Darling Georgie (16 page)

The exterior consisted of black-and-white Elizabethan gables mixed haphazardly with Gothic turrets, pebbledash stucco and local stone, with several small more or less useless, non-functioning balconies. The interior of the cottage, although reasonably large, was little better. Most of the rooms were small and dark and furnished rather gloomily in the unattractive suburban style of the day. The Prince’s sitting-room was particularly dark, because its windows were obscured by a laurel.

Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, recalls in her memoirs (Athlone, 1966) that she would stay regularly with her Uncle George and her sister-in-law Princess May at York Cottage.

It was a poky and inconvenient place, architecturally repulsive and always full of the smell of cooking. George adored it, but then he had the only comfortable room in the house, which was called the ‘library’, though it contained very few books. The décor of this room was hideous. The walls were lined with a red material worn by Zouaves! Uncle George’s much treasured guns were on display in a glass-doored cabinet. He was one of the best shots in England and I think his love of York Cottage was in great measure the outcome of his passion for shooting. The drawing room was small enough when only two adults occupied it – but after tea, when five children were crammed into it as well, it became a veritable bedlam.

The cottage was also too small for live-in staff, but its disadvantages were partly compensated for by its surroundings. It was a novel situation for the happy couple to have a home of their own and they enjoyed the experience. It was not long, however, before Princess May realized that Prince George was entirely indifferent to his surroundings. Having spent so long in the Navy, a house to him seemed to be nothing more than a place to stay in between voyages. He liked the size of the rooms, many of them not much larger than ships’ cabins.

Princess May saw her home in a different light. Her interest in it was that of a bride looking to build the nest in which she could bring up a family. In marrying a Prince of the realm, she had not considered that she would be condemned to life in an overcrowded ship’s cabin. Neither had she considered that Prince George would furnish the house himself and in a style which she found totally unacceptable. The Prince, with his father and his eldest sister Princess Louise, had bought all the fabrics, carpets and wallpapers from Maples which was noted for its ‘modern’ furniture. Princess May was given no say in how her new home would look and she found herself living in a house in which many of the
paintings were replicas and nearly all the furniture reproduction.

Prince George, who had been brought up in the shadow of an older brother destined to be King, was not himself an ‘original’. He was the second son, it was the unexpected death of his brother that had made him heir presumptive to the throne and he had even taken his brother’s place at the altar. Throughout his life he had been a replacement and destined always to be number two. Prince George was not his wife’s first choice, and neither was Princess May his.

From this false start the Prince and the Princess were to jockey with each other over the next few years for first place. Princess May had an additional rival to contend with. She found herself living next door to a woman still in love with her husband.

A
T FIRST
P
RINCE
George and Princess May, a country boy and a sophticated girl, seemed to have little in common. The Prince’s main interests, other than stamp-collecting, took place outside the home, whereas the Princess preferred life indoors amongst the artefacts and
objets
which were often reflections of her family background. She loved her new home, arranging it and rearranging it in an effort to make it more attractive. While the Prince’s home life had been interrupted by his two years aboard
Britannia,
followed by a further three years on the
Bacchante,
Princess May’s life had been similarly disrupted when her parents left London, which they could not afford, for Florence, but at least Princess May’s move to Italy provided her with a new interest centred around the paintings and the architecture of the city.

Prince George, a Victorian English gentleman, while well acquainted with the world geographically knew little about its culture. Princess May, a typical English rose, had yet to bloom. The personality of the Prince allowed him to play his ceremonial roles without difficulty. The personality of the Princess demanded that she involve herself in all matters relating to the arts and, unusually for her time, the needs of women. On his marriage the Prince was a dutiful and highly disciplined naval officer. When the Princess married she had little experience of life other than that which she had learned from nineteenth-century literature. The press eulogized her intellectual attributes and informed their readers that ‘no young lady of the present day … is more thoroughly grounded in the English classics, or more happily at home in modern literature than is our future Queen’. She was described also as a brilliant linguist and familiar with the works of Goethe and Schiller. When Prince George set up home with his new bride he
expected life to continue as before. When Princess May pledged her troth to a potentially wealthy Prince of the realm she anticipated a radical change in her life-style and hoped perhaps that she might be able to remedy some of the more obvious defects in her husband’s education.

