The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  At this stage a new way out – a morganatic marriage – was suggested. Baldwin, who now only wanted a speedy abdication, seized the opportunity. He consulted his Cabinet and the Dominion governments and none of them would consent to a morganatic marriage. Abdication was the King’s only course.

  On 1 December the dam broke. The Right Reverend A. W. F. Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, addressed an audience of clergy of his diocese and, in the course of his speech, criticized the King, not for immorality, but for his failure to attend church. The Yorkshire Post picked up the story and the rest of the press scrambled to follow suit. Now the editors, released at last, went into action.

  Wallis now decided to escape. She telephoned her old friends Mr and Mrs Rogers at the Villa Lou Viei near Cannes and that night, secretly, she left for Newhaven and Dieppe.

  The same night, after Wallis had left, the King returned to Buckingham Palace. Encouraged by Beaverbrook and Churchill, he had been persuaded to try to mobilize popular support, which he believed he had in the country. Deciding to make an appeal over the head of the government, he drafted a broadcast. He sent for Baldwin and gave him the draft to present to the Cabinet the next day and also sent his legal advisers with copies to Beaverbrook and Churchill. Late though it was, while waiting for their replies he drove across to Marlborough House. His mother had written gently asking him to call, since she had not heard from him for ten days. He tried to explain his neglect: that he had to make his own decision and that was irrevocable. He must marry Wallis. ‘All that matters is our happiness,’ he repeatedly told her. Then he drove back to the Palace. Now it symbolized all that he hated. He wrote in his memoirs:

  The immense forbidding bulk of the Palace loomed up as the motor turned into the Mall. Few windows showed any light. My presence in London had evidently become known, for as I approached the gates I perceived, gathered around the foot of Queen Victoria’s memorial, a small crowd staring at the edifice, thinking of God knows what. At that moment there came over me, like a wave, a powerful resurgence of the intense dislike for the building I had always felt. Did I really belong there at all? The answer came immediately – certainly not alone.31

  Desperately tired, the King decided to return to the Fort and wait for the Cabinet’s reply to his suggested broadcast. Monckton, who throughout these days had served him with efficiency and kindness, would not allow him to return to the Fort alone. So at 10 a.m., accompanied by Monckton, he drove out of the Palace.

  Even at that hour, there was still a small cheering crowd outside the Palace. In a revealing passage in his memoirs he wrote:

  In this simple, spontaneous demonstration I found consolation for a day of trial. And the episode gave rise to a fleeting and tempting thought – a notion so ephemeral and obviously so impossible that I mention it now merely as an illustration of a how hard-pressed mind will clutch at straws. The people at the gate were for me. Why not turn their undoubted affection to proper account? Manifestly, my Ministers were not going to let me speak to my people. What was there to prevent me from addressing them where they stood? My parents’ practice of ‘showing’ themselves on the balcony of Buckingham Palace provided a precedent. The spotlights playing on the façade, the lonely figure of the King pleading his cause – the scene could have been extremely effective. But no sooner had the image formed in my mind than it vanished. For one thing, it smacked of balcony politics, of which there was already too much in the Europe of that era. What was more important, it would have meant driving a wedge into the nation.32

  He had never enjoyed the balcony appearances, but he was aware of their power to unite the nation. ‘The car sped up Constitution Hill,’ he wrote, ‘leaving the crowd behind. I never again set foot inside Buckingham Palace as King.’33

  From now on the Fort became his headquarters. However, he kept his private telephone line through the Palace; it was to serve him in these last days as a link with Wallis in Cannes. Daily they talked for hours, keeping his telephone line constantly engaged, to the annoyance of his Household at the Palace. His loyal telephonist, William Bateman, kept watch over this phone, sleeping by it at night to protect the King’s secrecy.

  On Friday 4 December, Baldwin motored down, bringing the Cabinet’s decision not to permit him to make a broadcast. Churchill, who still hoped for popular support, came to dine that night and tried to persuade him to delay decisions to allow time for ‘the battalions to march’. But after he had gone, the King spent a sleepless night facing the reality that there could be no ‘King’s Party’ without national division and possibly civil war.

