by Kitty Kelley
When the King married Mrs. Simpson six months later, Queen Mary wrote in her diary, “To give up all this for that!!!!” The Prime Minister repeated a music hall joke: “He was Admiral of the Fleet, but now he’s the third mate of an American tramp.”
The man known to his family as David was born HRH the Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. For twenty-five years before becoming King, he was the most popular Prince of Wales in history. In every country he visited he was hailed as gallant and charming, a mesmerizing knight with shining gold hair and sad blue eyes. He bestowed the magic of royalty wherever he went, and people bowed eagerly in his presence. He was one of the most adored heirs ever to grace the British empire.
“Probably no one in our history has ever had so marked a power as this young Prince to rivet the ties of emotion and sympathy between the Mother Country and the millions of men, women and children in the outlying commonwealth of nations,” wrote Frances Donaldson in her definitive biography of Edward VIII. “The emotions felt for England could never be explained merely by political or economic advantage, and there is no doubt that the monarchy was the greatest single influence in welding these disparate nations together….”
Women were especially thrilled to be in the company of such a man. Even meeting someone who had met him was exciting. This gave rise to a popular lyric of the time: “I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.”
One of those women was the daughter of a Scottish earl, Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon. As the ninth of ten children, she was pampered and spoiled by her indulgent father. Like other women of her generation, she was formally uneducated but well versed in the arts necessary to marry well. Yet at the age of twenty-two she was still single while most of her aristocratic friends had husbands. Then she met the Prince of Wales, the most dashing man of the era. She relished the attention she received when the Daily News of January 5, 1923, reported:
“Scottish Bride for Prince of Wales. Heir to Throne to Wed Peer’s Daughter.”
The paper did not identify her by name, but she was obviously the young woman in question. “The future Queen of England is the daughter of a well-known Scottish peer, who is the owner of castles both north and south of the Tweed.”
“We all bowed and bobbed and teased her, calling her ‘Ma’am,’ ” Henry “Chips” Channon wrote in his diary. “She is more gentle, lovely and exquisite than any woman alive, but this evening I thought her unhappy and distraught.”
She knew the rumor of romance was untrue, and to her chagrin, the newspaper printed a royal retraction a few days later. “We are officially authorized to say that this report is… devoid of foundation….”
Only in her old age did she admit to a friend that she was one of the many young women in the 1920s who had fallen in love with the Prince of Wales. “He was such fun,” she said. “Then.”
At the time, the Prince was interested only in other men’s wives who were thin, streamlined, and looked as androgynous and anorectic as he did. He was not in the least attracted to the dumpling fullness of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. In fact, years later he and his wife mischievously nicknamed her “Cookie” because of her unfashionable plumpness and fondness for food.
In April 1923 Elizabeth married Bertie, the Prince’s younger brother, the Duke of York, who had proposed to her after Lady Maureen Stanley had rejected him. He suffered from such excruciating nervousness that he stuttered, blinked incessantly, and could not control the muscles around his mouth. “Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was determined to marry into the royal family,” said biographer Michael Thornton, “so after his third proposal, she settled for the runt of the litter. I say this because I interviewed the Duke of Windsor to chronicle the blood feud between the Duchess of Windsor and the Queen Mother. I asked him why the Queen Mother continued to be so implacable toward his wife in later years, so unrelenting in her hatred of the Duchess.
“ ‘Jealousy,’ he said. ‘To put it politely, she wanted to marry me.’
“Now, of course, so many years later, her friends deny this, but that’s what the Duke told me a few years before he died.”
Upon the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, his younger brother, Albert, known to the family as “Bertie,” ascended to the throne. To keep continuity with the reign of his father, he became King George VI. His wife, who as a little girl had dressed up to play queen, now became a real one. The news was delivered to the public by newsreels and radio, but the coronation on May 12, 1937, was not broadcast. The ceremony in Westminster Abbey was considered too sacred to be aired. The Archbishop of Canterbury feared men in pubs would listen with their hats on.
Upon his accession, the new King, George VI, was determined to keep his older brother out of England to avoid competing with a second court. Churchill recommended the Duke of Windsor be appointed Governor of the Bahamas. But the King objected because the Queen felt that even that insignificant position was too good for the Windsors.
“She wanted them banished and completely stripped of all status,” said Michael Thornton. “She was so vengeful that she wrote a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Lloyd, and said that to make the Duchess of Windsor, a divorced woman with three living husbands, the wife of the Governor of the Bahamas would result in a disastrous lowering of standards.”
Sir Walter Monckton, the royal courtier who acted as intermediary, also recognized the Queen’s motivation. As he wrote in his diary:
… I think the Queen felt quite plainly that it was undesireable to give the Duke any effective sphere of work. I felt then, as always, that she naturally thought that she must be on her guard because the Duke of Windsor, to whom the other brothers had always looked up, was an attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new King, who was less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please.
