George VI and Elizabeth, page 36
Elizabeth occupied herself with fittings and other arrangements while Bertie carried out solo duties, including debutante courts at the Palace on July 5 and 6. On Saturday the ninth at Royal Lodge, George VI suddenly succumbed to what his doctors called “gastric influenza.” He was running a fever and immediately went to bed, where he remained for six days. When Queen Mary offered to visit early in the week, Elizabeth suggested she wait “in case of infection. It is very catching, I believe, & he would like to be out of his room before seeing anybody.” Every measure had to be taken to ensure the King and Queen could travel to France as planned.
The King canceled all his engagements, and Elizabeth felt duty bound to substitute at one of them, the presentation party at the Palace on July 12. She “decided to set aside her own wishes in order not to disappoint the guests,” wrote The Times. At ten p.m., she arrived at the state room in a gown of black velvet trimmed with lace and seed pearls, a diamond tiara, diamond necklace, and diamond bracelet. It could not have been easy for her, scarcely three weeks after losing her mother, to smile graciously before twelve hundred guests and receive the curtseying debutantes. Her performance showed her inner strength as well as what her childhood friend David Cecil called her “astonishing self-control.”
Having made a full recovery, the King was able to join the Queen at the Buckingham Palace garden party for ten thousand guests on the eve of their journey. Bertie and Elizabeth put on their happiest expressions, accompanied by Lilibet and Margaret, wearing matching silver-gray crepe de chine dresses. The princesses “have learned to face the gaze of hundreds of eyes without seeming to notice they are the centre of interest,” commented The Manchester Guardian.
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Over four days in France, George VI and Elizabeth followed the routines they had carried out repeatedly for fifteen years. In the City of Light, surrounded by Gallic extravaganza, they moved from one elaborately decorated venue to another in a spectacular progress. The French had spent eight million francs (the equivalent of some $230,000, which would be nearly $4 million at today’s values) to create opulent apartments for the royal couple at the Quai d’Orsay, the headquarters of the French Foreign Ministry, with artwork brought from the Louvre, Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Chantilly.
The royal couple attended a gala performance at the opera and were feted at one banquet after another. At the state dinner in the Élysée Palace hosted by President Lebrun and his wife, Marguerite, the Queen dazzled in her crown sparkling with the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The King “spoke well and clearly in French with practically no hesitation,” reported diplomat Oliver Harvey.
George VI and Elizabeth traveled on the Seine in a white “royal barge” to the Hôtel de Ville, where the King again spoke in French. “Our entente has lost nothing of its strength or of its vitality,” he said—a theme he sounded, along with a commitment to peace, in all his remarks. In the Bois de Boulogne they were entertained at a “Bagatelle garden party” by ballet dancers on rafts moored in a lake. The Queen’s white wardrobe—especially her floor-length full-skirted gowns of satin, organdy, tulle, and crepe—bowled over the French, who set the highest bar for fashion excellence.
The pièce de résistance came on the final day in Versailles. At the château where the treaty ending the First World War was signed, the King reviewed fifty thousand troops—a display of France’s “modern military might” that would prove illusory two years later against a German onslaught. The midday formal luncheon in the Hall of Mirrors extravagantly re-created the seventeenth-century milieu of the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King.
George VI and Elizabeth and 280 guests were served by 125 footmen in white powdered wigs and coats of royal blue. They watched a performance by the Comédie-Française, also in period costume—“one of the most elaborate pageants ever devised for royalty in modern times.” Lady Diana Cooper marveled at the “thirteen glasses apiece for thirteen precious wines, all bottled on the birthdays of the presidents and kings.”
That night, after a banquet at the Quai d’Orsay, the British King and Queen appeared on a floodlit balcony, smiling and waving to tens of thousands of Parisians mobbing the streets below. Lady Diana Cooper stood among the throng and later observed, “To the French the Royal Visit seemed to safeguard against the dreaded war. That at least is what they told me but I could see nothing to allay fears.”
George VI and Elizabeth received an ecstatic welcome when they returned to London. The crowds were so thick on the route from Victoria station to the Palace that they engulfed the royal car several times. Out on the balcony for five minutes of sustained cheering, the Queen blew kisses, and the couple stood still for the singing of “God Save the King.” The trip was “a great personal triumph for the King and Queen,” wrote The Illustrated London News. They had emphatically reinforced Britain’s strong ties with France in a manner that “should make the dictators think,” Oliver Harvey wrote. He ascribed Bertie and Elizabeth’s impact to “their simplicity and dignity.”
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The royal family settled into Balmoral in early August for ten weeks. Their only planned public engagement was in late September, when the King and Queen were scheduled to launch the new ocean liner Queen Elizabeth. It turned out that they had just three carefree weeks in the Highlands until the arrival of Neville Chamberlain on August 31 for the annual four-day prime minister’s visit.
In their private audiences, George VI and Chamberlain discussed the grim news from the Continent: German troops were massing at the Czech border, and an invasion to secure Sudetenland and “return” its three million German citizens (nearly a quarter of the Czech population) to the “Motherland” seemed imminent. At the heart of the emerging crisis was France’s pledge to support its Czech ally and whether Britain would be obliged to do the same, sparking another European war.
