Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  “I want to make one more appeal to you not to go to sea on D Day. Please consider my own position. I am a younger man than you, I am a sailor, & as King I am the head of all three Services. There is nothing I would like better than to go to sea but I have agreed to stop at home; is it fair that you should then do exactly what I should have liked to do myself? You said yesterday afternoon that it would be a fine thing for the King to lead his troops into battle, as in old days; if the King cannot do this, it does not seem to me right that his Prime Minister should take his place ... I ask you most earnestly to consider the whole question again & not let your personal wishes, which I very well understand, lead you to depart from your own high standard of duty to the State ...”

  Although in the end he agreed to remain in England, the next day Churchill replied:

  “Sir ... there is absolutely no comparison in the British Constitution between a Sovereign & a subject. If Your Majesty had gone, as you desired, on board one of your ships in this bombarding action, it would have required the Cabinet approval beforehand & I am very much inclined to think as I told you, that the Cabinet would have advised most strongly against Your Majesty going. On the other hand, as Prime Minister & Minister of Defence, I ought to be allowed to go where I consider it necessary to the discharges of my duty ... I must most earnestly ask Your Majesty that no principle shall be laid down which inhibits my freedom of movement when I judge it necessary to acquaint myself with conditions in the various theatres of war. Since Your Majesty does me the honour to be so concerned about my personal safety on this occasion, I must defer to Your Majesty’s wishes & indeed commands ...”

  This was perhaps the only occasion when Churchill was overruled by the Monarch whom he served. The incident reveals in King George the same kind of obdurate behaviour that he exhibited in his confrontation with his brother at the time of the Abdication.

  D-Day, the Allied landing in the North of France on June 6, 1944, was a combined operation, brilliantly ordered and carried out. The supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, was American, his deputy, British. The air and naval commanders were British. Land forces were commanded by General Montgomery, British Commander of the invasion forces, and General Eisenhower himself. Nearly 200,000 men were engaged that day in naval operations (two-thirds of them British). By nightfall, 156,000 men had been put ashore. D-Day was a success. Ten days later, King George got his wish and crossed a choppy Channel in cold and gusty weather to visit his troops. He arrived at 12:30 and was back on the cruiser, H.M.S. Arethusa, by 4:00 P.M. for his return trip to Portsmouth and then Windsor. That same night Hitler’s secret weapon, the V-1—pilotless planes filled with explosives—made their first harrowing and destructive descent on England.

  The day following, in his characteristically low-keyed manner, the King wrote in his diary: “A change in our daily routine will be needed.”

  Christmas 1944 at Badminton was an attempt to recreate the old traditional and gay rituals at Sandringham. Besides Sir Osbert, the Princess Royal, Lord Harewood, the Beauforts, Lady Constance Milnes-Gaskell who was in waiting, and the elderly deaf courier Sir Richard Molyneaux, two American officers were present. (“Perhaps we should still be one country,” Queen Mary told the gentlemen, “if my great-grandfather hadn’t been so obstinate.”) An enormous table was placed in the hallway, and gifts were laid out on it as they had always been at Sandringham, although the contents of the boxes reflected the parsimony of war—with guests giving possessions of their own to each other: books, cigarette cases, small pieces of jewelry.

  At dinner Christmas Eve, Queen Mary looked superb. She wore a silver gown, enormous sapphires, a pearl collar, and huge diamond-and-pearl brooches and pendants. “As this magnificent figure, blazing and sparkling, led the way from the room,” Sir Osbert writes, “Dick Molyneaux turned to me and said in his loud, deaf voice, like that of a man shouting from a cave into a strong wind, ‘I wonder if you realise it, after that old lady has gone, you’ll never see anything like this, or like her, again!’ ”*

  At midnight, May 8, 1945, Germany’s unconditional surrender was officially announced. As the news had leaked out twenty-four hours earlier, V-E Day lacked an element of surprise. Vast crowds gathered before Buckingham Palace. The Royal Family was given a triumphant ovation when they appeared on the palace balcony, and they were called back again and again. But the struggle was not yet over. Many sacrifices in lives still lay ahead as war continued in the Pacific.

