Читать книгу King Edward VIII - Philip Ziegler - Страница 8

THERE WERE GOOD REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE ROYAL Navy as a training ground for future monarchs. Careers open to princes at the beginning of the twentieth century were rare indeed, and the armed services provided one of the few in which they could find employment. The Navy, as the senior, was the obvious choice. It was a cherished national institution, its officers were recruited largely from the gentry or aristocracy, it offered less opportunities for debauchery or any kind of escapade than its land-based counterpart, it inculcated those virtues which it was felt were above all needed in a future king: sobriety, self-reliance, punctuality, a respect for authority and instinct to conform. A few years at sea would do harm to few and most people a lot of good. But to thrust a boy into the Navy at the age of twelve and leave him there until he was nineteen or twenty, if not longer, was unlikely to produce the rounded personality and breadth of mind needed to cope with the plethora of problems which afflict the constitutional monarch. When Edward’s father and uncle went to sea, Queen Victoria complained that the ‘very rough sort of life to which boys are exposed on board ship is the very thing not calculated to make a refined and amiable Prince’.¹

The risk seemed more that the Navy would blinker rather than brutalize a prince. The curious thing was that the Prince of Wales himself was aware of the limitations of a naval education. He knew that he had grown up without any understanding of international affairs, any knowledge of society or politics, any facility for languages. He deplored these handicaps. And yet when it came to his own sons, he condemned them to the same sterile routine. At least when he had joined the Navy it had not seemed likely that he would become King. Prince Edward was destined for the throne, yet still the same formula was applied. It was almost as if the Prince of Wales was determined that, as he had himself been deprived of proper training for his life work, his son should suffer equally; and yet in fact no thought could have been further from his mind.

The best hope for Edward seemed to be that he would fail to pass the entrance examination. Everyone agreed that he should be subjected to the same ordeal as any other candidate, though he was to be medically inspected by the royal doctors – ‘I may perhaps add that he is a particularly strong, healthy boy,’ wrote Hansell.² He had no Latin, but at a pinch could have offered German as an alternative. No one doubted that he was intelligent enough, but his spelling was appalling and his knowledge of mathematics exiguous. The Prince of Wales was apprehensive, then delighted and relieved to be told his son had passed the viva voce examination with flying colours. ‘Palpably above the average,’ said Sir Arthur Fanshawe,³ while another examiner, Lord Hampton, said that of the three hundred boys he had seen, Edward had been equal to the best.⁴ ‘This has pleased us immensely,’ wrote the Princess of Wales proudly.⁵ But the overall results of the written examination were not so flattering. In fact he ‘failed by a few marks to pass the qualifying examination, an Admiralty official reported in 1936. ‘Prince Edward obtained 291 marks out of 600 … but I notice that 5 candidates with lower marks were entered.’⁶

At all events, he did well enough to be admitted without imposing too great a strain on the examiners’ consciences. In May 1907 his father took him to the Naval College at Osborne in the Isle of Wight. ‘I felt the parting from you very much,’ the Prince of Wales wrote two days later, ‘and we all at home miss you greatly. But I saw enough … to assure me that you would get on capitally and be very happy with all the other boys. Of course at first it will all seem a bit strange to you but you will soon settle down … and have a very jolly time of it.’⁷ It seems unlikely that Prince Edward saw jolly times ahead when he received this letter. For any small boy the first exile to boarding school must be a scarifying experience; for Edward the ordeal was worse since he had been evicted abruptly from a cloistered family circle in which the existence of other children was hardly known. He shared a dormitory with thirty others, adjusting himself painfully to the fact that the day began at six, discipline was rigid, all work and play were conducted in a hectic bustle. He slept between the sons of Lord Spencer and Admiral Curzon-Howe. They had been chosen because their parents were well known to the Prince of Wales, but to Edward they seemed at first as alien as if they had been visitors from Mars. He had no idea how to relate to his contemporaries and had to learn not only new manners but almost a new language. It was much to his credit that he managed to look cheerful when his father left and to write proudly a few days later: ‘I am getting on very well here now … I think nothing of going up the mast as I am quite used to it.’⁸ His mother gratefully took his protestations at face value. ‘He has fallen into his new life very quickly,’ she told her aunt Augusta, ‘which is such a blessing.’⁹

The Prince of Wales’s instructions were that his son was to be treated exactly like any other naval cadet. Edward asked for nothing better, his ruling desire was to conform and to be accepted by his peers. But there was no chance that he would be able to escape altogether from his identity. He was subjected to mild bullying by small boys determined to show that he was not anything very special; red ink was poured down his neck, his hands were tied behind his back and he was guillotined in the sash window of his classroom. But his inoffensiveness and obvious determination not to trade on his rank soon led to his acceptance. Within a few weeks he had won through, was given a nickname – ‘Sardines’, presumably because he was the son of the Prince of W[h]ales – and became a tolerated if not leading member of society.

‘Perhaps the actual hours of work at Osborne are not excessive,’ the Prince of Wales wrote to Hansell, with greater perception than might have been expected, ‘but the whole life is a very strenuous one and they are never alone and therefore never quiet from the time they get up till the time they go to bed.’¹⁰ Sociable by nature, Edward survived the hurly-burly well, but the gaps left by Hansell’s teaching quickly became apparent. He did well in French but even special coaching in mathematics failed to raise him from the bottom ten places in the Exmouth term of sixty or so cadets. On the whole he settled respectably, if without great distinction, a little above the halfway mark; more important, he worked steadily throughout his two years at Osborne, reaching his peak after eighteen months and then only slipping back because of ill health. His father applauded his achievements and was decently consolatory about his setbacks. ‘I am delighted with the good reports that were sent me about you and that you are now 24th in your term,’ he wrote at the end of 1907, ‘… that is splendid, and I am sure you must be very pleased about it too and it will make you more keen about your mark.’¹¹

Edward’s letters to his parents were short and uncommunicative even by the standards of schoolboys, consisting mainly of excuses for not having written before or at greater length: ‘I am in a bean-bag team and I had to practise every morning,’ was one explanation; ‘I have had to practise Swedish drill every morning,’ occurred a few weeks later; then, in desperation, ‘I have been doing such a lot of things lately that I have not had much time.’¹² His father tolerated brevity but not a failure to write at all. ‘You must be able to find time to write to me once a week,’ he protested, ‘… I am anxious to hear how you are getting on.’¹³ Edward endured stoically the separation from his family, but felt it a bit hard when his mother announced that she intended to visit Germany during the first two weeks of his first holidays. The Princess of Wales was apologetic but unrelenting; Aunt Augusta was eighty-five and unable to travel. ‘I hope we shall have great fun when we do meet,’ she wrote.¹⁴ In spite of the demands on their time the Waleses generally did manage to make the holidays fun. ‘We miss you most dreadfully,’ the Prince of Wales wrote when his son returned to Osborne. ‘I fear you felt very sad at leaving home. I know I did when I was a boy, it is only natural that you should, and it shows that you are fond of your home.’¹⁵

By the time Prince Albert followed his brother to Osborne, Edward was in his last term and a figure of some consequence. ‘I hope you have “put him up to the ropes” as we say,’ wrote their father. ‘You must look after him all you can.’¹⁶ Opportunities for such tutelage were limited, boys from different terms were not supposed to mix at Osborne and when the brothers wanted to talk together surreptitious assignations had to be made in the further reaches of the playing fields. Prince Edward was expected to do more than just give comfort to his sibling; the Prince of Wales frequently instructed him to make sure Bertie worked harder or to pass on complaints about his failure to concentrate. Edward seems to have relished the quasi-parental role, especially since his brother did conspicuously worse than him. ‘Bertie was 61st in the order which was not so bad,’ he wrote later from Dartmouth. ‘I really think he is trying to work a bit. This is an excellent thing …’¹⁷

Though Edward had hardly been an outstanding success at Osborne, let alone a hero, he had profited by his time there. He had gained immeasurably in confidence and found that it was possible to get on well with his contemporaries. ‘He is wonderfully improved,’ noted Esher, ‘Osborne has made him unshy, and given him good manners.’¹⁸ His father, after only one term, found him ‘more manly’ and much more able to look after himself.¹⁹ It had been sink or swim; anyone who could not look after himself in the maelstrom of Osborne life would not have survived for long. But he had swum, and even got some pleasure out of doing so. When he got home to Frogmore at the beginning of his first holidays he had found the entrance beflagged and a large banner reading ‘Vive l’amiral!’ No banners flew on his final departure from Osborne but a sense of achievement possessed him just the same.