For one accustomed to life at sea, running a home might seem little different from running a ship. At the age of twelve Prince George had been expected to look after himself, to carry out running repairs to his clothing, to prepare simple meals and to batten down the hatches when navigating difficult waters. At the same time, however, he had also been provided with a valet and other attendants. He was like the other cadets but different from them. He was special. He had special privileges. A special cabin to be shared only with his brother. He had been a special child and had a special mother, albeit one who had let her son leave home with scarcely a word of protest. He had been trained to live by the rules and not to question them, and he expected others to do the same. But in his rule book nothing was as it seemed. His mother wrote love letters to him, and his father loved other women. He had been sent away to become independent but had been provided with servants. He had adapted to life without parents but remained dependent upon their approval, as he was later to depend on the approval of his wife and his subjects. He was expected to become a parent, but he had role models whose attitudes to him were at best confusing.

Princess May had lived by more flexible rules and continued to do so. But her role models were as confusing as her husband’s. Like Prince George she had a dominant mother and a weak father, but unlike Prince George she was entirely in control of her feelings. She found no difficulty in identifying with her dominant mother and looked forward, with a crusading zeal, to shaping the Prince’s behaviour to correspond more closely with her own. Princess May was acutely aware of her husband’s educational deficiencies. The comment that ‘his planned education ended just where and when it should seriously have begun. [He was] below the educational and perhaps intellectual standard of the ordinary public school educated country squire’ (Gore, 1941) encapsulates the problem that Princess May decided she would attempt to remedy. She took it upon herself to continue
her husband’s education by reading to him and conversing with him in French and German.

Prince George, a resourceful and essentially a practical man, looked after the interests of those who were dependent upon him and, in return, he expected that his own dependent needs be satisfied. His employees, like him, had been brought up to know their place and like him they expected to do as they were told. The Prince could give as well as he had got. A physical, rather than a cerebral man, he had probably survived his fragmented childhood for being so. Had he been more thoughtful and introspective he might have coped less well with the stresses of his reign.

Women had as yet played only a small part in Prince George’s life. He noted in his diary that a year or so before his marriage he had ‘shared’ a girlfriend with his brother in St John’s Wood. It has been suggested that the two brothers were kept so short of money that they could afford only one girl between them. It seems more likely that where the sexually adventurous Eddy would lead the more timid George would follow. His two brief emotional forays, the first with his cousin Marie and the second with his childhood friend Julie Stonor, had also been abortive and he soon turned his back on them. Women seemed not to need him and he would have no need of them. He would emulate instead his father’s passion for shooting and, with a firm grip on his gun, make a life for himself. He was, above all, unaware of a woman’s nesting instinct and her need to furnish her own home. He believed that in preparing the cottage with the help of his mother for his wife’s arrival he had saved Princess May the trouble of decorating it herself.

Princess May was distressed that she had not been given the opportunity to choose her own decorations but deemed it inappropriate to complain. Like her husband, she had also brought some emotional baggage to the marriage. She needed to be admired not only for her appearance but for her intellectual qualities. As a child she had relied on the education she had had with Mademoiselle Bricka to compensate for her material deficits, and from her she had learned that for a woman who had little to fall back on financially education was an asset.

Before her marriage, while she was considering whether she wanted to spend her life on the Sandringham estate, Princess May could not have anticipated Prince George’s controlling personality. Life at York Cottage had to proceed at his pace. Used to being the captain of a tight ship, and not knowing any other way, he expected to continue in the same manner in his home. Princess May, wise beyond her years, struggled to play the role imposed upon her by her husband and knew that if their relationship was not to be emotionally sterile she must proceed slowly. Unwilling to reproach her husband for fear of rocking the boat of a marriage as yet barely afloat, she looked around her for a scapegoat. It was not long before she found one.

