George VI

Denis Judd

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857730411
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Historical Biographies

George VI was the man not born to be king. He nonetheless rescued the British monarchy in the aftermath of the abdication crisis and cemented its prestige with his well-judged performance during World War II and the Blitz. In this acclaimed biography, Denis Judd tells the story of Prince Bertie's transformation into King George VI including his struggle with a crippling shyness and sense of inadequacy, exacerbated by the stammer which was the focus of the Oscar-winning film The King's Speech. His marriage to the self-assured and supportive Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons and his unexpected accession to the throne in 1936 changed the direction of the young prince's life for good. Once on the throne, it was he who bore the weighty responsibility for restoring the nation's confidence in their monarchy following his elder brother's abdication, and for maintaining morale during the darkest days of World War II, when, together with Winston Churchill, his dignified presence functioned as a beacon of reassurance to civilians and military alike.
Denis Judd provides a fascinating, if sometimes controversial, reassessment of the man who, quite unexpectedly, came to occupy an extraordinary position in a time of unprecedented change.

1
A ROYAL, AND DEPRIVED, CHILDHOOD 1895–1908

…my grandfather [George V] found it so easy to find fault with anyone that what was probably a basic kindness was quite lost in his gruff exterior…I don’t think he really cared much for children and he had a positive mania for punctuality.

The Earl of Harewood

The child to whom I was most drawn was Prince Albert – Bertie – although he was not a boy who made friends easily. Intensely sensitive over his stammer he was apt to take refuge either in silence – which caused him to be thought moody – or in naughtiness. He was more often in conflict with authority than the rest of his brothers.

Mabell, Countess of Airlie

THE FUTURE KING GEORGE VI was born in 1895 at Sandringham on the blackest day in the calendar of the Royal Family – 14 December, the anniversary of the death of Prince Albert thirty-four years earlier, and of Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice in 1878.

In a more superstitious age, soothsayers would have struggled to interpret the omen. As it was, there was much consternation within the Royal Family and early, anxious attempts to propitiate the imagined wrath of Queen Victoria, who was now in her seventy-sixth year, and, despite her physical infirmities, a matriarchal totem of great potency.

The baby’s father, the Duke of York, later to become King George V, recorded in his diary the events of the momentous day in the spare prose of the naval log:

A little boy was born, weighing nearly eight lb. at 3.40 a.m.…Everything most satisfactory, both doing well. Sent a number of telegrams, had something to eat. Went to bed at 6.45, very tired.1

Among the telegrams was one addressed to Queen Victoria, mourning at Windsor. It read: “Darling May was safely confined of a son at 3.30 this morning both doing well. GEORGIE.”

How would the old Queen respond? Early newspaper reaction to the birth met the problem head-on: the Globe believed that:

Henceforth it is permissible to hope that the august lady, in whose joys and sorrows the nation claims a right to share, may find in the felicitous event of December 14, 1895, a solace for the mournful memories of December 14, 1861, and December 14, 1878.2

On 16 December the Standard weighed in with an editorial in which sound advice was presented in pompous and leaden prose:

But, surely, the Fourteenth of December may, henceforth, bear its white mark. Not that the Past can ever be forgotten, not that even the sound of the joy-bells of the present hour can ever deaden our ears to the recollections of a sadder and graver note. It is the distinguishing characteristic of the higher natures, and equally of the more serious communities, never to part wholly with their reminiscences, even though these should give to existence a certain air of sombreness. But the “Too much sorrow”, on which Shakespeare comments with disapproval, is incompatible with the healthy activities either of individual or of national life; and all of us, from our beloved Sovereign downward, will, we are quite sure, hail with eagerness the new cause given us by the Duchess of York for looking on the Fourteenth of December as not by any means one of the days devoted exclusively to mourning and regret.3

Within the family, Queen Victoria’s eldest child, Victoria, the widowed mother of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, was quick to put the best interpretation on the birth. Writing to her mother from Berlin on 17 December she said:

I cannot say how much I rejoice! On the one hand I thought it rather to be regretted that the dear little Baby was born on a day of such inexpressibly sad memories to us – but on the other – it is a gift from Heaven and a very precious one – and there is something very touching in the thought – that on this darkest day of your Life a ray of sunshine is sent in after years! and I like to look at it in this light!4

The new baby’s grandfather, the Prince of Wales, had written in similar terms to the Duke of York from Windsor on 14 December. While admitting that, “Grandmama was rather distressed that this happy event should have taken place on a darkly sad anniversary for us,” the future King Edward VII added, “but I think – as well as most of us in the family here – that it will ‘break the spell’ of this unlucky date.” The Prince of Wales followed up this letter with a second, written two days later, in which he reassured his son that, “Grandmama is not the least annoyed with you about anything, but she only regretted that the little boy was born on the fourteenth though we have all told her that it will dispel the gloom of that sad anniversary.” In order to make the best of it, the Prince of Wales, after reminding the Duke of York that the Queen “is ageing rapidly – and has always been very kind and affecte. to you”, suggested, “I really think it would gratify her if you yourself proposed the name of Albert to her.”

Queen Victoria had probably already indicated the pleasure that naming the new baby Albert would give her. Indeed, it was difficult for her descendants to christen their male offspring without including Albert among the names. Thus the Prince of Wales’ first name was Albert, as had been that of his eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, who had died of typhus in 1892; the Duke of York’s fourth name was Albert, and his eldest son, later to be King Edward VIII, bore Albert as his second name. The name should, in Queen Victoria’s view, be the distinguishing mark of the lineage that had sprung from her joyful union with the Prince Consort.

The Duke of York hastened to play the Albert card, and with some finesse. He wrote to the Queen, soon after the new prince’s birth, repeating the family sentiment that “his having been born on that day may be the means of making it a little less sad to you”, and then produced his trump: “Dear Grandmama, we propose with your permission to call him Albert after dear Grandpapa & we also hope that you will be his Godmother.”

Queen Victoria accepted these offerings at the shrine of her dead husband with the warmth and spontaneity of the middle-European great-grandmother that she was. She replied immediately:

I cannot tell you how much pleased & gratified I have been by your dear letter [she wrote to her “Darling Georgie”]. But before I answer it let me express my joy at dear May’s doing so well & recovering so quickly. Thank God! she is, unberufen, very strong. She gets through these affairs like nothing. It is a great satisfaction to us all that it should be a second boy & I need not say how delighted I am that my great wish – viz. that the little one born on that sad anniversary shd. have the dear name of Albert – is to be realized. Most gladly do I accept being Godmother & this dear little Boy born the day when his beloved great grandfather entered on a new greater life will be especially dear to me. – I thank you lovingly for your very kind letter & will write again soon, but I must end to save the Post.

Ever Your devoted Grandmama
V.R.I.5

So excited was she by the birth that she confessed to the baby’s mother, “I am all impatience to see the new one,” and would dearly have liked the christening to have been held at Osborne so that she could have personally played the part of Godmother. The new prince was, however, christened at the Church of St Mary’s, Sandringham, on 17 February 1895, taking the names Albert Frederick Arthur George. Within the family he was destined always to be known as Bertie.

The prospects for Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George were overwhelmingly favourable. Britain was still the greatest world power in 1895, her influence, like her Empire, far-flung and world-wide. The Royal Navy patrolled the seven seas and British exports still dominated the world’s markets. Although Britain’s commercial pre-eminence was shortly to be challenged by the rapidly growing industrial strength of Germany and the United States, and her military shortcomings cruelly exposed in the Boer War of 1899–1902, there seemed little cause for pessimism on these scores in 1895.

If Britain was the centre of a global imperial structure, the Royal Family were the unquestioned leaders of British society and the only viable focal point of imperial patriotism. The republican agitation of the 1870s had died away; indeed, a few months before Prince Albert Frederick’s birth, Joseph Chamberlain, earlier a demagogic radical and republican, had taken the post of Colonial Secretary in a Unionist government dominated by the Tory party. Few in 1895 countenanced the overthrow of the British monarchy or imagined a bloody revolution that would plant the red flag amid the smoking ruins of Buckingham Palace.

