King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      3

      ‘Oh!! That I Had a Job’

      THAT IN 1914 THE YOUTH OF BRITAIN WENT EXULTANTLY to war is one of the stranger features of that agonizing conflict. The Prince of Wales had even less reason than most to share in this exultation. For one thing, many of his close relations, whom he had grown to know and like over the past few years, were now numbered among the enemy. For another, his position as heir to the throne set him apart from his contemporaries: they set off with armour shining to defeat the Huns and be home by Christmas, he knew that his armour was likely to be more ornamental than useful and that he had only a slim chance of wearing it in battle. Yet when he heard that he was to join the Army in France, he wrote to Sir George Arthur of this ‘wonderful and joyous surprise’. Twenty-five years later he was shown this letter and commented how terrifying he found it, coming as it did from an average boy of twenty. He had conceived war almost as a holiday, ‘a glorious adventure’. ‘How disillusioned we all were at the end of it,’ he commented ruefully. ‘One wonders if the generation of that age today feel as we did, or are they conscious of the appalling consequences of another World war and its futility? No! far worse than that how it would utterly destroy civilization.’¹

      The run-up to war found the Prince incredulous and baffled. The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo embroiled first Austria and Serbia, then Germany and Russia, finally France and Britain. The Prince was inclined to believe that Russia and Germany were behaving reasonably and that Austria was the prime offender, but admitted, ‘I must stop talking all this rot, for I know nothing about it.’² As war between France and Germany became inevitable, his chief fear was lest the government should stay neutral. ‘That will be the end of us; we shall never be trusted by any power again.’³ The decision to stand by our allies came as a great relief but ‘Oh!! God; the whole thing is too big to comprehend!! Oh!! That I had a job.’⁴ That last expostulation was to be his constant refrain for the next four years. He went on to the balcony with his parents at Buckingham Palace to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. The King wrote in his diary that night that he prayed to God he would protect dear Bertie’s life.⁵ It never occurred to him that his eldest son might be exposed to danger. How could he be? He was the Prince of Wales.

      The Prince poured out his woes to his closest confidant, his brother Bertie:

      Well, this is just about the mightiest calamity that has ever or will ever befall mankind … To think that but 17 days ago we were together with everything working peacefully in Europe, and now we are at the commencement of a most hideous and appalling war, the duration or issue of which are impossible to predict … ‘England at war with Germany!!’ that seems a sentence which would appear nowhere but in a mad novel.

      The Germans could never СКАЧАТЬ