King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ go down to history as about the worst and most infamous action of any govt!! Don’t you agree? I bet you do.

      I am as good as heartbroken to think I am totally devoid of any job whatsoever and have not the faintest chance of being able to serve my country. I have to stay at home with the women and children, a passenger of the worst description!! Here I am in this bloody gt palace, doing absolutely nothing but attend meals … Surely a man of 20 has higher things to hope for? But I haven’t apparently! Oh God it is becoming unbearable to live this usual life of ease and comfort at home, when you my dear old boy, and all naval and army officers, are toiling under unpleasant conditions, suffering hardships and running gt risks with your lives, for the defence and honour of England … At such a time you will picture me here, depressed and miserable and taking no more part in this huge undertaking than Harry and George, 2 irresponsible kids who run about playing inane games in the passage. However, enough about my rotten self, for I am a most bum specimen of humanity, and so must not be considered.⁶

      The self-disparagement in the last sentence is a constant feature of his letters and his diary; consciously overstated, yet nonetheless sincere. He knew that it was not his fault that he was not among the first of the volunteers to fight for King and country, but he still condemned himself for being left behind. In fact his period of misery hanging around ‘this awful palace where I have had the worst weeks of my life’⁷ was quickly over. On 6 August 1914, only the day after he had written in such anguish to his brother, he asked for and was given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. He was only 5 feet 7 inches tall instead of the regulation 6 feet, but recorded in triumph: ‘I am to go to the King’s Company but shall be treated just like an ordinary officer, thank goodness, and am to share a room in barracks.’⁸ In fact his treatment for the first fortnight was far worse than the ordinary officer, let alone the ordinary Guards officer, would have expected while serving at home. The 1st Battalion was training at Warley Barracks in Brentwood. The officers’ mess was a ‘filthy hole’, the rooms were garrets, there was no furniture and no carpet. ‘But what does one care when living under war conditions? I am so glad to have joined up and to have escaped from the palace!!’⁹

      When the battalion moved back to London his euphoric mood persisted. He established that he was the first Prince of Wales ever to carry the colours on the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, and accepted with relish what in peacetime he would have dismissed as a piece of pompous ritual, as well as positively welcoming the long, boring route marches from Wellington Barracks through Kensington and Fulham returning down the King’s Road. ‘It is pretty rotten in London,’ he told Godfrey Thomas, ‘and we can’t do any training. But anyhow we are on the spot and feel that this is a stepping stone to getting out!! How we long for it.’¹⁰ He deluded himself that he would continue to be treated ‘just like an ordinary officer’ and would soon go to France and the front with his fellow officers. His delusion was quickly dispelled. On 8 September, a week before the 1st Battalion sailed, his father told him that he would not accompany it. Instead he would join the 3rd Battalion and remain in London. ‘This is a bitter disappointment,’ he wrote in his diary.¹¹ When the time came for him to watch the battalion march off from the barracks, his bitterness was still greater. ‘I am a broken man,’ he told his friend Jack Lawrence. ‘It is terrible being left behind!!’¹²

      His closest friend in the Grenadiers, Lord Desmond Fitzgerald – one of the very few contemporaries who was invited to call him ‘Eddie’ – wrote to console him and tell him how much he had admired ‘the way you have borne your disappointment … However, it is not the fact of going to war, when thousands are doing so, that needs bravery; but to cheerfully accept the unpleasant things of life needs the greatest strength of character. And thus you have been able to set a wonderful example of how to do one’s duty.’¹³ The Prince was unconvinced. In public he put a good face on it, but his misery was too acute to conceal from his friends. Indeed, he was anxious to advertise it; he would have been less than human if he had not wanted everyone to know that he was eager to share the dangers of war and stayed behind against his will. How real those dangers were became rapidly apparent; by 2 November only six officers of his beloved 1st Battalion remained unwounded.

      He appealed to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, and called on him with his father’s assistant private secretary, Clive Wigram. ‘He is now a gt fat bloated man,’ he wrote vengefully in his diary, who put forward what seemed to the Prince most unconvincing reasons for refusing him leave to return to the 1st Battalion, but held out vague hopes of his joining the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, in a few months when the line had been stabilized. ‘A pretty rotten contrast to my gt wish,’ commented the Prince, adding grudgingly: ‘He is a rough customer but mighty strong, and is just the man to boss these politicians at such a time!!’¹⁴ The King told Esher that his son had argued that he was expendable; if he were killed there were four brothers to take his place. ‘What if you were not killed, but taken prisoner?’ Kitchener asked drily.¹⁵

      While eating his heart out in London with the 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers – ‘strictly entre nous,’ he told Lady Glenusk, ‘there are not many really nice people in the 3rd Batt … The junior ensigns are a poor lot!!’¹⁶ – he made himself useful in other ways. Shortly before the outbreak of war he had become President of a National Fund for providing food for the poor, and had published an appeal in the daily papers. A quarter of a million pounds came in on the first day and within a week the total was more than £1 million. Most of the work was done by a Liberal member of parliament, Ernest Benn – future Lord Stansgate – whom the Prince judged ‘a nice, capable little man’.¹⁷ Public relations were entrusted to a Mr Pearson, who wanted the Prince to be painted by the military artist Caton Woodville at the head of his regiment, and the resultant poster to be exhibited on every available hoarding. This idea was quashed (as also was a still more eccentric suggestion that a certain celebrated music hall artist should be drawn in a cart to Trafalgar Square where he would delight the populace by playing patriotic airs on a piano with his nose).¹⁸ The King approved the principle of the Fund, but insisted that whatever publicity there was should stress that his son had nothing to do with its administration. Otherwise he foresaw the disgruntled poor blaming the Prince if their applications for relief were rejected.¹⁹ The Prince took the point and fully shared his father’s apprehension. All his life he disliked the role of patron, lending his name to some enterprise over which he had no real control. At the end of 1915 he became Chairman of the Statutory Committee of the Patriotic Fund, a body set up to concern itself with the care of sailors and soldiers who had suffered during the war. ‘Its work will, alas!, be carried into long years to come …’ explained Lord Stamfordham. ‘It will indeed be a vast machine of National Relief.’²⁰ Few projects could have appealed more strongly to the Prince, but after the inaugural meeting he still wrote gloomily: ‘It’s such a rotten show for me; just a mere figurehead with the name of P of Wales as usual!!’²¹

      Major Cadogan had rejoined his regiment when war broke out, and to help him with the Fund and his other duties the Prince persuaded Godfrey Thomas to take time off from the Foreign Office and join him as part-time equerry. His chief function, in Stamfordham’s eyes at any rate, was to persuade his master to eat more and take less exercise. Thomas tried dutifully but soon admitted defeat. He won the King’s confidence, however, and was held to be a healthy influence on his employer. Towards the end of 1914 he spent a weekend with the royal family at York Cottage. After dinner everyone sat around while the King, in big tortoiseshell spectacles, read extracts from the newspapers, ‘generally adding explosive comments about the Germans’. When the Queen and Princess Mary had gone to bed, the party adjourned to the billiard room, where the Prince of Wales and Prince Albert played while the King read his telegrams. Next day they went for a long walk. On the way back they met the epileptic Prince John and his nurse. ‘The Prince of Wales took him for a run in a kind of push-cart he had, and they both disappeared from view.’²²

      The Prince’s initial distaste for the idea of a job on French’s staff lessened as other possibilities СКАЧАТЬ