There now began for me an interesting experience. I had started out to travel and see the sights of Europe, a bride of twenty-two, with a mind in some ways older than my age, as inquisitive as youth, but, perhaps, not so subject to youth’s self-deception; as interested as youth in my own observations (rather than in any general view or philosophical explanation of society), but sceptical, and with no youthful tendency to illusions either romantic or royal. The European travels of such a young lady could not have much interest, ordinarily. But, for ten years and more, I went from Court to Court, rather than from country to country, in that huge family of Royalty whose members have been intermarrying for so many generations that all the occupants of the thrones of Europe have become cousins, and a princess can visit from palace to palace as if from house to house among relatives in a countryside. And it was an interesting experience, I say, because Royalty is not{107} of semi-sacred caste that in one country will be accepted as quite holy and God-given, and in another will be merely allowed to live pensioned—like vergers in some fine old cathedral after its worship has been abolished and its altars removed—and in yet others will be existing in all the intermediate stages between these two extremes; honoured by this faction and attacked by that, reformed and reconstructed and embellished and defaced. It was interesting, as it had been in Spain, to discover the anomalies and false appearances and thin lava-crusts on which we seemed to live so securely. Being well aware of how I saw myself in my own mind, it was interesting to study what was in the minds of other royal personages—to see how they regarded themselves and how they thought they were regarded—and to learn what real credit we had and what actual appearance we made in the minds of the people who saluted us with such varying degrees of curiosity and respect.
In Paris, where we went first, Royalty has no problems. Being for ever dispossessed of its claims in France, it is accepted there without awe and without enmity. It flees to Paris from the dulness of{108} its official life in every monarchy of Europe; and at times it seems that more royalties are there than in all the other capitals of the Continent together. Paris has become a holiday rendezvous for them; and it needs them as little as it does its tourists. They can meet and dine and gossip, unobserved even by the Press. They can find circles of aristocracy in which they will be received as formally as they would be in their Courts. Or they may enjoy, if they can, on terms of some human naturalness, the life of salons and studios. And if they desire the crowded solitude of the streets, they will rarely find any one to stare. Paris is freedom, even for princesses. It was, for me, on that first return, an old home of childhood that I was revisiting; and I went to the convent to see the nuns who had taught me, and hunted up some of my playmates to recall myself to them after the nine years that seemed a lifetime that had passed. Then, in a week, we set out for England; and there we were Royalty again.
It was then I first saw Queen Victoria, and I shall not easily describe what a surprise it was. She had been for a long time the great Queen in my thoughts, on the throne of an empire beyond imagination in
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Dowager Queen Alexandra of England, Queen Maud of Norway and Prince Olaf, Crown Prince of Norway
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wealth and power, and ruling so many millions of the most civilised people devoted in their loyalty. I had formed a mental picture of I do not know what majesty and grandeur for her. We came to her from the City of London (so impressive after Paris) to have luncheon with her in Windsor Castle, that is so noble a seat of sovereignty; and when I entered the room in which she waited to receive us, I had a shock of pity and dismay. She was so small that I thought at first she must be sitting down. And she was not only feeble with age, but evidently ill, her eyes dulled, her hands swollen, her face as if feverish. Her merely human aspect of infirmity was increased by the black dress of mourning and widow’s cap that she wore; and standing with her two Indian servants behind her, leaning on her short cane, in that magnificent apartment that would have dwarfed a giant, holding out a tired hand to you vaguely as if she did not clearly see you—it brought a lump to the throat. Here was Royalty then! The greatest and most famous of us all! Queen Victoria!
My father-in-law and she had known each other many years, and at the luncheon table he sat beside her and kept up a conversation with her. She said{110} very little, and with her eyes most often on her plate, like a person who is polite, but distracted by illness, and incapable of rousing the mind. The English Royal Family has the sensible habit of dining without the ladies-in-waiting, who take their meals in another room; so we were en famille; and the conversation was that of intimate domestic interests and the little social happenings of the day. One could hardly find a family more charming, more serene, more simply happy.
