by Theo Aronson
Within the palace itself there was an awareness that something must be done to counteract this anti-monarchist chill in the air. 'We must endeavour', wrote the King's private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, 'to induce the thinking working classes, socialist and others, to regard the Crown, not as a mere figurehead and as an institution which, as they put it, "don't count", but as a living power for good . . .'3 And George V's assistant private secretary, Clive Wigram, suddenly woke up to the fact that more use should be made of the hitherto ignored press to advertise the tireless wartime activities of the King and Queen.
For there was no doubt that the royal couple had fully identified themselves with their country's struggle. Although George V was not actively involved in the military conduct of the war, he followed its progress with great interest. On five occasions he crossed to France to spend a few days with the army; on one of these he was thrown from his horse and severely injured. At home he dedicated himself to an apparently ceaseless round of gruelling duties: reviewing troops, inspecting naval bases, conferring decorations, touring munitions factories and visiting hospitals.
But not even these conscientiously undertaken tasks could counteract the rumours that the King's support for the Allied cause was less than whole-hearted. As much as any other sovereign, George V suffered for his mixed ancestry. By the year 1917, with victory over Germany seeming as remote as ever, his German blood – and alleged German sympathies – had become the subject of malicious slander. H.G. Wells spoke out against the 'alien and uninspiring court'; to which jibe the King answered, 'I may be uninspiring, but I'll be damned if I'm alien.'
Yet George V took the criticism of his German ancestry seriously enough to come to a momentous decision: he would change the name of his House. He had ascended the throne as a member of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (although, on being consulted, the College of Heralds thought that the name might more properly be 'Wettin' or even 'Wippcr'). In any case, it was agreed that the King should adopt the uncompromisingly British name of 'Windsor'. This was done and the new name was proclaimed on 17 July 1917.
All in all, this royal name-change was a supremely nationalistic and patriotic gesture. No less than someone like Tsar Ferdinand, who had felt that his duty to Bulgaria overrode his duty to his Bourbon ancestry, was George V putting his country before his dynasty.
Nor was the change confined to the King's immediate family. Various Teck and Battenberg princes re-emerged with such mellifluously Anglicised surnames and titles as Mountbatten, Cambridge, Athlone, Milford Haven and Carisbrooke; while those two grand-daughters of Queen Victoria, the princesses of Schleswig-Holstein, became, as the King robustly put it, 'Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Nothing'.
The change did not please everyone. Some regarded it as a betrayal of monarchical clanship; it has even been described as 'a loss of nerve'4 on the part of George V. Prince Alexander of Teck, who had been metamorphosised into the Earl of Athlone, announced himself 'furious' at the change. 'He thought that kind of camouflage stupid and petty,' said his wife, Princess Alice. And another dynastically conscious observer, the Bavarian nobleman, Count Albrecht von Montgelas, considered that 'the true royal tradition died on that day in 1917 when, for a mere war, King George V changed his name.'5
But perhaps the wittiest reaction came from the Kaiser. The title of that well-known Shakespearean play, he scoffed, was to be changed to 'The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha'.
The King whose kingdom had been reduced to a mere twenty square miles of his country's soil – Albert of the Belgians – had little reason for fearing a revolutionary upheaval. It was true that, in occupied Belgium, the Germans were doing their utmost to divide the country along racial lines by encouraging Flemish nationalism but, in the main, the Belgians remained loyal to their absent King. To the members of all political parties, Albert had become the symbol of Belgian resistance, their hope for a better future.
Among the soldiers, crowded on to that strip of featureless Flemish landscape behind the sandbags and barbed-wire entanglements of the front line, the King was immensely popular. The royal family – Albert, Elisabeth and their three children – had established themselves in a doleful little villa in the seaside resort of La Panne, eight miles from the front line and a stone's throw from the French frontier. The house was spartan in the extreme. When the visiting Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, once asked Queen Elisabeth how she could bear to go on living, for year after year, in such discomfort, the Queen explained that to make the house more comfortable would be to accept it as home. She would not allow herself to believe that they would go on living there much longer.
