by Andrew Marr
By 1917, however, deep into the bloodied mud of total war, this royal web seemed likelier to choke the British monarchy to death than to protect it. Germans had become loathed in Britain, their shops destroyed, their brass bands expelled, even their characteristic dogs put down. To be a monarch with German connections was uncomfortable. Rising radical and revolutionary feeling across Europe had made monarchs generally unpopular too. King George was already well aware of it. During 1911–12 Britain had faced mass strikes and great unrest. At times it felt like a revolution, in which London would be starved of food by militant dockers. Radical Liberals struck at the aristocratic principle when the House of Lords blocked their radical budget. In the streets, a more militant socialism was being taught, with the earliest Labour politicians often defining themselves as anti-monarchists. Labour’s much loved early leader, Keir Hardie, was a lifelong republican who was particularly hated by the Palace. Though an MP, he had been banned from the Windsor Castle garden-party list for attacking Edward VII’s visit to see his cousin Tsar Nicholas in 1908. Later, he described George V as ‘a street corner loafer . . . destitute of ordinary ability’. The King responded by calling him simply ‘that beast’. For monarchs, even before the war came, these were unsettling times.
George, however, was lucky in his advisers, one above all. Lord Stamfordham’s story began colourfully. As Arthur Bigge, the son of a Northumberland parson, he was an artillery officer who fought in the Zulu War of 1879. One of his friends was the son of France’s deposed Emperor Napoleon III and when this young man was killed by a Zulu, Bigge was chosen to show his bereaved mother where it had happened, and to visit Queen Victoria to tell her the story. Queen Victoria liked Bigge so much that she immediately appointed him her assistant private secretary. He spent the rest of his life working for the monarchy. When Edward VII became king, Bigge served his son, first as Duke of Cornwall, then Prince of Wales, then as King George V, when Bigge became Lord Stamfordham. He had a huge influence on George, who said he could hardly write a letter without his help, but to start with Stamfordham did not get everything right. George and Stamfordham both had instinctively strong conservative views, and in the constitutional crisis of 1910–11 he advised George to face down the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith. The Liberals were confronted by the Tory-dominated House of Lords, which was blocking the ‘People’s Budget’. Asquith had had a promise from Edward VII to allow a deluge of Liberal peers to be created, as a last-resort way of swamping the upper house. George V instinctively hated the idea, which seemed an assault on the notion of aristocracy. Had the newly crowned George V gone with his instincts and backed the peerage rather than the elected government, he would have forced an immediate general election that would have been in part about the right of the monarch to interfere in politics – the very thing his granddaughter has spent her entire reign carefully avoiding.
Had George and Stamfordham stood and fought on the rights of the aristocracy and then lost the battle in the polling stations, the future of the British monarchy would have been in doubt. What we often now imagine as reassuring, golden-hazed ‘Edwardian’ Britain was a confrontational and seething nation. The Liberals, though more moderate than the rising Labour and socialist parties, were convinced Stamfordham was their implacable enemy, sitting at the centre of the imperial state. Feelings were running high. The then Liberal chancellor, later prime minister, Lloyd George, disliked him so much that when Stamfordham came for meetings in Downing Street during the war he made him wait outside on a hard wooden chair. Yet Stamfordham learned from his mistakes. Later King George said he was the man who had taught him how to be a king. He had done it by telling truth to power. Stamfordham was a dry and difficult man, but he prided himself on his honesty, and in particular telling his king the facts, however alarming they might seem. He now began to work hard to turn the sea-dog and countryman into a politically aware national leader. By the outbreak of the First World War, and then through its first hard years, George V had become a vivid and popular rallying point.
By the spring of 1917, however, the truths brought to him by his adviser seemed very alarming indeed. The war was going badly. There were strikes and growing complaints that the King was closer to his German cousin, the hated Kaiser, than to his own people. This was entirely untrue. But George V had made mistakes that gave the wrong impression.
