George VI and Elizabeth, page 9
Ten days after the official armistice, at eleven a.m. on November 11, 1918, Bertie proudly represented his father with the Belgian royal family for a jubilant arrival in Brussels. A triumphant parade down the Champs-Élysées in Paris with George V and the Prince of Wales offered an even greater thrill. Prince Albert was deeply moved by the gratitude of the French to the British. The Prince of Wales had a more typically jaundiced view, complaining to Freda, “Gud [sic] how I loathe all the official work…. It’s rotten having to trot around with the King, really, such a waste of time.”
By George V’s command, Albert remained on the Continent with Greig. Bertie was appointed captain and attached to the Royal Air Force headquarters staff, in Spa, Belgium, where the brothers spent Christmas. Among those befriended by the prince was Alec Cunningham-Reid, a World War I flying ace who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. During long walks in the nearby hills, Bertie confided to Alec that to continue representing the RAF, he needed to “wear the wings” by actually learning to fly, although he was uncertain that he could “stand the strain.” Bertie drilled the veteran pilot with questions about “practical flying,” including casualty rates as well as do’s and don’ts. Alec admired Bertie’s “sheer determination and pluck.”
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Before Bertie could begin his instruction, the royal family was hit in mid-January 1919 by the death of his brother, Prince John, just thirteen years old. It was a sudden although not unexpected tragedy that dramatically illuminated the increasingly divergent characters of Bertie and David—one kind and compassionate, the other selfish and stony-hearted.
“Johnnie”—as everyone called him—was the youngest of the six royal children. At the age of four in 1909, he had been diagnosed with epilepsy. The seizures were intermittent and relatively mild at first. He often kept company with his brother, Prince George, just two years older, until his episodes intensified to several alarming attacks a day. Some seizures lasted as long as ten minutes: “very painful to see, as he struggles so much poor child,” George V reported to Queen Mary toward the end of 1912.
Queen Mary closely monitored Johnnie’s condition and entrusted his care to the royal family’s longtime nurse, Lalla Bill. Johnnie also failed to advance beyond the age of six in his mental development—severe learning disabilities that may have been a form of autism—which further relegated him to the periphery of royal life.
When Johnnie was eleven, the King and Queen moved him into his own home at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate. The five-bedroom cottage was set in a secluded location with views over the marshland. Decades later, it would become a weekend retreat for Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, and his home for several years after his retirement.
Johnnie lived as normal a life as possible, with Lalla as his devoted companion, along with a male orderly to help restrain his fits. He tended a garden plot, was driven to the Norfolk seaside, cared for his chickens, and played with local children. His mother and sister visited him periodically, but he received the most attention from his “Grannie,” Queen Alexandra, and his aunt Toria.
At the end of December 1918, George V and Queen Mary traveled to Norfolk for a month of house parties and shooting. Their entourage included twenty-one-year-old Princess Mary; Prince Henry, who at eighteen was finishing at Eton; and sixteen-year-old Prince George, in training for the navy at Dartmouth.
Saturday, January 18, 1919, was a “lovely day” on the Sandringham estate, Queen Mary noted in her diary. In the morning she took a walk with her sister-in-law, Queen Maud of Norway, while Princess Mary walked with Johnnie. Back at Wood Farm in the afternoon, Johnnie suffered an especially violent seizure. Lalla held his hand as he fell asleep, and he died shortly afterward. Moments after Lalla’s phone call, the King and Queen drove to Wood Farm, where they found Johnnie looking “very peaceful.”
“I feel rather stunned,” Queen Mary wrote to Bertie in Belgium. “Poor Mary and Georgie awfully upset. Their first real sorrow.” Bertie responded tenderly, “It must have been a great shock to you coming at a time like this. I can see from your letter that it has upset you very much. I don’t wonder either. When I received the telegram from Papa it upset me too, especially as I had not seen him since this time last year.”
