Читать книгу King Edward VIII - Philip Ziegler - Страница 12

DON’T THINK YOU CAN ACT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE, THE KING warned his son at the end of the war. ‘You must always remember your position and who you are.’ But, the Prince asked himself, ‘who exactly was I?’¹ He was a man apart, that much was clear, and he loathed it. He did what he could to mitigate his isolation, to treat others and to be treated himself as if he were a normal human being; but though a normal human being was what he was, he would never win acceptance of the fact. Even by those who knew him best he was treated with gingerly deference, as a freak with a touch of the divine, an improbably animated refugee from Madame Tussaud’s. His jokes would be greeted with sycophantic fervour by those who were amazed a prince could joke at all; his peccadilloes were met with extravagant censure by those who did not believe a prince should be vulnerable to the weaknesses of the flesh. Part at least of the sympathy he felt towards Americans came from his conviction – rarely justified – that they would not view him with the curious compound of reverence and resentment that the average Briton adopts towards its monarchy.

That veteran courtier Fritz Ponsonby placed all the Prince’s qualms firmly into focus when he remonstrated with him for making himself too accessible. ‘The Monarchy must always retain an element of mystery,’ he maintained. ‘A Prince should not show himself too much. The Monarchy must remain on a pedestal.’ The Prince flatly disagreed. The last place he wished to be was on a pedestal, he wanted to be down among the people, getting to know them and letting them know him.² There was more truth in both points of view than either party was ready to concede. But the argument was anyway academic. Every time the Prince of Wales tried to descend from his pedestal the British people put him back again. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he was walled around by deferential affection, a barrier imperceptible sometimes but inexorably setting him apart. Even when he first went out with the Pytchley hunt, six stalwart followers were secretly deputed to escort him and to ensure that he returned unharmed.³ If he could not be treated as an equal on the hunting field, where a man is traditionally worth no more than his courage, his prowess as a rider and the quality of his horse, then where could he hope to find the sort of acceptance that he craved?

To be isolated was bad enough, to be isolated in inactivity was insupportable. The designated successor to the leadership of some great company or institution will be fully occupied with the specialist duties that fall to him while he is waiting to take over. The heir to some great estate, even in 1919, could busy himself in whatever career he chose until the title and the land became his. The Prince had no specialist duties, yet the tasks that were imposed upon him effectively prevented him pursuing any serious career. His life was divided between furious bouts of what he described as ‘princing’ – opening hospitals, addressing dinners, receiving addresses, smiling, smiling, smiling – and tracts of emptiness which it was up to him to fill as best he could. Geddes, the British Ambassador in Washington, suggested that the Prince would make an ideal Governor General of Canada.⁴ The King insisted that he was needed nearer home. The Queen said that he must ‘learn how to govern’.⁵ Yet little indeed was done to teach him. He was denied access to all but a limited range of state papers, never encouraged to talk to politicians or civil servants. He told Lady Airlie that he realized he must work to keep his job, but was given no work and was not even sure he had a job.⁶

In the middle of the nineteenth century Bagehot had written perceptively of what was now the Prince’s problem: ‘Whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.’⁷ The Prince had done no more than taste the flavour of the fleshpots before the war, there had followed four years of dour privation, now everything was his for the taking. If his life had developed as had been expected in 1914 he would have had time to adjust to the heady and dangerous delights of liberty. As it was, he was almost entirely inexperienced. In 1921 he told Freda Dudley Ward that he had been reading Max Beerbohm’s essay on King George IV.⁸ ‘I’ve found a sentence in it that I think must be amazingly suitable and applicable to me and somewhat an apology for my doings and behaviour … “He was indeed still a child, for royalties not being ever brought into contact with the realities of life, remain young far longer than other people.” No one realizes how desperately true that is in my case [more] than I do.’⁹ When he surveyed the monstrous banquet of pleasures which the world laid in front of him, and the unsubstantial restraints placed upon his capacity to gratify himself, he might have been inclined to cry with Clive that he stood astonished at his own moderation.

‘I think David ought to return home before very long,’ wrote Queen Mary to the King three weeks after the armistice, ‘as he must help us in these difficult days.’¹⁰ In a letter that must have chilled the Prince’s heart, Lord Stamfordham sketched out the sort of help that was in question. The King had decreed he should take over the Presidency of the King Edward VII’s Hospital Fund. ‘Then there is the Royal College of Music. The University of Wales is the most pressing as the King really constitutionally ought not to be the Chancellor. Then Your Royal Highness is to be elected a Trustee of the British Museum.’¹¹ And so the dismal catalogue went on.