Dartmouth follows Osborne as the day the night, and giving something of the same impression of light following dark. Though the discipline seemed almost as harsh, the bullying as mindless, the tempo of life as relentless as at Osborne, the cadets were that much nearer to maturity and their troubles easier to endure. ‘This is a very nice place, much nicer than Osborne …’ wrote Edward in relief in May 1909. ‘There is a very nice Chapel here and I think I am going to join the Choir.’ But the pressure was still on. ‘There is an awful rush here and everything has to be done so quickly. We are allowed 3 minutes to undress in the evening.’²⁰ His mother was alarmed by this last piece of information. How could he do a proper job of cleaning his teeth in so short a time? ‘This is so important and I want to know. Don’t forget to answer this question.’²¹ Edward’s reply was tinged with the exasperation that a boy of fifteen properly feels towards a fussing mother. The three minutes did not include time for brushing teeth. ‘We are allowed plenty of time for that. There is also plenty of time in the morning, and I am taking great care of my teeth.’²²

He had moved on to Dartmouth with his contemporaries from Osborne, so the process of adjustment was less painful than at the junior college. Stephen King-Hall, who was a cadet in the same year, recorded that he was ‘rather shy but generally liked’. In his first terms he was sometimes seen staggering back from the football fields with a load of boots, victim of the wish of some senior cadet to be able to say in later life: ‘The King once carried my boots.’²³ His academic strengths and weaknesses did not greatly change. In May 1909 he reported proudly that he was top in German, second in history, top in English, third in French, but only thirty-seventh in the overall order, still dragged down by his inability to manage any branch of mathematics.²⁴ In the exams in March 1910 he was forty-eighth in geometry and forty-fifth in trigonometry out of a term of fifty-nine: ‘That is quite good for me,’ he wrote defensively.²⁵ He found exams difficult and regularly produced worse results than he had in class. Lord Knutsford stayed at York Cottage early in 1911 and spoke to Edward about the examination system. The Prince praised it, in spite of his own inadequacy. As to the final exams, he said, ‘I dare say I shall take some time, as I am not at all clever, but I might pass.’ Knutsford found him ‘a really charming boy, very simple and keen’. He taught him card tricks and found that ‘he could do the “French drop” fairly well’.²⁶

The previous year his Easter holidays had been unexpectedly extended by the sudden illness of the King. During the night of 6 May 1910 Edward VII died. The first Edward knew of it was when Bertie saw from their window in Marlborough House that the Royal Standard over Buckingham Palace was at half mast. He mentioned this to his father who muttered, ‘That’s all wrong,’ and ordered the Standard to be transferred to Marlborough House and flown ‘close up’.²⁷ King Edward VII might be dead but the King lived.

With his father now King George V, Edward automatically inherited the Dukedom of Cornwall. Life at Dartmouth in theory was unchanged but the cadets would have been less than human if they had not recognized that only one life stood between their fifteen-year-old contemporary and the throne.

Perhaps in deference to his presence, the authorities at Dartmouth had introduced a course of Civics. He told his father that he was much enjoying it and discovering a great deal about the constitution: ‘It is such a useful subject for me to learn.’²⁸ He began to follow the daily papers, taking the Morning Post and the Westminster Gazette. It was ‘a very good thing, I think’, he told his mother. ‘It is about time I read the papers, as in years to come, when I am obliged to follow politics, I shall know something about it.’²⁹ The King saw this letter and at once wrote to insist that The Times be substituted for the Morning Post – ‘the views and opinions expressed are much sounder in every way’. The Westminster Gazette was excellent and moderate – ‘You should always try and form moderate opinions about things, and never extreme ones, especially in politics.’³⁰ He must have written with special feeling since Britain was involved in a constitutional crisis over the powers of the House of Lords in which moderate opinions were hard to find. ‘It must have been so very hard for Papa to say the right thing, and yet show at the same time that he was not partial to one party or the other,’ wrote Edward sympathetically.³¹

The succession of his father to the throne with all the attendant ceremonies reduced the usefulness of Edward’s last term at Dartmouth. His parents were sorry that he should find himself thrust into the position of heir to the throne ‘without being older and having more preparation’. Still, the Queen told her aunt Augusta, ‘we have done our best for him and we can only hope and pray we may have succeeded and that he will ever uphold the honour and traditions of our house’.³² The Rev. H. Dixon Wright, who prepared Edward for confirmation, had the same cause at heart. The Prince’s mind, he told Archbishop Davidson, was ‘absolutely innocent and uncontaminated’. With the consent of the King Wright had ‘warned him on the subject of “the sinful lusts of the flesh”, that he may be forearmed’.³³ The Archbishop was somewhat dismayed to find that the King expected him to ‘examine’ the Prince in the presence of his parents and suggested some relaxation of the procedure. ‘I have no wish whatever for the examination which my dear brother and I had to undergo in the presence of the Queen and my parents,’ wrote George V cheerfully. ‘I thought it a terrible ordeal, but was under the impression it was always done with the members of my family. Delighted to hear that it is not necessary.’³⁴ The confirmation passed off none the worse for this breach with precedent. ‘The impression made upon me by the quiet boyish simplicity, the clear and really thoughtful attitude, and the wistful keenness of the young Prince is one which can never be effaced,’ wrote the Archbishop, a tribute that would have been still more impressive if it had been written to anyone but the Queen.³⁵

The Coronation was fixed for 22 June 1911. Being still only sixteen Edward could not wear a peer’s robes, so his father created him a Knight of the Garter. For one who was soon to show an almost pathological dislike of dressing up, Edward donned the somewhat fanciful costume with striking calm, in his diary noting merely that it would ‘look very well when ready’ and that it was lucky that his father no longer needed his, since the expense would otherwise have been considerable.³⁶ The Queen told her aunt that he had carried off the ceremony with great sang-froid and dignity: ‘David wore the Garter dress white and silver with the cloak and big hat and feathers. He really looked too sweet.’³⁷

The Coronation followed a few days later. The children paid their usual morning visit to their parents and found the King brusque and conspicuously nervous. He showed Edward the Admiralty Order in The Times gazetting him a midshipman and handed him the dirk that went with the rank.³⁸ The children then processed together to the Abbey in one of the state coaches. Queen Alexandra had thought this a poor idea and was proved right when the younger princes began to giggle and play the fool. George tried to tickle Mary and fell on the floor. On the return journey things got so bad that only Edward’s threats to hit his brothers maintained any sort of order.³⁹ In the Abbey, however, all was decorous. Edward was conducted to his stall, his brothers bowed as they filed in front of him, Princess Mary curtsied deeply ‘and the Prince rose and gravely bowed to her’.⁴⁰ When the moment came for him to do homage he was consumed by nerves; if he blundered or behaved clumsily, he believed his father would feel that he had failed him.⁴¹ He did not blunder. That night George V wrote in his diary: ‘I nearly broke down when dear David came to do homage to me, as it reminded me so much [of] when I did the same thing to beloved Papa. He did it so well.’⁴²

