George VI and Elizabeth, page 34
Elizabeth balanced Bertie’s diffidence with her open-hearted enjoyment. She set the more relaxed and less formal tone of their entertaining. Out went knee breeches, in came trousers for dinner parties. When the King and Queen gave a ball at Buckingham Palace, “there was very little ceremony,” observed Duff Cooper. For the supper procession, men were “simply told to take a lady. There was a crooner with the popular Ambrose’s band, and guests could smoke everywhere.”
Six months into his reign, Bertie set himself apart from his father in his relations with the courtiers. Tommy Lascelles told Harold Nicolson that George V had regarded his decades-long private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, as his “intimate” confidant and friend. He had shared all his thoughts and impressions with Stamfordham, who wrote detailed memoranda describing the King’s conversations with officials.
Unlike his father, who often held forth in his audiences with his prime ministers, George VI said little. He annoyed his private secretaries by declining to share with them what had passed in his private audiences. Lascelles blamed George VI’s secretiveness on Elizabeth, who felt that his private secretaries “were inclined to be bossy.” The King tackled all the documents in his dispatch boxes and was determined to analyze problems and make his own judgments. As her husband’s number one listener, Elizabeth understood his thinking better than Alec Hardinge and Tommy Lascelles ever did.
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During the weeks after the coronation, the new king and queen felt the love of the British people at every turn—not without some cost to their own well-being. Lionel Logue expressed concern to Alec Hardinge in midsummer that the King was being “overloaded.” In an audience with George VI on July 20, the speech therapist noted that he “seemed very drained.” The King confided that his “weak stomach” was affecting his speech. Noted Logue in his diary, “Give him too much work and make him too tired,” and it affects “his weakest part—his speech.”
Nevertheless, the King and Queen swept through all the events and rituals: the Guildhall luncheon, the Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Trooping the Colour, a historical pageant and torchlight parade at Windsor Castle, the procession of the Knights of the Garter and service at St. George’s Chapel, military and naval reviews, and tours of Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and Wales.
Lilibet and Margaret were reliable crowd pleasers when they appeared with their mother and father. At the first garden party given by George VI and Queen Elizabeth on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, the princesses strolled among the guests with their parents, pausing to speak to specially honored individuals. The Queen instructed her daughters to walk slowly and always be polite. “People liked to see them at these affairs,” wrote their governess Marion Crawford, “but I don’t think the children much enjoyed them.”
The girls accompanied their parents on the Edinburgh leg of the Scottish tour at Holyroodhouse, arriving in an open landau. Onlookers massed on the nearby slopes, forming “an immense natural ‘grand stand.’ ” When the King, Queen, and their daughters emerged from the Palace gates, “a tremendous burst of cheering echoed round the hills.” In the Thistle Chapel at St. Giles’ Cathedral, Lilibet and Margaret watched their father install their mother as the first lady of the Order of the Thistle. The honor bestowed by the British monarch dates from the seventeenth century and is Scotland’s counterpart to the Order of the Garter.
All this should have been a source of great satisfaction, but for the persistent problem of Edward, the former king “over the water.” The flashpoint for a deepening rift was George VI’s decision to officially deny Wallis the title of “Her Royal Highness.” Bertie, his mother, and his wife had made up their minds on the matter early in the year. On February 4, Queen Mary had told the King that it was “unfortunate” the Duke of Windsor “does not understand our point of view with regard to the H.R.H. and that this rankles still, but there is no doubt you must stick to this decision, as it wld make great difficulties for us to acknowledge her as being in the same category with Alice & Marina.”
Their stance, while understandable, contradicted law and precedent. Bertie knew from his conversation with Walter Monckton the night before his Accession Council that Edward’s royal birth meant he retained “His Royal Highness” for his lifetime; his title could be removed involuntarily only by an Act of Parliament. The new king used those three crucial words in naming his brother Duke of Windsor at St. James’s Palace. Prince Edward’s wife was, in fact, entitled to the same status as her husband.
But the royal family couldn’t condone that outcome, on the grounds that Wallis was not a “fit and proper person…after what she has done to the country,” George VI told Stanley Baldwin. To circumvent the law, the King’s advisers and government officials created the fiction that the abdication itself invalidated David’s royal status for himself, his spouse, and his future children. As king, George VI could bestow the HRH through his position as “Fount of Honour”—his power to grant and remove titles. This enabled him to “restore” his brother’s HRH that had never actually been removed.
With the approval of Baldwin’s cabinet, King George VI issued letters patent on May 27. He announced that Edward was “entitled to hold and enjoy for himself only” the title Royal Highness, and that “his wife and descendants if any shall not hold said title style or attribute.” Tommy Lascelles, in one of the most blinkered understatements of his courtier career, wrote to his wife, Joan, three days later, “The question of Mrs S’s ‘style & title’ has at last been satisfactorily settled & answered. They took it quite calmly in the end & saw, I think, that it was to her own interest to be definitely in the non-royal category, rather than to be mortified for the rest of her life by people refusing to give her royal courtesies to which she was technically entitled—as they undoubtedly would refuse.”
