The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

After she had inspected the troops, she and the Prince sat on a flower-bedecked dais (though she stood much of the time) to watch the parade together. It began with a march-past of the regiments of which she was colonel-in-chief, followed by the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery and the Mounted Bands of the Household Cavalry. One hundred homing doves were released as a young boy sang ‘Oh for the Wings of a Dove’.

  Then came a cavalcade of the century, a light-hearted look at the hundred years she had lived through; more of a circus than a parade, it included 450 children and adults, with a variety of stars. Among the scenes and players who passed in front of her were soldiers of the First World War, ballroom dancers from the 1920s, a Second World War fire engine and ambulance, Pearly Kings and Queens from the East End of London, and people in 1940s dress celebrating victory in 1945. Then came a series of post-war cars – Enid Blyton’s Noddy in his yellow car, the first Mini Minor, James Bond’s Aston Martin, an E-type Jaguar. More recent – and perhaps more surprising – twentieth-century memories were recalled by Hell’s Angels on their bikes, punk-rock youths in black and the television characters, the Wombles.

  After this eclectic depiction of the previous ten decades, representatives of 170 of the more than 300 civil organizations, charities and other groups with which Queen Elizabeth was associated marched past her. This part of the parade began with Queen Elizabeth’s page leading two of her corgis, the breed of dog which had for so long shared her life. There were more animals: camels (ridden by members of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, whose emblem is a camel), horses, an Aberdeen Angus bull, North Country Cheviot sheep, chickens, racehorses. The groups waving gaily as they passed included the Girls’ Brigade, Queen Elizabeth’s Overseas Nursing Services Association, the Cookery and Food Association (a hundred chefs all in their whites), the Mothers’ Union, the Poultry Club of Great Britain, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the National Trust, the Royal College of Midwives, St John Ambulance Brigade, the Royal School of Needlework, the Colditz Association, the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, the Bomber Command Association and, bringing up the rear, twenty-two holders of the Victoria and George Crosses, Britain’s highest awards for heroism, followed by the venerable Chelsea Pensioners marching stiffly but proudly in their bright red uniforms. Everyone in the stands stood up as these brave men and women passed.

  RAF planes from the Second World War – a Spitfire, a Hurricane, a Lancaster bomber, a Bristol Blenheim – flew overhead, followed by the Red Arrows trailing red, white and blue vapour trails. And all the while the bands and the orchestra played on and the choirs sang. Hubert Parry’s glorious anthem ‘I Was Glad’, which had been sung at King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1937, was followed by First World War music-hall favourites such as ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and (nicely vulgar) ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’. Three hundred children from the Chicken Shed Company danced. Altogether some 2,000 military personnel and more than 5,000 civilians celebrated on Horse Guards Parade.

  The whole event lasted an hour and a half, and at the end the Queen Mother made a short speech of thanks saying it had been a wonderful afternoon and ‘a great joy to me’. The crowd cheered, the National Anthem was sung again, and Queen Elizabeth got into her car to make a lap of honour past thousands of happy, cheering people before driving off to St James’s Palace, where she climbed the stairs to the State Rooms and spent the next hour and a half at a reception, sitting down only to talk to the singer Dame Vera Lynn.

  Two weeks later, on the morning of her actual hundredth birthday, 4 August, a large crowd gathered outside her London home, Clarence House. The gates were opened and Queen Elizabeth came out to take the salute when the King’s Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery, marched past. In front of the crowd the royal postman, Tony Nicholls, delivered her the traditional message sent by the Queen to all her subjects who reach their hundredth birthday. The Queen Mother started to open it and then passed it to her equerry. ‘Come on, use your sword,’ she said. Captain William de Rouet unsheathed his ceremonial blade and slit the envelope open. The message was written in the Queen’s own hand and read, ‘On your 100th birthday all the family join with me in sending you our loving best wishes for this special day. Lilibet’.1

  Then, with the Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth climbed into a landau decked with flowers in her racing colours of blue and gold, and was driven to Buckingham Palace past the large crowds lining the Mall. The Prince was deeply moved by the rapturous reception for his beloved grandmother. It was, he thought, ‘the British at their best – and you always manage to bring the best out in people!’2 At the Palace, Queen Elizabeth appeared alone on the balcony. She waved to the crowds as she had first waved after her marriage in 1923 and, most famously, on Victory in Europe (VE) Day in May 1945. As the Band of the Coldstream Guards played Happy Birthday and the crowd roared its approval, she was joined by twenty-seven of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews, nieces and many of their spouses.

