King Edward VIII

Early in 1919 his epileptic brother, Prince John, finally died. The young invalid’s always frail grasp on reason had been failing rapidly and it had been obvious for some months that he could not survive for long. The Prince of Wales hardly knew him; saw him as little more than a regrettable nuisance. He wrote to his mother a letter of chilling insensitivity. She did not reply but he heard from others how much he had hurt her. He was conscience-stricken. ‘I feel such a cold hearted and unsympathetic swine for writing all that I did …’ he told the Queen. ‘No one can realize more than you how little poor Johnnie meant to me who hardly knew him … I can feel so much for you, darling Mama, who was his mother.’59 His overture was gratefully received. At first she had thought his attitude a little hard-hearted, she confessed, but now felt that he was only taking the common-sense view.60 The King fully shared his attitude: ‘the greatest mercy possible,’ he called John’s death, his youngest son had been spared endless suffering.61

Stamfordham had urged the King to bring the Prince back to London in the winter of 1917. ‘Time is slipping away and these years are valuable and important ones in His Royal Highness’s life. He should be mixing with leading men other than soldiers, doing some useful reading and gradually getting accustomed to speaking in public.’62 Cavan concurred. Then suddenly the Italian line collapsed. German troops, set free by the collapse of Russian resistance, had come to the aid of their Austrian allies and quickly turned the tide of the campaign. It seemed that Italy might be knocked out of the war if British and French reinforcements were not rushed south. The 14th Army Corps was chosen for the task. Cavan pleaded that if the Prince of Wales accompanied the Corps the moral effect in Italy would be great. Against this, he had to admit that the Corps might arrive too late to save the Italians, in which case anything might happen and the risk to the Prince be considerable.63 The King decided the risk must be run and by 8 November the Prince had joined the Corps HQ at Mantua. ‘… and here we stay indefinitely,’ he told Lady Coke. ‘The whole show is the vaguest thing on record and we know nothing of our future … as it all depends on where the Italians stop the Huns.’64

At first it was uncertain whether the Italians would stop the Huns at all. The Prince arrived in time to see the wreckage of the Italian 2nd Army retreating by way of Treviso and Padua. It was a kind of mobile warfare which he had never witnessed, and even though the allied forces were patently coming off worst, he found it irresistibly exciting: ‘This is real campaigning, not the stale old warfare in Flanders, and it’s all a great experience for me.’65 His initial opinion of the Italian armies could hardly have been less favourable: ‘contemptible soldiers,’ he described them, who didn’t understand the elements of modern warfare and retreated so fast that the enemy was unable to keep contact with them.66 Inevitably his opinion changed when the Italians made a stand: ‘fine stout-hearted fellows’ they then became, though of course ‘one mustn’t forget that they are a Latin race!!’67 He complained about those French and British officers who criticized the Italians too overtly, and though he referred to them privately as ‘Ice-creamers’, was at pains to speak of them politely in public. But a constant refrain of his diary and letters was the superiority of the French, Britain’s leading and natural ally. ‘They are a grand people, the French, and I’m more fond of them than ever now,’ he told the King; ‘what a far finer and nicer nation than the Italians. If only they had a monarchy!!!!’68

His views of Italian cuisine and culture were as jaundiced as of their military prowess. He could not stand macaroni, spaghetti or Chianti and hadn’t seen a single pretty woman, he told Lady Coke, so ‘I’m rather off Italy just now’.69 The monuments were little better: Mantua was ‘a deadly dull and antiquated little town’, Bologna had lots of picturesque buildings ‘tho I can’t say that I spent much time looking at them’; the Veronese paintings in the Villa Giacometti were ‘interesting as being over 300 years old … but I can’t say that actually they appeal to me enormously, and are, of course, typically Italian’.70

