17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up

by Andrew Morton

  Unaware of the momentous nature of this encounter, the royal party sailed on for the antipodes, the prince once again experiencing the spontaneous adulation and adoring affection that characterized his North America trip. “They murdered him with kindness,” recalled Mountbatten. It was a similar story in India, Nigeria, South Africa, and many other nations that made up the empire, or trading partners like Argentina and Japan where he was Britain’s super salesman. During his tour of Australia, Prime Minister Billy Hughes told him: “The people see in you the things they most believe.”

  They were worshipping a false god. It was all a grotesque illusion, a monstrous charade played out before an innocent public. The mute, immovable reality was that the prince did not believe either in himself or in his future position as sovereign. In his reflective moments of melancholy and self-doubt, which were frequent, he felt he was living a lie, trying to match an image that bore no relation to the real man. He baulked at the very thought of becoming king and being revered by these adoring millions and hated a daily existence of what he derisively called “princing.”

  “If only the British public really knew what a weak, powerless misery their press-made national hero was,” he told his girlfriend, Freda Dudley Ward.

  His despondency manifested itself in frequent denunciations of his future role as king. It was such a recurring theme of his life that friends and advisors feared for the future of the Crown. A life of service was not high on his royal agenda. “Princing,” as he endlessly complained to Freda Dudley Ward, “was much easier abroad. I guess it’s because one isn’t hit up with a lot of old-fashioned and boring people and conventions.”

  Prone to bouts of brooding depression, at the heart of his darkness the gloomy prince considered suicide as the only sure way out of his lifelong prison sentence. Upon his return from his wildly successful tour of North America in 1919, his morbid temperament was in full spate. He told his private secretary, Sir Godfrey Thomas, that he felt “hopelessly lost,” as if he were going mad. “I loathe my job now. . . . I feel I am through with it and long and long to die.” As an indication of his yearning to escape, he bought a 1,600-acre ranch in Alberta, the prince beguiled by a romantic vision of living the simple life, away from the cares of his position. It was, though, a bolt-hole he visited only four times in the forty years that he owned the property.

  His depressions were frequent and prolonged, especially on long sea voyages during his interminable imperial tours. Lord Mountbatten recalled that the miserable prince often said how he longed to change places with his travelling companion. Before he left for his tour of Australia and New Zealand he was in floods of tears, ostensibly because he was leaving his lover, Freda Dudley Ward. As Mountbatten recalled: “He was moody—had fits of downright gloom. He made a fine appearance . . . but then one of his fits would come over him—and they came like a flash—and he’d shut himself in his cabin for days, alone, face drawn, eyes brooding. He was basically a lonely person, lonely and sad.”

  When he finally got his way and walked away from the throne in 1936, his childhood nanny Charlotte “Lalla” Bill wrote a plaintive note to Queen Mary: “Do you remember, Your Majesty, when he was quite young, how he didn’t wish to live, and he never wanted to become King?” In his mind the abdication was the final renunciation of a lie that had begun in childhood. As far as the prince was concerned, the perception of the royal family in the popular imagination as the ideal family was a grotesque myth. “I had a wretched childhood,” he told American writer Charles Murphy. “Of course there were short periods of happiness but I remember it chiefly for the miserableness I had to keep to myself.” Beaten by sadistic nannies and tutors, bleakly observed with stiff disapproval by his remote mother and father, King George V and Queen Mary, and bullied by his peers, this sensitive, intelligent, and lonely boy realized early on that personal happiness played no part in the royal equation of existence.

  The diarist Sir Henry “Chips” Channon described talking to Queen Mary as like “having a conversation with St. Paul’s Cathedral,” and letters the prince received from his parents during his imperial tours were “stiff and unnatural,” as if from the head of a company to a line manager. In his rather pathetic attempt to find some common ground between himself and his parents, the young prince learned to crochet to please his mother. A dreaded summons to his father’s library was invariably the prelude to a royal admonition to work and try harder. “Remember your position and who you are” was his father’s constant refrain.

