The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  I thank you with all my heart for what you have been to us during these last difficult and tragic months – a good counsellor and true friend – we are indeed grateful. I am, Your affectionate friend Elizabeth R.185

  * Sir Kenneth Clark (1903–83), Director of the National Gallery 1934–45, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, 1934–44. Later Slade Professor of Fine Art, Oxford, Professor of the History of Art, Royal Academy, and chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Author of many art-historical works, he was also an inspiring lecturer and broadcaster who reached a broad audience through his television series, notably Civilisation in 1969, the year in which he was created a life peer as Baron Clark of Saltwood.

  * The small Private Chapel in the royal apartments at the Castle is used only by the Royal Family. The Royal Chapel in the grounds of Royal Lodge is also a private chapel, originally built for King George IV and enlarged by Queen Victoria for the use of the Royal Family and people who lived and worked in the Great Park. It has its own chaplain, and members of the Royal Family regularly attend Sunday services there when staying at Windsor, rather than in St George’s Chapel in the Castle. St George’s is the chapel of the Order of the Garter, and the annual Garter service is held there, as well as some royal weddings and funerals.

  * Subsequently Queen Mary was quoted by one of her ladies in waiting as saying that ‘My son actually came to see me one day in November and said, “I’m going to marry Mrs Simpson on April 27 and be crowned on May 12.” I said, “But my dear David you cannot do any such thing.” Well, he said that was what he had decided to do.’ (Note by Owen Morshead, 14 January 1937, RA AEC/GG/12/OS/1)

  * According to a later chatelaine of Chatsworth, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, Queen Elizabeth never stayed at the house again, because of its association with this unhappy time in her life.

  † Reginald Herbert, fifteenth Earl of Pembroke (1880–1960), and his wife Beatrice. Their daughter Patricia (1904–94) was a friend of the Duchess of York and later, as Lady Hambleden, became a long-serving lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth.

  * She was now the Princess Royal, the title traditionally conferred on the eldest daughter of the sovereign, but held by only one princess at a time. So Princess Mary acquired it in 1931, on the death of the previous Princess Royal, Princess Louise, Duchess of Fife, the eldest daughter of King Edward VII.

  * Lieutenant Colonel Victor Cazalet (1896–1943), MP for Chippenham 1924–43. He served as political liaison officer to General Sikorski, the Polish wartime leader, from 1940, and was killed in the same aeroplane crash as the General in 1943.

  * Lady Hyde (1900–70), née the Hon. Marion Glyn, married in 1932 George, Lord Hyde, eldest son of sixth Earl of Clarendon. He was killed in a shooting accident in 1935. Their son Laurence became the seventh Earl.

  * Sir Harold Nicolson KCVO CMG (1886–1968), diplomat, author, diarist and politician, married to the writer Vita Sackville-West. He entered Parliament as a member of the National Labour Party in 1935 and quickly became a strong voice in alerting the country to the dangers of fascism. His diaries are among the most important first-hand accounts of British political and social life in the mid-twentieth century. He wrote the official biography of King George V, published in 1952.

  * The Koh-i-nûr (Mountain of Light) was the most famous of the jewels in the Lahore Treasury, ceded to Britain following the annexation of the Punjab in 1849. The diamond was presented to Queen Victoria in 1850 and recut under Prince Albert’s direction in 1852.

  * Ribbentrop, a supporter of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, had already given the Nazi salute in an even more enthusiastic manner, when he presented his credentials to the King. This had caused something of a scandal. The German diplomat Reinhard Spitzy recorded that, although the King had smiled weakly, his courtiers were furious and the press splashed the story, nicknaming the Ambassador ‘Brickendrop’. The salutes nonetheless continued. Spitzy wrote that at this Court ‘Ribbentrop delivered his three salutes in a rather more conciliatory fashion and not without a little humility.’ (Reinhard Spitzy, How We Squandered the Reich, Michael Russell, 1997, pp. 70–1)

  * Sitwell had written an ‘Ode for the Coronation of Their Majesties, May 12, 1937’, which began:

  The King and Queen of England, what fair names

  That for a thousand years have lit the flames

  Within Their people’s hearts; what trumpets sound

  Through timeless vistas as They both are crowned!

