A shadow was cast over the day by a surprising announcement in the Star, a London newspaper, which reported that Prince George was already married to the daughter of a British naval officer in Malta. The Prince was at first amused to think that there were some who thought of him as being a sexual adventurer, but as time passed the joke, such as it was, turned sour. It was not until 1910, however, after years of being haunted by allegations of bigamy, that legal steps were taken to quash the rumour. After an article in a French republican newspaper stated that the King ‘foully abandoned his true wife and entered into a sham and shameful marriage with a daughter of the Duke of Teck’, the editor, E.F. Mylius, was immediately arrested. He was successfully prosecuted for criminal libel and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. There was no evidence to support the slur on the King’s character, but it was not until the trial ended that his honour was finally vindicated (Rose, 1987).
On 3 May 1893 the nation’s only concern was with the news of the royal engagement, and preparations were immediately put in hand for the pageant that was to make Princess May’s and Prince George’s wedding day the century’s most colourful event. In honour of the occasion the Princess’s portrait was painted, and because she was slim-waisted and tall she looked particularly becoming in her court dress. An editorial in The Times, however, struck a pragmatic note. Referring to the recent death of Prince Eddy (Duke of Clarence), it conceded that the ‘betrothal accords with the fitness of things, and, so far from offending any legitimate sentiment, is the most appropriate and delicate medicament for a wound in its nature never wholly effaceable’. Queen Victoria was entirely delighted, not least because the heir of the heir apparent had chosen for his bride the first consort of English birth since James, Duke of York, married Anne Hyde, daughter of the first Earl of Clarendon in 1659.
Princess Alexandra wrote to her son from Malta two days after the announcement of the engagement. The message the letter bore was ambivalent. ‘With what mixed feelings I read your telegram! Well all I can say is that I pray God to give you both a long and happy life together, and that you will make up to dear May all that she lost in darling Eddy and that you will be a mutual happiness to each other, a comfort to us, and a blessing to the nation.’
The leader in The Times and the letter from his mother brought home to Prince George that he was Princess May’s second choice. It was a difficult role for any man, but it was too soon to expect the shadow of Prince Eddy to disappear and unreasonable to expect it to do so.
Prince George and Princess May had been close companions since childhood, and since the death of Prince Eddy they had been drawn closer to each other and understood each other’s feelings. Although the marriage might in a sense have been arranged, this was only because there was no other suitable candidate for either of them. From the time of Prince Eddy’s death both of them knew that they were being considered for one another and were happy with how events turned out. Although either one of them could have refused the match, neither of them did so.
Prince George in reality had little or no experience of women other than his sisters and his mother, all of whom, in their different ways, had mixed feelings about the marriage. His mother never denied that she found it difficult to let him go, and his sisters had previously championed the cause of Princess Helénè. Only Queen Victoria knew where her duty lay. She had to secure the accession and had a thousand years of royal ancestry and a compliant grandson to back her up. Prince George had been trained to obey all orders that came from above, and when the Queen informed him of his duty he had no problem with accepting her command. He might even have felt relieved that a decision had been taken for him in a matter of which he had no previous experience.
Princess May also knew her duty. She was pressed to accept Prince George’s proposal not only by her ambitious and financially impoverished mother but also by her sense of destiny. Her disappointing childhood, the nagging realization that she was cut out for better things than always to be a poor relation of the Royal Family and her conviction that fate had demanded that she would marry the younger brother were sufficient to make up her mind. It was unlikely that either Prince George or Princess May was ‘in love’, but they certainly liked one another and were happy that it should be so.
It soon became apparent that the Prince and Princess were opposites in almost every way. Princess May, brought up with nothing, had been taught to expect everything; Prince George, brought up with everything, had learned to expect nothing. The Princess had an importunate, greedy and grossly overweight mother who adored material possessions and who envied the wealth of others. She had led her daughter to believe that a person’s worth was represented by their degree of personal adornment. Prince George, on the other hand, had been brought up to believe in simplicity and hardship, in duty and obedience, in the unavailability of women other than his mother and in the written rather than the spoken word.
By the time his father, King Edward VII, died in May 1910 Prince George had been married to Princess May for almost seventeen years. Five months later, shortly after his accession to the throne, the young couple, now King George V and Queen Mary, exchanged letters with each other. The King, who was at Sandringham, had, perhaps belatedly, become aware that his wife was beginning to wonder whether he really liked her. He wrote: ‘Fancy this is the first letter I have written to you since our lives have been entirely changed by darling Papa having been taken away from us. You have never left me for a single day since that sad event.’
Aware that his relatively carefree days had ended, King George seems to have realized his need for a strong replacement for his father. He explained to his wife that, although he had never been able to show his feelings for her, he loved her dearly. He told her also that her strength and support following the death of his father had been an enormous comfort to him: ‘My love grows stronger for you every day mixed with admiration & I thank God every day that he has given me such a darling devoted wife as you are. God bless you my sweet Angel May, who I know will always stick to me as I need your love & help more than ever now.’
