessings to the doubtless startled crews.
It was against the iron will of King Carol, however, that the independently minded Princess Marie most frequently beat her wings. Able to handle both her complaisant husband and the romantically minded Queen, she could never get round der Onkel. He remained always unsmiling, unsympathetic, unemotional. She could take no step without his permission; she was allowed no say in even the most trivial matters. He was forever criticizing her behaviour. 'I was considered too English,' she complains, 'too free-and-easy, too frivolous, I was too fond of dress, of riding, of outdoor life, I was too outspoken, I had not enough respect for conventions or etiquette.' He, who was so Germanically self-disciplined and correct, looked upon her as die Fremde – the Stranger – a dangerously liberated creature, 'distressingly English in tastes and habits'.
That, indeed, was at the heart of the trouble. Marie might not, in many ways, have been a typical English princess, but in others – in her frankness, her emancipation and her lack of bigotry – she was. 'Don't you understand,' she once shouted at the King during the course of one of their many rows, 'that I am a transplanted tree, that my roots were torn out of my own ground?'
For no matter how much Marie had identified herself with her new country (and, in years to come, she was to be completely identified with it) she could never forget that she was Queen Victoria's granddaughter. She had only to return to her native land to feel overwhelmed by her love for it. 'The sensation of coming home, to what is no more "home", is both wonderful and unbearable,' she once wrote, 'it seems to tear apart your heartstrings, to fill you to the very brim with all the tears you never dared weep, with all the world-wide Sehnsucht – yearning – you never dared express.'