  He was expected to sacrifice his life on the altar of monarchy, exchanging his privileges and status for a lifetime yoked to duty and service. It was not a contract he wanted to sign, his inner turmoil expressed in his nervy behaviour—he was continually fiddling with his cufflinks, tugging at the knot in his tie, and never without a cigarette in his hand or pipe in his mouth. Heavy bouts of drinking helped him forget, the prince arriving late for official engagements still hungover.

  To the modern eye, his distorted self-image, his belief that he was fat even though he was painfully thin, his bouts of violent exercise and frugal diets—he never ate lunch—indicate that he may well have suffered from the pernicious eating disorder anorexia nervosa. At the time, his private secretary, not knowing about eating disorders, contented himself with describing the prince’s eccentric lifestyle and eating habits as “idiotic” and “utterly insane and unreasonable.”

  More than anything else he wanted to be treated like anyone else, to blend in. He was continually reminded of his apartness, often cruelly. From the time he was enrolled into Osborne naval college at age thirteen—the prince later went to Dartmouth naval college—he had what he termed “a desperate desire to be treated like any other boy of my age.” Instead he was regarded as a curiosity by the other cadets, who bullied and teased him, on one occasion dying his hair with red ink, on another staging a mock execution when they forced his head out of a sash window and brought it down on his neck like a guillotine.

  Later he attended Magdalen College, Oxford, at the same time as his regal contemporary, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. Unlike his royal friend, he was, according to Prince Paul, “reserved and shy and unable to enter into undergraduate life, or indeed make real friendships.” “A lost lamb” was how one of his tutors described him, the prince leaving the college after two years without graduating.

  The outbreak of World War One in August 1914 brought home the acute realization that however hard he tried, whatever he did, the Prince of Wales was different from his friends and compatriots. Even though, after much lobbying, he was granted a commission in the Grenadier Guards, he was forced to stay behind in England when his unit was ordered to the fighting in France. He asked the army commander, Lord Kitchener: “What does it matter if I am killed? I have four brothers.” In the face of this fatalistic hyperbole, Kitchener explained that he could not permit the future king to be placed in harm’s way, especially if he were likely to be captured and held hostage.

  It was, the prince would recall, the biggest disappointment of his life; to be in war and not to see battle was utterly devastating. He went through a prolonged period of self-loathing and despair, his sense of inadequacy manifest in his meagre eating habits. At his most troubled his situation provoked thoughts of suicide, a recurring theme in his life. Eventually he was allowed to join military headquarters in France, where he was occasionally permitted near to the front lines. The experience had a sobering effect, shaping his world view profoundly, the prince blaming the malign behaviour of politicians for creating conflict between ordinary Germans and Englishmen who, he believed, had much in common.

  On September 29, 1915, he joined Major General (later Field Marshal) Lord Cavan on a tour of the front line at Loos. As the party were making their way forward, a shell burst forty yards away, forcing them towards no-man’s-land.

  He later recorded: “Of course the dead lie out unburied and in the postures and on the spots as they fell and one got some idea of the horror and gha
stliness of it all. Those dead bodies offered a pathetic and gruesome sight, so cruel to be killed within a few yards of your objective after a 300-yard sprint of death. This was my first real sight of war and it moved and impressed me most enormously.”

  When they returned to Vermelles church, where he had left his car and driver, they discovered that the prince’s chauffeur had been killed by a burst of shrapnel. It was a tragic event that underlined the casual, random nature of death in wartime.

  Prince Edward came from a generation haunted by the First World War, the industrial scale of the killing leaving a permanent scar. Years later he recalled: “I have only to close my eyes to see once more those awful charred battlefields, miles and miles of duck board winding across a sea of mud, columns of heavily laden men trudging up to the front, columns of men trudging back, their vitality gone, their eyes dead. I remember the blood-stained shreds of khaki and tartan; the ground gray with corpses, mired horses struggling as they drowned in shell holes.”

