Читать книгу King Edward VIII - Philip Ziegler - Страница 7

EVEN IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TO BE one of the 540 or so^*1 living and legitimate descendants of Queen Victoria is a matter of some moment. To have been born in 1894, eldest son of the eldest surviving son of the eldest son of the Queen Empress, was to be heir to an almost intolerable burden of rights and responsibilities.

Queen Victoria had then been on the throne for fifty-seven years. The great majority of her subjects had no recollection of another monarch. She had weathered the unpopularity which had grown up when she retreated into protracted seclusion after the death of the Prince Consort and now enjoyed unique renown. The Widow of Windsor, ruler of a vast empire and grandmother to half the crowned heads of Europe, was a bewitching figure; her obstinate refusal to play to the gallery had eventually won her the reverent respect of all but a tiny republican minority among her people. She had become a myth in her own lifetime.

To have a myth as a mother is not necessarily a prescription for a happy family life. In 1894 the future King Edward VII had already been Prince of Wales for more than fifty years. The role is never an easy one to fill, and in Edward’s case was made almost impossible by the carping censoriousness of his parents. The Prince of Wales gave them something to censure – he was self-indulgent, indolent and licentious – but he was also uncommonly shrewd and well able to do a useful job of work if given the chance. The Queen gave him as few chances as possible. She treated him as an irresponsible delinquent, and in doing so ensured that his irresponsibility and delinquency became more marked. It was not until he at last succeeded to the throne that his qualities as a statesman were given a proper chance to flourish.

In 1863 he married Princess Alexandra of Denmark – ‘Sea-King’s daughter from over the sea’ – radiantly beautiful and with a sweetness of nature which enabled her to endure her husband’s infidelity with generosity and dignity. She was capable of great obstinacy and occasional selfishness but she was still one of the most endearing figures to have sat upon the British throne. She rarely read, her handwriting would have disgraced an intoxicated spider, increasing deafness cut her off from society, but she enjoyed a vast and justified popularity until the day she died.

The first duty of an heir to the throne is to ensure the succession. The Prince and Princess of Wales did their best, producing two sons, three daughters, and then another short-lived son. Unhappily, however, their eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, always known as Eddy, proved an unhopeful heir for the throne of England. Languid and lymphatic – ‘si peu de chose, though as you say a “Dear Boy”’, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz brutally dismissed him¹ – he deplored the strident jollity of his family and preferred to trail wistfully in the wake of whatever unsuitable woman had attracted his attention. A determined and reliable wife seemed the only hope for his redemption, and a paragon was found in Princess Victoria Mary – May to the family – only daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Teck.

The Tecks were professional poor relations. The Duke was haunted by the fact that his father’s morganatic marriage had deprived him of his claim to the throne of Württemberg, and all his life attached to the rituals of rank and precedence an importance which seemed extravagant even to the courtiers who surrounded him. His mountainous wife Mary Adelaide, ‘Fat Mary’, was by no means unaware that she was a granddaughter of King George III, but she bore her royal blood more lightly. She devoted her energies to entertaining lavishly beyond her means and then recouping the family finances by ferocious economies and periods of exile in the relative cheapness of Florence. There Princess May spent some of her most formative years, learning the value of money the hard way, but also learning to appreciate beauty and acquiring a range of aesthetic interests which to her English cousins seemed odd if not actively undesirable. From her parents she inherited a respect for the blood royal which led her to regard the occupant of the British throne with something close to reverence.

The Tecks were protégés of the British royal family, who let them occupy rooms in Kensington Palace and make their home in the pleasant, rambling grace-and-favour White Lodge, in the heart of Richmond Park. The Princess of Wales was particularly fond of the Duchess, and it was hardly surprising that May’s name should have come to the fore when the quest began for a wife for Prince Eddy. It was not a spectacular match but it was respectable, and Queen Victoria considered that a future King of England needed no extra réclame in his bride to secure his immortality. To the Tecks the marriage was all that they had dreamed of; May’s morganatic blood would have proved an impediment to an alliance with any of the grander continental royal families, while the upper reaches of the British aristocracy had shown little eagerness to embrace this peripherally royal and penniless princess. Only May hesitated. ‘Do you think I can really take this on?’ she asked her mother. ‘Of course you can,’ was the robust reply, and of course she did.² Her future husband was given equally little opportunity to object. ‘I do not anticipate any real opposition on Prince Eddy’s part if he is properly managed and told he must do it,’ wrote the Prince of Wales’s private secretary, Francis Knollys, ‘– that it is for the good of the country etc. etc.’³

