George’s solution was to summon a conference at Buckingham Palace to hear the grievances on both sides. By now it was the summer of 1914 – negotiations began on 21 July. The king would have been hoping for a mutual display of goodwill and compromise but the gathering lasted only three days, for suddenly Ireland was not the most serious difficulty on the horizon. Within a fortnight of the delegates gathering at the Palace, old Europe – the social and political order that had lasted for much of the nineteenth century – would start to unravel.
The European war that was about to begin would be by far the most significant event of George’s reign. It started with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian nationalists. Though war had been likely for several years, no one had expected it to start in such an obscure corner of the Continent, and over a matter that seemed at first to have been resolved when Serbia offered an apology. The Habsburgs were one of the few European dynasties with which the British throne had no family connections. Nor was their empire in competition with Britain in any naval or military sphere. Now, because of an internal quarrel within their territory, most of Europe was to be caught up in an Armageddon that would dwarf in size and slaughter any conflict seen before. Because Austria mobilized, Russia did so too. With Russia facing the Austrians, its ally Germany came to its aid. But Germany’s plans for a European war assumed that France – which wanted revenge for the last European war – would strike at its western border. France must therefore be treated as an enemy and invaded before it could attack. To deal with this threat while avoiding incurring heavy casualties meant invading the country through its ‘back door’, by crossing through neutral Belgium. Britain, which did not want Germany gaining control of the Channel ports, had guaranteed (by a treaty of 1839) to come to Belgium’s aid in such a circumstance. An ultimatum to the German government, demanding withdrawal from Belgium by midnight of 4 August 1914, went unanswered. The war began as British clocks struck eleven on that warm summer night.
George was a cousin of two of the combatants – the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. Could his intervention halt the juggernaut before it ran out of control? The answer was no. Tsar Nicholas had already failed to have the cause of conflict – the Sarajevo assassination – referred to the International Court at The Hague. The mood among the General Staffs was too belligerent for a last-minute climbdown, and no one at the time had any reason to expect a protracted war. Recent European conflicts had been short: the wars fought by Prussia in the 1860s against Denmark and Austria had lasted a matter of a few weeks, while the Franco-Prussian conflict had taken ten months. It was assumed that, with the vast armies and the destructive weaponry available, this new outbreak of hostilities would be a short and violent clash that would bring some decisive result within months at most. The German and Austrian governments even welcomed war as a means of combating left-wing tendencies (the Social Democratic Party) or separatism at home.
For the British government, the outbreak of war diverted attention from the pressing matter of Ireland (many thousands of Irishmen, especially among loyalist Ulstermen, enlisted at once). George gave his consent the following month to a Bill granting Irish Home Rule – no other solution was possible in the end – but it carried the proviso that it would not be enacted until after the war. The issue was shelved for the time being – or so it was assumed. For years it had been received wisdom that a European war would come. Some crisis would provoke it, the spark would be lit and the conflagration begin. It was, however, disappointing that the cause should prove to be events in a small and obscure Balkan country. ‘God grant that we may not have a European war thrust upon us, and for such a stupid reason too, no, I don’t mean stupid, but to have to go to war on account of tiresome Serbia beggars belief,’ Queen Mary wrote to her aunt, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, at the end of July.
The king was naturally grieved by the division of Europe into warring camps that put many of his relatives on the other side. It had always been assumed that the network of relationships among the royal houses would make war between them an impossibility. Though these connections had been important, they were no more than window-dressing, however. The Parliaments or General Staffs that actually ran the different countries could act with no more than nominal reference to them. Even Tsar Nicholas, in theory an autocrat who could take a binding decision to involve his country in the war, was sensitive to public opinion, which was largely in favour of assisting Serbia against the perceived bullying of neighbouring rival powers. The mob-mentality that rapidly grew up throughout Europe was astonishing in view of what was actually to happen. For young Frenchmen, in particular, the outbreak promised an opportunity to wrest back from Germany the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost in the Franco-Prussian War. For almost fifty years schoolchildren had been brought up to hate the country that had stolen this territory from their forefathers. Many gave thanks that they had been born at the right time in history to take part in such a national crusade.
No British sovereign before this had presided over an era of total war. The situation was without precedent, with the country under attack, the mobilization of the entire civilian world necessary to support the war effort, and the need always to work with allies, who could be difficult. George had to make up his role as war-monarch as he went along. He certainly looked the part, and was to feature often in patriotic publications. Though others would naturally be associated with the conflict – Prime Ministers Asquith and Lloyd George, the Cabinet Minister Winston Churchill, Generals French, Kitchener and Haig – the king, who alone among them remained constantly at the head of affairs, became a potent symbol for his armies and his people. His function in the war was, like that of any constitutional sovereign, to be a rallying point for the nation, to attend public events in uniform as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, to encourage his people through a relentless programme of visits, inspections, speeches, messages.