  * The chaplain’s faint in 1937 was recorded by King George VI himself. The 1923 incident appears only in Dorothy Laird’s Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Coronet, 1966; it may be that Laird confused the two occasions.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  QUEEN CONSORT

  1937–1939

  ‘From thirty to forty, one battled and remade one’s ideas’

  THE HISTORIAN and royal biographer Noble Frankland observed that most biographies are about extraordinary people: they seek to explain how their subjects accomplished ‘whatever it was that caught the eye of history’, and they explore tensions related to ability, ambition and rivalry. The tension in a royal biography, however, ‘is about how the ordinary man adjusts to the extraordinary position into which he is born’. The interesting question is not the position itself, nor how the subject reached it, but what sort of a fist he made of it.1

  In the case of the non-royal bride of a royal prince, of course, it is marriage rather than birth that confers her position on her. As the subject of a biography, therefore, she crosses the boundary between Dr Frankland’s definitions, for the story of how she achieved her marriage may well be part of the interesting question. This is certainly so in Queen Elizabeth’s case. She was the first commoner to become queen consort since the seventeenth century – that in itself is of interest, at least to students of the British monarchy. Secondly, how she reached her position is of interest not just because it is an appealingly romantic tale, but also because it took place against a background of social and political ferment potentially damaging to the monarchy. Then there is the added curiosity that it was not a position she had sought. Indeed she rejected it at first. The story so far has tried to show why she inspired her royal suitor with so powerful a determination to win her hand. It has aimed also to show what she made of the position she took on.

  The moment when the reluctant royal Duchess found herself becoming a queen malgré elle is an appropriate one at which to step back to consider her life as she had lived it since she had joined the Royal Family. In so doing we may ask how successful she had been in filling the lesser role into which she had married, and how well this had fitted her for the greater one into which she was now projected.

  She had been understandably nervous of marrying into the first family of the land, a family far less easy-going and openly affectionate than her own. She was reluctant to have to live a life of much more formality, constraint and public scrutiny than she had ever known. But she had adapted superbly and had quickly learned how to win the approval and affection of both the King and Queen and the wider family.

  She had disliked the autocratic streak in her father-in-law which alienated his sons from him, but she treated him with a combination of respect, humour and charm which won him over. Although she enjoyed dancing, cabarets and nightclubs as much as many contemporary young women, she retained a romantic, old-fashioned seemliness which the King contrasted favourably with the fast, modern girls whom he deplored. The warm relationship she established with him – knitting him socks and sharing jokes – enabled her to stand her ground without causing friction, to protect herself, her husband and his brothers from paternal wrath, and also to use her influence with the King to good effect in her public life.

  With Queen Mary she was perhaps not quite as successful, although this is largely a matter of speculation, for the correspondence between them was invariably affectionate. In character, the two women were quite different, with Queen Mary as reserved and methodical as her daughter-in-l
aw was outgoing and spontaneous. But each made an effort to treat the other considerately, and the Duchess showed tact in consulting her mother-in-law and sharing activities that both enjoyed: shopping, interior decorating, visits to art galleries. Importantly, too, the two confided in each other about the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson, a matter on which they saw eye to eye, and which undoubtedly drew them together.

