Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  Lilibet prepared for the long journey before her with a heavy heart. Once again she was to travel with the documents that would make the transition of sovereignty go smoothly should her father die while she was abroad. And once again she would have to leave the children for an extended time (the tour was scheduled for six weeks). Her husband’s desire to return to the command of Magpie was also evident to her. She understood that her journey would still rumors of the seriousness of the King’s condition, for the press was already speculating that she would have postponed the tour if there was any fear for the King’s life.

  The short time between Christmas and her planned departure was filled with official engagements, fittings for a wardrobe adaptable to the warm climates of the countries she would visit and “crash courses” in their history, customs, laws and current problems. Bobo, Lady Pamela Mountbatten, Major Charteris, John Dean, Michael Parker, Stanley Clark, the Royal Detective, and two secretaries would accompany the Edinburghs on the tour.

  Lilibet and Philip lived across the road from Queen Mary at Marlborough House. They came over the night before they left to bid her good-bye and then, as a bon voyage celebration, joined the King, Queen, Margaret and Townsend at Drury Lane to see the musical South Pacific, where they were given a prolonged and moving ovation from the audience. The King appeared almost skeletal, but his spirits were momentarily buoyed.

  At noon the next day, the Queen, Margaret, the Gloucesters, the Mountbattens and the King came aboard the blue and silver Royal aircraft that would fly the Edinburghs to Kenya. Before he left the plane the King told Bobo, “Look after the Princess for me, Bobo. I hope the tour is not going to be too tiring for you.” He then turned quickly away and disembarked. Moments later he stood “hatless, in a bitingly cold wind [his hair blowing across his forehead], and waved his daughter farewell.... His face [was] haggard and drawn.... ” His last view of his elder daughter was as she stood “framed in the doorway of the airliner, smiling and gaily waving.” The Royal departure was seen on television by Chips Channon, who commented that the King looked “cross, almost mad-looking, waving farewell to the Edinburghs.... He is reported to be going out duck shooting next week, suicidal.”

  Lilibet had requested and been granted a week’s respite in Kenya before undertaking the strenuous tour. The Royal Party arrived in Nairobi the morning following their departure. She visited a maternity hospital and attended an Afro-European garden party where “fellows in leopard skins were eating cream buns next to women dressed for Ascot.” The next day the Royal Party visited the game reserve of the Nairobi National Park; and Lilibet filmed, with her movie camera, an African lion with its kill only ten yards from her bush wagon. At dawn the following day, the entourage drove ninety miles up-country to Nyeri, where they would have five days of privacy at Sagana Lodge, a wedding present to the Edinburghs from the people of Kenya. The lodge turned out to be a modest cedarwood bungalow built on a stone foundation, not large enough to accommodate all members of the Royal Party. Bobo shared a room with Lady Pamela and Major Charteris with Michael Parker. But the remaining members of the group had to sleep under canvas in the nearby camp of the King’s African Rifles, who were posted on the grounds for guard duty. The beauty of the country was ample compensation. The house faced the majestic snowcapped peak of Mount Kenya, “and the garden ran steeply down by zigzag paths to the Sagana River.”

  The King returned to Sandringham after seeing the Edinburghs off at London Airport. He did not go duck shooting but spent his days hare and rabbit shooting. Few guests were at Sandringham with him; but some twenty guns including tenants, the police and gamekeepers could be gathered. Tuesday, February 5, was a crisp day of “blue sky, sunshine . . . long shadows . . . and the call of mating partridges ringing clearly across broad fields.” Before the shooting began, the King “merrily chided ... another gun, ‘I bet I shoot any hares before they cross the hedge to you!’” Which he proceeded to do with great proficiency.

  That evening he planned the next day’s sport, had a quiet family dinner with the Queen and Margaret and retired at 10:30. About midnight, a security man in the garden glanced up to the King’s bedroom and noted that he was affixing the latch of his window. A moment later the lights were turned off. Shortly after 8:00 A.M. the next morning, Ainsley, the King’s butler, came to bring him tea and found the King dead. He had suffered a coronary thrombosis sometime during the night and apparently had died quietly in his sleep.

