King Edward VIII

There were good points about the position too. As Duke of Cornwall, he now enjoyed the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, derived from much valuable property in London and huge estates in the West Country. These amounted to some £90,000 a year, far more than he could possibly require before he came of age and set up his own establishment. The Treasurer of the Duchy of Cornwall, Walter Peacock, estimated that by the end of his minority savings would probably amount to £400,000; say, very roughly, £10 million at current values.50 With new wealth and consequence came new responsibilities. J. C. Davidson, some time in 1912, was summoned from his work in the Colonial Office to St James’s Palace to be looked over as a prospective private secretary. He quickly decided it was no job for him: ‘I would have made a very poor courtier, nor did I quite like the character of the Prince of Wales, charming in some ways as he was.’51 The Prince possibly reciprocated the mild dislike; certainly no job was offered to Davidson, nor any private secretary appointed.

Meanwhile his naval career was running to its close. His last term at Dartmouth had been truncated by a fierce attack of measles. He retreated to Newquay to convalesce and to pay a few perfunctory visits to his recently acquired estates in the vicinity. On 29 March 1911 he returned briefly to Dartmouth to give presents and signed photographs to the officers, masters and a few particularly close friends. On the same day he presented to the town of Dartmouth the silver oar which symbolized the ancient rights of the Duke of Cornwall over the adjoining waters: ‘This was my first function, and I think it went off very well,’ he noted in his diary.52 Neither he nor his father appeared to have any doubts about the value of the education he had received. ‘I certainly think the College is the best school in England,’ wrote the King.53 The Prince echoed the sentiment when he visited Winchester in 1913. ‘I believe it is a very good school,’ he told his father. ‘… It is amusing to see the difference between an ordinary school and Dartmouth. The boys talk of discomfort, but in the dormitories they have cubicles and they sit about in studies all day. Their life is not half as strenuous as it is at Dartmouth and we were more contented. There can be no better education than a naval one.’54

The Dartmouth course ended with a training cruise. The Coronation made it impossible for the Prince to take part, but as a consolation in the autumn of 1911 he was sent on a three-month tour in the battleship Hindustan. The Prince served as a midshipman as the ship sailed along the south coast to Portland, Plymouth and Torbay, then for a month to Queensferry and back to Portland for the final weeks. The Captain, Henry Campbell, was a shining example of those bluff sailor men who maintain a conspicuous independence of attitude while keeping a weather eye always open to the wishes of those likely to further their careers. ‘Not the smallest exception or discrimination has been made in his favour,’ he wrote in his final report on the Prince.55 Up to a point it was true. The Prince did work hard, get up at 6 a.m. to do rifle drill or P.T., receive the same pay – 1/9d (9p) a day – as the other midshipmen, keep his watches, do a stint in the coal bunkers – ‘the atmosphere is thick with coal dust and how the wretched stokers who have to remain down there can stand it, I do not know’.56 But not many midshipmen ate regularly with their captain, went for walks ashore with him when the ship was near land, lunched in their stately homes with Lord Mar, Lord Rosebery and Lord Mount Edgcumbe. He was always the Prince of Wales and though he seems to have been genuinely welcome in the gunroom by the other midshipmen, he was there as a guest, not as a member.

‘I like the Captain very much indeed, he is always so interesting,’ wrote the Prince in his diary. ‘The Chaplain had a talk with me … and gave me some tracts to read.’57 The Chaplain, one suspects, was found less interesting than the Captain. Campbell reciprocated the boy’s affection, and, though he was not above flattery, his letter to Queen Mary has the ring of sincerity:

We in the Navy rate a man for what he does, not for what he is; from the highest to the lowest he was looked upon with affection and respect. His character has formed; it is strong but very gentle and is best described in the old Scotch words ‘Ye can break but ye canna bend me.’ In spite of his very happy nature he thinks a great deal and he one day made it quite clear to me that he was fully alive to the fact that false speech and fond hopes do not alter facts … The Prince said to me one day; ‘If I have learnt nothing else since I have been with you, I have learnt what inconvenience is and what it means to be really tired.’ I thought of my promise to you and felt that it had been fulfilled.58

When he went ashore for the last time the ship’s company sang ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ and ‘Auld lang syne’. The Prince knew it was the end of his naval life. ‘I only wish it was possible for you to continue serving in what I consider the finest service in the world,’ his father had written to him.59 But it was not possible. The first year of his reign had finally convinced George V that life aboard a ship could not equip a prince to be King. Edward must travel, he must learn languages, he must study history and the constitution, he must serve in the Army, he must become the very model of a modern monarch. The Prince of Wales was disconsolate, but he knew his father was right.

