by Day, Malcolm
Furthermore, the Prince refused to spend within the budget agreed by the government. His racing activities alone cost £30,000 a year. The enormity of his debts, which escalated to £640,000, caused great embarrassment at a time when the nation’s coffers were already depleted by the Napoleonic Wars.
Deal struck
A strategy was hatched by Prime Minister William Pitt. In return for scrapping his debt, the Prince should wed again (the first marriage being deemed illegal). This time it would be to an attractive, fashionable young woman of impeccable pedigree, his German cousin Princess Caroline.
But the Prince was not happy. Commissioners were appointed to watch over his expenditure in every detail. As the commentator William Cobbett remarked, ‘The prince was placed under a guardianship and control as severe as if he had still been an infant, or something even lower in the scale of intellectual capacity.’
On top of this, he did not like his new wife, who turned out to be as spendthrift as her husband. The ploy backfired. The couple separated, but the Prince’s parties continued as riotously as ever, probably as much to irritate his poor father as for any desire for pleasure.
Regency turn
Curiously, once his father was forced to relinquish power of rule and the Regency set up in 1811, the Prince’s outlook began to change. As nominal head of state, he now felt too grown up – at nearly 50 – to continue in the role of enfant terrible. Instead, the Prince Regent directed his energies into art and architecture.
From his partnership with a dashing designer in John Nash came forth a new style of architecture now known as Regency. He channelled his flair for flamboyance and frippery into buildings, notably the onion-domed Royal Pavilion in Brighton. With Nash they redesigned great swathes of the West End of London, creating Regent Street and Regent’s Park, with its ‘wedding-cake’ terraces. They also remodelled Buckingham Palace.
However, by the time the Prince Regent was crowned king, as George IV in 1820, he was a spent force. The heady lifestyle of his past was over and he withdrew into isolation at Windsor.
Sick and troubled by insomnia, the new King doused himself with large doses of cherry brandy and laudanum to soothe his gout. When George died in 1830 Britain was to lose one of the most controversial kings in its history. As The Times newspaper recorded, ‘There was never an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king.’
Surprised to be King
Sober William IV is welcome relief
The third son of George III was not expected to become king and so was not trained for monarchy. At the age of 13 he was sent to sea and there he acquired a nautical directness and taste for strong language. He was known for being tactless and earned the original nickname ‘Silly Billy’.
William had spent most of his life as a private man, with none of the indulgence his elder brother George IV enjoyed. He lived quietly with his mistress and actress who mothered their ten illegitimate children. When his other elder brother, Frederick (the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’) died, and George IV’s only child Charlotte had died in childbirth, William suddenly found himself next in line to the throne.
Furthermore, the present king, George IV, was seriously ailing. William had three years to prepare to receive the crown but was certainly chuffed at the idea. He is said to have spent months practising his royal signature, ‘William R’.
Although 64 when he did accede, William was in good shape. Being essentially good-natured and compliant, his reign was mostly uneventful. In agreeing to all the government proposals put to him over the Reform Bill of 1832, the King was said by Prime Minister Earl Grey to have behaved ‘like an angel’.
William’s common-sense attitude to most things helped raise the public estimation of the monarchy. If nothing else, he had rescued it from the depths of scandal to which his brother had plunged it.
Propping Up The Queen
Victoria and her men
Queen Victoria’s vital statistics are: married 21 years, widowed 40 years, reigned 64 years; lived 82 years. The longest reigning monarch England has ever had may also have been the most emotionally troubled. An unhappy childhood, stifling mother and inconsolable bereavement at the loss of Prince Albert undermined the confidence of this most austere Empress of India.
Intimate pictures of Victoria and Albert bely the power struggle between them
Despite her strong sense of sovereignty, in which she alone was ruler of this nation and empire, Victoria always needed a man at her side for support. And it had to be a beautiful one at that. Lord Melbourne was her prime minister in the early days of her reign. In this witty and charming politician she found the kindly advice and almost flirtatious attention that pleased her.
Victoria was constantly in need of reassurance. A deep insecurity stemmed from her earliest days. Her father, Duke of Kent, died when she was just eight months old, and her mother, Princess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, believed that Victoria should be shut away from the world and kept under the strictest supervision. She was not even allowed downstairs at home in Kensington Palace without the governess holding her hand.
Becoming queen
The strict code of morality and manners that were to be the hallmark of Victoria’s later character were inculcated in this stifling domestic atmosphere. When at table as a young girl, she had to sit with a holly leaf between ruff and chin to keep her face respectfully upright.
Victoria’s loathing for her mother did not vent itself until the day she became queen. Alone after the coronation ceremony, she turned to her and asked, ‘And now, Mamma, am I really and truly queen?’ Her mother affirmed that she was. ‘Then, dear Mamma,’ Victoria continued, ‘I hope you will grant me the first request I make to you as queen. Let me be by myself for an hour.’ This snub was probably as much as her daughter could muster at the time, but it reveals a deep resentment. |
Offering comfort and flattery, Lord Melbourne was able to help Victoria overcome her self-doubts and nervousness, easing the transition from Princess to Queen. But despite the elevation in her status, Victoria continued to suffer from the suffocating relationship with her mother, a ‘dreadful state’ she confessed, and one that could only be remedied by marriage.
