In 1066 when Duc Guillaume le Bâtard conquered England he, almost to a man, replaced all the nobility, both lords temporal and spiritual, with his Norman-French speaking cronies. For the remaining 20 years of his rule I doubt he ever felt the need or desire to speak a word of English. Similarly George I managed to reign Britain for 13 years without ever being able to speak even the simplest of sentences in English. Yet other monarchs were accomplished polyglots. Elizabeth I for instance may have had "the body of a weak and feeble woman", but she could still address the common people in their own language ... as well as flirt with the Duc d'Alençon in French, address the Venetian ambassador in Italian, the Papal legate in Latin, and had Aristotle accidentally popped up at court, she could even have chatted in ancient Greek too.

So when did English replace French as the principal language at court? And which monarchs were sufficiently competent in English to be able to speak directly to their subjects - regardless of whether English was their mother tongue or just a language they'd managed to learn?

Good question Meles.

My understanding is that King John was the first monarch (after 1066) who could speak passable English. The first who was conversant in English and who also encouraged its use at court was Edward III. His patronage of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer should also be seen in this light. Edward also presided over the Pleading in English Act 1362 which permitted the use of spoken English in courts of law. Edward's son Richard II was the first monarch to be fluent in English while Henry IV was the first monarch for whom English was his first language.

An odd thing about the Pleading in English Act is that only predated the Statutes of Kilkenny in Ireland by 4 years. Those statutes famously bemoaned the fact that English settlers in Ireland were 'forsaking the English language'. So one wonders if this must mean that while English was being promoted in Ireland and Wales it was simultaneously being treated as second rate in England itself. Puzzling.

P.S. re Elizabeth's language skills. Here's a copy of a phrase list believed to belong to her when she briefly studied Irish:

Your mention of Richard II and Chaucer immediately made me reflect that even if he (Richard) could speak good, court/London/lawyers' English, there's no certainty he'd have been understood throughout all the realm. I'm writing from memory here but doesn't Chaucer (himself a speaker of the London/South Midlands dialect of Middle English) recount the tale of two merchants, one from northern England, the other from the south, who, whilst travelling together, stop at an inn in the Midlands? One asks for "eggys", the other asks for "eyren" ... and the landlady understands neither, until it finally dawns on her that they are both simply asking for eggs!

And in the same vein ... as well as studying Irish I believe it has been said that Elizabeth could also speak some Cornish, Welsh and Scots. If that is true then she could certainly claim to be able to speak directly to nearly all of her subjects.

Wasn't the eggy story Caxton's, MM?

Elizabeth was probably taught Welsh by Blanche Parry, a bi-lingual Welsh lady:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_Parry


EDIT:

It is Caxton:

In the preface to the Eneydos he told a story of some merchants going down the Thames. There was no wind so they landed on the Kent side of the river to buy food. ‘And specyally he axyed after eggys. And the good wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstood hym wel’ [And he asked specifically for eggs, and the good woman said that she spoke no French, and the merchant got angry for he could not speak French either, but he wanted eggs and she could not understand him. And then at last another person said that he wanted ‘eyren’. Then the good woman said that she understood him well].

Temperance wrote:

Wasn't the eggy story Caxton's, MM?

Ooops ... wrong author, wrong king and about 100 years out   ... but I maintain that my basic premise was still correct in that even though a late medieval king might have been able to speak good English, there's no guarantee that he'd have been universally understood throughout the realm.

I've been thinking about Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary. She certainly spoke English like a native, but I wonder if she wouldn't have been more comfortable in private speaking Spanish? Her childhood was mostly spent away from court under virtual house arrest with Catherine of Aragon and her mother's Spanish speaking confessors and maids. A bit like Queen Victoria who'd learned German as a child from her mother (Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saarfeld). Doubtless in private Victoria spoke German with Albert, and apparently even during official ministerial audiences she sometimes lapsed into German when speaking with him ... much to the irritation of Lord Palmerston, who was fluent in Italian but not German.

MM wrote:

... but I maintain that my basic premise was still correct in that even though a late medieval king might have been able to speak good English, there's no guarantee that he'd have been universally understood throughout the realm.

Yes - and that was possibly true for the older royals and the aristocracy (not the upper-middles, but the proper posh lot) until very recently.

If ever a real old aristocrat - like some ancient lady-in-waiting or dowager duchess - appears in some documentary on TV, they speak in their own super-posh version of received pronunciation which makes it hard sometimes to know what they are on about: hice for house and rarely for really for example. And they all pronounce Charing Cross as if it were still the original  French: Chère Reine Cross, not the vulgar, flattened Cha-ring Cross.