  That night, pacing the bedroom floor, he made his decision. On Saturday morning he sent Monckton to Baldwin to tell him of his decision to abdicate.

  Throughout this dramatic weekend when the fate of the monarchy was being decided, the Duke of York, the one man most nearly concerned, was not consulted. It was not until Monday night that the King agreed to see his brother.

  When Bertie arrived at the Fort the next evening, he found Baldwin there, righteously determined to make one more effort to persuade the King to give up Wallis. He wanted, he said, to help him ‘wrestle with his conscience – all through the night if necessary’.34 The King begged his aides to get rid of him. But, courteous as ever, he invited him to stay for dinner.

  It was a strained dinner party that night. But, as Monckton wrote, it was the King’s

  tour de force. In that quiet panelled room he sat at the head of the table with his boyish face and smile, with a good fresh colour while the rest of us were pale as sheets, rippling over with bright conversation, and with a careful eye to see that his guests were being looked after. He wore his white kilt. On Mr Baldwin’s right was the Duke of York, and I was next to him, and as the dinner went on the Duke turned to me and said: ‘Look at him. We simply cannot let him go.’ But we both knew there was nothing we could say or do to stop him.35

  The Duke of York was silent, bowed down under the burden that he now had to take up. Only the King was lively; as Baldwin told the Cabinet, he was ‘happy and gay as if he were looking forward to his honeymoon’.36

  For two days the Duke of Kent, also present, remained at the Fort, still trying by every means ‘to persuade the King to stay’. In London his wife, Princess Marina, confessed to her friend Chips Channon that she believed ‘if this issue had not arisen something else could have’. Two years ago, she said, the King had told the Duke that he did not know if he ‘could stick it’. 37

  In the House of Commons on Monday, MPs cheered Baldwin’s statement. Thursday 10 December 1936 was a historic day in the history of Parliament and the monarchy. At 2.00 p.m. members of the House of Commons met, among them Chips Channon:

  The House was full for there had not been an Abdication since 1399 … Baldwin was greeted with cheers … At last he went to the Bar, bowed twice – a message from the King and he presented a paper to the Speaker who proceeded to read it out. At the words ‘renounce the throne’ his voice broke and there were stifled sobs in the House.38

  Baldwin’s statement that day, outlining the sequence of events leading to the abdication, was rambling and muddled, but he paid tribute to the King, who ‘had behaved in a constitutional manner’. Baldwin told how in October he had warned the King ‘that the respect grown up in the last three generations for the monarchy … might lose that power far more rapidly than it was built up, and once lost, I doubt if anything could restore it’. One sentence revealed Baldwin’s irritation at the King’s immaturity. ‘It is difficult to realise that his Majesty is not a boy, although he looks so young.’39 Otherwise his references to the King were courteous, even complimentary.

  In the House of Lords the next morning, 11 December 1936, the Bill accepting the King’s abdication was passed. Chips Channon was there again.

  Black Rod was sent to summon the Speaker from the House of Commons. The Clerk read the Royal Commission. The three Lords bowed and doffed their hats. The Bill was read. The King was still King Edward. The Clerk bowed
‘Le Roi le veult’* and Edward, the beautiful boy King with his gaiety and honesty, his nervous twitching, his flair and glamour, was part of history. It was 1.52.40

  * ‘Le Roi le veult’ is the Norman French command traditionally used on the final passage of Bills in the House of Lords.

  CHAPTER NINE

  King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

  ‘Elizabeth could make a home anywhere’.1

  KING GEORGE VI

  The Palace under Fire

  On 11 December 1936 at 1.52 p.m., in the chamber of the House of Lords, Bertie, the Duke of York, became officially King George VI of Great Britain. Usually a monarch succeeds after the last breath of a dying King or Queen – The King is dead, long live the King.’ But for the Duke of York the agony had been prolonged. His brother, King Edward VIII, had signed the instrument of abdication at 10.00 a.m. on Thursday 10 December in the Octagonal Drawing Room at Fort Belvedere with his brothers as witnesses. It was not until after Prime Minister Baldwin had presented the document to the House of Commons on the afternoon of the same day, and completion by the House of Lords of ‘His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Bill’. The next morning, that agony was over.