Albert of Germany
An initial determination not to marry altered on meeting her cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Soon after their second encounter, three years later, Victoria was apparently smitten by Albert’s lean masculine beauty. She wasted no time and proposed to him, as was her prerogative.
Though uncomfortable in English surroundings, Albert vowed ‘to train myself to be a good and useful man’. Scholarly and diligent, he was more at home with books than people; his shyness and inability to master the English language did nothing to help his confidence either.
And what exactly of their love? Their wedding night ended with an early morning walk, hardly the endorsement of a flourishing passion. The Queen is said to have adored Albert, yet he showed none of the signs of requiting that love.
In reality he suffered miserably from her dominance – she had insisted on keeping the word ‘obey’ in his marriage vow – and was refused any real power in state affairs. The business of ruling was hers alone. She allowed him to blot her papers for her, as a concession, but did not make him consort until 1857 when the last of their nine children was born – and only then when she realised that her son Edward, in whom both parents were disappointed, would otherwise succeed to the throne.
The frustration Albert felt is apparent from his diary. Once he wrote of his difficulties: ‘She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches of suspiciousness, want of trust, envy, etc.’ This does not sound like a loving relationship.
Role reversal
With her increasing confinement for child-bearing, Victoria came to cede more and more power to Albert, causing a curious reversal of roles. She became submissive and withdrawn, he overbearing, coldly rational and unforgiving of her frequent outbursts. Victoria suffer
ed from depression, Albert from emotional isolation.
Having finally yielded so much to her supportive husband, on whom she came to depend utterly, Victoria was devastated by his death from typhoid fever in 1861.
The Queen wore widow’s weeds for the remaining 40 years of her life. She refused to have her room changed in the slightest detail, except for the fresh flowers she strewed over his bed every day. Even five years after his death, Victoria excused herself from opening Parliament because she did not wish to be the ‘spectacle of a poor, broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking, dragged in deep mourning.’
John Brown
Alas one more man would come into her life, in the unexpected form of John Brown, a no-nonsense Scottish Highlander who referred to her as ‘wumman’. He too became her prop, which she needed now more than ever before. Nobody was allowed to speak to her, except through Brown as her intermediary. Such was her dependence that she even tolerated his heavy bouts of whisky drinking.
Pleasure Seeker
Edward VII epitomises age of excitement
With the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Britain entered a new era. For many it was an age of unbridled pleasure. The restraints the old queen had symbolised were now thrown off in an access of exuberant recreation.
No one epitomised this new mood better than the new king, Edward VII, despite his 60 years of age. His obvious enjoyment of the good things in life – enormous cigars, racehorses and attractive women – set the tone of social life across the classes.
The first motorcars were being driven, music halls were packed with loud audiences around Piccadilly Circus. The invention of the radio and wind-up gramophones brought stirring patriotic songs by Elgar into Edwardian parlours. And throughout the country the earliest images on celluloid flickered across new cinema screens. The King himself was the first monarch to win the Derby.
Despite a sense of fun that Edward brought to the court, he was also capable of diplomacy and a certain amount of work – despite the academic laziness he exhibited as a youth.
Indeed he had long shed his early playboy image to pursue peace. His visits to France were well received and paved the way for the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Astute and perceptive, Edward was one of the few monarchs in Europe who could foresee the coming storm clouds that would burst into world war.
Hanover Dropped
George V endeavours to keep onside in wartime strife
George V was unfortunate in having to lead his country through the First World War. He was doubly unfortunate to have German ancestry and relatives in the enemy camp.
When anti-German feelings were running at their highest in 1917, George decided enough was enough. Great fondness he might have had for his cousin Wilhelm II, but duty to the nation came first. In a momentous act that brought greater change to the monarchy than at any time since the Glorious Revolution, the King made two radical revisions.
George V enjoyed taking the helm aboard his favourite royal yacht, Britannia
Firstly he renamed the dynasty ‘Windsor’, thus symbolically removing their attachment to the German Hanover. By the same token any aristocrats with Germanic names were required to change theirs, for example Battenberg to Mountbatten.
The second alteration to the monarchy was still more radical. Not only did George change the name, he dropped the Hanoverian custom that marriage partners should have aristocratic status. From now on British monarchs were free to marry whoever they liked, as long as they were not Catholic or divorced.
In one stroke George had both anglicised and broadened the monarchy. A royal wedding would now become a marriage of love, not a political affair, and the royal family would be taken as a model of family life. This, as future generations would discover, was a mistaken ideal.
The king himself was therefore the last English monarch to have an arranged marriage. His mother, Queen Victoria, decided he should marry Princess May of Teck (later known as Queen Mary), who had been engaged to George’s elder brother Eddy before he died prematurely. Fortunately it turned out to be a good match.
