George VI and Elizabeth, page 32
Queen Mary, who had stoically borne incalculable strain during the crisis, succumbed to a respiratory infection and retired to her bedroom on Christmas Eve. “At dinner I nearly choked with my awful cough,” she wrote in her diary. She didn’t come downstairs again until New Year’s Eve. Elizabeth later told Victor Cazalet that the abdication “very nearly killed poor Queen Mary. There is indeed such a thing as a broken heart and hers very nearly collapsed.”
The royal family managed to celebrate the holiday in familiar fashion. Following church on Christmas Day they had a luncheon of Sandringham beef, Norfolk turkey, and plum pudding. In the ballroom afterward, the King touched a switch to illuminate the large Christmas tree. He carried out his father’s custom in the afternoon by presenting each of the estate workers with a joint of beef as Lilibet and Margaret looked on. Three days later, the King led a shooting party in the fields surrounding Appleton, Queen Maud’s house. Elizabeth and the princesses joined the shooting luncheon in a tent, and the King enjoyed the day so much he didn’t return to the Big House until dusk.
Only two weeks into his reign, George VI declined to give a Christmas Day radio address—an occasion that would have imposed enormous stress. He simply wasn’t up to it. His anxieties about his stammer had been inadvertently worsened by his friend Cosmo Lang.
In his remarks on the BBC, the archbishop had generously praised the new king’s character and qualities of leadership. Then he had added, “When his people listen to him they will note an occasional and momentary hesitation in his speech. But he has brought it into full control, and to those who hear it need cause no sort of embarrassment, for it causes none to him who speaks.”
The archbishop’s effort at reassurance was as unnecessary as it was misleading. George VI had by no means mastered his stutter. It would be a lifelong struggle requiring relentless practice and concentrated effort to keep the wayward consonants in check. Lionel Logue was irritated by the archbishop’s remarks and worried that they would dent Bertie’s already shaky confidence. Logue was right to be concerned. Several years later, George VI said he had been “so stunned” by Lang’s words that it had taken “a long time” to get over them.
During his six-week stay in Norfolk, George VI came to grips with two shocking discoveries that would forever alter his relationship with his older brother. In the months before his abdication, Edward VIII had secretly arranged to sell two significant tracts of land on the Sandringham estate—the Anmer and Flitcham farms—to a prominent farming family in Lincolnshire. George VI urgently instructed his land agent, William Fellowes—the chief administrator at Sandringham—to stop the sale. “It was a complicated business, because the contract had been signed,” said a man whose father was privy to the arrangements. Fellowes was able to unwind the sale, and George VI was deeply angered by his brother’s duplicity.
Even more upsetting was Bertie’s realization in those weeks that David had deceived him by concealing his private Duchy of Cornwall fortune of more than £1 million in accumulated revenue that he had hoarded. Under the system of Civil List annuities distributed by the government, Edward VIII as an unmarried monarch had been receiving £370,000 a year—nearly $38 million at today’s values—which ceased on his abdication. After receiving £25,000 annually (some $2.5 million today) as Duke of York, Bertie got a significant pay raise upon taking the throne: £410,000 a year ($42 million today)—the amount designated for a married king. It covered the family’s expenses, including the costs of the royal household—the private secretaries and other officials and staff who ran the day-to-day operation.
In the midst of their intense financial discussions on December 10—what Bertie described as “a terrible lawyer interview”—David had pleaded his own special form of poverty. He said his assets amounted to only £90,000 (around $9 million at today’s values)—a fraction of his real wealth. He insisted he needed an annual payment of £25,000 tax free for his life as a private citizen. Bertie had signed off under duress, without proper investigation, and had left hanging David’s life tenancy of Sandringham and Balmoral.
“I understood from you when I signed the paper at the Fort that you were going to be very badly off,” Bertie wrote to David early in 1937. “The fact remains that I was completely misled.” George VI felt that under those circumstances, the Duke of Windsor was no longer entitled to an annual pension. What’s more, the British government refused to pay him out of the Treasury’s funds. Baldwin and his ministers had no interest in debating the former king’s finances with the Labour Party in Parliament.