Capitulating to Hitler’s demands would mean tearing apart the democratic Czechoslovakian Republic and consigning a swath of its territory to authoritarian Nazi rule. The führer gave a venomous speech at Nuremberg on September 12, insulting the Czech prime minister and provoking Sudeten Germans to revolt. Queen Mary wrote to Bertie that she had listened to the speech on the radio and was “horrified at his voice & shouting & what he said, so theatrical & awful.” But she added, reflecting the King’s own view, “God grant we may not have war…the Czechs are not worth fighting for.”
George VI headed for London in mid-September, eager to be close at hand for a major foreign policy emergency. When the King arrived at Buckingham Palace on the fifteenth, Chamberlain had already departed on the first airplane flight of his life, a mission to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden.
Over the following fourteen days, Chamberlain made two further flights to Germany in his effort to preserve peace. Hitler outmaneuvered him each time. During their initial encounter, Chamberlain gave in to Hitler’s demand that the Sudeten Germans could leave if a majority of them supported the change in a referendum. At the second meeting, Hitler reneged on his earlier terms and insisted that German troops occupy Sudetenland before a plebiscite.
It was clear that Germany planned to deploy its military might, and Chamberlain could only agree to Hitler’s postponement of his move across the border until October 1. Jittery about its alliance with Czechoslovakia, France joined Britain to urge the Czechs to surrender Sudetenland or risk a European conflagration. Chamberlain stressed this point in a memorable speech on September 27, when he declared that Britain should not go to war “because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Chamberlain’s third meeting, a conference convened by Hitler in Munich, resulted in an agreement signed by Britain, France, Germany, and Italy on September 30, 1938. It ratified the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain took Hitler’s word that he had no further territorial ambitions in Czechoslovakia or elsewhere. The führer mollified the prime minister with an Anglo-German agreement confirming friendship and “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again.” With that, the German army rolled into Czechoslovakia on October 1 and seized the Sudetenland.
George VI remained in London throughout the crisis, alternating between bouts of anxiety and efforts to use his influence to help avoid conflict. Three times he offered to send personal messages to Hitler, and each time Chamberlain deflected him. Bertie shared his distress with Tommy Lascelles, at one point confiding, “Everything is in a maze.” In meetings with and letters to the prime minister, the King praised his courage and exhorted him to pursue appeasement.
Bertie had the wholehearted support of his wife. In a preview of how closely he would keep Elizabeth’s counsel during World War II, he sent papers to Scotland for her to read. “You will see I have marked the different papers with notes, as it is easier,” he wrote to “my own darling Angel” on September 19. “The Cabinet Minutes of Saturday are very interesting & gives [sic] the P.M.’s impressions of Hitler.” He cautioned her to avoid traveling to London “as it might make people feel nervous. We will keep you well informed as to the daily progress of the situation.” He admitted, “My brain is getting addled & I have told Alec to send you a précis as well. They won’t tally probably!”
On September 21, Elizabeth finally took the train to London to support her husband. Three days later she told her sister May that Bertie “has had such a terribly anxious and worrying time, & still has now.”
The Queen found a city immersed in frenetic preparations for the war that seemed likely. Basements were converted into air raid shelters, and Londoners registered to receive gas masks in case Germany waged chemical warfare. The government mobilized the Royal Navy and called up the Auxiliary Air Force. Antiaircraft guns appeared in Horse Guards Parade and on Westminster Bridge. In Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, workers dug “slit trenches” to serve as shelters from bombs. Hospitals were cleared for potential casualties, and schoolchildren were evacuated to the countryside.
Elizabeth performed her greatest service on September 27—the peak of international tension—when she traveled to Glasgow to deliver her husband’s speech before she launched the Queen Elizabeth liner meant to travel between Britain and the United States. The new ship was the largest afloat, and “the greatest engineering feat of the century.” At the King’s request, the speech had been written by Lord Tweedsmuir in consultation with Alec Hardinge.
The gravity of the hour required Elizabeth to begin her remarks with a special message from the King. Speaking not only to the quarter million spectators at the launch but also millions of BBC listeners across the nation, her voice “rang out clearly” as her daughters watched from the dais.
The Queen said that the King “bids the people of this country to be of good cheer, in spite of the dark clouds hanging over them, and indeed, over the whole world. He knows well that, as ever before in critical times, they will keep cool heads and brave hearts; he knows, too, that they will place entire confidence in their leaders, who, under God’s providence, are striving their utmost to find a just and peaceful solution of the grave problems which confront them.”
Elizabeth paid tribute to the “fabric of friendship and understanding between the people of Britain and the people of the United States.” It was “altogether fitting,” she said, that “the noblest vessel ever built in Britain…should be dedicated to this service.” Back in London, George VI “listened to every word,” he told her sister May. “I was so proud of Elizabeth taking on that ordeal of broadcasting the speech at a moment’s notice…. I knew how well she would do it.”
