According to Elizabeth’s diary, Bertie set out for Wembley that morning “very downhearted.” His legs trembled throughout the speech, and he had trouble articulating some of the words. The duchess listened over the wireless from White Lodge. “It was marvelously clear & no hesitation. I was so relieved,” she wrote. Bertie admitted after it was over that he thought it was “easily the best I have ever done. Papa seemed pleased which was kind of him.” However, His Majesty told the duke’s brother George, “Bertie got through his speech all right, but there were some rather long pauses.”
Bertie’s first appointment with Lionel Logue did not take place until October 19, 1926. The Australian, who had trained as an engineer but took up speech pathology to help soldiers traumatized during World War I, wrote of his first session with the Duke of York, “He entered my consulting room at three o’clock in the afternoon, a slim, quiet man, with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of the man whom habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left at five o’clock you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.”
Elizabeth, who accompanied Bertie to nearly every session, encouraged her husband each step of the way during his course of therapy, supporting him through the rigorous battery of exercises, from rapid-fire tongue twisters to diaphragmatic breathing exercises on the floor. Together with Logue, she gave him the confidence to deliver his speeches, where previously he’d been a self-conscious embarrassment—to the royal family, to the kingdom, and to himself.
Logue later stated that the Duke of York was “the pluckiest and most determined patient I ever had,” largely, and most likely, because his plucky and most determined duchess refused to let him become defeated.
The duke still remained anxious about public appearances, however. Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, recalled how Elizabeth would take charge of her bashful husband. After attending a public function in Leicester, the Yorks boarded a Pullman car. A crowd had gathered outside the train and “The Duke was very shy and rushed along the carriage, pulling down the blinds. I was very impressed by the way that the Duchess snapped them up again immediately, saying to her husband, ‘Bertie, you must wave.’”
Nicknamed “the smiling duchess,” Elizabeth managed to balance a pitch-perfect ear for public relations with her genuine adoration for her husband. Theirs was clearly a love match, as Duff Cooper, a contemporary who later became Secretary of State for War, wrote to his wife, Diana, after seeing the Yorks at the theater one night in 1926. “They are such a sweet little couple and so fond of each other. They reminded me of us, sitting together in the box having private jokes, and in the interval when we were all sitting in the room behind the box they slipped out, and I found them standing together in a dark corner of the passage talking happily as we might. She affects no shadow of airs or graces.”
In the 1920s the British Empire reached its geographical zenith, covering a quarter of the world. And ever since the Prince of Wales’s successful state visit to Australia in 1920, the Duke of York had longed to follow in his footsteps. Now that he had the exceptionally popular Elizabeth at his side, the monarchs finally agreed. So in 1927, the Yorks embarked on their first official state visit: a comprehensive tour of Australia that would keep them away from their infant daughter for half a year or so, given the additional ports of call that would take them around the world. The duchess was heartbroken, but soon learned that one’s royal duties always trumped domestic yearnings.
The Yorks departed England on January 6, and did not return until June 27, 1927. After sailing thirty thousand miles and traveling many more on land, the duke and duchess came away with a few valuable lessons from their lengthy journey. With his wife at his side, Bertie had a newfound confidence; he felt respected, rather than mocked, by the world. And Elizabeth discovered that her personality was currency. Wherever they went, she could use it to win people’s hearts, not just for herself, but for her husband and his kingdom.
The state visit had also been priceless practice for what lay ahead.
At the end of 1928, George V caught a chill and nearly died. Not daring to believe that his father was as ill as the doctors feared him to be, the Prince of Wales refused to quit his African safari with Denys Finch Hatton. The king’s assistant private secretary, Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, cabled the heir to the throne. “Sir, the King of England is dying, and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to us.” The prince’s behavior was a foreshadowing of the future, when, eight years later, David, thinking of no one but himself and Wallis Simpson, would relinquish the throne.
In December 1928, and again in July 1929, the king needed an operation to drain an abscess just behind his diaphragm. In each case a rib had to be removed. As discussions were privately undertaken about the inevitable succession, the royal household even then despaired of David. His charm and popularity were undeniable, but palace insiders agreed that he lacked the seriousness to do the job.