  In her long life the world had undergone technological change with unprecedented speed, and political transformations of exceptional violence. It had moved from the age of travel by horse to that of travel through space. The First World War and the Russian Revolution had toppled the emperors of Austria, Germany and Russia. Many other European kings and queens had subsequently departed their thrones. The United Kingdom had suffered the trauma of the Great War and then faced almost continuous challenge from economic and political turmoil, from war and the threat of war – through a world slump, the abdication of King Edward VIII, the Second World War, the Cold War. Queen Elizabeth had come to terms with massive changes – loss of empire, the growth of a modern multi-racial Commonwealth of newly independent states in Asia and Africa, and a social revolution in Britain itself which had begun with the first majority Labour government elected in 1945.

  The British monarchy was not isolated from the political and social changes. Indeed the abdication in 1936 was a self-inflicted wound from which it might not have recovered. It had adapted itself, and it had survived; more than that, it had retained the consent of the people essential to constitutional monarchy. This adaptation was largely due to the efforts of successive sovereigns and their advisers. But a key question, explored in this book, is the extent to which the consent necessary for its survival was generated by the woman who was for almost eighty years at its heart – as Duchess of York, Queen and Queen Mother.

  In any biography of a public person there is a danger of overemphasizing the role of the individual in shaping events. This is particularly true when the individual has, like Queen Elizabeth, great prestige but no real power. Nevertheless, it remains legitimate to ask how Queen Elizabeth responded to the great personal and public crises of her life and what wider effect this had.

  How did she do it? What combination of qualities had enabled this young Scottish aristocrat to come into the Royal Family and play such a central role in the life of the nation for almost eighty years? What part did she play in her unique family, as a young married woman, as a mother, as grandmother and great-grandmother? And on the national stage, how did she earn and, more remarkably, how did she retain her popularity through all of the turbulent twentieth century? What were the drawbacks to her very particular style? What did she really contribute to the monarchy and to the nation in times of crisis and social revolution? Would the British monarchy have evolved in a very different way without her influence? And would that have helped or hindered the institution and the country? All these questions can perhaps be examined in the context of a few words from Walter Bagehot, the mid-nineteenth-century writer who is often seen as the greatest interpreter of modern monarchy: ‘The nation is divided into parties, but the crown is of no party. Its apparent separation from business is that which removes it both from enmities and from desecration, which preserves its mystery, which enables it to combine the affection of conflicting parties – to be a visibl
e symbol of unity.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN EDWARDIAN CHILDHOOD

  1900–1914

  ‘The sun always seems to be shining’

  ELIZABETH ANGELA Marguerite Bowes Lyon, the ninth child and the fourth daughter of Lord and Lady Glamis, was born at the end of the Victorian era, on 4 August 1900. Her family was of distinguished and colourful lineage in both England and Scotland.

  Lord Glamis was the son and heir of the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. The Strathmores trace their ancestry back to the fourteenth century. John Lyon of Forteviot, the Chamberlain of Scotland from 1377 to 1382, married the daughter of King Robert II in 1376 and was knighted the following year. He was granted the thaneage of Glamis, a Crown possession in the Vale of Strathmore in eastern Scotland, some twelve miles north of Dundee, and this remained thereafter the principal seat of the family, although the transformation of a hunting lodge on the land into a castle did not begin until the early fifteenth century. Sir John Lyon’s grandson Patrick was created the first Lord of Glamis.

  In 1537 Janet, Lady Glamis, a Douglas by birth, wife of the sixth Lord Glamis, was burned at the stake in Edinburgh on charges trumped up by James V of Scotland. Then, having disposed of Lady Glamis and imprisoned her two sons, the King seized the lands and Castle of Glamis. He occupied the Castle and held court there, on and off, between 1537 and 1542.