But things have changed: Her Majesty's accent (unlike the speech of some of her generation of aristocratic courtiers) has modified greatly over the past fifty years and, oddly, as this Telegraph article suggests, the upper-middle classes now sound posher than the young aristocrats. I suppose the latter no longer want to seem to be a breed apart. They still are, of course: speaking Estuary English fools no one.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9653166/Prince-Williams-cut-glass-accent-is-a-little-less-polished-than-Kate-Middletons.html

I read somewhere that Mary Tudor spoke Spanish to her husband, Philip of Spain, but that, having learnt the language from her mother, it was a very dated Spanish - rather like a youngish woman today speaking as if she were living back in the 1930s. Philip apparently said it was like conversing with an ancient maiden aunt. Don't know how true that is.

Emperor Charles V is reputed to have said; "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse"

During the last French State visit to the UK (in about 2005 - so it must have been Chirac), at the state banquet held at Windsor Castle, Liz gave a good part of her welcoming address in French. As I recall quite a lot of her speech was transmitted direct, without translation/voice-over, on all the main French TV news channels. My French is far from perfect but I was watching the news with a native French speaker and he commented that her French was grammatically faultless. She was of course reading from prepared notes, but even so he said it was clear that she was a very competent speaker of the language.

However he added that her accent was a bit odd. And here I had to agree since she seemed to speak French in exactly the same tightly-clipped tones that she used to use when speaking English in the 1940s and '50s. Her English pronunciation may have mellowed a bit over the decades since, but her French seems to have remained as sharply aristocratic as ever. And though I describe it as 'aristocratic' I've never actually heard any real French aristos (such as the various ducal claimants to the French throne who do still occaissionally pop up on French TV), ever speak French quite like that. Perhaps Liz's French accent is just as she learned it in the 1940s, and so perhaps it actually reflects that of one particular, very posh, English governess.

PS:

Trike .... wasn't that Charles V comment made by Voltaire? If so I suspect it is not an entirely true representation of his Imperial Majesty's command of languages ... but rather Voltaire making pithy comments about things he didn't much like, such as the institution of the Holy Roman Empire and divinely appointed monarchs generally, and with sly digs at Spaniards, Germans and God. (I note that as quoted, it's only Frenchmen - comme Monsieur Voltaire himself - that remain free from obvious criticism).

Meles meles wrote:

Ooops ... wrong author, wrong king and about 100 years out

Don't worry Meles - you're not alone in making boobs on this thread. For example I've noticed that earlier I referred to Richard II as being the son of Edward III when, of course, he was his grandson.

Regarding royals and their command of languages, then only today Martin McGuinness commended Prince Charles on his ability in Irish:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-charles/11621350/Prince-Charles-visits-Catholic-church-in-Belfast-on-mission-of-reconciliation.html

Meles meles wrote:

PS:

Trike .... wasn't that Charles V comment made by Voltaire? If so I suspect it is not an entirely true representation of his Imperial Majesty's command of languages ... but rather Voltaire making pithy comments about things he didn't much like, such as the institution of the Holy Roman Empire and divinely appointed monarchs generally, and with sly digs at Spaniards, Germans and God. (I note that as quoted, it's only Frenchmen - comme Monsieur Voltaire himself - that remain free from obvious criticism).

Very possible, Meles.

Vizzer wrote:

Regarding royals and their command of languages, then only today Martin McGuinness commended Prince Charles on his ability in Irish:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-charles/11621350/Prince-Charles-visits-Catholic-church-in-Belfast-on-mission-of-reconciliation.html

I'm fairly sure James IV was the last king to be fluent in Gaelic.

In my original post I seem to have rather assumed that, pre-Norman conquest, all kings of England spoke English ...  but actually I suppose Cnut (king 1017-1035) spoke Danish as his first language, and though Danish/Fresian is linguistically very close to Old English, I wonder if Cnut ever actually spoke "English".

Meles meles wrote:

In my original post I seem to have rather assumed that, pre-Norman conquest, all kings of England spoke English ...  but actually I suppose Cnut (king 1017-1035) spoke Danish as his first language, and though Danish/Fresian is linguistically very close to Old English, I wonder if Cnut ever actually spoke "English".

Or if the term "English" was particularly meaningful at that time .....

Well yes, quite.

Perhaps for the sake of this thread we'd best stay post 1066 .... although even then, as has been discussed, the English spoken in Cornwall was probably nigh incomprehensible to english-speakers in Cumberland, and visa versa.

Meles meles wrote:

Well yes, quite.

Perhaps for the sake of this thread we'd best stay post 1066 .... although even then, as has been discussed, the English spoken in Cornwall was probably nigh incomprehensible to english-speakers in Cumberland, and visa versa.

"Was"????????????????

Meles meles wrote:

In 1066 when Duc Guillaume le Bâtard conquered England he, almost to a man, replaced all the nobility, both lords temporal and spiritual, with his Norman-French speaking cronies. For the remaining 20 years of his rule I doubt he ever felt the need or desire to speak a word of English.

