King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ never did a child any harm; he shouted, ranted, struck out both verbally and physically to express his displeasure. A summons to the library almost always heralded a rebuke, and a rebuke induced terror in the recipient. His banter was well-intentioned but it could also be brutal. On the birth of Prince Henry: ‘David of course asked some very funny questions. I told him the baby had flown in at the window during the night, and he at once asked where his wings were and I said they had been cut off.’²⁴ Prince Edward was six at the time, and he claimed the vision of his brother’s bleeding wings disturbed his sleep for weeks afterwards.

      The Duke of York had rigid ideas, invested with almost totemic significance, about punctuality, deportment, above all dress. The children were treated as midshipmen, perpetually on parade. Any deviation from the approved ritual was a fall from grace to be punished for the sake of the offender. ‘I hope your kilts fit well, take care and don’t spoil them at once as they are new,’ wrote the Duke to his eldest son. ‘Wear the Balmoral kilt and grey jacket on week days and green kilt and black jacket on Sundays. Do not wear the red kilt till I come.’²⁵ Inevitably they got things wrong, wore a grey jacket with a green kilt or a Balmoral kilt on Sundays. Retribution was swift and fearful. ‘The House of Hanover, like ducks, produce bad parents,’ the royal librarian, Owen Morshead, told Harold Nicolson. ‘They trample on their young.’ ‘It was a mystery,’ said a royal private secretary, Alec Hardinge, ‘why George V, who was such a kind man, was such a brute to his children.’²⁶

      Prince Albert, more nervous and slow-witted than his elder brother, suffered as much, but Edward, both because of his status and his tendency to carelessness, came in for the most censorious attention. His father took due pride in his achievements. David recited a poem ‘quite extraordinarily well’, he noted in his diary. ‘He said Wolseley’s farewell (Shakespeare) without a mistake.’²⁷ But he felt correspondingly sharp dismay at his son’s backslidings. ‘The real difficulty had been with the Duke of Windsor, never with the present King,’ Queen Mary told Nicolson many years later.²⁸ She deluded herself if she thought that Prince Bertie had escaped unscathed, but she was right in her belief that her elder son, from whom so much was expected and who found acquiescence in his father’s shibboleths so much more uncongenial, was the principal victim in the generation war. Prince Edward certainly saw himself as such, a conviction that was fortified as his childhood slipped farther into the past. He told Freda Dudley Ward’s daughter Angela how lucky she was to have a loving mother. His own childhood had been dreadful, he said; he had received no love and no appreciation for his achievements.²⁹ ‘I had a wretched childhood!’ he told his authorial assistant, Charles Murphy. ‘Of course there were short periods of happiness but I remember it chiefly for the miserableness I had to keep to myself.’³⁰ That this misery was exaggerated in retrospect seems evident, that it was real and painful at the time is hardly less so.

      His mother did her best to provide a refuge from the Duke’s harshness. ‘We used to have a most lovely time with her alone – always laughing and joking,’ Edward remembered, ‘… she was a different human being away from him.’³¹ But though she made manifest her sympathy for her children, she did little to protect them from their father’s wrath, or to try to change his attitude. Though to later generations she appeared the quintessence of intractable strong-mindedness, she held her husband in awe, as an individual and still more as a future monarch. ‘I always have to remember that their father is also their King,’³² she was later to pronounce, and the King-to-be deserved almost the same reverence. She saw her role as that of loyal support; to argue with, or still more, criticize her husband was something to be done rarely, and then only with extreme caution.

      The Duke and Duchess were not the only people of significance in the children’s lives. It is curious that almost all the nannies who feature in the pages of childhood memoirs are either saints or sadists. Edward had one of each. The sadist delighted in pinching him or twisting his arm just before his evening visit to his parents’ drawing room; as a result he would cry and find himself peremptorily banished.³³ The saint, Charlotte ‘Lalla’ (or, to Edward, ‘Lala’) Bill, came later as nurse to Princess Mary and extended her attention to the boys. Neither had any great importance in Edward’s upbringing. More influential was the stalwart Finch, a nursery footman whose father had been in the service of the great Duke of Wellington and who shared some of that dignitary’s resolution and resourcefulness. From male nanny he stayed on to serve his master as valet and then butler, dependable, devoted, totally loyal, always respectful yet blunt sometimes to the point of rudeness. He allowed his youthful charge to take no liberties and on one occasion spanked him for teasing Lalla Bill. Edward threatened to denounce him to his father, but Lalla Bill got her story in first and insult was added to injury when the Prince was made to apologize to Finch for being such a nuisance.³⁴

      But it was his grandparents who provided the most striking contrast to his father’s stern regime. The Prince of Wales could be quite as bad-tempered and as much a stickler for protocol as his son, and possessed a streak of meanness which was missing in the Duke of York, but to his grandchildren he was almost as indulgent as he was to himself. Edward basked in his obvious affection and endured with equanimity outbursts that would have terrified him in his father. Once he infuriated his grandfather by fidgeting at luncheon and finally knocking something off the table. ‘Damn you, boy!’ roared the Prince, smashing a melon to the floor. ‘David surveyed the debris in silence and then turned to his grandfather with an irresistibly funny expression of polite enquiry. Then the two burst out laughing.’³⁵ His grandmother was still less alarming. ‘We saw dear Grannie yesterday,’ Edward wrote in 1897, in a letter presumably dictated to a nursemaid, ‘and she had a funny cock and an owl which she blowed out of a pipe.’³⁶ With Queen Alexandra, as she was shortly to become, it was always cocks and owls and laughs and demonstrative affection.

      It amused the Waleses to subvert their son’s austerity. In August 1900 the Yorks set off on an extensive imperial tour. The grandparents were left in charge, and reports were soon reaching the royal tourists of the way the children were being pampered and their education neglected. The last straw came when the woman supposed to be teaching Edward French was left behind when the family moved to Sandringham. The Duchess protested, but got little satisfaction. ‘The reason we did not take her,’ wrote Queen Alexandra, ‘was that [Doctor] Laking particularly asked that he might be left more with his brothers and sister – for a little while – as we all noticed how precautious [sic – “precocious” is presumably what she had in mind] and old-fashioned he was getting – and quite the ways of a “single child”! which will make him ultimately a “tiresome child” – laying down the law and thinking himself far superior to the younger ones. It did him a great deal of good – to be treated the same as Bertie …’³⁷

      The charge that Edward was being brought up as an only child does not seem well founded. The three elder children were much together, and, in spite of their father’s insistence on correct clothing on every occasion, enjoyed a freedom to roam the countryside on foot or bicycle which would seem enviable to contemporary princes. Edward felt protective towards his siblings; it is said that once, when he heard that his father was on the way to inspect the flower beds that they were encouraged to look after at Windsor, he covered up for his sister’s inadequacy as a gardener by running ahead and transplanting some flowers from his plot to hers.³⁸ Lord Esher spent some time with them in 1904 and noted: ‘The youngest is the most riotous. The eldest a sort of head nurse.’ Looking through a magazine together the children chanced on a picture of Prince Edward labelled ‘Our Future King’. ‘Prince Albert at once drew attention to it – but the elder hastily brushed his brother’s finger away and turned the page. Evidently he thought it bad taste.’³⁹

      But outside the family his social horizons were severely limited. Occasional visits to cousins of his age was the utmost permitted him. The children of the Duke and Duchess of Fife were favoured companions. ‘He was so pleased to be with them,’ reported a governess. ‘They wanted to take his hand and he wanted to take their ball’ – an exchange which СКАЧАТЬ