And the explanation of this air of the English Court is easily found. England is a country of accepted classes, of which each class makes no infringement on the rights of the class above it and fears none from the class below. There are even upper and lower servants in a household. And each class receives servility from the class below it to reimburse it for the servility that it pays to the class above. Royalty is just a final upper class, neither envied by an aristocracy which cannot aspire to it, nor feared by the lower classes over which it has no authority. It is a social ornament of government, a symbol of national majesty.
The aristocracy is almost equally ornamental, with{111} certain appearances of power that are allowed it by the sufferance of the rest. The real government is the commerce and industry of the nation. It is a commercial empire, ruled by considerations of trade, but disguising itself, even to itself, by forms of administration that are aristocratic, with an established church in a nation largely nonconformist, a military power that in the main engages in wars for the extension or protection of commercial interests, and an ideal of empire for humanitarian ends—at the same time making it pay. You will always hear, for example, of the devoted self-sacrifice of the British rule in India, which carries the peaceful blessings of civilisation to natives incapable of self-government; but if India were being held at a continual loss to the British tax-payer—if he had to pay out of his own purse, without return, to protect the natives from their own incapacity—I wonder whether the British Empire in India would last a year. It is this faculty of almost honest self-deception which makes the Englishman so insoluble a puzzle to the foreigner.
It makes the English Royal Family the most popularly revered in Europe, even though it has, of all the royal families, the least governmental power to{112} compel awe, and has no English blood in it to endear it to the nation, and is allowed not even a pretence of leadership in peace or war to make it picturesque. When I attended Queen Victoria’s jubilee, about a year after my first meeting with her, it seemed as if the whole nation had poured itself into the streets of London to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her succession to the throne. And if one were sceptical, it might be said that they were only to come to enjoy the spectacle and to rejoice in the display of their own national magnificence. But the celebration had all the evidences of a personal tribute, and it was undoubtedly so accepted by the Queen and her family.
King Edward, who was a man of the world not easily deceived, always seemed to have this conviction of his importance in the eyes of his people. I do not know to what extent he interested himself privately in the problems of their government, from which the Royal Family is so jealously excluded; certainly, in years of familiar acquaintance with him, I never once heard him refer to them. Yet he was a man whose intellect would have been of value to his country, for he was one of the cleverest sovereigns of Europe, a striking personality, genial and shrewd.{113} It seemed a pity that such a brain should be wasted in the idleness of royal life after it had succeeded in developing itself in spite of the restrictions that make most royal brains so dull.
Coming first to England from the animations of the South, I thought the people looked as stupefied as if they were all just recovering from a fit; and I felt the same general blank of reserved dulness among the aristocratic and official circles that surrounded the Court. It seemed a country that was not ruled by intelligence but by property. Property is a blind master, and great masses of the people were already rotted out by a poverty and industrial oppression from which any governing intelligence would have protected them. It took the fiasco of the Boer War, and the strikes and internal disorders of the last few years, to awaken the nation from its stupor of imperial complacency. Since that time there has been a great appearance of revolt and reform; and I have been interested to hear the foreign speculation on the probable fate of the throne in the final issue of the upheaval. I should like to know what power the British throne still has of which the country could deprive it, or what liberty the people could acquire{114} by its abolition! They would gain as little as if, by a popular uprising, the citizens of London killed the lions in their Zoo. There may have been a time when lions were dangerous in England, but the sight of them in their cages now can only give a pleasurable holiday-shudder of awe—of which, I think, the nation will not willingly deprive itself.
There was then beginning the great industrial and commercial rivalry between England and Germany that before war came led to so much talk of it; and this rivalry was paralleled by an antipathy between the Kaiser and King Edward that was as frank as the enmity between the nations. Neither sovereign made any disguise of it even when they were together, and I always felt that it did them both good—for a strong hostility is often as potent as a strong affection to make character.
But let me leave the sovereigns for a moment and turn to the people. The English impressed and baffled me in many ways. To the foreigner of Latin blood and temperament, the English character indeed presents an almost insoluble enigma. Often just when we feel that we are really beginning to understand it, we are faced with some contradictory trait{115} that completely baffles us. Certainly when we saw the country, apparently seething with internal dissensions, lay aside its family quarrels and present a united front to the enemy, we realised more than ever what a complex thing the English mentality is.
