The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Lady Strathmore replied thanking the Queen ‘many times’ for her most kind letter. She was sure that Prince Bertie would make Elizabeth happy and was ‘quite certain that she will make him the best & most loving of wives, & a very loyal & affectionate child to Your Majesty’.5

  The Prince was overjoyed by everything. He thanked his mother for being so charming about his engagement. ‘I am very very happy & I can only hope that Elizabeth feels the same as I do … She was delighted with your letters, though feels rather shy about how to answer them.’6 In the event she did well, writing to the King, ‘I am so grateful to Your Majesty for welcoming me so kindly as a future member of your family and I only hope that I shall be able to help Bertie in all his many duties, and in many other ways also.’7 To the Queen she wrote, ‘my greatest wish is to be a real daughter to Your Majesty. I shall look forward intensely to my visit to Sandringham on Saturday, and I do hope you will think I shall make Bertie a good wife, we are both so happy, and it is all wonderful.’8

  On Tuesday the Prince returned from Sandringham for lunch at Bruton Street, and afterwards they faced a crowd of photographers and well-wishers when they drove off to the Palace together for the first time. There they chose the engagement ring from a selection brought by the jeweller Bert of Vigo Street: it was a large sapphire flanked by diamonds in a platinum setting.

  Back at Bruton Street, Elizabeth made a mistake. She talked to two Scottish reporters.* And she also saw another journalist, ‘the most fearful bounder of the gentleman class’, as Lady Strathmore described him, ‘whom Father had been much too kind to’.9 This was Charles Graves, brother of the writer Robert Graves and reporter for the London Evening News. He had at first driven down to St Paul’s Walden, where, stealing a march on the newsmen waiting outside the house, he simply rang the doorbell and produced his personal visiting card. The affable Lord Strathmore apologized for his daughter’s absence and gave him a letter of introduction to her. Armed with this and seated in a large Daimler provided by his newspaper, Graves was able to bypass crowds, rival reporters and police in Bruton Street, and to gain admittance to the house. His interview, describing Elizabeth seated at a table stacked with telegrams, ‘a charming picture of English girlhood, in a simple dark-blue morning dress edged with fur’, her ‘brilliant eyes … alight with happiness as she talked of the goodwill that had been shown her by high and low’,10 appeared on the front page of the Evening News and was picked up by the daily newspapers next day. Graves claimed in his memoirs that pressure was brought to bear on Elizabeth ‘by royal circles’ to deny the interview, which she refused to do.11 This may not be strictly true – Queen Mary, for example, simply commented, ‘How tiresome the newspaper people have been interviewing poor E., such a shame,’12 and Elizabeth herself, to judge from her diary, was both thrilled and appalled by the press interest. But whether as a result of a royal warning or her own decision there were no more interviews.*

  Wednesday was another day of newspaper stories and the constant delivery of sacks of letters, scores of telegrams. Several of her girl friends – Betty Cator, Doris Gordon-Lennox and Diamond Hardinge – came to see her. Christopher Glenconner dropped in too. Elizabeth and Doris slipped out for a walk in what must have been for once welcome fog: ‘Talked hard – she is so pleased.’ The Prince went hunting during the day but came to dinner and they talked till midnight. Thursday was the same, with hundreds more letters and telegrams, and she posed for photographers for an hour. ‘When we went out at 4, there was a large crowd – most embarrassing.’ That evening the Prince had to go to an Industrial Welfare Society dinner, but he came around to Bruton Street afterwards to see her. ‘Talked nonsense till 12!’13

  The Prince of Wales sent Elizabeth a warm letter of congratulation. ‘I’m so glad & I do so hope you will both be very very happy.’14 Arthur Penn wrote with emotion to her and she replied at once that his letter was ‘far the nicest I’ve had yet … It was all so surprising and I am very pleased with being engaged!’15 Penn wrote also to Lady Strathmore and she thanked him, praising his understanding of Elizabeth’s character. ‘She is such a perfect being in every way that I am naturally very anxious about her future, because outside, or rather inside that bright character is a terribly acute sensitiveness, which makes life much more difficult for her. However Prince Bertie simply adores her, and I think grasps her true worth – although I think he will have to grow a little older to fully appreciate her character.’16

