The King began once more to take a keen interest in both home and foreign affairs. Having been made conscious of his mortality by his illness, it was as if he wanted to make his mark in politics while there was still time. His long association with India, where the Raj reigned supreme, and his love for the country which had in 1911 had so warmly welcomed him, led to feelings of sadness as India moved inexorably towards independence. His great wish was for India to remain within the British Empire and he thought back to the time when after his departure from Bombay work had begun on the triumphal arch on the waterfront. The monument had been built not only to commemorate his visit but – as he saw it – to welcome through it both him and his descendants as Emperors. Indian nationalism had, however, found a powerful voice in Mahatma Gandhi who was achieving remarkable success in the non-cooperation movement, a form of passive resistance in which no one would be hurt.
The King’s nostalgia for the Indian subcontinent and his wish to return to it in the role of favourite son was in naïve contrast to Gandhi’s more intellectual approach to the apparently insoluble problem of Indian independence. In no way was India calling her surrogate son home from across the seas, as the King would like to have believed. She was calling rather to her own sons to grow up and take responsibility for themselves. Gandhi was in touch with the teachings of the psychoanalytic movement, and his concept of independence was very different from that of King George V who saw it as an abrupt and painful divorce, with little hope of reconciliation and with both parties going their separate ways. His own separations (from his biological mother) had been abrupt and had been caused by long journeys overseas. They were, as a consequence, painful. In 1925 Gandhi’s search for independence through peaceful coexistence took him to a meeting of the Calcutta psychoanalytic society where a solution to the ever-present problems of Hindu—Muslim cooperation was discussed (Kakar, 1997).
Unlike Gandhi, King George sought not a coexistence between equals but, as always, the perpetuation of a parent—child dependency between Mother India and ‘darling Georgie’. In 1935, at a conference in London which echoed the verbal violence that the King had been used to, both in the school room and as a naval cadet, he warned Gandhi that he would not tolerate any form of terrorism. He showed no understanding of Gandhi’s well-known insistence on non-violent forms of protest.
Other than the slow disintegration of the British Empire, more sinister events were gradually becoming apparent, not least of which was the erosion in the fabric of the League of Nations. Following the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Germany had withdrawn from the League of Nations when the Disarmaments Committee had refused their demands for military parity with France. In 1932 Japan had already done likewise after she had illegally seized possession of Manchuria. The King’s interest in what was going on around him allowed for some forthright although undiplomatic responses. Never one for small talk, and occasionally at a loss with big talk, he was, however, familiar with the bluntness of the ward room. At a meeting with the German Ambassador in 1934 he told him that Germany was the peril of the world and that if she went on at her present rate, there could be a war within ten years. King George knew how to deal with bullies. He had had plenty of experience. The King took an immediate dislike to Hitler. Unlike some of his ministers who believed that it might be possible for an accommodation to be reached with the German dictator in the interests of avoiding conflict, King George, no more prescient than they, saw in Adolf Hitler a reminder of the tyrant that he had discovered his cousin the Kaiser to be, another German hate object which allowed him to focus all the violently angry feelings that less than twenty years earlier he had had to suppress in the interests of family unity. The cold politics of appeasement were not for him. In the last two or three years of his life he had found in Adolf Hitler an appropriate outlet for the bottled-up rage of his over-controlled upbringing.
Despite the occasional feeling that gloom and despair were once again on the move over Europe, Britain was pleased to be diverted by the kind of ceremonial distraction that had so pleased the nation when King George and Queen Mary had married twenty-five years earlier and with which as a child the King had been familiar when separation had been in the air. A military band at the quayside, however, was not going to heal the rifts in Europe any more than it had healed the rifts when Prince George’s personal world was falling apart. Neither the King nor the Queen could have known that four years after their accession in 1910 the First World War was to break out: neither could they then have predicted that twenty-five years later and four years after the celebration of their Silver Jubilee another world war would be initiated by Germany, involving more or less the same protagonists.
The Silver Jubilee of King George and Queen Mary was celebrated on 6 May 1935, a warm summer’s day. On his return from the Jubilee Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s Cathedral the King, together with the Queen, stood on the balcony of the palace. Looking down at the welcoming crowds with amazement, he said: ‘[This is] the greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life.’ In the evening the King spoke to his people on the wireless. Many of his listeners stood in silence and to attention while he spoke. For a man who normally eschewed public emotion he was unusually outspoken. As if he was aware that within seven months he would be dead, he thanked the people of Britain for the love they had shown him, a love he probably thought he deserved but which none the less he was touchingly gratified to receive.
The King may have had greatness thrust upon him, but on his sometimes faltering journey through life he had made his way without recourse to psychotherapeutic help to enable him to unravel his dysfunctional upbringing. It would have occurred to him neither to disclaim accountability for his own shortcomings nor to blame his parents for their haphazard attention to his emotional needs. Familiar with the name of Freud, but probably not with the significance of his discoveries, he would have been intolerant of any intrusion into the privacy of his thoughts or of any suggestion that others might have been to blame for his adult behaviour. The King had risen through the ranks from cadet to commander, from child to adult. In the end he was a better commander than he had been a cadet. He had inherited an image. His subjects recognized before he did that, as with all icons, the more one looks at them the more of their hidden treasure they reveal.
