Darling Georgie (27 page)

Forbidden as monarch to take part in the fighting, King George was angered by reports of daily carnage brought about by the inadequacies of General Haig who by 1917 had not relinquished the idea that to win a war one had to throw more and more soldiers into battle, irrespective of the casualty rate. The King turned at last against his German family and disassociated himself from them. The Royal House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ceased to be. On 17 July 1917 the King proclaimed that his Royal House was henceforth to be known as the House of Windsor and that all German titles held by members of his own family were to be changed to English ones. The King’s cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, became the Marquis of Milford Haven, his two brothers-in-law, the Prince of Teck and Prince Alexander of Teck, became respectively the Marquis of Cambridge and the Earl of Athlone. Even Queen Mary’s German origins were suspect and were used by republicans to whip up anti-royal feeling. Kaiser Wilhelm, not previously known for his sense of humour, said that he was looking forward to the next performance of that well-known opera ‘The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’. Having failed so far to defeat his enemies abroad, King George had turned on his relatives at home.

Three months later he failed to attempt a rescue of his beleaguered Russian cousins, all of whom, including his
doppelgänger
Tsar Nicholas II, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg. The turning of the King’s anger on to his family (and in reality on to aspects of himself), together with the guilt which resulted from his abandonment of them, led him to become severely depressed. His low mood, never far from the surface, now erupted. Even the sudden change in fortune in 1917 brought about by the arrival of American troops under the command of General Pershing, and the formation of a new coalition government under the powerful leadership of Lloyd George, did little to improve his self-esteem. Throughout the trench warfare the King had supported the foolhardy policies of the blinkered General Haig and had loudly opposed the Liberal policies of ‘that damned fellow’ Lloyd George. When the war was over Lloyd George’s bitter comment ‘I owe him nothing. He owes his throne to me’ was the first, but not the last, anti-monarchical blow dealt to the new House of Windsor. In a letter to
The Times
H.G. Wells referred to the King as a foreigner and the Court as ‘alien and uninspiring’, a Labour MP called him a ‘German pork butcher’, and Max Beerbohm wrote an offensive poem with a refrain that referred to the King and Queen as ‘dull’.

By 1918 the German fleet had mutinied and there was a revolution in Berlin. Germany had lost the war and King George V some members of his family. This real and metaphorical bereavement revived the sense of loneliness present in the King from the moment his beloved mother, with her protestations of undying love and without protest, had bidden the twelve-year-old ‘darling Georgie’ goodbye for three long years.

T
HE END OF
the 1914–18 war coincided with a short-lived economic boom. Although food rationing had been introduced in February 1918 and there were shortages of consumer goods, because of the demands of the war unemployment was at an all-time low. More than 750,000 men were mourned by their bereaved families and those servicemen who had survived the war were angered by the slow rate of demobilization. The 1918 Reform Act gave the vote to all men over twenty-one and, as a result of the militant suffrage movement, to women over the age of thirty-five. There was a sense of relief throughout the country that with the signing of the armistice, on 11 November 1918, the war with Germany was finally over. Those who had lost loved ones were in sombre mood as they prepared to celebrate the first post-war Christmas, four years after they had confidently predicted that it would all be over by Christmas 1914.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles, signed on behalf of Britain by Lloyd George, brought the war officially to an end. The treaty decreed that peace was to be made on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The frontiers of most of the countries of Europe were redrawn; the victors gained land from the losers; republics were created where Kings and Emperors had once ruled, and the foreign affairs of the Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) ceased to be managed from Whitehall. Above all, a League of Nations was set up ‘in order to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war’. Every party to the treaty agreed these terms, an agreement which within a few years was to become not worth the paper it was written on.

