A Brief History of the House of Windsor

by Michael Paterson

  When war broke out in 1914 the Prince of Wales proved to be highly adept at boosting public morale. Genuinely frustrated at being forbidden to serve on the frontline or be exposed to danger anywhere else (‘Oh, that I had a job!’ he lamented), he was at least able to make official visits to the different fronts. These gave him a more-or-less authentic experience of the war, so that, to himself and to others, he seemed shaped by the same terrible events as the rest of his generation. He went to the Middle East and to Italy, as well as gaining a posting behind the lines in France. From here he made visits to scenes of action once the fighting was over, becoming a familiar sight as he travelled the roads in a staff car or on an egalitarian bicycle. (‘A bad shelling always produces the Prince of Wales!’ said the soldiers.) On one occasion a ‘bad shelling’ very nearly killed him. He had gone by car to a sector of the front. He stepped out of the vehicle, and moments later it was hit by a shell. His driver was killed. It is interesting to speculate that if the prince too had died his reputation as a martyr would have ensured him of lasting popularity throughout the empire, and his contribution to history would have been seen as heroic rather than shabby.

  Nevertheless with the coming of peace his stock was about to rise. As had happened after the Boer War, it was felt fitting that the overseas territories should be thanked for their contribution to the cause by a visit from royalty. Lloyd George, now prime minister, suggested that the prince should go. The idea proved immensely popular with the public, both at home and in the colonies. One trip took in the Dominion of Canada and the then-separate colony of Newfoundland. On the other he visited India, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. David had already been portrayed in the illustrated press as a figure of film-star glamour. He was boyishly handsome, smiled often and with a hint of shyness that many found irresistible, and looked very attractive in uniform. In 1915, when a Welsh regiment had been added to the four existing Foot Guard units, he had become its Colonel-in-Chief. His picture appeared everywhere in the khaki service dress of the Welsh Guards, his peaked forage cap with its prominent badge – a leek – tilted at a slight but rakish angle (a major breach of regulations that no one else could have got away with). He wore either this or his naval uniform at ceremonial events. Otherwise, he had a penchant for checked suits in a light grey (this pattern was named Prince of Wales check in his honour) and his trademark suede brogues. These outfits suited his slight, slim figure, and young men everywhere sought to look like him.

  His manners were naturally pleasing. He made charming little speeches. He flattered officials, and was grateful for courtesies shown and trouble taken on his behalf. In Canada he shook hands with so many people that he had to stop offering his right hand and use his left instead. In New York – for he visited the USA as well – he received a ticker-tape parade. In Australia his train suffered an accident and he remained calm, which enabled him to be portrayed as heroic. Everywhere vast crowds turned out to see him. His face became what would nowadays be called ‘an international icon’. Women, naturally enough, dreamed of marrying him, or at least meeting him, or even just catching a glimpse. One of the popular songs of the era was entitled ‘I Danced With a Man Who Danced With a Girl Who Danced With the Prince of Wales’.

  Yet he was never quite as agreeable as he seemed. His affability was no more than skin-deep, a veneer that rubbed off very quickly. His charm, which was mentioned by numerous observers, could turn abruptly and without warning to childish petulance, and his thoughtlessness often caused offence. One lady living at a remote house in Australia held a dance at which he was to be the guest of honour, having invited him and secured his acceptance. The evening wore on without any sign of him and the guests became more and more anxious. Eventually a telephone call from his equerry announced that he was not coming. The road, apparently, was not passable owing to recent rains. The guests, naturally disappointed, set out in their own vehicles to test the road and found it entirely dry. He had obviously decided not to bother attending. This sort of cavalier behaviour – in this case he would have humiliated his poor hostess in front of all her friends – was not forgotten.