‘You know, I think father now is quite a nice man,’ Edward had said in apparent surprise to his mother in the summer of 1910.60 That George V was in fact quite a nice man is hardly in question; that his son continued to think him quite a nice father is more doubtful. The trouble was partly that the King tried too hard. ‘Now that you are leaving home, David, and going out into the world,’ he said when he deposited his son for the first time at Osborne, ‘always remember that I am your best friend.’61 The same refrain reverberated down the years: in 1908, ‘I wish you always to look upon me as your best friend, when in doubt and want advice, come to me’; in 1913, ‘I want you always to look upon me as your best friend’; in 1914, ‘I want you to treat me as your best friend.’62 It is possible that some boys may indeed regard their fathers as their best friends, but even if they did it is unlikely that they would relish being constantly reminded of the fact.

There was a sententiousness about the King’s approach which must have grated on its victim. ‘I trust that you will always remember …’ wrote George V just after his accession, ‘that now you must always set a good example to the others by being very obedient, respectful to your seniors and kind to everyone.’63 ‘May God spare you for many, many years and may you grow up to be a happiness and a credit to your parents and your Country,’ was the message for the Prince’s thirteenth birthday.64 The sentiments were unexceptionable, but no teenage boy could be expected to pay much attention to such exhortations. In later life Edward was apt to say that his father never said anything nice about him, always it was carping criticism and rebuke. This is not altogether fair. The King did sometimes congratulate his son on his manners, his letter-writing or some new achievement. But such occasions were the exception. ‘Papa has been so nice to me since my return …’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913. ‘No faults have been found … Such a change!!’ It was too good to last. Within a few days there was ‘an awful row’ when the King took exception to his sons going out for a walk with small rifles and shooting rabbits. ‘Those things are always a great bore,’ noted the Prince wearily.65 His recreations were a frequent source of recrimination: ‘You seem to be having too much shooting and not enough riding or hunting. I can’t understand why you didn’t hunt when Sir G. Fitzwilliam came expressly for that … What on earth were you doing? … I must say I am disappointed.’66

A less sensitive or more self-confident boy might have recognized the genuine solicitude which lay behind the King’s captiousness and have responded to the spirit rather than the manner. The Prince did not. His health provided grounds for constant skirmishes. ‘Do smoke less, take less exercise, eat more and rest more,’ wrote the King, in despair at his eighteen-year-old son’s increasingly eccentric train of life. ‘You are just at the critical age from now till you are 21 and it is most necessary that you should develop properly, both in mind and body. It all depends … whether you develop into a strong, healthy man or remain a sort of puny, half grown boy.’67 The Prince paid little attention. He had, for reasons difficult to follow, concluded that he was teetering always on the verge of fatness, and to avoid such a fate submitted his body to much violent physical exercise and ate with ill-judged frugality. He considered his parents’ efforts to modify this regime to be fussy and interfering, and dismissed the injunctions of the royal doctors as the vapourings of the King’s hired lackeys. He found it hard to credit what to the outsider seems the patent sincerity of his father’s heartcry: ‘I am only telling you these things for your own good and because I am so devoted to you and take such an interest in everything.’68 There were interludes of harmony: ‘We now understand each other so well,’ wrote the Prince of Wales in July 1913;69 a conversation with the King at York Cottage a few months later ‘made a difference to my life and made me look on everything in a totally different light’;70 but soon there would be more grumbles and recriminations and all the good would be undone.