Not one of the major participants of the 1914 war had gained by the
conflict. Poverty had begun to replace prosperity everywhere and a dangerous humiliation had been imposed on Germany and her allies. In every village and town in Britain ‘Lest We Forget’ memorials were erected, but twenty-one years later, as peace came of age, a new generation forgot and only remembered by repeating what it had forgotten. Changes in land frontiers provided the victors with territorial gains, but it was the overwhelming response by government and people alike to the slogan ‘Let Germany pay’ that created the economic depression in Germany which sowed the seeds of the Second World War.

Reparations demanded of Germany by the Allies, the return of massive unemployment owing to the closure of munitions factories and the repatriation of the troops began to cause social chaos not only in Germany but throughout Europe. The stresses of the previous four years had so compromised the collective immune system that outbreaks of virulent influenza occurred, causing almost as many casualities as in the worst days of the fighting. Lloyd George’s promise to the men who had survived the conflict, that Britain would be a land ‘fit for heroes’, was only briefly fulfilled, as the immediate but short-lived post-war economic boom came to an abrupt end.

King George V found himself in an alien world. In 1918 Lloyd George and his Coalition had been returned to power with a majority of 249 over the opposition and Asquith had not only been defeated at East Fife but had, somewhat spitefully, been denied a seat at the Peace Conference by Lloyd George. The Irish problem the King had tried so hard to resolve had not gone away. The newly formed Sinn Fein party had been successful in the general election and was demanding independence from Britain. For two years violence returned to the British Isles until a new Home Rule Bill was passed in 1920 which divided Ireland into two. Ulster in the north would remain part of the United Kingdom, although it would have its own parliament, and the remainder of Ireland would become a Free State with its parliament in Dublin. King George looked around him for friends and allies. Most of them were dead.

The King could not bring himself to forgive his cousin the Kaiser for
his dishonourable conduct during the war. Among other ‘ungentlemanly’ acts, the German navy had not only fired on unarmed merchant ships but on 7 May 1915 had sunk a passenger ship off the coast of Ireland, the British registered
Lusitania,
with the loss of 1,195 lives. King George did not go so far as to endorse the cries of ‘Hang the Kaiser’ which were heard on the streets of London, but his opinion of his cousin was radically changed from his pre-war view that he might in some way have avoided the disaster. Unlike the Kaiser, who had come to hate Britain, the King felt almost sorry for his cousin’s lack of judgement. He was certainly relieved when, after the Kaiser’s abdication less than two weeks before the end of hostilities, the Dutch government offered him asylum. He could not bring himself to speak to his cousin for five years.

King George V disliked music and the performing arts. As far as books were concerned he identified only with those that spoke of a world he had once known and loved, in which nothing changed, where everyone knew his or her place, in which heroes were admired and rewarded and battles (in particular naval ones) were fought with honour. It was a world that was gone for ever. John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling were the King’s favourite authors. He not only shared Kipling’s jingoism but his prejudices. Reminded of the two visits he had himself paid to India, he was fascinated by Kipling’s depictions of Indian life which were based on his memories of Bombay, his birthplace, and later on his experiences as sub-editor of the Lahore
Civil and Military Gazette.
Kipling’s views and opinions resonated with the King’s. The two men, who were born in the same year, died within twenty-four hours of one another.

Kipling came not from an aristocratic but from an artistic background. His father had been a painter, and two of his sisters married artists. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and no stronger recommendation of his writing could have been made than that by Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate: ‘[Kipling] is the greatest living genius that we have in literature.’ Before he met Rudyard Kipling King George had decided that the man whose views so impressed him, but who, unlike himself, was able to articulate them in prose and poetry, was deserving of
official recognition. He accordingly instructed that the poet be appointed a Companion of Honour in 1917, the year that the honour was introduced. Kipling believed himself unworthy of such recognition and wished to be recognized in no way other than through his poetry. Refusing the honour, he wrote to Bonar Law asking him how he would like it ‘if you woke up one morning and found that they had made you Archbishop of Canterbury’.

