George VI and Elizabeth, page 6
In August of the following year, their grandfather, Edward VII, was crowned in Westminster Abbey. Princes Edward and Albert, wearing costumes of royal tartan kilts and dress tunics, sat in the royal box with their minders, Finch and Hansell. Then aged eight and seven, the boys “fidgeted and whispered incessantly but watched with awe their father do homage to the newly crowned king.”
The world outside the bubble of royal childhood at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was of no consequence to Prince Albert. Britain was riding a wave of industrial strength powered by a global empire that stretched across eleven million square miles and encompassed four hundred million people. In its South African colony, war broke out with rebellious Dutch settlers that ended in British victory. Otherwise, its relations were peaceful with a European continent ruled by twenty monarchs.
Whenever Bertie and his siblings joined their parents in London, he took dancing classes—with emphasis on Highland reels, waltzes, and polkas—and singing lessons at Marlborough House, where they moved in April 1903 when Edward VII and Alexandra relocated to Buckingham Palace. At the Bath Club, an elegant gentlemen’s club in Mayfair, he and Prince Edward learned to swim and play racquet sports. Hansell did his best to enrich their dry curriculum with sightseeing trips to the Tower of London and museum exhibitions, as well as cricket matches at Lord’s and the Oval.
Albert plodded through five years of Hansell’s tedious lessons until he reached the age of thirteen in December 1908. As the second son, he was destined to follow George V’s career in the Royal Navy. Was he ready for naval training? Not particularly, either by temperament or by experience. That didn’t matter to his dictatorial father. In his final report on Bertie’s academic achievement, Hansell vaguely pegged him as a “scatter-brain” in need of “a shove.” But he was unequivocal in sizing up Bertie’s character: As “a very straight and honourable boy, very kind hearted and generous,” he was “sure to be popular with other boys.”
“When he felt at ease in the company of others, his stutter diminished.”
Prince Albert at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in 1911.
THREE
Stuck in Sick Bay
Bertie showed admirable pluck when he successfully tackled the entrance examinations for the fledgling junior Royal Naval College on the grounds of Osborne House. He enrolled in January 1909, two years after his brother David, who was destined to be king, not a naval officer.
It was a shock to the system for both brothers, but less so for the confident and gregarious Prince Edward. Neither of them had competed with peers, and most of the other boys had already spent four years at boarding schools. Albert was acutely homesick. His stammer was aggravated by heightened anxiety and the inevitable taunting of the other cadets, who nicknamed him “Sardine” for his scrawny physique.
But within months, Bertie’s essential goodness and “never say I’m beaten” spirit won them over, as Hansell had predicted. He compensated for his inadequacy in team sports with his speed as a cross-country runner. His royal pedigree notwithstanding, he was appealingly down-to-earth. As Mabell Airlie had discovered, when he felt at ease in the company of others, his stutter diminished.
The cadets slept in unheated dormitories with iron beds and small chests for their belongings, and they followed a strict daily schedule that began with a plunge in a frigid pool. Albert was discomfited by living cheek by jowl in these conditions. The education was technical rather than classically academic: navigation, knot-tying, engineering, and the mathematics that had always bedeviled Bertie.
Infected with whooping cough at the end of the summer term in 1909, Albert missed the state visit of the czar of Russia, his father’s first cousin. But he was fortunate to be treated by a dynamic Scottish doctor, twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Louis Greig, who also happened to be an international sports legend for his prowess on the rugby pitch. Bertie took instantly to Greig’s cheerful encouragement. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship in which Greig would serve for six crucial years as a mentor and father figure. Tall and rugged, Greig would not only instill confidence in the timorous young prince but also rescue him from chronic illness and play a pivotal role in Bertie’s courtship of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon.