  Perhaps, however, she was lucky in that she did not actually meet him, for a personal encounter could be worse. A typical instance was seen on a visit he made to his old Oxford College, Magdalen. When he entered the Junior Common Room the assembled undergraduates rose to their feet. Flashing his trademark wry smile, he chided them for being so formal. He had been one of them, he said, and need not be treated with such deference. An hour or more later, having toured the College with the Master, he once again entered the JCR. No one stood up. He stated, with voluble irritation, that when the Prince of Wales came into a room people were expected to get to their feet!

  He had few close friends (one of them, Lord Mountbatten, genuinely liked him but later said he would never have made a good king), and did not attract the loyalty of staff, who were often at their wits’ end trying to keep up with his changes of mind and mood. The prince was a nightmare to organize. It is incumbent on royalty to plan their activities far in advance. Arrangements must often be timed to the minute so that a multitude of visits, meetings, speeches, ceremonies, can be fitted in. David had the exasperating habit of changing plans at the last minute, and without explanation, throwing into chaos all the hard work of the half-dozen or so people who had expended much time and effort on organizing the occasion.

  The prince did not enjoy good relations with his father. It is in fact uncommon for ruler and heir to see eye to eye, and often there is outright hostility between them. King George’s utterly conventional nature chafed at the young man’s assumed informality in both dress and manner. To the king, it was the business of monarchy to set an example of quiet and unostentatious rectitude, not to follow – or start – trends in clothing. (‘You look like a cad, you are a cad!’ he was heard to yell at his son on at least one occasion.) A stickler for protocol and etiquette, for these provided the framework within which official life was carried on, the king hated his son’s comparative informality, and was genuinely anguished by the prince’s failure to marry. Did he not understand that the whole empire was waiting for an heir? But instead of taking anything seriously, David spent his time in nightclubs, or risked his life in steeplechases – a practice that King George forbade him from continuing after a serious fall. Rather than allow a suitable wife to be found for him, the prince carried on affairs with the wives of others – Society women who provided a quasi-maternal presence in his life that he apparently craved. He and his father did not see the world from even remotely the same viewpoint. They were on opposite sides in a generational war, and there could never be concord between them. King George, who simply could not visualize his heir as a reigning monarch, would not allow him access to dispatch boxes or encourage his education in kingship. As a result the Prince of Wales, like his grandfather before he succeeded, was left to a life of largely empty idleness. Lord Stamfordham reported that his parents were grieved by his ‘late hours, lack of food, excess of smoking, restlessness and dislike of reading or of any salutary occupation’.

  His life was not entirely idle, however. He possessed in full the restless energy and iconoclasm of the post-war world – the desire to seek pleasure, to forget recent trauma in a round of fads and parties and sports. He also, however, devoted energy to the betterment of society, for he became a sincere and consistent patron of ex-servicemen. He toured the poorer parts of his father’s realm and was struck by the drabness and misery he found there, yet he uttered no words of private sympathy as King George did, for those on strike in 1926, and indeed lent his chauffeur and his car to deliver copies of Churchill’s official newspaper, the British Gazette. Nevertheless, he made a difference. He established the Feathers Clubs, their name derived from the three feathers that symbolized the Prince of Wales, as a charity for former servicemen. He also founded King George’s Jubilee Trust for Youth. In modern terms he was extremely good at ‘fronting’ an organization, in being the pub
lic face of some deserving cause. Lady Astor, the Member of Parliament, once told him that his charitable instincts and popularity had made ‘the way easier for your successors’. He not only looked handsome but spoke easily, and was described as ‘a born communicator’. To seek his equal in terms of profile-raising glamour one would only have to think of Princess Diana at the height of her charitable involvement in the 1990s.

  David did not accept the teaching of Bagehot, on which other monarchs both before and after him were brought up: the widely accepted belief was that ‘letting daylight in on magic’ was the fastest way to disaster. Over-familiarity would lose the monarchy the respect of the public and diminish its prestige, it was thought. The Prince of Wales took an approach that was entirely at odds with this. He sought instead to befriend the public by being frequently visible in comparatively informal circumstances. He was depicted in the press more often than any of his predecessors, and was photographed doing ordinary things – or at least ordinary by the standards of the aristocracy – like playing golf, riding in steeplechases, visiting London nightclubs and parties. Though there were plenty of images of him in uniform or in a bowler hat, attending official occasions, he was also frequently shown in photographs dressed in plus-fours, socks and jerseys of outrageous loudness, smoking, chatting, joking with his future subjects in a way that even the genial Edward VII would not have done. It seemed to work. He was as popular as a film star.