I must confess I thought that it would be hard for England to rise to any great national emergency, not so much because things seemed to have reached the breaking point in Ireland or because her colonies seemed bound to her more by self-interest than by real loyalty, but on account of the devastating habits of ease and luxury that had spread like a disease among her aristocracy. But now we know that these corrupting influences had not vitally affected the upper classes. Unlike the extravagances of ancient Rome that had eaten to the heart of the nation’s energies, England’s hurt was only skin-deep.
We can have no doubt of this when we see great ladies facing unfamiliar hardships and risks at the battle front, others dismantling their huge country houses and transforming them into hospitals and others freely giving their whole time and activities to the great relief organisations for the war’s sufferers.{116} The English aristocracy’s ingrained sense of responsibility to the nation remains untouched by all its latterly acquired taste for luxury and over-indulgence in sports.
I say “latterly acquired,” because it is undoubtedly true that this love of extravagance has grown enormously during the last decade or so. From the pomp and lavishness displayed nowadays in certain smart establishments, I should never realise that I was in the same circle whose courtesy and simplicity used to delight me so in the England I learned to love years ago.
It was, as I have said, as a young married woman that I had my first experience of English life. The Comte and Comtesse de Paris, my husband’s relatives, had been exiled from France and had been living for some time in Tunbridge Wells. I spent many months with them there, and, through their large circle of friends, I became acquainted with all sorts and conditions of people, and soon found myself accepting the hospitality of these newly-made friends. When I made it clear to my host and hostess that I desired them to forget that I was an Infanta and to be treated as an ordinary individual,{117} etiquette was banished, and I was able to do as I liked.
Life in the country houses always pleased me best. In those days it was the custom for the family and guests to breakfast together, and I loved the informality of it all undisturbed by the ministrations of liveried lackeys. Often, when there were children in the house, they were allowed to come to the table too, and we all had very jolly times over the porridge.
We often went bicycling for the whole day, carrying our lunches with us and eating them in some pleasant grove by the wayside. Sometimes we went on coaching expeditions and lunched in some old thatch-covered inn. When my children were little, I seldom missed passing some time in England each summer, so that they too could enjoy the freedom of the open-air life.
It did not take me long to appreciate the charm of the English home and country, which are vastly different from anything abroad. In Spain, people never live all the year round in the country if they can possibly avoid it, and they seldom visit their estates unless they wish practically to retire from the world. On the rare occasions when they do snatch{118} themselves from the conventional round of gaieties in the cities or the big watering places, they shut themselves up in their big, bare castles, receiving no one and seldom venturing outside their own properties. It is almost a time of penance.
They are simply incapable of understanding the English love of life in the open air, with its many exhilarating and ingenious pastimes which appeal so strongly to me. More than that, they are inclined to look upon such taste as rather ill-bred. For instance, only the humblest Spaniard would dream of eating his cold lunch by the roadside, and I am sure that the true aristocrat would never appreciate the charm of seeking out some picturesque spot and having tea from a tea-basket. No Spanish lady of quality would even allow herself to walk hatless in her own garden, and reclining in a hammock or on the grass would be ruthlessly banned by her traditions and upbringing.
One summer day Queen Cristina came to me with a look of sheer consternation on her face.
“Eulalia,” she said, “I have just seen an appalling sight: an Englishwoman lying on the grass in the park.{119}”
The culprit was a lady-in-waiting, who had been brought to Spain by an English princess visiting the Court. I had some difficulty in convincing the Queen that such an action would not be considered such a shocking breach of etiquette in England as she imagined.
In France, country life in the Smart Set is more animated than in Spain, but it still lacks the spontaneity and freedom of the English out-of-doors. The chateaux are occasionally thrown open to visitors, but the guests are content to undergo the same routine as in Paris—the only difference being that it is adapted to another setting. Of course, there are hunting meets, and, of late years, garden parties, but much of the entertaining takes place indoors—dinner-parties, theatrical performances, afternoon receptions, etc. The French have not yet learned how really to live in the country, to relax and to change their entire mode of thought and activities.