The first essential was to find him a private secretary. Lord Cromer, a former diplomat and banker turned courtier, was the Prince’s original choice, but the King ruled that he could not be spared from his present duties. Next to be canvassed was a former journalist and much-decorated officer in the Brigade of Guards, Edward Grigg, who seemed to accord admirably with Stamfordham’s prescription: ‘someone with brains, with some Colonial knowledge: a facile pen – a nice fellow …’¹² Grigg, however, hankered after a career less restricted than he would find in royal service. Eventually the job went to Godfrey Thomas, whose diplomatic career had already been interrupted by the Prince’s demands on his time. In his diary the Prince described Thomas as a ‘topper’ and a ‘ripper’ and he wrote to him as ‘my greatest friend and the one man I can trust and who really understands me’.¹³ It was perhaps a feeling that the two men were too close to each other that led the King to question the wisdom of the appointment. The Prince stuck to his guns. Thomas was ‘very able, full of tact, and popular with everyone … in addition to never hesitating to point out or tell me of any failings he may think I am guilty of’. ¹⁴ It proved a good choice. A stronger personality than Thomas might possibly have curbed some of the Prince’s excesses, but more probably the two men would have quarrelled and greater mischief been done than good. Thomas served his master with loyalty and devotion until the abdication.

With a private secretary came an independent household. The Prince insisted that, at twenty-five, he could no longer live under his parents’ roof. ‘I must be free to live my own life,’ he told Lady Airlie.¹⁵ The King took the line that the roof of Buckingham Palace was quite large enough for two – or twenty for that matter – but he grudgingly gave way and in July 1919 the Prince moved into York House, not so much a house in fact as a fragment of the great complex of St James’s Palace, which grew or shrank according to the needs and pretensions of the occupant. It was not ideal, few good rooms and those north-facing, dark, antiquated, but it suited the new owner’s needs and gave him the privacy and independence he so much desired.

And so, in his new premises, he set up in business as Prince of Wales. Lloyd George still presided over a coalition government elected with a large majority at the end of 1918, but though his personal prestige was high the overwhelming Conservative preponderance in the alliance meant that his position was far less strong than it seemed. The Prince’s views at the time of the election were much as might have been expected from a serving officer: ‘One dreads to think of the Labour people returning a greater number of members … and then all these crazy women candidates; however Lloyd George seems to be all right just now, tho’ one can’t trust him a yard.’ Wigram had been sending him the Scotland Yard reports on the state of opinion among the working classes and he read them with alarm: ‘I’m afraid I’m always a pessimist but the situation looks pretty black just now, tho’ it’s not half as black as it will be in a year’s time, perhaps less than that.’¹⁶ The problems were going to start when the soldiers were demobilized and expected employment and a decent standard of living. Only radical action could avert disaster: ‘Oh! we’ve got funny, or, rather, serious times before us, but they’ve got to be faced and in the right and proper way and to hell with precedents!! They won’t wash nowadays!!’¹⁷ He agreed wholeheartedly with his mother when she rejoiced at the defeat of the more extreme socialists in the general election and concluded her letter: ‘If only the Coalition Govt will now hurry up and get the much needed reforms (which the working classes need) passed, they can take the wind out of the sails of the extremists, and I trust they will be wise enough to realize it.’¹⁸

He returned to a Britain that was riven by class antipathies and violent industrial disputes. ‘One can’t help seeing the work people’s point of view,’ he told the Queen, ‘and in a way it’s only human nature to get as much as one can out of one’s employer.’¹⁹ He soon found that he sympathized with Lloyd George and the more radical wing of the government and resented the intransigent callousness of the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war. ‘I look on [Lloyd George] as the only possible man living to be PM and feel that if he goes a Labour govt is bound to come in. I have the greatest confidence in him now, tho’ I didn’t use to!!’²⁰ That the accession to power of a Labour government would be an evil seemed as obvious to him as it did to 99 per cent of the upper classes, but that the injustices of society required drastic redress and that, if nobody else would do it, it would have to be done by the socialists, seemed quite as evident. ‘It is a very sad and depressing thought that there are so many desperately sad and sordid homes this Christmas,’ he wrote in 1921, ‘destitute men (thousands of them ex-service men) and consequently still more starving women and children.’²¹ Such sentiments are easily voiced, but less easily acted on. The Prince of Wales was no crusader and was disinclined to concern himself with any problem which was not thrust forcibly on his attention. But the unemployment and destitution among so large a part of the population were thrust on his attention, and the issues preoccupied him for many years.