May was spared what must have seemed an unappealing match. The engagement was announced at the end of 1891; the wedding fixed for February; early in January 1892 Prince Eddy contracted influenza, pneumonia developed, within a few days he was dead. His place in the line of succession was taken by his brother George. The change was in every way to the benefit of the country. In 1873 Queen Victoria had sent Prince George a watch, ‘hoping that it will serve to remind you to be very punctual in everything and very exact in all your duties … I hope you will be a good, obedient, truthful boy, kind to all, humble-minded, dutiful and always trying to be of use to others!’⁴ Few precepts can have been taken more earnestly to heart. Prince George had been conscientious, hard-working and responsible as a boy; he was no different as a man. The Royal Navy, for which he had been trained, can claim many men of cultivation and even a few eccentrics and intellectuals among the officers, but it takes considerable independence of mind to maintain such characteristics in a mainly unsympathetic environment. Prince George had neither the wish nor the ability to stand apart. He was an arch-conformist; bored by books, pictures, music; wholly without intellectual curiosity or imagination; suspicious of new ideas; entertained only by his stamp collection and the slaughter of ever greater quantities of pheasants, partridges and the like.

Yet his bluff and phlegmatic exterior was to some extent illusory. He was a worrier, an insomniac, a man whose sense of duty often stood between him and the enjoyment of his role in life. In 1892 his duty was to marry quickly and to provide heirs to a crown which would otherwise eventually fall into the unpromising hands of his sister Louise, Duchess of Fife. With a suitable bride for a future British monarch already selected, the solution seemed obvious to the Tecks and to his parents. The wedding planned for Prince Eddy should take place, only the date and the bridegroom would be changed. Prince George took little convincing that this was his destiny; May felt slightly greater qualms, but she too was soon persuaded. In May 1893 the Duke of York, as Prince George had been created the previous year, dutifully proposed to his late brother’s fiancée. He was as dutifully accepted. On 6 July the couple, by now very much, if undemonstratively, in love, were married in the Chapel Royal. A year later, on 23 June 1894, their first child, a boy, was born at the Tecks’ home in Richmond Park. He was not Victoria’s first great-grandchild but in her eyes he was beyond measure the most important.

The original plan had been for the baby to be born in Buckingham Palace but an early heatwave drove the couple to the comparative cool of White Lodge. The Duke of York was in the library, pretending to read Pilgrim’s Progress, when the birth took place at 10 p.m.; his father, the Prince of Wales, was holding an Ascot Week ball in the Fishing Temple at Virginia Water. The telephone that had recently been installed to link White Lodge to East Sheen was used to give him the news and enable him to propose a toast to the new prince.⁵ ‘My darling May was not conscious of pain during those last 2½ terrible hours,’ the Duke of York wrote to Victoria; in terms that sound as if the end of the operation had been not so much the cradle as the grave. ‘The baby weighed 8 lbs when he was born, and both grandmothers … pronounce him to be a most beautiful, strong and healthy child.’⁶ Fifteen hundred people signed their names on the following day in the book which had been placed in a marquee for the occasion, and the Duchess of Teck’s sister, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, announced that she ‘went – mentally – on my knees, tears of gratitude and happiness flowing, streaming, and the hugging followed’.⁷

The bickering that normally accompanied the naming of a royal child now ensued. The Queen took it for granted that a daughter would be called Victoria and a son Albert. The Duke of York said it had long been decided ‘that if it was a boy, we should call him Edward after darling Eddy. This is the dearest wish of our hearts, dearest Grandmama, for Edward is indeed a sacred name to us, and one which I know would have pleased him beyond anything.’⁸ ‘You write as if Edward was the real name of dear Eddy,’ retorted the Queen severely; everyone knew that he had in fact been christened Victor Albert.⁹ The Duke proved unusually obstinate and the baby was called Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. Christian was the name of the baby’s godfather, the King of Denmark; the other four names represented England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Some reports state that David was an afterthought, introduced to gratify the aged and moribund Marchioness of Waterford. There are differing views about her motives: that assiduous and well-informed courtier Lord Esher said it was because ‘she had some fad about restoring the Jews to the Holy City’;¹⁰ the Prince of Wales’s friend the Marquis de Breteuil recorded that the old lady had dreamed of an ancient Irish legend according to which there would be a great king over the water and his name would be David.¹¹