Nine months later, King Edward VII was dead at age sixty-eight from emphysema and heart failure, a victim of his chronic smoking. Alexandra smoked discreetly, as did Princess May, while Prince George inherited his father’s nicotine dependence and was constantly wreathed in smoke. It’s no wonder that starting as a teenager, Prince Albert would smoke one cigarette after another to tame his nerves. On his eighteenth birthday, his mother gave her blessing to his habit with a gift of a silver cigarette case. His daily intake was routinely around forty “gaspers.”
Bertie and David stood at attention atop the garden wall at Marlborough House as they watched their father proclaimed King George V in Friary Court at St. James’s Palace on May 9, 1910. They participated in an elaborate state funeral eleven days later. On an unusually hot day they wore their naval cadet uniforms and marched slowly behind their grandfather’s coffin up the hill at Windsor Castle to St. George’s Chapel. A month afterward, David, the next in line to the throne, was made Prince of Wales.
They witnessed the coronation of their father and mother in Westminster Abbey a year later, on June 22, 1911. On the King’s crowning, the Prince of Wales, who would turn seventeen the next day, lifted a coronet onto his own head and knelt before the throne to pay his homage. From the royal box, dressed in his naval cadet’s uniform, Prince Albert observed this ancient ritual, followed by emotional kisses on young Edward’s cheeks from George V.
The two princes were now handsome boys with delicately sculpted faces. The Prince of Wales was generally regarded as the better looking of the two. Each had an attractively turned-up nose and narrow blue eyes above high cheekbones. Albert’s mouth was more generous than Edward’s, with a hint of warmth that his brother lacked despite his charm. Edward’s eyes were steely, while Albert’s betrayed his sensitivity. Edward claimed to be five foot seven, but he was easily two inches shorter than Albert, who was five foot six at most.
Bertie had completed his studies at Osborne in December 1910, ranking sixty-eighth out of his class of sixty-eight. He was nevertheless admitted to the new Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where David was in his final year when Bertie arrived in January 1911. Bertie’s progress through Dartmouth over the following two years was no more distinguished than at Osborne. His final result after six terms was a disappointing sixty-first out of sixty-seven. George V reacted with equanimity to his second son’s setbacks, and his attitude generally softened as he witnessed his progress in other ways.
Bertie was developing into a fine shot on the grouse moors at Balmoral and the fields and woodlands at Sandringham, and he showed considerable skill at tennis. He also took seriously his preparation to be confirmed in the Church of England. He asked searching questions and developed a depth of faith that would be integral to his character. He regarded his confirmation on April 18, 1912, as a day “on which I took a great step in life.”
Prince Albert finished his naval training with a six-month cruise to the West Indies and Canada. For the first time in his life, he was on his own, without having to measure up to the magnetic and debonair brother who preceded him. Edward had already been sent to Magdalen College at Oxford, where he spent two years and hardly opened a book.
George V had taken a liking to Louis Greig, and he shrewdly arranged to have Bertie assigned to HMS Cumberland, where the Scotsman was the ship’s surgeon. Bertie was chronically seasick and gripped with insecurities, but he was determined to show his father he could succeed. He passed the exams to qualify as a midshipman, and he took on whatever task was asked of him, even lugging heavy bags of coal to the engine room.
Thirty-three-year-old Greig and eighteen-year-old Bertie solidified their friendship during these months on shipboard as well as ashore, where they went riding and played tennis. Bertie toured banana, cocoa, and sugar plantations, listened to talks on the science of irrigation, and saw oil wells in Trinidad. In Toronto and Quebec, he endured mandatory social functions. He was timorous around girls, finding refuge in corners so he wouldn’t be compelled to dance with strangers. He even touched down briefly in the United States for a tour of Niagara Falls. He groused that the Americans had “no manners at all and tried to take photographs all the time.”
Sir Martin Charteris, one of Queen Elizabeth II’s private secretaries, later likened Greig to a psychiatrist, saying, “he listened, he encouraged, he helped. He allowed Albert to help himself. He was the doctor who thought that he could set him right after a childhood with its own peculiarities. Louis was the right man in the right place to help him reach his potential.”
