King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

Prince’s next important stop, Quebec, introduced him to what he had been told would prove the greatest impediment to a successful tour, the hostility between anglophone and francophone Canada. Expecting the worst, he was pleasantly surprised. ‘They are a curious people and very touchy, but they seemed quite pleased and certainly gave me a good welcome,’ he wrote of the French Canadians to the King.¹⁰

      In Montreal, speaking half in French and half in English, he claimed that the union of the two races was more than a matter of political convenience, ‘it was, and will always remain, an example of the highest political wisdom’.¹¹ The French Canadians, an anonymous lady assured the King, likened the Prince to ‘L’Enfant Jésus’.¹² One may doubt whether many French Canadians spotted the similarity but the Prince went down well with a public disposed to be critical and captious.

      It was Toronto which offered the most turbulent welcome. The Prince’s stay there, Thomas told the Queen, ‘were the most extraordinary days I have ever seen’. Things began relatively quietly, enthusiasm mounted by the hour, and the scenes when he drove through the city on his final day made Thomas think ‘that half the people had taken leave of their senses’.¹³ To the Prince it was overwhelming. For the first time he tasted the heady, dangerous wine of mass adulation. ‘The most wonderful days of my life,’ he described them, ‘… amazingly marvellous. People seemed to go quite mad.’¹⁴ An unidentified lady in Toronto wrote to a friend in England and at third hand her letter came to the Queen. ‘He has won all hearts, and the demonstration here was personal love for him,’ wrote the lady. She had been to hear him speak: ‘He was very boyishly shy and very pink, but the dearest, sweetest and most bewitching creature. He really looked as if he were going to cry and bit his lip, but imagine, he faced a crowd of 50,000 people, who rose of course and yelled and screamed and cheered, never was there such a greeting. He spoke beautifully and to the point and looked sweet, his lovely complexion and blue eyes are the admiration of everyone.’¹⁵

      There was a physical price to pay for this glorification, beyond the exhaustion that followed a day among the crowds. He was jostled and buffeted, his right hand so bruised by constant shaking that he had to use his left. The King saw photographs of his son being mobbed and deprecated the loss of dignity. ‘It isn’t my fault,’ protested the Prince. ‘You just can’t think how enthusiastic the crowds have been, and they just go mad and one is powerless!!’¹⁶ Grigg described ‘his happy way of making crowds no less than individuals feel that he meets them half way. It is always quite obvious somehow that the huge masses of people who have thronged his movements everywhere feel that his heart goes out to them as much as theirs to him, and the effect is (I use the word literally) indescribable.’¹⁷

      By the time that the Prince had visited all the main centres of the east, he was close to collapse. ‘HRH really does work very very hard,’ Halsey reported. What tired him most were visits to hospitals, ‘especially as he talks to practically every soldier who is bedridden, and his sympathy with them is so genuine that of course he finds it extremely hard to go on for any length of time’.¹⁸ Some at least of his exhaustion was brought on by his refusal to rest when he had a chance. As he grew more tired, so he would insist on staying up later and later, talking, smoking, feverishly restless. No one else could have stood the strain so wonderfully, said Thomas, ‘but he could give himself much more chance if he would only be sensible and occasionally sit down in a chair or go to bed at a normal hour’.¹⁹ The strain was not eased by interminable official banquets without even a solitary glass of wine to ease his nerves or dull the pain of other people’s orating. The Prince deplored prohibition, not just because of the personal inconvenience it caused him, but as being ‘the very worst form of class legislation’. There was plenty of liquor to be had, but only for those who were prepared to pay the exorbitant prices. ‘It’s the women’s vote which is the trouble, otherwise prohibition couldn’t last.’²⁰ On those occasions when liquor was available, things were bad in a different way. Thomas described a dinner at Calgary where he knew things were beginning to warm up when a Justice of the Supreme Court tottered to his feet and sang ‘Another little drink couldn’t do us any harm’. ‘It is a very remarkable thing now that the country has gone dry, the appalling effect of liquor on everybody when they manage to get some.’²¹

      The Prince would certainly have preferred an orgy like the one in Calgary to the more formal functions of eastern Canada. He thought the Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire, though in a ‘hopelessly narrow groove’, was at least ‘a d—d good fellow and has no side’, but the Duchess was ‘hopelessly pompous … she plays the ‘Queen stunt’ far more than Mama would, and that doesn’t go down on this side’.²² The Duke gallantly did his best to be one of the boys, but found the effort uncongenial. ‘There is a good deal of regard for what is called ‘a real sport’,’ he told Stamfordham. ‘It is an odious term. After I had been to a hockey match I was described as ‘a real sport in spite of his white hair’.’²³ The Prince, he recognized, was ‘a real sport’ par excellence; he refrained from criticism but contrived to leave the impression that he felt the performance hardly becoming the heir to the throne.

      It was with some relief that the battered and enervated Prince escaped from all this to the space and relative tranquillity of the west. ‘I came to Canada as a Canadian in mind and spirit,’ he declared in Calgary, ‘I am now rapidly becoming a Westerner.’²⁴ He was impressed by the immense potential of the prairies and saw the west as the ‘country of the future … It is up to the Empire and particularly to the UK to see that its population is British and not alien!!’²⁵ He told his mother that he would love to work on a ranch for a few months – ‘That’s a real life.’²⁶ Such wishes are habitually voiced by those who know there is no risk that they will become reality, but the Prince did something to forward his ambition when for £10,000 or so he bought a small ranch in Alberta. The King was doubtful about the purchase as an investment and feared too that his son would be under pressure to do the same when he visited the other Dominions.²⁷ He left it to the Prince to decide, however, and he went ahead – to the great pleasure of the Canadians. In spite of the King’s fears, there is no record of the Prince being asked to buy a farm in the Australian outback or the South African platteland.

      In all his major speeches, the Prince hammered home his creed that he was not primarily a Briton and only secondarily a Canadian: ‘On the contrary, I regard myself as belonging to Great Britain and to Canada in exactly the same way.’²⁸ This was not just rhetoric reserved for public consumption. He told the Queen that the royal family must keep closely in touch with Canada and pay regular visits. ‘We belong to Canada and the other dominions just as much as we do to the UK.’²⁹ The King warned him that if he called himself a Canadian in Canada then he would have to be an Australian in Australia and a New Zealander in New Zealand. And why not? asked the Prince. ‘Of course in India there would be no question of it as I happen to have been born a white man and not a native.’³⁰

      ‘I do like all these Canadians so much,’ the Prince wrote after a few weeks. ‘They are charming and so kind and hospitable if one takes them the right way and if they take to you, and the latter means success or total failure.’³¹ No one can doubt that the Canadians had taken to him and that his first tour abroad had been not merely a success but a triumph. ‘It almost takes one’s breath away,’ a Canadian wrote to Grigg. ‘It is not mere loyalty to the Crown, but the expression of a deep, spontaneous affection for the young man who is heir to the oldest throne in the world … The Prince has something to offer that can come from no other human being. He symbolizes the unity of the whole Empire, and does it with the joyousness and courage that belongs to youth.’³² Even courtiers as loyal as Stamfordham admitted that George V offended by his constant carping at the Prince and decrying of his accomplishments. Sometimes the complaint was justified but on this occasion his praise could hardly have been more generous. ‘I offer you my warmest congratulations on the splendid success of your tour,’ he wrote in mid-October, ‘which is due in a great measure to your own personality and the wonderful way you have played up. It makes me very proud of you.’³³

      ‘When I go down