The christening took place with all the pomp befitting a baby who stood third in line to the British throne. Twelve godparents, mainly German, attended; as well as the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. The gold bowl used as a font was brought from Windsor Castle. The cake, thirty inches high and five feet in circumference, was made by McVitie and Price in Edinburgh. ‘I have two bottles of Jordan water,’ the Duke proudly told his old tutor, Canon Dalton, and both were lavished on the occasion.¹² The only discordant note was struck by the first socialist member of parliament, Keir Hardie. When it was proposed that the House of Commons should congratulate the Queen on the happy event, Hardie opposed the motion. ‘From his childhood onward,’ he said, with what to some will seem dreadful prescience, ‘this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score … A line will be drawn between him and the people he is to be called upon some day to reign over. In due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’¹³

Prince Edward, who from birth was always known to his family as David, was followed eighteen months later by a brother, Albert George, who was in due course to become Duke of York and, less predictably, King George VI. Edward attended his sibling’s christening and behaved impeccably until Prince Albert, in the arms of the Bishop of Norwich, began to yell. Edward, evidently seeing this as a challenge to his primacy, yelled louder and was removed. ‘Of course he is very young to come to church,’ the Duke of York told the Queen, ‘but we thought that in years to come it would give him pleasure to know that he had been present at his brother’s christening.’¹⁴ A daughter, Mary, was born in 1897; then came a gap of three years, after which Henry – future Duke of Gloucester – was born in 1900 and George – future Duke of Kent – in 1902. The youngest child, John, born in 1905, was an epileptic who lived in seclusion and was to die at the age of fourteen.

The three elder children were close enough in age to be much together; Princes Edward and Albert – David and Bertie – being in particular inseparable. Lord Esher, visiting Sandringham, played with the children in the garden and noted that: ‘The second boy is the sharpest – but there is something rather taking about Prince Edward.’¹⁵ Most other observers agree it was Edward who was the sharper and who habitually took the lead – ‘because as the eldest son he had the highest status in the family,’ explained the Duchess of York’s close friend, Lady Airlie.¹⁶ He found that he could easily manage his tractable and worshipping younger brother, but that Princess Mary was an independent-minded tomboy who was disinclined to do the bidding of any mere boy.

It has often been alleged – not least by the subject of this biography – that the Duke and Duchess of York were cold and distant parents. It would be foolish to pretend that the relationship between the future King George V and his sons, in particular his eldest son, was a happy one. When they were babies, however, all the evidence is that he was a doting father; far more ready to take an interest in his children than was true of most English parents of the upper and upper middle classes. ‘I have got those two photographs of you and darling Baby on my table before me now,’ he wrote to his wife from Cowes in August 1894. ‘… I like looking at my Tootsums little wife and my sweet child, it makes me happy when they are far away.’^17*2 ‘Baby is very flourishing. He walks about all over the house, he has 14 teeth,’ he boasted to Canon Dalton. A month later Prince Edward still walked about all over the house but had sixteen teeth.¹⁸ The Duchess was more critical in her attitude. Her baby, she told her brother, was ‘exactly what I looked like as a baby, consequently plain. This is a pity and rather disturbs me.’¹⁹ She does not seem to have had much idea of what was to be expected from a small child: ‘David was “jumpy” yesterday morning,’ she wrote when he was a little over two years old, ‘however he got quieter after being out, what a curious child he is.’²⁰ When Edward began to get letters from his parents, the Duke of York was always the more demonstratively affectionate. He was coming to Sandringham on Saturday, he told his three-year-old son, and would be ‘so pleased to see our darling little chicks again’. When the chicks had chickenpox; ‘I hope none of you have grown wings and become little chickens and tried to fly away, that would be dreadful and we should have to go up in a balloon to catch you.’²¹

