The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  She continued to talk to him regularly as he worked on the book, and invited him to Sandringham as well as Birkhall. Obviously the abdication was one of the most important and most difficult episodes to cover, and perhaps the one about which the Queen Mother felt most strongly. Indeed, when Helen Hardinge, wife of Alec Hardinge, the King’s former Private Secretary, had sent the Queen the manuscript of her book The Path of Kings in 1951, the only passage to which the Queen had objected dealt with the abdication, and was critical of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. ‘I don’t like the idea of you writing about this agonising interlude in our history. I am quite certain that you would be wise to say very little on this subject – It only does harm, and the effect on people is sometimes so different to what you think it may be … Please take it out. Your loving friend, ER.’83

  Wheeler-Bennett naturally conducted many interviews on the subject of the abdication – he spoke to the Duke of Windsor himself, but not to the Duchess – and wrote about the crisis at some length. His account was judicious; like almost everyone who studied the subject he came to feel a great deal more sympathy for King George VI than for Edward VIII. His painstaking, lucid biography, published in 1958, demonstrated well the author’s regard for his subject; Queen Elizabeth was pleased.

  For Christmas 1952 the whole family gathered as usual at Sandringham. Queen Mary was increasingly frail – the death of her son the King was a blow from which she could not recover. She spent much of the holiday in her own rooms, only coming down to join the family for tea. The Queen Mother stayed at Sandringham until late January, and she visited areas of the east coast hit by the worst flooding in decades. She was filled with admiration for the courage of homeless people and wrote to the Queen, ‘it was terribly like the war all over again, the same defiance, the same “I don’t care” & I felt quite shattered & exhausted by memories, & the sad reality of the present tragedy’.84 She returned to Royal Lodge and on the first anniversary of the King’s death she took communion, with Princess Margaret, at the Royal Chapel. This service became an annual fixture for the rest of her life.

  By this time, Queen Mary was nearing death. To one old friend, Lady Shaftesbury, she said, ‘I suppose one must force oneself to go on until the end?’ ‘I am sure’, replied Lady Shaftesbury, ‘that Your Majesty will.’85 She did; her duty all ended, Queen Mary died peacefully at Marlborough House on the evening of 24 March 1953. A week later tens of thousands of people stood silent and bareheaded as the coffin of a dignified and admired queen, who seemed to have been always with them, was carried ‘slowly and majestically’ away. Her biographer commented that ‘by undeviating service to her own highest ideals, she had ended by becoming, for millions, an ideal in herself’.86 Her death brought another huge change for her daughter-in-law. She and Queen Mary had enjoyed and suffered much together ever since Queen Mary had warmly welcomed Elizabeth Bowes Lyon into the family in 1923. Not only was an important bond with the past severed but Queen Elizabeth was now the senior member of the Royal Family.

  In early April 1953 she travelled north to Fountains Abbey where she dedicated the monument Clare and Doris Vyner had erected to their children Elizabeth and Charles. Writing to Doris afterwards, she praised her friends’ composure at what must have been a moment of anguish, and spoke of the solace she had found in being with them. ‘Once again I subsided into the delicious feeling of “being with friends”. There is nothing like it to heal wounds.’87

  The question of a London residence for the Queen Mother had been resolved with the decision that she should move to Clarence House, which was now being prepared for her. Arthur Penn kept her informed of progress and offered advice on the colours of the walls to go with her old curtains, which were to be reused there.88 It was not a house that she liked, however, and, after the death of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth expressed a wish to move to Marlborough House instead – it was much more suitable, and it had a garage and good staff accommodation. Moreover, it probably did not need much spending on it. She was annoyed that Members of Parliament had been commenting on the costs of altering Clarence House for her. She said to Arthur Penn, ‘Perhaps they would like me to retire decently to Kew and run a needlework guild?’ If there were any more such complaints, she said, ‘you must tell them angrily how little has been done and how loathsome it [Clarence House] is.’89 Nonetheless, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret finally moved into Clarence House in May 1953, a few weeks before the Coronation. The Queen eventually gave Marlborough House to the Commonwealth Secretariat.