The Prince of Wales also wrote to his mother, but with “chilling insensitivity,” in the words of his official biographer, Philip Ziegler. The specific contents of that letter remain unknown, but Edward made his feelings clear to Freda. He was upset—not by the loss of his brother, but by his father’s order that he and Bertie remain on duty rather than come home for the funeral or travel to Paris for fun, as Edward had originally planned. He called Johnnie’s death “the greatest relief imaginable…but to be plunged into mourning for this is the limit just as the war is over which cuts parties etc right out!!” Johnnie, he wrote, “had become more of an animal than anything else & was only a brother in the flesh & nothing else!!!”
Queen Mary declined to reply to David. A week later he apologized, calling himself a “cold-hearted and unsympathetic swine,” and weakly explaining “how little poor Johnnie meant to me who hardly knew him.” He professed to “feel so much for you, darling Mama, who was his mother.” She accepted his apology and said she and the King recognized his commonsense view that Johnnie had been released from his suffering.
Still, she was more anguished than she revealed to her callous eldest son. The funeral took place on Tuesday morning in St. Mary Magdalene Church at Sandringham followed by burial in the churchyard. She shared her sorrow with Bertie, knowing she could rely on his empathetic nature. The little church was “crammed with our own people, who love poor little Johnnie, who was so kind hearted, and polite to them all,” she wrote. In his reply, Bertie said, “It must have been very trying for you, but at the same time a great relief to know that all those present had known him all his life and had the same feelings as you.”
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Prince Albert and Louis Greig trained together for their pilot’s licenses. In July 1919, Bertie became the first—and for many years the only—member of the royal family to qualify as a pilot. His achievement came with a caveat, however: The RAF medical board judged him too high-strung to fly solo, a restriction that embarrassed the twenty-three-year-old prince.
It had been a tradition since Edward VII for royal princes to receive a smattering of university education. The Prince of Wales had endured Oxford until World War I gave him an excuse to bolt. For Prince Albert and his brother Prince Henry, George V devised a postwar stint at Trinity College, Cambridge. Classes began in early October 1919 and wrapped up in July the following year.
As Bertie’s equerry, Greig attended lectures with the two brothers and reported back to the King. Bertie’s stutter frequently plagued him, and he enlisted an Italian speech therapist, with uneven results. He did manage on several occasions to minimize his hesitations by speaking off the cuff rather than from prepared remarks. Nevertheless, any public forum overwhelmed him with anxiety.
He diligently applied himself to his courses in economics, civics, and history, with particular emphasis on Walter Bagehot’s book on the English constitution. But these studies were often interrupted by an increasing number of royal engagements around Britain.
Among Albert’s new public duties, one enterprise stood above all others and proved essential training for his future role as monarch. The Boys’ Welfare Association was founded in July 1918 by the Reverend Robert Hyde, an idealistic and energetic clergyman from London’s East End. At a time of growing labor unrest, Hyde’s aim was to improve working conditions in factories by enlisting industry leaders to provide resources such as healthcare facilities and canteens.
When Hyde sought a royal patron to raise the profile of the organization, George V recommended Bertie. The prince instantly recognized the opportunity to have a meaningful royal role—especially with the Prince of Wales being dispatched by Prime Minister Lloyd George on a series of tours around the empire to reinforce ties with Britain. “I’ll do it,” Bertie said, “provided that there’s no damned red carpet about it.”
He signed on as president of the association in March 1919 and presided over the first annual meeting in London two months later. To broaden its scope beyond “boys,” the association renamed itself the Industrial Welfare Society (IWS). Prince Albert told the participants their work to promote “good will between all classes in industry” was “essential to the prosperity of the nation.” In the months before he went to Cambridge, and for many years afterward, Bertie visited hundreds of factories and mines throughout Britain. He became known in the press as “the Industrial Prince,” which pleased him. Bertie’s brothers jokingly called him “the Foreman,” but they failed to dent his earnestness.