Early on he made a few minor attempts at proclamations in English, but it quickly proved impractical, of course.  Whether he could speak any is a moot point.  Which makes me wonder, when Harold went to Normandy, how did the Duke and the Earl communicate?  Did Harold speak French?  Did everything have to be done through translators?  Or was there another common language they could use?

(Incidentally, I'd understood that Edward III was first to be fluent in English, and Richard II first to use it as his principal language).

Not entirely relevant to the thread, but Victoria was learning Hindi. Her notebooks still survive.

Last night the BBC2 programme about Queen Victoria mentioned how German was the favoured language of Victoria's family. One Lady-in-Waiting, in her recollections of Victoria's family, apparently had noted in her memoirs how, in their old age, when Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, got together, they would still talk in English, but that, as they chatted, they reverted to the "English" of their childhood - a language so heavily accented that it sounded as if they were actually speaking German!

Accents are interesting. When Prince Arthur was engaged to Catherine of Aragon, but before they actually met, they corresponded in Latin since she knew very little English and likewise he hardly any Spanish. But when they did finally meet they found they still couldn't converse as they spoke Latin which such extremely different accents.

Also, just as a minor matter of interest, it is recorded that Napoleon I spoke French with a strong and rather common Corsican accent, while Hitler spoke German with a heavy Austrian accent ... which in both instances gave ammunition to their political enemies, at least early in their respective careers.

So much for ammunition versus amnition re accents then. The House of Hanover has survived it too. A true test would probably be surviving high position in the Women's Institute. When did the term 'Speaking the King's/Queen's' language come in? 

However, looking further backwards in time, how many of the English monarchs spoke English? Many were from or were schooled in France - and what of James 1? Russian aristocracy preferred to use French I have always believed - perhaps that is a myth of my grandmother's.... along with tales of incest and affairs. (I had an interesting raising.)

Priscilla wrote:

Russian aristocracy preferred to use French I have always believed - perhaps that is a myth of my grandmother's.... along with tales of incest and affairs. (I had an interesting raising.)

My granny came from Bootle, although she was born in Ireland. They had incest and affairs there too, I believe.

Temperance wrote:

Priscilla wrote:

 Russian aristocracy preferred to use French I have always believed - perhaps that is a myth of my grandmother's.... along with tales of incest and affairs. (I had an interesting raising.)

My granny came from Bootle, although she was born in Ireland. They had incest and affairs there too, I believe.

Ah but did she write her billets-doux and whisper her petits-mots, en Française?

Tolstoy had the Russian aristocracy speaking French, with varying proficiency, in War and Peace. But I think it was only a custom (affectation?) developed in the 18thC when one of the Tsars tried to reform Russia from perceived 'backwardness'. Not really up with Russian history so I could be wrong.

Edit. Just had a quick look and this site is quite informative
http://languagehat.com/language-in-19th-century-russia/

Anyway by the late 19th century the Russian royal family were mostly German (ie from German/Danish families), weren't they? I thought that Tsar Nicholas II (and later the Tsarina Alexandria) had to learn Russian as a third or fourth language, only when adults, after having mastered French and German as children (the languages used at home). And I believe that neither of them ever spoke Russian with complete confidence ... but then they very probably rarely had to.

Meles meles wrote:

Temperance wrote:

Priscilla wrote:

 Russian aristocracy preferred to use French I have always believed - perhaps that is a myth of my grandmother's.... along with tales of incest and affairs. (I had an interesting raising.)

My granny came from Bootle, although she was born in Ireland. They had incest and affairs there too, I believe.

Ah but did she write her billets-doux and whisper her petits-mots, en Française?

Well, she would often say, "Pardon my French" after commenting bitterly on some faux pas committed by my grandfather while he was drunk which, alas, he usually was.

Didn't English aristocrats always lapse into French when discussing (at dinner) something not suitable for the servants to hear? Wasn't "Pas devant les domestiques" the signal for the judicious change of lingo? They did that in Upstairs Downstairs anyway.

Also featured in Dowton:

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2012/sep/23/downton-abbey-series-three-episode-two

Inspired by Matthew and Mary's continental honeymoon the second episode also came over all French in parts. In his prison bunk, Bates had been dreaming about Anna dancing the can-can and eating frogs' legs. Matthew was "en déshabillé" in front of Anna. Martha warned Cousin Isobel against talking about her Charitable Home for Harlots over dinner: "Pas devant les domestiques."

https://books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=0141186003 Search for "Pas devgant l'enfant".

I've always wondered how William the Conqueror and Harold Godwinson actually spoke to each other when the latter travelled to Normandy.  I can't imagine William knew much, if any, English and whilst Harold may have picked up a bit of Norman-French at Edward the Confessor's continental court I doubt it was enough to have an extended conversation in.  So was it all done through translators? Or did they find a common tongue?  (Perhaps Latin, like Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon?)

