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

by Andrew Morton

  Baldwin responded: “God forgive me, I have often thought the same.”

  While his halo of boyish glamour invested the prince with an undeniable appeal and popularity, up close and personal the vista was not so inviting. His advisors and courtiers were, like the prince, living a lie, covering up the stark fact that he was looking for any excuse to escape from his destiny. At some point in 1928 all his senior advisors—Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey, Sir Godfrey Thomas, and Alan Lascelles—seriously considered their positions, the trio believing that the Prince of Wales was made up of entirely the wrong stuff for a future sovereign.

  The strain of juggling the growing chasm between the breezy public image and the despondent private reality eventually became too much. Lascelles snapped, the final straw coming during a tour of Africa in 1928 when the royal party were on a train in Tanzania. He received an urgent cable from Prime Minister Baldwin saying that the king was gravely ill and that the prince should return home at once. Prince Edward thought that Baldwin was bluffing and returned to his seduction, which was ultimately successful, of a certain Mrs. Barnes, the wife of the local district officer. The prince’s selfish behaviour prompted Lascelles to hand in his resignation. In their final interview the future king returned to a familiar refrain, candidly admitting: “I’m quite the wrong sort of person to be Prince of Wales.”

  The strains and stresses facing courtiers trying to reconcile the unsuitable reality with the radiant image of the Prince of Wales is reminiscent of the turmoil inside Buckingham Palace several decades later when it was clear that the present Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, was desperately unhappy in his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer and had returned to the arms of his lover, Camilla Parker Bowles. The difference was that during the 1930s the mass media was much more compliant, a handful of proprietors such as Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere controlling the distribution of information.

  Even so, disaster beckoned. Lord Strathmore, the father of the new Duchess of York, was one of a widening circle who reluctantly believed that the bachelor prince would never succeed to the throne of England. As the years ticked by, it was not just the prince’s courtiers who were gripped by a grim sense of foreboding but the entire British ruling class.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Adolf Hitler, Royal Matchmaker

  In the royal houses of Europe marriage was a serious business. There was certainly little room for love, passion, or romance. Royal marriages were arranged, the vagaries of the heart no match for the inexorable demands of duty and dynasty. Those feckless royals who had the temerity to fall in love and marry beneath their station were abruptly cast into the outer social darkness.

  The parents of the Prince of Wales, King George V and Queen Mary, were typical results of a caste system where royalty married only royalty, English royals traditionally matched with their German counterparts. Queen Victoria’s writ ran large during her long reign, her decisions about and choices of marital partners for her growing family absolute and final. When her grandson and heir to the throne, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, died unexpectedly in 1892 shortly before he was due to marry a German princess, Victoria Mary of Teck, the old queen hardly missed a beat. She summoned his younger brother George, then an aspiring naval officer, and ordered him to quit the navy, marry Princess Mary, and prepare for kingship. Any personal ambition or feelings George had for himself were snuffed out beneath the smothering blanket of monarchy, though fortuitously he did become very fond of Mary. He duly did his duty, married Princess Mary in July 1893, and a year later produced an heir, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, known in the family as David.

  As procreation is the principal function of royalty, the mating game for this new arrival began pretty much from the moment Edward Albert was born. All over Europe royal parents reviewed their own broods with an eye to one day claiming the glittering prize, consort to the future king-emperor, ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. It was an innocent parlour game that everyone, rich and poor, could join in. The unveiling of a statue to Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace provided the first public forum to discuss an issue that would come to convulse the country. Accompanying German emperor Wilhelm II to the service was his eighteen-year-old daughter, the pretty if imperious Princess Viktoria Luise. She was immediately singled out as a future bride for the sixteen-year-old prince, the Daily Express describing how she had taken “London by storm.” The princess, who enjoyed the attention, was not so enamoured of her possible paramour, dismissing Prince Edward with faint praise. “Very nice but terribly young.”