Less than three months before his death the King, although already frail, had one last pleasant duty to attend to. On 6 November 1935 his third son, Prince Henry the Duke of Gloucester, married Lady Alice Christabel Montagu-Douglas-Scott. The ceremony was a private one, not only because of King George’s failing health but also because of the recent death of Lady Alice’s father, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury. The ceremony took place in the chapel at Buckingham Palace. In possibly the last letter the King wrote, he informed his new daughter-in-law that he ‘would try to take [her father’s place] & would do anything to try to help her’. Although he had done his best during his lifetime, he had not shone as a father. He tried to make up for this both as a grandfather and as a surrogate ‘father’ to anyone who needed him.
King George V died at his home at Sandringham on 20 January 1936 with his children dutifully gathered around the bedside. For two days crowds of well-wishers had been gathering outside Buckingham Palace to read the bulletins posted on the gates. The first hint of imminent disaster came at 3.30 p.m. on 18 January. A bulletin signed by Sir Frederic Willans, Sir Stanley Hewett, Lord Dawson of Penn and the cardiologist Sir Maurice Cassidy stated that ‘His Majesty the King had had some hours of restful sleep. The cardiac weakness and the embarrassment of the circulation have slightly increased and give cause for anxiety.’ Lord Dawson of Penn’s final bulletin was broadcast at midnight. ‘Death came peacefully to the King at 11.55 p.m.’
Fate had it that the nation would mourn not only the King but the poet Rudyard Kipling whose love for one another was a brotherly one and continued until the end. ‘The King is dead,’ the newspapers decla
red, ‘and has taken his trumpeter with him’. The two men who met in 1922 among the war graves in the presence of death and whose friendship flourished through the sadness of their mutual loss were parted in death fourteen years later.
It is said that Dawson hastened to end the King’s suffering by injecting his jugular vein with morphine and cocaine (he was already in a coma) so that his patient’s death would occur before midnight. Thus it would be first reported in the morning rather than in the less prestigious evening papers (Watson, 1986). The King had never been over-impressed with Lord Dawson since his handling of his near-fatal illness in 1928. He would most probably have been amused by the acid wit of Margot Asquith – the widow of his first Prime Minister and a woman addicted to outrageous flights of fancy – who commented in old age: ‘The King told me he would never have died if it had not been for that fool Dawson of Penn’ (Longford, 1989).
• 20 •
And it all goes into the laundry, but it never comes out in the wash
KING GEORGE V’s death was peaceful. His family were at his bedside. Queen Mary turned to her eldest son and, bowing, took his hand and kissed it. In a clear voice she uttered ‘God save the King’, words that had ensured the continuity of the monarchy for a thousand years. The following day the Prince of Wales acceded to the throne and the day after that he was officially proclaimed King Edward VIII. On 24 January the coffin of the late King George V was taken by train from Sandringham to London. From there it was carried on a gun-carriage to Westminster Hall for the four-day lying in state before the burial in the chapel of the Knights of the Garter at Windsor Castle. The Imperial Crown, made especially for King George V for the Coronation Durbar in India, had been secured to the lid of the coffin, but as the cortège turned into New Palace Yard the jewelled Maltese Cross which was attached to the coffin fell to the ground. It was quickly retrieved by one of the escorting guardsmen, but King Edward VIII, who had seen the incident, gloomily, and in the event presciently, declared it a ‘most terrible omen’. Whether the new King thought of the omen as foretelling the fall of the Empire or his own downfall is a matter for speculation.
In the five generations that have passed since the reign of Queen Victoria it is highly possible that in at least four of them the failure of male heirs to the throne to have bonded with the parent of the opposite sex has been in part responsible for the emotional crises that have befallen the Royal Family. This failure to bond causes boys to seek often inappropriate compensation for the absence of this love from other women in later life. Because it has long been the custom for those born to royal parents to be cared for from birth by attendants other than their mothers, such children grow up feeling not only excluded from the family circle but also excluded from what they believe to be their parents’ love for them. The essential love affair with the opposite-sex parent, for both boys and girls, in early childhood is often ignored by parents who confuse the physical needs of their children with their emotional needs. ‘It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father’ (Freud, 1900). Royal heirs may even have ‘denied’ this oedipal wish to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, because their ‘god-like’ fathers were essentially too remote. Their patricidal impulses may instead have been turned inwards upon themselves or unwittingly directed at other ‘fathers’, like the husbands of the married women with whom they sometimes seek out affairs. Such ‘fathers’ are also to be found in religion (‘our Father which art in heaven’), in respected tutors and advisers (in the case of King George V) or in same-sex encounters (as in the case of Prince Eddy).
The reign of King George V, midway between that of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II, played a pivotal role in reinforcing this mode of behaviour. Changes in royal child-rearing methods, however – such as can be observed in the case of Prince William and Prince Harry – could bring the faulty pattern to an end.
