Regretting at leisure
Elizabeth Longford
THE KING'S WIFE: FIVE QUEEN CONSORTS by Robert Gray
Secker & Warburg, f17.95, pp.367
The moral of this royal saga is clear: never be a queen consort. One can think of a far better life for each of these queens than the one into which she was propelled. Henrietta Maria could have been a charm- ing little lady presiding over a huge French chateau; Catherine of Braganza, a splendid mother superior with fine organising ability — though she would have had to forbid her nuns to bring sugar or Brazil-wood as their dowries (as she had done) in the interests of health, conservation and the plaudits of posterity. Caroline of Brunswick could have been the laugh of any German dukedom she opted for; while our own Queen Mary could have held a responsible position in the Victoria & Albert Museum, followed by the post of librarian in the Windsor Castle Archives. Only Eleanor of Aquitaine, married consecutively to a French and English king, could probably not have bettered herself. But that was only because she was believed to be already at the zenith of human success, a 'matchless woman'. By supernatural stan- dards she was a 'demon queen'. So pathetic was the fate of most of them, at least in Robert Gray's presentation, that one is relieved when they finally depart this world. As he says of Queen Mary's death: `she had entered a kingdom where, just possibly, the claims of the English monar- chy do not press quite so hard.' It is true that Queen Mary's sense of duty pressed harder on her than George V's refusal to let her shorten her skirts an inch or dine en famine without a tiara. The spectre of 'duty' managed to subdue her human instincts in much the same way that two heartless husbands, Charles II and George IV, prevented their hapless wives' potential for love from ever being realised. With Henrietta it is not so easy to chercher l'homme, though beingmarried to a martyr (Charles I) seems only a short step from being one. Altogether one might suspect this volume of being a study in misery in five acts. But there one would be entirely wrong.
Robert Gray calls it 'an entertainment' and entertaining it certainly is. His style is exactly calculated to please the reader who respects academia but does not want to be loaded with its regalia: source notes, bib- liography, acknowledgements, the lot. (There is not even an index!) Without these burdens the writing can afford to be light-hearted and often ironical; there are no axes, and so no grindings. With his two earlier queens, Gray adopts a still more free-and-easy style than with the later three. Husbands wonder what their wives are 'getting up to'; wives, very occasional- ly, have 'a whale of a time', but more often 'a most almighty row'. If Gray's method is mid-way between Lord Clarendon and 1066 and All That, it is a cheerful half-way house for any historical pilgrimage.
The best of the quintet is undoubtedly Caroline of Brunswick, probably because a great deal is known about her farcical yet dramatic personality. Hers is a story that never palls. Her considerable awfulness only begins to pale when it is viewed alongside the glaring frightfulness of her husband. Gray gives their marriage the prize for 'sleazy sensationalism', beating even the Abdication. But whereas certain aspects of the 'WE' romance (Wallis and Edward) make one positively angry, George and Caroline seem to belong rather to the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream — 'Lord, what fools these mortals be.' Seen through the eyes of Rex Whistler, George at least had the artistry of a plump Bacchus romping around Brighton, while there have been worse things than Caroline's coarse good nature.
We are asked by the author to 'take the academic underpinning on trust'. I am prepared to do that 'in the cause of avoiding undue solemnity', though I like a little solemnity myself. But when we are asked to accept that Queen Victoria died in 'the great canopied bed', that the Kaiser joked about 'The Merry Wives of Mecklenburg-Strelitz' and that Gandhi gave Princess Elizabeth a loincloth as a wedding-present, I get a bit pompous. Victoria was moved into an ordinary bed, the more conveniently to be nursed; 'The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha' was the Kaiser's sly reference to George V's grandfather Prince Albert (and his own grandfather, incidentally); and according to Lord Mountbatten, Queen Mary mis- took Gandhi's piece of hand-woven cloth for a loincloth.
On the whole, Robert Gray's historical judgments are humane and just. I must put in a plea for Lady Castlemaine (Charles II's Barbara), however, whose 'vicious- ness', he writes, 'was wholly unflawed.' I think he exaggerates, if only because a minuscule drop of her blood flows in the veins of my husband and children.
There are many good stories, ranging from Pope Eugenius III's performance as marriage counsellor to Eleanor and Louis — 'he made them sleep in the same bed' to Princess Marina's fingers. 'I'm afraid the King doesn't like painted nails', said Queen Mary to her daughter-in-law, who replied, 'Your George may not but mine does.'
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