Despite the Queen’s objection, the appointment was made. “She wreaked her sweet revenge later by making sure the Duchess of Windsor never received a curtsy or was addressed as Her Royal Highness,” said Thornton. “The Queen helped institute the Letters Patent, which bestowed upon the Duke of Windsor ‘the title, style, or attribute of Royal Highness’ while withholding such title, style, or attribute from his wife and his descendants.”
The King referred to the Duchess as “Mrs. Simpson,” while the Queen disparaged her as “that woman.”
Together, Their Majesties instructed the Lord Chamberlain to wire their new ruling to all Government House officials. His telegram from Buckingham Palace read:
You are no doubt aware that a lady when presented to HRH the Duke of Windsor should make a half-curtsey. The Duchess of Windsor is not entitled to this. The Duke should be addressed as “Your Royal Highness” and the Duchess as “Your Grace.”
The Duke of Windsor drafted a passionate, bitter letter of protest to Winston Churchill:
… I am up against the famous Court ruling… whereby the King (or shall we say the Queen?) decreed that the Duchess shall not hold Royal Rank…. I am quite sure that had your wife been the target of the vindictive jealousy… you would have the same repugnance to service under the Crown that I have….
Until this time, every wife automatically enjoyed the status of her husband. Now the rules were suddenly changed to deprive the Duchess of Windsor of royal acceptance. If the twice divorced American was not fit to be Queen of England, then she certainly was not fit to be a member of the royal family or admitted into their exalted circle. So no member of the House of Windsor ever received her until her husband’s death, and even then she was accorded only minimal courtesy. “They were polite and kind to me,” she said, “but they were cold. Very cold.” The Duchess of Windsor died several years later at the age of ninety, alone and shriveled by infirmity.
Long before she became Queen, Elizabeth and her husband had assumed responsibility for restoring the royal family’s reputation. Stolid and middle-class, they had drawn
a stark contrast between themselves and the Champagne-swilling heir to the throne who cavorted at Fort Belvedere with his married lovers. The Yorks, or “Betty and Bert,” as some newspapers called them, embodied domesticity. Elizabeth fostered this image by posing for pictures pouring tea and walking her corgis in the park. She invited Lady Cynthia Asquith to write The Married Life of the Duchess of York, a book whose cover announced that it was “Written and Published with Personal Approval of Her Royal Highness.” After the birth of her first child, she allowed Miss Anne Ring, a former member of her staff, to write The Story of Princess Elizabeth, Told with the Sanction of Her Parents. With these frothy concoctions, she began establishing a myth that would elevate her beyond reproach.
“All done with mirrors,” was how Noel Coward described the cunning mystery of mythmaking. But Elizabeth did it with feathers, a dazzling smile, a soft voice, and a tiara. With these ingredients she produced her soufflé of magic.
She was born in 1900 during the reign of Queen Victoria and lived through many monarchs and prime ministers. She survived two world wars and watched the British empire shrink to a commonwealth of countries. As she aged, she was celebrated as a befeathered emblem of a glorious past. She was history—the continuum that linked generations to their best memories of courage and duty and steadfastness.
From the beginning she understood the enduring power of image on the public imagination—the curtsies, the uniforms, the prancing horses, the movie star waves from the golden coach. She instinctively knew the value of such pageantry in stirring people’s hearts. She was a genius at marketing herself and her husband, especially during the war years, when she propped up the weak, faltering man she had married and made him look like a king.
As the first commoner to marry into the House of Windsor, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon showed the country how royalty should behave. She ingratiated herself as the Duchess of York with twirly little waves and gracious smiles. But she earned mass adoration as Queen during World War II when she stayed in London during the Blitz. She was photographed standing with the King in the bombed-out ruins of Buckingham Palace. “I’m almost happy that we’ve been hit,” she said. “It makes me feel I can look the blitzed East End in the face.”
Endearing herself forever to her embattled country, she refused to flee England to seek safety for herself and her children.
“They could not go without me,” she said. “I could not possibly leave the King, and the King will never go.”
When she and the King toured London’s East End to inspect the bomb damage, a Jewish tailor advised the monarch “to put the empire in the wife’s name.” She became such a morale booster that Adolf Hitler called her the most dangerous woman in Europe. After the war, a grateful soldier rhapsodized:
She put on her finest gown, her gayest smile
and stayed in town, while London Bridge was falling down.
A photograph of the Queen in her crown was turned into a Christmas card during World War II and sent to every man and woman serving in the armed forces. It was a cherished keepsake from the monarch to his subjects.
Elizabeth was so ingenious at humanizing the royal family that she became an international media sensation in the newsreels shown in movie houses before the advent of television. Her radio speeches inspired hope throughout Occupied Europe as she told her listeners: “Wherever I go, I see bright eyes and smiling faces. For though our road is stony and hard, it is straight, and we know that we fight in a great cause.” The sight of her smiling in the face of German bombardment inspired patriotism.
