The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  In early December the Queen had a rare treat: she went to a private lunch party with friends. ‘I enjoyed it enormously. My first luncheon party out since Dec 1936.’ Hannah Gubbay was the hostess and one of the other guests was Osbert Sitwell, who gave her a book on gardens. Thanking him, she told him how much she appreciated his ‘unfailing and loyal friendship’. Reflecting the widespread nervousness about the state of the world, she told him how much she loved his writing and asked him to ‘Write us something hopeful & courageous for next year. After all, this is a grand little country, & as we can never be warlike, let us at least have some pride in it – we must be serious about something.’76

  Christmas 1937 at Sandringham was a relief – in 1935 the King had been dying, in 1936 the King had just gone over the water. Now, everyone – King, Queens, family, friends, Household, staff – could enjoy the end of the first year of a new and optimistic reign which they all hoped would prosper. In the party was Dick Molyneux, to whom the Queen had sent a characteristic invitation: ‘My dear Dick, Will you come to Sandringham for Xmas and help us with [three drawings of bottles, each larger than the last, labelled Claret, Burgundy and Champagne respectively] pull a few [drawing of a cracker] & help us with that [drawing of a Christmas tree]? I hope that you are free -(not too free of course). Yours sincerely, Elizabeth R.’77

  After the King’s Christmas Day broadcast, which he did well in spite of his nervousness, both the King and the Queen could relax a little. There was only one slight family mishap. Before Christmas the Queen sent the Duke of Windsor a present, a set of antique dessert knives and forks with porcelain handles. In a letter to accompany them she wrote that she hoped that ‘perhaps they might appeal to you, who like old things … Anyway, they take best wishes for Xmas & the New Year, of health & happiness to both of you. With love, Yours Elizabeth.’78 Unfortunately this letter was not posted with the parcel, and the Duke, evidently puzzled by a set of cutlery with no note, wrote saying he assumed he must have been sent the present in error – he offered to return it.79 The Queen was embarrassed and responded at once: ‘Darling David, When I received your little note this morning, I rushed to my writing table, and after hunting about amongst the letters on it, I found the lost letter. I am furious and disappointed, because I left it addressed & ready to post, and have no idea what can have happened … you must have thought it very odd.’80

  The Duke replied that he was surprised to get any gift. ‘Since your note of November 23rd nineteen hundred and thirty six, in which you stated that “we both uphold you always”, so many things have happened to contradict this statement, things which I know from my own experience as King, lay in Bertie’s power to prevent, that it is not easy to believe that we are the recipients of so beautiful a gift. At the same time, we both appreciate and thank you for your thought of us.’81

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  EARLY IN THE new year the Queen was yet again laid low by influenza. So was Princess Elizabeth, and they wrote to each other pencilled letters from their respective sickbeds.

  Her Royal Highness

  The Princess Elizabeth

  In Bed

  Sandringham.

  My darling Angel, Thank you so very much for your dear little letter … I believe that I have got the same disease as you have, only I was sick, & you felt sick! I hope that your throat is better, and drink plenty of orange juice with plain water mixed.82

  The next day, the Queen’s letter was addressed to her daughter at ‘Gettingupforlunch, The Nursery’. She was glad that the Princess was feeling better. ‘I am feeling much better too, but still a little achy and still living on tea! I hope by tomorrow that I shall be eating Irish stew, steak & kidney pudding, haricot mutton, roast beef, boiled beef, sausages & mutton pies, not to mention roast chicken, fried chicken, boiled chicken, scrambled chicken, scrunched up chicken, good chicken, nasty chicken, fat chicken, thin chicken, any sort of chicken.’83

  While she was in bed she read Leo Rosten’s Hyman Kaplan stories, which D’Arcy Osborne had sent her. Once more, Osborne had judged his friend well. She found the New York Jewish humour of the stories ‘heavenly’. But her relationship with Osborne operated on many levels: as well as exchanging jokes they debated issues of state and morality. He was one of the few people to whom she talked and wrote in absolute confidence. Now, she told him she was worried about the sort of leadership she and, more especially, the King should provide. The Queen feared that since young people had given up on religion,

  they look more & more to individual leadership, or rather leadership by an individual, and that is going to be very difficult to find. It is almost impossible for the King to be that sort of leader. For many years there was a Prince of Wales, who did all the wise & silly & new things that kept people amused & interested, & yet, because he did not, or would not realize that they did not want that sort of thing from their King – well he had to go.