By then Edward was already Prince of Wales, given the title on his sixteenth birthday. There had been no formal investiture of a Prince of Wales for more than three hundred years, but the Empress Frederick had suggested the ceremony should be revived; the Bishop of St Asaph espoused the idea; and Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Constable of Caernarvon Castle, saw a chance to gratify Welsh national pride and win political support.⁴³ Some time-honoured traditions were hurriedly invented, Caernarvon Castle refurbished, gold quarried from the Merionethshire hills to make the Prince’s regalia, and a quaint costume of white satin breeches and purple velvet surcoat devised for the occasion. At this point Edward struck. What, he asked, ‘would my Navy friends say if they saw me in this preposterous rig?’⁴⁴ The Queen talked him into grudging acquiescence and Lloyd George taught him some Welsh phrases for the occasion. He practised in the garden at Frogmore, bellowing ‘Mor o gan yw Cymru i gyd’ – all Wales is a sea of song – to Hansell fifty yards away. He could hear every word, reported Hansell.⁴⁵

The ceremony was a great success; the only people who recorded their displeasure were the Mayor and Aldermen of Chester, who felt that since Prince Edward was among other things Earl of Chester, the investiture should have happened there. The leading man earned himself a crop of compliments. Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, congratulated him on possessing a voice ‘which carries well and is capable of being raised without losing expressiveness’.⁴⁶ Lloyd George assured him that he had forged a lasting bond of affection with the Welsh ‘and won the admiration of all those who witnessed the spectacle’.⁴⁷ Queen Mary told Aunt Augusta that he had played his part to perfection, ‘It was very émouvant for George and me.’⁴⁸ To the youthful Harry Luke he seemed ‘the incarnation of all the Fairy Princes who have ever been imagined’.⁴⁹ The last description encapsulated everything that disquieted Edward about the ceremony. He was not sure he wanted to be a prince at all, certainly he did not wish to be a fairy prince. He hated anything which made him a man apart, which set him on a pedestal for his fellows to goggle at and worship. If to be Prince of Wales meant to put on fancy dress and strike attitudes in remote Welsh castles, then it was not a job for him.

There were good points about the position too. As Duke of Cornwall, he now enjoyed the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, derived from much valuable property in London and huge estates in the West Country. These amounted to some £90,000 a year, far more than he could possibly require before he came of age and set up his own establishment. The Treasurer of the Duchy of Cornwall, Walter Peacock, estimated that by the end of his minority savings would probably amount to £400,000; say, very roughly, £10 million at current values.⁵⁰ With new wealth and consequence came new responsibilities. J. C. Davidson, some time in 1912, was summoned from his work in the Colonial Office to St James’s Palace to be looked over as a prospective private secretary. He quickly decided it was no job for him: ‘I would have made a very poor courtier, nor did I quite like the character of the Prince of Wales, charming in some ways as he was.’⁵¹ The Prince possibly reciprocated the mild dislike; certainly no job was offered to Davidson, nor any private secretary appointed.

Meanwhile his naval career was running to its close. His last term at Dartmouth had been truncated by a fierce attack of measles. He retreated to Newquay to convalesce and to pay a few perfunctory visits to his recently acquired estates in the vicinity. On 29 March 1911 he returned briefly to Dartmouth to give presents and signed photographs to the officers, masters and a few particularly close friends. On the same day he presented to the town of Dartmouth the silver oar which symbolized the ancient rights of the Duke of Cornwall over the adjoining waters: ‘This was my first function, and I think it went off very well,’ he noted in his diary.⁵² Neither he nor his father appeared to have any doubts about the value of the education he had received. ‘I certainly think the College is the best school in England,’ wrote the King.⁵³ The Prince echoed the sentiment when he visited Winchester in 1913. ‘I believe it is a very good school,’ he told his father. ‘… It is amusing to see the difference between an ordinary school and Dartmouth. The boys talk of discomfort, but in the dormitories they have cubicles and they sit about in studies all day. Their life is not half as strenuous as it is at Dartmouth and we were more contented. There can be no better education than a naval one.’⁵⁴

The Dartmouth course ended with a training cruise. The Coronation made it impossible for the Prince to take part, but as a consolation in the autumn of 1911 he was sent on a three-month tour in the battleship Hindustan. The Prince served as a midshipman as the ship sailed along the south coast to Portland, Plymouth and Torbay, then for a month to Queensferry and back to Portland for the final weeks. The Captain, Henry Campbell, was a shining example of those bluff sailor men who maintain a conspicuous independence of attitude while keeping a weather eye always open to the wishes of those likely to further their careers. ‘Not the smallest exception or discrimination has been made in his favour,’ he wrote in his final report on the Prince.⁵⁵ Up to a point it was true. The Prince did work hard, get up at 6 a.m. to do rifle drill or P.T., receive the same pay – 1/9d (9p) a day – as the other midshipmen, keep his watches, do a stint in the coal bunkers – ‘the atmosphere is thick with coal dust and how the wretched stokers who have to remain down there can stand it, I do not know’.⁵⁶ But not many midshipmen ate regularly with their captain, went for walks ashore with him when the ship was near land, lunched in their stately homes with Lord Mar, Lord Rosebery and Lord Mount Edgcumbe. He was always the Prince of Wales and though he seems to have been genuinely welcome in the gunroom by the other midshipmen, he was there as a guest, not as a member.

‘I like the Captain very much indeed, he is always so interesting,’ wrote the Prince in his diary. ‘The Chaplain had a talk with me … and gave me some tracts to read.’⁵⁷ The Chaplain, one suspects, was found less interesting than the Captain. Campbell reciprocated the boy’s affection, and, though he was not above flattery, his letter to Queen Mary has the ring of sincerity:

We in the Navy rate a man for what he does, not for what he is; from the highest to the lowest he was looked upon with affection and respect. His character has formed; it is strong but very gentle and is best described in the old Scotch words ‘Ye can break but ye canna bend me.’ In spite of his very happy nature he thinks a great deal and he one day made it quite clear to me that he was fully alive to the fact that false speech and fond hopes do not alter facts … The Prince said to me one day; ‘If I have learnt nothing else since I have been with you, I have learnt what inconvenience is and what it means to be really tired.’ I thought of my promise to you and felt that it had been fulfilled.⁵⁸

When he went ashore for the last time the ship’s company sang ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ and ‘Auld lang syne’. The Prince knew it was the end of his naval life. ‘I only wish it was possible for you to continue serving in what I consider the finest service in the world,’ his father had written to him.⁵⁹ But it was not possible. The first year of his reign had finally convinced George V that life aboard a ship could not equip a prince to be King. Edward must travel, he must learn languages, he must study history and the constitution, he must serve in the Army, he must become the very model of a modern monarch. The Prince of Wales was disconsolate, but he knew his father was right.

‘You know, I think father now is quite a nice man,’ Edward had said in apparent surprise to his mother in the summer of 1910.⁶⁰ That George V was in fact quite a nice man is hardly in question; that his son continued to think him quite a nice father is more doubtful. The trouble was partly that the King tried too hard. ‘Now that you are leaving home, David, and going out into the world,’ he said when he deposited his son for the first time at Osborne, ‘always remember that I am your best friend.’⁶¹ The same refrain reverberated down the years: in 1908, ‘I wish you always to look upon me as your best friend, when in doubt and want advice, come to me’; in 1913, ‘I want you always to look upon me as your best friend’; in 1914, ‘I want you to treat me as your best friend.’⁶² It is possible that some boys may indeed regard their fathers as their best friends, but even if they did it is unlikely that they would relish being constantly reminded of the fact.