  He might have become king in 1928, when the sudden illness of his father caused him to cut short an overseas visit and hurry home. Had he done so, two years before meeting the woman he was to marry, he would have been a popular sovereign, though Mrs Simpson might well have caught his attention earlier than she did and events could well have taken the same course. His preference was self-evidently for married women. Frances Donaldson, who wrote a biography of him, said that ‘he was actively seeking a dominating, quasi-maternal partner’, first in Thelma, Lady Furness, and then in Wallis Simpson. Both women were Americans, from outside the British Establishment, and therefore perhaps more uninhibited about entering into a close friendship with the heir to the throne.

  That they had these origins would have made a positive impression on the prince. He had liked America enormously and the affection had been mutual. The United States – the most glamorous country in the world – was to him associated with modernity, informality, comfort and social flexibility. He liked the people, whom he saw as sharing his own impatience with fustian tradition. Both the ladies with whom he was to become seriously involved in Britain had the confidence to dominate him, and in this they clearly fulfilled a need that he probably did not even articulate. Mrs Simpson, in particular, met his emotional needs so exactly that he knew at once she was the partner he wanted. One observer was to remark that he had never seen one human being so utterly and completely possessed by another as the Prince of Wales was by his second American lover. Lady Furness was to be unceremoniously got rid of, entirely eclipsed by his new companion.

  Had Mrs Simpson not entered into previous marriages (she had been wed not once but twice, and the second time to a Guards officer – a connection too close to be overlooked), she might just have made a suitable consort. She would at least have given the prince an extremely happy home life. Her second husband, fiercely loyal to the monarchy though himself American in origin, declined to criticize the prince, even when the latter was openly taking holidays with the woman who was still Mrs Simpson, and had a habit of festooning her with jewels. In fact, David and Mrs Simpson made no attempt to keep their friendship secret, and this upset the king, if not Mrs Simpson’s lawful spouse. Like many who are smitten with love, the prince did not understand why others should disapprove of his happiness or fail to wish him well. Had he sought to wed before his father’s death, it is quite possible that King George would have used the Royal Marriages Act (which allowed the monarch to veto any union among his relatives of which he disapproved) to prevent his son marrying, but the king’s health was failing and it was only a matter of time before the prince succeeded. If he could be patient a little while longer, he would need no one’s permission.

  It might be assumed that the choice of Mrs Simpson as consort to the king of England would be popular in the United States. In fact, many Americans were horrified at the development of this friendship. Had she been a worthier sample of American womanhood – a younger, previously unmarried lady of good family and good character – many citizens of the Great Republic would have felt considerable pride. That she was instead twice-divorced, middle-aged and not strikingly pretty (though men who met her remarked on her considerable magnetism), gave her in the eyes of some compatriots the image of a shop-soiled adventuress. As one American was to comment many years afterward: ‘If we had sent over the best we had, it would have been a wonderful act of international friendship. But we felt let down at being represented by her.’ Nevertheless, the abdication seemed to others a snub. Decades later, some would still ask if Edward’s departure was caused by the fact that his intended wife was a divorcee or because she was American.

  After succeeding to the throne on the death of George V on 20 January 1936, Edward – he had decided to take the regnal name of his grandfather – swept into his new role with an impatient gleam in his eye. He created the King’s Flight as a modern means of transport. He decreed, somewhat eccentrically perhaps, that Yeomen of the Guard – Beefeaters – need no longer wear beards if they preferred not to. He demanded that his left profile, which was considered his better side, be shown on stamps even though images of sovereigns alternate and he should have been depicted from the right. He continued his father’s custom of speaking to his peoples by wireless, and addressed at his coronation an audience of over two million. His modern attitudes were already well known. He disdained formal religion, and so fulfilling his role as head of the Anglican Church and Defender of the Faith was going to be problematic. He had little credibility with Church leaders and his views on divorce were – given his own situation – likely to be unacceptable to the Establishment.

