The royals - Kitty Kelley [8]
After walking out of Schindler’s List, which she described as “a tedious film about Jews,” she advised her butler not to waste his money on the Academy Award– winning film.
“A movie like Schindler’s List just incites morbid curiosity,” the Princess said when her butler served her breakfast the next morning. “I couldn’t stand it. It was so thoroughly unpleasant and disgusting that I had to get up and leave.”
The butler listened patiently, as always. Then he bowed his head and returned to the pantry. Later he repeated the conversation to an American, who asked if he were not offended by Princess Margaret’s remarks. He seemed puzzled by the American’s question.
“Oh my, no. You don’t understand. The Princess is royalty. Royalty,” he said, pronouncing the word with reverence. “The Princess belongs to the House of Windsor—the most important royal house in the world. She’s the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen. That’s as exalted as you can possibly be on this earth.”
“Do you mean to suggest that royalty, especially British royalty, can do no wrong? That just because she’s a princess, she’s immune to criticism?”
“She is royalty,” repeated the butler.
“And therefore above reproach?”
“Royalty is royalty,” he said. “Never to be questioned.”
TWO
Once upon a time… the House of Windsor was a fantasy. The figment of a courtier’s imagination. The dynasty was created in 1917 to conceal the German roots of the King and Queen, and the deception enabled the monarchy to be perceived as British by subjects who despised Germany.
Until then, many English kings never spoke the King’s English. They spoke only German because for almost two hundred years, from 1714 until this century, a long line of Germans ruled the British empire. By 1915 England finally had a king, George V*, who could speak English without a German accent. Although he was a German from the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line that had ruled England for eighty years, he considered himself to be indisputably British. His subjects, who hated Germany, Germans, and all things Germanic, were not convinced.
For years, especially in the early 1900s, the English had become increasingly afraid of Prussian militarism. They felt threatened by the Kaiser’s oppression. And they were “sore-headed and fed up,” as George Bernard Shaw wrote, with Germany’s rattling sabers. They viewed World War I as a war against Germany.
Newspapers carried eyewitness accounts of revolting cruelty by the Germans, who bombed undefended towns and killed civilians. Those actions shocked the world in 1915. In England, editorials denounced “The March of the Hun” and “Treason to Civilization” as German U-boats sank British ships. The mounting death tolls on French battlefields caused hardships in England, which exacerbated Britain’s hatred of foreigners.
King George V was disturbed as he watched his subjects stone butchers with German names and burn the homes of people who owned dachshunds. Pretzels were banned and symphony conductors shunned Mozart and Beethoven.
This antipathy was not unique to Great Britain. Blood hatred of everything German had infected all of Europe and spread to America, where Hollywood produced a string of hate films such as To Hell with the Kaiser, Wolves of Kultur, and The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin.
The King of England deplored the “hysterical clamor,” calling it “petty and undignified,” but few listened. The