He was more impressed by Rome, which he visited in May 1918 to attend the celebrations of the third anniversary of the Italian declaration of war (a cause for jollification which the Prince was not alone in thinking somewhat far-fetched). The main function took place in the Augusteum, and in the course of his speech the Italian President, Orlando, spoke of the Prince as having come to Italy to share their dangers and defend their country. ‘The whole audience rose, faced the Prince and cheered madly,’ Henry Lygon told the Queen.71 The Prince’s speech from the royal box was delivered, wrote the Ambassador, Sir James Rodd, ‘in a clear voice which carried well, with just a little touch of boyish shyness that went straight to the hearts of his audience’.72 Claud Hamilton told Lady Coke that he had done it very well, ‘everybody could easily hear him, he received a great ovation’.73 It was a period at which Hamilton was inclined to be critical of his employer so his judgment that the Prince ‘played his part better than I have ever seen him do before’ can be taken seriously. The Prince was no less ready to judge his own performances harshly but he told the King that he felt his visit had done some good and had helped cement the alliance with Italy; ‘it has been rather a trying week but very interesting and it has taught me a lot’.74 His parents were delighted by his achievements: the King told him how much he appreciated the excellent way he had carried out the visit, while the Queen wrote of his ‘wonderful success … I feel prouder of my dearest son than ever.’75

The King had objected to the proposal that the visit to Rome should include a call on the Pope but Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, insisted that this was essential.76 Dutifully, the Prince paraded at the Vatican. He was not greatly struck by what he saw: he found Pope Benedict XV unprepossessing in his appearance, ‘tho intelligent and well informed and he talks fairly decent French’. The Prince kept the conversation to generalities; ‘and I most certainly did not kiss his ring,’ he told the Queen proudly. ‘Nothing would have induced me to!!’77 This sturdy independence availed nothing with the Daily Express, who reported that the Prince ‘appeared to be greatly gratified by his visit’. Under the headline ‘Visit which should not have been made’, the Express condemned the King for not having stepped in to veto it.78 George V considered the report a direct attack on the Crown, all the worse because the proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, was a member of the government.79

‘Much tho one loathes the —— Huns, one can’t help admiring the way they are sticking out the war,’ the Prince wrote to King George V in October 1917.80 Their first offensive subsided, but there were signs that it was about to be renewed when the time came to celebrate the royal Silver Wedding in London. The last thing the Prince wanted was to become involved in what promised to be wearisome festivities. He persuaded Cavan to cable the King arguing that it would make a bad impression in Italy if the Prince left at so critical a moment.81 The King agreed, but little in the way of a German attack ensued, indeed, within a few weeks the enemy lines were crumbling all across Europe.

The war was clearly ending. The plan had been for the Prince to spend three months at the end of 1918 taking a staff course at Cambridge, but with time running out Haig pleaded that he should instead visit the Dominion and American troops in France. The King left the final decision to his son, who had been looking forward to three relatively easy months at home. ‘Of course I never hesitated as to what was the right thing,’ the Prince wrote. ‘… one has to sink one’s personal feelings and wishes on these occasions.’82 He was being disingenuous as well as priggish; Cambridge might have been enjoyable but nothing would have induced him to leave the continent with final victory so close.

He hoped that he would be able to visit the Dominion forces with a minimum of fuss. He was quickly disabused by Lord Stamfordham. The Prince of Wales could not visit Canadian or Anzac troops un-officially: ‘On the contrary these visits … have an undoubted political significance and may have far-reaching effects upon the Empire and Crown. You will be there as … Heir to the Throne and every word and deed will have its own particular influence.’ Pressmen would follow him everywhere and the coverage they gave him would affect the reception he received when he visited the Dominions after the war. He would be constantly in the public eye.83 It was a melancholy reminder to the Prince that with the armistice a new form of penal servitude would begin and that this time the sentence would be for life.

The Canadians were the first on whom he called. He was euphoric about his reception. ‘They are great lads these old “Knucks”,’ he told Joey Legh, ‘real, husky stout-hearted fellows for whom I’ve a great admiration.’84 He was overwhelmed by their cheerfulness and friendly informality: ‘How I wish I had been across to Canada, and living amongst them makes me just long to go there.’85 His only complaint was that they tended to assume that they had done all the serious fighting and to speak with some disdain of the ‘Imperial’ or British troops. ‘Still, I just don’t listen when they talk like that, it’s only really a pose and the best fellows never talk like that.’86 A report from an unidentified Canadian colonel somehow found its way into the Windsor archives. The Prince, it read, ‘had been the best force in real Empire building that it was possible for Great Britain to have, because he absolutely won the hearts of the many he came in contact with. As they put it, he was every inch the gentleman and sportsman, so simple, so charming and so genuine …’87 Even allowing for hyperbole, he seems to have made himself uncommonly well liked.

