by Andrew Marr
The droll, immaculately dressed yet always sad-eyed prince had for a long time been the hope of the British Empire. He had been trained by the navy and struggled hard to be allowed to fight in the trenches, getting near enough to the front line to be shelled. After the war, he had been sent on ritual tours of the Empire, touching that vanished world at its grandest moment before it began to crumple, meeting and greeting adoring crowds from the highlands of India to the snowy wastes of Canada. He read out the speeches written with fluency and grace.
In the 1920s he was, for British newspaper-readers, the beau idéal of the modern man: informal, a keen dancer and pleasure-seeker who nevertheless said the right words at the right moments. Though a demon rider to hounds, he also sought out the new world of nightclubs and golf links. He was taken at face value by the masses, in Britain and overseas, as an attractive man of energy, advanced views and great charisma. Yet ‘David’ was, before Diana, the prime example of what can happen when a leading member of the royal family starts to behave like a celebrity. The little-people’s rules did not count for him. He was bored by royal paperwork and he was privately contemptuous of the courtly world enclosing him.
One can sympathize. His own book, though self-serving and moany, is a convincing account of the stultifying life of George V’s inter-war court, with its slow dinners, endless protocol and early nights. Edward was also tinged with the progressive ideas of the day. When his father, at the end of the Great War, called upon the eldest son to remember his position and who he was, he reflected: ‘But who exactly was I? The idea that my birth and title should somehow or other set me apart from and above other people struck me as wrong . . . without understanding why, I was in unconscious rebellion against my position. That is what comes, perhaps, of sending an impressionable Prince to school and war.’15 If republican readers perk up at this point and start to ask if Edward is a putative hero, they must remember that he was as haughty to those around him as the worst modern ‘celeb’. He rebelled not by rethinking the role and rhythm of monarchy, or even declaring for its abolition (and thus all the comforts it brought him too, presumably), but by being selfish and wayward. He took married mistresses, then brutally dumped them. He danced into the small hours and infuriated his staff with his petulant demands. Behind the scenes, he was causing despair to the people on whom he depended, and no senior member of the royal family can afford to do that. Unlike the rest of us, they are attended on, followed and guided by a small army of their own. And as in any army, if the chief loses the support of the soldiers, everything goes.
‘Tommy’ Lascelles was the war-decorated and intensely patriotic assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales. He later served George VI and – briefly – the present Queen. Like most people, he was star-struck by Edward when he first met him and as a fervent monarchist he was delighted by his new job. As time went on, though, he grew more and more alarmed by the playboy capriciousness of his ‘Chief,’ until he became thoroughly disillusioned. During their 1927 tour of Canada, he took counsel from the then prime minister, who was part of the British group:
I felt such despair about him [the Prince of Wales] that I sought a secret colloquy with Stanley Baldwin one evening . . . I told him directly that, in my considered opinion, the Heir Apparent, in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment, was rapidly going to the devil, and unless he mended his ways, would soon become no fit wearer of the British Crown. I expected to get my head bitten off; but Baldwin heard me to the end, and, after a pause, said he agreed with every word I had said. I went on, ‘You know, sometimes when I sit in York House waiting to get the result of some point-to-point in which he is riding, I can’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.’ ‘God forgive me,’ said Stanley Baldwin, ‘I have often thought the same.’16
That is quite a moment: the prime minister and a private secretary to the heir to the throne agreeing it would be better for Britain if he accidentally killed himself. Lascelles considered resignation but was short of money and long on patriotism. Encouraged by his wife, he soldiered on. Yet only a year later, writing to her during another tour, this fervent monarchist was questioning whether monarchy was really such a ‘flawless and indispensable institution’ after all. The thoughtless behaviour of the Prince had made the life of a courtier with the slightest self-respect simply intolerable. Lascelles reflected: ‘It is like being the right-hand man of a busy millionaire, when one is not at all certain that capitalism is a good thing . . . Why should I undo an hour’s work just because another man suddenly decides he wants to play golf at three instead of five? Why should I continually hang about on one foot or the other because another man can’t take the trouble to go and change his clothes in time?’17 If you want a explanation as to why the Queen places such emphasis on behaving well to her staff (never her ‘servants’), and expects her family to treat them with similar thoughtfulness and courtesy, look no further than Uncle David.
Lascelles – not the last senior courtier to grind his teeth about a Prince of Wales – finally exploded with Edward during their lion- and elephant-hunting expedition in East Africa in November 1928 when King George V fell seriously ill and Baldwin cabled repeatedly, begging the Prince to come home at once. Lascelles showed Edward the cables. The Prince, who was having far too much fun to want to leave Africa, replied that he didn’t believe a word – it was ‘just some election dodge of old Baldwin’s. It doesn’t mean a thing.’ Lascelles recounted that after this ‘incredibly callous behaviour’, he lost his temper with the heir to the British Empire: ‘ “Sir,” I said, “the King of England is dying; and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to us.” He looked at me, went out without a word, and spent the remainder of the evening in the successful seduction of a Mrs Barnes, wife of the local Commissioner. He told me so himself next morning.’18
Not only Lascelles but two more of Edward’s most senior staff were desperate to escape from him. Lascelles got in first, however, in January 1929, writing the Prince a blunt letter and later giving him a verbal dressing-down: ‘I paced his room for the best part of an hour, telling him, as I might have told a younger brother, exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.’ To their mutual credit the two men parted relatively affably. Lascelles returned to serve George V shortly before he died, and remained at Buckingham Palace through the next two reigns. He was not surprised by the abdication when it came, but he was appalled by what he saw as a dereliction of duty. Once exiled, the Duke of Windsor referred to Lascelles simply as ‘the evil snake’.
