King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler
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Название: King Edward VIII

Автор: Philip Ziegler

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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isbn: 9780007481026

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СКАЧАТЬ to his parents. The wedding planned for Prince Eddy should take place, only the date and the bridegroom would be changed. Prince George took little convincing that this was his destiny; May felt slightly greater qualms, but she too was soon persuaded. In May 1893 the Duke of York, as Prince George had been created the previous year, dutifully proposed to his late brother’s fiancée. He was as dutifully accepted. On 6 July the couple, by now very much, if undemonstratively, in love, were married in the Chapel Royal. A year later, on 23 June 1894, their first child, a boy, was born at the Tecks’ home in Richmond Park. He was not Victoria’s first great-grandchild but in her eyes he was beyond measure the most important.

      The original plan had been for the baby to be born in Buckingham Palace but an early heatwave drove the couple to the comparative cool of White Lodge. The Duke of York was in the library, pretending to read Pilgrim’s Progress, when the birth took place at 10 p.m.; his father, the Prince of Wales, was holding an Ascot Week ball in the Fishing Temple at Virginia Water. The telephone that had recently been installed to link White Lodge to East Sheen was used to give him the news and enable him to propose a toast to the new prince.5 ‘My darling May was not conscious of pain during those last 2½ terrible hours,’ the Duke of York wrote to Victoria; in terms that sound as if the end of the operation had been not so much the cradle as the grave. ‘The baby weighed 8 lbs when he was born, and both grandmothers … pronounce him to be a most beautiful, strong and healthy child.’6 Fifteen hundred people signed their names on the following day in the book which had been placed in a marquee for the occasion, and the Duchess of Teck’s sister, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, announced that she ‘went – mentally – on my knees, tears of gratitude and happiness flowing, streaming, and the hugging followed’.7

      The bickering that normally accompanied the naming of a royal child now ensued. The Queen took it for granted that a daughter would be called Victoria and a son Albert. The Duke of York said it had long been decided ‘that if it was a boy, we should call him Edward after darling Eddy. This is the dearest wish of our hearts, dearest Grandmama, for Edward is indeed a sacred name to us, and one which I know would have pleased him beyond anything.’8 ‘You write as if Edward was the real name of dear Eddy,’ retorted the Queen severely; everyone knew that he had in fact been christened Victor Albert.9 The Duke proved unusually obstinate and the baby was called Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. Christian was the name of the baby’s godfather, the King of Denmark; the other four names represented England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Some reports state that David was an afterthought, introduced to gratify the aged and moribund Marchioness of Waterford. There are differing views about her motives: that assiduous and well-informed courtier Lord Esher said it was because ‘she had some fad about restoring the Jews to the Holy City’;10 the Prince of Wales’s friend the Marquis de Breteuil recorded that the old lady had dreamed of an ancient Irish legend according to which there would be a great king over the water and his name would be David.11

      The christening took place with all the pomp befitting a baby who stood third in line to the British throne. Twelve godparents, mainly German, attended; as well as the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. The gold bowl used as a font was brought from Windsor Castle. The cake, thirty inches high and five feet in circumference, was made by McVitie and Price in Edinburgh. ‘I have two bottles of Jordan water,’ the Duke proudly told his old tutor, Canon Dalton, and both were lavished on the occasion.12 The only discordant note was struck by the first socialist member of parliament, Keir Hardie. When it was proposed that the House of Commons should congratulate the Queen on the happy event, Hardie opposed the motion. ‘From his childhood onward,’ he said, with what to some will seem dreadful prescience, ‘this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score … A line will be drawn between him and the people he is to be called upon some day to reign over. In due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’13

      Prince Edward, who from birth was always known to his family as David, was followed eighteen months later by a brother, Albert George, who was in due course to become Duke of York and, less predictably, King George VI. Edward attended his sibling’s christening and behaved impeccably until Prince Albert, in the arms of the Bishop of Norwich, began to yell. Edward, evidently seeing this as a challenge to his primacy, yelled louder and was removed. ‘Of course he is very young to come to church,’ the Duke of York told the Queen, ‘but we thought that in years to come it would give him pleasure to know that he had been present at his brother’s christening.’14 A daughter, Mary, was born in 1897; then came a gap of three years, after which Henry – future Duke of Gloucester – was born in 1900 and George – future Duke of Kent – in 1902. The youngest child, John, born in 1905, was an epileptic who lived in seclusion and was to die at the age of fourteen.

      The three elder children were close enough in age to be much together; Princes Edward and Albert – David and Bertie – being in particular inseparable. Lord Esher, visiting Sandringham, played with the children in the garden and noted that: ‘The second boy is the sharpest – but there is something rather taking about Prince Edward.’15 Most other observers agree it was Edward who was the sharper and who habitually took the lead – ‘because as the eldest son he had the highest status in the family,’ explained the Duchess of York’s close friend, Lady Airlie.16 He found that he could easily manage his tractable and worshipping younger brother, but that Princess Mary was an independent-minded tomboy who was disinclined to do the bidding of any mere boy.

      It has often been alleged – not least by the subject of this biography – that the Duke and Duchess of York were cold and distant parents. It would be foolish to pretend that the relationship between the future King George V and his sons, in particular his eldest son, was a happy one. When they were babies, however, all the evidence is that he was a doting father; far more ready to take an interest in his children than was true of most English parents of the upper and upper middle classes. ‘I have got those two photographs of you and darling Baby on my table before me now,’ he wrote to his wife from Cowes in August 1894. ‘… I like looking at my Tootsums little wife and my sweet child, it makes me happy when they are far away.’17*2 ‘Baby is very flourishing. He walks about all over the house, he has 14 teeth,’ he boasted to Canon Dalton. A month later Prince Edward still walked about all over the house but had sixteen teeth.18 The Duchess was more critical in her attitude. Her baby, she told her brother, was ‘exactly what I looked like as a baby, consequently plain. This is a pity and rather disturbs me.’19 She does not seem to have had much idea of what was to be expected from a small child: ‘David was “jumpy” yesterday morning,’ she wrote when he was a little over two years old, ‘however he got quieter after being out, what a curious child he is.’20 When Edward began to get letters from his parents, the Duke of York was always the more demonstratively affectionate. He was coming to Sandringham on Saturday, he told his three-year-old son, and would be ‘so pleased to see our darling little chicks again’. When the chicks had chickenpox; ‘I hope none of you have grown wings and become little chickens and tried to fly away, that would be dreadful and we should have to go up in a balloon to catch you.’21

      The trouble began when his children reached an age at which mature conduct might reasonably – or unreasonably – be expected of them. Admiral Fisher, at Balmoral in 1903, noted: ‘The two little Princes are splendid little boys and chattered away the whole of their lunch-time, not the faintest shyness.’22 The comment is notable as marking one of the last occasions on which father and sons were observed together without something being said about the constraint and fear which dominated the atmosphere. Kenneth Rose has convincingly challenged the story by which King George V is supposed to have told Lord Derby: ‘My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I’m damned well going to see that my children are frightened of me!’23 But though the tale may well be apocryphal, like most apocryphal tales it contains an essential truth. The Duke of York loved СКАЧАТЬ