With his sensitive nature and his highly developed sense of duty, he did this effectively and well. He also set an important example. At the outbreak of war his cousin Nicholas had imposed Prohibition on Russia. In 1915 George was persuaded, reluctantly, to take the more modest step of declaring that the royal cellars would be sealed for the duration of the war – a move that was aimed at encouraging workers in the munitions industry to follow suit. They were forbidden to drink, on safety grounds. (George in fact thought the gesture pointless and irritating, describing Lloyd George’s suggestion as ‘a scurvy trick’.) The whole country was aware of the king’s abnegation, though it was rumoured he was secretly taking glasses of port regardless. Whatever happened in private, his sense of duty was such that he refused alcohol in public even on occasions such as visits to the Front. He made several such journeys, dressed in Field Marshal’s uniform, to inspect the armies, tour the rear areas, confer with Generals. Though as usual surrounded by formalities, he enjoyed the more relaxed atmosphere in France and Flanders. He was flattered by the welcome he received, and gratified that he was sharing the same environment, if not the same dangers, as the fighting men. Hordes of them would follow him about, which he liked. It was on one such visit in October 1915, however, that a sudden burst of cheering frightened his horse, which reared up and then fell on him. The injury was excruciating – his pelvis had broken in two places. It was badly diagnosed, and never properly healed.
In a time of national hardship, the royal family had to be seen to be doing their job, but also to be living as modestly as possible. It had never previously been necessary for the monarchy to seem so ostentatiously ordinary, though this would be something that they would continue to do throughout the coming generations. The king was photographed in shirtsleeves, tending a vegetable plot in the grounds at Windsor. For much of the war, German U-boats attempted to starve out Britain by sinking shipping around its coast and thus preventing the importing of foodstuffs. With agricultural estates at their disposal at Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral, the royal fam
ily were unlikely to suffer hardship, but the gesture was made and recorded and noticed. While politicians, press and public blamed the war’s reverses on the generals and called for their removal, the king publicly maintained loyalty to them. This was most conspicuous in the case of Sir Douglas Haig, who fell from favour as a result of the disastrous losses suffered on the Western Front. Royalty could not indulge itself in the luxury of criticism or disapproval, at least in public.
The king was known to hold humane views on the treatment of prisoners. A fair man in private and in public, he had, as we have seen, created for himself the role of peacemaker and moderator with regard to the domestic politics of the United Kingdom. He showed a similar attitude toward the national enemy. (‘Intern me first!’ he had cried when the locking up of enemy nationals had first been mooted.) From the moment that German troops invaded Belgium, Britain was awash with refugees who told blood-curdling stories of teutonic barbarity. Civilians had been taken hostage and executed, women had been routinely violated. Much of this was later found to have been exaggerated, but in a climate of wartime hysteria no outrage seemed implausible to the British public. Once the submarines of the German Fleet attempted to starve the country by sinking shipping, public outrage reached a new pitch. George opposed the demand for summary reprisals against captured submariners, and no doubt held the same view toward any airship crews that managed to survive after being shot down. Never by a single remark in public or in private did the king endorse the call for examples to be made of captured Germans. Though sensitive enough to weep over both public outrages and personal slights, he expressed no vindictive or draconian views on the enemy.
As a former naval officer, the king naturally took a detailed interest in the conduct of the war at sea, but this was to be predominantly a land conflict. The British government dispatched its small Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium where, with the armies of those countries, it stopped in its tracks the advance of the enemy The pre-emptive Schlieffen Plan had not worked. The German armies were stuck on the River Marne, east of the French capital, and the war reached a stalemate. With each side unable to push back the other, they dug in where they stood, creating a trench system that ultimately ran all the way from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, and which would remain substantially unaltered for over four years. The Royal Navy, though it saw action in the South Atlantic, did not play a major role in the conflict nearer to home.
The prelude to war had been characterized by a massive, mutual increase in naval strength – an arms race – in which Britain and Germany had found themselves virtually equal by 1914 in the number of modern Dreadnought-class battleships they possessed. When hostilities broke out the German China Squadron was destroyed in battle off the Falkland Islands at the end of 1914 while another battleship was penned into an East African river estuary until it rusted away. The British Royal Navy commanded the North Sea, and imposed a blockade on the Baltic that at once affected the supply of foodstuffs and raw materials to Germany. The majority of German warships were in harbour in Kiel or Wilhelms-haven, and it would not be until two years into the conflict that they would venture out into battle. The resulting encounter, the Battle of Jutland, fought in May 1916, was indecisive but, though both sides claimed success, it was the Germans whose fleet remained trapped in the Baltic for the rest of the war. The remainder of the German Navy, scattered around the world, was able to do little except mount raids to harass the enemy and tie up resources.