He had been against stripping the Kaiser and his family of their honorary commands of British regiments and their British chivalric honours, not to mention their banners hanging at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Royal solidarity and ancient hierarchy apparently counted, even in the throes of an industrial war. Early in the war, King George had been furious at the campaign against Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, born German, but married to one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters and now British First Sea Lord. Battenberg had to quit, to the despair of his son, then a naval cadet himself, who wrote to his mother about the latest rumour ‘that Papa has turned out to be a German spy . . . I got rather a rotten time of it.’ (That boy grew up to be Lord Louis Mountbatten, and one of the most influential figures in the Queen’s life; what seem remote historical footnotes to outsiders turn out to be significant family memories.)
These instinctive flinches against the rampant anti-Germanism of wartime Britain had allowed the King’s critics to begin to paint him as not wholly patriotic. Lloyd George, summoned to Buckingham Palace in January 1915, wondered aloud ‘what my little German friend has got to say to me’. London hostesses mocked the court’s Hanoverian character. Street-corner agitators warned about ‘the Germans’ in the Palace. In fact, George was an exemplary wartime monarch, carrying out hundreds of troop visits and cutting down heavily on the expenses and living standards of the monarchy while the country suffered. He even gave up alcohol when Lloyd George asked him to, in order to set an example to drunkards (not an example, it has to be said, that Lloyd George himself followed). But the whispering went on. It grew louder. On 31 March 1917 there was a mass meeting at the Albert Hall chaired by one of Labour’s great heroes, George Lansbury, to celebrate the fall of Tsar Nicholas II, with much cat-calling against monarchy in general. Government wartime censors kept news of this out of the papers, but George was given eyewitness reports of what was said. Stamfordham had made it his job to get as much information as possible and to pass it on.
Thus, when Ramsay MacDonald, later Labour prime minister, called for a convention to be held in Leeds ‘to do for this country what the Russian revolution had accomplished in Russia’, or the trade union leader Robert Williams called for a ‘to let’ sign to hang outside Buckingham Palace, George was told about it. Stamfordham said a few weeks later, ‘There is no socialist newspaper, no libellous rag, that is not read and marked and shown to the King if they contain any criticism, friendly or unfriendly to His Majesty and the Royal Family.’3 In April 1917 the writer H. G. Wells had written to The Times calling for the establishment of republican societies; he was also reported to have complained that England suffered from an alien and uninspiring court, to which George famously retorted: ‘I may be uninspiring, but I’m damned if I’m an alien.’ In the Marxist newspaper Justice the eccentric, top-hatted editor Henry Hyndman argued that the royal family is ‘essentially German’ and called for a British Republic. At the other end of the political scale, the editor of the Spectator magazine, John St Loe Strachey, told Stamfordham that there was a spread of republican feeling among coalminers who ‘feel kings will stand together’ and that there was ‘a trade union of kings’.4 Lady Maud Warrender said that when George was told that it was whispered he must be pro-German because his family had German names, ‘he started and grew pale’. Wells returned to the attack, this time in the Penny Pictorial, calling for the monarchy to sever its destiny ‘from the inevitable collapse of the Teutonic dynastic system upon the continent of Europe . . . we do not want any German ex-monarchs here’. The file headed simply ‘Unrest in the Country’ had begun to thicken at the Palace.
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nbsp; More than ninety years on, it might seem that all this was mere hysterical fluff, and that George and his advisers were wrong to take it seriously. Small magazines, reported conversations in the coalfields, publicity-seeking authors . . . did it really add up to the beginning of the end for the British monarchy? The truth is that in 1917 British society was stretched to breaking point. People were ready to believe the wildest claims about German plots and secret networks of sexual blackmail, stretching right up to the court itself. The armies in France faced defeat and the Atlantic seabed was a graveyard of supply ships. Russia had been engulfed, Germany was next and there was rising militancy in British factories. In Britain the key war leader was not the King but the King-mocking Lloyd George, soon to be hailed as ‘the man who won the war’. Aristocracy, which has always buttressed monarchy, was on its knees, its sons dead or maimed and its estates facing financial ruin. The monarchy, it seemed, had few powerful friends. King George and Queen Mary had thrown themselves into visits to regiments, naval bases, children’s homes and voluntary organizations of all kinds. The King had clocked up 300 hospital visits alone, most of them emotionally draining. Yet none of it seemed to have made much difference. So George V decided that if the monarchy was to survive in Britain, it must be changed.
