King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