Alexandra’s response to her own new position as Dowager Queen did not help. After 47 years of marriage she was not coping well with change, although Edward’s death had at least presented her with an opportunity for self-pity, the admissible indulgence of a grieving Queen. Having been reluctant to move into Buckingham Palace on her husband’s accession, she was now unwilling to move out to make way for May and George and their family. When she finally agreed to go, she wrote to May in poorly disguised criticism. ‘OUR dear old rooms,’ she sighed. ‘I shall indeed be very curious and anxious to see them and how you have arranged it all. Yes the sitting room with its nice and pretty bow window is certainly very cold and draughty in the winter – particularly where my writing table stood – I wonder where you have put yours – and the lovely bedroom with its pretty arches which I hear you have removed. How is that arranged?’

  But May was sensitive enough to see beyond Alexandra’s difficult behaviour. Her capriciousness and vulnerability reminded May of her own mother, and endeared Alexandra to her. Like Mary of Teck, Alexandra was infuriatingly unpunctual, sweeping into a room where everyone had beenwaiting for ages, crying ‘Oh, am I late?’and disarming everyone with her beautiful smile. There was something else about Alexandra that aroused May’s compassionate nature: she had become very deaf. She had tried to learn lip-reading but had failed to master it, and May would observe her brave attempts to follow a conversation over dinner, watching for someone else to laugh so she could give a little wave of her hand to indicate she too had enjoyed the joke. May’s sweetness over her disability was not unappreciated by Alexandra, who wrote to her daughter-in-law: ‘You are always so dear and nice to me, and whenever I am not quite au fait because of my beastly ears you always, by aword or even a turn towards me, makeme understand. I ammost grateful, as nobody knows what I have to go through to understand.’May understood: Alexandra was lonely too.

  May’s sisters-in-law made her no such overtures of affection. Having grown up with three brothers she had been starved of feminine companionship of her own age for much of her life, and had longed to get on with Louise, Victoria and Maud, but Queen Victoria’s demonstrative favouritism had aroused a deep jealousy in George’s sisters and their dislike of her never faded. Under the pretence of persuading a dinner guest to put her new sister-in-law at her ease, George’s unmarried younger sister Toria implored: ‘Now do try to talk to May at dinner, though one knows she is deadly dull.’ Looking for companionship within her own family, May had been urging her adored Aunt Augusta, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg, her late mother’s only surviving sister, to come from Austria for the Coronation to give her some support. There had even been a wild suggestion of arranging a flying-machine to bring her across to England, but by early summer May had realised that the visit would not be possible. At 85, Aunt Augusta was too old.

  Loneliness was best countered, May found, by spending time with her family and by indulging the private passions that had sustained her over many years – arranging pictures and furniture and cataloguing her precious collections of china and porcelain. Occasionally she was alone for the evening with her husband, and while he wrote up his game book or sorted out stamps for his collection she would knit and smoke a cigarette. When George was away on extended visits to the grouse moors, she would invite her growing children to join her in her small sitting room, where she would tell them stories of royal history. May had not enjoyed the babyhood and infancy of her six children – Edward (known as David), Albert George, Mary, Henry, George, and the sickly John. As was the convention of the day they had all been entrusted to the care of nannies, but their abusive treatment by one in particular had gone unnoticed by May, even in the imposed intimacy of York Cottage, their small country residence at Sandringham, until a lady-in-waiting drew her attention to it. However, as the children grew up she spent more time with them, doing her best to protect them from their father’s often over-strict reactions. The children loved these rare weeks spent with her in their father’s absence. ‘We used to have the most lovely time with her alone, always laughing and joking,’ her eldest child David remembered. ‘She was a different human being away from him.’ His mother’s experiences of her years in Italy before her marriage and her cultivated and well-read mind made a great impression on him. He treasured the hours before bedtime with her as ‘the happiness associated with this last hour of a child’s day.’

  When her children were in the schoolroom, May was most content when she could spend hours by herself organising the porcelain, hanging and rehanging her huge collection of miniatures, or pasting and labelling her photographs into albums. She always went to bed early, noting in her diary with a few exclamation marks the rare times she stayed up beyond midnight. Unexpansive in her speech, she was just as sparing in her diary, and only relaxed in the long weekly letters to her adored aunt.