The armistice was signed while the Prince was with the Canadian Corps. ‘I feel it can’t be more than a marvellous dream and I still feel in a sort of trance,’ he told the Queen. ‘But I suppose I shall soon wake up to the fact that it all really is true.’88 It was soon time for him to move on. ‘I don’t think my month with the Australians will be so pleasant somehow,’ the Prince had written, when his love of all things Canadian was at its height. ‘These Canadians are so much more English and refined.’89 His first reaction, indeed, was to find the Australian troops somewhat shy and rough, but ‘that’s because they live so far from England’, he concluded charitably.90 It did not take him long to decide that he liked them enormously, and they seem to have responded quite as warmly. ‘The Prince has won the hearts of the Australians,’ General Rawlinson told Wigram. His stay had been an unqualified success; he would be fervently welcomed in Australia; not just because he was Prince of Wales ‘but as a personal matter between the soldiers and himself’. The Prince was nervous about his forthcoming visit to General Pershing, Rawlinson went on, ‘but it is both right and necessary for him to be with the Americans for a period’.91

The Prince had in fact long been anxious to see something of Pershing and the 2nd US Army. In common with most British he had been quick to denounce the ‘rotten Americans’ who sat back and let the allies do the fighting. ‘They said they were “too proud to fight”; I have never heard such rot!! Of course it is their game to keep out of it.’92 But once they were in the war, his enthusiasm for their efficiency and fighting qualities rapidly grew. They welcomed him rapturously at their headquarters at Coblenz and put twenty thousand men on parade to honour him, making some of them march twenty-five miles for this privilege. The Prince professed mild surprise: ‘How far more democratic we really are, and the American discipline is really fearfully strict.’93 Yet the spirit of the men, the quality of the drill and turnout, the immense vitality and exuberance, impressed him profoundly. ‘They are a big power in the world now,’ he told his father, ‘I might say the next biggest after ourselves, and they are worth while making real friends with … I’m just crammed full of American ideas just now, and they want me to “go over to them” as soon as possible, which is another item for consideration and one that should not be “pigeon-holed”.’94

His time with the Australians and Americans took him into occupied Germany. He found himself billeted at Bonn in the home of the Kaiser’s sister, Vicky, Princess of Schaumburg-Lippe, and was outraged to find photographs of his family displayed in the principal rooms – ‘I feel so ashamed, however one is consoled by the thought that we’ve “cut them right out” for ever!!’ He was still more annoyed when the Princess addressed him as ‘dear’ and told him that the Germans would have been able to continue the war for several years but for the revolution. Rather grudgingly he admitted that she seemed ‘a nice enough woman for a Hun’, no doubt because she was ‘one third English’.95*4

He had no doubt that the Germans must be ruthlessly crushed and complained to the King about the ‘idiotically mild and lenient treatment of this —— Hun population. No one,’ he claimed, with more justice than usually accompanies such a boast, ‘is more against a bullying spirit than I am, as that would only place us on the same level as the Huns … But we are not making these Huns feel that they are beaten … There is no danger of serious fraternization as, thank goodness, the infantry and in fact all the men, still loathe the Huns and despise them. Of course, as regards the women, well all women in the world are made the same way, whether German or Japanese or any race you like, so that isn’t fraternization, it’s medicinal …’96 The spirit behind these words was neither magnanimous nor far-sighted. It was, however, shared by almost every junior officer, indeed by every soldier, in the allied armies. They read curiously in the light of later charges that he had been pro-German from his childhood and thus an easy convert to Nazi doctrines.