Franglais?

"Qu'est-ce que vous think you're doing, Guillaume? L'Angleterre n'est pas pour vous, sweet pea*. So pensez encore une fois.

*He meant cabbage.

EDIT:

For those of you too young to remember the wonderful language invented by Miles Kington for Punch, here is the blurb from Amazon about  "Le Bumper Book of Franglais".

Franglais is the ultimate invented language. A source of unending delight to anyone who did French at school, it is the creation of the great English humorist Miles Kington.
This new collection brings together the best pieces written in the two-and-a-half decades up to the author's tragic death in 2008. Each appears in paperback for the first time, with more than 50 specially commissioned illustrations by Wendy Hoile.
These 101 comic masterpieces provide a timeless survey of the British character in all its eccentricity. Page after page is filled with hilariously recognizable send-ups of our national life, from Wimbledon to Windsor Safari Park, grouse-shooting to Guy Fawkes' night, the library to the lost property office.
In no time even the most linguistically challenged reader will be thinking, speaking and dreaming Franglais. For, in the words of the grand-maître himself: 'Parler franglais c'est un doddle!'


Sorry, A-N, yours was a serious question. Je suis aller back under mon petit stone now et je ne reviens ici plus. Honnête.

That Amazon blurb is true to form. It claims that Franglais was 'the creation' Miles Kington. I'm pretty sure that dual linguistic usage and toying has been a feature on both sides of the British Channel for centuries. It could be that Kington was the first to coin the word. It's a similar canard, perhaps, to the 'football was invented in England' nonsense which the UK establishment and media regularly put out as gospel until very recently. Codification, of course, is not the same thing as invention.

Also eyebrow-raising is the reference to Kington's death as being 'tragic'. For a man in his sixties to succumb to cancer is not that unusual I would suggest. A misuse of the word 'tragic' here perhaps.

Amazon doit essay durer to chercher for le just word.

OK, OK, OK - I was only quoting.

Vizzer wrote:

Amazon doit essay durer to chercher for le just word.

That's not very good franglais, Vizzer.  I suggest: "Le blurb sur Amazon est, dans mon opinion, un load de complete crap."

I didn't know Kington had done a translation of Le Franglais Lieutenant's Femme.

I've just looked up "stone" in French and discovered that a dry-stone wall is un mur de pierres seches. How very useful. I'm sure that will come in handy sometime.


EDIT: When poor Kington was told he'd got terminal cancer, he wrote a book called "How Shall I Tell the Dog?"  (and other musings). In English.

Anglo-Norman wrote:

I've always wondered how William the Conqueror and Harold Godwinson actually spoke to each other when the latter travelled to Normandy. 

Just a thought ... but both their families were related, in several ways, to the Norwegian and Danish nobility. William was the great-great-grandson of Rollo the 'viking' founder of the Norman dynasty, while Harold was a nephew of Sven Forkbeard and a cousin of Cnut the Great. William of course probably spoke Norman-French at home, while Harold usually spoke Old Wessex English. But might they not both still have understood some sort of common Norse language - a sort of Scandinavian 'lingua-franca' perhaps?

But anyway I'd have thought that Harold probably spoke some Old Northern French as well as his English. Wasn't French already becoming established as the language of international trade, at least with England and the Low Countries, albeit if not yet quite as the standard language of diplomacy (which I assume was then ecclesiastical Latin)?

And surely if the current incumbent of the English throne can be fluent in French (and her husband fluent in French and German with some modern Greek as well), I really don't see why her predecessors shouldn't also have been competent in at least one language other than their habitual one.

I suppose that's true.  I just don't see Harold as bilingual, but I admit not on any real evidence, just a gut feeling (which is what he got from a sword...  Sorry!)

William apparently did experiment with issuing English proclamations at the start of his reign, but quickly realised that since his own deputies wouldn't understand them he might as well stick to his native lingo.

Meles meles wrote:

And surely if the current incumbent of the English throne can be fluent in French (and her husband fluent in French and German with some modern Greek as well), I really don't see why her predecessors shouldn't also have been competent in at least one language other than their habitual one.

A very good point. In fact, the flip-side of the question would be to ask if there has ever been a monarch in England since 1066 who was unable to speak French. The Hanoverian George I, for instance, was unable to speak English (as mentioned in the opening post) yet was proficient in French.