Queen Victoria’s life may have been a model of sexual propriety, but it was marred by her unfulfilled dependent needs which she handed on to her children. Brought up without a father (the Duke of Kent had died from pneumonia when Princess Victoria was a baby of nine months), as a young woman the Princess had suffered from long periods of depression. An ageing uncle, King Leopold, and a Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, did what they could with their advice and support to help her, but it was not until as Queen she met and married her cousin Prince Albert that her loss was assuaged. Eager to have the comfort and compensation of a large family the Queen bore nine children over the course of seventeen years. For much of her life a ‘child’ in search of a father, Queen Victoria had little time for other children, including her own. She pronounced her heir Prince Edward unattractive from the moment of his birth, handed him over to a wet nurse at the earliest possible moment and did not set eyes on him again for six weeks. Her consort Prince Albert was the only male in her life. Believing that she had found in her husband the father she had lost, she was inconsolable when Prince Albert died from typhoid fever in 1861, and she unjustly blamed Prince Edward’s ‘scandalous’ behaviour with the actress Nellie Clifden and the aftermath of it for his father’s death.
Disapproved of by both his parents, but particularly by his mother, Prince Edward grew up insistent upon righting the wrongs of his childhood. He sought illusory compensations for the absence of his mother’s love in food, drink, gambling and sex. Not having a father to whom he could direct his murderous rage, King Edward VII forced the cuckolded husbands of his mistresses into the role. His continuing urge to satisfy his own need for love and attention allowed him little time to satisfy similar needs in his children.
King Edward VII’s heir, Prince Eddy, and his younger son, Prince George, were apparently happy and carefree in their early days on the Sandringham estate. Their idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end at the ages of eight and six with the arrival of their new tutor, Mr Dalton. Prince George, the brighter and more intelligent of the two boys, was frustrated by being taught at the slow pace of his intellectually slow older brother. Five years later he was shocked once again by his banishment from home to the draconian Naval Academy at Dartmouth where he was told by his father that ‘a man would be made of him’.
Boys generally metamorphose into men through emulating the behaviour of their fathers. Since for much of his childhood Prince George’s male role model was unavailable to him (which in view of King Edward VII’s philandering may have been all to the good), he was forced to seek alternatives in authoritarian men, while his brother Eddy found father substitutes in sexually promiscuous ones. King George V consequently grew up to be as rigid and unbending as the senior naval officers on whom he modelled himself.
As a cadet, Prince George soon realized that once again he would not be allowed to develop at a pace suited to his temperament but one that suited the officers in the institution in which he had been incarcerated. While it is true that many of the other cadets came from a similar background, few, if any, would have stepped straight from the sheltered environment of a school with only two pupils to a far stricter school in which they were surrounded not only by fellow cadets but also by midshipmen, officers and crew older and bigger than them. It is unlikely that any would have been brought up to believe himself so special that his overwhelmingly doting mother would want to keep him by her side for ever. Prince George never became reconciled to the pain of parting. The once good-natured and sensitive boy eventually became so indoctrinated by the life-style into which he had been forced – believing it to be for the best, otherwise his loving mother would not have permitted it – that in the course of time he insisted upon a similar life-style for his children.
Satisfied with the love that his mother had impressed upon him, the Prince, unlike his father, was not forced to seek compensatory love from women. Because of his mother’s many absences he sought compensatory love instead, first from his dreamy and effeminate brother and later from his spouse
who neglected her children in order to attend to his dependent needs. Prince George’s adolescence was spent in a claustrophobic, all-male institution in which he was indoctrinated with the importance of obedience and duty. In company with other graduates from the naval college, he offloaded on to other victims, including his children, the violent practices he had been taught.
King George’s personality was well suited to the rigid training he received. From the age of six his upbringing had been over-structured and over-disciplined. He had sensed his mother’s persistent unhappiness, owing both to her ill health and the indifferent attitude of her husband. Prince George tried to comfort her, but because she often left him for prolonged periods it must have appeared to ‘darling Georgie’ that his efforts to please her had failed. He became angry both with his mother and with himself; angry with his mother because of her unavailability and the fact that she had allowed him to be sent away from home, and angry with himself because he had not pleased her sufficiently. Like other children in the same predicament he was unable to express his anger because he feared that one day his mother might leave him for ever.
Prince George was trained to perform for his instructors, but his ambivalence towards them led him to join in with the practical ‘jokes’ which allowed for a respectable acting-out of hostility to authority. Prone to angry outbursts, he later learned to control his feelings lest he damaged those he loved. His bullying tactics towards his sons, who were unable to leave him, turned one of them against him and the other into a timid and depressed adult.
When he was well into his career as a naval officer and had begun to settle into the passive role of gentleman landowner, with only his guns to reflect his slowly awakening sexuality, the 25-year-old Prince George was plunged once again into a role for which he was unprepared when, on Eddy’s death, he unexpectedly found himself heir to the throne. While King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra mourned their son, Prince George grieved for the loss of his big brother.
Darling Georgie Page 23