by Theo Aronson
The annual state ball was another affair never to be forgotten. Brand Whitlock, the American ambassador, always remembered 'the dancers under the brilliant chandeliers, the jewels and the gleam of white shoulders, and the gold lace of the officers of the Guides – their trousers cherry red; and old generals whose breasts were heavy with orders; and suddenly the King, in black evening dress . . .'
More typical, though, is the vignette given by someone who was once received in audience by King Albert. As the King never knew how to bring an audience to a close, the two of them were making strained conversation when the guest, glancing up at a looking-glass behind the King's head, saw the reflected image of the Queen peeping through a doorway. She was making frantic signs to her husband to dismiss his guest.
'You must go,' said the King abruptly, and then added, as a means of softening the brusqueness of his order, 'but don't forget your handkerchief.'
As the guest, in complete bewilderment, looked down at the scrap of lace-trimmed fabric on a nearby table, a voice suddenly sounded from the doorway.
'It's my handkerchief,' said the Queen.2
Who would have thought that, in a few years time, this awkward monarch would have proved himself a hero, and that this spirited queen would have come to be regarded as little less than a saint?
The first important royal guest to be received by Albert and Elisabeth was Kaiser Wilhelm II. In October 1910 the Kaiser paid a state visit to Brussels to attend the Exposition Universelle.
Like his late uncle, Edward VII, Wilhelm II enjoyed few things more than a full-blown state visit. And Brussels, replanned and embellished by Leopold II to the point where it was known as 'Little Paris', made the perfect setting for those parades and processions in which the Kaiser took such delight. The buildings were gratifyingly a-flutter with German flags, the crowds were flatteringly enthusiastic, the speeches were suitably congratulatory. Wilhelm II rhapsodised over the glories of Belgian art and architecture and had a great deal to say about the country's commercial and industrial enterprise.
In his eagerness to win Belgian goodwill, the Kaiser laid frequent stress on the ties which united the royal houses of Belgium and Germany. King Albert's family, the Saxe-Coburgs, were German; Queen Elisabeth was a Bavarian; King Albert's mother, the Countess of Flanders, had been born a Hohenzollern princess. So it was almost incomprehensible to the German Emperor that King Albert, through whose veins flowed the proud and autocratic blood of the Hohenzollerns, should pay so much attention to the opinions and aspirations of his subjects.
'Why grant so many audiences, and to men of no account?' he one day asked Albert. 'You have your policy – it is for them to follow it.'
'My country and I, we make our policy together,' explained the King.
'But we Hohenzollerns', protested the Kaiser, 'are the bailiffs of God.'
Such robust sentiments could have done little towards calming Albert's already considerable fears. For ever since his accession, the Belgian King had become increasingly apprehensive about the aggressive attitude of his powerful neighbour. He appreciated, to the full, how very vulnerable his country would be in the event of a future war between the great powers.
Wedged between those two implacable enemies, France and Germany, Belgium formed what was usually called 'the crossroads' or, more frighteningly, 'the cockpit' of Europe. Some years after the establishment of the kingdom of Belgium in 1831, the country's independence – and neutrality – had been guaranteed by the great powers. How much longer it could hope to maintain this neutrality was an open question.
With the countries of Europe becoming ever more firmly locked in alliances and sympathies, it seemed unlikely that strategically placed Belgium could remain unattached much longer. She was merely biding her time, it was assumed, until she saw which group of powers offered the best chance of victory in some future struggle. France suspected her of being in secret alliance with Germany, and Germany suspected her of being in secret alliance with France. In that golden age of clandestine diplomacy – of verbal agreements over the schnapps in gilded chancelleries, of secret clauses drawn up in the tilting saloons of royal yachts, of unofficial discussions under the linden trees of some elegant spa – few could believe that King Albert had not concluded some undercover alliance.