In the early days of her marriage it was the close proximity of her mother-in-law that troubled Princess May the most. She wrote in her journal: ‘I sometimes think that just after we were married we were not left alone enough and this led to many little rubs which might have been avoided.’ She soon began to realize that Princess Alexandra believed that there was room for one Princess only at Sandringham. Any change in York Cottage had to be approved by ‘Georgie dear’s’ mother who often arrived uninvited, daughters and dogs in attendance, and felt herself free to criticize not only her daughter-in-law’s home but the marriage. Princess Alexandra made it clear from the beginning that she resented Princess May for taking ‘Georgie dear’ away from her. It was understandable resentment from a woman whose philandering husband had left her with only the comfort of her children. It was no consolation to Princess May to discover that Princess Alexandra was just as demanding of her two unmarried daughters as she was of her son and his new wife. She had already made it plain that she would not allow Princess Victoria, who was anyway considered insufficiently attractive to find a husband, to marry. The Princess was told that she was needed at home to look after her mother. Princess Maude had had a few suitors, but her mother always found reasons to send them away. Both girls had at first been fond of Princess May, but they soon began to resent her and envy her the marital status to which they themselves aspired but which they were prevented by their mother from achieving.

The royal biographer John Gore, very conscious of the rights of women and particularly sensitive to what Princess May was going through, looked back at the early years of the royal marriage. In his personal memoir of King George and Queen Mary he writes: ‘Sometimes the Duchess’s intellectual life there [at York Cottage] may have been starved and her energies atrophied in those early years. For she came from a younger more liberal generation, with far more serious notions of woman’s spheres of usefulness, and very strong ideas of the responsibilities demanded of the first ladies of the realm. For many women, then and now, the daily call to follow the shooters, to watch the killing, however faultless, to take always a cheerful appreciative part in man-made, man-valued amusements, must have been answered at the sacrifice of many cherished, constructive and liberal ambitions’ (Gore, 1941).

Prince George was almost certainly unaware of the growing disharmony within his family. Since the season had begun soon after the wedding, much of his time was spent shooting. The Prince, who was becoming increasingly obsessional, had taken to wearing a pedometer and recording the distance he walked during a day’s shooting. His average was somewhere between eleven and twelve miles. Despite some of the more irritating incidents that marred the honeymoon period for his wife, he at least was happy. He wrote to an old naval friend, Flag-Lieutenant Bryan Godfrey-Faussett, on 16 July 1893: ‘I can hardly yet realise that I am a married man, although I have been so for the last 10 days. All I can say is that I am intensely happy, far happier than I ever thought I could be with anybody.’ He went on to tell his friend how contented he was to be spending his honeymoon in the ‘charming little cottage’ that his father had given him, describing it as a haven of peace ‘after all we went through in London’.

After living for so long at sea, Prince George found himself in an alien environment. He was certainly happy at York Cottage because the rooms reminded him of the small cabins that he was used to, but he was at first embarrassed to find himself alone with a cultured adult woman. Such was the strength of Princess May’s personality, however, and her obvious
desire to make the relationship work, that within a very short time he fell in love with her, and he remained in love with her for the rest of his life. His feelings for his wife were reciprocated. On 9 July 1893, during the first week of the honeymoon, Princess May wrote to Mademoiselle Bricka to tell her how she was feeling. ‘Georgie is a dear … he adores me which is touching. He likes reading to people so I jumped at this & he is going to read me some of his favourite books … I am very glad I am married and I don’t feel at all strange.’ The Princess told Mademoiselle Bricka that she felt as if she had been married ‘for years’ but thought the cottage too small, although she was certain that she would be able to do something with it.