Determined to learn at ground level, he literally got his hands dirty time and again—deep inside coal mines, climbing scaffolding at construction sites—as he vastly increased his knowledge of Britain’s industrial life. His tours were often unannounced and invariably informal. Remarked one business manager after a visit from Prince Albert, “I never met one who asked more sensible questions or showed greater understanding of our fundamental problems. He does like getting to the bottom of things.”
Louis Greig traveled with the prince as his equerry and mentor. His encouragement and sound guidance were vital in shaping the character of the second in line to the throne. But in Bertie’s private life, Greig was no match for David’s magnetic appeal. Bertie first kicked over the traces with his elder brother in the spring of 1919 when he became involved with Freda Dudley Ward’s best friend, a beautiful Australian named Sheila Loughborough.
Freda, an Anglo-American unhappily married to well-connected aristocrat William Dudley Ward, was pretty and petite. The Prince of Wales had been besotted with her since their chance meeting early in 1918 during a London bombing raid. Shortly afterward, Freda had befriended Sheila, a kindred spirit locked in an equally bleak marriage.
Sheila had a classic oval face, sultry dark eyes, a delicate nose, a cupid’s bow mouth, and wavy auburn hair. Serge Obolensky, an émigré Russian prince who had his own affair with Sheila, once observed, “Her entire appearance was languorous. Her every gesture was dreamlike.”
Born Sheila Chisholm in 1895, she had spent her childhood in rural Australia where her father bred racehorses. She learned to ride and to hold her own among the rough ranch hands, even as she lived graciously in her parents’ well-appointed homestead with a staff of five. She was educated by a series of governesses and finished at the Anglican Kambala school for girls in Sydney, where her family moved when she was seventeen.
Two years later, in 1914, she and her mother left on an ocean liner for an extended European tour, but after the declaration of war, they sailed to Cairo to be near Sheila’s brother Jack, who had joined the Australian Expeditionary Forces. It was there, after the Battle of Gallipoli, that she fell in love with a wounded English aristocrat, twenty-three-year-old Francis St. Clair-Erskine, the heir to the Earl of Rosslyn. He was titled Lord Loughborough—nicknamed “Loughie”—and he had a reputation as a compulsive gambler and alcoholic. But he pursued her ardently, and they were married in December 1915.
On arriving in England the following April, Lady Loughborough made a splash in aristocratic circles. But Loughie’s reckless behavior made her miserable, even after the birth of two sons whom she adored. She had nannies to care for her boys, which allowed her to get out and about with complete freedom while Loughie indulged his gambling and drinking with friends. When the Prince of Wales introduced Sheila to his shy and gentle younger brother in May 1919, she was ready for a romance, and so was Bertie.
He had never known anyone as exotic and worldly as Sheila. They were both twenty-three when they began going out together, and they made a handsome pair. Freda abetted the affair by letting Bertie and Sheila use her house on Great Cumberland Place for assignations in London. In mid-May, Edward confided to Freda that Albert had left the Palace for Lankhills, the Loughboroughs’ house near Winchester. “I don’t expect to see him tonight!!!!”
Despite the high profile of the princes, the two couples blended into London’s elite social scene—dancing at the balls, joining the glamorous crowds at the theater, in restaurants and nightclubs such as the Embassy on Old Bond Street in Mayfair. They named themselves “The 4 Do’s.” David was “Do No. 1” and Bertie was “Do No. 2.” “What marvellous fun we 4 do have, don’t we angel & f___ the rest of the world,” David wrote to Freda.
It wasn’t until April 1920 that King George V and Queen Mary fully realized the extent of their second son’s involvement with a married mother of two children. By then Prince Edward was on an extended empire goodwill tour, spending six months in Australia and New Zealand from March until October. He only belatedly learned from his brother that their father had confronted Bertie about Sheila on April 7. As Bertie recounted to David the next day, “He is going to make me Duke of York on his birthday provided that he hears nothing more about Sheila & me!!!!”