There was a sententiousness about the King’s approach which must have grated on its victim. ‘I trust that you will always remember …’ wrote George V just after his accession, ‘that now you must always set a good example to the others by being very obedient, respectful to your seniors and kind to everyone.’⁶³ ‘May God spare you for many, many years and may you grow up to be a happiness and a credit to your parents and your Country,’ was the message for the Prince’s thirteenth birthday.⁶⁴ The sentiments were unexceptionable, but no teenage boy could be expected to pay much attention to such exhortations. In later life Edward was apt to say that his father never said anything nice about him, always it was carping criticism and rebuke. This is not altogether fair. The King did sometimes congratulate his son on his manners, his letter-writing or some new achievement. But such occasions were the exception. ‘Papa has been so nice to me since my return …’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913. ‘No faults have been found … Such a change!!’ It was too good to last. Within a few days there was ‘an awful row’ when the King took exception to his sons going out for a walk with small rifles and shooting rabbits. ‘Those things are always a great bore,’ noted the Prince wearily.⁶⁵ His recreations were a frequent source of recrimination: ‘You seem to be having too much shooting and not enough riding or hunting. I can’t understand why you didn’t hunt when Sir G. Fitzwilliam came expressly for that … What on earth were you doing? … I must say I am disappointed.’⁶⁶

A less sensitive or more self-confident boy might have recognized the genuine solicitude which lay behind the King’s captiousness and have responded to the spirit rather than the manner. The Prince did not. His health provided grounds for constant skirmishes. ‘Do smoke less, take less exercise, eat more and rest more,’ wrote the King, in despair at his eighteen-year-old son’s increasingly eccentric train of life. ‘You are just at the critical age from now till you are 21 and it is most necessary that you should develop properly, both in mind and body. It all depends … whether you develop into a strong, healthy man or remain a sort of puny, half grown boy.’⁶⁷ The Prince paid little attention. He had, for reasons difficult to follow, concluded that he was teetering always on the verge of fatness, and to avoid such a fate submitted his body to much violent physical exercise and ate with ill-judged frugality. He considered his parents’ efforts to modify this regime to be fussy and interfering, and dismissed the injunctions of the royal doctors as the vapourings of the King’s hired lackeys. He found it hard to credit what to the outsider seems the patent sincerity of his father’s heartcry: ‘I am only telling you these things for your own good and because I am so devoted to you and take such an interest in everything.’⁶⁸ There were interludes of harmony: ‘We now understand each other so well,’ wrote the Prince of Wales in July 1913;⁶⁹ a conversation with the King at York Cottage a few months later ‘made a difference to my life and made me look on everything in a totally different light’;⁷⁰ but soon there would be more grumbles and recriminations and all the good would be undone.

Queen Mary’s role in the relationship was curiously remote. In the future mother and son were to develop a close rapport, but though there are occasional references in these years to ‘charming talks’ or ‘wise advice’, she played very much a secondary role. When the Prince’s equerry, William Cadogan, urged her to use her influence with the King to ensure that he sometimes addressed a word of encouragement to his son, she accepted that such advice was badly needed but could not bring herself to proffer it.⁷¹ One of the few fields where she seemed ready to take an initiative was in the selection of Christmas or birthday presents. Here she avoided any possible disappointment by acting both as donor and recipient. ‘I must just tell you,’ she wrote in May 1912, ‘that I have got for you to give me as a birthday present 2 charming old Chinese cloisonné cups (price £12) for my Chinese Chippendale room.’ The King adopted the same somewhat curious practice. For Christmas the same year he wanted a gold soup bowl. It was ‘awfully expensive, £150’, the Queen told her son, ‘but Papa is very anxious to have it and has ordered it, and I only hope you won’t mind’.⁷²

Prince Albert remained Edward’s closest ally. At Osborne and Dartmouth Edward’s role had been that of protector or occasional critic, but with the Navy behind him the Prince of Wales was able to develop a close companionship with his younger brother. ‘Bertie is a delightful creature and we have so many interests in common,’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913, and then a fortnight later, ‘I am so miserable it is dear old Bertie’s last night; we have been so much together of late and I shall miss him terribly.’⁷³ Prince George too, though eight years younger, was now becoming a friend. At first the relationship was very much de haut en bas; the Prince of Wales rather patronizingly explained to his brother about the Royal Navy or made him exercise – ‘George got stitches all the time … he is too fat for running.’⁷⁴ By 1914 he had become ‘a capital boy’,⁷⁵ they spent much time together and chatted freely. Bertie was still the real support, however, with whom the Prince of Wales formed a common front against the assaults of unreasonable parents. At dinner with Queen Alexandra, ‘Bertie and I did our best to be funny and we succeeded’;⁷⁶ at Christmas in York Cottage, ‘it is hard work keeping 3 wild brothers in order; well I should say two, as my 2nd brother helps me. He is nearly as tall as I am and weighs more.’⁷⁷

Oxford in the autumn of 1912 was to be the next phase of the Prince’s education, but before he went up it was decided he should spend a few months in France. He was reasonably fluent in French but had picked up ‘a very John Bull intonation’ while at Dartmouth, and this called for improvement.⁷⁸ The Marquis de Breteuil, an anglophile French aristocrat with an American wife and two sons of the Prince’s age, somewhat reluctantly allowed himself to be selected as host. He was summoned to Buckingham Palace to inspect his future charge and found him ‘very thin, younger in appearance than his years, puny [chétif], timid but most attractive’. He insisted that Hansell, by whom he was much impressed, should accompany the Prince. George V emphasized that the visit must be entirely informal; the Marquis pointed out that his guest could hardly fail to call on the President. ‘You’re right,’ said the King. ‘I can’t get used to the idea that in a few months he will be eighteen, and that he’s already the Prince of Wales.’⁷⁹

He had some excuse for his failure. Everyone agrees that both physically and mentally the Prince was slow to develop. The image of the slight, shy, wistful figure which was to become imprinted in the public consciousness over the next twenty years was already well established. In 1912 he still seemed conspicuously ill-equipped to grapple with the demands imposed on him by his position. Any boy of his age would have been discomfited by the ‘huge and most alarming’ luncheon given by the prefect of police, Louis-Jean Lépine – ‘it was rather trying and the food was nasty,’ but most would have coped better with the informal dance which the Breteuils held in his honour: ‘They were mostly young folk who went on to a ball. I danced once or twice but it bores me to a degree. I went to bed at 10.15.’⁸⁰ There is no evidence from his diary that he met any girl in France who engaged his attention for more than a few minutes.

