Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  Bertie later confided to Alan Lascelles that David said to him, “It was never in my scheme of things to be King of England.” Neither was it in Bertie’s. The idea terrified him. Baldwin was faced with two men, both in a terribly emotional state. Bertie’s old facial tics had returned in force and his speech impediment had regressed to pre-Logue days. Baldwin, suspecting David’s dilemma, hoped that the old King’s life would be quickly and mercifully extinguished so that there would be no time for his heir to do something irresponsible that could have a most disastrous effect on the people.

  While the two older brothers were in London, a macabre scene was taking place at Sandringham. That morning, “the King was propped up in a chair before the open door of his room, just visible to the Privy Councillors.... Nurse Catherine Black stood nearby and beside her, the Queen. The King’s doctor, Lord Dawson, leaned over his cadaverous figure and with great effort got him to understand the necessity for him to try to form the word “approved” so that the appointment of the Councillors of State, who were to be the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York, Gloucester and Kent, could be made. After about ten minutes, a faint whisper was heard and accepted as royal consent. Then the King was handed a paper and Lord Dawson, visibly exhausted, managed to get the King, by holding his hand with the pen in it, to make two little crosses. Tears filled King George’s eyes. He understood that his effort would be his last act as King.”

  Once he returned to his bed, King George made one more attempt to speak. Those around his bedside believed he uttered the word “Empire.” One interpretation was that he was concerned about what would happen to the Empire under David’s rule.

  On Lord Dawson’s later admission the end was hastened with medical help. That same night at five minutes to midnight, the King died “with no signs of pain or suffering. His breathing had simply ceased.” Queen Mary glanced over his stilled form to Lord Dawson to confirm her fears. The doctor nodded. The King’s death had been so peaceful that no one else gathered around the bed had yet comprehended what had taken place. Instantly, the Queen turned to her eldest son and, bowing, took his hand in hers and kissed it.

  “ ‘God save the King,’ she said in a strong, unwavering voice, and, looked him squarely in the eye. She then stepped back with a slight curtsy and Georgie [the Duke of Kent], who was standing next to her, stepped forward, bowed and followed her example.” The new King appeared startled, then noticeably embarrassed. “I could not bring myself to believe that the members of my own family or indeed anyone else, should be expected to humble themselves before me in this way,” he was later to write.

  Shortly after midnight he telephoned Wallis from Sandringham.

  “It’s all over,” he said, adding, “I can’t tell you what my plans are, everything here is so very upset. But I shall fly to London in the morning and will telephone you when I can.”

  It was only as she hung up, Wallis recalled, that she “realized that David was now King.”

  King George’s will was read to the assembled family, in the hall of Sandringham, the following morning. The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duchess of York, Marina, Duchess of Kent, and Viscount Lascelles (husband of Mary, the Princess Royal) had now joined the three brothers and their sister. Although not at the reading of the will, Alan Lascelles was at Sandringham. He came out of his office just off the hall, and ran into the new King “striding down the passage with a face blacker than any thunderstorm. He went straight to his own room, and for a long time was glued to the telephone. [He was, in fact, speaking to Mrs. Simpson.] Under the will, each of his brothers was left a very large sum—about three-quarters of a million [pounds] each in cash; he was left nothing and was precluded from converting anything (such as the stamp collection, the racehorses, etc.) into ready money....

  “Money, and the things that money buys,” Lascelles believed, “were the principal desiderata in Mrs. Simpson’s philosophy if not his; and when they found that they had, so to speak, been left the Crown without the cash, I am convinced that they agreed, in that interminable telephone conversation, to renounce their plans for a joint existence as private individuals and to see what they could make out of the Kingship, with the subsidiary prospect of the Queenship for her later on.”

  The day after the King’s death (January 21), the accession of King Edward VIII was announced. Moments later the new King, having returned to St. James’s Palace, was sent for by the Privy Council. He entered the Council Chamber, Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, the American-born, indefatigable diarist and Member of Parliament, recorded, “... solemn, grave and dignified in Admiral’s uniform. Much bowing and he in turn swore his Oath.”

