by John Matson
It was for later historians to assess the effect of the Prince’s death, which must be seen in the context of the comparatively secluded life of the Queen and the prevailing unpopularity of the Prince of Wales. Indeed, the Monarchy might not have survived the reign of a weak, vacillating successor to Edward VII in whom every quality required of a sovereign was lacking. No wonder Prince George’s succession has been described as a ‘merciful act of providence.’
There was, thankfully, much to be done during that sad summer of 1892. The damage to the house had to be made good and the Prince took the opportunity to engage Colonel Edis again to construct a range of rooms above Teulon’s conservatory, whose style was to be preserved in the extensions. The effect is especially noticeable from the west, where the later work, with its lower roof-line and contrasting brickwork, joins Humbert’s house at an octagonal turret. Only a sentimental attachment could have accepted such a strangely incongruent effect: each half of the house seems to be competing for supremacy but there is little architectural merit in either. To all intents and purposes the Big House, now containing some 365 rooms, was complete. Of greater importance, Prince George had now become, through default, the heir-presumptive, and it was necessary to prepare him for his future role. This, and other related considerations, would occupy the parents in the ensuing months.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PRINCESS MAY
Queen Mary, who had been born Princess Victoria Mary of Teck – Princess May – was to become a central character in the story of Sandringham, her home for half a century, and her developing role deserves study. She was appalled by the suddenness of her fiancé’s death and, shocked into numbness by the tragedy and not in the best of health herself, she remained at Sandringham with her family until Prince Eddy’s funeral at Windsor, comforted by the kindness shown by the Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘Bertie and Alix kindly wished to keep us on,’ the Duchess of Teck wrote to Queen Victoria, after the Prince’s body had been taken to the church, ‘united as we are by a common sorrow… Of their kindness to our May, I cannot say enough. They have quite adopted her as their daughter & she calls Alix ‘Motherdear’ & hopes you will allow her to call you ‘Grandmamma?’144 Was Princess Mary Adelaide’s agile mind already at work planning another marriage for her daughter?
After the funeral the Tecks returned to their home at White Lodge and then, having endured three weeks of misery, travelled down to Osborne. The Queen was quick to observe the change in Princess May: ‘The dear girl looks like a crushed flower,’ she wrote, ‘but is resigned & quiet & gentle, – it does make one so sad for her. She is grown thinner, but otherwise is not looking ill.’145 At the end of February the Princess visited the Prince and Princess of Wales at Eastbourne. It was a muted gathering, for the visit coincided with the date of Prince Eddy’s intended marriage and the bereaved family felt all the poignancy of the cancelled occasion; yet the Princess was received with the utmost kindness. ‘May has become the child of the Waleses,’ her father wrote. ‘I foresee that she will be very much taken up with them.’146 Not long afterwards the Tecks took a villa in Cannes; curiously enough, the Waleses were staying at Cap Martin, a little further along the coast. Was it not strange that the two families found themselves in such proximity? Not in the least; Princess Mary Adelaide had already contrived just such a situation, developing an idea which had already occurred to the Prince and Princess of Wales: May must marry George! The Prince of Wales, however, was not quite happy at the prospect of the Tecks’ proximity; it lacked subtlety and might very easily cause ill-natured gossip.
