The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  He was still waiting for Lady Strathmore’s response. ‘I am sending this by messenger if I know I am going down to her family & will send you a telegram at once; if her answer is as I hope it will be, in 3 words “All right. Bertie.” Not another soul will know what has happened until I hear from you & I will let you know where I am.’ As he was finishing this letter, he heard that he was indeed invited to St Paul’s Walden. ‘So I do hope you will wish me luck. I am very very excited about it all. Best love to you darling Mama, I remain Ever Your very devoted boy Bertie.’192

  While the Prince had been waiting and writing at Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth awoke in Bruton Street feeling ‘very tired. Up by 11. Doris came round & talked till 12.30 … I sat before the fire in a stupor till 1.30. Dashed off to be photographed for Vogue.’ Back at the house she telephoned the Prince on her father’s behalf – ‘he was out, so left a message to bring guns … Home ¼ to 6. Prince Bertie called for me at 6 & we motored down to St Paul’s Walden.’193

  There has till now been some uncertainty about just when Elizabeth finally accepted the Prince. Records in the Royal Archives and at Glamis tell a coherent story of the weekend. According to her diary, on the morning of Saturday 13 January she had ‘breakie’ at 10.30 and then went for a walk with the Prince. After lunch they both went to saw wood with her father. ‘Prince Bertie sawed hard. Talked after tea for hours – dediced ot tiaw a elttil – epoh I ma ton gnivaheb yldab.’194 So, on Saturday night, the Prince once again went to bed uncertain.

  On Sunday morning after breakfast she sat and talked with the Prince until 12.30 ‘& then went for a walk in the enchanted wood. Long walk after lunch & long talks after tea & dinner.’ She did not record it in her diary, but late that evening she did finally accept his proposal of marriage. Lady Stathmore’s account, written to her daughter May, put it like this: ‘He came down to St. P.W. suddenly on Friday, & proposed continuously until Sunday night, when she said Yes at 11.30!! My head is completely bewildered, as all those days E was hesitating & miserable, but now she is absolutely happy – & he is radiant.’195

  On Monday morning the happy Prince drove Elizabeth up to London and dropped her at Bruton Street. Later he took her to lunch with Princess Mary and Lord Lascelles at Chesterfield House. The Prince of Wales came to congratulate them and then escorted her home while Prince Albert set off with Louis Greig to Sandringham to tell his parents. He appears not to have sent the agreed telegram. The King recorded in his diary, ‘Bertie with Greig arrived after tea and informed us that he was engaged to Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, to which we gladly gave our consent. I trust they will be very happy.’ The Queen was less reserved. ‘We are delighted and he looks beaming. We sent off telegrams, wrote letters & were very busy.’196

  The same was true of Elizabeth. At home in Bruton Street with her mother, she wrote ‘lots’ of letters, including one to her friend Arthur Penn. ‘I must tell you, I am going to marry Prince Bertie – I do hope you like him – I feel terrified now I’ve done it – in fact no one is more surprised than me. Arthur, you have been my best friend for years please please don’t cast me off as one now, will you?’197 She went out to tell Lady Nina Balfour and Lady Airlie. Back home she wrote more letters. Then the news was released from Sandringham. ‘The telephone rang the whole evening – hundreds of reporters clamouring! Last day of peace I suppose! Bed 11.’198

  * In 1919 there were three special garden parties at Buckingham Palace to which 15,500 were invited, including thousands of debutantes who had missed their presentation at Court. The traditional Courts began again in 1920, although at first ‘shorn in some small measure of [their] former full magnificence by the decision not to permit the wearing of feathers and full Court train’, as The Times recorded of the first peacetime Court on 10 June 1920. Feathers and trains reappeared in a modified form in 1922 and continued to be worn until 1939, with a brief interruption in 1936 when King Edward VIII decided not to hold Courts.

  * It may also have reflected the King’s predilections: like his future daughter-in-law he was an avid theatregoer. But he had given up this pastime for the duration of the war, as well as racing, most other social activities and the consumption of alcohol, as part of the exercise in setting an example of restraint which the government had urged upon him.

  † Helen Cecil (1901–79), daughter of Lord Edward Herbert Gascoyne Cecil, married in 1921 Major the Hon. Alexander Hardinge (1894–1960), later second Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, equerry and Assistant Private Secretary to King George V and later Private Secretary to King Edward VIII and King George VI.

