Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  Now he capitalized on his familiarity with France to undertake, on his own initiative, a state visit to Paris in May 1903. At first, with widespread pro-Boer sentiment, his reception was cool, even hostile. But during the interval at the Théâtre Français he gallantly saluted – in French – a French actress he’d known in London as representing ‘all the grace and all the spirit of France’.

  The remark spread like wildfire and the visit turned into a triumph. The following year, the French president paid a return visit to London and the Entente Cordiale was signed. For better or for worse, Britain was involved in the alliances of Continental Europe once more.

  On 6 May 1910, Edward’s bull-like constitution finally broke. After smoking his last cigar and taking a light luncheon, he collapsed and was helped to a chair. At five o’clock, he was told that his horse had won at Kempton Park. ‘I am very glad,’ he replied. They were his last coherent words and he died at about quarter to midnight.

  Edward’s last words were characteristic, for he had enjoyed being king. He and his advisers understood, of course, that royal ceremony had needed to be polished and made more appealing to the men (though not yet the women) who formed the new, mass electorate and increasingly wielded political power. But Edward preened and paraded because he wanted to and not just to make the monarchy more ‘democratic’. Historians who present his reign as a turning point in the history of the monarchy also forget that he reigned scarcely nine years and left most of his projects unfinished.

  If he had been succeeded by his eldest son, the doe-eyed but dim, unstable and apparently perverted Eddie, it is more than likely that the usual Hanoverian pattern would have reasserted itself. The son would have rejected his father’s legacy and Edward’s ceremonious revolution would have died with him. But his eldest son had predeceased him in 1892 and he was succeeded instead by his second son, George.

  Soon after his father’s death, the new king, George V, wrote in his diary: ‘I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers. I never had a word with him in his life. I am heartbroken and overwhelmed with grief.’ For the first time in the two centuries of the House of Hanover a father had been succeeded by a son who loved and respected him.

  But, despite his fondness for his father, George, who had spent his early career as a well-regarded naval officer, was his opposite in almost everything. He was slim, abstemious and rather shy. He wore the same elegant clothes to the same events and detested changes of fashion. He mistrusted the telephone, except for family gossip; was never driven at more than thirty miles an hour and loathed aeroplanes, submarines and all modern weaponry. He was a crack shot and a notable stamp collector. He was devoted to his wife, his weather gauge and the unchanging daily routines of his life as a country gentleman. Above all, he was driven by a strong sense of duty. The result was that, though George set himself to preserve and complete his father’s programme, he also took it in a very different direction.

  His first steps were devoted to his parents. His widowed mother, the beautiful, deaf and rather daffy Queen Alexandra, he decided, was to be known by a new title: ‘queen mother’, rather than the traditional, coldly formal ‘queen dowager’.

  Back in 1898, the great Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone had lain in state in Westminster Hall. Now George, who had acted as one of Gladstone’s pall-bearers, decided that his father should follow in the steps of the Great Commoner and lie in Westminster Hall before his burial in the royal vault at Windsor. The result was the grandest and most moving ceremony of a ceremonious reign, in which half a million people filed past Edward’s coffin in what the Illustrated London News called ‘The People’s Lying-in-State’.

  George, however, who had nothing of the celebrity in his temperament and loathed the very concept, was far less relaxed about the ceremonies in which, of necessity, he was the star. And, since he had never acquired his father’s ease at public speaking, he was particularly anxious if they involved a talking role. ‘The most terrible ordeal I have ever gone through,’ George confided to his diary of his first state opening of Parliament. But his sense of duty meant that he persevered nonetheless. It even made him go beyond his father, with his natural appetite for ceremony. Edward, because of his illness, had not been crowned with the massive St Edward’s Crown; his son was. Edward had no separate inauguration as emperor of India; George travelled to the subcontinent in 1911 to wear yet another specially made crown and receive the homage of his Indian subjects in the huge, spectacular Delhi Durbar. Finally, Edward had worn only a field marshal’s cocked hat at the annual state opening of Parliament. But, from 1913, George decided that ‘people wanted him’ to wear the Imperial State Crown, now augmented with the massive South African Cullinan II diamond.

  The crown, as the jewellers’ labels inside it show, was subject to repeated alterations. But it was never successfully fitted to George’s narrow skull, and, as he got older, it gave him dreadful headaches. All the same, he continued with his self-imposed burden of wearing it at the annual state opening.

  This is the measure of the difference between George V and Edward VII. Edward revived ceremonies because he enjoyed pomp and circumstance and was a natural at it. His son kept them going and even augmented them, not because he liked them, but because he thought it was the right thing to do. This is ceremony as a monarch’s hair-shirt, undertaken, not through inclination, but as a solemn duty. It is this devotion to duty which would transform the monarchy once again as it faced the challenge of ever more rapid and more radical social change.

  III

  George V had come to the throne in the midst of the worst political crisis in generations. In 1906 the Liberals won a crushing general election victory on a platform of social reform and state welfare benefits. The proposals and the consequent need for heavy taxation were more bitterly divisive than anything since the First Reform Act of 1832, and, like the Reform Act, they pitted the Liberal House of Commons against the Tory House of Lords. Also, as in 1832, the monarchy risked finding itself pig-in-the-middle.