That Belgium was determined to maintain her neutrality was a simple truth that Europe's more Machiavellian politicians and diplomats refused to credit. To King Albert, neutrality was something positive, something to be cherished, protected and defended, not something to be bartered. Any Belgian approach to one of the rival power blocs, no matter how tentative, would give the other side all the excuse it needed to violate this neutrality. There is no doubt that an agreement with the Entente Powers – Britain and France – to whom Albert naturally inclined, would have benefited Belgium enormously, but the King remained stubbornly and meticulously impartial.
Nor was there any doubt that it was the braggardly Wilhelm II whom Albert feared most. Sceptical of Germany's intention of respecting Belgian neutrality, the King had begun, from the very outset of his reign, to urge the strengthening of Belgium's army and defences. Now, during the Kaiser's state visit, Albert was able to give voice to his apprehensions. In his speech of welcome, the Belgian King assured his royal guest that he had every confidence in the Kaiser's peaceful intentions. To this plain hint, Wilhelm II made a fulsome but noncommital reply.
But before leaving Belgium the Kaiser, flushed with the success of his visit, assured Baron van der Elst, of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that Belgium had nothing to fear from Germany. 'You will have no grounds of complaint against us,' he said expansively. 'I have a great affection for your King who, through his mother, belongs to our House. I will allow no one to do him harm. I understand your country's situation perfectly.'3
3
King Emperor
'A VERY NICE BOY' was how Kaiser Wilhelm II once described King George V to Theodore Roosevelt. The Kaiser was then fifty-one, the King forty-four. Yet always allowing for the German Emperor's tendency to patronise, there was something boyish about the new British King. Compared to his late father, the assured, urbane and cosmopolitan Edward VII, George V appeared diffident, unsophisticated, insular. He did not even have his father's commanding physical presence. Short, slender, with frank blue eyes and a neatly trimmed beard and moustache, George V looked what he was: an honest, unpretentious man of simple tastes and limited interests. His public manner was unsmiling; his conversation bluff.
The new King was singularly ill-educated. At his accession, admits one of his more well-disposed biographers, the forty-four-year-old George V had not yet attained 'the normal educational standard of the average public schoolboy at leaving age'.1 He wrote with painful slowness; he was fluent in no foreign language. Incapable of philosophic or abstract thought, indifferent to the arts, science or even politics, the King shared the country interests and conservative outlook of those Norfolk squires among whom he had passed so much of his adult life. Shooting and stamp collecting were his chief recreations.
Yet George V was no fool. A youth spent in the Royal Navy (he was known as the Sailor King) had inculcated him with several valuable characteristics: self-discipline, orderliness and consistency. To these he brought his own fund of common sense. It was, and is, more important for a monarch to be dependable and dignified than clever or original. Unimaginative and unintellectual George V might have been, but he was a man with a strong character, an organised mind and a fully integrated nature. To the end of his life, he was to retain the unswerving sense of duty of a naval officer.
From the Navy too, had come the King's somewhat gruff, quarterdeck manner. In private, George V was known for his booming voice, his hearty laugh, his bantering tone and his salty turn of phrase. He had a quick temper and an impressive vocabulary of oaths. Yet all this naval bluster masked a compassionate nature and a kind heart. George V was a well-intentioned man whose innate shyness made him appear more brusque than he
actually was.
His private life was eminently respectable. His marriage to Princess May of Teck in 1893 had been very successful. Although the match had been one of convenience rather than love, the couple had come to care for each other deeply and to suit each other admirably. Both were reserved and somewhat inarticulate, with a taste for domesticity and a belief in the bourgeois virtues of morality and industry. Queen Mary might have been more intellectually curious, more culturally aware and more socially enlightened than her husband, but she had long ago adapted her tastes and personality to his. By the year of George V's accession, the couple had six children–five boys and a girl – with ages ranging from fifteen to four. This, too, helped give the British throne a reassuringly domestic aura.