  Princess Elizabeth had spent the night of her father’s death at a resthouse called Treetops near Sagana Lodge. It is believed that at the approximate hour of the King’s death she became Queen Elizabeth II while watching a herd of rhinoceros from the balcony of Treetops that overlooked a vast nature reserve. She was the first English Sovereign not to have known the exact time of his or her accession. Major Charteris was informed by a local reporter over the telephone that a news flash had carried the King’s death. Michael Parker was immediately told. Both men tried unsuccessfully to contact an official at Government House to confirm the news, not wanting to say anything to any member of the Royal Party until this had been done. Nearly an hour later, the news affirmed, Parker “went round to the wide window of the lodge and beckoned urgently to the Duke. His Royal Highness came out and was told what had happened and then he went back and broke it to his unsuspecting young wife [who was twenty-five] that her father was dead and that she was Queen.”

  She took it, Major Charteris has said, “bravely, like a Queen.” No one in her party saw her cry. She sat down at a desk almost immediately to write messages to her mother and Margaret. She called Bobo and asked her to unpack and press the mourning outfit she had brought with her and then composed a series of telegrams “to her various expectant hosts in the Dominions, regretting that her visit must be not cancelled but indefinitely postponed.”

  Major Charteris then asked her by what name she wished to be known as Queen.

  “Oh, my own name,” she replied, “what else?”

  She signed the telegrams “Elizabeth R.” Philip entered the room. She was “pale but composed” as she stood up and took his arm and they went outside where they could be seen—Queen Elizabeth and her Consort—walking side by side along the bank of the winding, deep-blue Sagana River.

  Michael Parker claimed that Philip was the more obviously affected by the news of the King’s death. “He looked as if you’d dropped half the world on him. I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life.... We got out of that place [Sagana Lodge] in an hour.”

  They drove to the airfield at Nanyuki, which lies on the equator. The streets of the native village through which they passed were filled with silent crowds. It was nearly dark when their car reached the airport and flares had been placed round the edge of the field in case they should be needed; but it was desired to avoid lighting them if possible since the grass was so dry that fire was feared. They flew to Entebbe in Uganda, a distance of some five hundred miles, where they were to continue the journey in the airliner Atalanta. But while the Royal Party waited to transfer to the airship, a sudden electrical storm accompanied by a fifty-mile-an-hour gale and lashing rain swept Entebbe airport, whipping the half-masted Union Jack on the control tower from its cord. It was nearly midnight when Atalanta finally lifted off.

  The new Queen had been wearing a beige dress and a white hat on the journey, but she changed into mourning clothes on board the plane. When it landed at London Airport at 4 P.M. local time, a few moments passed before she emerged alone. Philip had decided to remain inside the aircraft until she had descended the steps to be greeted by Clement Atdee, Anthony Eden and Prime Minister Churchill, who was unable to control his tears. Philip now appeared at the top of the gangplank, his tall, craggy figure somehow dwarfing his wife as he stood behind her.

  She reached Clarence House at 4:30 P.M. A half hour later, Queen Mary drove the few yards from Marlborough House to Clarence House in her black Daimler. Wearing mourning dress and carrying a black umbrella, she sat
rigidly in the rear seat and turned and waved stiffly at the silent crowds “gathered at the street as she passed through the gates of Marlborough House. She refused assistance as she walked the few steps from the car to the residence of the new Sovereign, using her umbrella as a cane.” She had grown angularly thin with age and her strong jaw, high forehead and aquiline nose “had the look of cast stone behind her black veil.”