Prince Albert optimistically embarked on his naval career aboard HMS Collingwood in September 1913, while Louis Greig transferred to medical duty with the Royal Marines. As one of the midshipmen, also known as “snotties,” Bertie held the lowest rank on his ship. He learned to obey orders and perform all manner of menial tasks during a thirteen-thousand-mile cruise around the Mediterranean that took him to Gibraltar, Malta, Italy, Egypt, and Greece. When he came home to Sandringham at the end of December after his eighteenth birthday, he showed greater maturity behind his natural reserve.
Six months later, on June 28, 1914, Bertie was back on Collingwood off the isle of Portland in the English Channel when some disquieting news came through. The heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, had been killed in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia—a province of Austria-Hungary. The assassin was a fanatical member of a Serbian nationalist group that believed Bosnia actually belonged to Serbia. The Austrians had been fiercely at odds with the Serbs, who were actively trying to annex Bosnian territory on the southern border of the Austria-Hungarian empire. Franz Ferdinand was unpopular in Sarajevo, so his visit was especially ill-advised.
The assassination of his heir gave the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph the pretext to invade and dismember the small nation of Serbia, triggering a cascade of violent reactions among a complicated web of European alliances. The Germans, led by George V’s first cousin, the volatile and aggressively nationalistic Kaiser Wilhelm II, sided with Austria. The Russians, led by another first cousin of George V, Czar Nicholas II, backed their ally Serbia and tumbled into war with Germany and Austria. Having significantly built up its army and navy, Germany then seized the opportunity to launch an assault on France, which was aligned by treaty with Russia. Among other motivations, Germany was eager to encroach on the French and British colonial empires.
The German invasion of France first blazed through Belgium—a meticulously premeditated plan that the high command had been preparing for years. At that point, Britain honored its treaties with Belgium and France and went to war on their behalf against Germany and Austria-Hungary on August 4. What had begun as a bilateral skirmish between Austria and Serbia exploded into a world war that would drag on for four years and claim the lives of more than nine million combatants and thirteen million civilians. As military men and materiel flooded across Europe, it was hard to imagine that only fourteen years earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm had held his grandmother, Queen Victoria, as she lay dying.
Britain reacted to the onset of war with giddy excitement. Crowds surged to Buckingham Palace in a show of support for King George V and Queen Mary, who came to the Palace balcony three times. The cause seemed honorable, and nearly everyone assumed the war would be short; some said it could be over by Christmas.
The men rushing to enlist included the Prince of Wales, who escaped Oxford to train with the Grenadier Guards. The army waived the minimum height of six feet in the Grenadiers’ King’s Company, making the prince “a pygmy among giants.” In November 1914, he reported for staff duty at the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force in France.
At first, George V failed to grasp the implications of events escalating rapidly across the Channel. Writing to Bertie a week before Britain declared war, he lamented that he had to give up the Goodwood races, and that his annual yachting at Cowes might be canceled. By August 4, the gravity of the situation had sunk in. King George V wrote in his diary, “Please God it may soon be over & that he will protect dear Bertie’s life.”
That month marked the onset of a more personal battle for Prince Albert that would persist throughout the war, bringing recurrent physical agony and mental anguish. His incessant seasickness was the least of it. He was now seized regularly with what were described as “gastric attacks.”
Bertie described his initial illness as a “violent pain in the stomach” so severe he could scarcely breathe. After being transferred to a hospital ship on a stretcher, he was hoisted by a crane to shore in his hospital bed. Two weeks later, he underwent an appendectomy at a hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland. He returned to London in October 1914 and shuttled between Buckingham Palace and Sandringham. Waves of pain returned the following month, and his doctors judged him unfit for service at sea.
