The Three Emperors Read online

  There were other pressures on Georgie too. From an early age he knew his prime function was as his brother Eddy’s “stiffener.” At seven, European princes left the nursery, Eddy acquired a tutor and Georgie came too. John Neale Dalton was an ambitious thirty-two-year-old curate with an impressively booming voice, chosen by the queen to take her grandsons in hand. Not long after the boys had come under his care, Dalton told Bertie and Alexandra that Eddy had an “abnormally dormant43 condition of mind.” He seemed unable to concentrate, and Dalton suspected he might even have “some affliction of44 the brain.” The solution, Dalton concluded, was to slow down his teaching, and to use Georgie to support him. From the age of six or seven it was impressed upon Georgie, in whom Dalton saw a tendency to “fretfulness,”45 that his role was to bolster and protect his older brother.

  By the time he was twelve, George was a correct, rather careful little boy—qualities particularly apparent in his relationship with the queen. Whereas Willy never felt intimidated by her, once he was out of the nursery Georgie approached Victoria with fear and awe. His letters to her were dutiful and impersonal. He hoped that “Dear Grandmama” was “quite well” and informed her that he was “quite well.” (By contrast Willy’s letters burst with energy and idiosyncrasy. “I am so sorry46 that you are sad,” he wrote, aged ten. He had planned to come and comfort her “but I could not because I had too much to do.” When she invested him with the Order of the Garter in 1877 when he was eighteen, he thanked her for “admitting me into47 that illustrious brotherhood of Knights. I can assure you, beloved Grandmama that I was quite speechless with astonishment, when my dear Mama told me that I was going to be invested with this highest order in Christendom.”) To her younger grandchildren Victoria must have seemed mainly a source of lectures. At some point she’d send each grandchild a watch and a homily. George got his when he was eight: “Be very punctual48 in everything and very exact in all your duties,” she told him. “… I hope you will be a good, obedient, truthful boy, kind to all, humble-minded, dutiful and always trying to be of use to others! Above all, God-fearing and striving always to do His Will.” George would try to be all these things, but above all he would be obsessively punctual.

  Aged twelve, in 1877, Georgie became the youngest and smallest boy on HMS Britannia, a kind of public school for naval cadets, anchored off the town of Dartmouth in Devon. Eddy and Dalton came too. Queen Victoria had suggested that Eddy go to public school—an idea just as revolutionary in England as it had been in Germany, and clearly inspired by Vicky’s example. “Good boys,”49 she wrote, hopefully, “of whatever birth, should equally be allowed to associate with them to prevent the early notion of pride and superiority of position which is detrimental to young Princes.” Dalton reported that despite his efforts, Eddy wasn’t up to it; both boys were behind their peers and in his opinion Eddy needed Georgie to be his crutch:

  Prince Albert Victor requires50 the stimulus of Prince George’s company to induce him to work at all … The mutual influence of their characters on one another … is very beneficial … Difficult as the education of Prince Albert Victor is now, it would be doubly or trebly so if Prince George were to leave him. Prince George’s lively presence is his mainstay and chief incentive to exertion; and to Prince George again the presence of his elder brother is most wholesome as a check against that tendency to self conceit which is apt at times to show itself in him. Away from his brother, there would be a great risk of his being made too much of and treated as a general favourite.

  Victoria thought the navy “a very rough51 sort of life,” but reluctantly agreed to Dalton’s “experiment.” How George felt isn’t clear. There are several references from this period to his picking fights with Eddy and finding fault with him; on the other hand, neither wanted to leave home and they at least had each other.

