by Kitty Kelley
When he and Elizabeth received honorary doctor of law degrees from London University, she, too, sounded humble. “There is one piece of fortune which we have never known,” she said. “We have never known a university from within….”
The King, a simple, uneducated man, prized his daughter’s lack of sophistication and wrote in his diary how much he would miss the charades, games, and parlor singsongs they had shared at Windsor Castle. At her wedding reception, he rose from his chair, raised his glass, and, pointedly ignoring the bridegroom, saluted his beloved daughter. “To the bride,” the King said with tears in his eyes. A few days later he sent her a touching letter:
… I was so proud of you & thrilled at having you so close to me on our long walk in Westminster Abbey, but when I handed your hand to the Archbishop I felt that I had lost something very precious. You were so calm and composed during the Service & said your words with such conviction, that I knew it was all right.
I am so glad you wrote & told Mummy that you think the long wait before your engagement & the long time before the wedding 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 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
Papa
SIX
A few months after their wedding Prince Philip complained that his young wife wanted sex constantly. He said he was astonished to find her insatiable. “I can’t get her out of my bed,” he said. “She’s always there. She’s driving me mad.”
Philip made these complaints during his 1948 visit to the South of France while his wife remained in England. He was traveling with his cousin David, the Marquess of Milford Haven, who was his best man and closest friend. They were staying in the Monaco apartment of an English friend, who entertained them and other visiting British nobility. Philip’s grousing shocked everyone, including his cousin, who criticized him in front of other guests for being indiscreet.
“Real swordsmen don’t discuss their fencing partners,” said Milford Haven.
“Prince Philip complained that he could not keep Princess Elizabeth out of his bed, that she was at him sexually all the time,” recalled the Duchess of Leeds, who was also vacationing in Monaco.
The Duke of Leeds reported Philip’s caddish behavior to his brother-in-law, Oliver Lyttleton, a leading Tory Member of Parliament, and strongly recommended an official sanction.
“We all thought that Philip was singularly unpleasant to discuss his wife in such an open manner,” said the Duke of Leeds. “He was a disgusting man.”
“My in-laws were stunned by Philip’s total lack of discretion,” said Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail gossip columnist, who married the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. “It wasn’t that Philip was lying, but that he was telling the truth too bluntly. My aristocratic in-laws couldn’t deal with the image of the randy little sex-crazed Princess who would one day be their Queen.”
Philip was partly forgiven that summer when the Palace announced that Princess Elizabeth was canceling her schedule for six months. The official bulletin of June 4, 1948, read, “Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, will undertake no public engagements after the end of June.” The message indicated that the Princess was pregnant.
“Royal decorum prohibited using the actual word,” said biographer Anthony Holden. “You had to read between the lines to understand that she was pregnant. In those days, physicians referred to pregnancy as ‘confinement,’ and the due date of birth was the EDC, or estimated date of confinement. After the birth, she started breast-feeding, but that news wasn’t reported either because the word ‘breast’ was taboo in relation to royalty. This antediluvian mentality was prevailing thirty years later when I wrote a biography of the royal baby Prince Charles and mentioned that his mother had breast-fed him. I submitted my manuscript to the Palace for corrections, and John Dauth, press secretary to the Prince, rang me up in near hysteria.
“ ‘The sentence about breast-feeding must be deleted. Absolutely and at once.’
“ ‘But why?’ I asked.’ ”
“ ‘One never mentions the royal breasts.’ ”
“ ‘Perhaps I could paraphrase and say, “The Princess fed the baby herself”?’
“ ‘That still implies the royal breasts, and the royal breasts must never be exposed.’ ”
“In the end,” said Holden, chuckling over the prudish restraints of royal protocol, “I deleted the sentence.”
When the heir became apparent, Prince Philip looked like a hero. Not only had he ensured the line of succession and the continuation of the monarchy, but he had also produced a boy. The future King, Charles Philip Arthur George, was born by cesarean section at Buckingham Palace six days before his parents’ first wedding anniversary at 9:14 P.M. on November 14, 1948. He was taken by forceps and weighed seven pounds six ounces.
His mother had insisted he be delivered in her suite at Buckingham Palace and not in a makeshift hospital wing. “I want my baby to be born in my own room, amongst the things I know,” she said.
When she was a child, Elizabeth had told her governess, “I shall have lots of cows, horses, and children.” When the twenty-two-year-old Princess became pregnant, Crawfie could not quite believe that she was going to have a baby.
“Are you frightened at all, Lilibet?” she asked. “What do you feel about it?”
Elizabeth said she was looking forward to the experience. “After all, it is what we’re made for.”
One morning her governess found her depressed after reading a newspaper account about the divorce of an acquaintance of hers who had small children.
“Why do people do it, Crawfie?” Elizabeth asked her governess. “How can they break up a home when there are children to consider?”
Crawfie tried to explain that some personalities were incompatible and some homes unhappy, but the Princess, who had been raised in a royal palace by loving parents and servants, did not seem to understand.