  Queen Elizabeth had to face another loss at this time. Her brother Mike suddenly and unexpectedly died at the age of fifty-nine. Among her siblings, Mike had been one of the closest to the King. They had shot together and laughed together. He was seen in the family and by his friends as a genial and generous man, possessed of great charm and ‘devoid of jealousy’.90 His death on 1 May 1953 meant that Queen Elizabeth had now lost five of her brothers, all in youth or middle age.*

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  THE DATE OF the Coronation was fixed for Tuesday 2 June 1953. Churchill had been against having it in 1952 because he felt that the country’s economic crisis was so serious that not a single working day should be lost. ‘Can’t have coronations with bailiffs in the house,’ he said.91 The Queen overcame her reluctance to have the whole event televised. Thus, for the first time a coronation would be taken to the entire nation, not just confined within the sight of its leaders. People scrambled to buy the new-fangled sets and gave the nascent television industry a huge boost. Excitement gathered as winter gave way to spring 1953. Houses were painted red, white and blue. Street parties and many other forms of celebration were planned. Some called it hysteria but, rather, it was a sense of vindication; the people’s reward to themselves for the immense sacrifice and effort of the war.

  The Queen Mother was understandably concerned about what she would wear. Before her death, Queen Mary had offered to lend her her own Coronation robe, an offer which Queen Elizabeth had accepted with gratitude; it would save the difficult task of altering the robe made for her own Coronation in 1937.92 Norman Hartnell made her dress and, in his memoirs, wrote about the difficulty of perfecting the hang of the heavily embroidered skirt ‘bordered with golden tissue and with jewelled feather embroideries’. It had to be mounted ‘on an underskirt of ivory taffeta laced with bands of horsehair and further strengthened with countless strands of whalebone’.93 With it the Queen Mother wore a triple diamond necklace, large drop-diamond earrings and a diamond waterfall stomacher, together with the Riband of the Garter and the Family Orders of her husband and daughter.

  On the morning of 2 June, she was wildly cheered by the crowds standing in the rain as she drove in a glass coach to Westminster Abbey. One journalist, Anne Edwards, described her progress through the Abbey as William Walton’s Orb and Sceptre thundered from the organ: ‘On she came up the aisle with a bow here to Prince Bernhard, a bow there to the row of ambassadors, and up those tricky steps with no looking down like the Duke of Gloucester, no half turn to check her train like the Duchess of Kent, no hesitation at the top like Princess Margaret, no nervous nods of her head like Princess Mary. She is the only woman I know who can slow up naturally when she sees a camera.’94

  The Coronation brought her a mix of emotions. There was sadness but also pride that she and the King had managed to take an institution in crisis and restore it to its place at the centre of popular imagination and esteem. The emotional power of the monarchy that Queen Elizabeth II now inherited had been revived by the extraordinary diligence and dedication of her father and mother. For the service, Queen Elizabeth sat in the front row of the Royal Gallery with the four-and-a-half-year-old Prince Charles. A photograph shows her standing behind the Prince, looking thoughtful as her daughter made the same vows as she and the King had made only sixteen years before.

  At Buckingham Palace after the Coronation there was merriment bordering on chaos. Cecil Beaton found it hard to corral all his subjects together for t
he group photographs. He described the Queen Mother as ‘dimpled and chuckling, with eyes as bright as any of her jewels’ and ‘in rollicking spirits’. She asked him if he needed more time. ‘Suddenly I felt as if all my anxieties and fears were dispelled … The great mother figure and nannie to us all, through the warmth of her sympathy bathes us and wraps us up in a counterpane by the fireside.’ She gathered her over-excited grandchildren in her arms and Beaton saw ‘a terrific picture’ as she bent to kiss Prince Charles’s hair. ‘Suddenly I had this wonderful accomplice – someone who would help me through everything.’95

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  IMMEDIATELY AFTER the Coronation the first family crisis of the new reign broke into the open. It was a drama played out painfully in public, an augury of what was to come over the decades ahead as the Royal Family had to adjust to a more populist and intrusive age. Princess Margaret had fallen in love with Peter Townsend, a married member of the Royal Household sixteen years her senior.