The same respectability characterised George V's court. The somewhat raffish air of Edward VII's day – the late-night card parties, the self-made men, the drifting cigar smoke, the mistresses – had been replaced by an almost middle-class decorum. 'The King's domesticity and simple life are charming,' wrote Lord Esher, that éminence grise of the previous reign. 'The King allows people to sit after dinner, whether he is sitting or not. There is no pomp . . . There is not a card in the house. '
The King's favourite home remained York Cottage – the cramped, unprepossessing house on the Sandringham estate in which he had lived as heir apparent; his favourite way of spending an evening was to dine at home with the Queen. An almost naval precision ordered his day. Punctual, methodical and punctilious, George V was happiest when bound by a set routine and surrounded by familiar faces. Compared to the restless glitter of the Edwardian court, it was all very wholesome, very peaceful, very correct.
But it was all still magnificent. George V might have had simple tastes but he was enough of a king to appreciate that he must maintain a certain standard of regal splendour. 'There are arguments', as the political analyst Walter Bagehot put it, 'for not having a Court, and there are arguments for having a splendid Court, but there are no arguments for having a mean Court.' This George V understood very well. Indeed, no capital in Europe – not the barbaric grandeur of St Petersburg, the showy militarism of Berlin nor the old-fashioned pageantry of Vienna or Madrid – could match the self-confident majesty of the British court.
'Nothing', wrote one of the King's Continental cousins, 'is more irreproachably perfect in every detail than the King of England's Court and Household, a sort of staid luxury without ostentation, a placid, aristocratic ease and opulence which has nothing showy about it. Everything is run on silent wheels that have been perfectly greased; everything fits in, there are no spaces between, no false note. From the polite, handsome and superlatively groomed gentleman-in-waiting who receives you in the hall, to the magnificently solemn and yet welcoming footman who walks before you down the corridor, everything pleases the eye, satisfies one's fastidiousness . . .'2
And if the King, in his somewhat old-fashioned clothes, never looked anything less than immaculate, the Queen, in her equally old-fashioned dresses, never looked anything less than majestic. Although no taller than her husband (each was five foot six inches tall) her upright carriage and towering hats gave an illusion of height. It was due, almost entirely, to her husband's conservative tastes that Queen Mary clung to the more opulent fashions of her early married life. Even with his untutored eye, says one of the King's secretaries, he could see that the dress which the Queen had chosen especially for her arrival in fashion-conscious Paris in 1914 was hopelessly out of date.
But this hardly mattered. Queens need not be fashionable any more than kings need to be intellectual. To see Queen Mary in one of her highly individual brocade dresses, blazing with diamonds was 'to understand the meaning of the word regal'.3 The Queen might have been stiff, she might have been uncommunicative, she might even have been a little dull, but she looked every inch a queen.
So, if life within their private or at least semi-private homes – York Cottage and Balmoral Castle – was relatively unpretentious, life in their official homes – Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle – was lived on the grandest of scales. The couple moved in a highly mannered world of private secretaries, lords-in-waiting, gentlemen ushers, equerries, ladies-in-waiting and hundreds upon hundreds of servants. Gradually the King and Queen mastered their natural shyness, their public nervousness and their preference for a quiet, countrified life, to play their parts with dignity and style. On all the great public occasions they stood out as the assured and unmistakable symbols of majesty.
King Emperor of the greatest empire the world had ever known, George V was yearly proving himself capable of filling what his grandmother, Queen Victoria, used to call 'the greatest position there is'.
One of the ways in which George V differed most fundamentally from his late father, Edward VII, was in his attitude to Continental Europe. Edward VII had been a European to his fingertips; George V was British through and through. The new King had very little interest in the politics, culture or way of life of the Continent; he detested foreigners. Lamentably insular, his poor command of French and German made him more insular still.
'It is hardly credible', wrote an astonished British consul-general from Berlin on the occasion of the King's visit in 1913, 'that Royal George cannot speak a solitary word of German, and his French is atrocious.'4
But the King did not mind. All his interests lay with Great Britain and her empire. His years in the navy and his subsequent journeys to various British dominions, colonies and dependencies had made him very conscious of his country's imperial, as opposed to its European, role. The King felt able to identify himself far more readily with Britons living abroad than he could with those Continentals so beloved of his father. George V saw himself, above all, as a British king.
