Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  Before the coffin was lowered through the floor to the Royal vaults below, King Edward tossed a handful of earth onto it. “We left him [King George] sadly,” the Queen wrote in her diary, “lying for the present with his ancestors in the vaults.”

  The harrowing, exhausting week finally ended in Queen Mary’s return to London. The next day, Dr. Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, went to Buckingham Palace to speak with her and found her already preparing to move back to Marlborough House. “I had a long talk with her,” he wrote, “her [the Queen’s] fortitude still unbroken ... I was told afterwards that the sons ... were painfully upset—I suppose they had seldom if ever seen death—and that it was the Queen, still marvellously self-controlled, who supported and strengthened them.”

  The King transferred his office to Buckingham Palace, occupying on the ground floor a small waiting room, decorated and furnished in oriental style and looking out on the courtyard. For the first time in over twenty years, Queen Mary was resident in a home to which her son came daily, motoring from nearby St. James’s (though he would have much preferred to have walked) in King George’s immense and sombre Daimler.

  “How glad I am to be a Queen Mother and not only a Queen Dowager,” Queen Mary said to Lady Airlie. She then explained to her old friend that at the time of King Edward VII’s accession, the two positions had been investigated, and it had been established that a Queen Mother had certain rights, whereas a Queen Dowager had no particular privileges except those voluntarily accorded to her by the reigning Sovereign. The distinction was an important one to Queen Mary, for her status had been clearly defined.

  Footnotes

  *Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox (1864–1945), born Hon Blanche Maynard. She and her husband were good friends of King George V and often at Sandringham.

  *The day after New Year’s, the Prince of Wales was said to have presented Mrs. Simpson with another £50,000 gift of jewellry of matched sapphires.

  *The Privy Councillors present were: the Lord President, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald; the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang; the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham; the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon; the King’s doctors, Lord Dawson and Lord Wigram; with Sir Maurice Hankey as Clerk to the Council.

  *Princess Louise had died in 1931, at which time King George’s only daughter, Princess Mary, had been named Princess Royal.

  *Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–). Author and wife of Charles Lindbergh. Her first book, North to the Orient (1935), an account of a flight she had made with her husband, had just been published.

  *When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, he was heir-apparent to his elder childless brother, Ernest II, reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. As Prince Albert predeceased Ernest II in 1861, Albert’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), became heir-apparent to the dukedom. When Prince Ernest II died in 1893, the Prince of Wales waived his right to succession to the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in favour of his younger brother, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who reigned until 1900. Alfred had no surviving heirs. Queen Victoria was responsible for the decision that the next in line, her third son, Duke of Connaught (who was her favourite), should not leave England, nor should his young son, Prince Arthur. The next in succession was Prince Charles, son of Queen Victoria’s deceased son, Prince Leopold, and brother of Princess Alice (married to Princess May’s brother, Prince Alexander, later Lord Athlone).

  †Foreign royalties in the procession were King Haakon of Norway; Crown Prince Olav of Norway; Leopold III, King of the Belgians; Boris III, King of Bulgaria; Prince of Piedmont; Paul, Prince Regent of Yugoslavia; Gustav, Crown Prince of Sweden; Paul, Crown Prince of Greece; Prince Zeid; Prince Farouk of Egypt; Prince Felix of Luxembourg; Grand Duke of Hesse; Charles, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; Prince Axel of Denmark; Prince Nicholas of Greece; Prince George of Greece; Duke de Nemours; the Count of Flanders; Prince Frederick of Prussia; Prince Ernest August of Brunswick; Prince Alvaro of Orleans-Bourbon; the Infante of Spain; the Duke of Braganza; Prince Salik of Albania; and the Grand Duke Dimitri of Russia. Eight of these men had been deposed.

  P A R T F O U R

  MAMA—MATRIARCH AND QUEEN MOTHER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  One afternoon in February 1935, Queen Mary suddenly interrupted Lady Airlie while she was reading aloud. “Your sons are about the age of mine, Mabell, and you have had to bring them up without a father. Tell me, have they ever disappointed you?”

  Lady Airlie, sensing the direction of this conversation and hoping to avoid any unpleasantness, commented lightly that most children disappointed their parents at some time or other.

  “Yes,” the Queen replied, “one can apply that to individuals, but not to a Sovereign. He is not responsible to himself alone.” She picked up her embroidery and stitched in silence for a moment. Then she added, “I have not liked to talk to David about this affair with Mrs. Simpson, in the first place because I don’t want to give the impression of interfering in his private life, and also because he is the most obstinate of all my sons. To oppose him over doing anything is only to make him more determined to do it. At present he is utterly infatuated. But my great hope is that violent infatuations usually wear off.”

  She was thoughtful for a long time. The conversation went on to other matters but quickly returned to the subject of Wallis Simpson. “He gives Mrs. Simpson the most beautiful jewels.” Her eyes clouded. “I am so afraid that he may ask me to receive her and I have promised King George I shall never do so....”