  The sisters remained at Royal Lodge until January 22, at which time Crawfie accompanied them home to 145. “Margaret [at five] was much too young to pay attention to what was going on,” she recalled. “She was intrigued by the fact that Alah from time to time burst into a flood of tears.

  “Lilibet [nine] in her sensitive fashion felt it all deeply.... I remember her pausing doubtfully as she groomed one of the toy horses and look[ed] up at me for a moment.

  “‘Oh, Crawfie ... Ought we to play?’ she asked.”

  The day the King’s body was brought back to London (January 23) was dark, bleak and leaden. Wearing black and leaving Margaret at home in the nursery, Lilibet was taken by Crawfie to Paddington Station in time to view the gun carriage with the King’s coffin coming down the ramp. “The Duke wanted her to see that and to have that memory,” Crawfie commented. Along with his mother and three brothers, Bertie walked in the bitter cold behind the cortege to Westminster Hall, turning his glance only once at Paddington Station to assure himself that Lilibet was standing at attention as they marched past.

  Chips Channon noted of the procession that King Edward looked “boyish, sad and tired ... the Queen, erect and more magnificent than ever.”

  Her father had also decided that Lilibet should go to the lying-in-state at Westminster Hall. Crawfie tried vainly to dissuade him. “She was so young, I thought. What could she possibly know of death? But she had to go. She drove off with the Duke and Duchess, in her black coat and black velvet tammie, looking small, and I thought, rather scared.”

  (Later, Lilibet was to tell Crawfie, “Uncle David was there and he never moved at all. Not even an eyelid. It was wonderful. And everyone was so quiet. As if the King were asleep.”)

  Their Uncle David was now King, and the sisters were instructed to curtsy to him and to call him “Sir.” Although he spent almost every weekend at Fort Belvedere just a few miles away from Royal Lodge, they did not see him again until that April day he chose to visit in his new station wagon with Mrs. Simpson.

  Within a short time after King George’s death, the sisters’ lives had returned to normal. They knew virtually nothing of the terms of their grandfather’s will, or “Sir’s” secret machinations that were moving him closer to abdication and Lilibet nearer to the Throne.

  Footnote

  * WE was the future Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s acronym for Wallis and Edward.

  5

  Not long after her husband’s death, Queen Mary, now the Queen Mother, moved into Marlborough House. Both Lilibet and Margaret found their grandmother the most “formidable figure in their lives.” Neither Alah nor Crawfie relished her command for a visit from her granddaughters, who later were to recall “the hollow, empty feeling” in the pit of their stomachs whenever a Royal confrontation was imminent. “We always felt that we were going to be hauled over the coals for something we had done,” Margaret remembers. The fact that they never were chastised did not relieve their terror in her company nor soften their memories of her over the years.

  What they could not be expected to understand was the wrenching change the seventy-year-old Queen had been forced to make in her life. Now a widow with children leading demanding lives of their own, she was left much to herself, cut off with alarming suddenness from the activities and demands of being Queen Consort
. King George before his illness (although only “a gruff, shadowy figure” in Margaret’s young memory) had been the magnetic force in the Royal Family. Queen Mary had shared with him the polarizing results.

  Not being of a maternal or a frivolous nature, she had filled her days with the duties of the Court and gathering of new information. “Mindless chatter echoed chillingly in her presence. She had little in common with any of her daughters-in-law, and perhaps even less with her own daughter ... widowhood did not alter this situation. Nor did having grandchildren warm her undemonstrative temperament.”

  For the sisters a summons to Marlborough House, habitually on short notice, meant an excursion to a museum or an exhibition. With one girl grasped firmly by each hand, Queen Mary (stylishly dressed in an elegant town suit, longer than was the fashion, matching dyed lizard shoes, a toque worn high on her silver head like a crown and an umbrella held as majestically as a royal scepter) would “troop through the British Museum or the Wallace Collection acting as a guide, reeling off a prodigious list of names, dates, and historic references, infallibly correct.” Exhausted, her feet hurting, Lilibet managed to keep walking by concentrating on the nearness of teatime, when the expedition would end. Margaret was an eager listener, quicker than Lilibet to learn, qualities that endeared her to her grandmother, although Queen Mary—conditioned by years of reticence with her own children—did not convey her approval to the litde girl.