The question looming in everyone’s mind after Prince Eddie’s death was that of the succession. In the fullness of time Prince George would succeed his father to the throne, and the future of the monarchy must be considered. As yet, there were no male children of the marriage of Princess Louise and the Duke of Fife, and the finding of a wife for Prince George had become a matter of importance. There was no Princess in Europe so eligible and so accessible as Princess May; the cousins had enjoyed an easy family relationship for many years but recently, of course, she had been engaged to Prince Eddy. Now fate had thrown them together, and the way forward towards matrimony, though by no means straightforward, was being prepared. Prince George himself at one time had been attracted to his cousin, Princess Marie of Edinburgh – ‘Missy’ – and her parents were asked to sound out her views. Influenced no doubt by her mother, the daughter of the Czar of Russia, she rejected this proposition. The Princess of Wales, fearful that ‘the bond of love… that of Mother & child’ might be severed, did nothing to urge the match. ‘Nothing & nobody can or shall ever come between me & my darling Georgie boy.’147 Soon after Prince Eddy’s death she had written that George ‘must give us double affection for the one that has gone before.’ Thus, in this bleakest of years in all her marriage, did the bereaved Princess try to cling to the nursery days which seemed to her to represent happiness. Yet it was a fast-vanishing world: Eddy and the baby Alexander were dead; Louise was married; only three of the family were left – and Prince George, though often at sea, had his own life and amusements ashore; at this time he was giving his attention to Julie Stonor; alas, she was a Roman Catholic and a commoner and would never do, though they remained life-long friends. He had written, at the age of twenty-one, to his mother, when missing a family reunion at Sandringham: ‘How I wish I was going to be there too, it almost makes me cry when I think of it. I wonder who will have that sweet little room of mine, you must go and see it sometimes and imagine that your little Georgie dear is living in it.’148
Such immoderate language immediately engages our attention: was this ‘family talk’ used by the Prince to humour his mother who wished to retreat into the nursery world which had already receded, a humorous turning aside perhaps of his real regret, or even a private joke between mother and son? Certainly there were echoes of the Princess of Wales’s own language in her letters to him and reflections of the child-world to which she clung. We should not assume that this is an example of immaturity in the Prince. He was at this time a young Naval officer afloat; when ashore at Sandringham, he was a country gentleman, comfortably well-off and expecting the best as a matter of course, yet with simple tastes, enjoying nothing so much as a shoot on the family estate, or those of his friends. In 1892, he had been promoted and been put on half-pay, which enabled him not only to enjoy deer-stalking at Mar Lodge but also, with his future responsibilities clearly in mind, to spend two months in Germany to improve his command of the language and further his relationship with his German cousins. Before his brother’s death, in between sea-going commissions, his leisure pursuits had indicated a lifestyle largely independent of domestic considerations.
By the beginning of 1893 rumours were flying: the young couple were seen walking arm in arm in Richmond Park; the newspapers were hinting broadly at an imminent engagement. Though the Queen had set her heart on it, the Prince’s parents were not over-enthusiastic: that Prince Eddy’s betrothed could bestow her affections on his brother scarcely a year after his death suggested to them that her heart had not been in her previous engagement – which was true. The Waleses had been very kind to her after Prince Eddy’s death, but they had already noted her shyness and reserve. She was, after all, so very different from themselves. Prince George was hesitant. He had been hurt by ‘Missy’s’ refusal of his advances and was uncertain of Princess May’s feelings towards him. Those early months of 1893, full of gossip and uncertainty, must have been distinctly uncomfortable for both the protagonists in this drama, but all was happily resolved on 3 May when he met the princess at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Fife at Sheen. ‘We walked together afterwards in the garden and he proposed to me, & I accepted him,’ Princess May recorded in her diary.149
There were but eight weeks in that torrid summer of 1893 before the wedding was to take place. There was much to arrange, not least the question of where the young couple would live. For their London home the Prince was granted a sui
te of apartments in St James’ Palace, to be known as York House. At Sandringham, which was of course a private property, the Prince of Wales gave his son the Bachelor’s Cottage originally intended for Prince Eddy and his bride, but always called, from that time, York Cottage. It was here that Prince George, recently created Duke of York, brought his bride on their wedding day, the 6 July. Both of them were half-dead with exhaustion from the blistering heat and the strain of the ceremony in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, and the reception at Buckingham Palace, and covered with a film of dust from the carriage drive from Wolferton Station. That the Duke had selected their future home for his honeymoon did not seem to him in the least strange; here, he felt, he could find peace and contentment with the woman he loved, amid surroundings in which he had grown up. Queen Victoria regretted his decision, thinking it ‘rather unlucky and sad.’
