A Brief History of the House of Windsor

by Michael Paterson

  In this they are simply the latest in a series of personalities to have benefited the monarchy, for the Windsors have, throughout their short history, been fortunate in those who have led and belonged to it.

  There is more to the House of Windsor than its sovereigns; those who have married into it have also made immense contributions to its success. Queen Mary, wife of George V, was a minor princess who became the most regal of queens – but confessed at the end of her life that she would have loved to have had some ordinary experiences. Her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was the strong-willed wife of George VI. She put her formidable energies to work in supporting her shy and diffident husband and in preparing her daughter to rule. Her superb ability to relate to people in all circumstances, particularly amid the hardships of war, made the monarchy more accessible and more universally well regarded than it had previously been. It was this Queen Elizabeth who, more than anyone else, created the concept of royalty that is familiar to us today.

  Prince Philip, scion of a minor and unstable royal house, was seen as alien and unsuitable when he married the heir to the British throne. Yet he brought to the role of consort enormous energy and intelligence, and – through his interest in technology, sports and conservation – succeeded in making the monarchy more modern and relevant. His outspokenness has entertained – or horrified – his wife’s subjects for over sixty years.

  Another charismatic young woman, who turned out to share Queen Elizabeth’s innate ability with people, married into the family in 1981. Diana Spencer brought to royalty a glamour that was at first very welcome. The tragedy of her subsequent life was to provide the monarchy’s greatest challenge since the abdication crisis, yet she created for her sons a legacy of public sympathy and goodwill that bodes well for the future. Kate Middleton, a genuinely ordinary member of the British upper-middle class, has already demonstrated a personal charisma that is winning her more and more admirers and has shown that an ancient institution can still successfully absorb outsiders.

  And what of the younger generations of Windsors? The queen’s children grew up at a time when royals were having to compete on equal terms with their subjects, in education, in sports, in the armed forces and in employment. Some of these new experiences were decidedly painful, for them and for the country, yet lessons were learned and the adjustment has in general been a happy one. In the space of a single generation of royal youth it has come to seem unremarkable that they attend school (albeit private ones), go on to a provincial university, plan a career, have exposure to – and make friends with – people of all backgrounds. This has been standard practice for decades among other European monarchies, whose children have long been educated locally. The process has surely now gone as far as it can – there must be some distance left between royalty and everyone else, because they must remain an abstract national symbol, and one that reflects the nation’s better qualities. This is guaranteed by the homes in which they live, the vehicles in which they travel, the possessions and collections at their family’s disposal, the duties they perform and the deference of those who surround them. Informality and ordinariness have probably gone as far as they can go without letting too much ‘daylight in on magic’ (to quote Walter Bagehot’s famous phrase). The result is, perhaps, a royal family that is better adjusted, more comfortable with its people, and more genuinely popular with them, than ever before.

  2

  GEORGE V, 1910–36

  ‘I am only a very ordinary sort of fellow.’

  George V, on the occasion of his Silver Jubilee, 1935

  Like his son and namesake after him, George V had never expected to be king. He was a second son, and his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, was the one who received the training for kingship, at least to a relative degree. The boys were born less than a year and a half apart, Albert Victor (at Queen Victoria’s request he was named after both his grandparents, but was known to the family as ‘Eddy’) in January 1864 and George Frederick Ernest Albert on 3 June 1865. Their father, the Prince of Wales, was not entrusted by the queen with any role in affairs of state and therefore his sons, although they were respectively second and third in line to the throne, did not grow up to be familiar with political or constitutional issues, or with any sense of impending responsibility.

  George may have been the second son, but he was far more suited by nature to be king than his brother was. Though somewhat spoiled by his mother, who was devoted to him, he had none of Eddy’s languid and unfocused nature. What he did have were good manners and a sense of duty that developed early and became so overriding that it guided his every action for the rest of his life. He was expected to make a career in the Navy – despite the fact that his grandmother thought this an unsound idea – and was ideally suited to the Service. He had a genuine ability in seamanship that would have made him extremely able in command of a vessel. He also excelled in mathematics, a highly important skill in such a technical profession.

  At the age of twelve he performed impressively in the entrance exam for midshipmen and then undertook, together with his tutor and brother, a series of three voyages that gave him valuable experience of the Navy, the British Empire and the wider world. By the time he became king he would have travelled more widely than any of his predecessors. While overseas he paid formal calls on rulers and governors, and thus his time in the Navy was in no sense an escape from protocol – or from education, for lessons continued on board.

  George probably received a finer education through this process than he could have gained anywhere else. He responded to the sights and sounds and experiences, and to the instruction he received, in exactly the way his elders had hoped he would. Naval discipline had stamped out a previous tendency toward self-indulgence. His inherent abilities as a seaman had been honed by practice to make him a thoroughly professional officer who would have been a credit to any ship and who could, in other circumstances, have enjoyed a successful career. His patriotism, greatly enhanced by his tour of British overseas territories and by the respect with which a grandson of the Queen Empress was received, was to become the hallmark of his character. As his biographer Harold Nicolson was to write: ‘Not being an intellectual he was never variable: he remained uniform throughout his life.’