  When Prince Edward returned home it was as though the war to end all wars had never taken place. His father’s life continued at the same imperturbable pace; at Sandringham, his Norfolk country estate, the clocks were set half an hour fast to give more daylight hours for shooting. When the guns were silent, the king busied himself with ordering his extensive royal stamp collection. For the sovereign it was a soothing pleasure, for the Prince of Wales it represented a royal court that was not just dull but stuck in the previous century. A man who considered himself a leading member of the so-called Jazz Age, he recoiled from a future mapped out in an unappealing vista of ceremonial tree plantings, laying cornerstones, meeting local worthies, and patronizing worthy charities.

  As he later explained: “Being a monarch . . . can surely be one of the most frustrating and over the duller stretches the least stimulating jobs open to an educated independent-minded person. Even a saint would find himself driven to exasperation.”

  That the king never dreamed of giving his sons any sort of responsibility, treating them like small boys, merely added to the prince’s frustrations. Only reluctantly did George V ever allow the future king to see State papers and then only after a near-fatal illness in late 1928. As Australian diplomat R. G. Casey told his prime minister, Stanley Bruce: “It is history repeating itself, as King Edward would never let the present King have access to such papers or indeed, I believe, have any responsibility for as long as he could keep him out of it.”

  The rigidity of court life, the dulling formality of the annual round, and the heavy burden of duty hung like a great bell around the neck of the Prince of Wales, sonorously summoning him onwards into a life as predictable as it was pointless. Of course, he was not the first—nor will he be the last—prince to feel that the restrictions of his birth vastly outweighed the privileges, Wordsworth’s “shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing Boy.”

  Everything about his father’s court, from the heavy, dark Victorian furniture and furnishings to the stilted formality of his advisors, spoke of another age, a world that had now passed. Even the king was forced, occasionally, to acknowledge the new order. In January 1924, George V received the first-ever Labour prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Highland ploughman. “What would Queen Victoria have thought?” mused King George V in his diary. Such was MacDonald’s reputation as a firebrand that during the war MI5 considered prosecuting him for making seditious speeches. The Establishment—including the Prince of Wales—became even more nervous when MacDonald’s government were the first in the West to give the new Russian regime de jure recognition.

  The fork in the road for father and son, both philosophically and physically, was the New World. In the same year that saw MacDonald elected into office, the prince sailed for what he came to consider as his safe haven, the United States, a land free from the pomp and protocol that dominated the court. Here he could enjoy the semblance of a life unanchored from the restraints and restrictions imposed by his father.

  His experiences in America encouraged him to believe that he could pick a pathway between his private life and his public duties. It was not a distinction that the king and queen, their advisors, or the mass media would allow him to make. The reality was that his increasingly hedonistic private life intruded into the public duty pressed on him by his family, politicians, and his people.

  Ostensibly billing the trip as a holiday, the prince spent three glorious weeks during the summer of 1924 carousing, dancing, drinking, and playing polo on Long Island with a flashy set of Americans whom the British ambassador, Esme Howard, dismissed as “oily magnates.”

  A headline in the Pittsburgh Gazette Times of September 8, 1924, summarized the prince’s behaviour. “Prince Likes America; Doesn’t Want to Leave. Spends Another Night Out—Vanishes from Party. Later Seen in All-Night Stand Eating ‘Hot Dogs.’ Dances with Duchess.”

  While the prince resented what he called the “damned spying” of the American press, his actions served only to encourage society matrons in thinking that their daughter might be the one for the bachelor prince. When he first arrived in New York onboard the Berengaria, he made himself a hostage to fortune by agreeing with a leading question from a female reporter who asked if he would marry an American “gal” if he ever fell in love with one.

  The chase was now on. “Never before in the history of metropolitan society has any visitor to these shores been so persistently and so extravagantly feted,” wrote one New York columnist. Little wonder that when the prince attended yet another late-night dance in his honour, his favourite tune was “Leave Me Alone.”