  For all her lack of small talk and dislike of politics, May was probably more responsive to Asquith’s conversation and jokes than he realised. She often checked herself, as she told Mabell Airlie: ‘I always have to be so careful not to laugh because you see I have such a vulgar laugh!’ Her family, however, recognised a twitching of the mouth as a sign that a laugh was on the brink of emerging. A small elongating of her lips, never quite dramatic enough to reveal her teeth, indicated a smile. When May did speak it was quietly, her voice clipped, precise and deliberate in enunciation, with a hint of a German accent.

  May’s public shyness and lack of confidence was due in part to the overwhelming personality of her mother and in part to the early difficulties of her life, including her troubled search for a husband. She was the only daughter of the shockingly greedy Princess Mary of Cambridge, at 250 pounds ‘a personage of unusual girth’, in the words of one observer, and her considerably less substantial husband Francis, first Duke of Teck. Tiny Queen Victoria found the size of her first cousin Mary ‘fearful. It is really a misfortune’, and a courtier described her as a ‘a mountain of a girl’. In her youth Mary of Cambridge was a liability in the ballroom, notorious for executing the polka with such vigour that an accidental collision with other dancers would send them flying. Her chest was winched so high that it almost grazed her chin, and she looked rather like a plumped-up, feather-filled sofa, with an extra cushion in the wrong place. To everyone’s surprise, at the age of 33 – until then, by polite universal agreement, a confirmed spinster – she found a man ‘prepared to countenance so vast an undertaking’. Francis was the younger by four years, but Queen Victoria judged him to be ‘very nice and aimiable’. There was only one obvious drawback to the match for Mary, a woman excessively fond of life’s pleasures: Francis had no money. However, the couple seemed happy enough together and further confounded their families’ expectations by producing four children, following their eldest child May with three brothers, Adolphus (Dolly), Francis (Frank), and Alexander.

  At first Queen Victoria looked after the impoverished Tecks by providing them with a large apartment in Kensington Palace and a more rural home, White Lodge, in the heart of Richmond Park. Fat Mary of Teck, as she was publicly and affectionately known, was devoted to her children, and used to visit the local Richmond studio to watch her daughter’s dancing lessons. With embarrassment May saw the other girls sniggering behind their hands as her mother was given two gilt chairs on which to spread her bulk. This experience was one cause of the shyness from which May was to suffer for decades.

  Queen Victoria enjoyed Fat Mary’s company for the sheer ebullience of her spirits and for a long time was patient with her extravagances, but eventually shewearied of shouldering her cousin’s debts and the Tecks were discreetly packed off to live in Italy. Her exile in such a vital and cosmopolitan city as Florence became for 6-year-old May one of the happiest and most stimulating times of her life. Able to live, if not anonymously, at least away fromthe attentions her family received in England, she discovered a passion for art, language, architecture, furniture and literature, and a life of the mind.

  The Tecks spent eighteen months abroad, but in 885 May and her family returned to England in preparation for her debut. After six years back at White Lodge, and five years after officially ‘coming out’, there was no sign of a suitable husband for May. Intelligent, educated and pretty enough, she was in danger of being left on the shelf. Mabell Airlie knew that ‘anyone who failed to secure a proposal within six months of coming out could only wait for her next season with diminishing expectations. After a third attempt there remained nothing but India as a last resort before the spectre of old maid became a reality.’

  But Queen Victoria had been studying May closely and began to have an idea that she would make an ideal bride and eventually an ideal queen for her eldest grandson, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The Queen and the Duke’s parents, the Prince and Princess of Wales, had experienced great difficulty in finding a suitable wife for the heir presumptive. Eddy, as he was known to his family, with his overlong neck, listless eyes and succession of moustaches each more preposterous than the last, was said to ‘lack manliness’ and rumoured to be homosexual, though he had pursued several romantic attachments with women, in particular with Princess Hélène d’Orléans and Princess Alix of Hesse. Neither had agreed to marry him.