The decline of the use of the French language has been very sudden. Following the establishment of the lingua franca by the Carolingian empire in the 8th century, French was virtually unchallenged in the West for the next 1000 years. As recently as 1801 (when the British monarchy finally abandoned its claim to the throne of France) there were still more French speakers in the world than English. A quarter of a century after the American Declaration of Independence and more than a decade after the French Revolution, the combined populations of the British Isles and North America was about 21 million people while the population of France at that time was about 29 millions. 1 in 6 of the population of Europe spoke French as a first language. Yet a hundred years later at the beginning of the 20th century, that proportion had slipped to fewer than 1 in 10 Europeans speaking French as a first language. Even so French still had sufficient clout to be established as the official language of international bodies such as the International Olympic Committee, the International Federation of Association Football, the United Nations Organisation and the European Broadcasting Union etc. Indeed in the case of FIFA, the French acronym is used even in the English language which would otherwise be 'IFAF'. More than 100 years on again, however, one wonders just how long French will survive as a significant international language.

The majority of French speakers are now in Africa. French is widely spoken in a huge swath of countries running down the west and centre of the continent from the Mediterranean to south of the equator. As with the status of English on the Indian sub-continent, French is often an official language as it is international and has wider usage than any of the regional languages. Worldwide the number of French speakers is actually increasing.

In Europe French is spoken in France obviously, but is also officially used in Belgium, Luxembourg, Romandy (Switzerland), Saarland (Germany) and Aosta (Italy). Along with German and English, French is one of the three working or "procedural languages" of the EU. However following brexit I wonder if English will retain that status and whether French and German might perhaps become more dominant? Or maybe another language, say Spanish (already with about 40 million native speakers in Spain alone and some 500 million native speakers worldwide, plus many more as secondary speakers especially in the US) might rise and demote the place of English within the EU. English as a second language is widely spoken throughout Europe (and globally is often the preferred language of commerce and diplomacy) but with brexit the only EU country that still actually uses English as one of its official languages is Ireland, where it's already alongside Irish Gaelic/Gaeilge.

Vizzer wrote:

... has [there] ever been a monarch in England since 1066 who was unable to speak French?

George V ... he famously mistrusted anything 'foreign' and was never particularly 'bright' intellectually. When he was in his late teens Queen Victoria complained to his father (Edward, the Prince of Wales, himself fluent in several foreign languages) that her grandson could speak neither French nor German. Accordingly in 1881, when Prince George was twenty and just about to embark on his naval career proper, Victoria ordered that he spend six months in Lausanne to try and get him to learn some French. The attempt was not successful.

I got the idea that Richard II was the first English Monarch to speak English most of the time, before that, as you say, it was French which continued to be the "official" language of Court for many years.

My father wrote this concerning the time he was a footman in 1938 at Quenby Hall in Leicestershire.

On a number of occasions, the duke (Prince Henry) and the duchess of Gloucester visited the Nuttings at Quenby Hall.  The duchess was a nice lady but the duke was Germanic in appearance and in speech, he could not pronounce Ws and so he called me ‘Vittle’.  He never seemed very intelligent and I noted that he would not join in any card games for money.  At the end of visits, his aide, a captain, used to do the ‘tipping’.  He was the fourth child of George V and Mary of Teck.

I don't understand why Prince Henry should have been thought to have a German accent or German manner of speaking. Frankly it makes no sense.

His father (George V) famously could only speak English and while his mother, Mary of Teck, had a German title and could speak fluent German (she was the daughter of a German nobleman Francis the Duke of Teck and the Anglo-German Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge) she had however grown up entirely in England at Kensington Palace and at the White Lodge in Richmond Park, where she had been educated by an English governess. Her son Prince Henry (of whom Tim was speaking) was similarly raised and educated in England and as far as I'm aware (with the exception of the classroom) his family spoke only English at home, not the least because his autocratic and xenophobic father was entirely mono-lingual.

Like his older brother Albert (later George VI) as a young boy he suffered from prolonged ill-health (aggressive colds and knock-knees for which he was required to wear leg splints) and reportedly was of a rather nervous disposition (probably due to the strict and over-bearing nature of his father). His early education was thus entirely at home (York Cottage on the Sandringham estate) under the tutorship of Henry Peter Hansell. However when he was ten he became the first son of a reigning monarch to be educated at a 'normal' English school. He started as a day boy at St Peter's Court Preparatory School in Broadstairs, Kent, and liked it so much that his father, the King, was persuaded to allow him to attend as a full-time boarder. He was by all accounts not academically bright, although he did have some aptitude for mathemetics, and his principal interests were cricket and football. After three years at St Peter's Court he went to Eton, then Trinity College Cambridge and finally the Royal Military College Sandhurst when he joined the army in 1919 (so overall a fairly conventional British upper-class education).

However, as well the ill-health and nervous disposition that he shared with his elder brother Albert, the young Prince Henry, also like his brother, had a combination of speech disorders. Albert famously had a severe stammer, but according to Wiki they both had rhotacism which prevented them from pronouncing the r sound, and while Albert's pronunciation was slightly reminiscent of the guttural rolled "French r", Henry was completely unable to pronounce it, causing the intended r to sound like w. On top of this Henry also had a nasal lisp and an unusually high-pitched tone, resulting in a very distinctive voice. His speech (as well as his general health) much improved as he got older, so I wonder if it wasn't the echoes of his earlier speech impediments that made him sound "Germanic" to your father, Tim.