  Not long after this, Queen Mary asked her old friend, “Has there been a great deal of gossip, Mabell—I mean here in London?” Lady Airlie replied truthfully that there had been. A few moments later, the Queen said passionately, “... it’s too late. He’s very, very much in love with her. Poor boy!”

  In the first months after the King’s death, Queen Mary concentrated on the task of sorting out all his letters and possessions, and then on preparations for her own move to Marlborough House. “It was a terrible wrench to her to leave Buckingham Palace with all its associations,” Lady Airlie commented, “but as always her own feelings were sublimated in her sense of duty. The King who had been her husband was dead but the Sovereign lived; the Palace which had been her home for over a quarter of a century now belonged to him. She deliberately filled her disciplined mind with trivial things—with the packing of her objets d’art, and the redecorating of the rooms at Marlborough House—to shut out her loneliness and her anxiety.”

  “I took leave of my lovely rooms with a sad heart,” Queen Mary confessed on July 30, when she left Buckingham Palace forever, to spend the summer at Sandringham before making the move into Marlborough House, which was being redecorated. “David kindly came to see me off ... I am so glad to be here but miss my G. too dreadfully, his rooms look so empty & deserted ...” To the King she wrote, “I fear I was very quiet today when you came to see me but I feel sure you realised that I felt very sad at leaving those lovely comfortable rooms which have been my happy Home for 25 years & that I was terribly afraid of breaking down—It was dear of you to come & see me off & I thank you with all my heart ...”

  Queen Mary was enduring a wrenching change in her life. She was a widow, and all her children had left home and had fulfilling and demanding lives of their own. Unlike Queen Alexandra, she had not been possessive of any of her offspring. The result was that she was left very much on her own, even further removed from her family than she had been during her husband’s lifetime. King George had been a magnetic force in the lives of his family, drawing all those close to him by monarchial awe and paternal respect, and Queen Mary had shared with him the polarising results. The power had now shifted and been split. David was King and earned his family’s wholehearted support, but he did not hold them together as a unit.

  For over twenty-five years, Queen Mary had played the role of the Sovereign’s closest devoted subject. Because of King George’s great respect for her intelligence and ability, this had never squashed her independent s
pirit. Not being of a maternal or a frivolous nature, her days had always been filled with the gathering of new information. Mindless chatter echoed chillingly in her presence. She had little in common with any of her daughters-in-law, and perhaps even less with her own daughter. Marina was the brightest of the lot, but she was a bit too socially oriented for her mother-in-law’s taste. Elizabeth—the most attentive and kind—lacked any spark of original thinking, and Alice remained timidly withdrawn. Queen Mary and her daughter had never had a great rapport, and widowhood did not alter this situation. Nor did having grandchildren warm her undemonstrative temperament.

  She thought very little of her daughter-in-law Elizabeth’s intellectual or artistic capacities and took on a programme of educational visits with her two young granddaughters (Lilibet, then ten, and Margaret Rose, seven) to various museums and exhibitions about London. These excursions were seldom organised by mutual consent and were usually undertaken on extremely short notice, most often to fill in a gap in Queen Mary’s day. With one girl grasped firmly by each hand, she would troop through the British Museum or the Wallace Collection acting as guide, reeling off a prodigious list of names, dates, and historic references, infallibly correct. Lilibet could manage only to “keep walking with every expression of great interest on her face when her feet were hurting her and it was getting towards tea-time.” But little Margaret Rose proved an eager listener. And whereas Lilibet had been her grandfather’s favourite, Queen Mary’s was the younger sister, who was quicker as well as more eager to learn.

  Bertie’s wife did not take education for women too seriously. Privately educated herself, the Duchess of York believed there were other attainments “just as important as academic excellence. To spend as long as possible in the open air, to enjoy to the full the pleasures of the country, to be able to dance and draw and appreciate music, to acquire good manners and perfect deportment, and to cultivate all the distinctively feminine graces.” Her mother’s priorities made a great impression on Lilibet, who had been unable to progress beyond the basic principles of mathematics and who confided to her governess, Marian Crawford, that when she grew up she wanted only to be “a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs.”

  Horses and dogs, indeed! Queen Mary cared little for either. She and Lilibet did share a kind of personal strength that made each the dominating personality in her family, Queen Mary with her sons and daughter, and Lilibet with her parents and sister.

  Members of Queen Mary’s Household were careful to avoid using the term “the Queen Mother.” Publicly, she was thought of as the shrewd matriarch of the Royal Family. As the first months of Edward VIII’s reign passed and his family’s angst became a national crisis, many people wished a widowed Queen Consort might inherit her husband’s monarchial powers. For by the summer of 1936, her mourning abandoned, Queen Mary was quite the most inspiring Royal figure in the Monarchy.

  What had been common gossip in the United States within a few months of King Edward’s reign had hardly been guessed at by the British people. The King was besotted by Mrs. Simpson, and his open flaunting of his feelings was at the very least an indication that his passion now controlled his reason. Queen Mary had only to look at the photographs of the King and Mrs. Simpson taken on the cruise of the Nahlin in July and August 1936 to recognise the truth—and she was no fool. American and French photographers and journalists had followed the yacht en masse from port to port, and their newspapers had carried daily front-page banner stories that revealed a bare-chested King Edward staring moon-eyed at his smugly smiling American mistress.