  The Duchess of York did not take education for women too seriously. Privately educated herself, she believed there were other attainments “just as important as academic excellence. To spend as long as possible in the open air, to enjoy to the full the pleasures of the country, to be able to dance and draw and appreciate music, to acquire good manners and perfect deportment and to cultivate all the distinctly feminine graces.” (She herself played the piano adequately and spoke German quite well, but her great loves were fishing, her flower gardens, dogs, and racing horses.) What the Duchess of York did not like was the unexpected. For this reason, and also because of her daughter’s early maturity, she was drawn closer to Lilibet, who held no surprises for her and even as a ten-year-old kept her toys and clothes in impeccable order. Lilibet could be relied upon to do what one asked of her.

  Margaret—with her “gay, bouncing way”—was the more mischievous sister; “Margaret always wants what I want,” Lilibet would complain, and “was quick with her left hook!” Crawfie added. “Margaret was more of a close-in fighter, known to bite on occasions.” More than once their governess had been shown “a hand bearing the Royal teeth marks.” They fought over their possessions just as other sisters did. (“I never won,” Margaret recalls.) They would snap elastic bands at each other with cries of “You brute! You beast!”

  Yet Lilibet possessed an air of dignity that greatly appealed to her father and her less flamboyant personality made him feel more comfortable. Margaret’s more demonstrative nature, the way she “wound her arms around his neck, nestled against him and cuddled and caressed him,” embarrassed the Duke of York. (Perversely, as a youngster, it had been the warmth of his grandfather Edward VII’s “great bear body as he held him” in genuine affectionate embrace that had been his “solace and refuge.”) This is not to imply that Margaret was in any way the recipient of less parental love than Lilibet. Her father admired her talent and self-confidence and was often inclined to take her side, and her mother was forever reminding Lilibet that she was the older sister and so should be forbearing.

  Both girls had difficult childhood problems; Lilibet constantly had to live up to what was expected of her (and more was expected of her), and Margaret suffered the gnawing fear that she could never be more than second best. Lilibet had been groomed from infancy as a possible future monarch, trained to appear cooler, almost detached with people, while Margaret had been allowed to express herself. There was no way that Margaret could close the gap in their ages or change the fact that Lilibet was two and she was three.

  Separated from the Throne by but one life, Bertie, nevertheless, continued his normal duties as Duke of York. He did take on, at the new King’s request, the chore of conducting an inquiry “into the whole question of how the running expenses [of Sandringham] could be most effectively reduced.” Cutting personal costs was uppermost in King Edward’s thoughts. Sandringham was now his private estate, but he could not sell it, and its upkeep—the dairy, farmlands, gardens, household, guest and staff houses and garages—would have to come from his own income. Bertie sadly saw a staff of seven hundred reduced to four hundred with the accompanying diminishment of the plenitude that had once been Sandringham (the favorite home of both his grandfather and father).

  For the next ten months King Edward devoted two hours to schemes, great and small, by which he could produce money, to every one that he devoted to the business of the State. His passion for economy became something very near to mania. The Coronation was scheduled for May 1937. His life was being lived on two levels, where two separate scenarios were developing in his mind. In one, he would remain King and marry Mrs. Simpson, and in the other, he would abdicate before the Coronation (a plan he apparently perceived as more moral) with what he considered sufficient funds. At no time does it appear he ever speculated on the possibility of not marrying Wallis Simpson no matter which plan he would ultimately follow.

  On July 9, Wallis Simpson’s name, without her husband’s, appeared for the first time on the Court Circular as having attended a dinner at York House where the King remained while Buckingham Palace was being readied for his occupancy. Wallis had obtained legal counsel and arrangements were being made for her to divorce Ernest in a manner that would leave her the innocent party. One of Wallis’s closest childhood friends, the recendy divorced heiress Mary Kirk Raffray from Baltimore, was visiting London. Mrs. Raffray’s family had founded the famous Kirk Silver Company. She and Wallis had been roommates at boarding school, and Mary had always admired and emulated Wallis.