PS

I've found this very short youtube clip of Prince Henry speaking in 1930. He doesn't seem to have any obvious speech impediments other than maybe a weak r pronunciation (although this brief speech, perhaps deliberately, has almost no words with strong r sounds) but anyway pronouncing r in that way was common to many of the upper class at that time and was often copied by those who aspiried to be part of 'that set'. So it's not really an error of pronunciation but rather an accepted language variation of the time. He seems to pronounce the w in "Mister West" in a fairly normal English manner, and he doesn't seem to have a problem with v when he says "given by an anonymous doner". Frankly he doesn't sound the least bit Germanic at all.

However I accept that in this example he is making a public speech, albeit a very short one, and so might be deliberately trying to speak 'correctly' as opposed, perhaps, to his usual casual manner of speaking when relaxing informally amongst friends and equals - such as the occasions at Quenby Hall as remembered by your father, Tim. Also in the youtube clip he does display some slightly odd 'nervous' mannerisms, which might suggest that he was uncomfortable with public speaking.

Meles meles wrote:

However when he was ten he became the first son of a reigning monarch to be educated at a 'normal' English school. He started as a day boy at St Peter's Court Preparatory School in Broadstairs, Kent, and liked it so much that his father, the King, was persuaded to allow him to attend as a full-time boarder. He was by all accounts not academically bright, although he did have some aptitude for mathemetics, and his principal interests were cricket and football.

That's fascinating Meles. I played rugby for my school and we used to have fixtures with Wellesley House which by then had absorbed St Peter's Court. Although Wellesley is a very smart school (much posher than mine was for example) I had no idea of this royal first from decades earlier.

Thank you for that research MM.  My father died in 2005 and so I cannot ask him about it.  Of his period of domestic service, 1930 to 1939, the three places that he talked most about were Sudeley castle, Cliveden, Belvedere House in Ireland and Quenby Hall; Quenby Hall is the only one of the four that I have not visited.  As well as his reference to the duke of Gloucester, I do remember him referring to the duke when I was younger and calling him 'Vittle'.  My father would have been 22 years old at the time.  I can see why my father thought that he looked Germanic.

There was another royal who my wrote about who also stayed at Quenby which was Princess Helena Victoria who was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.  She could definitely speak German but I do not remember my father referring to her as having a German accent, just as looking like an 'old washerwoman'.

'The Princess Helena Victoria, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, also spent three months as a guest of Lady Nutting during the period of the Munich crisis.  One day Lady Nutting asked the butler, Mr Powell, if he would kindly lend them, the gentry, the servant’s wireless so that the Princess could translate Hitler’s speech.  This was after the second of the three trips by the Prime Minister, Mr Chamberlain, to Germany by air to meet with Hitler.  The dinner had started at 8:00 p.m. with soup and then we took the plates off and replaced them with clean ones and the fish course.  From time to time, she translated Hitler’s words as he said them.  At first she said that he is now “ranting and complaining about the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles 1919”.  While the meal went on the Princess continued to listen to Hitler’s speech, eat her food, and brief the others on Hitler’s tirade – quite a feat.  By the time they got to the meat course, according to the Princess, Hitler was threatening war on Czechoslovakia.  She seemed very frightened by the harsh threatening voice and her fear was passed on to the others.  They mentioned what war would mean to this country; the death, destruction and rationing!'

...

To look at Princess Helena Victoria you could imagine her as a cook or a washer woman.  We were told that she only received £6,000 per annum from the Privy Purse and so she was relatively poor.  I found her easy to talk to and interested in people, she used to refer to ‘the great unwashed’. '

Tim

'

I apologise if this has been mentioned previously in this thread, but Edward I (since the conquest) writing in 1295 (in Latin) does accuse the French king of 'planning to wipe out the English language entirely from the earth'.

Tim

Tim - I didn't mean to cast doubts on the accuracy of your father's testimony about Prince Henry, I was just intrigued by the comment. I wonder if by saying he appeared "Germanic" your father meant that he came across as having a strong military bearing. Certainly while his brothers all opted to do their military training primarily in the Royal Navy, Henry chose the army and moreover he aspired to be a career officer and see active service. As a son of the King this was always going to be difficult, and following his brother Edward's abdication and the accession of his other brother Albert as George VI, Prince Henry was forced to retire from active military duty - he did however see active service again in 1940 when he went with the British Expeditionary Force to France as Chief Liason Officer to Lord Gort (during which time he was injured in a German bombing raid on Tournai). I'd also wondered whether Henry had perhaps shared the pro-German/Nazi sympathies of his brother Edward, but that doesn't seem to have been true at all, rather the contrary in fact.