  Only then did the new King, at luncheon at 145 Piccadilly with his wife and daughters, received a message brought to him by his secretary, Sir Eric Miéville: ‘Will you tell his majesty that he has just been proclaimed King.’ According to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother’s biographer, King George ‘looked round the luncheon table and said, “Now if someone comes through on the telephone, who shall I say I am?”’2 It was a characteristic remark of a shy and diffident man who had always been outshone by his older brother. It took some time before he became aware of his own strengths, and only gradually did the public become aware that here was a King with the authority of a naval officer and the dedication and high seriousness of a deeply religious man.

  From the time when, on 12 December, he took the oath of succession at St James’s Palace to 12 May 1937, the day of his Coronation, he took charge of the preparations with a competence and foresight that King Edward VIII would never have shown. And at the same time he fought with determination to conquer the stammer that made every speech of his life a nightmare. That he did finally succeed was due partly to the skill of his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, but even more to the loving support of his wife, who, with the touch of a hand or an encouraging smile, gave him confidence.

  His brother, King Edward VIII, may have been full of his admiration for his grandfather, the flamboyant Edward VII. The Duke of York, however, signalled by his adoption of his father’s name, George, that it was in his footsteps he intended to walk. On the same day that he took the oath he created the former King, Edward VIII, HRH The Duke of Windsor. It was typical that King Edward VIII had not given a thought to his future title, and equally typical that King George VI carefully considered the question with its implications for the future. That morning, the Clerk of the Crown, Sir Claud Schuster, came to find out how King Edward VIII should be announced in the broadcast he was due to make that night. Crisply, the new King told him:

  I suggest H.R.H. D[uke] of W[indsor]. He cannot be Mr. E. W. as he was born the son of a Duke. That makes him Ld E. W. anyhow. If he ever comes back to this country, he can stand &be elected to the H. of C. Would you like that? S. replied No. As D. of W. he can sit and vote in the H. of L. Would you like that? S. replied No. Well if he becomes a Royal Duke he cannot speak or vote in the H. of L. &he is not being deprived of his rank in the Navy, Army or R. Air Force. This gave Schuster a new lease of life &he went off quite happy.3

  That same night the new King gave the old King a farewell dinner at Royal Lodge, Windsor, his country home. Queen Elizabeth was not there. Through all these difficult last days she was seriously ill with influenza and stayed at their Piccadilly home. ‘I kept right out of it all.’ she remembered.4 The Duke of Windsor later recalled, ‘The dinner passed pleasantly enough, I hope I was a good guest.’5

  Afterwards the Duke of Windsor went across to Windsor Castle to make the broadcast with the memorable words: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’6

  Queen Mary, who had disliked the idea of so public a declaration, was somewhat relieved by the dignity of the broadcast. She bade her son ‘the dreadful goodbye as he was leaving that evening for Austria’.7 Throughout, she had behaved with magnificent control. There was an unforgettable moment when her four sons stood to see her leave for the drive back to London. She gave one last look from her big black Daimler, there was a final bow from the son who had rejected his kingdom, and Queen Mary swept off into the foggy night.

  The brothers talked on until after midnight. When D & I said goodbye,’ King George VI wrote with characteristic simplicity, ‘we kissed, parted as freemasons & he bowed to me as King.’8 Their old affectionate friendship would never be the same again.

  ‘There was’, the Duke later wrote, ‘great sadness in my heart at leaving Great Britain and its people.’9 Yet all who observed him at this time noted his air of euphoria. He was like a prisoner released – Peter Pan did not have to grow up after all. As Queen Mary later wrote to him, he did not seem to comprehend the magnitude of his decision, nor the hurt and humiliation he had caused to those who loved him.