  The two had been youthful conspirators in Wallis’s schooldays escapades. It was Mary who was the lookout when Wallis climbed out the window of their ground-floor room after lights out to meet a young man; Mary who sounded the alarm—a bad imitation of a hoot owl. Later, the obliging Mrs. Raffray had covered for her friend when she was secretly dating a married man—who just happened to be Ernest Simpson. Mrs. Raffray could be trusted not to talk to the press and so she was enlisted by Wallis to help in her divorce action. At Wallis’s request and with Ernest’s compliance, she did not hesitate to accompany him to the Hotel de Paris at Bray on the Thames, and register with him (he in his own name, and she under the alias of Buttercup Kennedy). Shortly after their late-night arrival, detectives, posing as waiters, served them breakfast in their room and took photographs of their unmade bed.

  On July 23, Wallis wrote Ernest a letter meant to be entered as evidence for divorce stating: “that instead of being on business as you led me to believe you have been staying at Bray with a lady. I am sure you realize this is conduct which I cannot possibly overlook and must insist you do not continue to live here [at their flat in Bryanston Court, London] with me. This only confirms the suspicions I have had for a long time. I am, therefore, instructing my solicitors to take proceedings for divorce.” The following day, Ernest left their apartment and took rooms at his club.

  Accompanied by close friends, including Secretary of State for War Sir Alfred Duff Cooper and his beautiful wife, the actress Lady Diana Cooper, and Kitty and Herman Rogers, as well as the King’s two secretaries, Godfrey Thomas and Alan Lascelles, the King and Wallis boarded the steam yacht Nahlin on August 10 at Sebernik, Yugoslavia. For four weeks they cruised along the Yugoslav, Greek and Turkish coasts. Everywhere they docked they were mobbed by newsmen and photographers. The King often appeared in beachwear, his chest and legs bared, an unheard-of code of dress for a Monarch. Not surprisingly the pictures caused a sensation in the American and Continental press. The British people still did not know the seriousness of the affair o
r its imminent threat to the Monarchy; for any mention of it or photographs of Wallis and the King together were prohibited from being printed in Great Britain.

  The cruise ended on September 14, Wallis going directly to Paris and the King to Zurich where he had financial business. (Part of this was to make a settlement of a large sum—reputedly £300,000—on her. But it does seem highly probable that he also arranged for other monies taken from England to be deposited in his own name.) In Paris, where she stayed at the Hôtel Meurice, Wallis was greeted by a sheaf of sensational press clippings about the cruise, forwarded to her from America by her Aunt Bessie Merryman. The disparaging contents, along with a cold, sent her into such a state of panic that she immediately took to her bed.

  The situation between her and the King was closing in. Her letters to Aunt Bessie, while on the cruise, display a surprising lack of enthusiasm for the affair. She complains about the stickiness, “too hot to write and not much to say.” Although Aunt Bessie had always been her confidante, there is no mention of David or any concerns she might have about him. Members of the cruise party found her attitude cooler to him as the journey progressed. No one doubted that he was more in love than ever. “I never knew any man whom it would have been harder to get rid of,” Walter Monckton, the King’s close adviser, noted.

  Whatever her reasons, Wallis suddenly took a new position. On the night of Wednesday, September 16, the King having returned to England, she wrote him from Paris where she was still languishing:

  ... I must really return to Ernest for a great many reasons which please be patient and read. [What she apparently did not know was that Ernest and Mary Raffray, while she was on the cruise, had formed a relationship and were now living together.] ... I feel secure with him and am only left with my side of the show to run. We each do our little jobs separately—with occasional help for the other and it all runs smoothly no nerve strain.... I know that though I shall suffer greatly now I shall be a happier calmer old lady [she was forty years old in 1936].... I know Ernest and have the deepest affection and respect for him. I feel I am better with him than with you—and so you must understand. I am sure dear David that in a few months your life will run again as it did before and without my nagging ... you and I would only create a disaster together.