“But why did they get married in the first place?” she asked.
Crawfie eased the subject back to her impending delivery.
“She said she did not mind whether her first child was a boy or a girl,” said John Dean, valet to Prince Philip, “but I believe the Duke was looking forward to having a son.”
The King was convinced that the baby was going to be a girl because female genes ran strong on both sides of the family: Philip was the only boy following the birth of four girls, and Elizabeth was one of two girls. The genetic probability of a girl worried the King, who wanted his grandchild to be given the royal treatment, which included the bows and/or curtsies that accompany the HRH style. Since the creation of the House of Windsor in 1917, that style—His Royal Highness—had been reserved for the boys of the sovereign and excluded the girls. Not being a gambling man, the cautious King would not take a chance. He issued an official proclamation* a week before his daughter gave birth (not wanting his grandchild to be a commoner) and decreed that all children born to Elizabeth and Philip would be considered royal: all must be given the royal appellation of HRH and styled Prince or Princess. That way he ensured himself a royal grandchild, even if she was a girl. When Elizabeth produced a boy, the King was ecstatic, and his enthusiasm affected everyone around the Palace.
“It’s a boy. It’s a boy,” shouted a policeman at the Palace gates. The gathering crowds sang lustily f
or hours as the country celebrated the birth of a future king. The royal baby was hailed with forty-one-gun salutes from His Majesty’s warships around the globe. Winston Churchill said the birth of Prince Charles had made the British monarchy “the most secure in the world.” Prime Minister Clement Attlee congratulated the royal family, who by their “example in private life as well as in the devotion to public duty, have given strength and comfort to many in these times of stress and uncertainty.”
At Windsor Castle, the two-ton curfew bell, which rings only for royals on four occasions—birth, marriage, investiture, and death—tolled for hours. For the next week, London’s church bells pealed day and night, bonfires blazed, and fountains spouted blue-for-boy water. More than four thousand telegrams arrived at Buckingham Palace the first night, and a dozen temporary typists were hired to handle the letters and packages that poured in from around the empire and beyond.
The day after Prince Charles was born, the King ordered laborers working on Clarence House to “stop taking so damned many tea breaks.” He insisted they work overtime to get the residence ready so his daughter, his son-in-law, and his eventual heir could move from their cramped quarters in Buckingham Palace. During World War II, the King had lent Clarence House to the British Red Cross. When he decided to give the bombed-out mansion—which had no heat, bathrooms, or electricity—to his daughter as a wedding present so she could live near him, Parliament allocated £50,000 ($200,000) for renovations. But work stoppages throttled England’s postwar economy and stalled the project for eighteen months, and it ended up costing five times more than the war-drained treasury had allotted. Still, the King’s subjects did not object. The royal family was so beloved after the war that the public willingly absorbed the cost of $1 million for remodeling the royal residence and installing crystal chandeliers, satin draperies, and gold faucets. Only the communist newspaper in London questioned the expenditures for the future sovereign at a time when the average weekly wage was less than $25 and scores of homeless families were shivering in abandoned military barracks.
The Queen addressed the misery of “all those who are living in uncongenial surroundings and who are longing for a time when they will have a home of their own.” In her radio address on the occasion of Their Majesties’ Silver Jubilee in 1948, she said, “I am sure that patience, tolerance, and love will help them to keep their faith undimmed and their courage undaunted when things seem difficult.”
The King continued raging at the laborers working on Clarence House, his irascibility now exacerbated by failing health. At the age of fifty-three, his habit of chain-smoking cigarettes had clogged his lungs with cancer, although the word was never used in his presence. The deadly disease had blocked his bronchial tubes, which caused incessant coughing and shortness of breath. He relied on his doctor, Sir John Weir, a genial seventy-two-year-old homeopath, who dispensed more jokes than remedies while His Majesty’s health deteriorated. Finally the amiable practitioner called in six other elderly specialists, who recommended surgery to remove the King’s left lung. None of the doctors ever told the King of his spreading malignancy, and only one cautioned against cigarettes.
“Before we do this operation, we’ve got to cut down on the smoking,” said James Learmonth, England’s top expert on vascular disease. Learmonth did not have the nerve to tell his sovereign that he was killing himself with cigarettes, but by then nicotine had become the Windsor family curse: Queen Mary, the Duke of Windsor, and Princess Margaret were all addicted, and even the Queen smoked eight cigarettes a day, although never in public.
In addition to lung cancer, the King also suffered from arteriosclerosis, which caused him painful leg cramps. In 1949 he underwent lumbar surgery to relieve the pain and prevent gangrene, which would have meant amputating both his legs. Cardiac complications so weakened him that he had to curtail his schedule and postpone the royal tour of Australia and New Zealand.