She put a caring face on the monarchy by visiting bombed sites throughout England. Beforehand, she had consulted with her couturier, Norman Hartnell, to make sure she was properly dressed. She would not wear anything as masculine as a military uniform, and she knew better than to appear imposing and regal. After urgent discussion, she decided she must never wear black—the color of mourning—or red, which would be too festive in wartime. Instead, as Hartnell wrote later, he designed a series of “combat frocks” in “the gentle colours—dusty pink, dusty blue and dusty lilac… because she wished to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible.”
Walking through bomb damage, she always wore her hat and her jewels. When asked if it was appropriate for her to wear her best dress while visiting the bomb-stricken areas, she smiled. “Of course,” she said. “They would wear their best dresses if they were coming to see me.”
She, in turn, despised Germans and declared she would shoot them before ever surrendering. Having watched the sorry parade of fallen kings and queens limping into London after their countries had been invaded, she vowed to defend herself and her crown. So she started taking revolver lessons every morning and insisted the King do likewise. “I shall not go down like the others,” she declared.
She and the King became incensed by the Windsors’ public admiration of Hitler. In April 1941, the Duke was reported as saying, “It would be very ill-advised of America to enter the war against Germany as Europe was finished anyway.” The Duchess agreed. “If the U.S. entered the war, this country would go to history as the greatest sucker of all times.” Then the Duke told the editor of the U.S. magazine Liberty, “… it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler was overthrown.”
The Queen became more irate after seeing newsreel footage of the Duchess of Windsor traveling by luxury liner while people in England stood in freezing queues to collect morsels of fresh fish and bread. With her hand-tooled Hermès handbags, the Duchess traveled in high style during the war. She wore emeralds as big as eggs and enough furs to carpet a room, while war-rationed Britons mended old coats to stay warm. The Queen became especially agitated by a newspaper story about the Duchess flying first class from the Bahamas to New York just to get her hair done.
The Queen had demonstrated stout resolve in facing other obstacles in the past; the most pressing was her inability to get pregnant during the months after her wedding. The fertility problem stemmed from the “nervousness” that afflicted her husband, producing his debilitating stutter, distracting twitches, rickety legs, and bleeding ulcers. Most disturbing to the new bride was his inability to impregnate her. This was a disorder he shared with his older brother. When the Duchess of Windsor was asked why she had no children with her husband, she joked about the disability: “The Duke is not heir-conditioned.”
Neither was his brother. For two barren years the Duchess of York was unable to conceive. She consulted several gynecologists and obstetricians about the problem. Finally, on the advice of her doctor, Lane Roberts, she and her husband submitted to the unorthodox science of artificial insemination which had been perfected by British fertility experts in 1866. The arduous procedure of mechanically injecting his sperm into her uterus finally enabled her to get pregnant. Only because of this manual fertilization was she able to produce her first child, Elizabeth, in 1926, and her second, Margaret Rose, in 1930. The only comment recorded from her doctors after the birth of Elizabeth referred to the delivery by cesarean section: “A certain line of treatment was successfully adopted.” Beyond that, the deferential British press did not report that the future Queen of England was a product of artificial insemination. “This was well-known in our circles at the time,” said a royal family friend whose mother was a goddaughter of Queen Victoria. “My mother and the Duchess of York talked about it because they shared the same gynecologist…. The Duke had a slight… problem… with… a… his ‘willy.’…” Another aristocrat, the 8th Earl of Arran, discussed the fertility procedure used by the Duke and Duchess of York. “It was over lunch at the Beefsteak Club,” recalled the writer Bevis Hillier, “when Lord Buffy Arran told me that both Elizabeth and Margaret were born by artificial insemination.” As George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Monarchs are not born; they are made by artificial hallucination.”
As a commoner, the Duchess was respected for accepting the royal responsibility of producing an heir and a spare, even if it meant being artificially seeded.
“Our family knew that Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were born by artificial means,” said a relative of the Earl of Arran. “It was revolutionary at the time, but it was not discussed publicly and probably never should be….”
By the end of the war, the Queen Mother had become a living saint to be praised and preserved. Because the country lionized her, the press followed suit and never printed a negative word about her. Even when every intimate detail of the royal family became newspaper fodder, she alone remained immune. The media respectfully refrained from reporting that as a result of intestinal surgery she wore a colostomy bag. Her incessant drinking, which might be described as incipient alcoholism in anyone else, was dismissed as mere tippling. Her propensity for gambling was never reported as an addiction, just an innocent pastime of a sweet old lady who happened to have installed in her house her own personal “blower,” or bookie wire, to receive up-to-the-minute race results. Her support of white minority rule in Rhodesia was tagged not as racist, but rather as a right-wing political quirk. By the standards of her time, she was excused for calling people of color “blackamoors” and “nig nogs.” “She is not fond of black folk,” wrote Paul Callan in the International Express, “but these are, of course, traits typical of her age and class.”