There is hardly a county in England that I am not familiar with. I have spent many weeks in Cornwall, Devon and Yorkshire, and have returned again and again to Brighton, Tunbridge Wells and Richmond. Curiously enough, during one visit to{120} Richmond I received a message from the Duchess of Teck that her daughter, then Princess of Wales, had just given birth to her first boy. I went at once to White Lodge to offer my congratulations, and I fancy that I was the first, outside the immediate family, to hold the future Prince of Wales in my arms.
What to me is convincing proof of the change in latter years from simplicity to lavish display is the difference in the way of living I have remarked amongst many of my friends. Each time I have visited England recently I have been struck with this.
One thing that used to delight me so was the informality of the English tea. It was invariably served sans cérémonie in the drawing-room. After the servants had brought it in they retired and left us to our own devices. Neighbours frequently dropped in without warning, and often, as we gathered round a big blazing fire and ate those wonderful home-made delicacies unknown to Continentals, there was a charming feeling of expansiveness and intimacy that we never had at other times of the day.
Of late years I have noticed that the custom has
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Courtesy of Collier’s
King George V, the Late King Edward VII and the Prince of Wales
{121}
changed. When you are invited to tea, you find your place set at a table loaded with expensive flowers and accessories from the chic caterer. Footmen are in constant attendance and the charm of informality has entirely gone.
Friends of mine who used to be content to dine in some simple tea-gown now wear the latest Paris creations and their jewels—and this every evening. Although the Frenchwoman may still think that the Englishwoman’s taste in dress is far beneath her own standard, she would have to admit, if she were invited to some fashionable house-party, that the Englishwoman of means has far eclipsed her in the matter of frequent change. She would see the hostess and guests appear in tweed suits and stout boots for their morning constitutional and breakfast, then reappear in white flannels for their afternoon game of tennis or boating. She would wonder how, in the thick of sports and entertainment, these energetic women found time to put on some clinging creation for tea which would later be laid aside for the décolleté dinner-gown.
Of course, these departures from the simple tastes of twenty years ago seem harmless enough in them{122}selves, but they are surely indications of a constantly growing love of lavishness in the whole social routine. I am sorry to say that the fine old-time courtesies of the English gentry seem to have suffered by these more luxurious habits of living. In many smart circles, polished manners seem to have become as super-annuated as crinolines and stage coaches.
Whatever may be the faults of the English land-lord-system—faults inherited from the centuries—the system used to work excellently whenever the lord of the castle or manor-house lived up to his responsibilities. In spite of its touch of paternalism, there was something impressive about the white-haired earl inspecting his broad acres, bowing tenants standing aside to let his carriage pass, and something altogether touching about his lady visiting the cottagers, her footman—far haughtier in mien than she—bearing gifts of food and warm clothing. As long as the villagers were well cared for, I suppose they never questioned whether it was right for their master to have a mansion while they had to toil so hard to keep their humble thatched roof over their heads. But when the young lord took to dissipating the family fortunes on the turf, when he married some foot{123}light favourite—in other words, when he began to neglect the responsibilities of his race—that, probably, was the beginning of their doubt in the justice of the English social order. Then they forgot to curtsy whenever the young lord and his bride motored through the village, and they began to listen to the itinerant labour agitator at the tavern.
Of course, the democratic spirit that is spreading all over the world has been at work in England for years, undermining rigid caste distinctions and differences, but I feel that it could not have grown so quickly nor expressed itself in just such forms as it has, if the extravagance and irresponsibility of many of the rich and powerful had not paved the way for it. Destroy respect and you destroy docility. There is no doubt that the English lower classes, in their first efforts toward democracy and equality, have made some pretty ludicrous mistakes. Instead of copying the fine qualities of the aristocracy, they have, more frequently than not, managed to imitate their shortcomings and limitations. I remember hearing that the valet of some prince insisted on having a valet for himself! I know that French maids, whom I have taken to England, have had their heads{124} turned by the amazing etiquette of the servants’ hall—all unquestionably due to the servants’ desire to pattern their masters.