Some people argue that the abdication crisis of 1936 was the defining moment of the Windsors, and there is a lot to be said for that. It was certainly their biggest shock. But the story itself need not keep us long here. It has been exhaustively described, from every possible angle, for seventy years. The wild rumours about the sexual hold Wallis Simpson had over the King; the brutal political battle between him and Stanley Baldwin; the arguments about a morganatic marriage (in which he would have been King but Wallis would not have been Queen); and the tussle over money and status when the King finally did abdicate are interesting questions but have been exhaustively discussed by several generations of historians, novelists and journalists. What matters in the Queen’s story is that, without the abdication, she would have led a quiet life, probably as a little-known royal countrywoman, enjoying her dogs and horses and supporting local charities. Her father would surely have lived longer since he would not have had to endure kingship during the world war to come. Her sister too would have had a happier and more private life. As it was, she seems to have watched which paths ‘David’ chose and in every way beetled as fast she could in the opposite direction.
The new dynasty had looked into the abyss. Had Edward fought to stay on as Kin
g and succeeded, it might well have meant the break-up of the Empire, with very great consequences for the war to follow. Even as it was, the institution of monarchy was exposed, sniggered at around the world, and had felt itself wobble. These things are not forgotten in the family. Almost as soon as Edward VIII abdicated and became the Duke of Windsor, going abroad to marry without the support of his brother or parents, he was vigorously erased from the story. His memory was expunged and the solid virtues were reinstated. The British court swiftly reverted to the style of the old king, George V. It returned to convention, family, duty.
Good King George
Except for her husband, the single biggest influence on the Queen was her father, George VI. If you want a measuring device for King George VI’s service to his country, you should not turn first to the recent film about his struggle with his stammer. Good though it is, its unforgettable image is of Colin Firth bellowing four-lettered words. Look instead at a picture of the real man when he was Prince of Wales, such as the Philip de László portrait of 1931, and then compare it with a photograph of him after the war, such as the official portrait in RAF uniform of twenty years later. We all age. The King, like most of his generation, was a heavy smoker. Even so, the alteration is shocking. He goes from looking like an adult boy, with a smooth, sensitive, carefree face – big, dark eyes and full lips – to an image of exhausted decay, haggard, lined and sunken. By his mid-fifties, he has the hair of a young man and the face of someone in his seventies. It was being a wartime leader that did this to him. Another measure of the alteration is found in the fearlessly frank diaries of Harold Nicolson, the politician and writer responsible for the official life of George’s father. In 1929 he found the Prince ‘just a snipe from the Windsor marshes’, but by 1940 was writing after meeting him that he was no longer ‘a foolish loutish boy’ but calm and reassuring: he and the Queen were ‘resolute and sensible. WE SHALL WIN. I know that now.’19
George VI knew what being king would do to him. He felt he was horribly unequipped for the job. On the day ‘David’ finally made it clear to his younger brother that he was abdicating, after having left him hanging in suspense for days, the future king went to see his mother, Queen Mary, ‘& when I told her what had happened I broke down and sobbed like a child’.20 She said he had sobbed for an hour on her shoulder. The next day, as he was watching his brother make his final preparations for departure, he told Mountbatten, one of Edward’s closest friends, in great distress, ‘Dickie, this is absolutely terrible. I never wanted this to happen; I’m quite unprepared for it. David has been trained for this all his life. I’ve never even seen a State Paper. I’m only a Naval Officer, it’s the only thing I know about.’21 For once, Mountbatten’s encyclopedic memory for royal anecdotage proved tersely useful: he happened to remember his father telling him that King George V had said just the same when his elder brother died, to be told: ‘George, you’re wrong. There is no more fitting preparation for a King than to have been trained in the Navy.’