Many years later, Elizabeth recalled that during his convalescence the ailing king told Bertie, “‘You’ll see, your brother will never become King.’ He must have seen something we didn’t, because I remember we thought ‘how ridiculous,’ because then everybody thought he was going to be a wonderful King…. I remember we both looked at each other and thought ‘nonsense.’”
In 1935, George V celebrated his jubilee: twenty-five years on the throne. But he was not a well man. During the last weeks of his life the ailing king passionately exclaimed to Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox, “I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet [the family’s nickname for Princess Elizabeth] and the throne.” He worried that the café society in which his heir traveled, with its easy virtue, was a bad influence on the manners and morality of the monarchy. David and Bertie could not have been more different, the former a glib bon vivant, and the latter a stammering family man. Their father took a dim view of the Prince of Wales’s character. “He has not a single friend who is a gentleman. He does not see any decent society. And he is 41.”
The king’s condition worsened throughout the month of January 1936. On the sixteenth, Queen Mary sent for the Duke of York. Four days later, the public was informed about the grave condition of His Majesty’s health, as the BBC announced, “The King’s life is moving peacefully to its close.”
Just before the end, the Prince of Wales “became hysterical, cried loudly and kept on embracing the Queen,” according to Lord Wigram. Helen Hardinge, wife of the king’s private secretary, judged Edward’s display of emotion to be “frantic and unreasonable.” And yet, if one is losing one’s father and inheriting the responsibility of governing an empire where the sun never sets when one isn’t particularly keen on doing so, one might cry hysterically, too.
The royal physician Lord Dawson scandalously gave the dying king a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine to help him sleep, hastening the process so that His Majesty would pass in time for his demise to be recorded in the more respectable morning papers, rather than the evening tabloids. His time of death was recorded as 11:55 p.m. on January 20. George V’s body lay in state at Westminster Hall and was interred in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor on January 28.
The Prince of Wales, now Edward VIII, came to the throne on a tide of popularity. He had served in World War I, so it was expected that the veterans would like him. He was affable and charming and not hampered by a stammer. Yet George V had predicted, “After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months,” and he was not far off the mark. Edward made it clear early in his reign that he found his royal duties irksome and had no intentions of giving up his fast set of friends for a more staid circle of associates. There were greater concerns as well. Winston Churchill was troubled about the rise of fascism across Europe, and the king’s sympathy for Mussolini and the Third Reich. According to Lord Wigram, senior officials at Whitehall believed he was in the pocket of the German ambassador, Lord Ribbentrop. Insiders at Buckingham
palace used the words “irresponsible” and “impractical” to describe the new king.
The most heinous crime of all, in the eyes of his government and his family, was Edward’s romance with Wallis Simpson, who was still married to her second husband when their affair began in 1934. Appalled that this brash American upstart was sleeping in Queen Mary’s bed at Balmoral and loudly discussing how the royal gardens should be rearranged, Elizabeth refused to accept her as Edward’s hostess. She resented the king’s shirking of his royal duties and responsibilities to accommodate “That Woman” instead. The duchess also resented seeing Wallis’s name at the top of the Court Circular with the Yorks’. From then on, whenever Mrs. Simpson’s name was mentioned, Elizabeth’s ordinarily twinkly blue eyes would harden and her smiling mouth would become tight.
But Edward was head over heels in love with Wallis. She was the one nonnegotiable element in the king’s life. On November 16, 1936, he summoned his prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and informed him that he intended to wed Mrs. Simpson and make her his queen—just as soon as her divorce proceedings were concluded and she received her decree nisi. Duff Cooper, the Secretary of State for War, recalled Baldwin saying, as he passed the news to his colleagues, that “he was not at all sure that the Yorks would not prove the best solution. The King had many good qualities but not those which best fitted him for his post, whereas the Duke of York would be just like his father.”