‘I just don’t know what’s happened to me since “this ’ere armistice”,’ the Prince told Joey Legh in mid-December. ‘I’m so mad and restless that I can’t sit down to think and write.’97 Sitting down and thinking was never to be one of his favoured activities, but the end of the war found him exceptionally agitated. He knew that what he was doing was of value, and did not dislike doing it, but at the same time he itched to escape from his military harness and address himself to his real profession. ‘I know that there is an enormous amount of work waiting for me in England, that is really why I’m so anxious to return and to “get down to it”,’ he told his father. Whether he would find the work tolerable once he had embarked on it, he did not know, but it was his future and he had better confront it now than later. He was more than ready for a change: ‘This makes the 6th Division I’ve visited in under a fortnight and it is wearing work.’98

He felt qualms about his ability to do the job ahead of him but also believed that he had qualifications lacking in any previous Prince of Wales and, still more, in King George V. There can be few sons in the same line of business as their father who do not from time to time believe that they have a monopoly of prescience and the spirit of progressiveness. The Prince was convinced that his father had failed to come to terms with the realities of the post-war world. In this belief he was fortified by the Queen. ‘I sadly fear Papa does not yet realize how many changes this war will have brought about,’ his mother wrote apprehensively.99 She did less than justice to the King, who could hardly have failed to notice the maelstrom which threatened to consume the heartlands of Europe. Bolshevik revolution had triumphed in Russia and was now rampant in Germany. ‘It all makes one feel anxious about the future,’ wrote the King; ‘all this sort of thing is very infectious, although thank God everything seems to be all right in this dear old country.’100 The Prince was very doubtful whether all was right in Britain, or at least whether all would continue to be right once the euphoria of victory had subsided.

He was certain that he understood the fears and aspirations of his future people far better than his father ever would and at least as well as any from the despised legion of politicians. His years with the Army had given him an opportunity denied to any other prince of getting to know the common man. This knowledge was, in part at least, illusory. He could never shed the prejudices of his caste and generation. When he heard that two of his closest friends had been transferred to the front line, he wrote that he hoped it was not true, ‘as we must have a few “gentlemen” left after the war … I’m afraid that’s rather a snobbish thing to say, tho’ I mean it, and so I suppose I’m a snob!!!!’101 He never doubted that, by training as well as breeding, ‘gentlemen’ were best qualified to run the country.

But unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not believe that the country was made for gentlemen. He knew that the men who had fought for Britain deserved more from society than they had enjoyed in the years before the war: better pay, better houses, better education for their children and treatment for their sicknesses. If their rulers failed to provide such treatment then they were not worthy to be rulers, were indeed not worthy of the title of ‘gentlemen’. His creed was simpliste perhaps, but it was generous and sincerely held. The war had left him a more thoughtful, socially conscious and open-minded man. At the end of May 1919 he received the Freedom of the City of London. Talking of his life as a soldier he told his audience:

The part I played was, I fear, a very insignificant one, but from one point of view I shall never regret my periods of service overseas. In those four years I mixed with men. In those four years I found my manhood. When I think of the future, and the heavy responsibilities which may fall to my lot, I feel that the experience gained since 1914 will stand me in good stead.102

On the whole, it did.

5

L’Éducation Sentimentale

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, THAT A SINGLE man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. When that man is not only in possession of a good fortune but is heir to the throne of Great Britain, the want becomes imperious necessity. From the moment the Prince of Wales advanced into adolescence, the need to find him a suitable wife began to preoccupy the King and Queen, their advisers, and increasingly the Prince himself.

Traditionally, spouses for the royal children were drawn from the courts of Europe, most of which were intricately bound together in a great web of cousinship that was the delight of genealogists and the despair of less well-equipped historians. This avoided not only adulteration of the blood royal but also the embarrassment involved in raising any individual noble family above the others by admitting it to relationship with the throne. When Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, married the future Duke of Argyll, the precedent was felt by many to be a dangerous one. Certainly such a match would never have done for a likely occupant of the throne. If the Prince of Wales, when young, did not share this view, he kept his doubts to himself. Whether he would have married Princess May must be uncertain, but that he would in the end have married some European princess is highly probable.

Then came the First World War, and in an instant many of the possible brides were transformed into enemy aliens. An already difficult problem became almost insoluble. ‘I hope some day you will find the woman who will make you happy!’ Queen Mary wrote to her eldest son, ‘but I fear this will not be easy as so much will have to be considered.’1 The Prince was not over-worried by the inevitable delays. Physically slow to mature, he enjoyed the companionship of women but felt no strong urge to consummate the relationship. ‘I hope you are home by now,’ he wrote to a Grenadier friend in May 1916, ‘and having a jolly good time and are appeasing your sexual hunger, which I more than understand, tho’ don’t actually experience it myself, strange to say.’2 With some fellow officers he visited a brothel in Calais and watched naked prostitutes striking a series of what were considered to be erotic attitudes. ‘A perfectly filthy and revolting sight,’ he called it, ‘but interesting for me as it was my first insight into these things!!’3