That autumn was particularly harrowing for Britain. Its forces suffered more than fifty thousand casualties at the First Battle of Ypres over a three-week stretch, and Turkey entered the war as Germany’s ally, putting the Ottoman Empire in direct conflict with the British Empire. Feeling guilty for “not doing his bit,” Bertie took a staff job at the Admiralty where Winston Churchill was First Lord.
Churchill invited Prince Albert for lunch, and over the next two months the young prince had his first opportunity to see in action the man who would serve as his prime minister some twenty-five years later. The prince was given access to the top-secret War Room, where he was responsible for charts that mapped the locations of British and enemy warships. From time to time he would proudly tip off his father about naval maneuvers before they were officially relayed to the monarch.
But Bertie was restless and despondent. “Nothing to do as usual,” he often peevishly wrote in his diary. When he turned nineteen in mid-December 1914, he was keenly aware that everybody he knew was on active service, especially David. Although his older brother was safely installed thirty miles from the Western Front, he was agitating to get into the action. Louis Greig had not only seen combat but also had been captured during the fall of Antwerp, Belgium, and was a prisoner of war in Germany.
Bertie pressed to return to his ship, and the Admiralty finally granted his request. He rejoined Collingwood on February 12, 1915. Three months later, his illness struck again. By late June, his superior officer reported that Bertie “is sick every time he swallows any food and is very mouldy. In fact wasting away.”
In mid-July 1915, his doctors fastened on what turned out to be a misdiagnosis: “the weakening of the muscular wall of the stomach and a consequent catarrhal condition.” His treatment consisted of rest, “careful dieting,” and nightly enemas. The confounded medical experts fell back on recommending a “change of scene and air.”
That meant a month in Scotland at Abergeldie Castle, three miles down the River Dee from Balmoral Castle, which was closed for the duration of the war. Bertie had enjoyed eight contented childhood summers with his family in the fourteenth-century castle with a medieval stone tower. Abergeldie was a reminder of an unrestrained time when he and his siblings had been alone with their mother. They had thrived in the wildness of the surroundings—the endless pine forests, the hills dappled with wildflowers, the shimmering lochs and the gurgling burns. Bertie loved it there, but cooped up with his doctor, he took little pleasure from Abergeldie during his recuperation.
Several weeks after he returned to York Cottage that October, his father had a horrific accident while on horseback reviewing troops on the front lines in France. Startled by the sound of a military band, the king’s horse reared and fell backward, pinning George V underneath in the mud. He suffered a fractured pelvis in at least two places, and he was in agonizing pain. His broken bones never properly knitted and would plague him for the rest of his life, increasing his general irritability and limiting his mobility. “He was never quite the same man again,” wrote Harold Nicolson.
George V returned to Buckingham Palace, where he was confined to his bed for six weeks. A greatly distressed Bertie rushed to London and fell ill again—exacerbated by his “emotional excitement.” The King’s recovery was prolonged and difficult; it took four weeks before he could walk with two canes, and he “lost seriously in weight.”
These weeks when father and son were convalescing together brought them closer. George V and Albert discussed political issues as well as news from the battlefields and the high seas. For Bertie, it was an invaluable opportunity to observe how a wartime monarch conducted himself—lessons he would revisit when faced with comparable challenges during World War II.
Once again, Prince Albert was assigned to the Admiralty for “light duty” that was unsatisfying. He broke the monotony of his London life with a trip to the Western Front to see David at the end of January 1916. Under tight security, the brothers visited scenes of fighting the previous autumn—La Bassée, Hulluch, and Loos. The two princes also witnessed a British bombardment and German counterattack.
Back in England, the high points of his dreary existence were visits to Sandringham for shooting with his father. He was in touch with Louis Greig, who had been released from German captivity in July 1915 in an exchange for a German doctor. Louis was married the following February, but Bertie was unable to leave his sickbed to attend the wedding in Norfolk. From late August 1914 to early May 1916, he was on sick leave for sixteen months and served on his ship for a mere four months.
