Such moods of contrition became more frequent after his first few months at Oxford. The Prince did nothing very wicked but for the first time in his life he found it possible to slip his leash, and it would have been surprising if he had not celebrated the fact with mild excess. Many years later he told the American journalist Cy Sulzberger that he had found Oxford quite agreeable ‘because we were drunk all the time’.113 He exaggerated, but though not drunk all the time, he managed it not infrequently. On 10 November 1912 he drank too much port, fell, made his nose bleed, and had to be put to bed by two friends who distracted Hansell while he got undressed. But he had the resilience of youth. He was walking round the garden by 7.30 the following morning and apologizing to his friends not long afterwards – ‘They were awfully nice about it.’114 Usually there was more noise than alcohol: ‘There were 25 of us and we went up to Somerville’s rooms where we danced and made a row … It was a great evening.’115 He eschewed the chic world of Evelyn Waugh’s Bollinger Club baying for broken glass. He was elected to the Bullingdon – in its own eyes at least the most elite of Oxford dining clubs – went to a dinner, was made to drink too much, and retired furious and the worse for wear: ‘I will have nothing more to do with the filthy riding men, they are a beastly set.’116
He never joined the set, but within a few months of making this entry in his diary he had become a riding man himself. His father considered that this was a part of his education quite as important as learning French or studying the constitution. ‘If you can’t ride, you know, I’m afraid people will call you a duffer,’ he told his son. Hunting was the only way to learn properly. ‘The English people like riding and it would make you very unpopular if you couldn’t do so.’117 Cadogan was in charge of the training and found his pupil at first recalcitrant. A year before, the Prince had hunted near Sandringham and had stood about all day ‘soaked through and petrified with cold. And then they wonder why one does not like hunting!’118 Now he grumblingly let himself be dragged off to ride in the neighbourhood but showed plainly that he thought it a bore – ‘deadly as usual’.119 To his surprise he found that he was beginning to enjoy the riding more and more. He went out with the South Oxfordshire hunt, was in the saddle for seven hours without falling off, was awarded the brush and enjoyed his day.120 ‘Until a few months ago I was terrified of riding and loathed the sight of a horse,’ he told a friend, ‘but it suddenly came to me, and under Cadogan’s instruction and tuition, I have now plenty of confidence and jump everything!!’121 Some time that spring he graduated to that horseman’s nirvana, the Pytchley hunt. The King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, congratulated him with all the gravity befitting so august an occasion. ‘I solemnly believe that few things will tend more to endear you to the people who some day by God’s will will be your subjects.’122
Riding was only one of the Prince’s sporting pursuits. He golfed, played squash and went for gruelling runs. He played cricket at Radley, made a duck, and commented sourly: ‘It’s a poor game.’123 He was a regular member of the Magdalen football second XI, and appeared occasionally in the first. He shot from time to time on estates near Oxford. Lord Crawford met him in October 1913 with the Wantages at Lockinge. ‘The Prince of Wales seems overburdened with his duties which he performs with meticulous precision,’ he noted. ‘Poor boy, somehow he made me feel very sorry for him … If only he would bolt with a ballet girl, say for twenty-four hours!’124 The poor boy still found time to gamble several evenings a week, though he rarely lost or won more than £10 or so; to acquire and drive a 39-horse-power touring model blue Daimler; to learn the bagpipes with Pipe-Major Ross of the Scots Guards. He joined the Officers’ Training Corps, whose adjutant was the future Field Marshal Jumbo Wilson, and scored 96 out of 100 shooting at a static target and 86 at a moving. Fifty would have earned a pass, and 75 been enough for qualification as a marksman. He took part in night manoeuvres in Blenheim Park and spent a hectic few days in the annual camp, rising at 5 a.m. to act as breakfast orderly and having a ride in an airship. ‘It was the first time I had ever flown and the sensation is wonderful.’125