To secure the amount he wanted, David essentially held the Sandringham and Balmoral properties hostage. At one point he even threatened to return to Britain and assert his ownership of both estates. Contentious negotiations dragged on for more than a year as Walter Monckton worked out a new settlement that was completed in 1938. George VI ended up paying David the £25,000 a year from his own pocket, and he bought out his brother’s interest in the two estates for nearly £300,000—almost $30 million at current values.
One of the King’s persistent worries was that David and Wallis would return to Britain and undermine his reign by stirring up discontent and seeking publicity. His family felt the same way. Even Prince George, David’s favorite brother, confided to Chips Channon that he had told Bertie, “Don’t ever let David come back. He will only cause you trouble.” As Elizabeth explained years later, “You can’t have two Kings.”
On George VI’s behalf, the government secured the Duke of Windsor’s concession that he would not travel to Britain without the King’s express permission—on penalty of having his pension payments suspended. The duke complied, but under vehement protest, calling the arrangement “unfair and intolerable…tantamount to my accepting payment for remaining in exile.” To David, this violated his assumption—based on informal assurances from Bertie before the abdication—that his brother would allow him to come back to Britain after several years and resume his life at Fort Belvedere.
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Yet there was no escaping the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson, even in the remote reaches of Sandringham. From his redoubt in Austria where he waited for Wallis’s divorce to become final at the end of April, David began regularly telephoning his brother at inconvenient times. He offered unsolicited advice—often contrary to government policy—but more frequently he harangued his brother about money and his insistence that Wallis be named “Her Royal Highness” after their marriage. The duke took advantage of these telephone calls, knowing that his fast-paced glibness could stymie his brother and make him stutter. After these long-distance conversations, the King often erupted in anger, his nerves jangling. At Elizabeth’s urging, Walter Monckton eventually persuaded the duke to stop the calls.
At the very height of tension in January 1937, Elizabeth’s friend Osbert Sitwell offered the royal family comfort in ridicule. He composed a fifty-six-line poem that made the rounds of all the great houses. Titled “Rat Week,” it skewered the Duke of Windsor’s social set that had abandoned him after the abdication. They were the “rats”—including leading hostess Sibyl Colefax in her “iron cage of curls”—who had left the “sinking ship” and now scarcely admitted even knowing him.
Lord Crawford first heard “Rat Week” at Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, where Stanley Baldwin had been reading it aloud to entertain his guests. “The spirit I might almost say the animation with which SB declaimed the verses, indicated I thought some measure of his feelings, of his sense of indignation towards the crowd who let down the poor King so heartlessly,” Crawford wrote to Tweedsmuir, adding, “Do not let us be too charitable, for HM himself never showed the smallest hesitation or reluctance to outstrip the worst of his bad companions.”
Sitwell worried that his caustic doggerel might not go down well with the King and Queen. But it proved as popular at Sandringham as at Chequers. “I must tell you first of all, that we all thought your satire absolutely brilliant,” Elizabeth wrote to the author. “It really is perfect—it hits hard (and never too hard for me) and is wickedly amusing.”
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The royal family said goodbye to 145 Piccadilly and moved into Buckingham Palace on February 15. While the rooms formerly occupied by George V and Queen Mary on the first floor were being prepared for the new king and queen, they stayed in the pink-and-gold-brocaded Belgian Suite on the ground floor—what Crawfie described as “camping in a museum.” Bertie had lived in the Palace for thirteen years before his marriage, and Elizabeth was familiar with some of its 775 rooms. Yet it was another matter to inhabit the vast building—really more an office complex than a home—as a family. Lilibet wondered if a tunnel might be dug so they could sleep in their old house. Soon enough, she and her sister were “delighted with the wide passages to play in,” Queen Mary noted a week after their arrival.
