by Kitty Kelley
Even the satirical television program Spitting Image held back on lampooning the most beloved member of the royal family. “For the first show, we had prepared a sketch of the Queen Mother arm-wrestling Princess Margaret over a bottle of vodka,” recalled Roger Law, “but the producer, John Lloyd, refused to let us debut with that skit…. We had to wait until the public accepted the show. The shock was that we treated the royal family as an ordinary family….”
“The Queen Mother was so untouchable by 1994 that I was prohibited from alluding to the possibility of her death in a piece of fiction,” said writer Sue Townsend, author of The Queen and I. “When I adapted my book to be a play, the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, Max Stafford-Clark, refused to let me use the scene of the Queen Mother’s funeral. He was afraid of the public outcry and what might happen to him as a result. So I had to rewrite that part. I went along with it because I was in awe of the director and wanted the play produced.”
When another writer reported some harmless remarks the Queen Mother had made over lunch, he was called a scoundrel. “I was denounced… as a cad for repeating the old lady’s conversation,” said A. N. Wilson, who broke the taboo of never repeating the unrehearsed words of a royal personage.
Writing in the Spectator, he reported the Queen Mother’s merry recollection of an evening during the war when she met T. S. Eliot. She was worried that her children were not receiving a proper education, so she asked that a poetry evening be arranged at Windsor Castle.
“Such an embarrassment,” she recalled. “We had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem… I think it was called ‘The Desert.’ And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the King.”
“ ‘The Desert,’ ma’am? Are you sure it wasn’t called ‘The Waste Land’?”
“That’s it,” said the Queen Mother. “I’m afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn’t understand a word.”
“I believe he did once work in a bank,” said the writer. He was roundly criticized for presenting the beloved Queen Mother as a philistine. By then she had become an icon.
“Perhaps the most loved person in the Western world,” suggested Sir Edward Ford, former assistant private secretary to the Queen.
“She is the embodiment of what royalty should be,” said writer Robert Lacey.
She solidified her pedestal with more than seventy years of royal engagements: cutting ribbons, visiting regiments, christening ships, and laying cornerstones. That’s how she earned her keep, which eventually cost British taxpayers about $1 million a year. She waved gaily, tilted her head coquettishly, and smiled sweetly.
“Work is the rent you pay for the room you occupy on earth,” she said.
To the British, she was worth every shilling they paid to support her one butler, two drivers, two security guards, three castles, four maids, four ladies-in-waiting, eight footmen, ten servants, and fifteen stable personnel (to look after her fourteen horses).
“The Queen Mum is my love—the only one in the royal family I care about,” said artist Fleur Cowles. “I don’t know any of the others and I don’t care to.” Opening the door to her London drawing room, she pointed to a plush velvet love seat. “When Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother comes for dinner, that’s where she sits. And when she leaves, she always turns in the doorway, kicks up her heels like a chorus girl, and throws her arms in the air. It’s such a cute exit.”
The soft, cuddly appearance and sunny manner concealed layers of duplicity. Underneath the Queen Mother’s feathers was flint. Stout-hearted and tough, she protected royalty’s mystique by keeping its secrets. Throughout her life she was the warden who ensured that anything detrimental to the sweet myth was destroyed or buried forever. She had helped rescue the House of Windsor, and she intended to keep it standing. Even when she was well into her nineties she exercised enough influence to keep the British government from releasing the remaining evidence of the Windsors’ sub-rosa contacts with the Third Reich. For more than fifty years she had guarded documents that detailed the Duke of Windsor’s proposed separate peace agreement with the Nazis. She had kept sealed in the vaults of Windsor Castle all the King’s papers, including the captured German war documents that summarized the Windsors’ 1937 visit to Germany to meet with Hitler.