  The queen was a little preoccupied elsewhere. She was about to become an empress—Empress of India, that is. She had persuaded her favourite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to pass an act through Parliament giving her the title in 1876. Bertie thought it “grandiose.” “I could never52 consent to the word ‘Imperial’ being added to my name,” he told Disraeli disapprovingly. It was widely rumoured that the queen had become rather jealous of the proliferation of emperors on the continent—the Russian, Hapsburg and now the new German emperor—and had decided that she, too, ought to be imperial, though she knew the British wouldn’t stomach an empress at home. It was also less good-humouredly suggested, and not only by the Liberal opposition, that Disraeli was encouraging in the queen, whom he shamelessly flattered, an unrealistic idea of her own position. “Is there not53 just a risk,” one of his cabinet colleagues asked gently, “of encouraging her in too large an idea of her own personal power, and too great an indifference to what the public expects? I only ask; it is for you to judge.” One reason the measure passed may well have been because the queen was female: it’s hard to imagine any British parliament willingly making a male monarch emperor of anything—it would have felt too autocratic. In return for her title, however, Disraeli managed to get through—unhindered by the bullying obdurance that the queen had been known to employ—a series of innovative social bills, including the Trades Union Act and the Public Health Act. It was perhaps no coincidence that the queen seemed to interfere less with domestic legislation after she became empress—though she still had plenty to say on foreign, military and imperial issues. Like Wilhelm, George did not enjoy school. “It never did54 me any good to be a Prince, I can tell you, and many was the time I wished I hadn’t been,” he complained years later with what would become a characteristic tinge of self-pity “… So far from making allowances for our disadvantages, the other boys made a point of taking it out on us on the grounds that they’d never be able to do it later on.” He was small for his age and the younger boys would force him to challenge the older boys to fight. “I’d get a hiding time and again.” Only a particularly bad thump on the nose got him off fighting for good. The bigger boys made him buy sweets for them and bring them aboard illegally. “I was always found out and got into trouble in addition to having the stuff confiscated. And the worst of it was, it was always my money; they never paid me back.” No doubt the bullying was not helped by the fact that George had certain privileges. Instead of sharing with the other boys, he and Eddy had a cabin of their own, servants, and Dalton—under whose supervision George did no better than mediocrely. Perhaps the juxtaposition of his sense of royalty and the democracy of having to compete with other boys, was—as it had been for Willy—uncomfortable. The royal family liked to talk about appearing normal, and being “humble,” but they didn’t really believe it. Dalton, who was genuinely fond of George, didn’t help by discouraging the boys from mixing with their contemporaries—even though HMS Britannia was stuffed with the sons of British grandees. George was taught to keep his distance from other people, Dalton and Eddy remained his world. This would be particularly harsh for him, because while Eddy would turn out to have something of his father’s charm and talent for socializing, George was shy, and never mastered the art of making friends easily.

  He left Britannia aged fourteen, for a three-year round-the-world cruise on a naval training ship, the Bacchante. He was still small at four foot ten. “Victoria [his grandmother] says55 ‘So old and so small’!!!” his mother wrote, helpfully. “Oh my! You will have to make haste to grow or I shall have that sad disgrace of being the mother of a dwarf!!!” (George would never be tall, about five foot six at most—the same height as Willy and Nicholas.) And Eddy was still in tow. Alexandra had been told by a senior commander that his time on board had been a complete failure, but she refused to separate the boys. Dalton came too. He now claimed that Eddy’s failings would be even more evident at a public school and anyway, a boat would allow him to keep the boys away from “evil associations.”56

  During his three years on the Bacchante George saw the Mediterranean, South America, South Africa, Australia, Japan, China, Singapore,
Egypt and the Holy Land; shot albatrosses, exchanged photographs with a Zulu chief and his four wives, almost got caught up in the first Boer War, encountered ostriches, saw the twelve Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem, had a dragon tattooed on his arm in Tokyo, met the Mikado, was nearly shipwrecked off southern Australia, experienced the street smells of Peking, travelled in gold barges down the Nile, and adopted a baby kangaroo. But all this failed to imbue him with a sense of curiosity or excitement about the world. A further ten years in the navy, during which he became the best-travelled British prince ever, left him with an active dislike of being abroad. Ships made him seasick and he never stopped missing his family. Setting off on his first two-year cruise, aged fifteen, he had written to his mother, “As we sang57 hymns I could not help thinking of you. I think this last parting was horrible and I think what you said was true, that it made it much worse, us having to wait in the hall till dear Papa came, because none of us could speak, we were all crying so much.” At nineteen, he tentatively voiced58 to his father a desire to give up the navy; the latter made it clear that this was impossible, and George dutifully accepted his fate. But at twenty-one, parting was quite as painful. “I miss you59 so very much and felt so sorry when I had to say goodbye,” he wrote after missing a family birthday. “How much I wish I was going to be there too, it almost makes me cry when I think of it. I wonder who will have that sweet little room of mine; you must go and see it sometimes and imagine that your little Georgie dear is living in it.”