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were actually livid and implacably remained so. David never gave up his campaign to persuade Bertie to reverse Wallis’s HRH exclusion. Each refusal from the King deepened the acrimony. George VI made the debatable decision on his own, with the crucial reinforcement of his wife and mother, both of whom emphatically declined to “receive” Wallis.
Sharpening the Windsors’ ire was the King’s order—again backed by Baldwin’s cabinet—that nobody in the family could attend his brother’s wedding. The ostensible reason was that the Church of England wouldn’t sanction such a ceremony. In reality, distaste for Wallis was at the heart of Bertie, Elizabeth, and Queen Mary’s entrenched opposition.
“None of us can go to the wedding,” the King’s mother wrote to him in mid-April. “It wld look as if we approved of it which of course we do not.” She said she got “endless letters…imploring us not to go out for the wedding as it wld do great harm especially after the terrible shaking the Monarchy received last Dec.” Bertie blocked his brother Prince George—the one member of the family still close to David—from participating.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor chose to be married at a friend’s home in France, the Château de Candé, with seven guests in attendance, presided over by a publicity-seeking English clergyman. The date was June 3, 1937—the birthday of King George V. This choice further incensed the royal family. “It must be too ghastly for you,” Elizabeth wrote Queen Mary on May 21. “I feel so outraged for you…I can hardly speak.” Queen Mary replied the same day that David had “hurt me very deeply, as you can imagine of course she did it, but how can he be so weak. I suppose it is out of revenge that none of the family is going to the wedding.” She declared that every aspect of the marriage was “sickening,” including “her 40-odd gowns for the trousseau!!!”
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Bertie, Elizabeth, and their daughters arrived at Balmoral on August 4, 1937—Elizabeth’s thirty-seventh birthday. It was their first stay in Royal Deeside since Bertie became king. After taking the night train to Aberdeen, they were driven for sixty miles along roads decorated with bunting, arches, and flags to a spot near the castle gates, where they transferred to a nineteenth-century open landau and were greeted by tenants and servants.
They had ten weeks in the Highlands that summer, interrupted only by the traditional visit to Glamis. Elizabeth gave the Balmoral interiors a brightening makeover. She had the woodwork pickled, and replaced a lot of the tartan curtains and upholstery. The King and Queen filled the bedrooms with old friends, including James and Rachel Stuart, as well as Elizabeth’s brothers. After being banished by Edward VIII, Cosmo Lang contentedly resumed his place in the court circle. He was impressed by the “homely family regime” set by the Queen, who “seems to reproduce the country house atmosphere of Glamis.”
Among the new visitors was Osbert Sitwell, who likened the Ghillies Ball to “Elizabethan times, quite devoid, the whole thing, of class feeling.” The designer Rex Whistler—another unconventional addition to the guest roster—watched with delight as “the King and Queen jigged with great abandon…. The pipes squealed, people hooted and laughed.” For Princess Margaret’s seventh birthday on August 21, Tommy Lascelles was conscripted for a hide-and-seek game in the garden after tea. In a letter to his wife, he described the King and Queen as “very domestic & friendly. The meals are short & no strain at all.”
George VI conscientiously tended to his official duties throughout his holiday. He set aside time each day to read and sign the documents in his red dispatch boxes, and he entertained officials and politicians, chief among them Neville Chamberlain, who had become prime minister on May 28 upon the voluntary retirement of Stanley Baldwin.
As chancellor of the exchequer, Chamberlain had been involved in the fractious financial negotiations with the Duke of Windsor, which were still months away from resolution. Chamberlain had taken a hard line against the duke, so he was a receptive listener for George VI’s litany of complaints about his brother during their first audience on May 30.
At age sixty-eight, Chamberlain was only a year younger than his predecessor. The new prime minister’s biographer described him as “masterful, confident, ruled by an instinct for order…his mind, once made up, hard to change.” Although his demeanor could be severe and distant, Chamberlain went out of his way to establish a warm relationship with the forty-one-year-old king and his thirty-seven-year-old consort.
During his four days at Balmoral at the end of August, Neville Chamberlain had the customary audiences with George VI and joined the royal family for shooting, fishing, and al fresco lunches. After three days together, the King wrote to his mother at Sandringham, where she was spending much of the summer, that Chamberlain “is getting over his natural shyness, which makes me the same.”
Yet the pall of the Duke of Windsor persisted. “The world is in a very troubled state & there is plenty to worry about & D seems to loom ever larger on the horizon,” Bertie wrote to his mother on October 4. Despite their manifest popularity, the King and Queen seemed haunted by David’s charismatic force field.
“The solitude and its reflections began to make them timorous,” wrote the Earl of Crawford after his brother Sir Ronald Lindsay visited Balmoral in early October. “Previously it was the burden and responsibility of Court ceremonial which appeared to weigh them down—but in the freedom of Scotland it transpired that they felt a rival was always hovering in the background and planning an open appeal to publicity, to popularity.” In Crawford’s opinion, “their modesty” made them “misjudge their position.”