Perhaps only partly reassured by her husband’s declaration, Queen Mary replied: ‘What a pity it is you cannot tell me what you write for I should appreciate it so enormously – It is such a blessing to know that I am a help to you.’ King George’s response the next day was only one of many letters written over the years protesting feelings for his wife that he was able to express (not surprisingly) only in writing. ‘I am glad my letter pleased. I really am full of feeling and sentiment & am very sympathetic but somehow I always find it difficult to express what I feel except in a letter, especially to the person I love & am always with like you darling.’
King George and Queen Mary had both been brought up to devote themselves to public ceremonial at the expense of devotion to family. If either of them had realized that they had themselves been cheated, and were now in turn cheating on their own families, their strong sense of occasion – at least in the run-up to their marriage – would have obscured this realization. King George had his early spontaneity dampened by too rigid a work schedule from the time that Mr Dalton had entered his life, and Queen Mary learned belatedly to suppress her own feelings in the face of positive feedback from her husband.
The wedding took place at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, on 6 July 1893. Prince George and Princess May were married by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London and Rochester in the presence of the Royal Family and most of the crowned heads of Europe. After the ceremony the royals returned to Buckingham Palace for the signing of the marriage register. At five o’clock, with the wedding breakfast concluded, the Prince and Princess drove in their carriage through the streets packed with cheering Londoners to Liverpool Street Station where they took the train to Sandringham where they were to spend their honeymoon.
Prince George and Princess May were given two homes by Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra: York House in St James’s Palace and York Cottage at
Sandringham. It was at York Cottage that the couple, now the Duke and Duchess of York, were to live for more than thirty years, and it was here that Princess May came to realize that she and her husband were unequal partners in the marriage. York Cottage had previously been known as Bachelors’ Cottage. A few hundred yards from Sandringham House, it had been built by the side of a pond to accommodate male guests for whom there was no room in the main house. The cottage had very little to commend it. Its neo-Gothic appearance was unattractive and it reflected a variety of architectural styles. Colonel Ellis, who claimed to be an architect but who turned out in fact not to be one, was hired by Prince Edward to refurbish it and make it habitable for the young married couple. He failed miserably.
The exterior consisted of black-and-white Elizabethan gables mixed haphazardly with Gothic turrets, pebbledash stucco and local stone, with several small more or less useless, non-functioning balconies. The interior of the cottage, although reasonably large, was little better. Most of the rooms were small and dark and furnished rather gloomily in the unattractive suburban style of the day. The Prince’s sitting-room was particularly dark, because its windows were obscured by a laurel.
Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, recalls in her memoirs (Athlone, 1966) that she would stay regularly with her Uncle George and her sister-in-law Princess May at York Cottage.
It was a poky and inconvenient place, architecturally repulsive and always full of the smell of cooking. George adored it, but then he had the only comfortable room in the house, which was called the ‘library’, though it contained very few books. The décor of this room was hideous. The walls were lined with a red material worn by Zouaves! Uncle George’s much treasured guns were on display in a glass-doored cabinet. He was one of the best shots in England and I think his love of York Cottage was in great measure the outcome of his passion for shooting. The drawing room was small enough when only two adults occupied it – but after tea, when five children were crammed into it as well, it became a veritable bedlam.
The cottage was also too small for live-in staff, but its disadvantages were partly compensated for by its surroundings. It was a novel situation for the happy couple to have a home of their own and they enjoyed the experience. It was not long, however, before Princess May realized that Prince George was entirely indifferent to his surroundings. Having spent so long in the Navy, a house to him seemed to be nothing more than a place to stay in between voyages. He liked the size of the rooms, many of them not much larger than ships’ cabins.
Princess May saw her home in a different light. Her interest in it was that of a bride looking to build the nest in which she could bring up a family. In marrying a Prince of the realm, she had not considered that she would be condemned to life in an overcrowded ship’s cabin. Neither had she considered that Prince George would furnish the house himself and in a style which she found totally unacceptable. The Prince, with his father and his eldest sister Princess Louise, had bought all the fabrics, carpets and wallpapers from Maples which was noted for its ‘modern’ furniture. Princess May was given no say in how her new home would look and she found herself living in a house in which many of the paintings were replicas and nearly all the furniture reproduction.
Prince George, who had been brought up in the shadow of an older brother destined to be King, was not himself an ‘original’. He was the second son, it was the unexpected death of his brother that had made him heir presumptive to the throne and he had even taken his brother’s place at the altar. Throughout his life he had been a replacement and destined always to be number two. Prince George was not his wife’s first choice, and neither was Princess May his.
From this false start the Prince and the Princess were to jockey with each other over the next few years for first place. Princess May had an additional rival to contend with. She found herself living next door to a woman still in love with her husband.