York Cottage was to be the home of the Duke and Duchess – or, as they became, King George V and Queen Mary – for thirty-three years, and must be described. King George V’s biographer, Harold Nicholson, was told by King Edward VIII: ‘Until you have seen York Cottage you will never understand my father.’ It had been built for the Prince of Wales by his architect, Humbert, for bachelor guests who could not be accommodated in the often crammed Big House, from which it was separated by a couple of hundred yards of gently sloping lawn. It has been described variously as ‘a glum little villa’, ‘an ornate hutch’ and ‘irredeemably hideous’. Never handsome, it attempted to combine some incongruous styles of architecture and construction: Mock Tudor, local stone, roughcast and pebbledash. Even before additions were made, it might have been a boarding house transported complete from the sea front at Cromer. Its appearance was not improved by the addition of a wing, designed by Colonel Edis to increase the facilities for the Yorks, and the slate-roofed turret which served to join this to the main building; the south-east aspect, of grey stucco, is decidedly bleak. The larger drawing-room, dining-room and billiard-room were still of only moderate size; the remainder of the accommodation tended to be small and dark. A certain cosiness was achieved, for Princess May was nothing if not a home-maker, but it was impossible to avoid a feeling of overcrowding. ‘One should really have in mind a doll’s house,’ she told Lady Airlie, when they were choosing patterns for curtains.150 Around meal-times smells of cooking pervaded the house, the corridors were narrow and one had to squeeze past the waiting footmen. Secretaries worked in the bathrooms, where boards were placed across the baths to make do as desks. Yet, despite all its inconveniences and eccentricities, it was ‘home’, where the Duke and Duchess could find a degree of privacy and bring up their family away the limelight.
For years the Duke had been accustomed to the Spartan, confined quarters allotted to junior naval officers, and his affection for York Cottage affords a clue to his character. He was a plain, simple man, who greatly preferred the homeliness of the rooms to the splendours of a stately mansion. It was not of the smallest concern to him that the view from the windows of his study was largely obscured by laurels, or that the floors were so thinly boarded that a lady-in-waiting upstairs once sent word to the servants that she did not mind overhearing their conversation if they themselves had no objection. Into this somewhat confined space, then, crowded a growing family of six children and their attendants, and the Royal couple with their Household. The Duke was aware of the difficulties and more than once remarked lightly that he ‘supposed the servants slept in the trees’. For him, at least, there was one supreme advantage: the rooms were too small to allow the kind of large-scale entertaining which he so cordially disliked. The Duke’s study was on the ground floor; its walls were covered with a red fabric once used for the trousers of the French army which had been found nobody knew where, and adorned with photos of the ships in which he had served, and other naval memorabilia. There still exists in this room the mirror on a wall near the window by which the Duke, sitting in his chair, could see who was approaching the house. He could thus send word to the servants if he did not wish to be disturbed.
The Duchess’s rooms were on the first floor: bedroom, dressing-room (with cupboards for her extensive wardrobe and a large safe for her jewellery), and boudoir – and immediately on her arrival her heart sank as she saw the need for tact and self-control. They had been ‘done up’ by the Duke and his sister, the Duchess of Fife: they had chosen the patterns for the carpets and curtains, and had bought furniture from Maples. The Duke’s well-meaning action thus effectively prevented the Duchess from doing the very things which any newly-married woman must look forward to and undertake with real delight. In all her subsequent moves one of her chief joys was to be found in ‘arranging her things’. In these early days she was to become more aware of the nature of the family into which she had married. After 1893, her reserve deepened in the face of criticism from the artless and childish ‘Wales’ sisters. Prince George was not insensitive to the difficulties inherent in the close proximity of his relations to York Cottage and admired his wife for her quiet common-sense, which enabled her to avoid the minefields so frequently encountered when a newcomer lives in close proximity to her in-laws.