The trouble began when his children reached an age at which mature conduct might reasonably – or unreasonably – be expected of them. Admiral Fisher, at Balmoral in 1903, noted: ‘The two little Princes are splendid little boys and chattered away the whole of their lunch-time, not the faintest shyness.’²² The comment is notable as marking one of the last occasions on which father and sons were observed together without something being said about the constraint and fear which dominated the atmosphere. Kenneth Rose has convincingly challenged the story by which King George V is supposed to have told Lord Derby: ‘My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I’m damned well going to see that my children are frightened of me!’²³ But though the tale may well be apocryphal, like most apocryphal tales it contains an essential truth. The Duke of York loved and wanted the best for his children but he was a bad-tempered and often frightening man; he was never cruel, but he was a harsh disciplinarian who believed that a bit of bullying never did a child any harm; he shouted, ranted, struck out both verbally and physically to express his displeasure. A summons to the library almost always heralded a rebuke, and a rebuke induced terror in the recipient. His banter was well-intentioned but it could also be brutal. On the birth of Prince Henry: ‘David of course asked some very funny questions. I told him the baby had flown in at the window during the night, and he at once asked where his wings were and I said they had been cut off.’²⁴ Prince Edward was six at the time, and he claimed the vision of his brother’s bleeding wings disturbed his sleep for weeks afterwards.

The Duke of York had rigid ideas, invested with almost totemic significance, about punctuality, deportment, above all dress. The children were treated as midshipmen, perpetually on parade. Any deviation from the approved ritual was a fall from grace to be punished for the sake of the offender. ‘I hope your kilts fit well, take care and don’t spoil them at once as they are new,’ wrote the Duke to his eldest son. ‘Wear the Balmoral kilt and grey jacket on week days and green kilt and black jacket on Sundays. Do not wear the red kilt till I come.’²⁵ Inevitably they got things wrong, wore a grey jacket with a green kilt or a Balmoral kilt on Sundays. Retribution was swift and fearful. ‘The House of Hanover, like ducks, produce bad parents,’ the royal librarian, Owen Morshead, told Harold Nicolson. ‘They trample on their young.’ ‘It was a mystery,’ said a royal private secretary, Alec Hardinge, ‘why George V, who was such a kind man, was such a brute to his children.’²⁶

Prince Albert, more nervous and slow-witted than his elder brother, suffered as much, but Edward, both because of his status and his tendency to carelessness, came in for the most censorious attention. His father took due pride in his achievements. David recited a poem ‘quite extraordinarily well’, he noted in his diary. ‘He said Wolseley’s farewell (Shakespeare) without a mistake.’²⁷ But he felt correspondingly sharp dismay at his son’s backslidings. ‘The real difficulty had been with the Duke of Windsor, never with the present King,’ Queen Mary told Nicolson many years later.²⁸ She deluded herself if she thought that Prince Bertie had escaped unscathed, but she was right in her belief that her elder son, from whom so much was expected and who found acquiescence in his father’s shibboleths so much more uncongenial, was the principal victim in the generation war. Prince Edward certainly saw himself as such, a conviction that was fortified as his childhood slipped farther into the past. He told Freda Dudley Ward’s daughter Angela how lucky she was to have a loving mother. His own childhood had been dreadful, he said; he had received no love and no appreciation for his achievements.²⁹ ‘I had a wretched childhood!’ he told his authorial assistant, Charles Murphy. ‘Of course there were short periods of happiness but I remember it chiefly for the miserableness I had to keep to myself.’³⁰ That this misery was exaggerated in retrospect seems evident, that it was real and painful at the time is hardly less so.

His mother did her best to provide a refuge from the Duke’s harshness. ‘We used to have a most lovely time with her alone – always laughing and joking,’ Edward remembered, ‘… she was a different human being away from him.’³¹ But though she made manifest her sympathy for her children, she did little to protect them from their father’s wrath, or to try to change his attitude. Though to later generations she appeared the quintessence of intractable strong-mindedness, she held her husband in awe, as an individual and still more as a future monarch. ‘I always have to remember that their father is also their King,’³² she was later to pronounce, and the King-to-be deserved almost the same reverence. She saw her role as that of loyal support; to argue with, or still more, criticize her husband was something to be done rarely, and then only with extreme caution.