  In hindsight it seems obvious that Dalton was a bad teacher whose expectations of his pupils seemed to diminish with the years. George’s well-educated wife, Queen Mary, admitted years later that it was slightly shocking that “the king had60 not been taught more,” and that Dalton had “never really tried to educate the princes.” Like Willy’s tutor Hinzpeter—though less sinisterly—he was extraordinarily successful at laying his own inadequacies at the feet of his pupils. The more he gravely reported the princes’ shortcomings, the more the family seemed to admire him. “What a fearless,61 honest man he is,” Queen Victoria recorded in her journal in 1877 after another dismal piece of educational news. Others were less charitable. “What on earth has stupid Dalton been about all these years!” the queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Geraldine Somerset wondered incredulously, and George’s Russian aunt Marie was “withering”62 about his “ignorance.” Whether or not Eddy was quite as inadequate as Dalton claimed, after twelve years of his teaching George was said to be “deficient in even63 the most elementary subjects,” including basic spelling and grammar. Geography, a cousin remarked, “had not been his64 strong point,” nor could he converse comfortably in French or German, the absolute bottom line of a royal education. Dalton camouflaged his failings by publishing a two-volume, 1,400-page work, The Cruise of the Bacchante, implausibly attributed to the two princes but written entirely by him—full of Latin quotations and flamboyant moralistic descriptions. As an adult, George freely acknowledged it to “be one of the dullest65 books ever written.”

  It’s possible that George might have been dyslexic—a condition completely unrecognized in the nineteenth century, and now perhaps an over-fashionable explanation for all manner of learning problems. But his difficulties with spelling, basic grammar and languages, despite years of effort, all fit this diagnosis, as did his problems with writing, which George found torture his whole life. The art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, whom he appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures in the early 1930s, reckoned he’d never seen anyone find the sheer act of writing so laborious66—a classic dyslexic’s problem. His cousin Marie of Romania, known as Missy, recalled his “wrinkled brow”67 while “labouring” through letters. Dyslexia would have fed characteristics very evident in George as an adult: anxiety and lack of confidence, a desire for the familiar and fear of the new. And it would have given an extra poignancy and discomfiting complexity to the expression of his feelings. Because of Alexandra’s deafness, much of what George wanted to say to her couldn’t be expressed verbally. Letters became the most direct way of communicating with her, and the vehicles of George’s gentler emotions. They would later become almost the only way he would be able to express love and intimacy to his wife. At the same time, because writing was so hard for him, the expression of feelings—hard enough for many upper-class Englishmen—became associated with difficulty and discomfort.

  It was a mark of how deeply George felt wedded to his duty that despite the exhaustion of writing, he began a diary at thirteen and stubbornly forced himself to write it every day until his death in 1936. The volumes are for the most part deadly, the acme of pedestrianism. “My word68 they are dull,” his biographer Harold Nicolson wrote privately. They showed the evaporation of his childhood liveliness—and perhaps also a dyslexic’s reluctance to move beyond the most basic phrases. Their pages gave almost no sign of interior life, recording day after day the weather, the time he rose, ate and went to bed, and important anniversaries.

  The truth was the family colluded in the children’s backwardness. Alexandra didn’t want them to grow up and leave her, and not even Bertie wanted them to turn out like him. “Our greatest69 wish,” he wrote to his mother, “is to keep them simple pure and childlike as long as it is possible.” Neither could really see the point of academic application. The queen liked the idea of a more vigorous, democratic education in principle, but in practice her sense of caste and tradition (and fear of them turning out like Bertie) was too strong to override her desire for things to remain reliably, even if disappointingly, the same. She believed royalty must be set apart—not least to preserve itself intact—and must never get close to commoners. Even aristocrats were questionable. One could really relax only among other royals. She was far from alone in her beliefs: most royal educations were as limited and lonely as George’s; most taught royal and aristocratic children to suppress their own will and not look beyond their circumstances, not be curious or questioning. The Grand Duchess Marie Romanov, a Russian cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, writing about her own education—which was, she said, “strictly in accord70 with the standards and rules which prevailed in almost all the courts of Europe in the later part of the nineteenth century”—described how “every expression of will or independence was at once suppressed.” In hindsight she felt it produced minds conditioned “towards the banal and the conventional … somehow the education that was given us atrophied our powers and limited our horizons.” It’s hard not to feel that George’s education had just such an effect on him.

