Free Royal Babylon by Karl Shaw Page B

neurotic version of Buster Keaton. The Prince was a heavy drinker, moody, bad-tempered andliable to fits of depression. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin noted that he appeared to be in a permanent state of arrested development. His Private Secretary, Alan Lascelles, agreed with Baldwin: “For some hereditary or physiological reason,” Lascelles wrote in the 1940s, “his mental and spiritual growth stopped dead in his adolescence.” Edward’s character defects were attributed by some members of his family to childhood mumps.
    The Queen’s father, George VI, was the most psychologically damaged of George V’s sons. He was born on what was cheerfully known in the family as “Mausoleum Day,” the anniversary of the death of Prince Albert and coincidentally the death of Albert’s third child, Princess Alice, some seventeen years later. He was a cripplingly shy neurotic, and suffered from facial twitches. From childhood to the age of thirty, George suffered with a pronounced stammer in his speech, which exacerbated his natural shyness. The stammer was possibly the result of his father’s attempts to “cure” him of left-handedness and knock-knees. (The old King had forced him to wear iron braces on his legs, from the age of eight, for several hours a day and all night, although the young boy had begged his parents to be allowed to sleep without them.)
    According to one of his biographers, George VI had a secret drinking problem which grew steadily worse with age. When he became King by default, he probably had a nervous breakdown. It was so widely doubted that he would even turn up for his own coronation that London bookmakers took odds against it. At times he appeared to be dangerously out of touch with reality. In 1939 he astonished his Prime Minister by twice offering to write to Hitler “as one ex-serviceman to another” in an attempt to avert war. The letters he wrote to his familyshowed that he alone believed that conflict with Hitler was avoidable even days before war broke out. On April 20, 1939, he sent congratulations to Hitler on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.
    In September 1940, Buckingham Palace was bombed. Although large chunks of London had already been blitzed by German bombers, the King took this bomb very personally. He claimed it had been deliberately dropped on his house by a distant Spanish cousin, the fifth Duke of Galliera. This Duke, claimed the King, was involved in a German plot to restore his brother on the throne. Only a close relative of the family, he explained, could have known exactly where to drop it. It hadn’t occurred to him that German intelligence might have been clever enough to acquire a map of central London. The King practiced firing his revolver, vowing that he would defend the palace to the death. Fortunately, no such defense was necessary.
    Unfortunately, some of the precious little new blood that has been introduced to the royal line also came from tainted stock. The mostly German-and-Danish bloodline of Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, is shot through with mental instability. When his father deserted him and his family for the nightlife of Paris and Monaco, Prince Philip’s eccentric mother, Princess Alice, became mad, believing herself to be a nun, and gave away the little money they had to Greek refugees.
    The Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, represented the first ever injection of truly non-royal blood into the family. Ominously, in 1941, five members of the Bowes-Lyon family were confined to a Surrey mental hospital on the same day. They were forgotten by the world until 1985, when the British press revealed that two of the Queen Mother’s nieces,Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, had been left to rot for more than forty years in an NHS ward of the Royal Earlswood Mental Hospital in Redhill. Nerissa, a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, died in 1986 aged sixty-seven and was