Queen Mary’s role in the relationship was curiously remote. In the future mother and son were to develop a close rapport, but though there are occasional references in these years to ‘charming talks’ or ‘wise advice’, she played very much a secondary role. When the Prince’s equerry, William Cadogan, urged her to use her influence with the King to ensure that he sometimes addressed a word of encouragement to his son, she accepted that such advice was badly needed but could not bring herself to proffer it.71 One of the few fields where she seemed ready to take an initiative was in the selection of Christmas or birthday presents. Here she avoided any possible disappointment by acting both as donor and recipient. ‘I must just tell you,’ she wrote in May 1912, ‘that I have got for you to give me as a birthday present 2 charming old Chinese cloisonné cups (price £12) for my Chinese Chippendale room.’ The King adopted the same somewhat curious practice. For Christmas the same year he wanted a gold soup bowl. It was ‘awfully expensive, £150’, the Queen told her son, ‘but Papa is very anxious to have it and has ordered it, and I only hope you won’t mind’.72

Prince Albert remained Edward’s closest ally. At Osborne and Dartmouth Edward’s role had been that of protector or occasional critic, but with the Navy behind him the Prince of Wales was able to develop a close companionship with his younger brother. ‘Bertie is a delightful creature and we have so many interests in common,’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913, and then a fortnight later, ‘I am so miserable it is dear old Bertie’s last night; we have been so much together of late and I shall miss him terribly.’73 Prince George too, though eight years younger, was now becoming a friend. At first the relationship was very much de haut en bas; the Prince of Wales rather patronizingly explained to his brother about the Royal Navy or made him exercise – ‘George got stitches all the time … he is too fat for running.’74 By 1914 he had become ‘a capital boy’,75 they spent much time together and chatted freely. Bertie was still the real support, however, with whom the Prince of Wales formed a common front against the assaults of unreasonable parents. At dinner with Queen Alexandra, ‘Bertie and I did our best to be funny and we succeeded’;76 at Christmas in York Cottage, ‘it is hard work keeping 3 wild brothers in order; well I should say two, as my 2nd brother helps me. He is nearly as tall as I am and weighs more.’77

Oxford in the autumn of 1912 was to be the next phase of the Prince’s education, but before he went up it was decided he should spend a few months in France. He was reasonably fluent in French but had picked up ‘a very John Bull intonation’ while at Dartmouth, and this called for improvement.78 The Marquis de Breteuil, an anglophile French aristocrat with an American wife and two sons of the Prince’s age, somewhat reluctantly allowed himself to be selected as host. He was summoned to Buckingham Palace to inspect his future charge and found him ‘very thin, younger in appearance than his years, puny [chétif], timid but most attractive’. He insisted that Hansell, by whom he was much impressed, should accompany the Prince. George V emphasized that the visit must be entirely informal; the Marquis pointed out that his guest could hardly fail to call on the President. ‘You’re right,’ said the King. ‘I can’t get used to the idea that in a few months he will be eighteen, and that he’s already the Prince of Wales.’79

He had some excuse for his failure. Everyone agrees that both physically and mentally the Prince was slow to develop. The image of the slight, shy, wistful figure which was to become imprinted in the public consciousness over the next twenty years was already well established. In 1912 he still seemed conspicuously ill-equipped to grapple with the demands imposed on him by his position. Any boy of his age would have been discomfited by the ‘huge and most alarming’ luncheon given by the prefect of police, Louis-Jean Lépine – ‘it was rather trying and the food was nasty,’ but most would have coped better with the informal dance which the Breteuils held in his honour: ‘They were mostly young folk who went on to a ball. I danced once or twice but it bores me to a degree. I went to bed at 10.15.’80 There is no evidence from his diary that he met any girl in France who engaged his attention for more than a few minutes.

How much French he learnt is another matter. An amiable French scholar, Maurice Escoffier, had been engaged to conduct the Prince around France and supervise his studies; not surprisingly he reported on his protégé’s amazing progress. To judge, however, from the Prince’s dislike of the language and reluctance to speak it, an aversion which persisted even after he had lived in France for many years, the progress must have been limited, or at least not maintained. The most that can be said of his three months in France was that he mildly enjoyed them and learnt quite a lot about the country’s history and political structure. More important still, he made himself well liked. ‘He charmed everyone during his stay,’ read a letter which was the more convincing for not being intended for the eyes of his parents. ‘Old and young, rich and poor, were equally impressed by his frankness. The Breteuils could not say enough about his generous and open [belle et franche] nature.’81