How much French he learnt is another matter. An amiable French scholar, Maurice Escoffier, had been engaged to conduct the Prince around France and supervise his studies; not surprisingly he reported on his protégé’s amazing progress. To judge, however, from the Prince’s dislike of the language and reluctance to speak it, an aversion which persisted even after he had lived in France for many years, the progress must have been limited, or at least not maintained. The most that can be said of his three months in France was that he mildly enjoyed them and learnt quite a lot about the country’s history and political structure. More important still, he made himself well liked. ‘He charmed everyone during his stay,’ read a letter which was the more convincing for not being intended for the eyes of his parents. ‘Old and young, rich and poor, were equally impressed by his frankness. The Breteuils could not say enough about his generous and open [belle et franche] nature.’⁸¹

‘French customs are very curious, but I suppose I shall get used to them in time,’ wrote the Prince resignedly.⁸² He was happiest at the Breteuil château in the valley of the Chevreuse, shooting, bathing in the lake, and generally behaving as if he was at home. ‘We hope you will treat him exactly like your own son,’ the King had written. ‘He is a good boy and I know he will always do at once what you tell him.’⁸³ The Marquis’s real sons may not have been best pleased by the imposition on them of this unexpected extra brother but they played their part gallantly. The Prince liked both of them: ‘Even the eldest who likes music is very nice.’⁸⁴ Fortunately François made up for this aberrant taste by liking tennis too. In Paris the Prince saw the sights; watched Sarah Bernhardt play L’Aiglon – ‘she is about 70 and takes the part of a boy of 18. I think she ought to stop acting now’;⁸⁵ visited the Jardin d’Acclimatation – ‘a rotten kind of zoo’;⁸⁶ was received by President Fallières and presented with the grand cordon of the Légion d’honneur – ‘Nothing could have been better or more self-possessed and tactful than the Prince’s manner,’ wrote the British Ambassador. ‘He did not hesitate at all in his French’; and visited the studio of the painter Monsieur Gillot – ‘The Yacht’s foremast is about half the height it ought to be,’ he told the King. ‘I think M. Gillot is one of these impressionist artists, but I know that you hate that sort of painting.’⁸⁷

He was not greatly impressed by the capital, telling the Aga Khan that he could not imagine what his grandfather had seen in it.⁸⁸ The press did not make it more agreeable for him. For the first time he found himself assailed by importunate photographers, and he did not relish the experience. His father sympathized. Unless the reporters behaved better, he decreed, ‘drastic steps must be taken to get rid of them’.⁸⁹ It would be interesting to know what he had in mind. The Premier and future President, Raymond Poincaré, met him several times during his stay in Paris and was struck by his ‘thoughtful character, eagerness to learn, interest in practical problems, and a real knowledge of industrial possibilities’. He was a poor trencherman, however, ‘the choicest menus being treated by him with complete indifference’.⁹⁰ What the Prince enjoyed most of all was the week he spent with the French Mediterranean fleet: he had a passion for the sea, wrote the Marquis de Breteuil, and would happily have made this part of his visit twice as long.⁹¹

And so it was back to England and the final preparations for his life at Oxford. It seems to have been Hansell and Lord Derby who urged the merits of a university education on the King, probably with some encouragement from Lord Esher. Not everyone approved. ‘Surely this cannot be true,’ expostulated his great-aunt Augusta. ‘It is too democratic.’⁹² That was one of the reasons that the King favoured it: ‘I have always been told that one can have the best time of one’s life at College if one makes up one’s mind,’⁹³ he told his son. The Prince was sceptical. He accepted that the time would probably pass well enough, at least provided Hansell came along, but he remained unenthusiastic.⁹⁴ When his mother tried to get him to make some choices about the furnishing of his rooms, he noted gloomily in his diary, ‘I am afraid it does not interest me much. I am just about fed up with the whole affair.’⁹⁵ The root of his woe became apparent when his brother Bertie remarked how much he envied him and the Prince retorted that the feeling was mutual. Oxford might be tolerable in its own way but it was not where he wished to be: ‘It is an awful situation and I only wish I was back quietly in the only service – the navy.’⁹⁶

As a Magdalen man himself, Hansell naturally urged its merits as a haven for the Prince. George V appealed to Lord Derby for advice. Starting from the very reasonable hypothesis that only three colleges were worth consideration, Derby dismissed New College as being at that moment beset by troubles and Christ Church as the haunt of nouveaux riches. That left Magdalen.⁹⁷ The King concurred. An additional argument was that Derby was ready to send his own son, Edward Stanley, to the same college. ‘David is certainly a most loyal boy and I am sure would always do his best to be keen and get on wherever he was,’ the King told Hansell.⁹⁸ In fact Magdalen does not seem to have been a bad choice. It had a reputation for independence of mind, the eschewing of anything that seemed smart or extravagant and a robust indifference to rank.⁹⁹ It was well suited for the somewhat special needs of an undergraduate who was also heir to the throne.

With Oxford as with Dartmouth, George V decreed that his son should be treated exactly like his contemporaries and then took steps to ensure that this would be impossible. The Prince was to be attended at Oxford not merely by Hansell and his valet Finch but also by an equerry. This last appointment caused some cogitation. Esher commented how difficult it would be to find somebody who would be ‘watchful but not seem to be so; instructive and not a bore; moral and not a prig; high spirited and not reckless. It would be an interesting task for a young man with imagination.’¹⁰⁰ The King preferred horses to imagination. He chose William Cadogan, a gallant and honourable soldier who was almost wholly without intellectual interests and whose chief function was to persuade his charge to hunt. ‘Not a very exciting sort of chap,’ commented the Prince when they first met.¹⁰² As if this entourage did not sufficiently separate him from the common herd, the Prince was settled in his own suite of rooms, furnished by the Queen with Sheraton pieces of furniture and good watercolours. Odder still for Oxford, he had his own bathroom. It may not have been very luxurious – ‘a cold, converted torture chamber’ one of his contemporaries described it¹⁰² – but it still set its owner apart from his fellows.

The real problem, however, was summed up by Cosmo Lang, then Archbishop of York. The object of the Prince going to Oxford, he assumed, was that he should enter ‘naturally and simply’ into college life. His life might be simple but would never be natural if his friends were selected for him. Yet if something of the sort was not done, the best men in college would hang back in the fear that they might seem royal toadies, while less desirable companions, ‘often agreeable and plausible enough’, would thrust themselves forward. The solution must be to persuade a few of the ‘leading and best men’ to ease the Prince’s passage into college society.¹⁰³ Derby’s son Stanley should obviously be a member of any such group.

On the whole the system worked. The Prince was still shy. Lord Grantley remembered his ‘characteristic way of coming into a room, jerking forward from the hips and fingering his tie the whole time … It looked as if it was torture to him to meet strangers.’¹⁰⁴ He was further handicapped by the fact that most of his contemporaries had moved on in a group from their respective public schools, while there were few if any naval cadets at Oxford. ‘The junior common room is something like a gunroom,’ he noted nostalgically in his diary. ‘At 7.00 I dined in hall … I got on fairly well, only my drawback is not knowing anyone. It lasted 1⁄2 hour and then Stanley and a chap called Higham sat in my room till 9.45. They are very nice and we talked about many things.’¹⁰⁵ It was not easy at first, but he was friendly and ready to become sociable. He forced himself out of his shell, attending the celebrated entertainments in the common room and marvelling at the amount people drank. ‘We were all pretty dead at the end and I had almost a drop too much. However, I managed all right … It is a good thing to do as one gets to know people.’¹⁰⁶ After the first few nights he spent almost every evening in the rooms of one of his friends, smoking, singing, talking or playing cards. Barrington-Ward, a future editor of The Times, remembered him calling in on his rooms when an impromptu concert was in progress. A number of cardboard trumpets were lying around. ‘The Prince promptly took one and made as much noise as anyone. He said he liked a “good row”. So we had a ragtime, comic songs and choruses, and he joined in merrily like a man … It was impossible not to like him. He is clean-looking and jolly, with no side at all.’¹⁰⁷

