The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  The young couple spent the first part of their honeymoon at Broadlands, the Mountbatten home in Hampshire. There the Princess received a loving letter from her father: ‘I was so proud of you & thrilled at having you so close to me on our long walk in Westminster Abbey,’ he wrote, ‘but when I handed your hand to the Archbishop I felt that I had lost something very precious. You were so calm & composed during the Service & said your words with such conviction, that I knew everything was all right.’ He was relieved that she had told her mother that the delay they had imposed on her engagement and marriage was for the best.

  I was rather afraid that you had thought I was being hard hearted about it. I was so anxious for you to come to South Africa as you knew. Our family, us four, the ‘Royal Family’ must remain together with additions of course at suitable moments!! I have watched you grow up all these years with pride under the skilful direction of Mummy, who as you know is the most marvellous person in the World in my eyes, & I can, I know, always count on you, & now Philip, to help us in our work. Your leaving us has left a great blank in our lives but do remember that your old home is still yours & do come back to it as much & as often as possible. I can see that you are sublimely happy with Philip which is right but don’t forget us is the wish of

  Your ever loving & devoted

  PAPA24

  From Broadlands, the Princess wrote equally loving letters to her parents. To her mother she said, ‘Darling Mummy, I don’t know where to begin this letter, or what to say, but I know I must write it somehow, as I feel so much about it. First of all, to say thank you … I tried to say the other evening how much I appreciated all you have done for me, but somehow it wouldn’t come. It’s been such fun being together – all four of us – and I hope that we shall have just as much fun, now that you have got a son-in-law!’ She hoped her mother had not been too miserable at the wedding. ‘I was so happy and enjoying myself so much, that I became completely selfish and forgot about your feelings or anyone else’s!’

  She thought her mother had looked wonderful: ‘Not just “the bride’s mother” but you – and in the middle of all the fuss and bustle, you were as helpful and wonderful as ever. (I do hope this doesn’t sound sentimental, because it isn’t meant to be – just the truth). I think I’ve got the best mother and father in the world, and I only hope that I can bring up my children in the happy atmosphere of love and fairness which Margaret and I have grown up in. I feel it will be easier for me with such a vivid example and personal experience to guide me!’ The Princess went on to say that she and Prince Philip felt completely at ease together – ‘we behave as though we had belonged to each other for years! Philip is an angel – he is so kind and thoughtful, and living with him and having him around all the time is just perfect.’25

  The Queen loved this letter; she re-read it many times, she told the Princess – ‘and each time I feel more thankful for our darling little daughter!’ She assured Princess Elizabeth that her parents were ‘so happy in your happiness’, having always hoped that she would be able to make a marriage of the heart as well as the head. ‘We both love Philip already as a son.’ She looked forward to having just as much fun as before now that ‘we four’ had become ‘we five’. She wrote that she had thought about her daughter ‘for nearly every minute’ since she had driven away. ‘Darling Lilibet, no parents ever had a better daughter, you are always such an unselfish & thoughtful angel to Papa & me, & we are so thankful for all your goodness and sweetness … That you & Philip should be blissfully happy & love each other through good days and bad or depressing days is my one wish – a thousand blessings to you both from your very very loving Mummy.’26

  From Hampshire the newlyweds travelled, with corgis, to Birkhall; the Princess, used to the Highlands in the summer, found the November corridors cold and draughty but the rooms were wonderfully warmed by large log fires. She wrote again to her mother to tell her how ‘blissfully happy’ she was, but she was beginning to realize what terrific changes marriage brought to life. She did want to ask her mother’s advice, in particular about how to square her husband’s feelings with the formalities of the Court. ‘Philip is terribly independent, and I quite understand the poor darling wanting to start off properly, without everything being done for us.’ She hoped to enable her husband to be ‘boss in his own home’ and she knew how difficult this would be, living in her old rooms at Buckingham Palace and subject to endless protocol. She was right – it was indeed hard for the Prince to remain his own man. He considered some of the courtiers to be overly conservative and stuffy; they found him abrasive and were unsympathetic. But it was essential for him to strive to maintain his independence and authority over the years ahead.

  The Princess ended her letter by writing, ‘It is so lovely and peaceful just now – Philip is reading full length on the sofa, Susan is stretched out before the fire, Rummy is fast asleep in his box beside the fire, and I am busy writing this in one of the arm chairs near the fire (you see how important the fire is!). It’s heaven up here!’27

  The new Duke of Edinburgh also wrote deeply affectionate letters in which he poured out his love for his new wife to his new mother-in-law. In one he said:

  Lilibet is the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good … Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me. Does one cherish one’s sense of humour or one’s musical ear or one’s eyes? I am not sure, but I know that I thank God for them and so, very humbly, I thank God for Lilibet and for us.28

  *

  THE NEXT GREAT family celebration was of the King and Queen’s Silver Wedding anniversary. It was an important and emotional moment for both of them – and for the country. The King’s biographer rightly quoted Walter Bagehot, who had stated, ‘A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and as such it rivets mankind.’ Eighty years before, with the happy marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert very much in mind, he had written, ‘We have come to believe that it is natural to have a virtuous sovereign, and that domestic virtues are as likely to be found on thrones as they are eminent when there.’29

  The marriage, at the threshold of which Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon had hesitated so long, had been a triumph. Both had brought great love, support and happiness to the other. Their evidently happy life together with their daughters had given great joy and a sense of confidence in the monarchy, particularly during the war. The family’s happiness was itself an object of national celebration.

