King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ of his parents. The two Princes united in a chorus of criticism. Prince Albert wailed about the ‘awful prison’ of Buckingham Palace: ‘The parents have got funny ideas about us, thinking we are still boys at school or something of that sort, instead of what we are.’⁹⁹ The Prince of Wales was no more enthusiastic about life in the Palace, especially after the King imposed a teetotal regime for the duration of the war: ‘Awful balls the whole thing. I don’t think it will have much effect on the drinking community. Lloyd George forced it on Papa.’¹⁰⁰

      As he grew older he became more adept at avoiding the sombre dignity of the family circle. By 1917 he was able to come and go more or less at pleasure. He was summoned for two weeks to Sandringham. ‘This little boy somehow says NO,’ he told Lady Coke. ‘He might possibly spend two or three days there, but not more, not for nobody, and he knows a bit too much for that!!!!’¹⁰¹ – a point so close to his heart as to demand even more than his usual allotment of two exclamation marks. In London he still stayed always at Buckingham Palace, but tried to time his periods of leave so that he had at least a few days there without his parents. This did not always work out. ‘I am sorry your style was rather cramped during your leave in London,’ Lord Burghersh wrote sympathetically. ‘It’s exactly the same with me. Family so inquisitive.’¹⁰² But it would be wrong to attach too much significance to such flights from the family nest. The Prince was far from rejecting his parents or demanding total independence. On his twenty-first birthday his father wrote to tell him: ‘You will have about £246,000 which … is a splendid sum of money which will go on increasing until you marry and set up house. Until then, I hope you will consider my home as your home.’ The Queen echoed her husband’s words: ‘I hope that for some years to come you, my darling Son, will continue to live under our roof, where you are and ever will be “le bienvenu”.’¹⁰³ The Prince in his reply told his mother how pleased he would be to remain with his parents ‘until the fateful day arrives when I shall have to think about finding me a wife, and I trust that day is as yet afar off!!’¹⁰⁴ Privately he had probably made up his mind that he must set up on his own once the war was over, but he had no wish to confront his parents on such an issue while the war was still raging and long-term plans seemed impossible to make.

      In June 1915 the Prince had first speculated about the possibility that a Guards division might be formed under the command of Lord Cavan, ‘an ideal state of things’.¹⁰⁵ A month later the ideal became reality; ‘It ought to be the finest division in the world,’ the King wrote proudly.¹⁰⁶ The Prince had no doubt that this was where he belonged. In his eyes the Guards were as far above the other line regiments as the Navy was above the Army. He admitted to the King that he and the other Guards officers were apt to think that their men were the only ones of any use, ‘which is v. wrong and which one must avoid above all things, but it’s not an unnatural point of view to take really!!’¹⁰⁷ But though his transfer to this martial empyrean brought some relief and moved him a little closer to the fighting, it did not prove entirely satisfactory. Life at Cavan’s headquarters was no less sybaritic than in his previous postings; Raymond Asquith visited the headquarters in November 1915 and was given ‘a good dinner and an excellent bottle of champagne … the Prince of Wales was there and gave me a long and fragrant cigar’.¹⁰⁸ Nor was the work more enlivening; a typical day in December had him devoting the morning to pursuing a missing consignment of gum boots and the afternoon to bargaining for the use of a piece of land on which to build bathing huts: ‘Heavens, the unparalleled monotony of this life!! … I shall go mad soon!!’¹⁰⁹ Worst of all, though he liked and admired ‘Fatty’ Cavan, he deplored the General’s reluctance to let him get near the trenches: ‘I think Fatty is going to shut me up in my glasshouse more than ever.’¹¹⁰ Only a week after this entry he escaped from his glasshouse and visited the front line during a lull in the battle of Loos. The 1st Guards Brigade had charged three hundred yards across open ground towards the enemy line and had been massacred by machine-gun fire as they reached the final wire, ‘too cruel to be killed within a few yards of yr. objective … This was my first real sight of war and it moved and impressed me most enormously.’ On the way back the party had to jump into a trench to avoid a storm of shrapnel, fifty yards away the Prince’s car was damaged and his driver killed: ‘He was an exceptionally nice man, a beautiful driver and a 1st rate mechanic; it’s an absolute tragedy and I can’t yet realize that it has happened.’¹¹¹