  In reply to D’Arcy Osborne’s congratulations, Elizabeth wrote, ‘You must come round and “ ’ave one” soon, you have no idea how tiring it is being engaged! I am quite gaga already!!’17 On Friday 19 January they were again swamped with letters which she endeavoured to go through with the help of a secretary, Norah Chard, enlisted by Louis Greig. After lunch she and the Duke drove to Richmond Park to look at the garden of White Lodge, the house the King and Queen were planning to let them have. Once again, they talked long into the evening.18

  *

  ON SATURDAY MORNING she had to prepare herself for her first formal meeting with her future parents-in-law. She came downstairs at 11 o’clock, and then she and the Duke set off in his car to Liverpool Street station. Her parents followed in the Daimler. ‘We got to Liverpool St in about 10 minutes. Vast crowd there, & hundreds of photographers.’19 Together with the Duke and her parents, she journeyed in a special carriage attached to the 11.50 train to Wolferton, the station which served Sandringham. A cold lunch was served en route.

  King George VI’s biographer, John Wheeler-Bennett, commented decades later that her first meeting with the King and Queen as her future parents-in-law was ‘an ordeal not to be underestimated but Lady Elizabeth came through with flying colours’.20 The King and Queen were awaiting them at York Cottage. Both immediately thought Elizabeth pretty and charming; the King wrote in his diary, ‘Bertie is a very lucky fellow,’ and the Queen noted that she was ‘engaging & natural’, adding next day, ‘I am much taken with Elizabeth.’21 They took her and her parents straight to Sandringham House for tea with Queen Alexandra. Many years later Elizabeth recalled that the Queen ‘looked beautiful in her old age, and tho’ practically stone deaf, managed with those Danish gestures to convey quite a lot!’22 Also there to examine her were four more royal ladies: Queen Alexandra’s youngest daughter Queen Maud of Norway, her sister the Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia, mother of Tsar Nicholas II, and Queen Alexandra’s eldest daughter Princess Louise, Duchess of Fife, with her daughter Princess Maud. After tea she was taken upstairs to meet Princess Victoria, Queen Alexandra’s second daughter, who was ill.

  Elizabeth enchanted them all and Queen Mary thought it was ‘a very happy cheerful party’.23 When they returned to York Cottage Elizabeth and the Duke spent much of the rest of the weekend reading through more piles of letters, and writing replies to their friends, relations and well-wishers. To Lady Leicester, a neighbour at Holkham, the Prince wrote, ‘I am very very happy to know that my dream of some years has come true, & that the most wonderful person in the world is going to be my wife.’24

  Elizabeth told her sister May that she was ‘almost gaga with writing’. She said that she had just been through ‘the most ghastly ordeal of going to tea with Queen A and all the old ladies. They were all too angelic to me, but it is a strain! The King & Queen are both so charming to me, but it’s most terrifying! … I really feel so happy, it’s so surprising, I never thought I’d say yes.’25 To Beryl Poignand she wrote, ‘I’ve had a ghastly time this week with reporters & photographers curse them, but hope they will very soon get tired of us.’ Meeting all the relations had not been easy. ‘They have all been so very kind & charming, but I’m feeling utterly exhausted.’ She had already received letters from two of the former patients at Glamis, Ernest Pearce and Norman Jepson* – ‘such delicious letters. I was so pleased.’ After exclaiming, ‘I am so happy, & most surprised, as I never thought I’d marry him!!!’ she added, ‘I am so tired already – I think I shall probably die
long before I get married. How delighted the papers would be – after the ROMANCE the TRAGEDY! What ho. Best love, I’ve got at least 500 letters to write.’26

  Mike, her wittiest brother, wondered what the weekend at Sandringham was like. ‘I do hope Father is behaving nicely & not pouring his cocoa backwards and forwards in four cups & two tumblers under the Queen’s nose at breakfast … Well, what ho Cheerie ho, What ho what! Your loving Mike.’ In a postscript, he asked, ‘Have you written to James? I think you ought to. Poor James! He will be angry, won’t he?’27 James Stuart had indeed heard the news; he sent a telegram of congratulations from New York.28 George Gage’s disappointment was acute, but he admitted, ‘You ought to be a princess – you are one naturally.’ He asked for her photograph.29 From Cairo came a letter from Archie Clark Kerr, who said that he was speechless with envy but sent her every possible kind wish.* The Prince, he thought, ‘is the luckiest person in the world to have for his own your happiness, your goodness, your beauty, your serenity, your everything that makes you what you are.’30