Into the interstices of these activities he fitted his academic life. Some further education was badly needed; his mind in 1912 was a ragbag of miscellaneous information and his power of expressing what he knew was limited. He spelt deplorably; in one letter alone writing ‘chaplin’ for chaplain, ‘chapple’ for chapel, ‘colision’, ‘dammaged’ and ‘explaned’. He was supposed to go regularly to lectures and follow a programme of special studies with tutors. The lectures he frequently eschewed. He went once to hear Walter Raleigh on English literature and complained, ‘It was very hard to understand and I do not think I shall go to any more.’126 The Rev. Lancelot Phelps on political economy proved more attractive: ‘Political Economy interests me more the more that I do it and I think I have quite got hold of the line of thought.’127 But the individual tuition was more important. The Prince studied history with Charles Grant Robertson, French with Monsieur Berthon, German with Professor Fiedler and constitutional law with Sir William Anson, the Warden of All Souls. Anson probably taught the Prince almost everything of importance which he retained from his time at Oxford; a brilliant expositor, a man of charm, humour and generosity, he was liked as well as admired by the Prince – ‘a remarkable and distinguished little man,’ he called him affectionately.128
Unfortunately, the central figure, to whom the Prince had to read an essay every week, was the President of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren. Warren had a good mind and no doubt many other redeeming features, but what most struck the undergraduates was that he was a bore and a snob. The Prince loathed him – ‘an awful old man’ he described him.129 Reading an essay to a critical and often supercilious pedagogue is always an ordeal; it is made worse if one dislikes one’s auditor. The Prince dreaded his weekly session. He knew, with reason, that essay-writing was not his forte and rarely got any pleasure from their composition. Most of his efforts survive;130 on St Anselm, Beaconsfield, Chatham, Nelson, ‘The Relation of Democracy to War’, Tennyson. They were conscientious, superficial and unimaginative. Cromwell was ‘one of England’s greatest statesmen and generals’; on ‘Ambition’ he commented: ‘The most ideal form of ambition is when it is used for the sake of one’s country. That patriotism should be the genuine motive is the most perfect thing conceivable.’
His best essay, and the subject which he most cared about, dealt with the explorer Scott. He had read Scott’s Last Expedition while on holiday at York Cottage, a laborious process, since he read slowly and it kept him up until 1 a.m. for almost a month, but a rewarding one: ‘It is a most fascinating book and a wonderful story of pluck in the face of ghastly hardship and suffering.’131 His essay reflected this enthusiasm; Warren thought well enough of it to send it to the King, who passed it on to the historian and former prime minister, Lord Rosebery. Rosebery was predictably enthusiastic: ‘It was really admirable … a clear, sympathetic and vigorous narrative through which one can see the author’s heart. I am quite astonished at it …’ He wrote more as courtier than critic, but the essay did deserve praise. The Prince’s final comment was characteristic: ‘It bears out the fact that Englishmen can endure hardships and face death as it should be faced.’132
It cannot be said that Oxford widened his cultural horizons. ‘We listened to classical music till 10.00. It was very dull,’ he wrote gloomily in his diary; and again after the Russian ballet, ‘That form of entertainment, like most stage things, leaves me stone cold.’133 Nor did he become a reading man. His tutors constantly praised his efforts but pointed out that his knowledge was too superficial; ‘he must read more and think more for himself which is most necessary in his position,’ was his mother’s verdict.134 ‘Bookish he will never be,’ wrote Warren in an otherwise unctuous article in The Times. Unsurprisingly, he went on: ‘The Prince of Wales will not want for power of ready and forcible presentation, either in speech or writing.’135 Lord Esher had long talks with the Prince at Balmoral and found: ‘His memory is excellent and his vocabulary unusual, and above all things, he thinks his own thoughts.’136 (The compliments were not returned. The Prince wrote of Esher: ‘That man has a finger in every pie and one cannot trust him.’137) A quick mind, a retentive memory, considerable curiosity, facility for self-expression: they were not everything but they were a lot.