  There was no hurry. The prince was still a teenager and, following the death of Edward VII in 1910, the new king, George V, had only just ascended the throne. Then forty-six, he was in robust good health. Nonetheless there was no harm in testing the waters, his son and heir visiting his German cousins in the spring and summer of 1913. Ostensibly the trip was to improve his language skills and general knowledge, but it was also for his German cousins to run the romantic rule over the young prince.

  He progressed, as he noted in his memoirs, “sumptuously” from one palace to another: visiting “Onkel Willie and Tante Charlotte,” the gluttonous king and queen of Württemberg; meeting with Count Zeppelin and seeing his eponymous airship; and enjoying a curious encounter with the Kaiser, who somewhat presciently described the prince as a “young eagle, likely to play a big part in European affairs because he is far from being a pacifist.”

  While he danced until the early hours in the nightclubs of Berlin, the romantic highlight was his meeting at her family schloss in Gotha with Princess Caroline “May” Mathilde of Schleswig-Holstein, who is from the same branch of the royal family as the present Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II. She was slim, elegant, and fashionable, and the prince found her easy to talk to, with a pleasing personality. Such was their rapport that the Kaiser’s son August Wilhelm subsequently wrote to the prince suggesting that a matrimonial match be made. While it seems he hesitated, Edward was sufficiently enthusiastic to plan another visit the following summer. So far so conventional, the future king conforming to royal tradition by fishing for a mate in the approved gene pool of German royalty. The outbreak of war in August 1914 changed all that, Edward remarking a year later to his private secretary Godfrey Thomas about what might have been. Thomas later recalled: “HRH [His Royal Highness] was very much attracted to her and I am perfectly certain that if the War hadn’t come, it would have been brought off.”

  As it was, the First World War harvested the royal families of Europe, drastically diminishing the prospects of the prince finding a royal mate. Initially he made it clear that he was not interested in marrying a commoner, a sentiment that precluded the chance of elevating an English subject, however high-born, into the ranks of royalty.

  In this regard he was even more conservative than his father, who issued a royal proclamation in July 1917 which not only formally changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg und Gotha to Windsor but, as significantly, specifically changed the rules of marital engagement. From that date on, his children and heirs could marry into English families, royalty for the first time allowed to marry its subjects.

  That the Prince of Wales preferred the former tradition greatly limited his options, perhaps deliberately so, indicating his hesitation about ever marrying.

  As he told Mountbatten: “I suppose I’ll have to take the fatal plunge one of these days, though I’ll put it off as long as I can, ’cos it’ll destroy me.” This reticence did not stop him playing the field.

  Like many men of his generation, he was generally bashful about the female form—“filthy and revolting” was his description of naked prostitutes posing in a Calais brothel—and both ignorant of and timid about the act of coition itself. Stories about his ambiguous, not to say confused, sexuality dogged him throughout his life. His one-time private secretary Anne Seagrim believed that his sexual ambivalence went to the heart of who he was. The cornerstone of his character was
his “fundamental uncertainty about his sexuality and his ability to be a heterosexual man. He was fundamentally afraid of women.”

  In July 1917, thanks to the efforts of his equerries, a French prostitute called Paulette helped him overcome his fears. A subsequent six-month affair with a Parisian courtesan named Marguerite Alibert gave the prince a healthy appetite for sex that belied his boyish, almost effeminate countenance. As society belle Lady Diana Cooper crudely observed, from then on the prince was “never out of a woman’s legs.” Often those legs were married.

  His first amour on home soil was in 1917 with Marion Coke, the wife of Viscount “Tommy” Coke, heir to the Earl of Leicester. The prince spent so much time in her company that eventually her husband warned him to stay clear. That didn’t stop Edward encouraging her to visit him in Paris. Twelve years older than Edward, who was young for his age, she sensibly declined his harebrained invitation which, apart from ending her marriage, would have brought social disgrace.

