The royals - Kitty Kelley [12]
The King had started his adult life as the Duke of York and spent seventeen years shooting grouse on the moors. He became the heir apparent when his older brother, the Duke of Clarence, died. Even as King, he kept the clocks set forward an hour to provide more time for shooting. A proper country squire, he enjoyed tramping across his twenty-thousand-acre estate in Norfolk. He adored his wife, indulged his daughter, and terrorized his five sons. “I was frightened of my father, and I am damn well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me,” he said.
Poorly educated, he rarely read, shunned the theater, and did not listen to classical music. He ignored the arts, letters, and sciences. For recreation he licked postage stamps and placed them with childlike precision in blue leather stamp books. By the end of his life he had compiled an enormous collection of stamps from places he never wanted to visit. Known as “the Sailor King,” he did not travel for education or pleasure. “Abroad is awful,” he said. “I know because I’ve been there.” Except for touring military installations, he took few trips. He made an exception in 1911 to go to India for his coronation and in 1913 to visit relatives in Germany.
“My father, George V, took quiet pride in never having set foot in the United States,” said his eldest son.
“Too far to go,” said the King.
What he was, his children would become. In later years his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who became the Duke of Windsor, was so humiliated by his father’s ignorance that he reneged on an agreement to write a book of royal family reminiscences. He confided the reason to his publisher: “I’d hate for the world to know how illiterate we all were.” The Prince of Wales had once embarrassed himself at a dinner party by not knowing the name of the Brontë sisters, who in their short lifetimes wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, both considered classics of the English novel. The Prince of Wales, who rarely read, did not know who they were or how to pronounce their name. “Who are the Bronts?” he asked.
Unenlightened about mental illness, the Prince of Wales considered the condition of his youngest brother, Prince John, a source of shame. The last of the monarch’s six children, John was mentally retarded and an epileptic. He was secretly removed from the family at an early age and lived on a farm on the Sandringham estate, where he died in 1919 at the age of thirteen.
As uneducated as the King was, George V won wide respect from his subjects for his conscientious performance of royal duties and for his numerous military uniforms and the obvious pleasure he took in wearing them in royal parades. His subjects looked up to him as the father of their country and the personification of their values. England had gained enough land by conquest to give her dominion over a quarter of the globe and a fourth of the world’s inhabitants, thus making George V the last great Emperor King. During his reign, the sun truly never set on the British empire.
By the time King George V died in 1936, his beleaguered country was on the brink of another world war with Germany, which would end Britain’s imperial power. And the House of Windsor, which he had built on the quicksand of illusion, started sinking under the weight of scandal.
For the last two years of his life, the King agonized over his heir. He dreaded leaving the monarchy in the hands of his feckless son, who at the age of forty-one was still unmarried. Following a fourteen-year affair with another man’s wife, the Prince of Wales was now besotted with a married American woman, once divorced, named Wallis Warfield Simpson. Already Mrs. Simpson envisioned herself as the next Queen of England. The concept of a divorced person in royal circles was considered such sacrilege in those days that the King refused to receive his son’s “unholy lover.” He forbade his son to bring a woman