Three days later, the Queen was back in London when Neville Chamberlain returned in triumph from Munich, clasping the Anglo-German friendship agreement. Amid a wildly cheering throng at the airport, he read the joint declaration aloud and described it as “a prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.” Later that day, he called the Munich achievement nothing less than “peace with honour” and “peace for our time.”
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At the King’s invitation, the prime minister drove straight to Buckingham Palace where his wife waited with George VI and Elizabeth in the monarch’s private apartments. The crowds outside chanted, “We want Neville,” and soon the royal couple appeared on the illuminated balcony with the Chamberlains. They stood together for four minutes—the men in morning dress, the women in unadorned coats—until George VI motioned his prime minister to move forward. With evident pride, Neville Chamberlain acknowledged the enthusiastic ovation.
George VI issued a message praising the “magnificent efforts of the Prime Minister in the name of peace” and expressing his “fervent hope” that “a new era of friendship and prosperity will be dawning among the peoples of the world.” To his mother, he described the “great day…. I am so relieved that the crisis is over.”
Before the royal couple left for Balmoral on the evening of Sunday, October 2, Elizabeth told her mother-in-law how relieved she was to return to Royal Deeside. “I am sure that it will do Bertie good,” she wrote. “He has been marvellously calm all these ghastly days & so courageous. It has helped him, I feel, to have complete trust in Mr. Chamberlain.”
The balcony appearance was at odds with the monarch’s proper role. George VI appeared to be endorsing a political position when he was expected to be above politics. Many politicians and other figures took exception to the Munich Agreement for its inherent weakness, its betrayal of the Czechs, and its mistaken assumption that Hitler could be trusted. Parliament approved it, but there was strong debate, not only with the Labour opposition but within the Conservative Party as well. Thirty Tories abstained, although none voted against the government. Duff Cooper resigned his cabinet position as First Lord of the Admiralty in protest.
Queen Mary expressed the royal family’s general opinion when she wrote to Elizabeth, “You & Bertie must be as angry as I am at the criticism there is now about the P.M.’s meeting at Munich. It really is a shame after all his hard work.” She wished “people wld only back him up.”
Many years later, in a rare interview with historian D. R. Thorpe, Elizabeth admitted that “the balcony appearance was a constitutional error,” according to William Shawcross. Still, she believed it was a “venial” mistake “because the British people were so relieved by Chamberlain’s agreement.” And she insisted, along with many other Chamberlain supporters, that the agreement gave Britain “one year to re-arm and build a few aeroplanes.” This was actually an illusion. Although Britain would accelerate its rearmament in the following year, Germany did so at an even faster pace. In September 1939, Britain’s military posture was relatively weaker than it had been at the time of Munich.
“Many of them felt that her bow was really for them personally.”
King George VI with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Queen Elizabeth with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on their arrival in Washington, D.C., on June 8, 1939.
TWENTY-SIX
Transatlantic Triumph
When the King opened Parliament for the second time in November 1938, the reason for the Queen’s effusive remarks in Glasgow about Anglo-American friendship became clear. He announced that in addition to taking their first trip to Canada in May 1939, he and Elizabeth had accepted President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s invitation to visit the United States. It would be a “practical expression of the good feeling that prevails between our countries,” he said.
Roosevelt had set a cozy tone in September 1938 by initiating a direct correspondence with “My Dear King George,” the first such exchange between a British monarch and an American president. The purpose of a trip to America was undeniably political; Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that her husband wanted it because he believed “that we all might soon be engaged in a life and death struggle, in which Great Britain would be our first line of defense,” and “he hoped that the visit would create a bond of friendship between the people of the two countries.”
But FDR had a personal motivation as well. The crucial element for him was a stay at the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York. “As I said to [George VI], the American people admire the essential democracy of the King and Queen,” the president wrote to Canada’s governor-general, Lord Tweedsmuir, that November. “It would help if the formal ‘functions’ could be supplemented by a peaceful and simple visit to a peaceful and simple American country home.”
The need for British preparedness for war came into disturbing focus in March 1939 when Hitler dramatically broke the terms of the Munich Agreement. On Wednesday the fifteenth, his troops invaded Czechoslovakia and seized the territory that remained. That evening in Prague, he announced that “Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist.” Appeasement was in tatters.
A shaken Chamberlain broadcast a speech from Birmingham calling Hitler an untrustworthy liar and voicing Britain’s new policy for Germany: “The liberty that we have enjoyed for hundreds of years…we would never surrender.” He promised to resist any further aggression by Germany. George VI sent him a letter commiserating over the prime minister’s “deep distress,” adding, “I am sure that your labours have been anything but wasted.”
Only days later, Hitler began making menacing noises about Polish territory that he insisted belonged to the Reich. On March 31, Chamberlain drew his line in the sand, announcing in the House of Commons that Britain and France had given guarantees to Poland that they would declare war if Germany attacked. In the following weeks the British government extended that protection to Greece, Romania, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Soon afterward came Britain’s first compulsory military service in peacetime. Germany countered by signing an alliance with Italy, which had already invaded neighboring Albania.
