A Brief History of the House of Windsor Read Online Free PDF

Albany and Cumberland. Another, Prince Albert, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, was commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp that housed captured Britons. An open disrespect for the royal family in Britain was spreading with alarming speed. It was even rumoured that they had been signalling to zeppelins from the roof of Sandringham. The prime minister, and the king himself, received an increasing number of vitriolic letters demanding that something be done to rid the country of these associations. Prime ministerial advice became more pressing: public repudiation of the German connection would not only be timely and welcome, it was now vital.
    With King George’s decree, the British royal family publicly shed all connections with its German heritage. It did so in the nick of time; waiting even a few months more might have been leaving it too late. A contemporary cartoon in the satirical magazine
Punch
, titled ‘A Good Riddance!’, showed the king with a broom, sweeping crowns out of the door. Only several years of bitter war could have provoked such an attitude, and the king did not share it. He was yielding to public pressure and prime ministerial advice. It is likely that the decision caused him some private grief, not only because he was abandoning the only family name he had known but also because he saw the gesture as a capitulation to his country’s mood of panic. Monarchy takes the long view. One of its most important functions is to represent continuity, to stand above the tides of fashion and the short-term preoccupations of the public, to remain unmoved by the issues of the moment. Another is to symbolize the best ofits people’s characteristics and aspirations – and certainly not to reflect their hatreds and prejudices. It must have been humiliating to have to yield to pressure from what appeared to be a mob howling for blood. Some supporters of the status quo may have felt that once the war was over the issue would quickly be forgotten, but in this they would have been mistaken. Hostility persisted for years after the Armistice in 1918 and the advent of another war, twenty years after the last, would ensure that anti-German feeling lingered well into the 1960s.
    The College of Arms, the ultimate authority on genealogy, was not actually certain that the family was called Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in the first place, so that the change might not even have been necessary. What, in any case, were they to call themselves now? Members had accumulated over centuries a host of other titles – dukedoms, earldoms, lordships – that referred to places in Britain and would therefore sound more appropriate, though these ranks were not exalted enough to be used by a sovereign. One of the first suggestions – The House of Brunswick-Luneberg – was no improvement at all, being if anything even more obviously German. The House of Cerdic was hopelessly unevocative, sounding like the name of some patent medicine. Other dynastic names – Guelph and Wettin – that were equally teutonic had been associated with the family in the past. Both sounded just as alien and, to British ears, frankly silly. A number of further names and associations were dredged up from history, tried on like hats and discarded. Whatever was chosen had to sound unmistakably British and long-established, and to reinforce the sense of seamless national continuity that is one of the major reasons for having a monarchy in the first place. Options considered included Plantagenet, York, Lancaster, Fitzroy. All of these awakened echoes of schoolroom history lessons, of dreary things learned by rote, or of Shakespeare plays. D’Este, another option, was absurdly foreign. It was suggested that ‘England’ as a surname would suit the purpose, though thiswould at once have alienated subjects in other parts of the United Kingdom and overseas.
    The notion of ‘Windsor’ as a family name was the inspired proposal of the king’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham. From the