‘French customs are very curious, but I suppose I shall get used to them in time,’ wrote the Prince resignedly.82 He was happiest at the Breteuil château in the valley of the Chevreuse, shooting, bathing in the lake, and generally behaving as if he was at home. ‘We hope you will treat him exactly like your own son,’ the King had written. ‘He is a good boy and I know he will always do at once what you tell him.’83 The Marquis’s real sons may not have been best pleased by the imposition on them of this unexpected extra brother but they played their part gallantly. The Prince liked both of them: ‘Even the eldest who likes music is very nice.’84 Fortunately François made up for this aberrant taste by liking tennis too. In Paris the Prince saw the sights; watched Sarah Bernhardt play L’Aiglon – ‘she is about 70 and takes the part of a boy of 18. I think she ought to stop acting now’;85 visited the Jardin d’Acclimatation – ‘a rotten kind of zoo’;86 was received by President Fallières and presented with the grand cordon of the Légion d’honneur – ‘Nothing could have been better or more self-possessed and tactful than the Prince’s manner,’ wrote the British Ambassador. ‘He did not hesitate at all in his French’; and visited the studio of the painter Monsieur Gillot – ‘The Yacht’s foremast is about half the height it ought to be,’ he told the King. ‘I think M. Gillot is one of these impressionist artists, but I know that you hate that sort of painting.’87

He was not greatly impressed by the capital, telling the Aga Khan that he could not imagine what his grandfather had seen in it.88 The press did not make it more agreeable for him. For the first time he found himself assailed by importunate photographers, and he did not relish the experience. His father sympathized. Unless the reporters behaved better, he decreed, ‘drastic steps must be taken to get rid of them’.89 It would be interesting to know what he had in mind. The Premier and future President, Raymond Poincaré, met him several times during his stay in Paris and was struck by his ‘thoughtful character, eagerness to learn, interest in practical problems, and a real knowledge of industrial possibilities’. He was a poor trencherman, however, ‘the choicest menus being treated by him with complete indifference’.90 What the Prince enjoyed most of all was the week he spent with the French Mediterranean fleet: he had a passion for the sea, wrote the Marquis de Breteuil, and would happily have made this part of his visit twice as long.91

And so it was back to England and the final preparations for his life at Oxford. It seems to have been Hansell and Lord Derby who urged the merits of a university education on the King, probably with some encouragement from Lord Esher. Not everyone approved. ‘Surely this cannot be true,’ expostulated his great-aunt Augusta. ‘It is too democratic.’92 That was one of the reasons that the King favoured it: ‘I have always been told that one can have the best time of one’s life at College if one makes up one’s mind,’93 he told his son. The Prince was sceptical. He accepted that the time would probably pass well enough, at least provided Hansell came along, but he remained unenthusiastic.94 When his mother tried to get him to make some choices about the furnishing of his rooms, he noted gloomily in his diary, ‘I am afraid it does not interest me much. I am just about fed up with the whole affair.’95 The root of his woe became apparent when his brother Bertie remarked how much he envied him and the Prince retorted that the feeling was mutual. Oxford might be tolerable in its own way but it was not where he wished to be: ‘It is an awful situation and I only wish I was back quietly in the only service – the navy.’96

As a Magdalen man himself, Hansell naturally urged its merits as a haven for the Prince. George V appealed to Lord Derby for advice. Starting from the very reasonable hypothesis that only three colleges were worth consideration, Derby dismissed New College as being at that moment beset by troubles and Christ Church as the haunt of nouveaux riches. That left Magdalen.97 The King concurred. An additional argument was that Derby was ready to send his own son, Edward Stanley, to the same college. ‘David is certainly a most loyal boy and I am sure would always do his best to be keen and get on wherever he was,’ the King told Hansell.98 In fact Magdalen does not seem to have been a bad choice. It had a reputation for independence of mind, the eschewing of anything that seemed smart or extravagant and a robust indifference to rank.99 It was well suited for the somewhat special needs of an undergraduate who was also heir to the throne.