  More conventionally, he romanced his sister’s best friend, Lady Sybil “Portia” Cadogan, one of five daughters of the Earl of Cadogan. His courtship with Portia, which coincided with his infatuation with Marion Coke, was thought by many, not least his sister, to be heading for the altar. In June 1917, when Portia telegrammed her parents and told them “Engaged to Edward,” they presumed they had a future queen in the family. Actually she had ended her association with the prince and accepted the hand of the prince’s university friend Lord Edward Stanley, who enjoyed a double celebration that month by winning a by-election as a Conservative candidate. He went on to become minister for the Dominions.

  Spurned by one potential bride, there were plenty of other ambitious young English aristocratic ladies encouraged by the king’s decree widening the marital choices for his family. So when the prince arrived in the capital in March 1918 while on leave, there was, according to writer Cynthia Asquith, “wild excitement.” She observed: “No girl is allowed to leave London . . .and every mother’s heart beats high.”

  Various names were in the frame as possible suitors but it was Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower who had tongues wagging. A recognized beauty who was sketched by society artist John Singer Sargent, Lady Rosemary, the daughter of the Duke of Sutherland, first met the prince in the summer of 1917 in Calais, where she was billeted as a Red Cross nurse at the hospital run by her mother, Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland. The prince accompanied the king and queen during an official visit and was photographed, head down, chatting to the aristocratic nurse. Described by the Illustrated London News as “generous, cheery and kind, ready for any excitement, especially outdoor expeditions,” Lady Rosemary, it seems, was the rebound girl for the prince, who fell for her shortly after being so abruptly ditched by Lady Portia Cadogan.

  After a whirlwind wartime courtship the prince, according to Lady Victor Paget, one of Rosemary’s closest friends, asked her to marry him. Both his parents were against the match, Queen Mary explaining that there was “bad blood—a touch of madness—in one line of the Leveson-Gower family.”

  At this time mental stability was uppermost in the minds of the king and queen. The mental health of Prince Edward’s younger brother John, who suffered from autism and was prone to violent epilepsy, severely deteriorated around this time. Kept in seclusion at Sandringham, he died a few months later in January 1919 from a seizure.

  The prince, who felt “bitter and furious” towards his parents, was entirely unsympathetic with regard to their cautious point of view, incensed that they were preventing him from following his heart. As Lady Paget told writer Michael Thornton: “I don’t think he ever forgave his father. I also felt that from that time on, he had made up his mind that he would never make what might be called a suitable marriage to please his family.”

  Even after she married William Ward, Viscount Ednam and later the 3rd Earl of Dudley, in March 1919 at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, the prince continued to stay close, privately visiting his one-time paramour at her home, Himley Hall on the outskirts of Dudley in the Midlands. He was godfather to her eldest son, Billy, who became the 4th Earl. Throughout his life Billy was amused by the possibility that the prince might have been his father.

  The prince’s latest spat with his parents seemed to end his conventional search for a bride. From now on he yo-yoed between grand passions and casual pursuits, invariably with compliant married women. The extremes of his romantic heart matched his erratic mood swings, which rapidly fluctuated from elation to despair.

  In many ways his next lover and long-time mistress Freda Dudley Ward, the half-American wife of a member of Parliament and vice chamberlain of the Royal Household, was, marital status apart, an eminently suitable choice. His family and friends pragmatically acknowledged that Freda—the daughter of a Nottingham lace manufacturer—whom he met by chance during an air raid at the end of the war, was a “good thing” in his life. She was much more than his lover, becoming his confidante, sounding board, and surrogate mother, a safe haven where he could pour out his frustrations.

  His devotion to his paramour was obvious even to the casual observer. When Winston Churchill, who treated the prince like a surrogate son, travelled to Nottingham with the couple, Edward’s adoration was transparent. “It was quite pathetic to see the Prince and Freda. His love is so obvious and undisguisable.”