  Their estates for the most part restored after James V’s death, the family continued to play a prominent role in Scottish royal history. The ninth Lord Glamis was created earl of Kinghorne by James VI of Scotland (James I of England) in 1606 and in 1677 Patrick, third Earl of Kinghorne, took the additional title of Strathmore. He became known as Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, the titles held by his successors ever since. Earl Patrick’s Book of Record, a diary written between 1684 and 1689, is a treasured item in the family archives at the Castle. In it he wrote that he was four years old when his father died and ‘the debt which my father left behind him was, by inventories whereof some are yet extant, no less than four hundred thousand pounds.’1 That this young man not only paid off such enormous sums but was also able to carry out extensive building works and improvements to the Castle says much for his qualities of character.

  In 1767 John, the ninth Earl of Strathmore, married Mary Eleanor Bowes. She came from a well-established north of England family which owned the estates of Gibside and Streatlam Castle in County Durham.* As she was the only child and heiress of her parents, the family name was perpetuated through her marriage: the ninth Earl and his Countess by Act of Parliament took the surname of Bowes, to be used ‘next, before, and in addition to, their titles of honour’.2 Under the eleventh Earl it became Lyon Bowes, and finally, with the accession of the thirteenth Earl in 1865, Bowes Lyon.†

  The Bowes family had acquired both power and wealth since Sir Adam Bowes, a fourteenth-century lawyer, was granted land at Streatlam, near Barnard Castle. And in 1691 Sir William Bowes married Elizabeth Blakiston, heiress of Gibside, thereby adding a large estate rich in coal to the Bowes possessions.

  Mary Eleanor’s father, George Bowes, third son of Sir William, was both a considerable landowner and one of the first to make a fortune from coal. He was said by his daughter in her Confessions‡ to have been ‘a great rake in his youth’, but he was astute too, and ‘a great sportsman with a real appreciation of beauty in art, architecture and nature’.3 The landscaped gardens at Gibside, created between 1729 and 1760, are testament to his energy and vision.

  Mary Eleanor was born in 1749 to George and his second wife, Mary Gilbert, whose father Edward owned St Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire. She inherited her father’s charm, and he imbued her with his own enthusiasm for all kinds of knowledge.4 Her marriage to John Lyon, celebrated on her eighteenth birthday in 1767, produced five children, but it was unhappy. The ninth Earl of Strathmore was known as ‘the beautiful Lord Strathmore’; he was not uncultivated,* but his wife’s biographer, Jesse Foot, characterized him as a bluff, hearty man and ‘a good bottle companion’, who was ‘not exactly calculated to make even a good learned woman a pleasing husband’.5 He believed that Mary Eleanor’s intellect needed to be restrained. She had a serious interest in botany, and in 1769 she published a poetical drama called The Siege of Jerusalem. Her husband thought such pursuits frivolous.6

  The Earl developed tuberculosis and he died at sea in March 1776 while on a voyage to Lisbon where he had hoped to recover his health. On board ship he wrote a kind last letter to his wife suggesting that she should protect her fortune by placing it in trust. He included another word of advice which perhaps illustrates the differences between the couple. ‘I will say nothing of your extreme rage for literary fame. I think your own understanding, when matured, will convince you of the futility of the pursuit.’7

  After his death, Mary Eleanor was left ‘one of the richest widows in Britain’.8 However, her personal life was tumultuous and in autumn 1776 she fell in love with Andrew Robinson Stoney, who became known as Stoney Bowes. One of the chroniclers of the Bowes Lyon family was frank in his description of Stoney Bowes: ‘This man was surely the lowest cad in history … He was the type of seedy, gentlemanly bounder, calling himself “Captain”, which has flourished in every era of society … [He] was cunning, ruthless, sadistic with rat-like cleverness and a specious Irish charm. He was a fortune hunter of the worst type.’9 He had driven his first wife to death; but he charmed and seduced Mary Eleanor and they married in January 1777.