  Queen Elizabeth II waited to receive her grandmother in her sitting room—the first time she had not been the one to make the approach. She wore the same slim black suit in which she had arrived, the single row of pearls that had been a gift from her father, the flame-lily brooch that had been given to her by the South African schoolchildren on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday and pearl-and-diamond earrings that had once belonged to her grandmother. Queen Mary, her step solid and decisive, walked to her. The young Queen extended her hand, and her grandmother and subject took it and kissed it lightly. “God Save the Queen,” she said in “a strong voice that had the ring of a declaration,” and then she added, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.”

  The Queen Mother and Margaret remained at Sandringham where the late King “had been left uncoffined on his divan bed.” The funeral was scheduled for February 15 at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Before that time, Margaret would have to do her own obeisance to her Sovereign. But she would not have her grandmother’s and mother’s years of training as a Royal to help her to control her feelings, nor would she have had the compensation, as they did, of also being a Queen.

  16

  On Wednesday morning, February 6, 1952, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were awakened at half past eight by a great commotion in the corridor outside their luxurious penthouse apartment at the Waldorf Towers where they were living while wintering in New York. The Duke’s butler informed him that at least twenty-five newspaper reporters were “clamouring for a statement.”

  “About what?” the Duke inquired.

  “I am sorry, sir,” his butler replied. “They tell me King George is dead.”

  A telegram had been sent by Queen Mary to the Windsors’ home in France, but for the first few hours the Duke endured the humiliation of believing that his family had not informed him of his brother’s death. Fearing further embarrassment if he arrived in England for the funeral and was snubbed, he instantly telephoned Winston Churchill. Within the hour, the Prime Minister rang back to assure him that Queen Mary would welcome him at Marlborough House and that he would have his proper place in the funeral procession. One request was made—that he come without the Duchess.

  He dispatched cablegrams of sympathy to his bereaved mother and sister-in-law and issued a press statement that he was in “profound shock” and would be departing alone for Great Britain the following evening aboard the Queen Mary. When the article appeared, Churchill cabled to the ship: “I thought your words indeed well chosen.”

  The Duke embarked, we are told, with feelings of “genuinely brotherly grief which transcended the bitterness of their relationship, the embarrassment . . . provoked by the idea of being with his family again after years of coldness [and] the hope . . . that the moment of reunion would also be a moment of reconciliation, that his relations would at last let bygones be bygones.” But other motivating forces existed.

  Years before, the Duke had written a letter to his mother blaming his sister-in-law for Bertie’s hard attitude regarding money and his refusal to grant the Duchess the title of HRH. Unadvisedly perhaps, Queen Mary showed this letter to her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, and the breach between the two brothers was further widened. The Windsors now hoped that with Bertie’s death the unfortunate letter could be pushed aside and a fresh start with his young niece, the new Queen, be made to their advantage.

  While he was en route to England, the Duchess wrote him a series of letters, sent by air so that they would be there on, or just after, his arrival. “Be canny with Dickie [Mountbatten]—we do not want any favours through the young Prince Consort because he doesn’t know how nice we are,” she warned in her first letter, much aware of Mountbatten’s continuing influence on Philip.

  “The papers and radio talk of nothing but Bertie and the girl [the new Queen]—very, very sentimental,” she commented in the second. “I hope that for once a few decent things will come your way after the long, sad journey and the difficult relationships.” And, finally, one dated February 13, the day of the Duke’s disembarkation: “. . . I hope you can make some headway with Cookie and Mrs. Temple Jr. [the Windsors’ nicknames for the widow and the new Queen].” That same evening the Duke drafted a buoyant letter to his wife confiding: “Officially and on the surface my treatment within the family has been entirely correct and dignified.... I insisted on meeting President Auriol of France at the door [of Marlborough House].... We have a foot in the door of the Elysee!”

  He decided not to send the letter and to telephone her instead. As soon as they disconnected the Duchess wrote him: “Now that the door has been opened a crack try and get your foot in, in the hope of making it open even wider in the future because that is the best for WE. I suggest that you see the widow and tell her a little of your feelings that made you write the offending letter. After all, there are two sides to every story. I should also say how difficult things have been for us.... Do not mention or ask for anything regarding recognition of me.... Try and see the Queen and Philip casually just so they will know what you are like, etc.... also talk to your mother.... This is a golden opportunity and it may only knock but once....”