  On the first night of his reign, King George VI was with his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten at Fort Belvedere, while the Duke of Windsor prepared for his final departure. ‘Dickie, this is absolutely terrible,’ the King said. ‘I never wanted this to happen; I’m quite unprepared for it. David has been trained for this all his life. I’ve never even seen a State Paper. I’m only a naval officer, it’s the only thing I know about.’10 In just these words King George V had complained to Lord Louis’ father. To which he had replied, ‘There is no more fitting preparation for a King than to have been trained for the Navy.’

  King George VI had been too modest; in fact, he had not only learned in the Navy self-discipline, common sense and an ability to command: as a biographer wrote,

  living as a member of a ship’s company gave him an understanding of humanity…

  He had learned too that in a ship you work together or sink. He had also qualities that his more charismatic brother had lacked – a determination to succeed, a sense of dedication that kept him going through periods of ill health. His father had understood him. ‘Bertie,’ he had said, ‘has more guts than the rest of his brothers put together.’11

  Above all, he had the unfailing support of the woman he loved. Queen Elizabeth had then, as now, unique charm and a friendly ease of manner that endeared her to all classes. But she has too a Scottish hardiness and strength of character that were to be proved in the fire of war.

  No monarch has succeeded to the throne under such painful circumstances. The last months had been an intolerable strain on a man who had always shunned the limelight. On 12 December, King George VI faced his first ordeal, the first meeting of the Privy Council at St James’s Palace, with courage; but his stammer, which he was beginning to overcome, was very pronounced that day. He spoke with obvious difficulty.

  On 15 February King George VI and his Queen left 145 Piccadilly and moved into Buckingham Palace: the simplicity of their private life was gone for ever. The cosy house where they had entertained informally, and got their own supper when they came in late from a theatre, had to be exchanged for the cold magnificence of Buckingham Palace.

  For the King the Palace was his place of work, his flagship – as it had been for King George V – and in wartime he was to make it the symbol of the unity of the nation, but he was determined that it should also be a home. For the Queen that was a challenge.

  Buckingham Palace had chilled many a royal heart over the past years. Queen Elizabeth was the first to bring warmth and the happiness of a young family there. ‘Elizabeth could make a home anywhere,’ King George VI tol
d Lady Airlie when she first had tea with them in the Queen’s Sitting Room at Buckingham Palace a few weeks after his accession. ‘I saw that the room was already beginning to show the traces of her own personality – the little feminine touches which I had always associated with her. It looks homelike already.’12

  For the first time in almost a century Buckingham Palace became alive. The two little girls ran down the long corridors, chased with their dogs around the gardens and rowed on the lake. ‘It was rather green and dirty,’13 Princess Margaret remembered, but the children found the big lake

  enchanting … all kinds of amusing birds came there and it had its own population of ducks. One of them, for reasons best known to herself, always laid her eggs and hatched them out in the smaller lake outside the Palace grounds. She then walked her children back to the Palace, over the courtyard and into the gardens. The Police on duty stopped the traffic for her and opened the gates.14

  Queen Elizabeth created their own microclimate within the chilly grandeur which gave the shy King the warmth and security he needed so desperately in the first difficult months of his reign.

  He regretted most that now he had less time for his beloved daughters, but he made sure that they had bright, cheerful rooms in the north-east corner of the Palace on the second floor. The dark study above the Balcony Room was rejected; he had never forgotten the gloom of the lessons he and his brother had shared there. It became a room for the children’s piano practice.

  While they were still living at Piccadilly, the Princesses had been enjoying swimming lessons at the Bath Club and no one had taken much notice of the two little girls in their regulation swimming costumes; but now that Princess Elizabeth was heir to the throne they attracted too much attention. So in the summer of 1938 it was decided to build ‘a swimming bath and squash court’ on the north side of the Palace, in one of Nash’s conservatories. According to The Times ‘the glass roof was left in position’.15