  In 1883 Eddy was sent to Cambridge—“How much I miss you in everything all day long,” he wrote to his brother—and Georgie, after several months in the North Atlantic, went to Greenwich naval college. Aged nineteen, he continued to be “protected” from any normal experiences. He wasn’t allowed outside the college at all except for sports and then only if accompanied. Balls and dances were forbidden. His letters were read and answered for him. Returning to the college one night with his military governor in a hansom cab, he asked if he might pay the driver—he’d never done it before—then had to borrow the fare. For his twentieth birthday in June 1885, Queen Victoria wrote him a thundering letter, exhorting him to71

  Avoid the many evil temptations wh. beset all young men especially Princes. Beware of flatterers, too great a love of amusement, of races and betting and playing high. I hear on all sides what a good steady boy you are and how you can be trusted. Still you must always be on the watch and must not fear ridicule if you do what is right … no end of young and older men have been ruined, parents hearts broken, and great names and Titles dragged in the dirt.500

  The following year Alexandra wrote urging him to resist “temptation”—i.e., sex—and congratulating him on having done so thus far: “it is the 72greatest proof you could possibly give me of how much you wish to please me that you should have done it for my sake and the promise you gave me of your own accord a few nights before you left.” Not till he was twenty-three would Georgie record—surprising
ly carelessly in his diary—that he had a girl he slept with in Southsea, and had another he “shared” with Eddy in St. John’s Wood, who was “a ripper.”73

  In 1886, aged twenty-one, he joined the navy proper, and spent the next four years as an officer in the Mediterranean fleet based on Malta. The Royal Navy was the glorious symbol of British power, the glue that held the empire together. By the late nineteenth century, years of peace and inaction (its last major sea battle had been at Navarino in 1827) had made it increasingly conservative, obsessed with tradition and the importance of appearances. “The success74 of a commander,” one historian of empire has written, “was judged chiefly by the appearance of his ship, how white its paintwork, how burnished its brass, how smart its time-honoured drills.” George was pretty much everything his parents and grandmother had hoped he would be: steady, persistent and dutiful. He grew a neat little sailor’s beard and ceased to smile in photographs, instead looking into the lens with an intent melancholy stare. Sailors didn’t75 smile on duty, he said.

  His leaves, with few exceptions, were spent at Sandringham with his family, shooting—fast becoming his major passion. One exception was the London celebrations in June 1887 for his grandmother’s Golden Jubilee in commemoration of her fifty years on the throne, when he took his position in the procession behind the queen’s carriage amidst the fifty royals—thirty-two of them directly related to her—who had come to honour her. The Golden Jubilee was a confident assertion of Britain’s Great Power status and ever-growing success. Though Germany and America might be chasing its heels, it was still the world’s biggest industrialized nation and its empire now stretched from the South Atlantic, through Africa, across Asia to the Australias. The queen, almost simply by virtue of having been around for so long and despite the fact that—or perhaps because—her subjects knew very little about her, had become a more potent symbol of nation and empire than ever, and enormously popular into the bargain. Though the most recent Reform Act, of 1884, had once again dramatically enlarged the electorate and the queen was finding it harder to get her own way in politics, nearly half a million people turned out to cheer her madly as she processed through London in a plain black dress and a little white bonnet. The procession, wrote George, who, with Eddy, had been made the queen’s personal ADC and rode next to her carriage, “was a most76 beautiful sight and the cheering was deafening.” To some extent this new burst of royal ceremonial marked a retreat to shiny appearances in compensation for the loss of something substantial.