Whether that is true or not – and there is a case for it, since the navy puts the trainee monarch alongside all types and classes of men in a confined place, and involves good timekeeping, practicality and dealing with stress – it was only part of the answer. ‘Bertie’ had been struggling all his life with a terrible stammer, perhaps derived from lifelong feelings of inadequacy prompted by comparisons with his glamorous and self-assured brother, whom he had once idolized. He had spent his early years with his siblings in York Cottage, a crowded home in the grounds of Sandringham, before going to the tough boarding environment of the Royal Naval College on the Isle of Wight, which had once been Queen Victoria’s favoured southern retreat, Osborne. This must have been hard for a shy boy who had never mixed well with other children. He was bullied and struggled to make his mark, coming sixty-eighth out of sixty-eight in his final exams. He nevertheless went on to the next phase of his naval training at Dartmouth, did a year at Oxford and was commissioned as a junior midshipman a year before the beginning of the First World War. He had had bow legs and been forced to wear excruciatingly painful leg braces as a boy. His digestive system was badly impaired, perhaps partly as a result of neglectful feeding by an early nurse. During the war, he was repeatedly away from his ship in hospitals but managed to get back to fight at the extremely bloody, if indecisive, Battle of Jutland. Unable to speak well in public, untrained in statecraft, physically in poor shape, though a good rider and tennis player, he seemed about as badly suited to become King-Emperor as any man could be.
Yet he had shown another side to his character, a streak of determination and persistence which would change his reputation. After the war, he fell in love with a glamorous Scottish aristocrat. Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was only twenty when they met for the first time at a dance in 1920. She was besieged by confident and pushy admirers. Bertie paid court and made his first proposal through an emissary. It was rejected. He was then rejected in person. He refused to give up and was eventually accepted in January 1923. This was a side to Bertie his parents had not seen before, and they were delighted. Elizabeth was the first commoner to be ushered into the family since the 1917 Windsor revolution. (‘Commoner’ in this respect means only ‘non-royal’, since she came from a grand Scottish landowning family.) Winning her changed his life. As his brother went further and further off the rails, their father began to see his second son in a kinder light. When Bertie married, George V wrote that ‘you have always been so sensible and easy to work with, and you have always been ready to listen to my advice and to agree with my opinions about people and things, that I feel we have always got on very well together (very different from dear David)’. Later, George was reported to have said he hoped his eldest son would not marry, so that Bertie and then little Elizabeth would succeed instead. ‘Ready . . . to agree with my opinions’ reads now as rather a double-edged compliment: Bertie, it implies, was doing well because he was complaisant and deferential, ready to go with the flow. There is some truth in that.
Between the wars he had settled into the quiet life of a private gentleman, while not shirking the royal duties imposed by his father. He was interested in industry and public works, opening a summer camp for boys from very different backgrounds. His inclinations, however, were profoundly private and quietly conservative as he revelled in a warm family life, leaning on a wife who was, according to courtiers at the time, even more instinctively conservative than he was. He was deeply suspicious of socialists, Liberals and indeed any politicians who were not ‘sound’ Tories of the old school. He loathed public speaking and there was a deeply embarrassing moment in May 1925 when he struggled to complete a speech at the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. As the authors of a book on the King’s speech defect put it, ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the psychological effect that the speech had both on Bertie and his family, and the problem that his dismal performance threw up for the monarchy. Such speeches were meant to be part of the daily routine of the Duke, who was second in line to the throne, yet he had conspicuously failed to rise to the challenge.’22
Though he had tried almost every obvious speech-therapist in London, it was after this, in October 1926, that his wife persuaded Bertie to meet Lionel Logue, the Australian whose unorthodox skills would do so much to help him. Speech therapy was still in its infancy, a hit-or-miss affair which oscillated between psychology, physical work on the diaphragm, lungs and tongue, and exercises both useful and bizarre. Logue was not medically trained but was himself a good and self-confident public speaker whose optimism and energy won over his suspicious and pessimistic royal client. The most striking thing about the treatment, hard to convey in the cinema, is the sheer relentlessness and frequency of the sessions. In a little over a year, running through to December 1927, Bertie had eighty-two sessions with Logue in Harley Street and practised day after day at home, breaking engagements and leaving his beloved hunting field early to force himself through tongue-twisters, breathing exercises and reading practice. Little by lit
tle, the intense effort paid off, and audiences who had been expecting a monosyllabic, stuttering performance found themselves listening to relatively fluent royal addresses. Throughout, his wife was urging him on, sitting beside him, her knuckles white with tension. On foreign visits, during numerous home speeches and even broadcasts, Bertie got steadily better.
Speech defects do not disappear overnight, and absolute cures are very rare. The psychological pressures of his early upbringing could not be simply magicked away; like so many people, the future king lived with the scar tissue of those very hard years and learned to cope with the consequences. Once he became king there was vicious gossip about him, even before it was decided that he would take his father’s name (he might have been the first King Albert). He was, it was said, too nervous and dim to manage the duties of kingship; he would barely make it through his Coronation. There is a theory, revealed by an authorized royal biographer called Dermot Morrah, that ‘some men of authority in the state’ had seriously considered hopping over Bertie during the December 1936 abdication crisis, and settling the Crown instead on his youngest brother, the more dashing and outgoing Duke of Kent, who also, unlike Bertie, had a son and heir.23 Had that happened, there would have been no ‘Diamond Queen’ for the British to celebrate in 2012. Instead, her cousin, the current Duke of Kent, would have been king. Now twenty-fourth in line of succession, he has had a long military career, is a leading Freemason and looks strikingly like George V. The royal pack is constantly shuffled, by chance and half-forgotten choices.