From this villa, the royal couple would emerge each day to carry out their self-imposed duties. Although the war had become largely one of attrition, not a day passed without some action along the Belgian front, often slight, occasionally massive. Danger was as prevalent as boredom, frustration and despair. The King and Queen faced all these trials with equanimity. Like Marie of Romania, similarly established in a corner of her country on the far side of the Continent, Elisabeth devoted herself to nursing the wounded. It was she who had encouraged the doctors in the setting up of field hospitals and who, faced with the lack of even the most elementary medical facilities, had simply telephoned Harrods in London to order whatever was needed. Harrods had fulfilled the order in a matter of days.
The Queen visited the hospitals every day. Sometimes she assisted the doctors, at other times she comforted the wounded. Her calm in the face of danger always astonished the men. Whether in the wards or in the trenches, she would continue her rounds, seemingly impervious to bursting shells. Once, when a hospital was struck and set ablaze, she refused to be whisked away to safety. She worked tirelessly, helping the nurses get the patients out of the burning building. When the raid was over and the wounded accommodated elsewhere, the doctor in charge complimented her on her courage. In what way, answered the Queen with a wry smile, had her courage differed from that of the nurses?
Dressed in white, Elisabeth would spend hour upon hour with the wounded. She would move from one bed to the next, smiling, questioning, comforting. Dying soldiers would call to her as to a mother; many died in her arms. The face of their little Queen was the last thing to be seen by many a Belgian soldier.
As the years went by, so more and more did Queen Elisabeth become an object of veneration. She was the sun, it has been said, of that grey winter. So small, so frail, she seemed to epitomise the spirit of her country's struggle. She became 'The Heroine of the Yser', 'The Mother of the Army', 'The Soul of Belgium'. To the men, bogged down for year after year in the hell of the trenches, it seemed in no way excessive when it was predicted that their Queen would one day be known as Saint Elisabeth of Belgium.
Yet not even the gloom and danger of her surroundings could repress the Queen's startling individuality: the romantic, theatrical, bohemian side of her nature. She was, after all, a member of the artistic and eccentric Wittelsbach family. In the grounds of that bleak villa, she had had a movable wooden pavilion erected. Here she would entertain those poets, musicians and artists in whose company she always took such delight. The interior of the bungalow, says one visitor, the French writer Pierre Loti, was entirely hung with pale blue Persian silk, relieved with a touch of rose-pink and decorated with a large design representing the portico of a mosque. Its furniture consisted solely of divans, piled high with brightly patterned cushions. Here, in her animated, sharp-witted fashion, Elisabeth talked to him about the religions of the East. And there were not many courts in Europe in which the religions of the East could be discussed with any degree of intelligence.
In a rather different way, King Albert was also winning the devotion of the troops. By now this shy, gauche and diffident sovereign had emerged as a man of immense stature: brave, resolute, realistic. Yet for all his worldwide reputation, Albert remained self-depreciating, with a solemn, preoccupied air and a painfully slow way of expressing himself. To read through the war di
ary he kept during these dismal years on the Yser is to come to some appreciation of his strength of character. He emerges from the scrawled pages as simple, as modest, as prudent, as sensible and as brave as legend has always claimed him to be. There are no histrionics, no delusions, nor is there any vindictiveness; the tone throughout is practical, highlighted by that vein of cynicism which ran so strongly through his nature.
In spite of all temptation he remained level-headed, refusing to indulge in what he called the 'exaggerated patriotism' of some of his fellow monarchs, or in the defeatist attitudes of some of his colleagues. So honest himself, he found the rhetoric of some of the Allied politicians highly distasteful. 'What does the struggle for right mean?' he asked himself; or 'a fight for civilisation', or 'to go on to the end'?