  Queen Mary was informed of the day-to-day developments in her son’s affair by friends and relations abroad who enclosed press cuttings in their letters. As always in her life, Queen Mary refused to succumb to gossip, although occasionally she displayed displeasure to Lady Airlie at the King’s lack of discretion. His mother, members of the Cabinet, and those few with contacts abroad knew of the King’s romantic activities, but his subjects did not, for there was a voluntary suppression of all news about the King and his affair in the British press. Mrs. Simpson’s name—always coupled with her husband’s—had appeared only a few times in the Court Circular. And only group pictures had been printed in which she was to be seen—true, most often beside the King, but never in a pose that revealed personal attachment.

  Originally, the cruise of the Nahlin had been planned by the King as a holiday. The Foreign Office, perhaps fearing what was the eventuality anyway—international press coverage of the King’s companion and their affair—attempted to distract the public by turning the vacation into a diplomatic tour. Thus, the King met with Prime Minister Metaxas in Athens; Cabinet ministers in Istanbul; King Boris in Bulgaria; the Prince Regent, Prince Paul in Yugoslavia; and in Vienna called upon President Nicklas and received the Chancellor, Dr. Schuschnigg, in a half-hour audience at the British Legation. These meetings were duly reported in the world press, but the photographs that were given front-page attention were intimate ones of the King and Wallis Simpson bathing in the sea or sitting close together in a small boat, “her hand on his arm, and he looking down at her.” Every line of his face and body told “... of his unalterable devotion.” These last were the clippings received by Queen Mary.

  Within one hour of the King’s return to London on September 14, he dined privately with his mother at Buckingham Palace. He was well tanned and had gained a few much-needed pounds. As he greeted Queen Mary in his study, he appeared more nervous than usual and lacking his former boyishness. To his irritation, she curtsied slightly in greeting, and when she straightened and glanced down—for with the shoes she wore, she was several inches taller than her son—he claimed that he “wondered how much she knew about the stories appearing in the American press.”

  Her conversation told him nothing.

  “Did you enjoy the cruise?” she asked.

  He assured her that he had had a wonderful time.

  “Didn’t you find it terribly warm in the Adriatic?” she inquired.

  The King flushed. Conversation was difficult. His mother’s superficial questions reminded him of similar confrontations when he had returned home from school bursting with emotions to share, fears to have explained away, experiences to relate. He did not understand then or at this time why she could not treat him in a maternal or at least familial fashion, even though he had been the Heir-Apparent and was now the King. Georgie was the only member of the family with whom he really had the kind of relationship he saw in other families like the Mountbattens and the Churchills.

  “I read in the Times of your meeting with King George [of Greece] at Corfu,” she said. “How is he getting along?”

  “He’s lost weight and [he’s] quite homesick for his friends in London, I’m afraid,” he replied.

  “Poor George,” she commented, “I don’t envy the rulers of those Balkan countries.”

  They then went in to dinner, their conversation remaining casual. She was pleased to hear that he intended to spend the last two weeks of September at Balmoral, an indication that he was aware how important it was to maintain the habits and customs of the family.

  What the King did not know was how much Queen Mary still hoped he would give up Mrs. Simpson and her “crowd” and return more to the ways of his father. She had begun to receive a volume of letters from friends and members of the government, urging her to act. The London and the provincial press kept their voluntary silence on the subject. On October 1, the day that marked David’s official move to Buckingham Palace, that solemn pact was near its end.

  After lunching together at Buckingham Palace, David drove with his mother to Marlborough House. They had tea and wandered from room to room, altering small things together—the position of some of the objets d’art, removing a firescreen—these homely exchanges constituting more intimacy than the two had previously shared. David was eager to please his mother, and interest in and enthusiasm over her most cherished possessions was the one way he knew to d
o so. The subject of Court presentation of divorced people arose when they were joined by his sister, the Princess Royal, and Lady Colville, prompted perhaps by the knowledge that Mrs. Simpson’s divorce case was known to be coming up for hearing. Conversation was immediately turned elsewhere, and a few moments later the King wished his mother well and departed.

  Members of the government had a sense of impending disaster. No story illustrates this better than one told by Harold Nicolson. Nicolson was talking with James H. Thomas, then Secretary of State for the Colonies and formerly the Lord Privy Seal.* “J.H.” had come up from cockney roots, and King George had always been amused by him.

  “ ‘J.H.,’ ’e says to me one day,” J.H. repeated to Harold Nicolson, “ ‘did I ever tell you that my grandmother asked me not to call myself George but Albert? I found a letter on my dressing table at Windsor saying that it was her dearest wish that I should change my name. But I said I wouldn’t. I had been christened George, and George I would remain.’ ’E was like that, you know, ’arold, not afraid of people, if you know what I mean. And now ’ere we ’ave this little obstinate man with ’is Mrs. Simpson. H’it won’t do, ’arold, I tell you straight. I know the people of this country. I know them. They ’ate ’aving no family life at Court.”