Vizzer - you might be interested to know that Prince Henry's younger brother George also attended Wellesley School (then still St Peter's Court) and in turn Prince Henry sent both his sons, the princes William (d. 1972) and Richard (the current Duke of Gloucester), there. The best I can claim - and certainly not from any personal involvement as my achievements were principally in the school's brass band and orchestra - was that throughout the 1970s my comprehensive school had an annual football match with the Russian crew of the Soviet freighter that regularly visited our port town (bringing mostly soft-wood timber and gypsum as I recall). Every year we pitted our plucky sixteen- and seventeen-year-old English schoolboys against hardened, twenty-something, Russian sailors who'd all recently completed their military service ... but actually we were fairly equally matched - strength against agility an' all that - and we won as often as not.

Returning to the matter of which monarchs could, or could not, speak more than one language ... Henry's other brother Albert (later George VI) is well-known for his speech impediment and his struggle to overcome it (as in the 2010 film 'The King's Speech'). He was nevertheless, at least as far as I can gather, a proficient French speaker. In 1938 he went on a state visit to France during which he made a speech at the grand banquet held in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, almost certainly at least in part, in French. In december 1939 he made a trip to France, visiting British and French troops, and also French government officials and military commanders, when presumably he again spoke French at least some of the time.

There are recordings of him speaking English on several occasions, most notably his address to the country and Commonwealth following the declaration of war but unfortunately I cannot find any of him speaking French. I'd be interested to know if he still stammered when speaking French, or whether having to think in a different language eased the mental 'feedback' problems that so often seem to cause a stammerer to hesitate and stutter. Certainly, like Prince Henry, he is known to have trouble pronouncing r although he actually did so much more in the rolled, throaty French way. But until I can find a recording or first hand report of him speaking French, I'm just speculating.

Anyway, here's a Pathé news recording of the 1938 state visit to France, but unfortunately with no record of the King speaking French,



... while here's him making the real 'King's Speech', delivered on 3 September 1939.

Although we watched The King's Speech I don't quite remember what words or letters he had trouble with. But what I do know is that 'r' often becomes 'l'. Good King Hal, for example, in New Zealand/Aotearoa Lake Waihola is the name of a southern lake though officially there is no 'l' in Maori (though southern Maori is a different dialect, as far as I know, from that used in the north).
But many names are like that eg Mary becomes Molly, Sarah = Sally. I have just been looking up one of my names books (of which I have many, being interested from a very young age in names) and see that Dick from Richard is thought to "result from the difficulty that English speakers in the Middle Ages had in pronouncing the trilled Norman R." It also says under Hal that similar substitutions of 'l' for 'r' have occurred in derivations of Terry (Tel) and Derek (Del).

MMs information on the duke of Gloucester has also left me pondering why my father formed such a negative view.  My father was very left wing at this time, he considered but did not actually join the Communist Party, and so I think it is quite likely that he was a republican and viewed the Royal family as basically a bunch of Germans.  Prince Henry's manner may have reinforced this view.

Tim

Tim - From what you say I suspect your father might well have held them all in contempt - a view which at the time (early/mid 1930s) my father, and especially his father, would gave heartily agreed (Granddad marched from Tyneside as part of the Jarrow Crusade). I suspect a great many of the British working population of the time were of the same view. However somewhat bizarrely the Royal Family were both despised but also revered at the same time  

The narrative has changed over time but the British royal family - with the possible exception of some of the canny women like Mary of Teck - were often thought by their contremporaries to be particularly thick, ill-informed, uncultured, ignorant and ... well, just stupid. Frankly I'm not sure very much changed in the century since: they're all still as thick as fud in my opinion.

George V, well before anyone even dared to speak about his dementia, was so thick, pig-ignorant, stupid, xenophobic and blindly bigotted, that I think he was essentailly unfit to rule (thank god for British Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Prime Ministerial system - well, at least circa 1900). Meanwhile none of his sons, at least while princes, ever showed much evidence of any great intelligence, while they continued to act as playboys satisfying their own selfish desires. However given this miserable line-up at least that complete and utter numbskull Prince Henry the Duke of Gloucester, was sufficiently far down the order of succession that he could be kept harmlessly out of harm's way - opening hospitals, lauching ships, sitting on committees, being an army officer and generally 'liasing' about things.  He was from all contemporary reports, even those from his peers, thought to exceptionaly stupid and dim, even by royal standards.