A little later all was changed. Towards the end of 1916 his equerries, Claud Hamilton and Joey Legh, decided that his virginity had been unhealthily protracted, took him to Amiens, gave him an excellent dinner with much wine, and entrusted him to the experienced hands of a French prostitute called Paulette. ‘She brushed aside his extraordinary shyness,’ recorded Lord Esher, to whom the Prince recounted a censored version of his experience.4 Paulette herself was permanently attached to an officer of the Royal Flying Corps and only on loan to the Prince for that and a few subsequent evenings, but she did her job with tact and skill. ‘A heavenly little woman of the kind,’ the Prince described her.5 From that moment, sex became one of the Prince’s most urgent preoccupations. ‘Oh! to set eyes on one of the darlings again,’ he wrote in anguish from the front in France, ‘how one does miss them, and I don’t think of anything but women now, tho what’s the use?’6 At Sandringham, in January 1917, they sang in the drawing room after dinner and the Prince then settled down to his crochet work. ‘What an occupation for a fellow on leave!!’ he complained in his diary. Shooting pheasants was as empty a pastime as patience or crocheting: ‘I can’t raise much enthusiasm over … anything except women!!’7

His new pursuit sometimes proved hazardous. In Paris, in July 1917, he spent ‘3 days bliss’ which disturbed him so profoundly that he was quite unable to settle down and write letters for several days afterwards: ‘It’s fearful what a change in my habits 48 hours of the married life in Paris has wrought.’8 Unfortunately his inability to write letters did not extend to Maggy, the object of his passions, and when he tried to disentangle himself he found that his emotional effusions were held against him. ‘I got a regular stinker from her this evening …’ he ruefully told Joey Legh. ‘Oh! those bloody letters, and what a fool I was not to take your advice over a year ago!! How I curse myself now, tho’ if only I can square this case it will be the last one, as she’s the only pol I’ve really written to and the last!! … I’m afraid she’s the £100,000 or nothing type, tho’ I must say I’m disappointed and didn’t think she’d turn nasty: of course the whole trouble is my letters and she’s not burnt one!!’9 The Prince never lost his touching belief that if one asked a woman to burn a letter, she would infallibly do so. Some of his correspondents seem to have done so, more did not. Maggy, however, proved that he had been right in his first judgment of her; having given her delinquent lover a nasty fright she let the matter drop.

Paulette and Maggy were excellent fun for a night or two. He was long in losing his taste for these diversions and planned to continue them once the war was over. But he did not delude himself that such affairs had anything to do with love, still less with matrimony. Until Mrs Simpson entered and monopolized his life he never found casual sex incompatible with a grand passion; indeed the first seemed sometimes positively to enhance the second. From the age of twenty-two or so until the day he died he was never out of love, occasionally with two women at the same time, far more often obsessively with one.

His first great love, almost certainly unconsummated, was for Marion Coke, wife of Viscount ‘Tommy’ Coke, heir to the Earl of Leicester. Small and vivacious, fond of much laughter, song and dance, she provided a delectable relief after the sombre splendours of the Palace. At first it was ‘Marion is a little dear’, always ready for a ‘delightful talk’; then she became ‘a little darling and I’m afraid I love her’; then, ‘Marion is heavenly and I love her more and more’.10 In 1917, by which time he had discovered that women were not solely for delightful talks, he became more ardent. ‘Dear Lady Coke’ had long given way to ‘Dear Marion’, now she became ‘My dearest Marion’. (‘By the way, of course I burn all your letters as I’m sure you do mine,’ he concluded one such letter,11 though Marion proved as unreliable as Maggy when it came to this searching test.) ‘How can I express to you all I feel about it or thank you for everything?’ he asked after his leave in London had proved particularly enjoyable. ‘C’est impossible, tho’ you know how much I long to and do in my thoughts. You have been too angelically kind to me for words and have absolutely changed my life; it is so wonderful to feel I have someone I can really confide in as you have let me do!! In your own words, “You now have your little M C” absolutely expresses my feelings and it does make all the difference as you may imagine.’12