The Queen wanted to hide her husband’s illness, so she began applying makeup to his face to camouflage his pallor during public appearances. Each time she rouged his sunken, wan cheeks, she cursed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “None of this would have happened,” she said, “if Wallis hadn’t blown in from Baltimore!” On her orders, the Palace denied that the King was camouflaging his ill health with cosmetics.
The Queen possessed the most engaging personality of the royal family. She usually demonstrated intelligence and forgiveness. But since the abdication in 1936, she remained implacable in her animosity toward the Windsors. Now, filled with bitterness, she blamed them for leaching life away from her husband. “If only Bertie hadn’t had to worry so much during the war,” she wrote in a letter, bemoaning the abdication that put her husband on the throne. “If only he hadn’t had to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.” In her mind, and that of her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, the cause of the King’s alarming deterioration was directly attributable to “that damnable Simpson woman.”
Distracted by her husband’s failing health, the Queen did not pay close attention to a letter she received from Ladies’ Home Journal, soliciting her comments and corrections on excerpts from a manuscript entitled The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford. She was stunned to learn that her children’s governess was publishing a memoir about her seventeen years of royal service. The Scottish schoolmarm, who retired in 1949, said she had postponed marriage until she was forty years old to take care of the Queen’s children. The governess said she waited until Lilibet, twenty-three, and Margaret Rose, nineteen, no longer needed her on a daily basis. Only then did she decide that she could in good conscience accept Retired Major George Buthlay’s proposal of marriage. The royal family did not rejoice. In fact, Queen Mary was horrified.
“My dear child, you can’t leave them,” she told Crawfie. “You simply cannot.”
The Queen, too, was appalled by Crawfie’s intentions, especially when she said she was going to be married three months before the royal wedding. The Queen, whom Crawfie described in her book as “always sweet,” “usually charming,” and “unfailingly pleasant,” stared at her coldly. After a moment of stony silence, the Queen recovered her composure.
“You must see, Crawfie,” she said, “that this would not be at all convenient just now.” Her dulcet tone had hardened into the sound of a woman discovering a dog’s mess in the middle of her living room floor.
The King, who usually agreed with his mother and his wife, flew into an imperial rage. Only when Crawfie promised to stay through the royal wedding was he pacified. He agreed then to make her a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. This honor, established by Queen Victoria in 1896 for members of the royal household who had rendered extraordinary personal service to the sovereign, was not good enough for Crawfie, or so the Queen maintained. She said the governess had expected to receive the highest household honor—Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, which truly separated the upstairs from the downstairs. Because she didn’t receive that particular decoration, she retaliated by writing a memoir and two more books.
The Queen denounced Crawfie as a traitor and never spoke to her again. When Marion Crawford died in 1988 at the age of seventy-eight, no member of the royal family attended her funeral, wrote a condolence letter, or even sent flowers. As far as the Queen was concerned, Crawfie was dead* the day her book was published.
More than anyone else in the royal family, the Queen understood the power of the revealing detail and the humanizing anecdote. She knew the historical impact of a book like Crawfie’s, and despite its loving prose and affectionate stories, she never forgave the governess. The Queen did not like Crawfie’s rendering of her as a passive, uninvolved mother who cared little about her children’s education beyond their ability to sing and dance. The Queen felt betrayed seeing herself using the governess as a psychiatrist to talk to her difficult daughter, Margaret. “I knew that my real work as Royal Governess at the Palace was over,” wrote Crawfie, who had trained to be a child psychologist before entering
royal service, “but in the new, busy life which Princess Margaret was leading, her mother thought an hour or two of quiet, unrestrained chat on general subjects might soothe her…. I had to go daily to the Palace to sit with Princess Margaret and discuss whatever subjects came up.”
Although Crawfie described the Queen as “one of the loveliest people I had ever seen,” she wrote that the Duchess of Kent was an “exceptionally beautiful woman” who, unlike the Queen, had married “the best-looking of all the Princes.”
The Queen also objected to seeing personal details in print, such as the King’s “blue-green draped bed” in his own bedroom “separate and away from the Queen.” She did not like the reference to Margaret Rose’s looking like “a plump navy-blue fish” in her bathing suit, and she was livid to read about “Uncle David” (the Duke of Windsor) being so “devoted to Lilibet.” She was miffed that Crawfie had allowed the world to eavesdrop on the transatlantic call that the King and Queen had made to their children in 1939: “We ended the conversation by holding the Queen’s corgi, Dookie, up and making him bark down the telephone by pinching his behind.”
And the Queen never forgave Crawfie for telling the stories of Lilibet’s nursery, which indicated the future Queen’s compulsive disorder as a child.
“She became almost too methodical and tidy,” Crawfie wrote. “She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes arranged so.” The image of such an obsessive youngster, “too dutiful for her own good,” was painful.
The Queen knew that The Little Princesses would make Marion Crawford the most quoted royal historian of the twentieth century, because no one before had been given such intimate access to the royal family. Afterward, any mention of the author’s name caused the Queen to turn away with displeasure. Her slang for treachery: “to do a Crawfie.”