Albert's war aims, from first to last, remained constant. He was dedicated to defending Belgian independence and Belgian neutrality. He was seeking neither glory nor revenge nor gain. He was simply fighting for the right of his country to live in peace, free of any international entanglements. With those members of his government, by now established at Le Havre in France, who cried out in terms of vengeance, of eventual territorial aggrandisement at the expense of Germany, he would have no truck. He was too good a European, and too much of a monarch, to join in the clamour for a war of annihilation.
When the Allies compiled their joint answer to President Wilson's note on their war aims, Albert resisted his government's pressure to include Belgium in the answer. Belgium's war aims were not the same as France's or Britain's, he explained to his ministers; they were not fighting to destroy Germany. As a result of his stand, Belgium sent a separate answer to Wilson.
These same, very human qualities were evident in the King's dealings with his soldiers. 'In the name of so-called liberty,' he afterwards wrote, 'we asked of free men, in the twentieth century, much more than what was ever extorted from the serfs in the Dark Ages – and they gave it.'6 Conscious of this, he did what little he could to lighten their load. No aspect of their daily lives was too trivial for his notice. Were they warm enough? Did they get enough vegetables? Were they bothered by rats?
Stories of his unheralded appearances amongst them, so different from the carefully orchestrated visits of sovereigns like Wilhelm II or George V, were legion. 'Close the bloody door!' shouted a private as his monarch, with characteristic awkwardness, came shuffling into a wooden hut. 'Careful with the sandbags!' barked another when the King looked in to see what he was doing. On asking a soldier the time and finding out that the embarrassed man had no watch, Albert saw to it that one was delivered to him the following morning.
One day, on walking past the villa in which one of his officers was billeted, Albert noticed the young officer sitting in the garden with his wife. As this was contrary to regulations and as it was too late for the young woman to escape into the house, the officer hurried forward to make his excuses.
'Your Majesty has caught me out,' he stammered. 'I am here with my wife.'
'And I also am here with mine,' answered the King quietly.
On another occasion, when two soldiers were wandering about the dunes in search of rabbits, they spotted an officer trudging towards them.
'A general!' exclaimed one, preparing to bolt.
'No,' answered the other, greatly relieved, 'only the King.'
Albert returned their salutes gravely and strode on across the sands.
Perhaps the most telling tribute to King Albert's fortitude comes from his biographer, Emile Cammaerts. 'Those who saw La Panne during the years of waiting', he afterwards wrote, 'will never forget that tall and austere figure on that last strip of Belgian shore confronted with stormy clouds and foaming sea, watching with calm courage during that long vigil, with all the regal splendour stripped from his Court, and almost all his land torn from his friendly grasp, alone against the blind elements and blinder injustice of man, with no comfort but his Queen, brought as low as any Sovereign could be brought by the forces of destiny, and as high as any man can be raised by the conviction of his right and the faith in his cause . . . '
One afternoon, when the King was visiting the trenches to ask the men if there was anything they needed, one soldier, bolder than the rest, asked in return, 'And you, Sire, don't you want anything?'
For a moment the King was silent. Then, in his halting way, he gave his answer. 'I should like to go back to Brussels,' he said.
As one, the men moved forward and crowded around him.
'Let us take you there!' they cried.
Seldom has the royal instinct for self-preservation, already brought into play on the fall of the Russian throne, been more graphically illustrated than in George V's handling of the matter of the Tsar's future.
On first hearing of Nicholas II's abdication, the King was all sympathy. 'Events of last week have deeply distressed me,' he wired to the Tsar on 19 March 1917. 'My thoughts are constantly with you and I shall always remain your true and devoted friend, as you know I have been in the past.'