The Prince admitted he owed something to Oxford but he was never fond of it nor ceased to think he would be better off in the Navy. His diary is pitted with groans about the awfulness of his life, increasing in violence as his second year wore on: ‘I’m absolutely fed up with the place and it has got on my nerves’; ‘It is pretty rotten to be back here’; ‘Back again in this hole!’138 Warren pressed him to stay on for another term and get a degree. ‘The answer to the 1st is NO and the second doesn’t interest me at all!!’139 At least in the spring and summer vacations of 1913 he escaped, both from Oxford and from his parents, to visit Germany. In later life he said that he had felt more at home in Germany than in France, ‘because there I stayed mostly among relations’.140 His diary suggests that he enjoyed himself more because he was that much older and had correspondingly greater liberty. Cadogan replaced Hansell and saw himself more as companion than as tutor, while Professor Fiedler, who was also in the entourage, was a ‘jolly old chap’ who was easily disposed of. Once in Berlin the Prince locked the professor in the bathroom and escaped with a friend to sample the night life, giving the porter the key and saying that something seemed to be wrong with the lock.141
His two longest stays were in Württemberg and Strelitz. He arrived at Württemberg in travelling clothes to find the King and his staff in full dress uniform, but soon settled in comfortably to this slow, sleepy court. Every day after a heavy lunch he and the King would drive around the city and adjoining countryside. At first the King would acknowledge the salutes of his subjects but ‘gradually movements of hand became shorter – eyes closed – all stopped – King sound asleep until horses pulled up at home and groom said “Majestät, ist zu Hause.”142 There was no golf, no tennis, no fishing, one day shooting capercaillie – ‘It is a curious sport … but I am glad to have seen it’ – too much sightseeing and too many visits to the opera. ‘I am getting fed up with life here to say the least of it.’ He was taken to Das Rheingold – ‘such a waste of time’; Siegfried – ‘appallingly dull’; Der Freischutz – ‘not exciting’.143 The King perhaps took in more than his young guest realized. The Prince had enjoyed his visits to an officers’ mess and to the Daimler factory, he told Queen Mary, ‘but visiting Museums he did not seem to like quite so much’.144
Possibly word of this visit got through to Neustrelitz, for the Grand Duchess Augusta wrote in some alarm to say that she feared the Prince would be bored, ‘there being no sports nor Games of any kind’.145 There was no reason to fear anything of the sort, replied Queen Mary firmly: ‘He is quite a contented person and never rushes about after amusement.’146 Her brother Alge, future Earl of Athlone, who was there for the visit, was less confident: ‘Strelitz, as you can imagine, after a short time is more than a young person can stand. A week is enough for Alice and me.’ He found his nephew ‘a mixture of extreme youth and boyishness with the ways of a man over forty … We both, as everyone, liked him extremely. He is so liebenswürdig [lovable] and simple, too much so, he should now realize he is “The Prince” and not require so much pushing forward.’147
Berlin proved the most enjoyable of his visits, mainly because he was entrusted for his entertainment to a young attaché at the British Embassy, Godfrey Thomas, who took him to funfairs, night clubs and the Palais de Danse, ‘where we remained till 2.00. It is a large public place frequented by very doubtful women with whom you go and dance, but it is devoid of all coarseness and vulgarity. I danced a good deal …’148 He spent one night with Kaiser Wilhelm II and was startled to find him seated behind his desk on a military saddle mounted on a wooden block. The Emperor ‘explained condescendingly that he was so accustomed to sitting on a horse he found a saddle more conducive to clear, concise thinking’.149 The Prince found his host unexpectedly easy to talk to and quite enjoyed his visit;150 the Emperor, according to the Prince’s future biographer, Hector Bolitho, considered his guest charming and unassuming but ‘a young eagle, likely to play a big part in European affairs because he is far from being a pacifist’.151
The Prince must have been uneasily aware that wherever he went in Germany he would be sized up as a potential husband for unmarried daughters. The courts of Germany had provided so many spouses for the British royal family that it was reasonable to assume the precedent would again be followed. He had experienced his first taste of what he could expect when the Emperor’s daughter, Victoria Louise, visited London in 1911. The press reported rumours that an engagement was imminent.152 Dynastically it would have been most suitable and Princess Victoria Louise had many good points. A young maid of honour, Katherine Villiers, pronounced her wholly without good looks but with much sweetness and joie de vivre.153 The Prince himself found her ‘most easy to get on with’.154 But there is no reason to think that he or his parents gave any serious thought to marriage. Nor did Victoria Louise; she found the Prince ‘very nice’ but ‘terribly young, younger than he actually was’.155