The friends he made, however, were not necessarily those whom his father or Hansell would have chosen. His opinion of Stanley varied from day to day, but his considered judgment in 1916, by which time they had become close friends, was that Stanley had greatly improved but that he had never really liked him as an undergraduate. ‘I wish you had rooms opposite mine, it would be great,’ he wrote to an old naval friend. ‘As it is, I have that chap Stanley, who I don’t know very well, and who is coshy!! That is the worst of all crimes!!’¹⁰⁸ Coshy meant stuck-up, putting on airs. Lord Cranborne was ‘very nice’ but Lord Ednam – who, as the Earl of Dudley, was in time to become one of his closest friends – was undoubtedly coshy; a period in a gunroom would have done him good.¹⁰⁹ The Prince’s friends tended to be more home-spun, people who would have fitted naturally into the Royal Navy. One or two were intellectuals; in February 1913 he dined for the first time with a man who was to play a critical role in his life, ‘the President of the Union debating society, W. Monckton, a very nice man’.¹¹⁰ A few were deemed unsuitable. Hansell and Cadogan warned him against one in particular: ‘They say that Ronnie is a bad lot, he is a gt friend of mine and of course this is a gt blow to me. However I shall in no way chuck him but merely not be seen about with him.’¹¹¹ Unfortunately he made the mistake of inviting the delinquent Ronnie to meet his brother Prince Harry when the latter visited Oxford. Hansell ‘was very sick with me … I am an awful failure in this life and always do the most idiotic things.’¹¹²

Such moods of contrition became more frequent after his first few months at Oxford. The Prince did nothing very wicked but for the first time in his life he found it possible to slip his leash, and it would have been surprising if he had not celebrated the fact with mild excess. Many years later he told the American journalist Cy Sulzberger that he had found Oxford quite agreeable ‘because we were drunk all the time’.¹¹³ He exaggerated, but though not drunk all the time, he managed it not infrequently. On 10 November 1912 he drank too much port, fell, made his nose bleed, and had to be put to bed by two friends who distracted Hansell while he got undressed. But he had the resilience of youth. He was walking round the garden by 7.30 the following morning and apologizing to his friends not long afterwards – ‘They were awfully nice about it.’¹¹⁴ Usually there was more noise than alcohol: ‘There were 25 of us and we went up to Somerville’s rooms where we danced and made a row … It was a great evening.’¹¹⁵ He eschewed the chic world of Evelyn Waugh’s Bollinger Club baying for broken glass. He was elected to the Bullingdon – in its own eyes at least the most elite of Oxford dining clubs – went to a dinner, was made to drink too much, and retired furious and the worse for wear: ‘I will have nothing more to do with the filthy riding men, they are a beastly set.’¹¹⁶

He never joined the set, but within a few months of making this entry in his diary he had become a riding man himself. His father considered that this was a part of his education quite as important as learning French or studying the constitution. ‘If you can’t ride, you know, I’m afraid people will call you a duffer,’ he told his son. Hunting was the only way to learn properly. ‘The English people like riding and it would make you very unpopular if you couldn’t do so.’¹¹⁷ Cadogan was in charge of the training and found his pupil at first recalcitrant. A year before, the Prince had hunted near Sandringham and had stood about all day ‘soaked through and petrified with cold. And then they wonder why one does not like hunting!’¹¹⁸ Now he grumblingly let himself be dragged off to ride in the neighbourhood but showed plainly that he thought it a bore – ‘deadly as usual’.¹¹⁹ To his surprise he found that he was beginning to enjoy the riding more and more. He went out with the South Oxfordshire hunt, was in the saddle for seven hours without falling off, was awarded the brush and enjoyed his day.¹²⁰ ‘Until a few months ago I was terrified of riding and loathed the sight of a horse,’ he told a friend, ‘but it suddenly came to me, and under Cadogan’s instruction and tuition, I have now plenty of confidence and jump everything!!’¹²¹ Some time that spring he graduated to that horseman’s nirvana, the Pytchley hunt. The King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, congratulated him with all the gravity befitting so august an occasion. ‘I solemnly believe that few things will tend more to endear you to the people who some day by God’s will will be your subjects.’¹²²

Riding was only one of the Prince’s sporting pursuits. He golfed, played squash and went for gruelling runs. He played cricket at Radley, made a duck, and commented sourly: ‘It’s a poor game.’¹²³ He was a regular member of the Magdalen football second XI, and appeared occasionally in the first. He shot from time to time on estates near Oxford. Lord Crawford met him in October 1913 with the Wantages at Lockinge. ‘The Prince of Wales seems overburdened with his duties which he performs with meticulous precision,’ he noted. ‘Poor boy, somehow he made me feel very sorry for him … If only he would bolt with a ballet girl, say for twenty-four hours!’¹²⁴ The poor boy still found time to gamble several evenings a week, though he rarely lost or won more than £10 or so; to acquire and drive a 39-horse-power touring model blue Daimler; to learn the bagpipes with Pipe-Major Ross of the Scots Guards. He joined the Officers’ Training Corps, whose adjutant was the future Field Marshal Jumbo Wilson, and scored 96 out of 100 shooting at a static target and 86 at a moving. Fifty would have earned a pass, and 75 been enough for qualification as a marksman. He took part in night manoeuvres in Blenheim Park and spent a hectic few days in the annual camp, rising at 5 a.m. to act as breakfast orderly and having a ride in an airship. ‘It was the first time I had ever flown and the sensation is wonderful.’¹²⁵

Into the interstices of these activities he fitted his academic life. Some further education was badly needed; his mind in 1912 was a ragbag of miscellaneous information and his power of expressing what he knew was limited. He spelt deplorably; in one letter alone writing ‘chaplin’ for chaplain, ‘chapple’ for chapel, ‘colision’, ‘dammaged’ and ‘explaned’. He was supposed to go regularly to lectures and follow a programme of special studies with tutors. The lectures he frequently eschewed. He went once to hear Walter Raleigh on English literature and complained, ‘It was very hard to understand and I do not think I shall go to any more.’¹²⁶ The Rev. Lancelot Phelps on political economy proved more attractive: ‘Political Economy interests me more the more that I do it and I think I have quite got hold of the line of thought.’¹²⁷ But the individual tuition was more important. The Prince studied history with Charles Grant Robertson, French with Monsieur Berthon, German with Professor Fiedler and constitutional law with Sir William Anson, the Warden of All Souls. Anson probably taught the Prince almost everything of importance which he retained from his time at Oxford; a brilliant expositor, a man of charm, humour and generosity, he was liked as well as admired by the Prince – ‘a remarkable and distinguished little man,’ he called him affectionately.¹²⁸

Unfortunately, the central figure, to whom the Prince had to read an essay every week, was the President of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren. Warren had a good mind and no doubt many other redeeming features, but what most struck the undergraduates was that he was a bore and a snob. The Prince loathed him – ‘an awful old man’ he described him.¹²⁹ Reading an essay to a critical and often supercilious pedagogue is always an ordeal; it is made worse if one dislikes one’s auditor. The Prince dreaded his weekly session. He knew, with reason, that essay-writing was not his forte and rarely got any pleasure from their composition. Most of his efforts survive;¹³⁰ on St Anselm, Beaconsfield, Chatham, Nelson, ‘The Relation of Democracy to War’, Tennyson. They were conscientious, superficial and unimaginative. Cromwell was ‘one of England’s greatest statesmen and generals’; on ‘Ambition’ he commented: ‘The most ideal form of ambition is when it is used for the sake of one’s country. That patriotism should be the genuine motive is the most perfect thing conceivable.’