The maid of the Infanta is a great person, and she soon found that she could take precedence over all the others. She had to be elegantly dressed. Indeed, whenever I go to England, I always remark that my maid has double the luggage she requires when I take her to other countries. Once I discovered that the English servants’ attitude toward their work had so affected one maid that she was almost completely spoilt. For instance, after a visit to England on which she had accompanied me, this maid broke down and sobbed when I told her to light a fire.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she said, piteously, with tears streaming down her face.
“But for years you have been accustomed to light fires for me,” I said. “What has happened to make it such a terrible thing to light one now?”
She explained that she had learnt in England that it was beneath the dignity of a lady’s-maid to do menial work.
A Spanish maid from Seville had more sense, and{125} amused me immensely by telling me that the English servants had told her that it was exceedingly smart to walk out on Sunday afternoons with a soldier, and they had added that if she desired to show herself with a Guardsman, he would expect to be paid.
“Fancy my paying a soldier to walk out with me!” she said, laughing.
However, it is not unreasonable to hope that the war, which has already done so much toward rousing the rich from their lethargy of extravagance and neglect of responsibilities to the most praiseworthy usefulness, will help correct the lower class conception of equality. As I have already said, no character is so full of surprises as the English—so capable of appearing to be one thing while underneath it is the exact opposite. Can this be what people of other nationalities mean when they speak of English hypocrisy? It is rather an innate reserve which the foreigner finds great difficulty in penetrating. It comes, no doubt, from the Englishman’s veneration for tradition, and for centuries he has been schooled to show no emotion. That is often why he is supposed to be either stupid or inattentive. As a matter of fact, this very exterior gives him the great ad{126}vantage of being able to size up a situation without betraying either the process or his conclusions.
The proof of what I say is the Englishman’s unquestioned superiority in diplomacy. People who have no experience of cosmopolitan society seem to think that the successful diplomat must be a detective of the popular novel type: an astute if somewhat unscrupulous politician and a polished lady’s man all rolled into one. To be sure, the representatives of certain countries often do their best to realise just such an ideal, but, although this type may succeed in carrying some of their machinations to a conclusion satisfactory to themselves, they almost never accomplish anything really worth while for their governments. Most of the English diplomats I have known on the Continent give the impression of being serenely indifferent to any intrigues that may be going on around them. It has often amused me to watch them at dinner-parties. Unlike certain representatives of other powers, they never go out of their way to make themselves agreeable to ladies. I have never seen them pay special attention to the wives of powerful statesmen for the purposes of their profession—indeed, they seem to scorn these back{127}door methods. Perhaps, it is because they know very well that real diplomacy is built on more solid foundations than on the gleanings of drawing-room conversations or the chance confidences of indiscreet women.
And they are right in this, for the whole tradition of diplomacy in England is different from that of any great power. She has not changed her tactics for centuries.
England has established such a prestige among nations that she is able to transact her international affairs in London, and has at her disposal the brains of her best statesmen. King Edward, in bringing about the entente cordiale, thus probably initiated the French Government into this way of conducting its international affairs, for of late years French diplomacy has steadily improved.
King Edward himself possessed in a high degree those national qualities that make the English such good diplomats. Not only in the conduct of nations, but in society, his self-possession and tact were unfailing. They certainly did not fail him on one occasion when I saw him placed in a very comical and embarrassing situation. We were both at a dinner-{128}party in a great London house, and among the guests was a lady who bore an historic Italian title. She was English by birth, and before her marriage had been famous in London society for her great beauty and her charm of manner. A wealthy Jew, who shall be disguised under the name of Abraham, was madly in love with her, and her friends, including King Edward, saw his growing infatuation with concern.
“Don’t you marry that man,” was the advice given her, peremptorily but good-naturedly, by King Edward.
But marry him she did; not, however, before he had been to Italy and bought the palace and the pompous title of an impoverished Florentine noble. Of this fact the king was unaware, and when the lady was presented to him at the dinner-table as the Marchesa di X., he smiled and said: “I am delighted to meet you again as the Marchesa di X., and so thankful you didn’t marry that awful Abraham.”