The childless Edward’s accession had made Bertie the heir presumptive to the throne, yet the king never took the duke into his confidence throughout the debacle known as the Abdication Crisis. The Yorks did not know what was on Edward’s mind until October 20, 1936, when his private secretary, Alec Hardinge, visited them at 145 Piccadilly, their London residence, to officially inform them of the possibility of Edward’s abdication and their succession to the throne. Elizabeth was incredulous at the news; Bertie was aghast. When the duchess saw her husband’s ashen face she grew even angrier at his irresponsible brother and her—his married floozy. How dared Edward consider abandoning his duty and leaving Bertie, clearly overwhelmed by the mere thought of it, to pick up the pieces?
On November 17, the king finally told the Duke of York of his intentions to abdicate if he could not marry Mrs. Simpson. After this bombshell, there was radio silence from Edward.
Panicked, Bertie tried to communicate with his older brother, but the king did not reply to his letters or return phone calls. “I do so [he double underscored the word] long for you to be happy with the one person you adore,” Bertie wrote to the king on November 23. “I feel sure that whatever you decide to do will be in the best interests of this Country and Empire.”
Always the angel on her husband’s shoulder, protective and supportive, Elizabeth took up the pen and wrote to the king herself on the same day.
Darling David,
Please read this. Please be kind to Bertie when you see him, because he loves you, and minds terribly all that happens to you. I wish that you could realize how loyal & true he is to you, and you have no idea how hard it has been for him lately…& as his wife, I must write & tell you this. I am terrified for him—so DO help him. And for God’s sake don’t tell him that I have written—we both uphold you always. E.
Across the top of the page, she added, “We want you to be happy, more than anything else, but it’s awfully difficult for Bertie to say what he thinks, you know how shy he is—so do help him.”
On November 25, Bertie wrote to Sir Godfrey Thomas, “If the worst happens and I have to take over, you can be assured that I will do my best to clear up the inevitable mess, if the whole fabric does not crumble under the shock and strain of it all.”
Elizabeth channeled her contempt for Edward and hatred for Wallis into keeping the Duke of York calm in the face of his increasing anxiety about the terrifying prospect ahead. On November 29, as the Yorks left to fulfill a royal engagement in Edinburgh, Bertie commented that he hated to leave London, because he was so anxious about the imminent future. “I feel like the proverbial ‘sheep being led to the slaughter,’ which is not a comfortable feeling.”
Elizabeth was appalled by the way Edward had been treating his family throughout the Abdication Crisis. Seventy-year-old Queen Mary, so recently widowed, had become seriously depressed. The Yorks, who had the most at stake, could not fathom that the king had left them entirely out of his discussions with the government. “Everyone knows more than we do. We know nothing. Nothing!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
Edward announced his intentions to their mother on December 3, then dropped off the planet when Bertie tried to reach him. The duke humiliated himself by phoning him at Fort Belvedere nonstop for four days. Elizabeth never forgave Edward for the agony he put her husband through during those ninety-six hours. She also never forgot the humiliating rumors that serious consideration was being given to bypassing Bertie for the crown in favor of one of his younger brothers—who were not hampered by an embarrassing speech defect.
However, the Duke of Gloucester was an uninspiring boozer, and the Duke of Kent was notoriously bisexual. At least the Duke of York had a secret weapon: his extremely popular wife—and the British adored their two little daughters. Additionally, Bertie had more experience than his younger brothers, and so it was determined that the order of succession would stand. “The Yorks will do it very well,” averred Stanley Baldwin.
Yet when Bertie saw the Instrument of Abdication on December 9, he broke down and sobbed on his mother’s shoulder for an hour. Elizabeth was so stressed that she came down with the flu. On December 10 at ten a.m., Edward VIII signed the Instrument of Abdication, and a few hours later, Prime Minister Baldwin informed Parliament and the rest of the world.
The Yorks were together as a family when a mob converged outside 145 Piccadilly. Elizabeth rose from her sickbed to see what the commotion was all about, then told Bertie he should show himself to his new subjects. “But what on earth am I to say to them?” he asked shyly.