  At Badminton, Queen Mary listened with great pride to the victory broadcast by the King. Bertie had endured with constancy and courage. The cheers of the crowds assured her that he had survived this crisis in his reign undaunted and triumphant, and as he spoke she was conscious of the lessening of his stutter.

  To the Household’s admiration and surprise, Queen Mary accompanied the members of her Court to the Portcullis Club in the local public house “where the village was celebrating,” and she cheerfully and lustily joined in as everyone sang songs, many of them the same she had sung in the sitting room at York Cottage to the amusement of her family.

  Pandemonium once again prevailed when Queen Mary prepared to leave Badminton to take up residence at Marlborough House on June 11. The endeavor was almost as overwhelming as D-Day. Over seventy crates, boxes, and cases had to be re-packed, and Marlborough House had to be readied.

  Marlborough House was in a terrible state of disrepair, and it hardly seemed possible that it could be made habitable in time for Queen Mary’s arrival. The great ground-floor reception rooms had been damaged by blasts; ceilings were down, doors blown from their hinges, and glassless windows boarded up. Yet by May 31, “Mahogany, satinwood and lacquered furniture, Chinese and European porcelains, ‘treasures’ of agate and lapis and gold were now emerging from what Queen Mary termed their ‘hide-outs.’ ”

  On May 18—with M[oving] Day still three weeks away, Mary, the Duchess of Beaufort, wrote to Sir Osbert Sitwell: “Vans of boxes and hampers and trunks all marked with the royal cypher continually leave the house. Today I saw such a van leaving with royal crowns and M.R.s bursting from every side, but at the very back and perched on the top of these dignified boxes sat, very cheerily and cheekily a common enamel slop pail—very plebeian, and showing no sign of its royal ownership.”

  When the day came for her to take her final leave of the Beauforts’ hospitality, Marlborough House still did not have windows in its drawing rooms, the library, or the dining room. Many weeks would be required before they could be replaced, since window glass, like all other building materials (and food and clothing), was difficult to obtain. But Queen Mary refused to let this delay her plans.

  Tears streamed down Queen Mary’s face—a very rare occurrence, indeed—the morning of her departure from Badminton. “Oh, I have been so happy here,” she said as she handed to each one of Badminton’s nine heads of departments a valuable and personally selected gift. To one she added, “Here I’ve been anybody to everybody, and back in London I shall have to begin being Queen Mary all over again.” But to all those with whom she had sat out a war, she had never ceased being Queen Mary.

  With President Harry Truman’s decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, and on August 9 on Nagasaki, the war was ended.* “The great host of the living” who would now return from foreign shores to try to pick up their lives where they had left them found a new England upon their return. Winston Churchill had been voted out of power, and Clement Attlee and the Labour Party, in a landslide victory on July 26, had begun the great task of reorganising postwar Britain.* The King found it difficult to deal with the socialism of the aggressive Labour Ministers. He now realised how greatly he had depended upon Winston Churchill and how sorely he would miss the gruff old man. “I regret what has happened more than perhaps anyone else,” he wrote the ex-Prime Minister directly after the election. “I shall miss your counsel to me more than I can say. But please remember that as a friend I hope we shall be able to meet at intervals. Beli
eve me. I am, Yours very sincerely & gratefully, G.R.I.”

  Queen Mary and Lady Airlie spent January 1946 at Sandringham while the final decorations were completed at Marlborough House. They found the ambiance at Sandringham changed. It had lost much of its Edwardian look and feel. A new informality prevailed. Jigsaw puzzles were set out on a large beige-covered table in the entrance hall, and Princess Elizabeth, who loved the radio, had it blaring all day long. Youth predominated with the two young Princesses and their guests; a cousin, Lady Mary Cambridge; and several young Guardsmen. The atmosphere was relaxed. No orders or medals were worn, the dress code was much more casual, and the Royal Family addressed each other in the manner of an ordinary family. When one of his daughters wanted something, the King would say, “You must ask Mummy.”

