The Prince must have been uneasily aware that wherever he went in Germany he would be sized up as a potential husband for unmarried daughters. The courts of Germany had provided so many spouses for the British royal family that it was reasonable to assume the precedent would again be followed. He had experienced his first taste of what he could expect when the Emperor’s daughter, Victoria Louise, visited London in 1911. The press reported rumours that an engagement was imminent.152 Dynastically it would have been most suitable and Princess Victoria Louise had many good points. A young maid of honour, Katherine Villiers, pronounced her wholly without good looks but with much sweetness and joie de vivre.153 The Prince himself found her ‘most easy to get on with’.154 But there is no reason to think that he or his parents gave any serious thought to marriage. Nor did Victoria Louise; she found the Prince ‘very nice’ but ‘terribly young, younger than he actually was’.155
More real was the putative romance with Princess May, or more formally Caroline Matilda, of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple got on particularly well when they were staying together at Gotha. May was ‘such a nice girl’, Alge’s wife Alice reported, ‘much like the others only taller and very slim’.156 Her brother-in-law August Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was sufficiently encouraged to write directly to the Prince in June 1914 to suggest that a match should be made. The nineteen-year-old Prince consulted his mother and with some difficulty constructed a reply – ‘an awkward job’.157 His letter does not survive, probably he pleaded that he was too young to contemplate matrimony at the moment. The war put an end to the possibility but in 1915 he remarked rather wistfully to Godfrey Thomas, ‘Well, I could very easily have done worse.’ Thomas commented that, though Princess May’s teeth needed attention and her nose was too red, a dentist and a little powder would soon have put things to rights. ‘HRH was really very much attracted to her, and I am perfectly certain that if the War hadn’t come, it would have been brought off. It is difficult to see now who he will marry or when, but whoever it is, I know that he will often think with affectionate regret of Princess May as the might have been.’158
It has been said that the sympathy for Germany which the Prince of Wales showed in the 1930s stemmed from the success of his pre-war visits. All the evidence is that, though he enjoyed his stay there and liked some of his relations, he was not particularly struck by the country or its people. ‘The Germans as a race,’ he told a friend, ‘are fat, stolid, unsympathetic, intensely military, and all the men have huge cigars sticking out of their faces at all times.’159 ‘The trip was very interesting,’ he reflected when he got back to London, ‘but I don’t care much about the Germans.’160 Of the countries which he visited before the First World War, the one that pleased him most was Norway, where he loved the skiing, the open-air existence and the informality of court life – ‘a lovely country with a charming people,’ he found it. ‘It was just like home.’161 This last comment betrayed his real priorities. Far though he might wander, and much pleasure though he might derive from his wanderings, whether as Prince, as King, or as Duke of Windsor, there was always for him to be no place like home.
By the summer of 1914 the King had agreed that his son should spend the last few months of the year travelling and should join the Grenadier Guards the following year. The prospect was pleasing enough, but already shades of the prison house were beginning to close upon the growing Prince. The first dread intimation of what was to come had struck him in June 1912, when he got back at lunch time from his stay in France to find that the same afternoon he had to go with the King and Queen to a St John’s Ambulance Parade – ‘rather, if not very dull’; at 6.30 p.m. he was receiving the Khedive of Egypt and at 8.30 he was taking the wife of the Bishop of Winchester in to dinner.162 From then on public functions multiplied. He quickly decided that the more formal and decorous they were, the more he would dislike them. He attended his first court in March 1914 and found it ‘mighty poor fun … I went in with the parents to the ballroom and stood till 11.00 while hundreds of women went by, each one plainer than the last … I don’t mind if I never go to one again.’ He did go, of course, and resented it even more: ‘a bum show. This court etiquette is intolerable.’ As for the state visit of the King and Queen of Denmark: ‘What rot and a waste of time, money and energy all these state visits are.’163
When he had a proper job to do, however, he did it conscientiously and well. He was sent by the King to greet Poincaré, now President of the Republic, on his arrival at Portsmouth. The French statesman was impressed by his ‘charm of manner and vivacity’. The Prince had ‘lost none of his former delightful simplicity’ but had ‘“come on” a good deal’.164 The King was delighted by the reports he was given of his son’s performance: ‘It gave both Mama and me great pleasure … I may sometimes find fault with you but I assure you it is only for your own good and because I am so devoted to you.’165 The Prince’s first important solo performance came in June 1914 when he opened the new church of St Anselm on the Duchy of Cornwall estates in south London. He took endless trouble with his speech and carried it off well: ‘I had a wonderful sense of confidence in the audience, who I felt would make allowances for it being my 1st public function.’166 At present, he told his audience, he knew little of the difficulties which beset those who were concerned with housing for the working classes, ‘but by studying the comfort and happiness of my tenants I hope to gain experience’. Congratulations flowed in, on his diction, his pace, his obvious sincerity; the one that would have pleased him most because it was not intended for his eyes was sent to one of the ladies-in-waiting, Lady Fortescue. ‘It was a wonderful success. He did it quite beautifully. At first he seemed a little nervous but it wore off and his speech was quite charming. He said it as if he really meant it … and in such a firm, charming voice. Everyone was tremendously enthusiastic … He looked so young among all those elderly prelates, but so dignified.’167
For the first time he began to talk seriously to politicians and form opinions of them. Churchill was his hero, mainly because he was now First Lord of the Admiralty and arch advocate of a larger Navy: ‘He is a wonderful man and has a great power of work.’ Asquith, the Prime Minister, he liked, though he found Mrs Asquith ‘rather tiring and never stops talking’; Esher and Lulu Harcourt (the Colonial Secretary) were particularly tiresome.168 If he had any preference between the parties he did not confide it to his diary, though on certain issues he feared the Liberal government would be insufficiently firm. He had strong views about the suffragettes and told his father that he hoped ‘the woman suffrage bill will never be passed. It is curious how divided the present cabinet is on the subject.’169 To his relief Asquith held firm. ‘I really think that at last some drastic measures are to be taken as regards those bl-d- suffragettes, whose conduct is becoming more and more infamous every day,’ he told Godfrey Thomas in the summer of 1914.170 He was as strongly opposed to Home Rule for Ireland. ‘I hope it will not pass,’ he wrote in his diary when the Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912.171 His parents shared his views on the future of Ulster. Queen Mary wrote him outspoken letters in March and April 1914 about the weakness of the government and the deplorable way they had treated the Army.172 ‘Although we aren’t supposed to have any politics,’ the Prince responded, ‘there does come a time when all that outward nonsense must be put aside, and that time has come.’173
Socially his life was transformed in that last summer before the war. His parents had had a party for him at Buckingham Palace in March 1913. ‘I had to dance, a thing I hate,’ he wrote forlornly in his diary: ‘The whole thing was a great strain.’ He did not change his views for a year at least; then in July 1914 as a twenty-year-old he went to the Londesboroughs’ ball. ‘I stuck out to the bitter end and got back at 2 a.m. It was really great fun,’ he recorded in mild astonishment. Next night it was the turn of the Portlands: ‘The floor was perfect and my dancing is improving.’ He stayed till 3.45, and did the same the following night at the Salisburys’.174 A looker-on at the Salisburys’ dance who did not know about his change of heart commiserated on his sad plight: ‘The Prince is no dancer … It was something of an ordeal for so young a boy and of so retiring a disposition.’175 The sympathy was uncalled for: ‘I have