  May and Eddy had barely met since they played together as children, but to her ‘great surprise’ he proposed to her at a ball at beautiful eighteenth-century Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire. May accepted immediately ‘of course’, and Fat Mary could hardly contain her excitement at this turnaround of fortunes, and even more at the treats that went with life in the glow of renewed Royal favour. ‘A capital HOT lunch of chicken and rice and beefsteaks and fried potatoes!’ she wrote, smacking her lips in delight, at the end of one train-ride to Sandringham. But Fat Mary’s contentment was not to last.

  Six weeks after his engagement Eddy caught the influenza that had reached epidemic proportions in the country and had been infecting other members of the Sandringham house party, and May was amazed by the speed with which the illness felled him. On his birthday on 8 January 1892 he was struggling with nothing more than a bad cold; the following morning the breathlessness settled on his weak lungs and turned to pneumonia. The doctor looking after the dying Prince during those dreadful few days, chancing to look out of his patient’s sickroom window, had seen May walking in the garden below, being comforted by her fiancé’s younger brother George. Within three days Prince Eddy was dead and May was left shocked, confused, and back once more on that shelf. Queen Victoria was horrified at the unexpected outcome of her apparently successful match-making. ‘It is one of the most fearful tragedies one can imagine,’ she said, ‘it would sound unnatural and overdrawn if it was put into a novel.’May’s mother could not bring herself to watch as her daughter, instead of carrying the flowers at her imminent wedding, laid the redundant bridal bouquet of orange blossom on Eddy’s coffin.

  Not long afterwards, with his indefatigable grandmother’s encouragement, Eddy’s brother George began a cautious courtship of May, and five months after Eddy’s death was persuaded by his sister Louise to take the plunge. They were having tea at Louise’s house at Sheen in Surrey when he invited May into the garden to look at some frogs in the pond and, against a background of loud croaks, asked if she would become his wife. She agreed immediately to marry a man she knew only a little better than she had his brother. An observer, Lady Geraldine Somerset, noted shortly after the engagement that George appeared ‘nonchalant and indifferent’while May seemed ‘placid and cold’. Mary of Teck felt no such reserve when she heard the delightful news and, unable to wait until the announcement was official, splashed out on sending telegrams to everyone she knew.

  George was not a demonstrative man, the stifling adoration of his mother having made him hesitant in any display of warmth, even to those he really loved. May craved affection, but she too was inhibited when it came to showing her feelings. Writing to him during their engagement, she apologised for her reserve when left alone with him. ‘I am very sorry that I am still so shy with you,’ she wrote. ‘I tried not to be so the other day, but alas, failed. I was angry with myself! It is so stupid to be so stiff together.’ He replied immediately: ‘I think it really unnecessary for me to tell you how deep my love for you, my darling, is and I feel it growing stronger and stronger every time I see you; although I may appear shy and cold.’ May hoped that with George’s encouragement her virginal reserve would dissipate after their marriage.

  The wedding took place on 6 July 891 at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, then May and George spent their honeymoon at York Cottage on the Sandringham estate. Cramped and vicarage-like, it was their wedding gift from the Prince of Wales. Princess Alexandra, ‘Mother dear’ to her son, showed no sensitivity to whatever desire for privacy the honeymooners may have felt, and could not resist walking the mere five minutes that separated York Cottage from ‘The Big House’ to drop in unannounced for tea with the newlyweds. She wanted to see how her ‘Georgie’ was coping with married life. Thinking back on those early weeks, May observed quietly: ‘I sometimes think we were not left alone enough.’ On her engagement she had received a letter from her future mother-in-law expressing the hope that ‘My sweet May will come straight to me for everything’, an invitation that held little appeal for someone so self-contained. Georgie, although exasperated by his mother, remained unable to resist her powerful influence.