In all these ways the new prince’s future seemed secure, but Prince Albert Frederick’s upbringing was little short of disastrous. A combination of circumstances robbed him of the consistently loving, intelligent support and guidance which should form the basis of childhood development. In a very real sense, his was a deprived childhood. To begin with, the Duke and Duchess of York had serious failings as parents. For those who remember them fondly as King George V and Queen Mary this may be difficult to accept. George V is recalled as a bluff, kindly, plain-spoken monarch, the embodiment of good sense, a father-figure to his people; Queen Mary, upright and alert, embodied family respectability and patriotic devotion, and was an emblem of stability amid much change.

All of this is true enough; it did not, however, make the Duke and Duchess of York good parents. Frances Donaldson, in her biography of Edward VIII, has even gone so far as to say that the couple “were for different reasons temperamentally unsuited to parenthood”.6

The future George V, though amiable with the children of others, and a devoted father to his own children in that he watched carefully over their development and bathed and played with them when they were babies, was far too ready to criticise and control them. In part, the problem lay in his excessive respect for discipline and order. The naval career that had been cut short by the premature death of his elder brother the Duke of Clarence in 1892 had encouraged his passion for tidiness and hard work, and made him later inclined to see his children as the potentially mutinous crew of an unseaworthy vessel. George V’s obsession with the formalities of dress, with doing things in the “correct” way, was an indication of a narrowness of outlook that sprang both from his strong belief in tradition and from feelings of intellectual inadequacy. He read very little and showed scant interest in artistic or cultural matters.

In addition to his need to control his children, he also gave way all too easily to fits of temper. He was, particularly as a young man, impetuous and unrestrained in giving vent to his feelings. So much so that his wife found it difficult “to stand between [the children] and the sudden gusts of their father’s wrath”.7 Apart from these unpredictable outbursts, George V frequently hauled his children before him for formal rebukes, many of which added yet another “Don’t” to an already lengthy list. The Duke of Windsor was one of the chief recipients of such rebukes, and recalled in his autobiography that nothing would ever be so “disconcerting to the spirit”8 as the message delivered by a footman that his father wished to see him in the library.

George V may have had a deliberate policy of intimidating his children, particularly his sons. The evidence is confused, but Harold Nicolson probably came nearest the mark when he recorded in his diary:

At dinner I sit next to Cromer. He makes interesting points about George V.1 He believed that Princes ought to be brought up in fear of their father: “I was always frightened of my father; they must be frightened of me.”9

At the very least, it seems clear that George V could be a very forbidding father and one likely to undermine the self-confidence of his offspring. It has been said, on the other hand, that he got on well with other people’s children. This is not the impression given by his grandson, the Earl of Harewood, in his recently published memoirs The Tongs and the Bones. Recalling his childhood contact with the King he wrote:

We saw our royal relations comparatively often and regarded them therefore with awe rather than dread, though my grandfather the King found it so easy to find fault with anyone that what was probably a basic kindness was quite lost in his gruff exterior, added to which the ritual good morning and goodnight peck had to be offered to a beard of astonishing abrasiveness. I don’t think he really cared much for children and he had a positive mania for punctuality.

The only person who was allowed to be late for anything, even breakfast, was apparently my mother, who was of course his only daughter, and whose instincts must have been similar to those of her two grandmothers, Queen Alexandra and the Duchess of Teck, each of whom was capable of being up to a couple of hours late for meals, which must have been astonishing even in Victorian times.

We used at Windsor to come down at nine o’clock to breakfast, not to eat – we’d done that – but to play, visibly of course but if possible inaudibly. The King had an African Grey parrot called Charlotte of which he was very fond, it sat at a table by his side eating seeds or the apple core he gave it, sometimes perching on people’s hands, including my mother’s. Like all parrots, it clung on hard and we were scared of those pinching claws and that awesome beak so that my grandfather shouted: “The parrot will see that child’s nervous – make him keep still.…”10

The possibility of getting something wrong was, where my grandfather was concerned, raised to heights of extreme probability, and our visits to Windsor for Easter usually provided their quota of uneasy moments. In 1931 he had been dangerously ill and was terrified of...