The royals - Kitty Kelley [9]
The King became so concerned about the reaction of his volatile subjects that he was afraid to protect his relatives of German descent. Instead he stood by silently as his beloved cousin Prince Louis of Battenberg was vilified simply because of his German name. When war had threatened, Battenberg as the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy mobilized the Admiralty with speed and efficiency, so that when war broke out, England was ready. But Battenberg, a naturalized British subject, became a target for abuse: his name was German, he was born in Germany, he spoke with a German accent, he employed German servants, and he owned property in Germany.
Despite his total loyalty to the Crown, he was forced to resign his naval position and relinquish his princely title. The final humiliation occurred when the King told him to change his name. Shattered, Prince Louis dutifully anglicized Battenberg (berg is “mountain” in German) to Mountbatten to make it acceptable to the English.
The King tried to mollify his cousin by making him a British noble. Louis accepted the title of Marquess of Milford Haven because he wanted his children to be noblemen, but he never recovered from the shame of renouncing his ancestry. Somehow, though, he kept his sense of humor. He wrote in his son’s guest book: “June 9th arrived Prince Hyde; June 19th departed Lord Jekyll.”
His younger son and namesake, Louis, was shocked by the news of his father’s resignation. “It was all so stupid,” he recalled years later. “My father had been in the Royal Navy for forty-six years. He was completely identified with England, and we always regarded ourselves as an English family. Of course, we were well aware of our German connections; how could we not be? It certainly never occurred to any of us to be ashamed of them—rather the contrary. We are a very old family, and proud of it…. My father had worked his way to the top of the Royal Navy by sheer ability and industry. And now his career was finished—all because of the ridiculous suspicion that he might be in secret sympathy with the very people he had come to England to avoid!”
Next, the King moved to cleanse the rest of his German family. Like the monarchs of mythology who bring magic clouds with them wherever they go, King George V waved his royal wand. Overnight, one brother-in-law—the Duke of Teck—became the Marquess of Cambridge, and the other—Prince Alexander of Teck—became the Earl of Athlone. One stroke of the royal quill eradicated all traces of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, Hesse, and Wettins from the King’s lineage: the ugly German ducklings were transformed into beautiful British swans. The royal family’s Teutonic dukes, archdukes, and princelings instantly became English marquises.
But the King felt he still needed to make the monarchy appear less imperial to survive. He decreed that members of the royal family could marry into the nobility. This paved the way for his second son, Albert, known to the family as “Bertie,” to propose to a sweet-faced Scottish girl, reared as an Earl’s daughter, although her mother has been rumored to have been one of the Earl’s Welsh servant girls (these rumors, never officially acknowledged, have yet to be borne out by any evidence). Ironically, Bertie’s marriage in 1923 to the commoner, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, brought stability to the British throne and propped up the dynasty for several generations.
During the First World War, concern was voiced over the bloody role of the King’s German cousin Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein, who was in charge of British prisoners of war in a camp outside Berlin.
“He’s not really fighting on the side of the Germans,” said the King defensively. “He was only put in charge of a camp of English prisoners.”
“A nice distinction,” Prime Minister Asquith later observed to a friend. His successor, Lloyd George, was even more blunt. When he received a royal summons to the Palace, he turned to his secretary and said: “I wonder