For the Duke, too, there were conflicts which only time and patience could resolve: loyalty to his wife, whom he really loved and admired, and to his mother, whose affectionate endearments sometimes cloyed; in the new domestic life at the Cottage, with its quiet, simple ways and the joys of an increasing family, and the style of life at the Big House, which he had known since his boyhood and which resisted change. That he could resolve them successfully was due to his love for the Duchess and to their joint good sense. The Duchess’s situation cannot be summarised better than in the words of King George V’s biographer Harold Nicholson:
The Duchess had married into a family which for years had been self-sufficient, a family which the Princess’s genius for affection had turned into something that was certainly a closely-guarded clique and was not far short of a mutual admiration society. It was a family little given to intellectual pursuits, without much in the way of artistic tastes or taste, a family not easily to be converted to any other manner of life than that which they had found all-sufficing in an age wherein privilege vigorously survived.
The Duchess was intellectually on a higher plane; she was already well educated – well read and interested in the arts, and was constantly seeking to increase her store of knowledge in many fields beyond the range of the Princess of Wales and the family in the Big House. She was full of initiative, of intellectual curiosity, of energy, which needed outlets and wider horizons.
Their recreations were not hers. Their manner of life could not satisfy her notions of the ideal in the intellectual life of those days. And she was living in a small house on an estate which drew its inspiration wholly from the Prince and Princess, whereon every smallest happening or alteration was ordered and taken note of by the Prince. The very arrangement of her rooms, the planting of her small garden, were matters which required reference to Sandringham House, and the smallest innovation would be regarded with distrust…
Sometimes the Duchess’s intellectual life there may have been starved and her energies atrophied in those early years… For many women, then as now, the daily call to follow the shooters, to watch the killing, however faultless, to take always a cheerful appreciative part in man-made, man-valued amusements, must have been answered at the sacrifice of many cherished, many constructive and liberal ambitions. It is fair to assume that the self-effacement which conditions at Sandringham in those days demanded of a fine and energetic character must have fallen hardly on the Duchess; and fair also to suggest that the Prince and Princess (of Wales) might have done more to encourage her initiative and fill her days.151
Though all this lay in the future, we may wonder whether these difficulties were not entirely unperceived by the Duchess. She knew her Wales cousins well enough to have gained some insight into their lifestyle; but she was intelligent and optimistic. As for the Duke, he wrote to an o
ld friend in the Navy a few days after the wedding:
I can hardly yet realise that I am a married man, although I have been so for the last 10 days. All I can say is that I am intensely happy, far happier than I ever thought I could be with anyone. I can’t say more than that. We are spending our honeymoon here in this charming little cottage which my father has given me & it is most comfortable & the peace and rest after all we went through in London is indeed heavenly…152
Yet already there had been difficulties; the newly married couple had not been installed twenty-four hours when there was a violent thunderstorm, which left the Duchess with a severe headache, followed by a period of heavy rain, keeping them indoors, with as yet few resources or much to say to each other. The Duchess must have regretted that there was nothing left for her to arrange in the house, since it had all been done. Within a fortnight, the Waleses arrived at the Big House, with their daughters, the Princesses Maud and Victoria, and members of the Danish Royal family, which seriously disturbed the peace and quiet of York Cottage. Their privacy was constantly interrupted by invasions from the family, even to the extent of their arriving early and sitting with the couple while they ate their breakfast. The Duchess found herself within the family circle, yet not entirely of it: it was not in her nature to participate in the airy badinage and the feeling of spontaneous gaiety and frivolity. Her enjoyment of reading tended to alienate her, and her wide interests and curiosity about the outside world were unfathomable to the Wales family. Even in those early days, the Princess of Wales began to realise that her son now had twin loyalties, and it was with some difficulty that she could relax her possessive hold on the Duke; but she no longer wrote to him as her ‘dear little Georgie’.