  Wing Commander Townsend had a heroic record as a Royal Air Force pilot; he was good looking and charming, if a trifle self-regarding. He had married during the war and had two young sons, but the marriage was not happy.96 He had joined the Royal Household in 1944 and, as we have seen, quickly became a family favourite. Queen Elizabeth had described him to D’Arcy Osborne as ‘a very nice, ultra sensitive ex-flying man, who was in the Battle of Britain, & nearly flew himself into a nervous decline’.97 He had travelled with the family on the South African trip in 1947, when he had helped soothe the tired and troubled King,98 and in 1948 when Princess Margaret was just eighteen he accompanied her to Amsterdam to attend the installation of Princess Juliana as queen of the Netherlands. At a dance afterwards the Princess danced with him and one report had it that she was utterly radiant.99 Townsend himself commented, in an internal Palace report, that the dance was stuffy, overcrowded and far from enjoyable.100

  Princess Margaret was bright, beautiful, mercurial and wilful. On her fifth birthday, Kenneth Rose has recorded, she captivated the playwright J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, a guest at Glamis. ‘Is that really your very own?’ he asked of a present by her plate. She replied, ‘It is yours and mine,’ a delightful response which Barrie put into his next play, The Boy David.101 As the younger child, she was spoiled by her parents – indeed it seems that within the family only Queen Mary was not captivated by her naughty winsomeness.102 It would not be surprising if she had felt competitive with her elder sister, recognizing that so much more was both given to and required of her. Sharp witted, she always regretted that she had not had a fuller education – she blamed her mother for the fact that she had not even had the tutorials in history that Princess Elizabeth was given.

  Nonetheless, after the war she became an attractive asset to the causes she chose to represent, and at home she savoured the role of joker and entertainer. She was, as her mother told D’Arcy Osborne, ‘a great delight to us both. She is funny, & makes us laugh (en famille!), and also loves people & seeing & doing things – I do hope that she will be useful.’103 After her elder sister’s marriage to Prince Philip, she became an object of press obsession in respect of her alleged romantic life. The press in those days was mild by comparison with what it became, but its attentions seemed constant and were often unwelcome.

  Princess Margaret visited Paris in November 1951 and afterwards Duff Cooper, the British Ambassador, wrote to the Queen to say how much he and his wife Diana had enjoyed entertaining her; ‘by her charm, her wit and her beauty she made it a wonderful evening for everybody.’ He also congratulated the Queen on the work of Princess Elizabeth. ‘There are moments when I feel a little pessimistic about the future. It is a symptom, I suppose, of old age. But when I reflect upon the good fortune of our Empire in the possession of two such wonderful Princesses my heart is filled with pride, confidence and gratitude.’104 The Queen was thrilled by such praise of her daughters. ‘One’s love for one’s children is one of the real & enduring things of life, and your letter gave me a moment of great pleasure – & I thank you with all my heart.’105

  Peter Townsend himself wrote later of the Princess:

  She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, confined as it was in her short, slender figure and centred about large purple-blue eyes, generous, sensitive lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach. She was capable, in her face and in her whole being, of an astonishing power of expression. It could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure, to hilarious, uncontrollable joy. She was by nature generous, volatile. She was a comédienne at heart, playing the piano with ease and verve, singing in her rich, supple voice the latest hits, imitating the famous stars. She was coquettish, sophisticated. But what ultimately made Princess Margaret so attractive and lovable was that behind the dazzling facade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity.106

  She had many admirers, but it was with Townsend that she fell in love. Her family may not have known, but she became closer and closer to him, all the more so after the death of the King. Indeed, the loss of her father created a chasm in Princess Margaret’s life. They had been particularly close; he had always indulged her and she had teased, delighted and flirted with him. Unlike her elder sister, when the King died Princess Margaret had no new role with which to occupy herself. She was utterly bereft.