  A tutor, John Dalton, had been appointed to teach both the princes, though he was not to have exclusive charge of them for long. As was normal for young men of their era with exalted future roles, the regime they endured was strict and the curriculum crowded and demanding, including as it did not only ‘book learning’ but, by way of exercise, military drill. Dalton quickly came to realize that neither of his charges was naturally academic, and Eddy in particular had an attention span of discouraging brevity. While he has been seen by some historians as slow-witted to the point of virtual imbecility, others have suggested that he suffered from mild epilepsy and that his inattention was perhaps characteristic of children born prematurely (he had arrived two months earlier than expected). George was more intelligent, less indolent, more amenable to instruction and to reason, and more aware of the dignity of his position. He was also absolutely devoted to his father, and wanted above all to earn his approval.

  Though it has been suggested that their tutor was a dull and conventional man who could have gained more of a response from the boys had he been more flexible, they in fact had a happy childhood that was not spoiled by an excess of discipline or deadening rote learning. Their father believed that the Royal Navy would provide them with the best preparation for life, and it was possible for them to go into the Senior Service at a very young age (Eddy was thirteen and George twelve). Because they worked best whilst together, they stayed together in the Service. Instead of learning about the world through geography lessons in a schoolroom, they would see it for themselves. Rather than receiving their education entirely from tutors in a ‘class’ that consisted only of themselves, they would have the company of boys their own age, a largely random collection of youngsters with whom they
would live on equal terms and whose respect they would have to earn through their ability to carry out the same tasks. It was, for the time, a remarkably democratic upbringing and it gave them common ground with their grandmother’s people in a way that very few other experiences could have done.

  Their naval careers began at Dartmouth. This training facility – later renamed Britannia Royal Naval College – is today a substantial and imposing collection of buildings overlooking Dartmouth harbour in Devon. At that time it was a fifty-year-old wooden warship – HMS Britannia, a veteran of the Crimea – moored in the same harbour, aboard which aspiring officers received instruction. It was as cramped and claustrophobic as being at sea. Dalton joined the ship with his two charges, for he had been appointed chaplain. He would continue to supervise the progress of one or both of them for many years to come.

  Following training, the two princes and their tutor transferred to another RN vessel, HMS Bacchante, and made three voyages round the world, which took them away for several years (1879–82). They sailed the Mediterranean, visiting Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Aden. They also went ashore in South Africa, Ceylon, Singapore, Japan and Australia, the Falkland Islands, South America and the United States. While in Japan, both of them visited a tattoo parlour and George was, for the rest of his life, to bear on his arm the design of a dragon in red and blue ink. When they returned, their grandmother was horrified to find that neither boy could speak French or German, the latter an outright necessity given their overwhelming preponderance of teutonic relations. They studied these languages for a time but in neither case with conspicuous success, despite spending an interlude at Heidelberg. Whatever the charms of this town – the ‘Oxford of Germany’ – George considered it ‘beastly dull’ in comparison with the places he had seen on his travels, and he hated German, considering it ‘a rotten language, which I find very difficult’.

  He might have been influenced here by more than mere personal disinclination. Though so many of his relations were German, the relative to whom he was closest – his mother – hated the country. A daughter of the king of Denmark, she would never forgive the Prussians for their war of 1864 against her people. The German states – they were not yet at the time a united nation – had, under Bismarck’s leadership, aggressively seized territory from a small and peaceful nation. Princess Alexandra’s vehemence can be seen in a statement she wrote after her son had been appointed honorary colonel of a Prussian regiment: ‘My Georgie boy has become a real, live, filthy, blue-coated, Pickelhaube German soldier!’ (A pickelhaube was the brass-and-leather spiked helmet ubiquitous throughout the German armies.) If he had good reason to inherit a dislike of Germany and its language, he had no such excuse for his failure to master French. He managed to communicate in that language, but with the Englishman’s perverse pride in speaking it very badly.

  George enjoyed his period of naval service immensely. One of those straightforward personalities who recognize at once the path he wishes to follow in life, he took to the sea and the camaraderie of the wardroom with genuine enthusiasm. He had the habit of instant obedience, and would be characterized all his life by an absolute respect for those above him – just as he expected similar reverence from those below. His period of naval service was to last for fourteen years, from 1877 to 1892, when the death of his brother meant that he was called to another type of duty. He was successful in professional exams, gaining qualifications in seamanship, gunnery and torpedoes – achievements that his exalted position alone could not have won for him. The Navy gave him a quarterdeck view of the world that would stay with him for the rest of his life – a bluff, blunt, to-the-point manner that would include fo’c’sle language, paroxysms of anger and loud expressions of impatience with those who failed to match up to his expectations. Deeply conservative by nature and entirely at home in this hierarchical, no-nonsense world, the Navy made him a man of absolutely decided views, which he saw no reason ever to change. Unlike his grandmother, who never travelled outside Europe and who thus never saw the worldwide empire over which she presided, George had first-hand experience of the lives of her overseas subjects. It was ironic that, having spent his early life roaming the world, he would come to hate foreign travel. Once he became king he would make only one significant trip outside his realms – a Mediterranean cruise – and even that was undertaken only on doctor’s orders. He did not want to go, and no doubt would have given vent to one of his outbursts when advised to take the trip.