  It seems impossible to mix King and ordinary vulgar leadership – so what can we do? We don’t want Mosleys, perhaps something will turn up. In the old days Religion must have given the people a great sense of security & right, and now there seems to be a vague sense of fear. Or am I sensing something that isn’t there at all. Perhaps it is me … What a sadness that things aren’t going any better in this troubled world.84

  Osborne agreed with her.85

  On 4 February 1938 Hitler made himself supreme commander of the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) and later that month he demanded that the Austrian government ‘invite’ German troops into Austria. ‘It was nothing less than the end of Austria’s independence,’ wrote Duff Cooper in his diary. ‘A portentous development in European history about which nobody in England seems to give a damn.’86

  After Austria, Czechoslovakia was the next country threatened by Hitler. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1938 the Sudeten Germans, who had been incorporated into the new Czechoslovak state after Austria-Hungary’s defeat in 1918, were instructed by Berlin to make more and more impossible demands upon the government in Prague, in order that Hitler could claim that they were being persecuted. Chamberlain made it clear in Parliament that Britain would not risk war with Germany to defend Czechoslovakia’s integrity and, in a vain effort to prise Mussolini away from Hitler, Britain signed the so-called Easter Accords with Italy. The main effect of these was to recognize Italian conquests in Africa. Anthony Eden resigned as foreign secretary in protest and was replaced by Lord Halifax. The dictators marched on.

  In these ominous circumstances the King and Queen were making plans for their first state visit. President Lebrun of France, which was Britain’s principal democratic ally in Europe, had invited them to Paris at the end of June. The purpose of the visit was both to demonstrate the strength of the renewed monarchy and to cement the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale in the face of German and Italian threats.* It would be the first British state visit to France since that of King George V and Queen Mary in April 1914, only a few weeks before both countries were at war with Germany. Many people believed that a similar disaster was inevitable once again. Others hoped that demonstrations of solidarity by the democracies could help to drive away the danger.

  The Queen asked her new dressmaker Norman Hartnell to create a collection of dresses for Paris. In his memoirs, Hartnell recalled that the King showed him at Buckingham Palace portraits by Winterhalter of the Empresses Eugénie of France and Elisabeth of Austria, wearing crinolines. The King made it clear to him that this romantic, swaying style was favoured. And so that was what Hartnell fashioned.

  While the preparations for Paris were gathering pace, the health of the Queen’s mother declined seriously. She had been ill for many months and for part of the time had to stay in a London nursing home, where the Queen visited her frequently. She was able to move back to the family home in Bruton Street but grew weaker through the early summer of 1938. On 22 June her condition worsened. The Queen, her father, the King and other members of the family gathered at Lady Strathmore’s bedside. At two o�
��clock in the morning of 23 June she died.

  Her daughter Elizabeth had often said that she had been ‘dreading this moment’ since childhood; now that it had come, she found it hard to grasp.87 ‘We are all feeling very unhappy,’ she wrote at once to the Archbishop of Canterbury; ‘my mother was so much the pivot of the family, so vital and so loving and so marvellously loyal to those she loved, or the things she thought right – an Angel of goodness & fun.’88 Her mother had indeed been an extraordinary matriarch; she possessed a genius for family life, as The Times noted. The loss of four children, especially her firstborn, Violet, at the age of eleven, left wounds which never healed, but also gave her unusual understanding of others. She never felt self-pity; she was a person to whom everyone, within and without the family, turned for advice or consolation. The Queen received hundreds of letters of condolence from people all over the world who had been touched by her mother. The Duke of Windsor sent a telegram from Antibes: ‘Sincerest sympathy in your great loss. David’.89