  Her letters at the time show the depth of her grief. To her uncle David Bowes Lyon she wrote of her father: ‘He was so tremendously the heart and centre of our family and together with Mummie made us a whole and complete family, united by the deepest love and respect. I think I told you how he always thought of us as one, as opposed to 4 different people.’107 ‘We were such a very happy and close family,’ she told Diana Cooper, ‘and we are so lucky to have countless lovely memories of my darling Papa.’108 She resented the fact that he was worked so hard after the war. She felt he had never been allowed to rest between the horrors of war and the strains of the ‘Socialist Experiment’.109

  At the time of the King’s death Townsend was already in the midst of his divorce, still an uncommon course of action which often aroused dismay if not contempt. But since his wife had admitted adultery, he was seen as the innocent party in the action and he was such a favourite of the Queen Mother that he was given the task of organizing her new Household, and preparing Clarence House for her and Princess Margaret to live in. This appointment alone suggests how little the Queen Mother may have known of the relationship which developed further during 1952 as each of these unhappy people sought solace in the company of the other.

  Some were more clear sighted. Towards the end of the Queen Mother’s stay at Balmoral in September 1952, Tommy Lascelles spoke about the matter to Townsend himself. By Lascelles’s own account, ‘He wished to consult me on some routine matter. When that business was finished I told him it was being commonly, and widely, said that he was seeing too much of Princess Margaret.’ The Private Secretary reminded the younger courtier that in their profession there was one cardinal and inviolable rule: ‘that in no circumstance ought any member of a royal household to give cause for such talk, particularly if the member of the Royal Family concerned was the Sovereign’s sister, and the member of the Household a married man’. According to Lascelles, Townsend left the room without responding.110

  In November 1952 Townsend obtained his divorce. Just before Christmas he went to see Lascelles again and told him that he and the Princess ‘were deeply in love with each other and wished to get married’. This may have been the occasion, which later became public knowledge, on which Lascelles told Townsend, ‘You must be either mad or bad.’111 But Lascelles recorded that he replied only that Townsend must realize that there were ‘formidable obstacles’ to any such marriage. He asked who else in the family had been informed and Townsend said only the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Lascelles suggested that the Queen Mother must be told and Townsend agreed. In fact, according to Lascelles, she was not informed until February 195
3.112 When the Princess and Townsend did finally tell her, she listened, according to Townsend, ‘with characteristic understanding’ and ‘without a sign that she felt angered or outraged – or that she acquiesced – and the Queen Mother was never anything but considerate in her attitude to me. She never once hurt either of us throughout the whole difficult affair.’113

  That may be so, but she was very upset. She discussed the matter with the Queen and then she wrote to Lascelles. ‘I would like to talk to you, soon please. I have nobody I can talk to about such dreadful things.’114 ‘The Queen Mother wept when I talked to her,’ Lascelles told Jock Colville, Churchill’s Private Secretary. ‘I have never seen her shed tears before.’115 She said that she was ‘quite shattered by the whole thing’. She felt that if the King had been still alive ‘it would never have happened’.116 In one sense that was incorrect, in that the Princess had fallen in love with Townsend well before her father died. But, had the relationship progressed so far while the King was living, he might have understood its dangers and intervened earlier than the Queen Mother had done.

  One of the Queen Mother’s characteristics within the family was that she never looked for trouble. In fact she had a tendency to ignore difficult situations. She had been brought up to believe that duty defined almost everything. Her shock was genuine – it had probably just not occurred to her that her daughter could be in love with a married (or divorced) courtier. She did not feel herself equipped to deal with such crises. But she felt comforted by the fact that Lascelles could ‘understand the human side of such tragedies – for so they are to the young’.117