The royals - Kitty Kelley [10]
As the devoted secretary to Queen Victoria, Lord Stamfordham was by far the most important of the King’s men. He had served Victoria’s heir, King Edward VII, who had put him in charge of his own son, George, at an early age. “He taught me how to be a king,” said the master of his servant.
It was Lord Stamfordham who received the unenviable job of telling King George V about D. H. Lawrence, who had been hounded into hiding because he married a German woman. The once revered writer had married the sister of German military aviator Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary Red Baron, credited with shooting down eighty Allied planes during World War I. After their wedding, Lawrence and his bride, Frieda, were forced by public hostility to seek refuge in the English countryside, where they hid in barns like animals.
This news was unsettling to the King, who also had a German wife. But the clever Queen—Mary of Teck—speaking English with a slight guttural accent, began referring to herself as “English from top to toe.” The King immediately stopped addressing Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, the commander of the German forces sweeping across Europe, as “sweet cousin Willy.” His German-hating subjects, who avoided references to sex, began referring to the male sexual organ as a “Willy.”
Still, the hatred of Germans became so intense in England that the King’s mother begged him to remove the Kaiser’s honorary flags from the chapel. “Although as a rule I never interfere, I think the time has come when I must speak out,” wrote Queen Alexandra. “It is but right and proper for you to have down those hateful German banners in our sacred Church, St. George’s, at Windsor.”
She sent her letter to “my darling little Georgie” after the Daily Mail had excoriated him for allowing the eight flags of “enemy Emperors, Kings and Princes” a place of honor at Windsor. “As long as the offending banners remain, their owners will be prayed for,” thundered the newspaper. “What are the King’s advisors doing?”
The King ignored the criticism until it came from his “darling Mother dear.” Then he yielded and had the banners removed. “Otherwise,” he told a friend, “the people would have stormed the chapel.”
The King then threw himself and his family into the war effort. He dispatched his sons to the western front, sending the Prince of Wales (Edward, but known to the family as David) to France, while Prince Albert (Bertie) served on the battleship HMS Collingwood. The King banned alcohol and began strict rationing at the Palace to set a national example.
In March 1917 his cousin the Emperor Nicholas II of Russia (“dear Nicky”) was forced to abdicate, in part because he, too, had a German wife whom the King blamed “for the present state of chaos that exists in Russia.”
The King’s equerry was more brutal on the subject: “The Empress is not only a Boche by birth, but in sentiment. She did all she could to bring about an understanding with Germany. She is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic and the ex-Emperor as a criminal for his weakness and submission to her promptings.”
That was all the King needed to hear. Concerned about the survival of his throne, he withdrew the warm friendship he had once extended to his “beloved cousin.” When the Czar appealed for asylum for himself and his family, the King refused, prohibiting them entry into England. The King felt he needed to separate himself from Russian imperialism, especially when wrapped with a German ribbon. So he wrote his cousin that he did not think it “advisable that the Imperial Family should take up their residence in this country.” He suggested instead Spain or the South of France. At that point the