• 10 •
I am very glad I am married and I don’t feel at all strange
AT FIRST PRINCE George and Princess May, a country boy and a sophticated girl, seemed to have little in common. The Prince’s main interests, other than stamp-collecting, took place outside the home, whereas the Princess preferred life indoors amongst the artefacts and objets which were often reflections of her family background. She loved her new home, arranging it and rearranging it in an effort to make it more attractive. While the Prince’s home life had been interrupted by his two years aboard Britannia, followed by a further three years on the Bacchante, Princess May’s life had been similarly disrupted when her parents left London, which they could not afford, for Florence, but at least Princess May’s move to Italy provided her with a new interest centred around the paintings and the architecture of the city.
Prince George, a Victorian English gentleman, while well acquainted with the world geographically knew little about its culture. Princess May, a typical English rose, had yet to bloom. The personality of the Prince allowed him to play his ceremonial roles without difficulty. The personality of the Princess demanded that she involve herself in all matters relating to the arts and, unusually for her time, the needs of women. On his marriage the Prince was a dutiful and highly disciplined naval officer. When the Princess married she had little experience of life other than that which she had learned from nineteenth-century literature. The press eulogized her intellectual attributes and informed their readers that ‘no young lady of the present day … is more thoroughly grounded in the English classics, or more happily at home in modern literature than is our future Queen’. She was described also as a brilliant linguist and familiar with the works of Goethe and Schiller. When Prince George set up home with his new bride he expected life to continue as before. When Princess May pledged her troth to a potentially wealthy Prince of the realm she anticipated a radical change in her life-style and hoped perhaps that she might be able to remedy some of the more obvious defects in her husband’s education.
For one accustomed to life at sea, running a home might seem little different from running a ship. At the age of twelve Prince George had been expected to look after himself, to carry out running repairs to his clothing, to prepare simple meals and to batten down the hatches when navigating difficult waters. At the same time, however, he had also been provided with a valet and other attendants. He was like the other cadets but different from them. He was special. He had special privileges. A special cabin to be shared only with his brother. He had been a special child and had a special mother, albeit one who had let her son leave home with scarcely a word of protest. He had been trained to live by the rules and not to question them, and he expected others to do the same. But in his rule book nothing was as it seemed. His mother wrote love letters to him, and his father loved other women. He had been sent away to become independent but had been provided with servants. He had adapted to life without parents but remained dependent upon their approval, as he was later to depend on the approval of his wife and his subjects. He was expected to become a parent, but he had role models whose attitudes to him were at best confusing.
Princess May had lived by more flexible rules and continued to do so. But her role models were as confusing as her husband’s. Like Prince George she had a dominant mother and a weak father, but unlike Prince George she was entirely in control of her feelings. She found no difficulty in identifying with her dominant mother and looked forward, with a crusading zeal, to shaping the Prince’s behaviour to correspond more closely with her own. Princess May was acutely aware of her husband’s educational deficiencies. The comment that ‘his planned education ended just where and when it should seriously have begun. [He was] below the educational and perhaps intellectual standard of the ordinary public school educated country squire’ (Gore, 1941) encapsulates the problem that Princess May decided she would attempt to remedy. She took it upon herself to continue her husband’s education by reading to him and conversing with him in French and German.
Prince Georg
e, a resourceful and essentially a practical man, looked after the interests of those who were dependent upon him and, in return, he expected that his own dependent needs be satisfied. His employees, like him, had been brought up to know their place and like him they expected to do as they were told. The Prince could give as well as he had got. A physical, rather than a cerebral man, he had probably survived his fragmented childhood for being so. Had he been more thoughtful and introspective he might have coped less well with the stresses of his reign.
Women had as yet played only a small part in Prince George’s life. He noted in his diary that a year or so before his marriage he had ‘shared’ a girlfriend with his brother in St John’s Wood. It has been suggested that the two brothers were kept so short of money that they could afford only one girl between them. It seems more likely that where the sexually adventurous Eddy would lead the more timid George would follow. His two brief emotional forays, the first with his cousin Marie and the second with his childhood friend Julie Stonor, had also been abortive and he soon turned his back on them. Women seemed not to need him and he would have no need of them. He would emulate instead his father’s passion for shooting and, with a firm grip on his gun, make a life for himself. He was, above all, unaware of a woman’s nesting instinct and her need to furnish her own home. He believed that in preparing the cottage with the help of his mother for his wife’s arrival he had saved Princess May the trouble of decorating it herself.
Princess May was distressed that she had not been given the opportunity to choose her own decorations but deemed it inappropriate to complain. Like her husband, she had also brought some emotional baggage to the marriage. She needed to be admired not only for her appearance but for her intellectual qualities. As a child she had relied on the education she had had with Mademoiselle Bricka to compensate for her material deficits, and from her she had learned that for a woman who had little to fall back on financially education was an asset.
Darling Georgie Page 12