  There were disagreements, resentments, near-rebellion – over White Lodge, over the naming of Princess Margaret, over the numbers of Court functions which the King and Queen insisted the Duke and Duchess attend – in other words, whenever the young couple felt their own rights and independence threatened by unwarrantable interference. But from the start the young Duchess had the wisdom and self-control to keep such feelings in check, and to encourage her husband, who was easily angered and demoralized, to do the same. She could usually turn a situation to their advantage, or at least make the best of it. She was by nature cheerful, positive and optimistic – to a fault, some would say later. It was not a one-way process. At the start of her marriage, she knew little of what was expected of her as a royal duchess, but she had been very willing to learn and paid tribute to the King and Queen for all that they had taught her.2

  As a daughter-in-law, then, she had filled her position with great success. As a wife, she achieved even more. That she and the Duke were happily married is evident from their letters and was obvious to those who saw them together both publicly and privately. The give and take in a marriage is so subtle and private a matter that no outsider can perceive the full truth of it. But she had clearly given her husband the self-assurance and joy that he had lacked. In particular, she helped him to overcome the stammer which had embittered his relations with his father. By the Duke’s own account, the King had considered him unfit for a public role because of it. After the Duke’s marriage, however, the King had gradually lost his prejudice against him, as the Duke appeared increasingly confident in public with his wife at his side. The Australasian tour, followed by the Duke’s performance as lord high commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1929, set the seal on the King’s regard for him – not entirely coincidentally, just as his respect for his eldest son waned. It was a change to which the Duchess had contributed a great deal. She had succeeded as a mother too; the births of her two daughters brought much happiness to her and her husband, while reassuring the Royal Family and the nation that the succession was safe even if the Prince of Wales did not marry.

  With the marriages of the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester in 1934 and 1935 the Duchess had acquired two sisters-in-law within a year, after more than eleven years as sole daughter-in-law to the King and Queen. She was no longer the only buffer between the King and his younger sons; and the larger family circle eased some of the pressure on the Yorks to be constantly on call for Court functions, or to spend more time at Sandringham or Balmoral than they wished. As for the Prince of Wales, his charm, high spirits and love of amusement appealed to the same qualities in her, and she remained devoted and sympathetic to him. But in the 1930s their lives diverged, they met less often and he seemed resolutely fixed on a path which dismayed and alarmed her, and which she was convinced was wrong.

  For all her commitment to her royal role, contact with her own family was vital to her wellbeing and she made sure that there was room for them in her life. If her parents were in London, she would lunch or dine with them when she could. She saw her brothers and their wives fairly often, especially David and his wife Rachel, whom he had married in 1929.* She saw her eldest brother Patrick and his wife Dorothy, to whom she had never been close, less frequently. Her sisters were habitual visitors, as were her nephews and nieces, especially the Elphinstone children, who came to stay at Birkhall in the summer holidays; and she and the Duke often stayed with the Elphinstones at Carberry when they had engagements in Edinburgh. Each year they and their daughters would spend several weeks at Glamis in the late summer and autumn, and at other times of the year they visited her parents in Hertfordshire.

  In the first few years of their marriage, as we have seen, the Yorks had no really satisfactory home of their own, either in London or in the country. The gradual resolution of this problem was a minor triumph for both of them, which took patience on their part and forbearance on Queen Mary’s. The exchange of White Lodge for 145 Piccadilly in 1927 was accomplished with the Queen’s help, when she might have taken umbrage; when the King offered them Royal Lodge as a country home, they accepted it against Queen Mary’s advice and won her round. In Scotland, meanwhile, they gradually established a claim on Birkhall as their base, although the King and Queen seemed not to understand why they preferred this extra expense to free accommodation at Balmoral.

  By 1935 the pattern had been set: from January to early August the York family was based at 145 Piccadilly, with most weekends and much of April spent at Royal Lodge. They stayed at Windsor Castle with the King and Queen for a few days in April, sometimes over Easter. From early August to mid-October they were in Scotland, with visits to Glamis at the beginning and end, and six weeks or so at Birkhall in between. Then they returned to London, with occasional shooting weekends for the Duke – often accompanied by the Duchess – in the country, until Christmas, when they all went to Sandringham to stay with the King and Queen for about three weeks. Sometimes the children would remain longer with their royal grandparents; at other times they would go to stay with the Strathmores.