  Shortly afterwards Stoney Bowes discovered to his fury that his bride had taken her first husband’s advice and secured her fortune in trust. Four months after their marriage he managed to force Mary to sign a document revoking her prenuptial deed and he dissipated her wealth as swiftly as he could. When Mary Eleanor’s mother died in 1781 she left her daughter St Paul’s Walden Bury, which Stoney Bowes began to use as a safe house from his creditors in the north. Eventually Mary Eleanor managed to escape from him and file for divorce on grounds of his adultery and cruelty. In May 1786 this was granted, with Bowes being ordered to pay Mary £300 a year in alimony. However, he appealed, and began ‘a ferocious war of propaganda’.10

  He then had her abducted by force and taken north to Streatlam Castle, where he incarcerated her and tried to compel her at gunpoint both to sign documents suspending the divorce and to cohabit with him again, which would have invalidated her case.11 She refused and he then dragged her around the north of England in appalling winter conditions while her solicitor searched for her in vain and had warrants issued for Stoney Bowes’s arrest. Eventually, after wild chases which excited wide public interest, she was rescued. Bowes and his accomplices were sentenced to three years in prison and fined £300. He continued a campaign of lawsuits and public vilification of his ex-wife until she died in 1800. Stoney Bowes himself died in 1810.12

  Mary Eleanor’s son John had become the tenth Earl of Strathmore on his father’s death in 1776. Unlucky in love, he threw himself into the restoration and improvement of the estates at Streatlam and Gibside, and then fell for Mary Millner, the daughter of George and Ann Millner of Stainton, a village close to Streatlam Castle. She bore his son, John Bowes, on 19 June 1811, and he married her in July 1820, the day before he died.

  The earldom of Strathmore and Kinghorne devolved on Mary Eleanor’s second surviving son, Thomas, who won the titles and estates after a lawsuit against his nephew John. He became the eleventh earl. But John Bowes inherited Gibside and Streatlam and, an accomplished man, he founded a great business empire. John Bowes and Partners operated twelve collieries and his income from coal alone was said to be immense. As MP for South Durham for fifteen years, he was a supporter of electoral reform, the anti-slavery movement and religious toleration. He bred four Derby winners at his Streatlam stud. In 1847 he went to live in Paris, where he met his first wife Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier. Together they collected works of art and then built the Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle, an imposin
g edifice in elaborate French Renaissance style, which is filled with fine paintings, tapestries, furniture and porcelain and thrives today, a striking monument to its founders.13*

  By contrast, the eleventh Earl, although fortunate in his lawsuit against John Bowes, lacked financial acumen and died in the debtors’ sanctuary at Holyroodhouse in 1846. His son Thomas, Lord Glamis, had already died at Honfleur in 1834; he too was in debt and his wife, Lady Glamis, née Charlotte Grinstead, was left with very little money to bring up four young children.† Her son Thomas became the twelfth earl on the death of his grandfather. He too lived beyond his means and died, a ruined man, in 1865. However, he achieved the distinction of riding twice in the Grand National. Later, his great-niece Queen Elizabeth adopted his racing colours of buff and blue stripes, blue sleeves and a black cap.

  Thomas was succeeded by his brother Claude, the thirteenth Earl, who finally brought the spendthrift era to an end. Life at Glamis under Earl Claude reflected all that was best in Victorian society, and his diaries‡ show that it was neither stiff nor dull.14 In his book, The Days before Yesterday, published in 1920, Lord Frederick Hamilton looks back fondly on his stays with the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and his family: ‘I like best, though, to think of the Glamis of my young days … when the whole place was vibrant with joyous young life, and the stately, grey-bearded owner of the historic castle, and of many broad acres in Strathmore besides, found his greatest pleasure in seeing how happy his children and his guests could be under his roof.’15

  No more charming family could be imagined, according to Lord Frederick. Lord Strathmore’s seven sons and three daughters were all ‘born musicians’, and they were always singing: ‘on the way to a cricket-match; on the road home from shooting; in the middle of dinner, even, this irrepressible family could not help bursting into harmony.’ They sang madrigals and part-songs after dinner, and at services in the family’s private chapel. They were equally good at acting and had a permanent stage at Glamis where they performed highlights from the latest Gilbert and Sullivan operas. All the sons were excellent shots and good at games; one brother was lawn tennis champion of Scotland, and another won the doubles championship of England.16