The King and Queen had good reason to feel apprehensive about the Windsors’ plans and intentions. In late September, the royal family was blindsided by the duke’s announcement—“a bombshell & a bad one, too,” said George VI—that he would shortly be visiting Germany. His purpose would be to show solidarity with laborers and study their living and working conditions, and he would later travel to the United States on a similar mission.
He was, of course, posturing, as the duke had neither the official position nor the means to carry out social welfare policies. Indeed, in his radio broadcast following his abdication, he had clearly said “I now quit altogether public affairs.” Yet there he was, proposing “private stunts for publicity purposes,” in the words of Alec Hardinge.
In his meetings with Lindsay, the King—backed up by Tommy Lascelles—spoke heatedly about the duke for “behaving abominably” and “trying to stage a comeback”—a highly unlikely event that reflected the King’s insecurity. Bertie was especially concerned that his brother would try to create his own following in America. The Queen lamented that David had changed and was no longer kind to his family. “She was backing up everything the men said,” Lindsay wrote, “but protesting against anything that seemed vindictive.”
Lindsay memorably concluded that George VI did not feel “safe” on the throne and was “like the medieval monarch who has a hated rival claimant living in exile.” Queen Mary complained to Elizabeth that David “only thinks of his and her point of view” and “not a bit of this Country & all of us—of course we know she is at the back of it.”
There was nothing George VI could do about the duke’s imminent trip to Germany, and the United States plans eventually fell apart. But the King and his government could curb any effort by David to visit Britain, which in late December they finally codified by tying his £25,000 yearly stipend to his enforced absence. Meanwhile, during their twelve days in Germany that October, the Windsors flouted protocol and shamelessly sought attention. Even worse, they revealed their Nazi sympathies amid growing evidence of Hitler’s authoritarianism, plans for further territorial expansion, and persecution of German Jews.
They followed an ambitious itinerary with visits to eight cities. They inspected factories, garden settlements, sports and leisure facilities, and Nazi headquarters in several locales, including Nuremberg. “Heil Edward!” and “Windsor! Windsor!” the crowds shouted. “Heil Hitler!” he replied, several times returning the stiff-armed Nazi salute. The Nazi leaders bowed to the duchess, and the ladies curtsied. To them, she was “Her Royal Highness.”
The couple met the Nazi high command, with whom the duke cheerfully conversed in German. Their friend Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain, wined and dined them. They took tea with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (who noted afterward that had Edward remained on the throne, “an alliance would have been possible…. What a shame”), visited the country house of Hermann Göring, creator of the Gestapo secret police, and had dinner with Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess at his home in Munich. The capstone at the end of their tour on October 22 was tea with the führer himself at his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden.
The German tour was widely criticized. The Windsors’ evident partiality for Hitler specifically and Nazism generally partly accounted for the cancellation of the visit to the United States. Most concerned of all was George VI, who read press accounts of his brother’s tour with growing alarm.
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The royal family had returned to London the day after David and Wallis arrived in Berlin. George VI and Elizabeth faced a full schedule of engagements, among them a tour of Yorkshire—the first by a reigning monarch—Armistice Day at the Cenotaph, and a state visit by King Leopold of the Belgians.
Lilibet and Margaret had a busy agenda as well, with their schooling once again assuming top priority after a long Scottish idyll. The education of the heiress presumptive had taken on greater significance after her father became king. Marion Crawford continued as the princesses’ main governess, with tutors brought in for supplementary instruction in French, German, music, and dancing.
The King relocated the schoolroom at Buckingham Palace from a gloomy space on the top floor to a light-filled room overlooking the gardens. Crawfie walked a delicate line between her eagerness, as she once wrote, to have “knowledge poured in as fast as I can pour it in” and her sensitivity to Queen Elizabeth’s wish that her daughters not be too burdened by academic routine. Helping the governess to find a proper course was Queen Mary, who became a sub-rosa ally in bolstering the girls’ curriculum.
Crawfie provided written progress reports and lesson plans to Queen Mary, and sometimes expressed frustration when Elizabeth pulled her daughters away for the “odd distractions like dentists, tailors and hair-dressers” that impinged on morning lessons. One letter in early November 1937, sent by way of Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting Lady Cynthia Colville, illustrated Crawfie’s intellectual discipline and educational philosophy.
The governess confessed to impatience when “sometimes…things are not made easy for me,” adding, “I have been more or less commanded to keep the afternoons as free of ‘serious’ work as possible.” She managed to subvert this edict by teaching the girls as they walked or played in the Palace garden. Queen Mary had objected that two and a half hours a week of history instruction seemed inadequate. Crawfie said that was all she was permitted until Christmas, when she planned to drop arithmetic to create more time.
“Princess Elizabeth should be absolutely ‘soaked’ in History and all the wide and wonderful avenues that such a subject opens up,” she wrote. Crawfie emphasized the importance of dates as well as the geography of the empire, noting that Lilibet possessed “a good visual memory.” She played educational games with the princesses, and they even devised “History chants.”