  Within the Palace he became both hated and feared. He expected to be waited upon at all hours, making life extremely difficult for footmen, pages and kitchen staff. He instigated cost-cutting measures that largely took the form of sacking staff. A number of these were officials who had faithfully served his father – or even himself. One of them, Admiral Halsey, had been head of his household. Halsey’s patience had surely in any case reached its limit, for he had several times had to use his own money to pay the prince’s bills. When the Admiral went to say farewell to his employer, the king sat looking at a book and did not even glance at him.

  The prime minister, the avuncular Stanley Baldwin, dreaded the prospect of Edward’s reign. In his estimation the new king had ‘the mind of a child’, and Baldwin knew him to be incapable of even pretending interest in the thousands of details of government business that a sovereign must master. He confessed to having secretly hoped (‘God forgive me’) that a broken neck in the hunting field would deprive the country of its ruler.

  While Edward’s modernizing zeal could be accepted with resignation, there were more serious issues to contend with. He was, for instance, in the habit of telling Mrs Simpson the details of confidential discussions, held in cabinet or the Privy Council, which she then repeated within her circle of friends. This included the German Ambassador, Ribbentrop, who therefore sometimes proved far more well informed about government affairs than was good for national security. As a result much sensitive information was kept from the king, and he was even under surveillance by his own security service.

  It was just as well that he did not have closer dealings with more serious issues of government, for the political views he developed as the thirties progressed were deeply unsettling. He was an admirer of Hitler, and felt it was no business of other countries to criticize the manner in which the Nazis ran their state. Though King George had bluntly told the German Ambassador that his country was the greate
st danger to peace and there would be war within a decade, King Edward saw matters differently. He liked Germany for the same reasons that he was impressed by America: he viewed it as aggressively modern, socially flexible and impatient with the past. He also approved of the no-nonsense way in which it had solved the problem of unemployment and had given its workless and its ex-servicemen a new sense of dignity and purpose. The details of how Germany’s rising prosperity, social reform and political stability were attained – the stealing of assets, the persecution, imprisonment and murder of anyone the regime did not like – did not interest him. The plight of the country’s Jews left him unmoved.

  In 1930 he had acquired a home at Fort Belvedere, an eighteenth-century folly in the royal domain near Windsor. It was a fantasy castle surrounded by cannon that had reputedly been used at Culloden. His father had grudgingly made it over to him: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for?’ he had asked. ‘Those damned weekends, I suppose.’

  He was right. Edward had created for himself an enviable home there. Gardens replaced the scrub which had formerly surrounded it, cleared away by his own efforts and those of his guests. It had been his headquarters as Prince of Wales, and remained so once he ascended the throne. He had showers and a swimming pool put in, and his weekends there were spent in parlour games and superficial, rather inane conversation over cocktails at the poolside. He often wore a kilt in the house or, as was customary in the royal family, a bearskin while in the gardens, to accustom himself to its weight before a military parade.

  While his relaxation there with Mrs Simpson was well out of the public eye, a holiday cruise that he undertook with her aboard the yacht Nahlin during the summer of 1936 caused many of his advisers to doubt his sanity, and certainly to worry for his future and theirs. The vessel made a leisurely tour of the Adriatic, and at every landfall the curious could see the British monarch, sometimes casually dressed to the point of near-nakedness, in obviously intimate circumstances with a woman who was quickly identified by the international press. Only in Edward’s own country did the newspapers, in a gesture of self-imposed censorship that would seem incredible only a few decades later, agree not to write about his public indiscretion or to publish photographs. As a result, Britons were often bewildered by the innuendo and outright speculation rife among their friends overseas on a subject about which they themselves knew little or nothing.