  Neither the public nor the press would extend him that courtesy. When the wallet of the prince’s equerry, Fruity Metcalfe—described variously as “weak and hopelessly irresponsible” by the prince’s chief of staff and “disastrous” by the British ambassador—was discovered behind the radiator in the West 72nd Street apartment of a known prostitute, New York society and the media reveled in the scandal. At court, Fruity Metcalfe was accused of being the habitual bon viveur who was leading the future king astray. From then on, strenuous efforts were made to keep the two apart—without much success.

  In a letter to the king’s private secretary, Ambassador Howard observed drily that the next time the prince came to America “he should avoid dances on Saturday nights and go to church on Sunday mornings.”

  There was a price to be paid. Once the king, who felt the prince’s holidaymaking was of a “somewhat strenuous character,” was fully apprised of his eldest son’s behaviour—and that of his entourage—visits to America were no longer on the agenda. As the king’s private secretary Lord Stamfordham observed to Esme Howard: “There is unquestionably a feeling of considerable uneasiness in the minds of thinking people that the whole visit has been too much characterized as one continuous form of recreation and amusement, not altogether devoid of frivolity and with a certain lack of dignity.”

  The prince was “bitterly disappointed,” the sovereign’s decision further marking the divergence between father and son, the fusty old guard and the fashionable Prince of Wales. For the future king, America represented freedom of a kind, at least time away from the restrictions of court. For George V, America was a foreign republic where the unwary royal could easily be led astray.

  It was not only his behaviour in New York that caused consternation at court. The charge sheet against him seemed to grow by the day. He was often late for official engagements, and when he did turn up he seemed bored and distracted, eager to get away. During a visit to Chile he was described by one onlooker as “boredom personified, restless, impatient to be away,” while in Argentina he was so exhausted by being, yet again, top of the bill in a travelling freak show that officials considered calling off the visit at the midway point. Even social functions such as balls bored him, at the last minute the prince crying off his attendance at dances held in his honour.

  His racy dress sense, his heavy drinking, his improper
dalliances, and his late-night revels at nightclubs infuriated the king. “You dress like a cad. You act like a cad. You are a cad. Get out!” he roared, his aggressively pernickety attitude towards his eldest son, who was after all a bona fide war hero with medals to boot, seeming to many overly censorious, as he had performed his duty manfully during war and peace. His reaction to fatherly rebuke is instructive, the prince, in tears, vowing to renounce his titles and go and live in the colonies. In the face of parental admonishment, or hostility of any kind, his first thought was flight. It was his default position, one he employed to catastrophic effect during the abdication crisis.

  His love of point-to-point hunting with his boon companion Fruity Metcalfe further exposed the character of a man with only a tenuous acquaintance with the notions of caution and self-preservation. He was notoriously reckless and foolhardy in the saddle, the prince taking risks that would make many other riders shudder.

  It was as if he was defying fate by his behaviour, challenging himself at the outer edge of life’s envelope because his entire life was entirely devoid of jeopardy. This characteristic is not unique to Prince Edward—his descendant Prince Charles has cheated death on several occasions, notably by skiing and playing polo, not to mention diving under the Arctic Circle and low-level parachute jumps.

  Such was the concern about Edward’s behaviour that, following a fall in 1924 at Arborfield Cross, which left the prince unconscious for several hours, both Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and George V insisted that he give up point-to-point races and steeplechasing. His stable was duly sold at auction—but not for another five years.

  The prince’s careless obstinacy and airy dismissal of the consequences of his actions seemed all of a piece with a man who was looking for a way out, any way out, of fulfilling his dread destiny. Ironically his reckless horsemanship merely added to his romantic appeal in the popular imagination. His close circle of advisors and confidants had an entirely different perspective. In April 1927 the prince’s private secretary, Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, complained to Stanley Baldwin about the heir apparent, stating that he was “rapidly going to the devil” in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women. He famously added that the best thing that could happen to him—and the country—would be for him to break his neck in a point-to-point race.