Within those documents were notes of a plan to return the Duke of Windsor to the throne after Germany’s conquest of Europe. In July of 1940, as he was considering the invasion of Britain, Hitler decided to kidnap the Windsors and hold them in Berlin, from where the Duke would appeal to the British people to change governments and seek peace with Germany. Once the treaty was signed, the Duke and Duchess would be restored to the throne as puppet monarchs. Although the plan was never enacted, the Windsors’ possible complicity with the Third Reich continued to taint the royal family.
The Queen Mother sailed into old age, smiling and undaunted. When she was ninety-six years old, she had hip replacement surgery. A few weeks after her hospitalization, she put on her blue silk hat, grabbed a walking stick, and visited an old age home. “I’m the oldest one here,” she told the enfeebled pensioners. She bestowed smiles and sweet words and then departed, leaving the elderly residents feeling almost blessed.
“She has tremendous charm,” said one woman. “All she says is ‘I know, I know’ and you feel rewarded. What a marvelous phrase. She changes inflection for every occasion: if she approves, she smiles and says, ‘I know. I know.’ If she’s consoling someone in grief, she pats the person’s arm and whispers, ‘I know. I know.’ ”
Few people—only her household staff and her immediate family—ever see the iron frame under the marshmallow.
“A steel hand within a velvet glove,” was how her husband’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, described her.
“She was tough and ruthless,” said historian John Grigg.
She herself agreed. “You think I am a nice person,” she once confided to a friend to whom she was speaking about the Windsors. “I’m not really a nice person.”
She had become the Crown’s most ferocious custodian, and having invested her life in the monarchy, she would protect it until her death. She became more royal than royalty in guarding their mystique. Over the years she became the keeper of the secrets. She had learned early from her father.
For years she had shrouded the details surrounding her own birth. She airily dismissed questions about why her father, after eight children, missed the six-week deadline for registering her birth. He then put his historic name as fourteenth heir of the Earl of Strathmore to a lie. In doing so, he risked life imprisonment, which in 1900 was the extreme penalty for falsifying an official document. Instead he paid a fine of seven shillings and sixpence and stated that his daughter was born at St. Paul’s Walden Bury, the family home in Hertfordshire. The Queen Mother maintained she was born in London.
This conflict gave rise to rumors over the years that after producing eight children, her thirty-nine-year-old mother finally had had enough. Some people have suggested that her father may have had an affair with a Welsh maid who worked at Glamis Castle in Scotland, and that this union produced the baby known as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. No evidence has been found to verify the suspicion, which may have arisen because of the unorthodox way her father filed her birth certificate.
“It really doesn’t matter where she was born or if there were inaccuracies,” said a Clarence House spokesman. “Strathmore did the evil deed and he is dead. If he did wrong, it didn’t show.”
The Queen Mother deflected scrutiny of her lineage to hide her family’s hereditary defects. For generations the Strathmores had been haunted by the Monster of Glamis, which according to legend was the misshapen creature born to her great-grandfather. Shaped like an egg with twisted spindly legs, this baby boy supposedly grew into a grotesque monster covered with long black hair. He was locked away in the castle for decades, his existence known only to his brothe
r and three other people. The family covered their shame with secrecy. “We were never allowed to talk about it,” said Elizabeth’s older sister, Rose. “Our parents forbade us ever to discuss the matter or ask any questions.”
This attitude toward physical deformities and mental illness was prevalent around 1920 when Elizabeth’s young nieces were born. Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, both retarded at birth, were secretly locked away in the mental hospital in Redhill, Surrey, where they lived for decades. So great was the disgrace felt by the family that they recorded the two women as dead in 1941 in Burke’s Peerage, the bible of British nobility.
“If this is what the family of the Bowes-Lyon told us, then we would have included it in the book,” said Harold Brooks-Baker, editor of Burke’s Peerage. “It is not normal to doubt the word of members of the royal family. Any information given to us by the royal family is accepted, even if we had evidence to the contrary….”