  *

  BY SUNDAY NIGHT the atmosphere at York Cottage was more relaxed. The Hardinges – Elizabeth’s friend Helen and her husband Alec, the King’s Assistant Private Secretary – came to dinner, and afterwards, watching the King and Prince Albert playing billiards, Elizabeth and Helen ‘sat on hot water pipes & talked’.31

  On Monday 22 January, the Prince and Elizabeth, with the Strathmores, left Norfolk by train from Wolferton, in the same private carriage. At Liverpool Street, there was another large, friendly crowd to greet them. He returned to Buckingham Palace, she to Bruton Street. At the Palace, the Prince immediately wrote to his mother thanking her for being so charming to Elizabeth.32 The Queen replied, ‘You ask what Papa & I think of Elizabeth, well we are simply enchanted with her & think her too dear & attractive for words & you have made a wonderful choice.’33 In the King’s eyes she possessed the added advantage of being ‘so unlike some of the modern girls’, and she would be ‘a great addition to our family circle’.34 To Lady Strathmore, Queen Mary wrote that the weekend had given her and the King ‘the greatest happiness and it was such a joy to see the radiant faces of “our children”. We are simply enchanted with your darling little Elizabeth and one and all here rave about her.’35

  That afternoon the Prince and his fiancée took tea with Princess Mary. Back home, Elizabeth found that her decision was proving contagious. ‘Doris came in – she is engaged to Clare Vyner.* I am so glad.’36 That was only the start of it. A few days later Diamond Hardinge announced that she was engaged – to Bobby Abercromby.†

  Next day, 23 January, the betrothed couple went with Lord Farquhar to inspect White Lodge. Farquhar,‡ a friend of the King and until recently Lord Steward, had leased the house from the Crown since 1909, and now relinquished it for them. It had been Queen Mary’s family home before her marriage, and she liked the idea of her son and his wife taking it over.37 Situated in the middle of Richmond Park, White Lodge was built by King George II between 1727 and 1729 ‘as a place of refreshment after the fatigues of the chace’. Queen Caroline, his wife, decided to live in it; later their daughter Princess Amelia was made Ranger of the Park and she took over the house and extended it.38 ‘We went all over the house. Charming place,’ Elizabeth commented in her diary.39 ‘I was simply enchanted by it all,’ she wrote to the Queen. ‘There is nowhere I should like to live in more, and I have fallen in love with it.’40 She did not remain enamoured for very long.

  The rest of the week was spent dealing with the continuing deluge of letters, seeing Diamond Hardinge, Arthur Penn, Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton and other friends, choosing new notepaper for herself, visiting her dressmaker, Madame Handley Seymour, for new clothes, dining at Claridge’s with the Duke and friends, and going with May and David to see a revue, The Co-Optimists§ – to find that a verse about her and the Duke had been added to one of the songs in the show. She also paid a visit to her doctor, Dr Irwin Moore, to have her throat treated. ‘It makes one feel awfully tired.’41 The treatment for tonsillitis, from which she suffered frequently, could be harsh in those days: she described it as having her throat ‘burnt’. She had eight more weekly sessions until the doctor pronounced her throat better in early April.

  On 25 January the Prince took the night train to Glasgow for two days of official visits. Released by their engagement from the conventions of formality, he and Elizabeth wrote to each other with a new tenderness. ‘My dear Darling, I am just writing you a very little letter,’ she began. ‘I shall be thinking about you when you get this, & hoping that everything will go off wonderfully well. I am quite sure it will. Also, I might add that I do [underlined several times] love you Bertie, & feel certain that I shall more & more. I shall miss you terribly. You are such an Angel to me. Goodbye till Sunday – may it come quickly. From your always & forever loving E.’42

  This letter crossed with one written by the Duke in pencil on the train.