  Margaret, now a lovely young girl of fifteen, displayed a great deal of sibling rivalry toward her older sister and would sulk if not allowed to do the things that Lilibet could. Of the two sisters, she was the greater tease and flirt with the young Guardsmen.

  The first evening at Sandringham, Lady Airlie sat next to the King. “His face was tired and strained and he ate practically nothing,” she recalls. “I knew that he was forcing himself to talk and entertain me. When I told him how much I had liked his Christmas broadcast, and how well written I thought the script had been, he looked across at the Queen. ‘She helps me,’ he said proudly. Looking at him and realising how hard he was driving himself I felt a cold fear of the probability of another short reign ...”

  Queen Mary had not enjoyed herself for a long time as thoroughly as she did at Sandringham that first night. The war was over, and the son she had worried about during those difficult days had acquitted himself admirably. There would be no male heir to the Throne, but Lilibet had all the qualities necessary in a good Sovereign. At about 11:30 that evening dancing began, with Queen Mary on the arm of her son and Lady Airlie escorted by a young Guardsman. And as the country band played “Hickey Hoo,” an old favourite, the music brought back the past to the two elderly ladies who were seventy-nine and eighty, respectively, and they outshone the two young Princesses and their guests. At the end of an hour, Lady Airlie stopped after a strenuous “Sir Roger de Coverly,” but Queen Mary kept on until nearly 1:00 A.M.

  No two sisters could have been less alike than Lilibet and Margaret, the elder with her quiet dignity and rather prim nature, the younger with her ebullient spirits, her puckish expression, and her love of mimicry. Queen Mary described her as “so outrageously amusing that one can’t help but encouraging her.”

  “The King was a devoted father to both his daughters,” Lady Airlie wrote. “He spoiled Princess Margaret and still continued to treat her as an enfant terrible, but Princess Elizabeth was his constant companion in shooting, walking, reading—in fact everything. His affection for her was touching. I wondered sometimes whether he was secretly dreading the prospect of an early marriage for her ...”

  Prince Philip was not at Sandringham in January, yet constant rumours circulated that an announcement would soon be made of his engagement to Princess Elizabeth. The ties between the Royal Family and Greece had always been strong. When Prince Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, had been arrested after the Abdication of King Constantine of Greece,* and tried by a Revolutionary Committee, he had escaped the death penalty only through the prompt intervention of King George V. Still, since British troops were now actively involved in the Greek Civil War, the timing was delicate. The possibility of Philip taking on British citizenship was discussed. But fear pervaded the Court that such an act might be interpreted as an indication of British support for the Greek royalists. With the Greek general election being held in March, it was hoped that the results would make an announcement of Princess Elizabeth’s engagement to a Greek prince less embarrassing. Finally, the King, after consulting the Prime Minister and Queen Mary, decided that his elder daughter’s marriage plans would have to wait upon political events in Greece.

  Princess Elizabeth celebrated her twenty-first birthday on April 21, 1947, in South Africa, where she was on tour with her parents and sister, the first time the Royal Family had ever undertaken together a tour of one of the Dominions. India was scheduled to gain her independence within the year. Now that so many British territories were on the verge of slipping away, “the hope was to reinforce the Crown as a common symbol.” With that in mind, Princess Elizabeth, her voice “still piping and a little child-like,” made a broadcast from South Africa, declaring to her future subjects that her whole life, “whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong. But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do ...”