On land, the stalemate on the Western Front was to endure, despite periodic attempts to break through the German lines. The most important of these offensives, along the River Somme in France in July 1916, was touted at the time in the Allied press as a victory, though it represented insignificant gains for the loss of over 600,000 men. The Germans attempted a major offensive against the French fortress of Verdun. This was probably the most horrific fighting of the war, with both sides suffering massive casualties, but the Germans failed completely to capture the defences. Cavalry, the most prestigious arm of service in European armies, was largely useless in this type of warfare, and its replacement – the tank, introduced in 1917 – failed to make more than initial headway. The ‘Central Powers’ – Germany and its allies – held firm in this war of attrition despite crippling shortages of food and raw materials at home. When Russia experienced the February Revolutions of 1917 and pulled out of the war in December of that year, German troops could be transferred to the west. With this surplus of men, the enemy launched an offensive in March the following year that drove the Allies back more than thirty miles and might, had they been more fortunate, have reached Paris, which they came close enough (seventy-five miles) to bombard. America had entered the war, however, and in April began to deploy in the European theatre of conflict.
George bowed to pressure from public opinion. He agreed, as we have seen, to change his family name, and did so by Royal Proclamation. (On hearing the new name of the British royal house, his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, remarked drily that he looked forward to attending a production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.) Though George personally regarded it as ‘petty and undignified’ to waste legislative time on the confiscation of titles, this was carried out through the Titles Deprivation Act of 1919. Among those who lost their positions in the British aristocracy were Prince Ernst August of Hanover, who was also known as Duke of Cumberland, and Prince Carl Eduard, who as well as being Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was also Duke of Albany. Similarly, British titles were granted to British relatives who had had to give up their German ones. The Battenberg family were created Marquesses of Milford Haven.
However, the king would not allow a witch-hunt to be conducted. He refused point-blank to let the names of the German kaiser and crown prince be deleted from the Army List, where they continued to appear as honorary colonels of regiments. (To this day one unit, the King’s Royal Hussars, continues to wear the black eagle of Prussia as its cap badge.) He was also unwilling to countenance the removal from the stalls in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, of the brass plates inscribed with the names of sovereigns who were now in the enemy camp – even though the banners carrying their coats-of-arms were taken down. The plates were, he considered, ‘historical records’ which should not be destroyed simply because of the feeling of the moment.
There were more serious issues to consider, however. Some sovereigns had begun to suffer loss and harm during the fighting. Queen Marie of Romania, for instance, once the object of George’s affection, had championed the Allied cause in her country. As one of the Entente powers, it had been invaded and devastated by the enemy, both the Germans and the Bulgarians. After revolution erupted in Russia in February 1917, the tsar had been forced to abdicate, to be replaced by a moderate Provisional Government that committed itself to keeping Russia in the war (vital as a counterweight to the Western Front). Partly because of this, further upheavals that autumn had replaced the Provisional Government with Bolshevism. The country’s new rulers proceeded to get out of the war, on any terms whatever, as soon as it could be managed. They also imposed on members of the imperial family a more stringent confinement than the house arrest they had previously suffered.
The Romanovs were George’s cousins, and the relationship between them had been close. The two men were three years apart in age, and of a similar physical appearance. In the manner of royalty in those days, the families met in various countries and on a number of occasions, both official and informal. The last had been in 1913 when they attended, both wearing German military uniform, the wedding of the kaiser’s daughter. Nicholas, his wife, four daughters and son were now in considerable danger. Apart from being George’s relations they had been allies through the difficult years of war. He offered them asylum in Britain.
He came to rue this decision, however. The Russian Revolution had encouraged socialists in other countries to dream of similar success. This was especially the case if the overthrow of government would lead to abandoning the war at
once. Not since the French Revolution had there been such a direct, implacable and serious threat to monarchical rule. Among the British working class there was open admiration for Russia’s new government (the tsars, autocratic and despotic, had featured in British demonology since at least the time of the Crimean War). Although the prime minister, David Lloyd George, was sympathetic to the plight of Nicholas and his family, George reconsidered his invitation. It might jeopardize the security of his own throne if he made a show of supporting an absolute monarch. Afterwards it was widely assumed for decades that the prime minister, a Liberal who had no reason to favour autocrats, was the one who was against helping them. The papers of the king’s private secretary, however, suggest that it was with George himself that the final decision lay. The offer of asylum was quietly withdrawn. The tsar and his family, imprisoned in the Urals and treated with increasing harshness, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918.
In view of this, it may be assumed that the king regretted the failure of his own or any other government to protect Russia’s imperial family. This has proved to be the darkest stain on his reign, and he has never been forgiven by Russian monarchists. He did not at any rate allow personal doubts to stand in the way of rescuing other royals in danger. He sent a warship, HMS Marlborough, to the Crimea to evacuate the tsar’s mother and sister. He had the Royal Navy rescue another royal family – the Greeks – when they lost popularity and had to flee (with them was their infant son Philip, who would later marry King George’s granddaughter).
A Brief History of the House of Windsor Page 6