  Delighted at being lower in the order of succession than Eddy, George had expected to spend his life as a serving officer. He was given one of the most agreeable postings in the Service – to Malta, where he was under the command of his uncle, the Duke of Edinburgh. (Sixty years later another Duke of Edinburgh would also serve there in the Royal Navy, and his wife would spend a very pleasant interlude on the island before becoming queen.) George was handsome and personable (his only faults, perhaps, his knock knees and the bulging blue eyes he had inherited from his grandmother), and he developed an affection for his uncle’s daughter, Marie. She was a spirited girl with both intelligence and a fine sense of humour. They were distant enough relations for a marriage to be possible, but her mother did not want him for a son-in-law. The Duchess of Edinburgh was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II. Haughty by nature, she had never taken to living in England, and disliked her husband’s family. She discouraged the match, and her formidable personality was an obstacle that could not be surmounted. Ironically, in that she considered the British royal family too pro-German, she was to marry Marie to a member of Prussia’s ruling house, the Hohenzollerns, which had been invited to occupy the throne of Romania. As queen of that country, Marie would exert influence to ensure that it fought on the Allied side in the Great War. Her children would subsequently marry so extensively into neighbouring royal families that she would earn the sobriquet ‘the Mother-in-Law of the Balkans’.

  It was during this period that George grew the beard that was to become his trademark (Eddy, though senior in years, was not yet able to manage one), and it was at this time too that he began the stamp collection that was to provide him with stimulus and solace, and which would grow into one of the finest in the world. He also became the first of his family to develop a passion for polo, a game taken up by British officers in India and which had spread throughout the British Empire. Enthusiasm for it was all but compulsory among the officer class, and to play it well was a certain route to popularity.

  His brother, who lacked any noticeable passion for anything, had meanwhile moved on to another phase of preparation for his eventual life. He went, still accompanied by John Dalton, to Cambridge to study, though he was to be exempted from having to take any exams. He followed this by going into the Army. Serving in the 10th Hussars, a fashionable cavalry regiment, he settled into a routine of training and garrison duties at Aldershot and Hounslow, though he rebuffed attempts by his fellow officers to ‘make a man of the world of him’. A certain innocence was noticeable in his nature. In spite of this, he became mired in scandal when, in 1889, the police raided a homosexual brothel in London’s Cleveland Street. He was not among those apprehended, but it was alleged that he had been a visitor. Modern biographers have dismissed this as implausible, but there were persistent rumours at the time. To these have since been added the theory that he was Jack the Ripper, the serial killer whose murder of a number of prostitutes brought a reign of terror to the streets of Whitechapel during the autumn of 1888. Why would he have wanted to do such a thing? Allegedly because he was being blackmailed over involvement in a vice-ring, and sought to silence witnesses. In fact, crimes of this nature must have taken considerable planning. They would have been well beyond Prince Eddy’s abilities, even had it not been definitively proved that he was at Balmoral when most of them took place.

  Though both his charges might have been a disappointment to Mr Dalton in that neither of them showed intellectual promise, they were good, agreeable young men, dutiful and dignifie
d, whom one observer described as having ‘a total absence of haughtiness’.

  Eddy began to carry out royal duties. He visited India, and at home opened the Hammersmith suspension bridge. He was created Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and began gradually taking his place as a public figure. While his military career was mere marking of time, he did of course have another significant role to perform. He must marry and continue the succession. He made three attempts to do so. Limited in his choice of spouse to a member of another ruling house, he chose one who was entirely suitable: the curiously named Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine. She simply did not like him, however, and refused his offer. She would go on to make a love match with the Russian tsarevich, Nicholas, marrying him in 1894. They would be immensely happy together, though their lives would become increasingly tragic, ending in front of a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918.

  Eddy’s second attempt at finding a match seemed more promising. His attachment to Princess Hélène of Orléans was a matter of genuine, and mutual, affection. She belonged to the ousted Bourbon family. (There was no reason why a member of a ruling family could not marry someone from a deposed one. It was the blood that counted, not their current status. Queen Victoria, in fact, had something of a weakness for exiled sovereigns, and her country gave sanctuary to several of them.) The Bourbons were former rulers of France, and Princess Hélène was a Roman Catholic. This was a serious obstacle, but both parties attempted to compromise. Eddy offered to renounce his place in the succession. She offered to convert. In the event his family was willing, but hers was not. Her father refused to let the marriage take place, his religious convictions overruling even the prospect of his daughter one day occupying a throne.