  * James Stuart (1897–1971), third son of seventeenth Earl of Moray, captain 3rd Battalion Royal Scots and brigade major 15th Brigade (dispatches), First World War. Equerry to the Duke of York 1920–1. MP for Moray and Nairn 1923–59, Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury 1941–5, Conservative Chief Whip 1941–8, Secretary of State for Scotland 1951–7. Created Viscount Stuart of Findhorn 1959.

  † This letter clinches the vexed question of when their meeting took place. James Stuart’s memoirs put it at the right place – the RAF ball – but in the wrong year, 1921. King George VI’s official biographer, John Wheeler-Bennett, and Hugo Vickers in his biography of Queen Elizabeth place it at a dance given by Lord Farquhar on 2 June 1920. Prince Albert went with Queen Mary, Princess Mary and Prince Henry to the dinner Lord Farquhar gave before the dance, but James Stuart did not go with him. Stuart and Elizabeth may have been among the 150 guests at the dance afterwards, but it was evidently at the RAF ball that she first danced with the Prince.

  * His papers in the Royal Archives include a file entitled ‘Unrest in the Country’ containing letters between his Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham, and various correspondents offering information and advice from 1917 onwards. See Frank Prochaska’s The Republic of Britain, pp. 159–80, for details of these and related papers, which show both the concerns of the King’s advisers and their views on how the monarchy should adapt itself to meet them.

  † This led to the appointment in 1918 of the first full-time press secretary at Buckingham Palace.

  * In the King’s diary entry recording the Council meeting at which he made his declaration about the House of Windsor, he went on to say: ‘I also informed the Council that May and I had decided some time ago that our children would be allowed to marry into British families. It was quite an historical occasion.’ (RA GV/PRIV/GVD/1917: 17 July, quoted in Kenneth Rose, King George V, p. 309)

  † In 1920 Queen Mary invited two girls to Windsor with their parents for the Ascot house party; in 1921 she selected eight other girls, including Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, to invite to lunch at Ascot, two each day, when Prince Albert and Prince Henry were there. (RA MRH/MISC/227, 228; list by Queen Mary, [1921], British Library, Add MSS 82748)

  * Margaret Sheila Mackellar Chisholm, daughter of Harry Chisholm of Sydney, NSW; married in 1915 Francis Edward Scudamore St Clair-Erskine, Lord Loughborough, eldest son of fifth Earl of Rosslyn; divorced 1926; she married secondly, 1928, Sir John Milbanke, eleventh baronet (d. 1947), and thirdly, 1954, Prince Dimitri of Russia. She died in 1969.

  † In her memoirs she also recalled one evening when she had been dancing with Prince Albert, and noticed ‘a young girl standing alone by the doorway with no partner and felt sorry for her. I asked somebody who she was and they told me she was a debutante called Elizabeth Bowes Lyon.’ (Princess Dimitri, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (unpublished memoirs of Lady Loughborough), 1948, p. 40, private collection)

  * Prince Paul (1893–1976) was the son of Prince Arsène Karageorgević (brother of King Peter I of Serbia) and his Russian wife Aurora Demidoff. After his parents separated he was taken in by King Peter, who brought him up with his own sons.

  † Sir Henry Rainald (‘George’) Gage (1895–1982), sixth Viscount Gage, lord in waiting to King George V, King Edward VIII and King George VI; Parliamentary Private Secretary to Secretary of State for India 1924–9. Married 1931 Hon. Alexandra Grenfell.


  ‡ Henry ‘Chips’ Channon (1897–1958), knighted 1957, Conservative politician and diarist.

  * Arthur Horace Penn (1886–1960), son of William and Constance Penn of Taverham Hall, Norfolk. Served in Grenadier Guards in 1914–18 war (MC, mentioned in dispatches). Afterwards practised as a barrister, then worked in the City. Appointed groom in waiting to King George VI 1937. Rejoined his regiment in Second World War and served as regimental adjutant, combining this with working as acting private secretary to Queen Elizabeth. Remained in her service as private secretary, and then treasurer, until his death.

  † Vreda Esther Mary (‘Mollie’) (1900–93), daughter of Major William Frank Lascelles. In April 1921 she married the Earl of Dalkeith, eldest son of seventh Duke of Buccleuch, who succeeded as eighth duke in 1935.