His best essay, and the subject which he most cared about, dealt with the explorer Scott. He had read Scott’s Last Expedition while on holiday at York Cottage, a laborious process, since he read slowly and it kept him up until 1 a.m. for almost a month, but a rewarding one: ‘It is a most fascinating book and a wonderful story of pluck in the face of ghastly hardship and suffering.’¹³¹ His essay reflected this enthusiasm; Warren thought well enough of it to send it to the King, who passed it on to the historian and former prime minister, Lord Rosebery. Rosebery was predictably enthusiastic: ‘It was really admirable … a clear, sympathetic and vigorous narrative through which one can see the author’s heart. I am quite astonished at it …’ He wrote more as courtier than critic, but the essay did deserve praise. The Prince’s final comment was characteristic: ‘It bears out the fact that Englishmen can endure hardships and face death as it should be faced.’¹³²

It cannot be said that Oxford widened his cultural horizons. ‘We listened to classical music till 10.00. It was very dull,’ he wrote gloomily in his diary; and again after the Russian ballet, ‘That form of entertainment, like most stage things, leaves me stone cold.’¹³³ Nor did he become a reading man. His tutors constantly praised his efforts but pointed out that his knowledge was too superficial; ‘he must read more and think more for himself which is most necessary in his position,’ was his mother’s verdict.¹³⁴ ‘Bookish he will never be,’ wrote Warren in an otherwise unctuous article in The Times. Unsurprisingly, he went on: ‘The Prince of Wales will not want for power of ready and forcible presentation, either in speech or writing.’¹³⁵ Lord Esher had long talks with the Prince at Balmoral and found: ‘His memory is excellent and his vocabulary unusual, and above all things, he thinks his own thoughts.’¹³⁶ (The compliments were not returned. The Prince wrote of Esher: ‘That man has a finger in every pie and one cannot trust him.’¹³⁷) A quick mind, a retentive memory, considerable curiosity, facility for self-expression: they were not everything but they were a lot.

The Prince admitted he owed something to Oxford but he was never fond of it nor ceased to think he would be better off in the Navy. His diary is pitted with groans about the awfulness of his life, increasing in violence as his second year wore on: ‘I’m absolutely fed up with the place and it has got on my nerves’; ‘It is pretty rotten to be back here’; ‘Back again in this hole!’¹³⁸ Warren pressed him to stay on for another term and get a degree. ‘The answer to the 1st is NO and the second doesn’t interest me at all!!’¹³⁹ At least in the spring and summer vacations of 1913 he escaped, both from Oxford and from his parents, to visit Germany. In later life he said that he had felt more at home in Germany than in France, ‘because there I stayed mostly among relations’.¹⁴⁰ His diary suggests that he enjoyed himself more because he was that much older and had correspondingly greater liberty. Cadogan replaced Hansell and saw himself more as companion than as tutor, while Professor Fiedler, who was also in the entourage, was a ‘jolly old chap’ who was easily disposed of. Once in Berlin the Prince locked the professor in the bathroom and escaped with a friend to sample the night life, giving the porter the key and saying that something seemed to be wrong with the lock.¹⁴¹

His two longest stays were in Württemberg and Strelitz. He arrived at Württemberg in travelling clothes to find the King and his staff in full dress uniform, but soon settled in comfortably to this slow, sleepy court. Every day after a heavy lunch he and the King would drive around the city and adjoining countryside. At first the King would acknowledge the salutes of his subjects but ‘gradually movements of hand became shorter – eyes closed – all stopped – King sound asleep until horses pulled up at home and groom said “Majestät, ist zu Hause.”¹⁴² There was no golf, no tennis, no fishing, one day shooting capercaillie – ‘It is a curious sport … but I am glad to have seen it’ – too much sightseeing and too many visits to the opera. ‘I am getting fed up with life here to say the least of it.’ He was taken to Das Rheingold – ‘such a waste of time’; Siegfried – ‘appallingly dull’; Der Freischutz – ‘not exciting’.¹⁴³ The King perhaps took in more than his young guest realized. The Prince had enjoyed his visits to an officers’ mess and to the Daimler factory, he told Queen Mary, ‘but visiting Museums he did not seem to like quite so much’.¹⁴⁴

Possibly word of this visit got through to Neustrelitz, for the Grand Duchess Augusta wrote in some alarm to say that she feared the Prince would be bored, ‘there being no sports nor Games of any kind’.¹⁴⁵ There was no reason to fear anything of the sort, replied Queen Mary firmly: ‘He is quite a contented person and never rushes about after amusement.’¹⁴⁶ Her brother Alge, future Earl of Athlone, who was there for the visit, was less confident: ‘Strelitz, as you can imagine, after a short time is more than a young person can stand. A week is enough for Alice and me.’ He found his nephew ‘a mixture of extreme youth and boyishness with the ways of a man over forty … We both, as everyone, liked him extremely. He is so liebenswürdig [lovable] and simple, too much so, he should now realize he is “The Prince” and not require so much pushing forward.’¹⁴⁷

Berlin proved the most enjoyable of his visits, mainly because he was entrusted for his entertainment to a young attaché at the British Embassy, Godfrey Thomas, who took him to funfairs, night clubs and the Palais de Danse, ‘where we remained till 2.00. It is a large public place frequented by very doubtful women with whom you go and dance, but it is devoid of all coarseness and vulgarity. I danced a good deal …’¹⁴⁸ He spent one night with Kaiser Wilhelm II and was startled to find him seated behind his desk on a military saddle mounted on a wooden block. The Emperor ‘explained condescendingly that he was so accustomed to sitting on a horse he found a saddle more conducive to clear, concise thinking’.¹⁴⁹ The Prince found his host unexpectedly easy to talk to and quite enjoyed his visit;¹⁵⁰ the Emperor, according to the Prince’s future biographer, Hector Bolitho, considered his guest charming and unassuming but ‘a young eagle, likely to play a big part in European affairs because he is far from being a pacifist’.¹⁵¹

The Prince must have been uneasily aware that wherever he went in Germany he would be sized up as a potential husband for unmarried daughters. The courts of Germany had provided so many spouses for the British royal family that it was reasonable to assume the precedent would again be followed. He had experienced his first taste of what he could expect when the Emperor’s daughter, Victoria Louise, visited London in 1911. The press reported rumours that an engagement was imminent.¹⁵² Dynastically it would have been most suitable and Princess Victoria Louise had many good points. A young maid of honour, Katherine Villiers, pronounced her wholly without good looks but with much sweetness and joie de vivre.¹⁵³ The Prince himself found her ‘most easy to get on with’.¹⁵⁴ But there is no reason to think that he or his parents gave any serious thought to marriage. Nor did Victoria Louise; she found the Prince ‘very nice’ but ‘terribly young, younger than he actually was’.¹⁵⁵

More real was the putative romance with Princess May, or more formally Caroline Matilda, of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple got on particularly well when they were staying together at Gotha. May was ‘such a nice girl’, Alge’s wife Alice reported, ‘much like the others only taller and very slim’.¹⁵⁶ Her brother-in-law August Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was sufficiently encouraged to write directly to the Prince in June 1914 to suggest that a match should be made. The nineteen-year-old Prince consulted his mother and with some difficulty constructed a reply – ‘an awkward job’.¹⁵⁷ His letter does not survive, probably he pleaded that he was too young to contemplate matrimony at the moment. The war put an end to the possibility but in 1915 he remarked rather wistfully to Godfrey Thomas, ‘Well, I could very easily have done worse.’ Thomas commented that, though Princess May’s teeth needed attention and her nose was too red, a dentist and a little powder would soon have put things to rights. ‘HRH was really very much attracted to her, and I am perfectly certain that if the War hadn’t come, it would have been brought off. It is difficult to see now who he will marry or when, but whoever it is, I know that he will often think with affectionate regret of Princess May as the might have been.’¹⁵⁸

It has been said that the sympathy for Germany which the Prince of Wales showed in the 1930s stemmed from the success of his pre-war visits. All the evidence is that, though he enjoyed his stay there and liked some of his relations, he was not particularly struck by the country or its people. ‘The Germans as a race,’ he told a friend, ‘are fat, stolid, unsympathetic, intensely military, and all the men have huge cigars sticking out of their faces at all times.’¹⁵⁹ ‘The trip was very interesting,’ he reflected when he got back to London, ‘but I don’t care much about the Germans.’¹⁶⁰ Of the countries which he visited before the First World War, the one that pleased him most was Norway, where he loved the skiing, the open-air existence and the informality of court life – ‘a lovely country with a charming people,’ he found it. ‘It was just like home.’¹⁶¹ This last comment betrayed his real priorities. Far though he might wander, and much pleasure though he might derive from his wanderings, whether as Prince, as King, or as Duke of Windsor, there was always for him to be no place like home.