  Freda, described as an “angelic waif” by Churchill’s cousin Shane Leslie, was the voice of calm in the storm of emotions that swept over him, soothing and steadying his tormented soul. Not just beautiful and charming but “cosy and warm,” observed Mountbatten. “She’s absolutely been a mother to him, comforted and advised him and all along he has been blind in his love to what the world is saying.”

  At times their relationship degenerated into a mother with her baby rather than the cliché of an immature man seeking a mother figure. “I’m just DIPPY to die with YOU even if we can’t live together,” was just one example of a burble of baby talk that issued from the princely pen. Edward fully acknowledged the truth of Max Beerbohm’s observation about King George IV: “He was indeed still a child, for Royalties, not being ever brought into contact with the realities of life, remain young far longer than other people.” What was true for his ancestor, he averred, applied equally to himself. As he wrote to Freda Dudley Ward: “No one realizes how desperately true that is in my case more than I do.”

  While his behaviour worried the king and queen, he was not the only one of their children with an eye for married women.

  His younger brother Prince Albert was infatuated with Freda’s friend Lady Sheila Loughborough, a striking Australian whose marriage to Lord Loughborough was on the rocks because of his drinking and gambling. She and Freda often danced with the two princes at balls, which, as Lady Loughborough confided in her memoirs, “annoyed some of the dowagers. However, we didn’t care. We knew no party was complete without us—and them.”

  The king used what leverage he had, warning his son that he would confer the title Duke of York only if he gave up his Sheila. He duly fell in line and, following the king’s declaration that allowed his children to marry subjects, in 1923 married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the daughter of the prominent Scottish noble, Lord Strathmore. While this match and the marriage the previous year of their daughter, Princess Mary, gave the king and queen much satisfaction, the behaviour of Prince Edward’s younger brother Prince George was of pressing concern.

  The king and queen had lost one son to congenital illness; now they were in danger of losing another to drug addiction. Prince George embraced the Roaring Twenties full on, enjoying a party life of drink, drugs, and wild sex. His string of lovers—men and women—were said to have included the singer Jessie Matthews; playwright Noël Coward; Princess Diana’s step-grandmother, novelist Barbara Cartland; and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.

  However, it was his long-time association with society drug addict Kiki Preston, known as “the girl with the silver syringe,” that really set alarm bells ringing.
While his parents were seized with a despairing paralysis about how to handle this unthinkable situation, Prince Edward—and his mistress—took control, helping to wean his brother off cocaine and heroin.

  Part of his cure was to ensure that Kiki Preston could no longer influence George, the prince “exiling” her for a time to Switzerland. It is widely believed that Prince George and his addict lover had a child together, Michael Canfield, who went on to become a New York publisher. He died in 1969. (It is hardly surprising, in view of Prince George’s colourful past, that historians frequently complain about the paucity of correspondence and any other records relating to Prince George, Duke of Kent, which are held at the Royal Archives inside Windsor Castle.)

  Whatever the vicissitudes facing Prince George, the fact remained that the future of the crown rested on the shoulders of the firstborn. While the king took a dim view of his eldest son’s skittish but obstinate character, his louche friends, and his late-night lifestyle, he would have forgiven him anything just as long as he married and produced an heir. The public, though, saw nothing of the dramas that went on behind the royal curtain, but as the years ticked by and Edward showed no sign of weaning himself away from Freda Dudley Ward or seriously searching for a bride, concerns were being whispered beyond the tight-lipped boundaries of the royal court. The king’s bouts of ill health—he never fully recovered from a fall from his horse during a review of the troops in 1915—made matrimonial matters a subject of pressing concern. In the summer of 1925 he was urged by his doctors to take a restorative Mediterranean cruise, and in November 1928 a severe bout of septicaemia left him so weakened that, as a precaution, the Prince of Wales was summoned home from an African tour by Prime Minister Baldwin. The king spent three months recuperating at the seaside resort of Bognor, his eldest son, together with Queen Mary, undertaking many of his engagements.