The Duke and Duchess were not the only people of significance in the children’s lives. It is curious that almost all the nannies who feature in the pages of childhood memoirs are either saints or sadists. Edward had one of each. The sadist delighted in pinching him or twisting his arm just before his evening visit to his parents’ drawing room; as a result he would cry and find himself peremptorily banished.³³ The saint, Charlotte ‘Lalla’ (or, to Edward, ‘Lala’) Bill, came later as nurse to Princess Mary and extended her attention to the boys. Neither had any great importance in Edward’s upbringing. More influential was the stalwart Finch, a nursery footman whose father had been in the service of the great Duke of Wellington and who shared some of that dignitary’s resolution and resourcefulness. From male nanny he stayed on to serve his master as valet and then butler, dependable, devoted, totally loyal, always respectful yet blunt sometimes to the point of rudeness. He allowed his youthful charge to take no liberties and on one occasion spanked him for teasing Lalla Bill. Edward threatened to denounce him to his father, but Lalla Bill got her story in first and insult was added to injury when the Prince was made to apologize to Finch for being such a nuisance.³⁴

But it was his grandparents who provided the most striking contrast to his father’s stern regime. The Prince of Wales could be quite as bad-tempered and as much a stickler for protocol as his son, and possessed a streak of meanness which was missing in the Duke of York, but to his grandchildren he was almost as indulgent as he was to himself. Edward basked in his obvious affection and endured with equanimity outbursts that would have terrified him in his father. Once he infuriated his grandfather by fidgeting at luncheon and finally knocking something off the table. ‘Damn you, boy!’ roared the Prince, smashing a melon to the floor. ‘David surveyed the debris in silence and then turned to his grandfather with an irresistibly funny expression of polite enquiry. Then the two burst out laughing.’³⁵ His grandmother was still less alarming. ‘We saw dear Grannie yesterday,’ Edward wrote in 1897, in a letter presumably dictated to a nursemaid, ‘and she had a funny cock and an owl which she blowed out of a pipe.’³⁶ With Queen Alexandra, as she was shortly to become, it was always cocks and owls and laughs and demonstrative affection.

It amused the Waleses to subvert their son’s austerity. In August 1900 the Yorks set off on an extensive imperial tour. The grandparents were left in charge, and reports were soon reaching the royal tourists of the way the children were being pampered and their education neglected. The last straw came when the woman supposed to be teaching Edward French was left behind when the family moved to Sandringham. The Duchess protested, but got little satisfaction. ‘The reason we did not take her,’ wrote Queen Alexandra, ‘was that [Doctor] Laking particularly asked that he might be left more with his brothers and sister – for a little while – as we all noticed how precautious [sic – “precocious” is presumably what she had in mind] and old-fashioned he was getting – and quite the ways of a “single child”! which will make him ultimately a “tiresome child” – laying down the law and thinking himself far superior to the younger ones. It did him a great deal of good – to be treated the same as Bertie …’³⁷

The charge that Edward was being brought up as an only child does not seem well founded. The three elder children were much together, and, in spite of their father’s insistence on correct clothing on every occasion, enjoyed a freedom to roam the countryside on foot or bicycle which would seem enviable to contemporary princes. Edward felt protective towards his siblings; it is said that once, when he heard that his father was on the way to inspect the flower beds that they were encouraged to look after at Windsor, he covered up for his sister’s inadequacy as a gardener by running ahead and transplanting some flowers from his plot to hers.³⁸ Lord Esher spent some time with them in 1904 and noted: ‘The youngest is the most riotous. The eldest a sort of head nurse.’ Looking through a magazine together the children chanced on a picture of Prince Edward labelled ‘Our Future King’. ‘Prince Albert at once drew attention to it – but the elder hastily brushed his brother’s finger away and turned the page. Evidently he thought it bad taste.’³⁹

But outside the family his social horizons were severely limited. Occasional visits to cousins of his age was the utmost permitted him. The children of the Duke and Duchess of Fife were favoured companions. ‘He was so pleased to be with them,’ reported a governess. ‘They wanted to take his hand and he wanted to take their ball’ – an exchange which he must have felt greatly to his advantage.⁴⁰ But he seems to have had no aversion to girls. ‘So dear David is precocious,’ wrote his great-aunt Augusta. ‘He was so from the first. I have a vivid and pleasing recollection of the only time I saw him this year at White Lodge, when he flirted with the nice Lady Cousins.’⁴¹

The Duke of York was a man of habit and, imperial tours apart, he liked the year to unroll to an unchanging pattern. In January the whole family was at York Cottage, Sandringham, the children staying on there in February and March while their parents were in London. At Easter they were reunited at York Cottage or Frogmore House, Windsor. They stayed together in London for May and June, and then in July and August the children with their mother would retreat to Frogmore while the Duke shot or yachted. September and the first half of October were spent near Balmoral; then it was back to York Cottage for the rest of the year.