But though Henry was apparently rather over-fond of whiskey the establishment could at least a relax a bit in that he wasn't a druggy and bisexual philanderer like his brother Prince George. By contrast to the boring, bovine, dull and dim Henry, his younger brother George was widely recognised as being intelligent, cultured and seductively charming. And so despire all the scandals - George's homosexual affairs, society romances, rumours of illegitimate children, liasons with foreign agents, general partying, drink and drugs - he still gained a certain grudging popular respect at the time for simply having fun and living life to the full. While at the same time the public thought Prince Henry was just dim, dense, dull and dum.

Well, the parents of a woman I worked with had both been in service at Himley Hall, the residence of the Earl of Dudley. A frequent visitor in the 20s and 30s was the then Prince of Wales (though reports suggest he was happier in the Dudley Arms pub than the Hall).  They both told me how wonderful he was, and that he should have been allowed to marry Mrs Simpson and remain king. Prince George's opening of part of the now University of Wolverhampton is commemorated by an engraved stone in the wall.

Another interesting question is whether King Henry VII - otherwise known as Harri Tudur ap Edmund ap Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur - actually knew how to speak any Welsh?

Henry was born in 1457 at Pembroke castle in South Wales, although even then Pembrokeshire was not a very Welsh-speaking region and was often referred to as "Little England beyond Wales". Henry was the only child of Lady Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor, albeit with his father dying three months before Henry's birth. Edmund Tudor was the son of Owen Tudor, a middling level Welsh noble who had started as a page at the court of Henry V and had advanced to become a well-regarded veteran of Agincourt, but who, following a romantic dalliance, is said to have secretly married the widow of Henry V, Catherine of Valois. This embarrassingly made the upstart Edmund Tudor half-brother to the reigning king, Henry VI - at least once the clandestine marriage had been formally declared legitimate by Parliament - and thus he found himself rapidly ennobled further to become a senior figure in the English court as the 1st Earl of Richmond. However the Tudor family - or Tudur as it was then spelled in Welsh - was originally only a fairly minor noble family from Penmynydd on the Isle of Anglesey, and indeed Henry VII's grandfather, Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, had fought alongside Owain Glyndwr, ''the last true prince of Wales", during his rebellion against English rule only half a century earlier.

In 1456 Henry's father, Edmund Tudor, was captured while fighting for Henry VI against the Yorkists and he died shortly afterwards while in prison at Carmarthen Castle. His younger brother, Jasper Tudor, the Earl of Pembroke, undertook to protect Edmund's young widow Margaret (who was just 13 years old when she gave birth to Henry) and likewise the lad himself. However when Edward IV became King in 1461 Jasper Tudor was forced into exile abroad while Pembroke Castle and the Earldom of Pembroke were granted to the Yorkist William Herbert, who then also assumed the guardianship of Margaret Beaufort and her son. The young Henry was thus raised in the principal Herbert household at Raglan Castle in the Welsh county of Monmouthshire. As at Pembroke he may well have encountered Welsh servants and retainers but also local Welsh-speaking merchants and gentry. William Herbert seems to have been something of an enthusiast of Welsh culture and it is known that he commissioned several famous Welsh bards to compose poems in praise of himself, in Welsh ... so presumably his Welsh language skills were sufficient to at least understand the sycophantic guff they were writing.

In 1469 Herbert was captured fighting for the Yorkists and executed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (the "Kingmaker") and the following year when Warwick restored Henry VI to the throne, Jasper Tudor returned from exile and duly presented Henry to the court at London. However when the Yorkist Edward IV regained the throne in 1471, Henry, his uncle Jasper and other Lancastrians fled to Brittany. Brittany was then still fiercely independent from France and remember also that linguistically Breton is very close to Welsh, although as English nobles the Tudors would have been perfectly competent in French. They spent most of the next 14 years under the protection of firstly Francis II, Duke of Brittany, and later at the French Court of Louis XI.

In 1485, with help from the French king and various mercenaries many of whom were Welsh, Henry Tudor made his bid for the English throne. He landed in South Wales where he had ancestral links and where there was strong support for the Lancastrian cause. As he advanced across Wales he gained support from the Welsh nobility and although there is no recorded evidence that he ever addressed his Welsh allies in their own language, it is perhaps telling that many of his forces were Welsh speaking. He also promoted the image of himself as a Welsh champion fighting against the English (somewhat ironically so as his aim was to claim the kingdom of England) and deliberately tapped into ancient prophesy and Arthurian legend (he named his first-born son Arthur). Moreover at the decisive battle of Bosworth Henry's standard featured the green and white colours of the Tudor family but also the red dragon, the Idrid Goch, the symbol of Wales.

In his childhood Henry likely encountered Welsh on a regular basis but I've never seen any firm evidence that he acquired any degree of proficiency in the language. He certainly used his Welsh ancestry to gain support, although once secure on the throne he seems to have rather down-played his Welshness in order to boost his less tenuous claim to the English crown through his mother. But is there any evidence that Henry VI was actually able to speak Welsh?