More real was the putative romance with Princess May, or more formally Caroline Matilda, of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple got on particularly well when they were staying together at Gotha. May was ‘such a nice girl’, Alge’s wife Alice reported, ‘much like the others only taller and very slim’.156 Her brother-in-law August Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was sufficiently encouraged to write directly to the Prince in June 1914 to suggest that a match should be made. The nineteen-year-old Prince consulted his mother and with some difficulty constructed a reply – ‘an awkward job’.157 His letter does not survive, probably he pleaded that he was too young to contemplate matrimony at the moment. The war put an end to the possibility but in 1915 he remarked rather wistfully to Godfrey Thomas, ‘Well, I could very easily have done worse.’ Thomas commented that, though Princess May’s teeth needed attention and her nose was too red, a dentist and a little powder would soon have put things to rights. ‘HRH was really very much attracted to her, and I am perfectly certain that if the War hadn’t come, it would have been brought off. It is difficult to see now who he will marry or when, but whoever it is, I know that he will often think with affectionate regret of Princess May as the might have been.’158
It has been said that the sympathy for Germany which the Prince of Wales showed in the 1930s stemmed from the success of his pre-war visits. All the evidence is that, though he enjoyed his stay there and liked some of his relations, he was not particularly struck by the country or its people. ‘The Germans as a race,’ he told a friend, ‘are fat, stolid, unsympathetic, intensely military, and all the men have huge cigars sticking out of their faces at all times.’159 ‘The trip was very interesting,’ he reflected when he got back to London, ‘but I don’t care much about the Germans.’160 Of the countries which he visited before the First World War, the one that pleased him most was Norway, where he loved the skiing, the open-air existence and the informality of court life – ‘a lovely country with a charming people,’ he found it. ‘It was just like home.’161 This last comment betrayed his real priorities. Far though he might wander, and much pleasure though he might derive from his wanderings, whether as Prince, as King, or as Duke of Windsor, there was always for him to be no place like home.
By the summer of 1914 the King had agreed that his son should spend the last few months of the year travelling and should join the Grenadier Guards the following year. The prospect was pleasing enough, but already shades of the prison house were beginning to close upon the growing Prince. The first dread intimation of what was to come had struck him in June 1912, when he got back at lunch time from his stay in France to find that the same afternoon he had to go with the King and Queen to a St John’s Ambulance Parade – ‘rather, if not very dull’; at 6.30 p.m. he was receiving the Khedive of Egypt and at 8.30 he was taking the wife of the Bishop of Winchester in to dinner.162 From then on public functions multiplied. He quickly decided that the more formal and decorous they were, the more he would dislike them. He attended his first court in March 1914 and found it ‘mighty poor fun … I went in with the parents to the ballroom and stood till 11.00 while hundreds of women went by, each one plainer than the last … I don’t mind if I never go to one again.’ He did go, of course, and resented it even more: ‘a bum show. This court etiquette is intolerable.’ As for the state visit of the King and Queen of Denmark: ‘What rot and a waste of time, money and energy all these state visits are.’163
When he had a proper job to do, however, he did it conscientiously and well. He was sent by the King to greet Poincaré, now President of the Republic, on his arrival at Portsmouth. The French statesman was impressed by his ‘charm of manner and vivacity’. The Prince had ‘lost none of his former delightful simplicity’ but had ‘“come on” a good deal’.164 The King was delighted by the reports he was given of his son’s performance: ‘It gave both Mama and me great pleasure … I may sometimes find fault with you but I assure you it is only for your own good and because I am so devoted to you.’165 The Prince’s first important solo performance came in June 1914 when he opened the new church of St Anselm on the Duchy of Cornwall estates in south London. He took endless trouble with his speech and carried it off well: ‘I had a wonderful sense of confidence in the audience, who I felt would make allowances for it being my 1st public function.’166 At present, he told his audience, he knew little of the difficulties which beset those who were concerned with housing for the working classes, ‘but by studying the comfort and happiness of my tenants I hope to gain experience’. Congratulations flowed in, on his diction, his pace, his obvious sincerity; the one that would have pleased him most because it was not intended for his eyes was sent to one of the ladies-in-waiting, Lady Fortescue. ‘It was a wonderful success. He did it quite beautifully. At first he seemed a little nervous but it wore off and his speech was quite charming. He said it as if he really meant it … and in such a firm, charming voice. Everyone was tremendously enthusiastic … He looked so young among all those elderly prelates, but so dignified.’167