At three p.m., Queen Mary came to see them. Her face was wet with tears after speaking privately with Elizabeth. The new queen told their daughters’ governess, “I’m afraid there are going to be great changes in our lives, Crawfie. We must take what is coming to us and make the best of it.”
On Friday, December 11, at 1:36 p.m., His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Act received Edward VIII’s own royal assent in the House of Lords. At that moment “Bert and Betty” were no longer Duke and Duchess of York but Their Royal Majesties, as well as Emperor and Empress of India. (The latter titles were relinquished on June 22, 1947, when India was granted independence.)
That night the former king took to the airwaves and made a radio broadcast to the nation, referring to his successor’s “one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me—a happy home with his wife and children.”
The following day, Edward departed Britain’s shores aboard the HMS Fury. Bertie’s first act as king of England was to confer a dukedom on his elder brother, who was henceforth to be known as His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor. The royal family’s—and Parliament’s—denial of HRH status to Wallis as his duchess after they wed on June 3, 1937, would become a source of tension for the rest of the Windsors’ lives.
Nine hours after Edward’s departure, Bertie, now George VI, looking (in the words of his biographer John Wheeler-Bennett) “pale and haggard, yet with an innate dignity and integrity which compelled the respect and reverence, as well as the protective instinct of his hearers…in a low, clear voice, but with many hesitations,” addressed his Accession Council at St. James’s Palace. He told them, “With my wife and helpmeet by my side, I take up the heavy task which lies before me. In it I look for the support of all my peoples.”
Three days after their accession, on December 14, George VI’s forty-first birthday, he conferred the Order of the Garter on his queen. It was clear from the start of his reign that Elizabeth was to be a full partner. Although there was no traditional Christmas
broadcast that year, Bertie released a New Year’s Eve message, dedicating himself to his subjects; and, referring to the burdens of kingship, he intoned, “I shoulder them with all the more confidence in the knowledge that the Queen and my mother Queen Mary are at my side,” adding, “[M]y wife and I dedicate ourselves for all time to your service, and we pray that God may give us guidance and strength to follow the path that lies before us.” The new sovereigns hoped their subjects would accept them with open arms, fearing that the popular and glamorous Edward VIII would be a tough act to follow. Elizabeth knew perfectly well that the über-svelte Wallis Simpson had mocked her unfashionably plump figure and nicknamed her “the dowdy duchess,” and that her husband’s stammer was a source of derision. Now, more than ever, a country that had been torn asunder by public opinion needed to be healed.
Mother knew best. A proud Queen Mary wrote to Lady Strathmore, “[D]ear Bertie and Elizabeth will carry out things in the same way that George V did…. Elizabeth is such a darling and is such a help to Bertie.”
And Bertie knew it. The Regency Act of 1937 made Elizabeth the first Queen Consort in English history to be eligible to serve as a Counsellor of State and to transact royal business in the sovereign’s name. It was proof of the king’s trust in her competence. His pride in Elizabeth was further demonstrated when he insisted that she precede him on all but the most formal state occasions. It was the queen who would emerge from a car first, smiling and waving regally, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd, while at a respectful distance the diffident king followed as if he were the consort.
After their accession the royal couple also bonded more closely in other ways. The country had been riven by the Abdication Crisis. Politicians and subjects taking sides created a toxic situation that was bad for the kingdom. Elizabeth and Bertie socially ostracized the courtiers who had worked for Edward VIII and those who had been among the former king’s tight circle of friends, especially the individuals who had championed Wallis. From the continent, the newly minted Duke of Windsor remained a thorn in his brother’s side, perpetually offering unsolicited political advice that often ran counter to the guidance of Bertie’s ministers. Edward was always ringing up Buckingham Palace to ask Bertie for money and to pressure him to grant Wallis the styling of a Royal Highness. His blasé indifference to the havoc he had wreaked on the kingdom and upon his brother’s health, engendering no end of “gnashes,” infuriated Elizabeth. Her husband’s nerves became exceptionally frayed during the first year of his reign, no thanks to Edward’s antagonizing him. Elizabeth urged Bertie to tell his brother not to phone him anymore—and that the reason for it should be clear: That Woman.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 46