Such deference to the Crown helped the Queen Mother conceal any secrets that might have shamed the royal family. She hid the alcoholism of her husband and the homosexuality and drug addiction of his brother, Prince George, who eventually married and became the Duke of Kent. After the war she buried an explosive military report to King George VI from Field Marshal Montgomery and two confidential reports from Lord Mountbatten, which he described in a television interview as “too hot and uninhibited” to publish. She knew that these three documents, if ever made public after her husband’s death, would reflect unfavorably on his stewardship during the war.
“The King was told everything,” she admitted to Theo Aronson in 1993, “so, of course, I knew about everything as well. That is when I learned to keep things to myself. One heard so many stories, I became very cagey. And I have been very cagey ever since….”
FOUR
The Yorks, now the King and Queen of England, cultivated important American friendships in hopes of influencing public opinion in the United States. They wanted America to enter the war before it was too late for Great Britain.
In the summer of 1939 the King and Queen had invited Joseph P. Kennedy, the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, and his wife, Rose, to spend a weekend at Windsor Castle. Over dinner in the Garter Throne Room, the Queen seated herself between the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and Ambassador Kennedy. She had told the Ambassador how much she and the King had enjoyed their recent trip to the United States and how charmed they were by President and Mrs. Roosevelt, who entertained them at Hyde Park with hot dogs and beer.
That royal visit had caused a political ruckus in America, especially among upper-crust Republicans, who venerated Great Britain as “the mother country.” One grande dame became so upset by the prospect of the monarchs’ being subjected to the President’s informal hospitality at Hyde Park that she appealed to the British Foreign Office to cancel that part of the visit.
“There is no proper arrangement for Secret Service men and police even in ordinary times,” she wrote. “The house has no proper suites and rooms, etc., and the service represents a scratch lot of negroes and white, English and Irish. The Footman is a lout of a red-haired Irishman, and should only be carrying wood and coals and polishing shoes….”
The President, who was widely suspected—correctly—of trying to take America into a European war, was facing a tough reelection campaign in 1940. The Neutrality Act, then being debated in Congress, would limit America’s ability to supply Britain with arms in case of war as well as limit Roosevelt’s powers as President under the Constitution. Roosevelt hoped the act would be revised.
Roosevelt wanted the royal visit to be a public relations success so that Americans would be positively disposed to Great Britain and see the wisdom of giving military aid. But the President was almost stymied by the snobbery of Britain’s class system, even among servants. He had tried to help the Hyde Park staff prepare for the royal visit by dispatching two black ushers from the White House. This incensed his mother’s English butler, James, who refused to work with men of color in serving the monarchs. He insisted on taking his annual leave during the royal visit.
“Oh, but James,” said Sara Roosevelt, “that’s just when Their Majesties are going to be here.”
“Madam,” replied the butler, “I cannot be a party to the degradation of the British monarchy.”
The King and Queen had requested that eiderdown comforters and hot-water bottles be provided for their ladies-in-waiting, which amused the President: the monarchs were visiting in June, when the weather was usually hot, even unbearably humid. He was also surprised by the attitude of his mother’s butler, but then he did not understand that British servants could be as haughty as those they served. The President laughed aloud when he heard that the footman to King Edward VIII had walked off his job three years before when he encountered his master behaving in what he called “a most unbecoming manner.” The footman explained: “Well, the butler, Mr. Osborne, sent me down to the swimming pool with two drinks. When I got there, what did I see but His Majesty painting Mrs. Simpson’s toenails. My sovereign painting a woman’s toenails! It was a bit much, I’m afraid, and I gave notice at once.”
Showing the same hauteur, the Roosevelts’ English butler left for vacation the day before the King and Queen arrived at Hyde Park. When Their Majesties were en route, the U.S. Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, sent a confidential memo to the President:
The little Queen is now on her way to you together with the little King. She is a nice girl—eiderdown or no eiderdown—and you will like her, in spite of the fact that her sister-in-law, the Princess Royal, goes around England talking about “her cheap public smile.” She resembles so much the female caddies who used to carry my clubs at Pitlochry in Scotland many years ago that I find her pleasant…. The little King is beginning to feel his oats, but still remains a rather frightened boy.