  By the summer of 1911, and after seventeen years of marriage, May had accepted that her husband would not entertain any other style of dress than that established by his mother, a woman 22 years her senior. Not from weakness of character but more out of her unwavering, almost oriental reverence for the monarchy, as personified by her husband, May deferred to his wishes. Although she longed to wear a scarlet dress, she dared not, because George hated red. She asked her friend Lady Airlie to try on one of the new shorter skirts one day, just to test the water. But when May enquired whether George had liked her friend’s new dress, he had told her ‘No, I did not. It was too short.’ Lady Airlie was not surprised by this reaction, and, let her hem down ‘with all speed’. She was well aware that the Queen had been ‘gifted with perfect legs’, but observed that they continued to remain fully concealed. May did allow herself one small act of defiance: to George’s consternation, she often appeared wearing huge dangling earrings.

  Beauty, wit, wealth, sophistication and affectation had been the qualifications for an invitation to his father’s Court; George’s tastes were severe by contrast, more reflective of the regime his grandmother had adopted after the death of her husband Prince Albert. He was passionate about shooting and stamp collecting and shunned parties whenever he could. The middle classes admired the reassuring air of a respectable family man that he had about him. He suffered from insomnia and toothache aswell as poor digestion, and had spent much of his childhood in splints to correct his knock knees. He favoured simplicity and disdained pretension. At Buckingham Palace dinners wine bottles had their labels steamed off, lest the Royal family be thought to be showing off the superiority of their cellars. George considered the French language effeminate, and would deliberately employ an exaggerated English accent when ordering his favourite dish of ‘Erf On Cock Ott’. To his son’s dismay, he took against the rather more relaxed, informal way of dressing the younger men were adopting. In the poem T.S. Eliot was writing that summer, Prufrock intended to wear the bottoms of his trousers rolled: George loathed ‘turn ups’, thinking they looked as if a man had rolled up his trousers to keep the hems out of a puddle. If his son appeared wearing them, he would ask, with raised eyebrow, ‘Is it raining in here?’

  George loathed change. He was a man of routine. Habits were set firm after fifteen years of naval training. He continued to consult his barometer twice a day, and to his satisfaction the summer weather of his Coronation, as the air pressure rose ever higher, was providing him with some particularly interesting readings. First thing in the morning and last thing before going to bed, according to a watchful courtier, the King would ‘peer at the glass, tap the case sharply to make sure the needle was not stuck, and set it again.’

  During the years of marriage largely spent out of the public gaze, May and George had settled into a loving relationship in which George relied heavily on his wife. In his diary on the day after his father’s death he wrote confidently that ‘Darling May will be my comfort as she has always been.’ Later that summer he wrote to her: ‘My love grows stronger for you every day mixed with admiration and I thank God every day that he has given me such a darling devoted wife as you are.’

  In 1911 George found himself ill at ease in his new role. He was a second son, not brought up to succeed. Life in the Royal Navy had distanced him from politics as well as from the gay society and easy interaction with people that had been such a mark of his father’s personality, and during the summer of 1911 a Constitutional crisis forced him to become involved, despite his reluctance, in controversial legislation at the heart of the political life of the country. Upper-class men had controlled the governmental process for centuries; now the gradual extension of the right to vote had begun to threaten the pattern for the first time since the Civil War more than 250 years earlier. The Liberal Government under the Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith and his Chancellor Lloyd George found itself opposed by the huge Conservative majority in the House of Lords in the passage of the Bill for a National Insurance Act, designed as ‘a measure to provide insurance against loss of health and unemployment and prevention and cure of sickness’. The Act was to be funded largely by a compulsory deduction levied on all wage-earners and employers, but also in part by a tax on rich landowners. This was a hit at the very core of the House of Lords, which counted among its members some of the wealthiest landowners in the country. Not surprisingly, they resisted, despite the fact that traditionally their power of veto was never implemented against a ‘Money Bill’. Asquith needed help. In secret talks he sought the King’s intervention, asking him to threaten to use his Royal Prerogative to create four hundred new Liberal peers, to swamp the Conservatives and force the Bill through the second chamber. He proposed that this should be followed by a Parliament Act that would severely restrict the powers of the House of Lords, and prevent the recurrence of such an impasse. Despite the new King’s inexperience, Asquith told his daughter that he found himself ‘deeply moved by his first audience with [him] and impressed by his modesty and common sense.’