Advised by Stamfordham, King George made a series of reforms which have had a huge influence on the current Queen’s reign. The first and most public was to change his name, and that of the dynasty. ‘Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ was not only a mouthful but rather obviously German. It had to go. Tellingly, George did not know what his own original surname might be: it was lost in the tangled skeins of monarchical bloodlines and rampant hyphenation. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else know. The Royal College of Heralds was consulted. They told the King his surname was not Stuart. It might be Guelph. More probably it was Wipper or Wettin, neither of which sounded helpfully British. So the search began for an invented surname. Tudor, Stuart, Plantagenet, York and Lancaster were all discussed, as colourful history books were rummaged through. They were cast aside, as was the too obvious ‘England’, which would hardly have pleased the Scots, Irish or Welsh. More obscure suggestions included D’Este and Fitzroy. Finally, Stamfordham went back to the place-name of the King’s favourite palace and chose ‘Windsor’. It sounded good. It later turned out that Edward III had once used the name too, so there was even a slender historical connection.
Thus, on 17 July 1917, the Windsor dynasty was born. George V declared and announced ‘that We for Ourselves and for and on behalf of Our descendants . . . relinquish and enjoin the discontinuance of the use of the degrees, styles, dignities, titles and honours of Dukes and Duchesses of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and all other German degrees . . .’ A cascade of further name-changes followed which confuse many people even today about who was really who. There were the Tecks, for instance. George V’s wife, Queen Mary, or May, was the daughter of Francis, Duke of Teck, who had married one of George III’s granddaughters, the famously substantial Mary Adelaide, known in the family as ‘fat Mary’ and memorably described as being ‘like a large purple plush pincushion’. So George V’s in-laws included a lot of Tecks. For de-Tecking, mellifluous British place-names were at a premium. One of Queen Mary’s brothers became the Marquis of Cambridge and another the Earl of Athlone. Similarly, the Battenbergs, descended from Queen Victoria and the Princes of Hesse, and connected to the Tsar’s family, became Mountbattens, one being renamed Marquis of Milford Haven and another Marquis of Carisbrooke. Anything Germanic was briskly rubbed out.
For monarchy, names matter a great deal – but there were more substantial changes to come. George V and Queen Mary also announced that, in the King’s words in his diary, they ‘had decided some time ago that our children would be allowed to marry into British families. It was quite an historical occasion.’5 Though less publicized than the name-change, this was indeed quite historical, and quite important too. As far back as the eighteenth century, politicians and much of the British public had not liked the Hanoverian habit of marrying German princesses and princelings since it seemed to mean British taxes subsidizing foreign families. Queen Victoria herself had pointed out that her family’s dynastic marriage habits had caused ‘trouble and anxiety and are of no good’ when European countries went to war with one another: ‘Every family feeling was rent asunder, and we were powerless.’6 Yet the habit had continued. Now Victoria’s instinct that ‘new’ blood – by which she meant, blood from non-royal British families – would strengthen the throne morally and physically became a settled policy.