  ‡ The Strathmores were unable to renew the lease on the house. Elizabeth was heartbroken at leaving ‘this darling house’, so full of happy memories. They rented 20 Eaton Square and then 6 Upper Brook Street until moving into their new permanent home at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, in late 1921 or early 1922.

  * Lady Helena (‘Nina’) Balfour (1865–1948), daughter of fifth Earl of Antrim, married 1888 Captain Charles Barrington Balfour. She was a great friend of Cecilia Strathmore.

  * The Prince may also have received encouragement from someone else who knew Glamis and Elizabeth very well. The minister at Crathie, the church attended by the Royal Family at Balmoral, was now the Rev. Dr John Stirton, who had previously been minister at Glamis. ‘I am really responsible for the Duke having first gone there,’ he recorded in his diary two years later, as Prince Albert set out for Glamis again. (Rev. John Stirton, Diary, 26 September 1922, RA AEC/GG/026)

  * Alec Hardinge’s sister, another of Elizabeth’s friends. Born in 1900, she married Major Robert Abercromby in June 1923. She suffered from ill health and died in 1927 following a serious illness.

  † Venetia James, née Cavendish-Bentinck (1863–1948), a cousin of Lady Strathmore, and Elizabeth’s godmother. She married, in 1885, John Arthur James of Coton House, Rugby, who died in 1917.

  * The Hon. Mrs Ronald Greville, née Margaret McEwan (1863–1942), the presumed only child of the Scottish brewer and philanthropist William McEwan MP, whose fortune and fine collection of pictures she inherited when he died in 1913. In 1891 she married the Hon. Ronald Henry Fulke Greville: he died in 1908. Her husband was a friend of King Edward VII, which led to a continuing friendship with the Royal Family. She entertained generously and in grand style at her London house in Charles Street, Mayfair, and at her Surrey mansion, Polesden Lacey. A forceful character, notorious for her acerbic wit, she had many critics, but she could also be kind and generous, and she was shrewd, witty, interested in people and an excellent hostess whose cuisine and cellars were renowned. During the First World War, like the Strathmores, she set up a convalescent hospital at her house, and for this and for other war work she was in 1922 made DBE – Dame Commander of the British Empire.

  * Charles Henry Wyndham, third Baron Leconfield (1872–1952), and his wife Beatrice, whose home, Petworth House, is renowned for its Grinling Gibbons carvings and its fine collection of paintings.

  * Her edited memoirs, Thatched with Gold, much quoted by other biographers, tell the story but are not wholly reliable and are imprecise about the sequence of events in the courtship.

  * This letter is quoted, inaccurately, in Thatched with Gold, p. 167.

  * The first Duke of York’s Camp started on 30 July 1921, when the Duke welcomed the 400 participants at the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, after which they were taken to the camp site at New Romney. The Duke visited them there on 3 August. Despite an unsympathetic press beforehand, the camp was indeed a great success.

  † Lord Clinton (1863–1957) was a member of the Council of the Duchy of Cornwall, Keeper of the Privy Seal to the Prince of Wales, and Lord Warden of the Stannaries at this time, and the Prince’s visit (16–25 May) was in his role as duke of Cornwall.

  * Maurice Mouvet (1888–1927), professional dancer in cabarets and nightclubs, and his partner Leonora Hughes. They danced with great success in London and Paris in the early 1920s; Maurice was particularly famous for his skill in the tango, the Brazilian maxixe and the Apache.

  * The sixth Duke of Portland (1857–1943) was a first cousin of Cecilia Strathmore, the son of her father’s younger brother.

  * Lady Margaret Ida Montagu-Douglas-Scott, daughter of seventh Duke of Buccleuch and elder sister of Lady Alice, the future Duchess of Gloucester. She married Captain Geoffrey Hawkins in 1926.

  * Henry George Charles Lascelles (1882–1947), Viscount Lascelles, succeeded his father as seventh Earl of Harewood in 1929.

  † Frances Dora, widow of the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore (1832–1922).

  * The first royal wedding in the Abbey for 650 years was that of Princess Patricia of Connaught, King George V’s cousin, to the Hon. Alexander Ramsay in 1919; it started a new and popular trend, and Princess Mary’s wedding attracted even more attention because she was the King’s only daughter and also the first of his children to follow their parents’ decision in favour of marriage into British families.