Social progress
George himself found developments happening in British society hard to accept, and more than a little worrying. The royal family had suffered great shock at the violent overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917, in which George’s cousin, Tsar Nicholas II and his family, had perished. Now civil unrest was afflicting his country. The working class movement and the General Strike of 1926, the demand for equality from the Suffragettes, some even going on hunger strike, another dying when she hurled herself at the king’s horse in the Epsom Derby, and not to mention the first Labour Government – these were all elements of a new political order at odds with the King’s own traditional culture.
George V was an old-fashioned stickler for routine and ritual. He always went to bed at 11.10 pm, demanded his sons wore morning dress when visiting him, and expected the servants to ensure no furniture was ever an inch out of its correct position. At his favourite residence of Sandringham in Norfolk, the clocks were all set half an hour fast to ensure he could never be late.
It was from here that George broadcast his historic first Christmas message in 1932. It was a great publicity coup. For the first time in British history the monarch could wish his subjects a Merry Christmas.
Eligible Bachelor Becomes Figure of Mistrust
Edward VIII’s fall from grace
Dashing and debonair, Edward Prince of Wales, eldest son of George V and heir apparent, was regarded by society as the most eligible bachelor in the world. The Prince toured the British Empire at the end of the First World War and joined Europe’s high society. He even set new trends in fashion with his trouser zip-fly, the Windsor knot in his tie, plus-fours on the golf course, and wearing no shirt on the beach.
It was a time of new found freedom, having spent his childhood restrained by the strict conventions and hallowed traditions observed by his parents. Parties, nightclubs, casinos and weekends in the country were meat and drink to Edward, and he had a string of affairs, often with married women. In short, Edward relished the carefree life which had been denied him as a child.
But with it also came a dislike of duty which he found ‘bothersome’. It became clear that while this man lapped up the adulation of crowds, he felt uncomfortable in any formal situation, disliking, for example, speaking in public.
Mrs Simpson
When Edward first met the American Mrs Simpson in 1931 she seemed to make little impact on him. But a year later, after being invited to dinner with the Simpsons (she and her second husband), he fell hopelessly in love with Wallis. Quite rapidly he fell under her spell in an infatuation that seemed to deprive him of most independent decision-making. The Prince’s equerry wrote in 1934, ‘Edward has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog’.
When his father died in January 1936, Edward succeded as king in what must have been a reluctant state of mind. He was hardly ever seen without Mrs Simpson on his arm. The affair with this woman, who had subsequently divorced her second husband, was common knowledge but generated a nervous silence in public. The press voluntarily kept out of their affairs.
Though Edward was at liberty to marry a commoner if he so wished, the Church of England refused to bless the marriage of divorcees. Therefore Mrs Simpson could not become queen, yet Edward as king was ‘Supreme Governor of the Church of England’. The dilemma was his.
Finally pressure mounted in December that year when Bishop Blunt of Bradford made public comment on the king’s ‘need for grace’. This came at the end of a year when much had happened to affect world politics: Hitler had marched into the Rhineland, Mussolini’s troops had conquered Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War had broken out. Britain now needed strong leadership, not dithering. It was Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, who forced Edward’s hand. In an unprecedented move, Edward VIII put his own private life before his duty to the nation, and abdicated.
It must have been a huge relief for him, a
nd Mrs Simpson. Immediately Edward went into ‘exile’ abroad, never to return. The couple married the following year.
Nazi sympathiser
Quite how much Edward was influenced by Mrs Simpson, who undoubtedly was a forceful character, has led to some claiming she was a German spy charged with the task of endearing the former king to side with Hitler. In 1937, the couple famously visited the Fuhrer and found much to admire in his social reforms. Edward is said to have even given the Nazi salute to Hitler. Clearly there was a propaganda opportunity for the Nazis if Edward could fall into partnership with Germany as a puppet-king in the waiting. His brother Albert, now the new king as George VI, ensured no such banner should be flown in England, and the ex-king found himself permanently banished to the political wilderness.
Fearless in War, Fearful in Life
Stuttering Bertie becomes the people’s champion
The life of George VI is a story of two halves. His early life was one of subjugation. Having an elder brother as glamorous as Edward VIII who set the world alight was always going to put Albert Frederick Arthur George in the shadows. But a lack of intelligence and chronic sickness compounded a sense of inferiority, which was not helped by being given the nickname, Bertie (he was only named Albert because his birthday fell on the anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria’s consort).
George developed a stammer and became heavily addicted to cigarettes and alcohol, which only undermined his health. But the Prince of York made it into the navy despite coming bottom in the college entrance exams. A determination to come up to the mark in the First World War was constantly checked by seasickness and bouts of gastritis (a legacy from his childhood due to poor diet and negligence at the hands of his nurse). In the crucial Battle of Jutland in 1916 – the year when he had a duodenal ulcer diagnosed – the Prince managed to salvage some pride by leaving his sickbed to fight in the gun turret of HMS Collingwood.