For the first time he began to talk seriously to politicians and form opinions of them. Churchill was his hero, mainly because he was now First Lord of the Admiralty and arch advocate of a larger Navy: ‘He is a wonderful man and has a great power of work.’ Asquith, the Prime Minister, he liked, though he found Mrs Asquith ‘rather tiring and never stops talking’; Esher and Lulu Harcourt (the Colonial Secretary) were particularly tiresome.168 If he had any preference between the parties he did not confide it to his diary, though on certain issues he feared the Liberal government would be insufficiently firm. He had strong views about the suffragettes and told his father that he hoped ‘the woman suffrage bill will never be passed. It is curious how divided the present cabinet is on the subject.’169 To his relief Asquith held firm. ‘I really think that at last some drastic measures are to be taken as regards those bl-d- suffragettes, whose conduct is becoming more and more infamous every day,’ he told Godfrey Thomas in the summer of 1914.170 He was as strongly opposed to Home Rule for Ireland. ‘I hope it will not pass,’ he wrote in his diary when the Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912.171 His parents shared his views on the future of Ulster. Queen Mary wrote him outspoken letters in March and April 1914 about the weakness of the government and the deplorable way they had treated the Army.172 ‘Although we aren’t supposed to have any politics,’ the Prince responded, ‘there does come a time when all that outward nonsense must be put aside, and that time has come.’173
Socially his life was transformed in that last summer before the war. His parents had had a party for him at Buckingham Palace in March 1913. ‘I had to dance, a thing I hate,’ he wrote forlornly in his diary: ‘The whole thing was a great strain.’ He did not change his views for a year at least; then in July 1914 as a twenty-year-old he went to the Londesboroughs’ ball. ‘I stuck out to the bitter end and got back at 2 a.m. It was really great fun,’ he recorded in mild astonishment. Next night it was the turn of the Portlands: ‘The floor was perfect and my dancing is improving.’ He stayed till 3.45, and did the same the following night at the Salisburys’.174 A looker-on at the Salisburys’ dance who did not know about his change of heart commiserated on his sad plight: ‘The Prince is no dancer … It was something of an ordeal for so young a boy and of so retiring a disposition.’175 The sympathy was uncalled for: ‘I have now become fond of dancing and love going out!’176 But he was still discriminating. Baroness Orczy saw him at a court ball in mid-July, dancing the quadrille d’honneur with one of his aunts and looking ‘moody and somewhat bored’.177 Nor did he allow his new-found enthusiasm in any other way to change his train of life. He was up at 6 a.m. after the Londesborough ball, rose at 7 a.m. for a swim after the Portlands’ and was playing squash by 7 a.m. after the Salisburys’: ‘I’ve had only 8 hours sleep in the last 72 hours.’178
The ferocious social round was combined with a course with the Life Guards – riding school, sword drill, care of horses and equipment, marching. ‘Not very exciting but anyhow a definite job which is the gt thing!!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Military life and ways are curious.’179 He still pined for the Navy. Halfway through his cavalry course he went with the King to Portsmouth for the naval review and visited old friends aboard HMS Collingwood. It was ‘glorious. God what a life this is compared to my attachment.’180 But he knew that it was a paradise not to be regained. The plan was that he should spend 1915 with the Grenadier Guards, 1916 with the Royal Horse Artillery, and then join the 10th Hussars on their return from South Africa. Meanwhile he danced the summer away and made plans for another grand tour of Europe in the autumn. A break in the routine came at the end of June when he spent a week with the Officers’ Training Corps and manoeuvred vigorously about the plains near Aldershot. ‘When in camp I make it a rule never to open a newspaper,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘so am completely ignorant of all happenings in the outer World, except that the Austrian Archduke and his wife have been assassinated. I expect it has caused a stir in Germany.’181
3
‘Oh!! That I Had a Job’
THAT IN 1914 THE YOUTH OF BRITAIN WENT EXULTANTLY to war is one of the stranger features of that agonizing conflict. The Prince of Wales had even less reason than most to share in this exultation. For one thing, many of his close relations, whom he had grown to know and like over the past few years, were now numbered among the enemy. For another, his position as heir to the throne set him apart from his contemporaries: they set off with armour shining to defeat the Huns and be home by Christmas, he knew that his armour was likely to be more ornamental than useful and that he had only a slim chance of wearing it in battle. Yet when he heard that he was to join the Army in France, he wrote to Sir George Arthur of this ‘wonderful and joyous surprise’. Twenty-five years later he was shown this letter and commented how terrifying he found it, coming as it did from an average boy of twenty. He had conceived war almost as a holiday, ‘a glorious adventure’. ‘How disillusioned we all were at the end of it,’ he commented ruefully. ‘One wonders if the generation of that age today feel as we did, or are they conscious of the appalling consequences of another World war and its futility? No! far worse than that how it would utterly destroy civilization.’1