  The death of the old king and the inauguration of the new reign had imposed a truce on political strife. But not for long. In November 1910 the Liberal government decided to go to the country on a proposal known as the Parliament Act to curb permanently the power of the Lords. But first, they would get George’s prior agreement to a mass creation of peers if the Lords continued to resist.

  The confrontation took place at Buckingham Palace. The Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, browbeat the inexperienced king mercilessly. He was also double-crossed by his private secretary, who concealed from him the Tories’ willingness to form an alternative government. George never forgave those who’d taken advantage of him. But, probably, it was for the best. The powers of the Lords were indefensible; the important thing from the king’s point of view was to stop the monarchy going down with the peerage.

  Six weeks after the coronation, the Parliament Act passed the Lords by a whisker, because the bishops decided to vote with the government to save the monarchy from embarrassment and the Lords from themselves.

  Soon the crown confronted a far more dangerous threat, when the system of Continental alliances, which Britain had rejoined under Edward VII, sucked Britain and the empire into the slaughter of the First World War. The royal family did its bit. The king visited the troops in the field; Queen Mary cheered up the wounded in hospital and the prince of Wales joined up though fear of his capture meant that, to his intense frustration, he was never allowed near the front.

  But, by 1917, the strain was beginning to tell. Abroad, the February Revolution overthrew the Russian autocracy and Tsar Nicholas II, George’s first cousin and spitting image. At home, there were strikes, mutinies and political radicalization. Confronting this double threat, George and his advisers embarked on a series of bold measures to shed old baggage and make new friends.

  Most dramatically, he dumped centuries of German dynastic history, culture and family connection by renaming the royal
family the ‘House of Windsor’. His German relatives were stripped of their British honours and titles. And those who remained in Britain were given new, British-sounding names as well, so that, for instance, the Battenbergs became the Mountbattens.

  Here the very deficiencies of George’s education helped. Speaking only English (probably the first king to do so since before the Conquest), he identified himself solely with England and the empire. In other circumstances, his insularity and Little Englandism would have been a disadvantage; now they became an asset. The novelist and radical H.G. Wells might denounce ‘an alien and uninspiring court’; George was able to reply, truthfully, ‘I may be uninspiring but I’ll be damned if I’m an alien!’ Neither his polyglot father and grandmother, both of whom spoke English with a slight though unmistakable German accent, could have got away with that.

  Next George used a wholesale remodelling of the honours system to accommodate the renewed Windsor monarchy to the new social forces that had emerged in the war years and just before, such as women, socialism and the vast growth of both the civil and the armed services. The key step was the establishment of the Order of the British Empire. The ancient orders of chivalry, such as the Garter and the Thistle, were deliberately exclusive, in both size and rank. And they were wholly male. The Order of the British Empire, on the other hand, was designed to be as large and inclusive as possible and to honour women as well as men.

  The first investiture was equally revolutionary. It took place not in the plush and gilt interiors of Buckingham Palace, but in the open air, at Glasgow Rangers’ football stadium at Ibrox Park in September 1917. Here the star of the show was Miss Lizzie Robertson, who wowed the 70,000-strong crowd by turning up in her natty khaki overalls to receive the Medal of the British Empire, ‘For devotion to duty in a national projectile factory’.

  The original insignia of the order featured a figure of Britannia in the centre. But, after their deaths, it was replaced by the twin profiles of the founders of the order, King George V and Queen Mary. It would be hard to think of a more fitting memorial to the ‘People’s King’, as contemporaries already called him.

  Also founded at the same time was another consciously ‘democratic’ order, the Companions of Honour. This conferred no title of rank or special precedence and was aimed at those new powers in the land such as the trade union bosses and Labour mayors who professed a wholesome socialist contempt for such outmoded trappings of class and wealth. Prominent among the original seventeen Companions were the leaders of the Metal Workers, the Railwaymen and the Transport Unions.

  But it soon became clear that the Palace had been wrong to take the socialists’ levelling pretensions seriously. For it turned out that the new aristocracy of labour was every bit as keen on badges and baubles, knighthoods and peerages, as the old aristocracy of birth and wealth. The result was a remarkable trade-off. ‘We are all socialists now,’ declared the Darlington Northern Star after the sweeping changes of 1917. But it should also have added: ‘We are all royalists now’ – even trade unionists, socialists and suffragettes.

  Most ‘socialist’ of all, perhaps, was George’s treatment of his Russian cousin, the dethroned Nicholas II. The Russians had been Britain’s allies against Germany. Nevertheless, tsarism was profoundly unpopular with Liberal and Labour politicians, who rejoiced at its fall. And George let this fact, rather than family ties or sentiment, govern his behaviour. He vetoed any offer of refuge to the imperial family, leaving them instead to their grisly fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks, after they seized power in the second, more extreme revolution of October 1917. Subsequently the king wept crocodile tears. Or perhaps he had simply suffered a convenient amnesia.