In June 1919 he made the first of the provincial tours which were to be so conspicuous a feature of his public life and were to give him a deeper understanding of British industry and working men than any monarch or heir to the throne had enjoyed before him. He spent four days in south Wales, was taken through the least salubrious slums, and in his speeches laboured constantly ‘the welfare of our ex-service men and the improvement of housing conditions, both of which I have very much at heart’. He went down Cymmr pit in the Rhondda Valley and found chalked on a wall a thousand feet down: ‘Welcome to our soldier Prince. Long may he live.’ He borrowed a piece of chalk and wrote below the slogan: ‘Thank you. Edward, Prince.’²²

Until his Commonwealth tours were behind him he was not to be put to the task of doing something practical to implement his sincere but vague benevolence. He did, however, manage to fit other provincial visits into the gaps between his voyages abroad. Glasgow, traditionally the most republican and fiercely left-wing of British cities, was a tough assignment. The first day he met with boos or sullen silence, but his patent good will, humility and charm gradually prevailed. ‘It’s with the greatest possible relief and gratitude to the people of Glasgow that I can tell you that I’m more welcome here now than I was yesterday,’ he wrote proudly to Freda Dudley Ward. ‘I’ve driven miles through the streets of this vast city today and the people … have been divine to me and were very kind and enthusiastic. Even the men cheered and far more took off their caps than yesterday and there were only 1⁄2 dozen boos.’ Next day was even better; ‘a large crowd gave me a marvellous send off tonight. To TOI, and TOI only, I say that I do feel I’ve been able to do just a little good propaganda up there and given Communism a knock.’ But he did not delude himself that the royal touch could miraculously cure economic ills: ‘I’m afraid the effect of my visit won’t last very long. Things have gone too far, darling, on the Clyde and I take a very gloomy view of the whole situation.’²³

In Cardiff three months later he was flabbergasted by the warmth of his reception. ‘They’ve all been divine to me today,’ he told Freda, ‘and I’ve seen hundreds of ex-service men and they were the nicest of the lot. Christ only knows why, for they are all having a real bad time and one is so terribly sorry for them.’²⁴ One of his problems was that the local dignitaries sought to swaddle him in pompous formalities, while his pre-occupation was to meet and be seen by as many people as possible. In Lancashire in 1921, for example: ‘Old Lord Derby has organized this tour marvellously, and I’m able to put in an occasional human touch or stunt of my own, so that I think it’s going well, though I’m afraid my ultra-democratic spirit has annoyed him a few times.’ He had his own way over the programme: ‘No waste of time, such as laying foundation stones and opening things, it was all just driving through miles and miles of crowded streets and stopping at groups of ex-service men and schoolchildren.’ But, as he found still more markedly on his tours abroad, the strain of constantly giving himself to the people, exuding warmth and enthusiastic interest for eight or nine hours on end, was sometimes cripplingly oppressive: ‘I’m down to bedrock, my angel, and Christ only knows how I’m going to scrape through the next 2 days.’²⁵

Painfully, he acquired the art of public speaking. Churchill appointed himself his coach. Don’t be ashamed to read a speech, he wrote, but in that case ‘do it quite openly, reading it very slowly and deliberately’. Of course it was better to memorize a text or talk from notes. To accommodate the notes, he advised, take a tumbler, put a finger bowl on top of it, put a plate on top of that, and then arrange the notes on top of the plate, ‘but one has to be very careful not to knock it all over, as once happened to me’. This advice was given before a banquet for the allied leaders in July 1919. Whether the Prince followed Churchill’s somewhat alarming system is uncertain. He memorized the speech, however, and evidently delivered it well. ‘You are absolutely right to take trouble about these things,’ wrote Churchill approvingly. ‘With perseverance you might speak as well as anybody in the land, and naturally and gracefully besides.’²⁶ The Prince never learned to speak as well as that but he mastered the technique of seeming sincere and spontaneous: ‘He talks very simply,’ wrote Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s personal secretary and future wife, ‘just like a schoolboy – saying little things that come into his head as he goes along, and then coming back again to the prepared speech. He charms everyone.’²⁷ But he never enjoyed making speeches. On another occasion Frances Stevenson congratulated him on his success. ‘He told me he would never get used to speaking in public – he was far too nervous. “My trouble is that I have not a ready pen,” he said. “I find it so difficult even to prepare a speech …” He is a dear thing, with beautiful eyes, but such a boy.’²⁸