  For the Royal Family the Duke of Windsor’s presence in London at this time created acrimony, confusion and further grief. The Queen not only had to deal with her own deep loss but with all the enormous pressures that attended the transition of power and the myriad decisions that had to be made regarding future living arrangements. When a Sovereign dies, his or her spouse must turn over all their Crown homes to the new Monarch. The Queen Mother and Margaret would have to vacate their apartments at Buckingham Palace and at Windsor, and in accordance with the King’s will, at Sandringham and Balmoral as well, for they were now the Queen’s sole and private homes. This meant that the Queen had to find a royal residence for her mother and sister. Her current home, Clarence House, was chosen because it had been through such extensive and recent renovations and was in what might be called “near move-in” condition; still it would take some work to convert the house for their use.

  The weather upon the new Queen’s sad return had contributed to a general depression. Sleet fell for three days out of bitter gray skies. People spoke of Elizabeth “‘as though she, too, had been struck down by some grave illness—‘the malady of sovereignty, which lasts a lifetime.’ ” But on the morning of February 8, when she held her first Privy Council at St. James’s Palace, the city was brightened by brilliant sunshine and the warming blaze of heraldic pageantry. In accordance with constitutional usage, the Queen made a Declaration of Accession to her Privy Councillors. “My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than that I shall always work as my father did, throughout his reign to uphold constitutional government and to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are, the world over,” she said in a clear but emotional voice. “I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily the heavy task that has been laid upon me so early in my life.”

  Immediately after her short speech Elizabeth and Philip drove to Clarence House in the Royal Daimler, the Royal Standard flying. For one moment she seemed about to cry. Philip placed his arm about her. A few moments later, she straightened, in control. She watched her accession proclaimed an hour later on the black and white television set in her own sitting room, while guns boomed out from nearby Hyde Park.

  The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh drove to Sandringham the following day. Snow fell in the morning and there were squalls of sleet and hail during the last half hour of their journey. The coffin containing the King’s body was transferred on a wheel
ed bier the few hundred yards from Sandringham to the Church of St. Mary Magdalene later in the afternoon, preceded by bagpipes and followed by the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret on foot. Estate workers, four at a time, kept two-hour watches at the church. The late King’s brother, Harry, Duke of Gloucester; his sister Mary, the Princess Royal; and the Duchess of Gloucester joined the late King’s family for the weekend. Queen Mary remained in London.

  Little time could be given to grieving in the light of the many urgent matters that had to be resolved. Arrangements for Royal visitors and dignitaries needed to be made and the funeral carefully scheduled to protocol. The Queen Mother refused at this stage to receive the Duke of Windsor and in a private meeting with her elder daughter apprised her of the full situation (as she knew it) between the King and his brother. Whether or not the Royal Family suspected that the Duke would bring up the past and attempt to improve his situation has never been established, but the Queen certainly prepared herself for this possibility.

  The Royal mourners left Sandringham for London on Monday, the eleventh, accompanying the coffin on its journey by rail to King’s Cross Station. There, the Imperial State Crown was placed on the coffin, which was borne in procession to Westminster—the Dukes of Edinburgh, Gloucester and Kent on foot behind it—through silent crowds, heads bowed as it passed. The Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret drove there by a different route.

  Chips Channon records of the Lying-in-State at Westminster that the “Great Hall was cold, splendid and impressive ... A few paces behind [the King’s coffin] the Royal Family followed, walking in measured paces like figures in a Greek tragedy. First walked the young Queen, all in black but wearing flesh-coloured stockings; behind her, to the right was the Queen Mother—unmistakable with her curious side-ways lilting walk. On her left, was Queen Mary, frail and fragile ... with her veil and her black umbrella and steel-coloured stockings.”