With Oxford as with Dartmouth, George V decreed that his son should be treated exactly like his contemporaries and then took steps to ensure that this would be impossible. The Prince was to be attended at Oxford not merely by Hansell and his valet Finch but also by an equerry. This last appointment caused some cogitation. Esher commented how difficult it would be to find somebody who would be ‘watchful but not seem to be so; instructive and not a bore; moral and not a prig; high spirited and not reckless. It would be an interesting task for a young man with imagination.’100 The King preferred horses to imagination. He chose William Cadogan, a gallant and honourable soldier who was almost wholly without intellectual interests and whose chief function was to persuade his charge to hunt. ‘Not a very exciting sort of chap,’ commented the Prince when they first met.102 As if this entourage did not sufficiently separate him from the common herd, the Prince was settled in his own suite of rooms, furnished by the Queen with Sheraton pieces of furniture and good watercolours. Odder still for Oxford, he had his own bathroom. It may not have been very luxurious – ‘a cold, converted torture chamber’ one of his contemporaries described it102 – but it still set its owner apart from his fellows.

The real problem, however, was summed up by Cosmo Lang, then Archbishop of York. The object of the Prince going to Oxford, he assumed, was that he should enter ‘naturally and simply’ into college life. His life might be simple but would never be natural if his friends were selected for him. Yet if something of the sort was not done, the best men in college would hang back in the fear that they might seem royal toadies, while less desirable companions, ‘often agreeable and plausible enough’, would thrust themselves forward. The solution must be to persuade a few of the ‘leading and best men’ to ease the Prince’s passage into college society.103 Derby’s son Stanley should obviously be a member of any such group.

On the whole the system worked. The Prince was still shy. Lord Grantley remembered his ‘characteristic way of coming into a room, jerking forward from the hips and fingering his tie the whole time … It looked as if it was torture to him to meet strangers.’104 He was further handicapped by the fact that most of his contemporaries had moved on in a group from their respective public schools, while there were few if any naval cadets at Oxford. ‘The junior common room is something like a gunroom,’ he noted nostalgically in his diary. ‘At 7.00 I dined in hall … I got on fairly well, only my drawback is not knowing anyone. It lasted 1⁄2 hour and then Stanley and a chap called Higham sat in my room till 9.45. They are very nice and we talked about many things.’105 It was not easy at first, but he was friendly and ready to become sociable. He forced himself out of his shell, attending the celebrated entertainments in the common room and marvelling at the amount people drank. ‘We were all pretty dead at the end and I had almost a drop too much. However, I managed all right … It is a good thing to do as one gets to know people.’106 After the first few nights he spent almost every evening in the rooms of one of his friends, smoking, singing, talking or playing cards. Barrington-Ward, a future editor of The Times, remembered him calling in on his rooms when an impromptu concert was in progress. A number of cardboard trumpets were lying around. ‘The Prince promptly took one and made as much noise as anyone. He said he liked a “good row”. So we had a ragtime, comic songs and choruses, and he joined in merrily like a man … It was impossible not to like him. He is clean-looking and jolly, with no side at all.’107

The friends he made, however, were not necessarily those whom his father or Hansell would have chosen. His opinion of Stanley varied from day to day, but his considered judgment in 1916, by which time they had become close friends, was that Stanley had greatly improved but that he had never really liked him as an undergraduate. ‘I wish you had rooms opposite mine, it would be great,’ he wrote to an old naval friend. ‘As it is, I have that chap Stanley, who I don’t know very well, and who is coshy!! That is the worst of all crimes!!’108 Coshy meant stuck-up, putting on airs. Lord Cranborne was ‘very nice’ but Lord Ednam – who, as the Earl of Dudley, was in time to become one of his closest friends – was undoubtedly coshy; a period in a gunroom would have done him good.109 The Prince’s friends tended to be more home-spun, people who would have fitted naturally into the Royal Navy. One or two were intellectuals; in February 1913 he dined for the first time with a man who was to play a critical role in his life, ‘the President of the Union debating society, W. Monckton, a very nice man’.110 A few were deemed unsuitable. Hansell and Cadogan warned him against one in particular: ‘They say that Ronnie is a bad lot, he is a gt friend of mine and of course this is a gt blow to me. However I shall in no way chuck him but merely not be seen about with him.’111 Unfortunately he made the mistake of inviting the delinquent Ronnie to meet his brother Prince Harry when the latter visited Oxford. Hansell ‘was very sick with me … I am an awful failure in this life and always do the most idiotic things.’112