York Cottage was thus as near to a permanent home as the children knew. It had been built by the Prince of Wales to hold the overflow from his vaster shooting parties and given to the Duke of York as a wedding present. The word ‘Cottage’ hardly conveys a true picture. Harold Nicolson, who must have visited it on a cold, wet day, described it as ‘a glum little villa … separated by an abrupt rim of lawn from a pond at the edge of which a leaden pelican gazes in dejection upon the water lilies and bamboos’.⁴² In sunnier circumstances the pond is a more than respectable lake and the life-size pelican looks contented if not exuberant. As for the glum little villa – villa perhaps, but large enough to provide today spacious estate offices, storage rooms for the Sandringham shop and five decent-sized flats. The rooms were small – the nursery being barely large enough to accommodate a medium-sized rocking horse – but the Duke liked small rooms, which reminded him of naval cabins. ‘Very nice to be in this dear wee house again,’ he wrote in his diary, and when his father offered to rent for him Lord Cholmondeley’s palace at nearby Houghton, he rejected the proposal with alacrity. As a child Edward was fond enough of its cosy and suburban comfort, as he grew older it came more and more to symbolize all that he disliked about family life.

His education was at first desultory. Reading, writing and a little history were given priority; Latin, mathematics and the sciences were eschewed; French and German were deemed essential, with enforced recitations of poems in both languages on his parents’ birthdays, turning these festivals into nightmares. ‘I am a good boy. I know a lot of German,’ Edward proudly told his father in 1901.⁴³ He was less good when it came to French, mainly from dislike of his teacher, a podgy Alsatian lady called Hélène Bricka whom he described as ‘a dreadful old person’.⁴⁴ Religious instruction, such as it was, came from Canon Dalton; it failed to enthral the young prince. Cecil Sharp, expert in folklore, song and dancing, was supposed to have taken charge of Edward’s ‘social education’ and first inspired in him a passion for ‘physical jerks’ and other forms of violent and uncomfortable exercise.⁴⁵ Geography was picked up largely as a by-product of the Yorks’ travels. ‘I am very pleased to get a present from Christchurch and a whip from Tasmania,’ he wrote when his parents were in the Antipodes. ‘I know where these places are … Fancy Papa shooting peacocks.’⁴⁶ He learned the art of crochet from his mother and picked up some general knowledge from forays into the royal palaces. ‘There are such a lot of books,’ he remarked in awe after a visit to the library at Windsor. ‘I saw the first book Caxton printed. I read all about him in Arthur’s History.’⁴⁷ It was not a bad beginning, but it did not add up to the formal education required by a future king. His father knew that something more was called for, but could not convince himself that the matter was of any urgency, until January 1901 when Queen Victoria died. The Prince of Wales succeeded as King Edward VII; the Duke of York became Duke of Cornwall and ten months later added the title of Prince of Wales.

Prince Edward, aged six, was now second in line to the throne. The event meant little to him; he was dimly aware that something of vast significance had occurred, an era had ended, hushed and reverent mourning was in order, but he had hardly known his great-grandmother and felt no personal grief at her disappearance. Of the funeral he remembered only ‘the piercing cold, the interminable waits, and of feeling very lost’.⁴⁸ He made a clearer impression on others than the ceremony did on him. His aunt Maud, Princess Charles of Denmark and later Queen of Norway, remembered that ‘Sweet little David behaved so well during the service and was supported by the little Hesse girl who took him under her protection and held him most of the time round his neck. They looked such a delightful little couple!’⁴⁹ King Edward’s Coronation the following year meant little more to him. Edward remembered only the longueurs of the service in the Abbey, mitigated by the clatter when one of the great-aunts dropped her book programme over the edge of her box into a gold cup below. Once only did the ceremony come alive, when his mother whispered to him, ‘Now Papa will do homage to Grandpapa.’⁵⁰ For a moment the relevance of what was going on to himself and to his country became dramatically apparent.