  On the morning of 26 April 1948, the King and Queen celebrated Holy Communion at the Palace and then drove with Princess Margaret in an open landau to St Paul’s Cathedral, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip following in a second open carriage. It was an exquisite spring day and the streets were lined with troops and filled with huge crowds cheering in the sunshine. That afternoon, after a joyful service, they drove in an open car some twenty-two miles through London’s streets, greeted by more enthusiastic crowds. Back at the Palace they appeared several times on the balcony to acknowledge the cheering people in the Mall and that evening they both broadcast to the nation. The King said it was ‘unforgettable’ to realize how many thousands of people ‘wish to join in the thankfulness we feel for the twenty-five years of supremely happy married life which have been granted to us’.30

  The Queen spoke, clearly from the heart: ‘The world of our day is longing to find the secret of community, and all married lives are, in a sense, communities in miniature. There must be many who feel as we do that the sanctities of married life are in some ways the highest form of human fellowship, affording a rock-like foundation on which all the best in the life of the nations is built.’ Remembering her parents and ‘my own happy childhood’, she said, ‘I realise more and more the wonderful sense of security and happiness that comes from a loved home. T
herefore at this time my heart goes out to all those who are living in uncongenial surroundings and who are longing for the time when they will have a home of their own.’31

  Congratulations and tributes, public and private, were numerous. The National Association of Master Bakers, Confectioners and Caterers baked a vast three-tiered, red, white and blue cake weighing some 240 pounds while the Poet Laureate, John Masefield, offered his own praise:

  To These, today (to them a sacred day)

  Our hopes become a praying that the stress

  Of these, their cruel years, may pass away

  And happy years succeed, and Wisdom bless.

  The King and Queen were both surprised and much moved by the tributes that came from Britain and from all over the world. ‘We were both dumbfounded over our reception,’ the King told his mother.32 The day after their anniversary, they gave a formal dance at the Palace. Duff Cooper, back again from Paris for the occasion, had a long talk with the Queen ‘which is always a great pleasure for me. She was as charming as ever and talked so sensibly about everything.’ Nye Bevan, the Minister of Health, was there ‘in an ordinary blue suit’ – rather than in white tie and tails, like everyone else. Cooper thought the Queen would say something to him about it when he came towards them ‘but he must have sensed danger for he swerved off.’33

  Bevan may have been concerned that the Queen would have more serious questions to ask him than about his dress. The government’s plans, which Bevan was leading, to create a national health service and the consequent nationalization of the hospitals were causing the Royal Family concern.

  *

  THE LABOUR PARTY had been elected precisely to extend public ownership, and a national health service was one of the basic building blocks of its proposed welfare state. The King and the Queen both understood this, but they were also devoted to the idea of individual service and a serious question for the monarchy now was where a nationalized health service would leave royal patronage.

  At the end of the war there was a patchwork of about a thousand charity-funded hospitals in Britain and hundreds of them had links to the Crown. Members of the Royal Family had preserved these links for generations. These hospitals were unevenly spread across the country and of varying quality but Frank Prochaska later speculated that what he called ‘the old Guard’, including Queen Mary, the Queen and the Duke of Gloucester, must have seen the nationalization of the charitable hospitals as an act of vandalism comparable to the dissolution of the monasteries.34

  Be that as it may, Nye Bevan’s bill to nationalize the hospitals passed through Parliament in November 1946 and was due to take effect in July 1948. During the interregnum, members of the Royal Family ‘made a concerted effort to bolster morale in the hospitals by visiting many of them and making symbolic donations’.35 In his 1946 Christmas broadcast, the King had taken up the topical word ‘reconstruction’ to speak of the need for ‘spiritual reconstruction’, saying ‘If our feet are on the road of common charity … our differences will never destroy our underlying unity’.36

  Similarly, the Queen never criticized government policy, but time and again she emphasized the need for individual service and for Christian commitment. Thus, praising Tubby Clayton, the creator of Toc H, the Christian charity which she had admired for years, she said, ‘In a world where the individual may sometimes seem almost to lose his individuality, submerged beneath the mass movements of which we hear so much, we may well be heartened by remembering that we stand here today because of the inspiration of one man.’37 (Clayton’s church, All Hallows Berkyngechirche by the Tower, had been badly bombed during the war and he toured the United States afterwards seeking funds for its restoration. In 1948 the Queen laid the foundation stone of the east wall of the restored church.)

  But the spirit of the time demanded centralization and collectivism. Labour ministers were convinced that the state was the embodiment of social good and that only state action could transform society. To the dismay of the Queen, whose faith was at her core, even the Church of England endorsed and embraced this concept. She was concerned that the Church seemed to be always in retreat in face of the march of what, like many others, she called ‘material values’.