  My own little darling one,

  How I hated leaving you this evening after our delightful little tete a tete dinner … This is my first letter to you since you made me such a very happy person that Sunday at St Paul’s Walden & you don’t know what a wonderful difference it has made to me darling, in all ways. I think I must have always loved you darling but could never make you realise it without telling you actually that I did & thank God I told you at the right moment.

  As soon as he reached Scotland, he wrote again in ink, ‘My darling, I have just arrived safely & am told a letter will reach you by the morning. I wrote you a line in the train in pencil which goes as well, though I know you don’t like pencil letters … I feel it terribly to be parted from you for so long darling.’43

  By the weekend, when she drove with her mother and her sister May to St Paul’s Walden, the excitement had taken its toll. ‘Felt very tired & rather depressed through feeling so tired,’ she wrote in her diary.44 She spent Sunday morning in bed; the Duke arrived at lunchtime, in a new car. That evening they danced a little and talked a lot.

  They returned to York Cottage on Monday 29 January to spend the week with the King and Queen. The days that followed were calm and predictable, as the King liked them to be, his future daughter-in-law absorbed into the routine without further ado. The men went shooting in the morning; the ladies joined them for lunch. The King wrote to his son Prince George of Elizabeth: ‘The more I see of her the more I like her.’45

  There were two more visits to the old ladies at Sandringham House – ‘Everybody as old as the hills!’46 wrote Elizabeth – a trip to Newmarket to see the King’s horses, lunch and a walk round the gardens at Holkham. The evenings were not lively. In other company she would certainly have preferred to dance to the gramophone, play games or sing, but she had evidently been advised to bring some kind of ‘work’ with her. ‘Knitted my blue thing after [dinner] until nearly 11,’ she noted in her diary on the first evening; and knit she did, for two more evenings. Her lack of skill at knitting socks later became a joke she shared with the King. Throughout the week, she and the Duke continued to reply to letters and to thank people for the gifts they had received.

  The Duke wrote an affectionate letter to his future mother-in-law to tell her how very happy he was that Elizabeth was to be his wife.

  I feel it must have come through all your great kindness to me during the last 3 years, when you were angelic enough to let me come to Glamis, St Paul’s Walden & Bruton Street after all the difficulties which seemed invariably to come up year after year. Elizabeth has always been angelic to me ever since I first knew her in 1920, & even after the various vicissitudes she was always the same wonderful friend to me. And now it has all changed into something much more wonderful, and I only hope that I am worthy of her great love. I can assure you that I will do my utmost to make her happy all our lives.47

  Lady Strathmore responded equally warmly. ‘All I ask & pray for, is that she shld be happy, & this I feel she will be with your love surrounding her. D
ear Bertie you have been so kind to me too, that I know, that tho’ I must in a sense lose E. I am gaining a son who will always be very dear to me.’48

  To Mabell Airlie the Duke wrote joyously, ‘How can I thank you enough for your most charming letter to me about the wonderful happenings in my life which have come to pass, & my one dream which has at last been realized. It all seems so marvellous to me & for me to know that my darling Elizabeth will one day be my wife. We are both very very happy & I am sure we shall always be.’ Her earlier letter after Christmas, he said, had been ‘an inspiration’ to them. ‘It only wanted very little to make us both make up our minds, and I am sure it was your words that did it … we can only bless you for what you did.’49

  Elizabeth wrote again to Beryl Poignand, saying that she had had a ‘delicious and restful week’ in Norfolk. ‘It is a bit of a strain staying with one’s future in-laws, whoever they are. Mine have been all too angelic to me, I must say.’50

  *

  ON 6 FEBRUARY James Stuart, who had just returned from New York, came to call. He was very depressed, Elizabeth thought, to find all his friends ‘engaged & scattered’. She recorded in her diary, ‘He is just the same – Very slow!’51 This private comment reveals, perhaps, that she had no regrets about him.

  Later that week she had a difficult day, driving with the Queen, the Duke and Louis Greig to White Lodge to go over the house again. Queen Mary loved the house as she knew it and considered that it was ‘in excellent order’.52 It was not easy for a young bride to suggest changes.53 After touring the upper floors for two hours they had a picnic lunch; then they descended to the basement, whereupon Sir John Baird, the First Commissioner of Works, arrived with the architects and they had to go all around the house again. It was exhausting.54