The King and Queen had made a royal visit to Paris the year before that was a public relations success with everyone except the French Premier, Édouard Daladier. He privately denounced the King as “a moron” and said the Queen was “an excessively ambitious young woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world so that she might remain Queen.”
Ambassador Bullitt’s 1939 memo to the President advised Roosevelt not to mention the Windsors to the King and Queen because “about a month ago the Duke of Windsor wrote to Queen Mary [his mother] that Bertie [his brother, the King] had behaved toward him in such an ungentlemanly way because of ‘the influence of that common little woman,’ the Queen, that he could have no further relations with Bertie. Brotherly love, therefore, not at fever heat.”
The King and Queen arrived with their valets, maids, dressers, and ladies-in-waiting, and the British servants immediately started squabbling with their American counterparts.
The King’s valet complained about the food and drink, saying it was far below what he was accustomed to in Buckingham Palace, which supposedly was getting by on war rations. Although the public was led to believe that the King and Queen and the two little Princesses were depriving themselves of meat, bread, and butter like everyone else in the country and sharing England’s bleak fare of boiled potatoes, gray Brussels sprouts, and powdered eggs, those behind the Palace gates knew differently. The King and Queen sidestepped the country’s strict food rationing and regularly ate roast beef and drank Champagne. Butter pats were monogrammed with the royal coat of arms, and dinners were served on gold plates.
“During the war, when the King and Queen were in London and their daughters at Windsor, the Princesses used to order their own meals,” recalled René Roussin, the French chef who worked for the royal family from 1937 to 1946. “A typical day’s menu for them began with buttered eggs for breakfast; boiled chicken with sieved vegetables—even when they were both in their teens, they still liked their vegetables sieved—potato crisps, and hot baked custard for lunch; bread and butter, cake, jelly, and toast for tea; and just some kind of broth followe
d by compote of pear with whipped cream for supper.”
In London, no restaurant was allowed to charge more than five shillings for a meal. But at the Palace, the King ordered two eggs and six rashers of grilled bacon for breakfast every day and grouse in season for dinner every night. The Queen, accustomed to a full meal at teatime, continued having her daily oatcakes, a rich dessert prepared by the Palace chef, which caused her to gain twelve pounds in one year.
“Her Majesty will not give up oatcakes,” said her maid, who admitted having to let out the seams of the Queen’s gowns.
The Queen insisted her tea be a special blend of China and Ceylon, brewed with London water that she had shipped to the United States with her luggage in heavy casks.
The vast amount of royal luggage—bulky wardrobes, numerous suitcases, crates of hatboxes, bins of shoes—surprised the President’s domestic staff. The British servants reacted defensively. They knew what the public did not know—that the King was dazzled by gold-braided military uniforms and spent hours with his personal tailor being fitted every day. This obsession with fashion had started early.
“Unfortunately, Bertie takes no interest in anything but clothes, and again clothes,” his father had complained. “Even when out shooting, he is more occupied with his trousers than his game!”
Equally concerned about his wife’s appearance, the King winced when he heard her described as “dowdy.” So he summoned couturier Norman Hartnell to the Palace to design a flattering wardrobe for her. Although silk was banned from sale to the public and used only to make parachutes, exceptions were made for the Queen, and by the time she left for America, she was changing her outfits as least four times a day.
During one photography session with Cecil Beaton, she posed in a pale gray dress with long fur-trimmed sleeves and a gray fox fur collar. She changed into a ruby-encrusted gown of gold and silver with ostrich feathers, then appeared in a spangled tulle hyacinth blue dress with two rows of diamonds as big as walnuts. For the last pose, she appeared in a champagne lace garden party dress that had been hand sewn with pearls to match the pearls that she had strewn through her hair.