Grumbling, the Duke of Cornwall – or Prince of Wales, as it is easier to style him without more ado – moved from his modest apartments in St James’s Palace to the massive grandeur of Marlborough House. He took over Frogmore House at Windsor and Abergeldie near Balmoral. These changes made little difference to his son’s way of life. But a far more significant event had already occurred. In the spring of 1902 the Prince of Wales engaged as tutor to his elder sons Henry Hansell, a thirty-nine-year-old schoolmaster and son of a Norfolk country gentleman, who had taken his degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, and had recently been tutor to the Duke of Connaught’s son, Prince Arthur.

There were a lot of good things about Hansell. Six foot three inches tall and strikingly handsome, he had played football for Oxford and was an excellent shot. Shane Leslie, who was taught by him, describes him as uproariously funny, to small boys at least, convulsing all around him by the comical goose step with which he would advance from his goal in a football match.⁵¹ He liked his charges and served them with loyalty and devotion. The Princess of Wales thought he taught history well and managed to engage the boys’ interest: ‘This pleases me immensely as you know how devoted I am to history.’⁵² He made an excellent impression on many people who should have been competent judges. Lord Derby said of him: ‘Never have I found a man who understands boys better. Admirably straight, but very broadminded. I can imagine no man better able to guide rather than drive a boy.’⁵³ ‘Mon impression sur M. Hansell fut excellente du premier coup,’ wrote the Marquis de Breteuil. ‘Je le jugeai de suite un homme intelligent, plein de tact, bon et complètement devoué a son élève.’⁵⁴

And yet it is impossible to doubt that this good, honest, conscientious man had a disastrous effect on the intellectual development of his pupils. Without imagination, with only the most rudimentary sense of humour, pedestrian in mind, aesthetically unaware, Hansell represented everything that was most philistine and blinkered about the English upper middle classes. Whatever adventurous instincts Edward might have had were blanketed by his tutor’s smug and unquestioning self-assurance. Harry Verney worked with Hansell during the First World War and told Edward that what had struck him was ‘his commanding presence … his savoir faire coupled with the most incredible stupidity in dealing with the business of the office … I am amazed to read that he got a Second in history at Oxford, but I expect you are right. With it all what a very charming man he was, and devoted to you.’⁵⁵ Edward’s final view was not dissimilar. He told Harold Nicolson in 1953 that Hansell had been ‘melancholy and inefficient’. ‘He never taught us anything at all,’ he went on. ‘I am completely self-educated.’⁵⁶

Prince Edward had a naturally enquiring mind. He was ready to question any dogma and investigate any phenomenon which he did not immediately comprehend. He was hungry for exact information, and wanted to know not only how things worked, but why, and whether they could work better. He did not lose this freshness of approach but, thanks in part at least to Hansell, it was never harnessed to an intellectual apparatus which would have made it an effective instrument. It was the mark of Hansell’s tuition that the Duke of Windsor could admit fifty years later that he had ‘always preferred learning history from pictures than from script, and it’s amazing how much one can learn from pictures’.⁵⁷ That his father should think his progress under Hansell all that could be desired was perhaps to be expected; that his mother was equally approving is more surprising. Yet she appears to have had no qualms. ‘I do so hope our children will turn out common-sense people, which is so important in this world,’ she told her aunt Augusta early in 1907. ‘We have taken no end of trouble with their education and they have very nice people round them so one feels all is being done to help them.’⁵⁸

To be fair to Hansell, he saw the claustrophobic limitations in the system of education imposed upon his charges. He wanted them sent to a preparatory school, preferably Ludgrove where he himself had taught. When this proposal was brusquely vetoed by the Prince of Wales, he at least tried to open their social horizons a little way by organizing football matches in which the princes and boys from the local village played against teams from nearby schools. Edward enjoyed both the games and the conviviality which accompanied them. His father was dubious, not so much over the principle as over the choice of sport. He complained to Hansell that the Prince much preferred ‘football to golf, which is a pity, and dislikes playing golf now, probably because his brother beats him, but I want you to encourage him all you can. I have already told him he will have more opportunities of playing golf when he grows up than football or cricket.’⁵⁹ But Edward was always hesitant about fresh experiences: ‘How funny he is about trying anything new like hockey,’ remarked his father. ‘We must try to get him over it.’⁶⁰

You’ll be glad to hear

That the Cuckoo is hear!