  It was just five days before the state visit to Paris. Both governments were anxious not to cancel the visit. There was some discussion about whether the Queen should stay at home and the King make the trip alone. But she was determined to accompany him as promised. President Lebrun suggested the visit be postponed for three weeks, which was agreed. Writing to thank Neville Chamberlain for his condolences, the Queen said she was sorry about the postponement ‘but as it was all Galas and Banquets and garden parties, it would have seemed rather a mockery to take part so soon, and the French have been very good about it, do you not think so?’90

  Lady Strathmore’s funeral was arranged at Glamis for 27 June and the family asked Arthur Penn, as one of their oldest friends, to arrange a simultaneous memorial service in London. Penn was deeply affected by Lady Strathmore’s death. He recalled in a letter to the Queen the ‘incomparable devotion between mother & daughter’. He had so many ‘perfect pictures’ of her mother – ‘in days long ago at St James Square, when you were coming out & we were all friends together – at St Paul’s Walden in summer days, – & most of all at Glamis’. He pictured Lady Strathmore sitting at the head of the dining-room table, at her piano playing Scarlatti and Bach by candlelight, ‘& most of all in her white sitting room, which seemed from every corner to radiate the kindness & character of its occupant’. The last time he was at Glamis he found her in the evening ‘alone, sitting quietly by herself resting contentedly after the exodus of a tribe of her grandchildren … I thought then how happy a picture she presented, surrounded by those who loved her, & of these I know you were always foremost.’91 The Queen treasured this letter.

  She concealed her misery from most and travelled with the King up to Glamis overnight on 25 June. In her childhood home she and other members of the family sat together for a time in her mother’s sitting room and, she told Penn, ‘found comfort even in that’.92 The funeral began with a short private service in the chapel where the family had worshipped all their lives. She found it ‘exquisite in its simplicity and beauty’.93

  Then the coffin was borne by farm-cart to the burial ground half a mile away, followed by a long line of mourners, including the King. The Queen and her father, who was calm and buoyed by his religious faith, came in a car. When the cortege was at the graveside the heavens opened and torrents of rain soaked the mourners. The King persuaded his wife and father-in-law to remain in the car while he helped carry the wreaths to the graveside, including the cross of white carnations and blue irises from Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, who remained in London. The Queen and her father then joined the King, and they stood in the lashing wind and rain for the service of committal taken by the Bishop of St Andrews.94 The Queen liked the wildness – ‘The elements taking a part made the whole mournful affair less agonizing.’95

  Afterwards she and the King went north to rest – not to Balmoral but to Birkhall. Alone with her husband in the mountains and woods, she received and wrote many letters. She told Queen Mary that her mother had had a real sense of perspective – ‘she gave things their due importance, and the things that did not matter were relegated to the background – that is so rare in women, & a great gift’. She assured her mother-in-law, ‘You have it very strongly darling Mama.’96

  The Queen received reports of the memorial service, held at St Martin in the Fields in London at the same time as the funeral in Glamis. Cosmo Lang sent her his own address, in which he had said of Lady Strathmore, ‘She raised a Queen in her own home, simply, by trust and love, and as a return the Queen has won widespread love. Her charm and graciousness were not due to any conscious effort but the simple outflow of her spirit.’97 The Queen wrote to thank him, saying his words were ‘perfect … Thank you, thank you, dear friend & good counsellor.’98

  Arthur Penn wrote in more intimate fashion about the London service. He thought the music had lifted it out of the melancholy which Lady Strathmore would have hated. The congregation was both distinguished and diverse and included ‘a considerable number of what Lord Curzon used to term “the rascality” ’ – which just went to show how widely she was loved. The church had been filled; Penn drew a moving portrait of Barson, the family butler, ‘who advanced down the aisle with his battered old face full of grief, making apologetic & deprecatory noises at being given the place to which his long & faithful service so amply entitled him’.99 The Queen thanked Penn ‘from my heart’. Birkhall had brought her solace, she said. ‘I have climbed one or two mountains, & spent my days amongst them, and feel very soothed – they are so nice & big & everlasting & such a lovely colour.’100 She picked a spray of bell heather to send to her daughters.101