It was ironic, then, that he should have reigned during the period when the Coburg dynasty, from which he sprang, reached its zenith; when his relations sat on almost every European throne. Among his first cousins he could count the German Kaiser, both the Tsar and the Tsaritsa of Russia, the King of Norway, the Queen of Spain, and the crown princesses of Sweden, Romania and Greece. The kings of Greece and Denmark were his uncles; their heirs were his cousins. The Dowager Tsaritsa of Russia was his aunt. The Queen of Norway was his sister. The kings of Belgium, Portugal and Bulgaria were all his cousins at various removes. Yet more of these cousins had married or would one day marry into the reigning houses of Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia. The kingdoms, principalities and duchies that went to make up the German empire were chock-a-block with his relations. And when they were not his, they were Queen Mary's. He was even related to that most outlandish of dynasties, the Bonapartes.
If, with his dislike of travel, his lack of diplomatic gifts, his mistrust of foreign foods and his want of foreign languages, George V did not relish the idea of following in his father's Continental footsteps, he did appreciate that he had a constitutional duty to pay some state visits. But when his foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, suggested that he visit Paris first, the King dug in his heels. With France being 'only a republic', he argued, it must come after the three leading Continental monarchies – Austria–Hungary, Germany and Russia.
In spite of George V's professed determination to dedicate himself to the affairs of the British empire, he was to become increasingly enmeshed in European politics. By the time of his accession, in 1910, Britain had finally abandoned her nineteenth-century position of 'splendid isolation' and, with the blessing of Edward VII, had come to understandings with both France and Russia. Whether King George V liked it or not, his country was now well and truly committed to Europe.
The first monarch to be received by George V was, inevitably, Wilhelm II. The King had invited the Kaiser to attend the unveiling of the memorial to their grandmother, Queen Victoria, erected outside Buckingham Palace, during the second week of May 1911.
Of all the Continental monarchs, his first cousin, Wilhelm II, was the one with whom George V was most closely involved. Both Edward VII and Queen Alexandra
had disliked Wilhelm intensely: the King because he considered his nephew to be a conceited, bombastic, mischief-making megalomaniac; the Queen because she hated all Prussians. Although George V had tended, when younger, to echo his parents' opinion, the passing years – and his own accession – had made him more tolerant of the Kaiser's impetuosity.
For his part, the Kaiser was vastly relieved that his bête noire, his worldly Uncle Bertie, had been replaced by what he imagined to be his more pliable Cousin Georgie. 'He is a thorough Englishman and hates all foreigners,' explained the Kaiser good-naturedly to Theodore Roosevelt, 'but I do not mind that as long as he does not hate Germans more than other foreigners.'
Now, in his letter thanking his cousin Georgie for the invitation to the unveiling of the Queen Victoria Memorial, the Kaiser was at his most fulsome. 'You cannot imagine how overjoyed I am at the prospect of seeing you again so soon and making a nice stay with you,' he wrote. Never, he swore, would he forget the hours spent at the dying Queen Victoria's bedside; or that it was in his arms she had died.
'Those sacred hours have riveted my heart firmly to your house and family, of which I am proud to feel myself a member. And the fact that for the last hours I held the sacred burden of her – the creator of the greatness of Britain – in my arms, in my mind created an invincible special link between her country and its people and me, and one which I fondly nurse in my heart. This your invitation, so to say, sanctions these ideas of mine. You kindly refer to the fact of my being her eldest grandson; a fact I was always immensely proud of and never forgot.'5
George V's reaction to this effusion is not recorded.
The unveiling ceremony, on 16 May 1911, was a splendid occasion. Preceded by colourfully costumed Beefeaters and flanked by Gentlemen-at-Arms, King George and the Kaiserin, followed by the Kaiser and Queen Mary, walked in slow procession from Buckingham Palace towards Sir Thomas Brock's dazzlingly white monument. In bright spring sunshine, to the thunder of guns, the clash of military bands and the cheering of the crowd, the King pulled the cord which unveiled the statue of his redoubtable grandmother.