The vast estates of the Duchy of Cornwall in London and the West Country gave him a chance to do something practical to help the unemployed and the homeless. He invested a large amount of money in new machinery for the Cornish tin mines, set up a farming concern run on cooperative lines and planted 250 acres of forest on the eastern side of Dartmoor. In London he regularly visited his estates in Kennington and the areas of the borough which he owned were conspicuously better furnished with houses than the parts for which the Council was responsible. At a public meeting the Mayor tried to blame his Council’s shortcomings on the policies of the Duchy. ‘Thereupon the whole Labour party who were in the hall rose and practically hissed the Mayor off the platform.’ The socialist leader in the borough later told Sydney Greville that the Prince, after the interview which he had given them, could do anything he liked with the Labour Party.²⁹

His public life directly after the war was not restricted to the University of Wales, the Royal College of Music and the other pressing calls on his time that Stamfordham had enumerated. ‘Other men might be chained to their desks,’ he wrote wryly in his memoirs. ‘I was metaphorically chained to the banquet table.’³⁰ A typical day in July 1919 saw him receiving Indian army and navy officers, attending a meeting of the Duchy Council, visiting the Australian YMCA, spending the evening at the Royal College of Music, moving on to a boxing display and ending up at the Embassy night club. In March he was initiated by the Duke of Connaught into the Household Brigade Lodge of the Freemasons. For once it seemed he might be spared a speech, since replies to toasts were traditionally limited to five words, ‘Worshipful Master, I thank you,’ but the rule was waived for the heir to the throne and the Prince had to hold forth about his ‘ardent desire to do his utmost to promote the principles of duty, loyalty and benevolence, on which Freemasonry rested’.³¹ Closer to his heart was his appointment the following year to be Honorary Colonel of the newly formed Welsh Guards. For one who was often to claim that this was the office which meant more to him than any other, his initial reaction was, however, hardly ecstatic. ‘Of course it is inevitable and is only right I suppose and I more than appreciate the honour etc. etc.!!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘But once a Grenadier always a Grenadier!!’³²

But such diversions were no more than aperitifs to the daunting meal that was to come. It was Lloyd George who first conceived the idea that the Prince should embark on a series of tours around the Empire, ostensibly to visit the soldiers he had met during the war in Europe and the Middle East and to thank their governments and peoples for all they had contributed to the final victory. Lloyd George knew that demands for reform in the structure of the Empire, pent up during the years of fighting, would now be vigorously put forward. Difficult and probably acrimonious negotiations were inevitable. Anything that could be done to ensure that they were conducted in a spirit of unity, and against a background of harmony, would be of the greatest value. Otherwise the strains might prove too great and the Empire disintegrate. ‘The appearance of the popular Prince of Wales,’ Lloyd George maintained, ‘might do more to calm the discord than half a dozen solemn Imperial Conferences.’³³

The King was not convinced that his son’s apparition would thus magically still the tempest, but he felt that at least it would be a useful stage in the education of a future monarch. Canada had asked first for a visit from the Prince, so Canada would start the series, the other Dominions and parts of the Empire would follow in the next few years. It was a prospect that exhilarated and alarmed the Prince. He longed to travel, but though he had no concept yet of how gruelling his tours would be, he knew well that they would be no joy ride. He would be constantly on parade, scrutinized in every detail of his behaviour, blamed if he were too solemn or too frivolous, criticized for his formality, rebuked for his informality. ‘Your visits to the Dominions will be made or marred according as you do and say the right thing,’ Lord Stamfordham sternly warned him. ‘The Throne is the pivot upon which the Empire will more than ever hinge. Its strength and stability will depend entirely on its occupant.’³⁴ The Prince found it troublesome enough always to do and say the right thing in the restricted periods during which he was on duty in the United Kingdom; to have to do so for months at a time under the microscope that is trained upon a royal visitor would test him unreasonably hard. It was with grave qualms that he sailed from Portsmouth on 5 August 1919, on his way to the New World.