After reading Albert’s message in mid-May, Edward furiously wrote to Freda: “Christ! How I loathe & despise my bloody family as Bertie has written me 3 long sad letters in which he tells me he has been getting it in the neck about his friendship with poor little Sheilie & that TOI et MOI came in for it too!!” Three days later, Edward continued, “If he really loved Sheilie he wouldn’t care a d___ about dukes or anything else.”
Prince Albert did indeed care a great deal about being honored with what his father called the “fine old title” that he had himself borne “for more than 9 years & is the oldest Dukedom in this country.” According to Sheila’s biographer, Robert Wainwright, father and son had their final showdown over Sheila at Buckingham Palace on June 2, the eve of the King’s fifty-fifth birthday. In a note written four days later, Bertie pledged, “I can tell you I fulfilled your conditions to the letter and nothing more will come of it.”
George V’s reply on June 7 underlined the gravity of what he had demanded of Bertie: “I know that you have behaved very well, in a difficult situation for a young man & that you have done what I asked you to do,” he wrote. “I feel that this splendid old title will be safe in your hands & that you will never do anything which could in any way tarnish it.” In accepting the dukedom, Bertie wrote, “I am very proud to bear the name that you did for many years, and I hope that I shall live up to it in every way.”
How serious was Bertie about his dangerous liaison? In his letters to Freda, David dismissed his brother’s feelings for Sheila as a poor imitation of his own ardor. But Robert Wainwright discovered that after World War II, a diplomat named Sir Charles Hepburn Johnston took Sheila to dine with George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. Johnston wrote in his diary that George VI and Sheila got to reminiscing about “what fun they all had” after World War I. Added Johnston, “Sheila saw the Q listening and thought it prudent to damp this a bit. She said ‘And when you think, Sir, how innocent it all was.’ K (red with fury): ‘Innocent? I don’t know what the devil you mean.’ ”
As the Sheila affair ended, so did David’s influence. Greig was ascendant, having been named comptroller of the Duke of York’s household. His next move arguably changed history when he recruited a handsome twenty-three-year-old Scotsman who had fought across France and Belgium and earned the Military Cross for bravery after the battle of the Somme.
Bertie and Greig met Captain James Stuart when they were in Brussels at the end of the war. Greig was impressed by his dash and his intelligence. Stuart went on to study law in Edinburgh, and on June 1, 1920, he joined the ranks of Buckingham Palace courtiers as equerry to none other than Bertie, his future rival for Elizabeth’s hand.
James Stuart astutely sized up Prince Albert, admitting “he was not an easy man to know or to handle.” He observed that Louis Greig was Bertie’s only close friend. James noted that Bertie’s temper, while intense, “did not last” and was usually the product of frustration. “He was never a strong man physically, and this doubtless affected his outlook on life,” James recalled. He felt “desperately sorry” about Bertie’s stammer, which he ascribed to a “nervous affliction, born of shyness.”
While Bertie and James were superficially amicable, their differing temperaments caused unease that Greig could not have anticipated. Nor did Greig know the most important fact of all: that Stuart had often stayed at Glamis for house parties and had been romantically involved with Elizabeth since September 1919. In only a matter of weeks after James’s arrival at Buckingham Palace, that relationship would open one door for Bertie and, eighteen months later—with the likely connivance of the Queen—shut another for his equerry.
“The biographer David Cecil recognized ‘great sweetness and sense of fun, and a certain roguish quality.’ ”
Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon as a teenager.
SEVEN
Radiant Vitality
While Bertie had marked the armistice on November 11, 1918, with the RAF in France, Elizabeth had observed the milestone quietly at Glamis. The convalescents “went straight to the village to celebrate and I think they drank too much,” she recalled. “Seats got broken up to make a bonfire and all that sort of thing. I can see them now, all going to enjoy this wonderful moment.”
When Elizabeth was just fourteen, her mother had remarked that she was “very old for her age”—likely a result of her upbringing with considerably older siblings. Four years later, having witnessed great suffering and having cared for physically and mentally broken men, Elizabeth had deepened her empathy and broadened her scope.