  Despite imminent nationalization, the Royal Family maintained the links with those hospitals with which they were most closely associated. In March 1948, the Queen visited the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead and made clear once more her enthusiasm for individual efforts, declaring that state control did ‘not absolve us from the practice of charity or from the exercise of vigilance. The English way of progress has always been to preserve good qualities and apply them to new systems.’38 In May that year she was guest of honour to mark Hospitals’ Day at the Mansion House. The future of the NHS could not be predicted, she said, but it would still need charitable volunteers – she called on hospitals to enrol charitable workers so as to ‘show that sympathy and compassion were still freely given’.39 That same month Princess Elizabeth attended the annual Court of Governors of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney, of which she was president and her mother patron. Referring to the members of the Court whose years of work would soon be rewarded by compulsory retirement, she was frank: ‘I feel a very special regret because of the long connection my family has had with this hospital.’40

  Nationalization proceeded, but the charities were determined to try and keep royal patronage alive. Perhaps to its chagrin, certainly to its surprise, the Labour government found that such patronage was still needed. Indeed a Home Office memorandum warned that any withdrawal of royal patronage might be construed as royal disapproval of the new NHS – and that would not do for either side.41 In fact there was a silver lining. Now that both the municipal hospitals and the former charitable hospitals were all under the same NHS umbrella, royal patronage could be extended to the municipal hospitals as well. As Prochaska put it, ‘Not even Bevan, that scourge of social distinction, could bring himself to blackball the royal family from the NHS.’ In 1948 Queen Mary had, with regret, resigned as president of the London Hospital – in July 1949 she and the Hospital were both pleased when she returned as joint patron with the King.42 The Queen felt the same about St Mary’s Paddington, of which she was president. Her title was changed to Honorary President and she remained involved with St Mary’s for the rest of her life.

  As with the hospitals, so with her regiments and the other organizations for which she felt an affection – the Queen tended to remain with them for ever. One of the least expected, perhaps, was the London Gardens Society, of which she became patron in 1947 and which was soon a favourite. One letter thanked her for a visit to the London Cottage Back Gardens in July 1947. ‘Dear Mam, We was very pleased to see you to see our gardens and we always says you seem happier when you come amongst the likes of us than in the Palace lot and having to act queen when you aint been born to it and must be hard work for you. We liked your pretty clothes and you are always welcome to come to us when you wants a friend. Our kids and our chaps send there love to you, From all of us with Gardens.’43

  With the exception of 1953, when she was unwell, the Queen visited gardens in one London borough or another every year from 1949 to 2001 (the penultimate year of her life). The tours originally included about six or seven different gardens – sometimes merely a good windowbox display at a council flat. By the end of her life the tour was reduced and it became a tradition for her to end it with a visit to a police station or fire station where there was some form of garden, and where she would join the officers for a drink. All of these visits gave pleasure to generations of London gardeners.

  *

  TO THE QUEEN’S delight, Princess Elizabeth had become pregnant some three months after her marriage. She and Prince Philip were still living in Buckingham Palace, and the baby was due to be born there in November 1948. The home that the King had planned for them at Sunninghill had burned down. (In summer 1949 they were finally able to move to Clarence House, a house rebuilt by
Nash in the 1820s for the Duke of Clarence next to St James’s Palace.)

  The Queen now had a rare tussle with Tommy Lascelles. A stickler for precedent, she was displeased to learn that Lascelles had persuaded the King to dispense with the tradition that the Home Secretary had to be in attendance at a royal birth. She asked that the decision be reversed. But Lascelles pointed out that the Dominions would also expect to be represented, so that in all there might be seven ministers sitting outside Princess Elizabeth’s room while she gave birth. The King was horrified and told Lascelles that he would drop the tradition.

  The Queen was of a different opinion. Fearing as she did that the avalanche of reform was sweeping away the old world which she loved and represented, she wrote to Lascelles, ‘I feel that we should cling to our domestic traditions and ceremonies for dear life.’44 He replied that he would never suggest discontinuing any ceremony which maintained the Crown’s dignity, but he felt that this one probably had the opposite effect. ‘Surely it is better to dispense with a thing that has no real significance, or dignity, rather than to allow it to become a source of friction & bitterness – of which there is quite enough in the Empire already?’ He thought the Home Secretary’s archaic presence was in fact ‘an unwarrantable & out-of-date intrusion into Your Majesties’ private lives’.45 The Queen was at last persuaded.

  By this time she had a much greater concern. The imminent birth of their first grandchild coincided with a serious deterioration in the King’s health. The South Africa tour had exhausted him – he had lost seventeen pounds in weight in the course of those strenuous weeks. And, as his biographer discreetly put it, ‘his temperament was not one which facilitated a rapid replenishing of nervous and physical reserves.’46 Through 1948 he had been suffering from cramp in the feet and legs. He did not complain, but he kept a note of it. The problem eased when he was on holiday at Balmoral – he found he could spend a day on the hills without being tired, but by October 1948 the symptoms had got worse. His left foot was numb and the pain in it kept him awake at night. The affliction then spread to the right foot.