Kipling claimed that his refusal was due to his wish not to be associated with any political party, but this does not explain why on three occasions he also declined the Order of Merit, the last time being in 1924 when it was personally offered to him by the King. At each refusal Kipling was careful to assure the King of his loyalty and his gratitude. It is likely that his sense of guilt, associated with the death of his only son in France in 1917, caused him to feel that he was undeserving. While he was glad that his son had been given the opportunity to serve his country, having encouraged him to enlist, he reproached himself for his untimely death. Kipling, like many other writers, was probably at his happiest when he was alone in his study. At Batemans, his Sussex home, with only his typewriter for company, he could, if only for a moment, distract himself from his grief. A lonely man, he was as shy and uncomfortable in social situations as King George himself had been, until his father’s death endowed him with a status behind which he could hide his feelings of inadequacy.

King George’s absolute belief in the monarchy gave him the illusion that he was always right, since few had the temerity to prove otherwise. Hiding behind the uniform of rank, those of lesser rank (almost everyone) seldom dared challenge him. Long after the war had ended ‘uniforms’ remained important. It reassured the King to know that his clothes served to remind his subjects of his rank and he retained his formal style of dress long after it had gone out of fashion. The curly-brimmed bowler-hat, the frock coat (a gardenia always in the buttonhole), his trousers pressed at the sides, the ceremonial attire, the kid gloves spoke for him when he found it difficult to speak for himself. Kipling also hid himself from the world but in his case behind his writing. While King George and his
favourite author lived fantasy lives, Kipling’s was an invention while King George’s was bestowed upon him by a thousand years of privilege.

The King and Kipling were not actually to meet until 1922, although it would have been impossible for them to be unaware of one another. King George read Kipling’s novels, which moved him emotionally, and Kipling admired his Emperor, the only person in a changing world whose attachment to what ‘had been’ matched his own. Appropriately enough, their meeting was in the war cemeteries of France in which the hopes and aspirations of both lay buried.

In the spring of 1922 King George and Queen Mary visited northern France. Although the visit was an official one it was probably more of a pilgrimage for them. Rudyard Kipling was also there to commemorate the death of his son, as was the King to commemorate the death of the many members of his own family. The construction of the seemingly endless war cemeteries had almost been completed, and the King had been called to inspect them on behalf of those whose sons were buried there. Kipling was officially present as a Commissioner for War Graves. In 1914, when war was declared, Kipling was forty-eight and too old for combat. His sense of patriotism and his desire to fight for his King and Country, however, was so intense that he encouraged his only son to volunteer in his place. John Kipling, born in August 1897, was barely seventeen and physically unfit. He was so short-sighted that he could scarcely see without glasses, but after leaving them at home he was passed as fit by an equally short-sighted medical officer. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Second Battalion of the Irish Guards and was believed to have been killed on 27 September 1915 at the Battle of Loos. His body was never found, and for a year Kipling, who had not accepted his son’s death, begged the Army Council to keep John’s name on the Army List.

His hopes were momentarily raised by a letter from an officer who thought it possible that his son might have been captured by the Germans. But by 1918 all hope had gone. Like Abraham before him Kipling had sacrificed his son for his god (King and country), but, while Abraham’s God at the eleventh hour had relieved him of his obligation to demonstrate his
faith, Kipling’s god had not. As literary adviser to the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1919 Kipling composed a simple inscription to be used on gravestones wherever unidentified bodies had been buried: ‘A soldier of the Great War known only to God.’ He may have considered himself fortunate when in 1922 he was given the opportunity to meet his god – the King – in person.

Like Kipling, King George had also sent his sons to the front. Protected by those with the interests of the monarchy at heart, however, both of them had survived. The King’s speech at the cemetery in which he said that ‘there can be no more potent advocates of peace upon earth than this massed multitude of witnesses to the desolation of war’ impressed Kipling. The King spoke to his wife Carrie, telling her how sorry he was that her son had died so young, and he also addressed a few words to Kipling. On King George’s return to England he set the seal on their developing rapport by inviting the author to meet him again at a private house in London. It was to be the first of many meetings.