That is poetry.⁶¹

wrote Edward proudly from Frogmore in April 1904. It was a solitary foray into an art form that was to hold little appeal for him in later life. But in some ways his education was less inadequate. He took a keen interest in the 1906 general election, which Hansell turned into a game. Edward backed Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader; Prince Albert favoured the Conservative Balfour. When Campbell-Bannerman, duly elected Prime Minister, visited Windsor, the eleven-year-old Prince asked whether being at the top of the ladder would not make him feel giddy. ‘Is this not delightful and promising for his future!’ exclaimed his doting great-aunt Augusta.⁶² His memory for names and faces was trained from a very early age – after going into a room with some fifty people in it he was rigorously grilled on the identity of every one he had met. He was encouraged to take an interest in any part of the world visited by his parents. When the Prince of Wales was in India: ‘Mr Holland Hibbert came to lecture to us. The part that interested me most was when he told us about the holy men of Benares. He said that some of them hold their arms up all their lives. I think it must be rather tiresome.’ Some of them also lie on a bed of nails, replied his father. ‘I thought them rather nasty kind of people.’⁶³

But the Prince never learned to read for pleasure or acquired even a superficial knowledge of the English classics. Tommy Lascelles, then his private secretary, speculated many years later about what Hansell could have taught his charge. ‘I recollect the Prince of Wales years ago, coming back from a weekend at Panshanger and saying to me, “Look at this extraordinary little book wh. Lady Desborough says I ought to read. Have you ever heard of it?”’ The extraordinary little book was Jane Eyre. Another time he asked Hardy to settle an argument he had had with his mother about whether the novelist had written a book called Tess of the D’Urbervilles; ‘I said I was sure it was by somebody else.’ Hardy answered politely that it had indeed been one of his earlier books.⁶⁴ A working knowledge of English literature is perhaps unnecessary to a monarch, but to be totally ignorant of its greatest monuments is surely undesirable.

In the many accounts that survive of Edward at this period, it is his quickness, brightness and anxiety to please which are most often remarked on. ‘A delightful child, so intelligent, nice and friendly,’ said Queen Victoria;⁶⁵ ‘a sweet little person’ was Esher’s judgment;⁶⁶ ‘he had a look of both intelligence and kindness, and a limpid clarity of expression,’ observed the Aga Khan.⁶⁷ His formal courtesy and consideration for others were unusual in one so young, as also ‘the look of Weltschmerz in his eyes’ which Lord Esher detected when he was only eleven years old. He was softhearted, telling Lord Roberts that when he was King he would pass a law against cutting puppy dogs’ tails and forbid the use of bearing reins on horses. ‘Those two things are very cruel.’⁶⁸ When he caught his first fish he danced for joy, then handed it to the boatman and said: ‘You must not kill him, throw him back into the water again!’⁶⁹ (Such sensibilities did not endure. Only a year later he was recording in triumph, ‘We caught such a lot of fishes! and had them for breakfast this morning.’⁷⁰) But his benevolence, though sincere, was sometimes remote from the realities of human existence. The first recorded story that he told his brothers was about an extremely poor couple living on a deserted moor. They were starving. One day the man heard his wife moan, ‘I’m so hungry.’ ‘“Very well,” said her husband. “I’ll see to it.” So he rang the bell and, when the footman came, ordered a plate of bread and butter.’⁷¹

In June 1904 Prince Edward’s skull was inspected by Bernard Holländer, an eminent phrenologist. Most of the comments could have been made by anyone of a sycophantic nature without reference to the cranium, but there are some interesting points. The Prince, said Holländer, was eager to acquire knowledge and a keen observer, but ‘he would show his talents to greater advantage were he possessed of power of concentration and greater self-confidence’. He had a good eye for painting and would like music, though mainly of the lighter kind, ‘for example songs and dancing tunes’. He would have little use for organized religion himself but would respect the views of others. ‘Persons with the Prince’s type of head are never guilty of either a mean or dishonest action; they are just-minded, kindly disposed and faithful to their word.’ He had strong ‘feelings of humanity and sympathy for the welfare of others … He will seek to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.’ He would be uneasy in company, dislike public appearances, accept responsibilities with reluctance. He would not, it was clear, find it easy to be King.⁷² Even at the age of ten he seemed to cherish doubts about his fitness for the role that his birth had thrust on him. More than thirty-two years later, after the abdication, Lalla Bill wrote in high emotion to Queen Mary. ‘Do you remember, Your Majesty, when he was quite young, how he didn’t wish to live, and he never wanted to become King?’⁷³