By the summer of 1914 the King had agreed that his son should spend the last few months of the year travelling and should join the Grenadier Guards the following year. The prospect was pleasing enough, but already shades of the prison house were beginning to close upon the growing Prince. The first dread intimation of what was to come had struck him in June 1912, when he got back at lunch time from his stay in France to find that the same afternoon he had to go with the King and Queen to a St John’s Ambulance Parade – ‘rather, if not very dull’; at 6.30 p.m. he was receiving the Khedive of Egypt and at 8.30 he was taking the wife of the Bishop of Winchester in to dinner.¹⁶² From then on public functions multiplied. He quickly decided that the more formal and decorous they were, the more he would dislike them. He attended his first court in March 1914 and found it ‘mighty poor fun … I went in with the parents to the ballroom and stood till 11.00 while hundreds of women went by, each one plainer than the last … I don’t mind if I never go to one again.’ He did go, of course, and resented it even more: ‘a bum show. This court etiquette is intolerable.’ As for the state visit of the King and Queen of Denmark: ‘What rot and a waste of time, money and energy all these state visits are.’¹⁶³

When he had a proper job to do, however, he did it conscientiously and well. He was sent by the King to greet Poincaré, now President of the Republic, on his arrival at Portsmouth. The French statesman was impressed by his ‘charm of manner and vivacity’. The Prince had ‘lost none of his former delightful simplicity’ but had ‘“come on” a good deal’.¹⁶⁴ The King was delighted by the reports he was given of his son’s performance: ‘It gave both Mama and me great pleasure … I may sometimes find fault with you but I assure you it is only for your own good and because I am so devoted to you.’¹⁶⁵ The Prince’s first important solo performance came in June 1914 when he opened the new church of St Anselm on the Duchy of Cornwall estates in south London. He took endless trouble with his speech and carried it off well: ‘I had a wonderful sense of confidence in the audience, who I felt would make allowances for it being my 1st public function.’¹⁶⁶ At present, he told his audience, he knew little of the difficulties which beset those who were concerned with housing for the working classes, ‘but by studying the comfort and happiness of my tenants I hope to gain experience’. Congratulations flowed in, on his diction, his pace, his obvious sincerity; the one that would have pleased him most because it was not intended for his eyes was sent to one of the ladies-in-waiting, Lady Fortescue. ‘It was a wonderful success. He did it quite beautifully. At first he seemed a little nervous but it wore off and his speech was quite charming. He said it as if he really meant it … and in such a firm, charming voice. Everyone was tremendously enthusiastic … He looked so young among all those elderly prelates, but so dignified.’¹⁶⁷

For the first time he began to talk seriously to politicians and form opinions of them. Churchill was his hero, mainly because he was now First Lord of the Admiralty and arch advocate of a larger Navy: ‘He is a wonderful man and has a great power of work.’ Asquith, the Prime Minister, he liked, though he found Mrs Asquith ‘rather tiring and never stops talking’; Esher and Lulu Harcourt (the Colonial Secretary) were particularly tiresome.¹⁶⁸ If he had any preference between the parties he did not confide it to his diary, though on certain issues he feared the Liberal government would be insufficiently firm. He had strong views about the suffragettes and told his father that he hoped ‘the woman suffrage bill will never be passed. It is curious how divided the present cabinet is on the subject.’¹⁶⁹ To his relief Asquith held firm. ‘I really think that at last some drastic measures are to be taken as regards those bl-d- suffragettes, whose conduct is becoming more and more infamous every day,’ he told Godfrey Thomas in the summer of 1914.¹⁷⁰ He was as strongly opposed to Home Rule for Ireland. ‘I hope it will not pass,’ he wrote in his diary when the Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912.¹⁷¹ His parents shared his views on the future of Ulster. Queen Mary wrote him outspoken letters in March and April 1914 about the weakness of the government and the deplorable way they had treated the Army.¹⁷² ‘Although we aren’t supposed to have any politics,’ the Prince responded, ‘there does come a time when all that outward nonsense must be put aside, and that time has come.’¹⁷³

Socially his life was transformed in that last summer before the war. His parents had had a party for him at Buckingham Palace in March 1913. ‘I had to dance, a thing I hate,’ he wrote forlornly in his diary: ‘The whole thing was a great strain.’ He did not change his views for a year at least; then in July 1914 as a twenty-year-old he went to the Londesboroughs’ ball. ‘I stuck out to the bitter end and got back at 2 a.m. It was really great fun,’ he recorded in mild astonishment. Next night it was the turn of the Portlands: ‘The floor was perfect and my dancing is improving.’ He stayed till 3.45, and did the same the following night at the Salisburys’.¹⁷⁴ A looker-on at the Salisburys’ dance who did not know about his change of heart commiserated on his sad plight: ‘The Prince is no dancer … It was something of an ordeal for so young a boy and of so retiring a disposition.’¹⁷⁵ The sympathy was uncalled for: ‘I have now become fond of dancing and love going out!’¹⁷⁶ But he was still discriminating. Baroness Orczy saw him at a court ball in mid-July, dancing the quadrille d’honneur with one of his aunts and looking ‘moody and somewhat bored’.¹⁷⁷ Nor did he allow his new-found enthusiasm in any other way to change his train of life. He was up at 6 a.m. after the Londesborough ball, rose at 7 a.m. for a swim after the Portlands’ and was playing squash by 7 a.m. after the Salisburys’: ‘I’ve had only 8 hours sleep in the last 72 hours.’¹⁷⁸

The ferocious social round was combined with a course with the Life Guards – riding school, sword drill, care of horses and equipment, marching. ‘Not very exciting but anyhow a definite job which is the gt thing!!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Military life and ways are curious.’¹⁷⁹ He still pined for the Navy. Halfway through his cavalry course he went with the King to Portsmouth for the naval review and visited old friends aboard HMS Collingwood. It was ‘glorious. God what a life this is compared to my attachment.’¹⁸⁰ But he knew that it was a paradise not to be regained. The plan was that he should spend 1915 with the Grenadier Guards, 1916 with the Royal Horse Artillery, and then join the 10th Hussars on their return from South Africa. Meanwhile he danced the summer away and made plans for another grand tour of Europe in the autumn. A break in the routine came at the end of June when he spent a week with the Officers’ Training Corps and manoeuvred vigorously about the plains near Aldershot. ‘When in camp I make it a rule never to open a newspaper,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘so am completely ignorant of all happenings in the outer World, except that the Austrian Archduke and his wife have been assassinated. I expect it has caused a stir in Germany.’¹⁸¹