      The Commander-in-Chief, told that the Prince had been in the car beside his driver, promptly ordered that he should return to Corps headquarters. The Prince wrote in dismay to his father. ‘What did you have me appointed to Guards DIV for? That I should be removed as soon as there is any fighting? … I can assure you it is one of the biggest blows I have ever had … My dearest Papa, I implore of you to have this most unfortunate and deplorable order from GHQ cancelled as soon as possible.’¹¹² French reconsidered his decision and the Prince stayed with the Guards. The King ruled, however, that his son should only go up to the front if it was ‘absolutely necessary’, otherwise Cavan would be placed in an impossible position.¹¹³ It all depended on what was meant by ‘necessary’, and the Prince eventually saw his interpretation of the word accepted: if it was necessary for the General to go to the front line it must be necessary for his staff officers to accompany him. But he was not content with what he had gained. ‘If only I could spend 48 hours in the line;’ he told his father, ‘… I should get an idea of what trench life is like, which it is absolutely impossible to do otherwise … I suppose you wouldn’t like to make permission for me to do this a form of Xmas present to me?’¹¹⁴

      It had not needed the sight of the mounds of dead in front of the German lines at Loos to make the Prince doubtful of the allied strategy. The endless, hideously costly attacks, achieving nothing except at the best the occupation of a few trenches, seemed to him futile. The commanders had promised great advances, the breaking of the German line: ‘When is all this? Ask of the winds, and I call it sheer murder!!’ He had lost all confidence in French. ‘The sooner we get a new C in C the better.’¹¹⁵ But when a new Commander-in-Chief was appointed it was Douglas Haig, a man as wedded to the policy of bloody attrition as ever French had been. ‘He is very unpopular,’ the Prince told Stamfordham. ‘I can’t stand the man myself, so hard and unsympathetic.’¹¹⁶ Towards the end of the war he was to revise his views, and even find Haig ‘human and sympathetic’,¹¹⁷ but at the end of 1915 it seemed to him that the new C.-in-C. treated men ‘as mere fighting tools’,¹¹⁸ and that, in the Prince’s eyes, was almost the ultimate accusation.

      Shortly before French departed George V came to France for one of his periodic visits to his troops. Startled by the cheering of the men the King’s horse reared, threw its rider and fell heavily on top of him. The Prince rushed to his father’s side, to find him winded and unable to breathe. Doctors arrived and pronounced that there were no internal injuries, only shock and severe bruising. It had been a lucky escape; the ground where the King fell was soft, otherwise he would have been crushed beyond recognition.¹¹⁹ The Prince hurried back to London with Claud Hamilton to reassure the Queen. ‘Thank God Papa is all right,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and little did Claudie and I think in the morning that we shd be on our way home in less than 12 hrs.’¹²⁰

      Before this episode the Prince had been in slightly bad odour at court because of his reluctance to wear some foreign medals which he had been awarded. He apologized to the King, ‘but you know how distasteful it is to me to wear these war decorations having never done any fighting and having always been kept well out of danger’.¹²¹ The sense of inferiority which he felt in the presence of fighting men was redoubled when he was flaunting honours which they had been denied. His discomfort was redoubled in mid-1916 when he was awarded the Military Cross. Lady Coke wrote to congratulate him. ‘I don’t feel I deserve it in the least,’ the Prince replied crossly. ‘There are so many gallant yet undecorated officers who should have MCs long before me.’¹²² He was promoted Captain at about the same time but got no pleasure from it ‘as I have no command’. ‘You’ll be saying to yourself “What СКАЧАТЬ