  When she returned from South Africa, progress was under way to make a Greek prince acceptable to the British public. After much deliberation, Prince Philip’s name (which was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg) was changed to Mountbatten, the name his mother’s family had chosen in 1917.* He was henceforth to be called plain Lieutenant Mountbatten. On July 10, 1947, Buckingham Palace reported: “It is with the greatest pleasure that the King and Queen announce the betrothal of their dearly beloved daughter The Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN, son of the late Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Andrew (Princess Alice of Battenberg) to which union the King has gladly given his consent.”†

  The public was not too thrilled with the match; 40 percent in one opinion poll were decidedly against the marriage on the grounds that Philip was foreign. No one was sure what his nationality was—Greek, German, or Danish—but his mother’s act of becoming a Greek Orthodox nun, and wearing religious robes and veil, and his father’s impecunious life and death in exile did not contribute to a good public image.*

  “They both came to see me after luncheon looking radiant,” Queen Mary wrote on July 10, just after being told of the engagement. She gave “darling Lilibet” the jewellry that, in July 1893, fifty-four years past, had comprised her own chief wedding present from Queen Victoria (the diamond necklace and stomacher). “Nearly all the members of our family who were present on that occasion are no more,” she noted sadly.

  The Royal Wedding was held on November 20, 1947. Still recovering from the aftermath of the war, London was dingy and bomb-scarred. To Queen Mary, as to millions of others, the pageantry of a Royal marriage represented “an escape from reality; a cut back to the past.”

  “It was a week of gaiety such as the Court had not seen for years,” Lady Airlie wrote. “[There was] an evening party at Buckingham Palace which seemed after the years of austerity like a scene out of a fairy tale ... Old friends scattered far and wide by the war were reunited; old feuds and jealousies were swept away. Most of us were sadly shabby—anyone fortunate enough to have a new dress drew all eyes—but all the famous diamonds came out again, even though most of them had not been cleaned since 1939.

  “Queen Mary looked supremely happy ... For the first time in many years I saw the old radiance in her smile. When Winston Churchill went up to greet her she held out both hands to him, a thing I never knew her to do before.”

  The pleasure she took in the occasion was marked in her diary entry for the day of the grand party: “Saw many old friends, I stood from 9.10 till 12.15 A.M.!!!! not bad for 80.”

  Footnotes

  *A suggestion by Sir Osbert Sitwell that one of his forebears had been a mistress to George IV.

  †Queen Mary’s paternal grandmother came from Transylvania.

  *Prince Philip (b. June 10, 1921), later Duke of Edinburgh, was the son of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s sister, Alice. His grandmother was Princess Victoria of Hesse, daughter of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Alice. On his father’s, Prince Andrew of Greece’s side, he was related to the Windsors through Queen Alexandra.

  †Queen Mary defined Prince Philip’s relationship to Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth) as being a third cousin on his father
’s side, and a second cousin on his mother’s side.

  *Major the Hon. Sir Richard Molyneaux KCVO (1873–1954) was Groom-in-Waiting to King George V from 1919–1936 and served as Extra Equerry to Queen Mary from 1936 until her death.

  *President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died on April 12, 1945.

  *Clement Richard Attlee (1883–1967), British statesman; Prime Minister 1945–1951. Earl Attlee in 1955.

  *King Constantine abdicated in 1917.

  *Princess Alice had never anglicised her name, Battenberg.

  †Ten years later it was realised that Prince Philip need not have bothered about naturalisation, due to the Act of Settlement of 1701. This measure gave British nationality and royal status to the Electress Sophia of Hanover and all her descendants. Prince Philip numbered among these and therefore technically had been a British Royal Highness since birth.

  *Prince Andrew of Greece was the youngest son of King George I of Greece (Queen Alexandra’s brother) and the Princess Olga, granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I. He died in Monte Carlo in 1944 in poverty, his Spartan funeral expenses finally paid for by the Greek government. When he had been arrested in Greece, his wife, Princess Alice, Prince Philip’s mother, had joined a religious order.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Toward the end of their stay in Nassau, the Duchess of Windsor had written Queen Mary a letter:

  Madam,

  I hope you will forgive my intrusion upon your time as well as my boldness in addressing Your Majesty. My motive for the letter is a simple one. It has always been a source of sorrow and regret to me that I have been the cause of any separation that exists between Mother and Son and I can’t help feeling that there must be moments perhaps, however fleeting they may be, when you wonder how David is ...