In effect, the British monarchy was being nationalized. The Bishop of Chelmsford, an influential figure, had told Stamfordham that ‘the stability of the throne would be strengthened if the Prince of Wales married an English lady . . . she must be intelligent and above all full of sympathy.’ A little later, another churchman, Clifford Woodward, the Canon of Southwark, had said to Stamfordham that the Prince of Wales should live for a year or two in some industrial city, perhaps Sheffield, and marry an Englishwoman preferably ‘from a family which had been prominent in the war’.7 Though ‘David’, the Prince of Wales, would later follow a very different path, this 1917 announcement paved the way for Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, a Scotswoman whose family had indeed been prominent in the war, to marry ‘Bertie’, the Duke of York and later George VI. It meant Prince Charles could marry Diana, and later Camilla; and that Prince William could marry Kate Middleton. Now it seems so obvious as to be barely worth mentioning; but marrying their subjects had hardly occurred to the old House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
The next move was more brutal, some say cowardly. George V cut off his ‘Cousin Nicky’, the deposed Tsar Nicholas II, and his entire family, leaving them to the tender mercies of Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution. The Tsar, unlike the Kaiser, had been a loyal ally of Britain’s until his empire collapsed. Though George cannot have known that the Romanovs would be assassinated in a cellar, he knew they were in serious danger, and that they hoped for refuge in Britain. Initially he agreed. But as we have seen, left-wing opinion was violently hostile to the Tsar and supportive of the revolution. For a long time it was thought and put about by friends of the Windsors that Lloyd George was to blame for letting the Tsar down. He, it was said, had countermanded the original offer of asylum for the Romanovs.
A detailed trawl through the correspondence by George V’s biographer Kenneth Rose revealed a different story. It was the King who panicked. At his request Stamfordham bombarded Number Ten with notes making it clear the Tsar was not welcome after all. Much was made of petty issues, such as the lack of suitably grand accommodation. This is a complicated story, for there was a fear at times that trying to get him out might actually put him more at risk – and even vague rumours of a secret British attempt to free him by force. But unless more evidence comes to light, it seems that George was at least willing to look the other way while Nicholas and his family were imprisoned and finally killed. The current Queen read the evidence and wrote with a flourish across a manuscript of Rose’s book: ‘Let him publish.’
Nothing could more eloquently show the radical change brought about by the war. Before it, in 1905, King George’s father had refused the Tsar’s plea for Britain to restore normal relations with Serbia, after the particularly brutal assassination of its king. In words that sound like those of George Bernard Shaw or even Oscar Wilde, Edward VII explained that his trade was simply ‘being a king . . . As you see, we belonged to the same guild, as labourers or professional men. I cannot be indifferent to the assassination of a member of my profession or, if you like, a member of my guild. We should be obliged to shut up our business if we, the Kings, were to consider the assassination of kings as of no consequence at all.’8 And now his son had taken avoiding action which would result in the assassination of the Tsar himself. No evidence of private guilt on George V’s part has emerged, merely his public expressions of regret at the murders. A revolution can focus the mind of a mon
arch as effectively as a judicial death sentence for lesser mortals. There were even discussions about whether or not he should attend a church memorial service for the Romanovs, though he did go in the end.
The next change was to the honours system. Most countries have some such system; Britain’s was both limited and tightly entwined with royal history. There were the ancient orders. The oldest is the Order of the Garter, established by Edward III probably in 1344 and limited to the monarch, the heir and up to twenty-four other members or ‘knights companions’. Membership is in the monarch’s gift. Today’s Knights and Ladies of the Garter, who parade each June at Windsor for a ceremony during Royal Ascot week, wearing Tudor caps with ostrich and heron feathers, blue velvet capes and blue garters, are a mix of aristocrats, former prime ministers and retired civil servants. There are also ‘Stranger Knights’ of the Garter who are foreign monarchs: in 1915 both Kaiser Wilhelm and the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz-Joseph were stripped of their memberships. So, during the Second World War, was the Japanese Emperor Hirohito (though the honour was restored to his successor Akihito). Haile Selassie was a member, too. Other old orders include Scotland’s Order of the Thistle, which goes back to 1687 and is limited to sixteen knights and ladies, and the Irish Order of St Patrick, now defunct. Apart from these, the grandest is the Order of the Bath, founded by the first of the Hanoverians, George I, in 1725. Though the name refers to the ancient medieval practice of new knights being bathed for purification, the order has a less elevated origin: it was created partly because the first and infamously corrupt prime minister Robert Walpole wanted a new form of patronage. It was extended after the Napoleonic wars and today is also used by Britain to honour eminent foreigners, from overseas generals to leaders. Two of them, the tyrants Nicolae Ceauçescu of Romania and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, were eventually stripped of the honour.