As was her habit, Queen Mary immersed herself in the Buckingham Palace redecoration, spending hours going over the rooms with her daughter-in-law. But Elizabeth proceeded prudently in the shadow of the continuing economic depression. She replaced carpets and silk curtains—one set of which was donated by Queen Mary’s friend Mrs. Charles Rothschild—and filled the rooms with flowers brought from Windsor to brighten the atmosphere.
Over tea in the Queen’s temporary sitting room, Mabell Airlie noticed “the little feminine touches which I had always associated with her.” “It looks like home already,” she said. George VI added with a smile, “Elizabeth could make a home anywhere.” At the end of April, the King and Queen moved into their apartments: “nice and comfortable,” Queen Mary wrote.
Their first public engagement as king and queen on February 13, 1937, took them into the heart of the East End, one of London’s impoverished districts. There they visited the People’s Palace, a community center for social and recreational activities that had been recently constructed to replace a similar building that had burned down in 1931. Their drive from Buckingham Palace to the People’s Palace was highly symbolic. In the words of The Times, they were able to “show in action the link that binds the two palaces together.”
Above all, the King and Queen wanted to make clear—after Edward VIII’s showy demonstrations of solidarity with the poor of South Wales before his abdication—their record of concern for the working class and the dispossessed. The Times got the message, noting that the King’s long association with the Industrial Welfare Society had brought him into “peculiarly close touch with the circumstances of industrial life,” a cause to which “he gave not merely support but leadership.”
Thick crowds of East Enders cheered and waved to the monarch and consort along streets decorated with flags and bunting. Inside the building, George VI and Elizabeth walked among five hundred representatives of youth organizations and questioned them about their activities. As they left, they received a rousing send-off.
In subsequent months, George VI and Elizabeth did the usual appearances, and they made a good impression everywhere, raising the stature of the monarchy. At a Buckingham Palace dinner in March, Harold Nicolson watched the Queen approvingly. “Nothing could exceed the charm or dignity which she displays,” Nicolson wrote. “I cannot help feeling what a mess poor Mrs. Simpson would have made of such an occasion.”
Courtiers and grandees equally admired the young king. Tommy Lascelles reported to his wife, Joan, that “I really like him awfully. He talks to me & I to him with naturalness that was never there with the other man.” The influential Earl of Crawford told Lord Tweedsmuir, “We have had 3 months of our new Sovereign—a contrast almost unbelievable with the last regime. The new sense of confidence pervades us all.”
Still, rumors persisted that George VI was not up to the job—especially after the Palace announced in February that the royal couple would not travel to India later in the year to celebrate the accession as they had hoped. The given reasons were the cost, an uncertain political situation on the subcontinent, and the need for the King to be in Britain during the first year of his reign. The strain such a trip would impose was also a crucial factor, which fed a perception that George VI was somehow frail and unwell, on top of concern that his stammer would prevent him from communicating with his people.
The main mission of forty-one-year-old Bertie and thirty-six-year-old Elizabeth in their first year as king and queen was to rebuild the foundations of the monarchy badly battered by Edward VIII. The apex of that reconstruction would be the coronation on Wednesday, May 12, 1937. George VI had to show that he was capable of leading Britain and the empire as well as inspiring his subjects. That meant performing at a high level not only during the lengthy coronation ceremony but also in the evening during a radio broadcast from Buckingham Palace to the empire. For the first time, the “elaborate ritual of personal and national dedication” in Westminster Abbey would also be transmitted to hundreds of millions of listeners around the world, which raised the stakes even more for Bertie.
After having been out of touch with Lionel Logue, he invited his speech therapist to Windsor Castle in mid-April. In the weeks before the coronation, Logue worked steadily with the King at a desk in Buckingham Palace that allowed him to broadcast standing up—which George VI believed would help him breathe more easily and speak with less effort. They also had to deal with the microphone fright that had persisted long after his two halting appearances at Wembley in 1925.