  But there was more to the reinvention of the British monarchy in 1917 than a remarkable, and remarkably successful, heading off of the threat of Red Revolution. The monarchy had long been a welfare monarchy, honouring, and thereby encouraging, the charitable donations which in the days before the welfare state had financed healthcare, education and poor relief. Now, as the state, under the impulse of socialism, was starting to take over these areas, it shifted to become a service monarchy, rewarding those who did that bit more in their jobs and communities. It was committed to the ethos of public service, of which it saw itself as the apex and exemplar. It was not socialist, far from it. But it did believe that ‘there was such a thing as society’. Which is why, from that day to this, it has tended to be more comfortable with Labour and wet Tory governments, rather than high and dry Thatcherite ones.

  The monarchy had become a moral one. And it was morality, in its vulgar sense of sexual behaviour, which was to carry it both to its peak and its depths.

  IV

  The ‘family monarchy’ was also a product of the year of transformation of 1917. For the last 200 years the Hanoverians had continued the German practice of marrying only into fellow-German princely families. Now George altered the rules to decree that his children could marry Englishmen and women. ‘This was an historic day,’ he wrote in his diary. It was. A German dynasty had become an English family – even, perhaps, the representative Great British Family.

  Here again George’s deeply conventional character meant that the role fitted like a glove – and much more comfortably than his crown. At his father’s coronation, Edward’s collection of mistresses, past and present, had been given special accommodation, known irreverently as the ‘Loose Box’. George, in contrast, had the most blameless personal life of any king since George III in the eighteenth century.

  But for the family monarchy to establish itself also depended on the next generation. Here the prospects were mixed. George V had two older sons: David Edward, prince of Wales, born in 1894, and Albert George, duke of York, who followed a year later. Despite the closeness of their ages, they turned out to be very different in character.

  David Edward took after his grandparents: he inherited Queen Alexandra’s blond-haired and blue-eyed good looks and King Edward’s temperament. He was intelligent, curious, a good linguist and a natural charmer. But he was also contrary, found it difficult to concentrate and reverted to the Hanoverian norm by getting on badly with his father.

  Albert George, on the other hand, was a slower, dimmer version of his father. He passed sixty-eighth out of sixty-nine in his final school exams, was knock-kneed and cursed with a dreadful stammer. But he had application, stamina and at the age of seventeen became a convinced Christian. The two brothers, in short, were the hare and the tortoise.

  Especially with women. David Edward acquired a maîtresse en titre even before the end of the First World War. But there was no sign of a wife. Two years later, in 1920, Albert George encountered Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. But Elizabeth was in no hurry and Albert George, inexperienced and justifiably afraid of rejection, hesitated. Not till 1922 and at what was rumoured to be the third attempt was his proposal accepted.

  Elizabeth, daughter of an earl and cousin of a duke, was exactly the kind of spouse that George had envisaged for his children when he changed the royal marriage rules in 1917. The king was delighted, and his letter of congratulation to his son ended: ‘I feel that we have always got on very well together (very different to dear David)’. The marriage thus neatly squared the circle. It was socially acceptable, as the king required; it was also rooted in romantic love, as the post-war popular mood demanded.

  The popular mood also demanded that the wedding be turned into a public spectacle. It took place at Westminster Abbey on 26 April 1923, the first of a royal prince to be held there since the Middle Ages, and the sermon was preached by Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of York. The great Victorian archbishops had been outstanding intellectuals. Lang instead was a courtier and committee man, with a view of Christianity in which the monarchy, rather than the cross, stood centre-stage as the symbol of the nation’s faith.

  George had already turned the monarchy into a monarchy of duty. Now Lang and his ilk added a new responsibility to the already overburdened royal shoulders: to hav
e, or at least to appear to have, a perfect marriage: ‘You cannot resolve that [your marriage] shall be happy,’ his sermon warned the couple in a solemn admonition, ‘you can and will resolve that it shall be noble.’ Or, in less elevated language: you will stick together come what may and never, ever divorce.

  Pressure had been mounting since the turn of the nineteenth century to liberalize England’s highly restrictive divorce laws. But the opposition to reform was also strong. It had been led by Lang despite his own (probably non-practising) homosexuality in the name of the defence of Christian marriage; now, with his marriage sermon, he enlisted the family monarchy as a powerful ally in his campaign.

  As it happened, the Yorks were happy. At least, George was: his marriage ‘transformed him, and was the turning point of his life’. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1926, and another, Margaret Rose, four years later. The result was an idyllic family life which, despite the trappings of wealth and royalty, the press contrived to present as ‘normal’.

  But Albert George was the second son. Meanwhile, the elder, David Edward, carried out a series of spectacularly successful tours of the empire – Canada, Australia and India – and the United States. He glad-handed, defied protocol and flaunted his sex appeal. The crowds went wild and he became the first royal star of the new mass media of the cinema, radio and the illustrated press. He was a celebrity and a royal rebel. But did he have a cause? Or was it mere self-indulgence?

  In 1935 George V celebrated his Silver Jubilee. The king-emperor, now almost seventy, was worried about the effort and expense. But the coalition national government, formed to cope with the depression, was keen for a demonstration of national unity in the face of threats at home and especially abroad from the rising dictatorships of Germany and Italy.