A few moments later, the king observed that the “awful Abraham” was standing close by and had heard the unfortunate remark. Without turning a{129} hair, he smiled at him and congratulated him heartily upon his marriage.
King Edward was the first member of the English Royal Family that I met. My acquaintance with him started in Madrid when, as Prince of Wales, he came with his brother, the Duke of Connaught, one of the most charming princes in Europe, to be present at the festivities given in honour of the marriage of my brother.
Later I stayed with him and Queen Alexandra at Sandringham. One of the first things to impress me there was the king’s extreme punctuality. Somebody used always to come and warn me ten minutes before meal-times that I must not keep him waiting. For some unknown reason, he had all the clocks in the house set half-an-hour in advance of the right time, and one of the first things that guests at Sandringham learnt was the existence of this curious practice. The king liked to be amused, and, as he had a taste for the Gallic turn of wit that makes Latin races such good raconteurs, there were always one or two foreigners about who, although they did not wear the cap and bells which would have defined their func{130}tions in an earlier age, played the part of Court jester admirably, and enlivened conversation at the dinner-table with praiseworthy persistence.
The Princess Louise, now Duchess of Argyle, possesses a share of the talent which distinguished her brother and their sister, the Empress Frederick. I spent a very agreeable time with her in the Isle of Wight, when I went to England for the first time. We had many cosy times together, leaving our husbands to amuse each other, and our mutual interest in art and literature naturally drew us together.
Undoubtedly, one of the cleverest and most charming figures in the royal circle is the Duchess of Connaught. Her husband would, I am certain, be the first to admit that his success in creating for himself the special place he holds in English life and in the life of the British Empire is largely due to the Duchess’s loyal help and wise advice. In spite of her German upbringing, she has given herself wholeheartedly to the country of her adoption, and her daughters, the Crown Princess of Sweden and Princess Patricia, are delightful and typically English girls.
The Russian princess, known best in England as{131} the Duchess of Edinburgh and now Duchess of Coburg, was unable to adapt herself to life in a strange country. It is a canon of Court etiquette that imperial personages take precedence of royal personages, and consequently it was held in Russia that the Duchess of Edinburgh, being the daughter of the Emperor of Russia, should take precedence of the Princess of Wales, who was merely the daughter of a king. Queen Alexandra is so amiable that I believe that she would have contentedly allowed the duchess and anybody else who wanted to do so to pass before her; but obviously the wife of the heir to the throne could not be permitted to take any place but the first after the Sovereign. What was to be done? Queen Victoria solved the difficulty very cleverly. She caused herself to be proclaimed Empress of India, and the claim put forward by the duchess immediately fell to the ground. The assumption of imperial rank by the Queen was undoubtedly dictated by political considerations, but the solution of the difficulty, created by the conservatism of Court etiquette, was an argument which weighed with her when she took the decisive step.
In no country is the veneration of royalty carried{132} to greater lengths than in England. That is doubtless why King Edward’s many American and Jewish friends were so readily received by the smart set, although these new-comers brought with them a love of lavishness and display that went counter to the taste and tradition of the English noblesse. When society opened its doors to these people of vast wealth and luxurious habits, and accepted their prodigal entertainments, it is hardly surprising that their example became infectious. Let us hope that England’s ingrained respect for royalty will induce the aristocracy to copy the simplicity and dignity of King George’s and Queen Mary’s life, and that this influence will aid in completely reviving the old-time ideals of courtesy and good-breeding.
As I have already said, this revival has already begun. The war, which has had the effect of rousing the rich from their over-indulgence in luxury and sports, will no doubt do much toward leavening the attitude of the classes toward each other. Surely, since they have been drawn together in a spontaneous movement of patriotism in the face of the enemy, they will lose much of their common mistrust and misunderstanding and the real democracy of the{133} spirit—not the sham equality of externals—will have freer leeway. More than that, I dare hope that the war, which has not only forced different classes but different nations to stand side by side, will break down their insular habit of thought which sees no good in foreign life and customs.