The King and his teacher, assisted by BBC sound engineer Robert Wood, built on the drills Logue had practiced with Bertie a decade earlier—sessions that would be touchingly depicted many years later in the film The King’s Speech. They couldn’t alter his speaking part in the coronation service—five brief responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury that needed to be flawlessly delivered. But they cut troublesome words from the speech text and substituted easier ones. Wood helped with “tone formation and lip formation,” showing how to “let the microphone do the work.” When they recorded the King and played it back, the results frustrated him. “He is indeed a gallant fighter,” Logue wrote, “and if a word doesn’t go right, he looks at me so pathetically and then gets on with the job.”
Elizabeth’s presence in the room for many of these meetings bolstered the King. She invariably steadied him when he became agitated. “He is a good fellow and only wants careful handling,” Logue noted. “He always speaks well in front of the Queen.”
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The blare of loudspeakers being tested near Buckingham Palace jolted Bertie and Elizabeth out of bed at three a.m. on Coronation Day. Soon afterward, the sound of bands practicing prevented their return to sleep. The King was unable to eat breakfast and “had a sinking feeling inside.” But having prayed with the Archbishop of Canterbury three days earlier, they were both ready to embrace the most profound religious aspects of the thousand-year-old ceremony. “There were tears in their eyes when we rose from our knees,” Cosmo Lang recalled.
They would be the thirty-eighth sovereign and twenty-sixth consort to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, “the temple and shrine of English history.” The coronation procession began at eight-thirty a.m. with more than fifty cars carrying foreign dignitaries. For the next two hours, as the King and Queen readied themselves at Buckingham Palace, came wave upon wave of carriages, bands, cavalrymen, and foot soldiers. It was a pleasantly noisy cavalcade, with drums and brass, jingling harnesses, and clattering hooves. Five million spectators packed the sidewalks, parks, and grandstands, filling the air with cheers and waving handkerchiefs and flags.
After the empire procession featuring delegations from the dominions, Princesses Mary, Lilibet, and Margaret appeared in a glass coach, the eleven-year-old heiress presumptive grinning through the window. They were followed by more carriages carrying members of the royal family, the last of whom was Queen Mary, with her sister-in-law Queen Maud of Norway.
Coronations had not typically included dowager queens. Alexandra had happily stayed away from the formal investiture of George V. But Queen Mary felt it her duty to support her son, and she had thrown herself into preparations for the big day. She chipped in on the design of Queen Elizabeth’s platinum crown, which incorporated the famous 105.6-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond from Queen Mary’s own coronation crown. She attended rehearsals, and she visited foreign royals when they arrived in London.
The long wait at the Palace was “nerve-wracking,” Bertie wrote that night, but their moment finally came when they left the forecourt at ten-thirty a.m. They traveled to the Abbey in the massive (twenty-four feet long and twelve feet high) Gold State Coach dating from 1762 and first used by King George III. It is a stunning piece of royal equipage, decorated with carved and gilded symbols—palm trees, tritons, and scepters, topped by the Imperial State Crown—its sides embellished with richly painted allegorical panels. It had to be pulled by eight Windsor Greys driven by four postilions in short red jackets and jockey caps.
The King wore white knee breeches and stockings, a red satin surcoat, a red velvet robe, an ermine cape, and a red velvet cap of maintenance rimmed by ermine—a medieval-era signifier of the King’s authority in the absence of a crown. The Queen was costumed in a white satin dress embroidered in gold thread with symbols of the British Isles and Empire. Her purple ermine-lined cloak was affixed to her shoulders by white satin bows and gold tassels.
The coach gleamed in the sunshine that had emerged only fifteen minutes before their departure. Behind its shimmering windows, the royal couple bowed to the masses of onlookers. “The size and magnificence of Their Majesties’ procession were astounding,” wrote The Times. In addition to their sovereign’s escort of mounted Life Guards in scarlet uniforms, shiny breastplates, and plumed helmets, they were accompanied by admirals and field marshals, regular troops, mounted and massed bands, Yeomen of the Guard, the King’s bargemaster, and twelve scarlet-coated watermen.