Wilhelm II was hardly less distressed. Regarding the Tsar as a fellow monarch rather than as an enemy, he gave secret orders that the Russian imperial family should be allowed to pass freely through the German lines and that a special train and guard of honour should be placed at the Tsar's disposal. Through the offices of Christian X of Denmark, he offered the Russian Provisional Government safe passage for any warship carrying the imperial family through the Baltic. Wilhelm's brother Henry, as Commander-in-Chief of naval forces in the Baltic, was told to make sure that any ship flying the Tsar's personal standard was to pass unmolested. 'I have done everything humanly possible for the unhappy Tsar and his family,'7 claimed the Kaiser.
For it was generally assumed that the Tsar would be allowed to share the fate of most other fallen monarchs by being sent into exile; and that – again like many another fallen monarch – this exile would be spent in Britain.
But it was not going to be quite so simple. Although the Russian Provisional Government was ready enough to get the imperial family away to safety, the Soviet – that more militant assembly of soldiers' and workers' deputies – was determined that the Tsar should be kept imprisoned. So while the imperial family and a band of loyal attendants remained under guard in the echoing rooms of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the Provisional Government considered how best to spirit them out of the country.
George V's telegram to Nicholas had strengthened the conviction of Russia's new foreign minister that it must be to Britain that the imperial family should go. He asked the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, to approach his government on the matter. In a series of increasingly urgent telegrams, the ambassador begged the British government to agree to the Russian request. Finally, after a meeting attended by George V's private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, on 22 March 1917, Lloyd George decided to grant asylum to the imperial family. His decision had not been taken lightly: the Liberal prime minister had very little sympathy for the fallen Tsar. But as he had the highest regard for the new revolutionary government in Russia, and as the request had come from them and not from the Tsar himself, Lloyd George agreed to it.
The King's reservations, expressed through Lord Stamfordham, seem to have been confined – at this stage – to the practicalities of the business. George V did not want to be saddled with the expense of accommodating and keeping the Tsar and his court. None the less, he concurred with his government's formal offer of asylum.
Within a matter of days the King had changed his mind. On 30 March, in a letter to the government, he mentioned his reservations. In spite of 'a strong personal friendship for the Emperor' and a willingness 'to do anything to help him in this crisis', George V now doubted the wisdom of offering him sanctuary. Politely, the government waved the sovereign's objections aside. The invitation had already been extended; it was too late to withdraw it. But George V refused to be fobbed off. In letter after letter, each more adamant than the last, he begged the government to reconsider the i
nvitation.
In the end he was successful. The government was persuaded to withdraw its offer.
Why was George V so determined to deny asylum to Nicholas II? After all, the Tsar and Tsaritsa were not only his fellow sovereigns and allies, but his first cousins. There were several reasons. The King realised that, whatever the truth of the matter, it would generally be assumed that he had been the one to initiate the offer of sanctuary. And no matter what he might think of them, there was no denying the fact that, in the eyes of many of George V's subjects, the imperial couple were far from blameless victims of the revolution. In left-wing circles, Nicholas II was regarded as a bloodstained tyrant whose fall from power had been richly deserved. Why, they wanted to know, should this reactionary autocrat be given a home in freedom-loving Britain? No sooner had the offer of asylum been made public than the King was inundated with letters from people 'in all classes of life' objecting to the proposal.
Already, a few months before, the King had been subjected to considerable abuse because of his sympathetic attitude towards his other first cousins, Constantine and Sophie of the Hellenes. Strong exception had been taken to the fact that George V had recently entertained two of Constantine's brothers. According to Allied propaganda, the entire Greek royal family were vehemently pro-German. And so, it was widely believed, was the Russian Tsaritsa. When the British government, egged on by the King, suggested that the imperial family be granted asylum in France instead, the British ambassador in Paris replied in no uncertain terms.
'I do not think that the ex-Emperor and his family would be welcome in France,' he wrote. 'The Empress is not only a Boche by birth but in sentiment. She did all she could to bring about an understanding with Germany. She is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic and the ex-Emperor as a criminal from his weakness and submission to her promptings.'8