  Since the giddy days of the 1920s when, as Queen Elizabeth later expressed it, ‘we did night club life madly for a few years, but also mixed with dinners & country house visits,’3 the Duke and Duchess’s social life had become quieter and more sedate, as the demands of both public and family life grew with their own maturity and sense of purpose. ‘Out of the welter, one gradually found one’s feet & head,’4 she wrote. They still dined out frequently with friends and went to private dances – charity balls at the great London houses or hotels were an obligation. More often, the dinner parties they gave or attended were followed by film shows, trips to the theatre and occasionally to the ballet. Their circle of friends had changed little since their marriage. The Duchess had kept many of her girlhood friends, habitués of Glamis house parties and London dances – notably Doris and Clare Vyner, Lavinia Annaly, who had accompanied her to East Africa and was still an ‘extra’ lady in waiting, Katie Seymour and Helen Hardinge, James Stuart and his elder brother Francis, the Earl of Moray.* Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and his wife Princess Olga visited them on their trips to England. Patricia Herbert, now Lady Hambleden, remained a lifelong friend, as did Tortor Gilmour, who had shared the Yorks’ Australasian tour with them; another friend was Audrey Field, formerly Coats, one of the flightier members of their set in the early 1920s.† Among the couples they saw most often were Teddy and Dorothé Plunket, whom they had known since their early married days; Maureen and Oliver Stanley were also good friends, she the daughter of Lord Londonderry, and once admired by the Duke, he a rising politician, the younger son of the Earl of Derby. It was not a fiercely intellectual set, but nor was it as frivolous as that of the Prince of Wales. The Duchess enjoyed people who had brains as well as charm and throughout her life she made sure that her close circle included people whom she found stimulating and amusing.

  As well as those of her own generation, there were older friends. She and the Duke were often entertained by her godmother Mrs Arthur James, whom she described as ‘one of the survivors of the Edwardian era’.5 Another Edwardian survivor and friend was Mrs Ronnie Greville, with whom they regularly spent a June or July weekend at Polesden Lacey. Each summer they also visited Trent Park in Middlesex, the home of the rich and hospitable Philip Sassoon, who entertained them lavishly at his London house as well. Here they met his cousin Hannah Gubbay, née Rothschild, who acted as his hostess and later inherited Trent Park: she was a friend of Queen Mary and became the Duchess’s friend too. When public duties took them north, the Duke and Duchess might stay at S
tudley Royal with the Vyners, at Lumley Castle with Katharine (the Duchess’s girlhood friend Katie McEwen) and Roger Lumley or at Darnaway in Morayshire with Francis and Barbara Moray; they were invited occasionally to Chatsworth, Longleat, Knowsley and other great houses. In the winter they spent shooting weekends at Elveden, Wilton and Lord Mildmay’s house, Flete, in Devon.

  This relaxed and agreeable social life amid a group of good friends was something of an innovation in the Royal Family. Had the Duchess been born a princess, she would not have been brought up among such people as her equals, and would have been far less able to form close and lasting friendships with them. Her friends had become the Duke’s friends. Although the King and Queen appeared in society and the King had his shooting and sailing intimates, their sons yearned for a new, less formal life. For the Prince of Wales this quest ultimately led to complete rupture with the world of his parents, but for his younger brother and successor it helped shape his idea of kingship, in which the sovereign would be a far less remote figure than his father had been. It was a social life the Duchess thoroughly enjoyed: although a member of the Royal Family, her position was still sufficiently untrammelled for her to choose, and see, her own friends, yet exalted enough to include plenty of delightful evenings and weekends in beautiful surroundings at the grandest of houses in London or the country.

  She had many friends, but she was well aware that the motives of those who sought her friendship might be suspect.6 She said some years later that she had very few intimates, and in 1936 she was still asking herself who her real friends were.7 Despite her caution, she retained several very close friendships, and in particular those which sprang from family contacts in her unmarried days, notably Arthur Penn, D’Arcy Osborne and Jasper Ridley. Less a confidant or mentor than a clever and well-placed friend was Duff Cooper, politician and diplomat; he and his wife Diana belonged to her social circle.