  After only a few days the peace had to end and it was back to London to rush through the preparations for Paris. The Queen had to make serious decisions about her wardrobe. She was in mourning and the coloured dresses that Hartnell had made were quite unsuitable. She was confronted with the possibility of having to wear only black and purple. According to Hartnell’s own account, he then pointed out that there was an alternative: white was also a colour of royal mourning – after all Queen Victoria had insisted on a white funeral.102 White was a bold proposal. But after some discussion the King and Queen agreed – instead of black, the Queen would be all in white. The couturier gathered all his seamstresses and in a fortnight all of the principal outfits had been remade. The Queen had to have endless new fittings and wrote to Queen Mary, ‘I am nearly demented with rushing up & down & trying to order & try on all my white things for Paris!’103

  It was worth all the trouble. The new dresses were exquisite and their effect was mesmerizing. As a result, Hartnell became official Court dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth, designing all her important outfits for the next four decades.

  *

  ON 19 JULY THE King and the Queen, who was still dressed in black, embarked at Dover on the Admiralty yacht, Enchantress. They crossed the Channel in thick mist, escorted by eight E-class destroyers – Electra, Escort, Express, Esk, Escapade, Eclipse, Echo and Encounter – and an air escort of eighteen Anson planes. In mid-Channel they were received by seven French destroyers, all flying the Union flag at their masthead, and the fleet made its way to Boulogne. From there the royal party took the train to Paris, a city the Queen had loved since her first adventurous visits as a young woman.

  They stepped into the heart of the city at the restored ceremonial railway station in the Bois de Boulogne. On the train the Queen had changed and appeared in the first of Hartnell’s dazzling white creations, a two-piece dress and coat edged with silver fox. From that moment, she captured Paris. Throughout, her dresses seemed to suit her personality exactly and were deemed to be lovely even by the fashion-conscious French. A 101-gun salute welcomed them and thousands of white doves were released. From the Eiffel Tower flew what was possibly the largest Union flag ever made, measuring 1,500 square yards.104 Public buildings were lavishly decorated and tens of thousands of shops and homes displayed the flags of the two countries and
photographs of the King and Queen. In deference to the Queen’s ancestry, even the Loch Ness monster made an appearance on the Seine.105

  Special apartments had been decorated for them at the Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, overlooking the river, at a cost of some eight million francs. Paintings, furniture and tapestries were brought from the Louvre and from the palaces of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Chantilly; the Queen’s bed had belonged to Marie Antoinette, the King’s to Napoleon. Silk had been specially woven – the Queen was even asked what colour she would like – for the walls of the Queen’s room. The chef from the Hotel Crillon came to cook for them in an electric kitchen built for their visit.106 Luxurious modern bathrooms had been installed, one silver and the other gold. (Only a few years later, during the Nazi occupation, Field Marshal Göring was reported to have filled what had been the King’s dressing room with cupboards for a hundred uniforms.)107

  Although the French took security very seriously – King Alexander I of Yugoslavia had been assassinated during his state visit to France in 1934 – the atmosphere was joyous and seemed to some of the English officials not unlike the Jubilee or the Coronation. Cheering crowds greeted the King and Queen everywhere they went. Lady Diana Cooper wrote, ‘Each night’s flourish outdid the last. At the opera we leant over the balustrade to see the Royal couple, shining with stars and diadem and the Légion d’Honneur proudly worn, walk up the marble stairs preceded by les chandeliers – two valets bearing twenty-branched candelabra of tall white candles.’ The Queen was wearing a spreading gown of oyster-coloured satin, the skirt draped in festoons held by clusters of cream velvet camellias. The Dowager Duchess of Rutland, standing with Diana Cooper and the Winston Churchills (who had been invited by the French government), said, ‘I felt proud of my nation. The French went mad about the King and Queen. Winston was like a school boy he was so delighted.’108