King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