  † It is not true, as has been stated, that she sat next to the Duke of York at the wedding breakfast. This was held in a different room and was restricted to the Royal Family, royal guests and the bridegroom’s family.

  * Christopher Tennant, second Baron Glenconner (1899–1983), married first, 1925, Pamela Winifred Paget; secondly, 1935, Elizabeth Harcourt Powell.

  * The Dover Patrol, created in summer 1914, became a vital wartime command. It could call upon a motley array of sometimes obsolete cruisers, monitors, destroyers, armed trawlers, paddle minesweepers, armed yachts, motor launches and coastal motor boats, submarines, seaplanes, aeroplanes and airships. The Patrol’s many tasks in the southern North Sea and the Dover Straits included escorting merchantmen and hospital and troop ships; laying sea-mines and sweeping up German mines; bombarding German military positions on the Belgian coast; and sinking U-boats.

  † John Colin Campbell Davidson (1889–1970), at this time MP for Hemel Hempstead and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister. Created 1937 Viscount Davidson. Married 1919 Hon. Frances Joan Dickinson.

  * Archibald Clark Kerr (1882–1951), diplomat; served under Lord Allenby in Cairo 1922–5; British Minister to the Central Americas 1925, Chile 1928, Sweden 1931. Knighted 1935; Ambassador in Iraq 1935, Peking 1938, Moscow 1942, Washington 1946. Created Baron Inverchapel 1946. Married 1929 Maria Theresa Diaz Salas, daughter of a Chilean millionaire.

  * Jasper Ridley (1887–1951), second son of Sir Matthew Ridley (later Viscount Ridley), married 1911 Countess Nathalie Benckendorff. A member of the Contemporary Art Society, he later became chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery and the British Museum, and also chairman of Coutts Bank.

  † Francis Godolphin D’Arcy Osborne (1884–1964), great-great-grandson of fifth Duke of Leeds; Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, Washington DC, 1931–5; Ambassador to the Holy See 1936–47; succeeded his distant cousin, Lady Dorothy’s brother John, eleventh Duke, as twelfth duke of Leeds 1963.

  ‡ One guest who had amused her was the American actor James K. Hackett, who had come to absorb the atmosphere of Glamis in the hope of improving his performances as Macbeth. She had never seen a man drink so much, she said.

  * Bettine Malcolm (1899–1973), married in December 1922 Captain Henry Somerset, kinsman of tenth Duke of Beaufort; their son David succeeded as eleventh duke.

  † Lady Rachel Cavendish (1902–77), daughter of ninth Duke of Devonshire. Mary Cavendish (1903–94), first cousin of Rachel, married Lord Balniel in 1925, and became Countess of Crawford in 1940 when he succeeded his father as twenty-eighth earl of Crawford.

  * Apart from her childhood diaries, her first surviving diary is that of 1923.

  * Lady Mary Thynne (1903–74) married in 1921 third Baron Nunburnholme (divorced 1947). She was lady in
waiting to Queen Elizabeth 1937–47; in 1947 she married Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse to King George VI.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A ROYAL WEDDING

  1923

  ‘You are perfectly safe in the hands of a Scots lassie’

  ON TUESDAY 16 January 1923 the papers were filled with news of the engagement.* Elizabeth read them in bed in Bruton Street. ‘Great headlines & lots of rot!’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Telegrams poured in all day, letters & reporters tumbling over each other.’1

  The King and Queen both wrote at once to their future daughter-in-law. The King told her that he was delighted she was to become a member of his family. Bertie, he wrote, was ‘radiant with happiness & I most gladly give my consent to your marriage with him. I know you will do all you can to help him in his many duties … God bless you my dear Elizabeth.’2 The Queen wrote, ‘The King and I are delighted to welcome you as our future daughter in law and we send you our warmest congratulations. The news has come as a great surprise and we feel very much excited!’ She invited Elizabeth and her parents to Sandringham the following weekend and promised a warm welcome. ‘I hope you will look on me as a “second mother” and that we shall become great friends. May God bless you both, my beloved children, is the heartfelt prayer of your loving future mother in law, Mary R.’3 To Lady Strathmore, the Queen wrote how delighted she and the King were that Bertie’s ‘great wish’ had come true ‘& that he is really engaged to dearest Elizabeth’.4