George was in awe of his father and adored his mother. He treated Edward VII with respect, tinged with fear, and Queen Alexandra with an almost puppy-like devotion. Even when he was King, he was Alix’s ‘darling Georgie boy’. On paper, in correspondence (especially with his ‘Motherdear’), he could be sentimental to the point of soppiness. In person, it sometimes seemed that he had an easier, more comfortable, relationship with his beloved pet parrot, Charlotte, than he did with either his wife or children. ‘I was frightened of my father,’ he once said, ‘and I’m damn well going to see that my children are frightened of me.’
Georgie and May had six children.22 The family was brought up in the main at York Cottage, a comparatively cramped and – by every account – cluttered and uncomfortable house in the grounds of the Sandringham estate. As parents, Georgie and May saw their children twice a day: once, briefly, in the morning, and then, for an hour, at teatime. The eldest, David, the future Edward VIII, had a particular loathing of the family nanny: ‘Before carrying me into the drawing room, this dreadful “Nanny” would pinch and twist my arm – why, no one knew, unless it was to demonstrate, according to some perverse reasoning, that her power over me was greater than that of my parents. The sobbing and bawling this treatment invariably evoked understandably puzzled, worried, and finally annoyed them. It would result in my being peremptorily removed from the room before further embarrassment was inflicted upon them and the other witnesses of this pathetic scene. Eventually, my mother realised what was wrong, and the nurse was dismissed.’
Queen Mary was no ‘Motherdear’. She was a concerned parent, but not a cosy or a cuddly one. To her children (as to the public as large) she seemed somewhat removed, forbidding, and formidable. She was a devoted and dutiful wife: she accepted her place and her husband’s character. She knew that his gruff exterior concealed a kindly nature. He suffered from dyspepsia, smoked excessively, and had a rough tongue. Their son David said his father had ‘a most horrible temper’: ‘He was foully rude to my mother. Why, I’ve seen her leave the table because he was so rude to her, and we children would all follow her out; not when the staff were present, of course, but when we were alone.’
Nor did Queen Mary have the confidence of being a full-blooded royal. She was naturally diffident, she accepted (as much of the world did in her day) that women were the weaker vessels, and, of course, she respected her husband as both master and monarch. She expected her children to do the same. ‘I always remember,’ she said, solemnly, ‘that as well as being their father he is also their King.’ She was a serious-minded traditionalist, conversationally limited, emotionally cautious. She and King George brought up their one daughter, Princess Mary, to be the same. Mary’s son, George Harewood, remembers a family where emotional inhibition was the order of the day. ‘We did not talk of love and affection and what we meant to each other,’ he says, ‘but rather of duty and behaviour and what we ought to do.’23
Mary was the King’s favourite and, to a limited extent, indulged. He was much tougher on his sons, especially the elder two. He picked on them, mocked them, made sarcastic remarks about them, and generally found ways of finding fault with them at every turn. According to Bertie, ‘It was very difficult for David. My father was so inclined to go for him. I always thought it was a pity that he found fault with him over unimportant things – like what he wore. This only put David’s back up.’
Bertie was not spared. He was a left-handed child but, as was the custom of the time, was forced to become right-handed. He was also knock-kneed and, during his pre-adolescence, for several hours every day, and throughout the night, he was made to wear corrective wooden splints. He developed a pitiful stammer, which dogged him all his days and infuriated his father. When Bertie was struggling to speak a word, his impatient papa would bark at him, ‘Get it out, boy, get it out!’
David, as he grew older, and especially once he had become Prince of Wales, deliberately defied his father, doing his own thing in his own way, and seemingly taking perverse pleasure in irritating – even shocking – his unbending parent. Bertie was more compliant. He gave way to occasional outbursts of frustrated rage – known in the family as his ‘gnashes’ – but, on the whole, he kept out of trouble’s way. Bertie was second in line to the throne, so, in any event, his public profile was lower, but his stammer also meant that he had less to say. He was shy, awkward, hesitant, in a way that David was not. Famously, as a little boy, at lunch with his grandfather, Edward VIII, David had dared interrupt the King in full flow. He was immediately reminded that children are to be seen, not heard, and to speak only when they are spoken to. Eventually, he was given permission to say whatever it was he had wanted to say. ‘It’s too late now, grandpapa,’ he chirruped. ‘It was a caterpillar on your lettuce, but you’ve eaten it.’
King George’s chaffing of his sons amounted to bullying. Queen Mary chose not to intervene, but others were bolder. Margot Asquith, second wife of Herbert Asquith, Liberal Prime Minister at the start of George’s reign, told the King that his treatment of his sons would drive them to drink. During the First World War, to set an example, the King imposed a drinking ban on the entire royal household, but after the war, once they were adults, each of the four surviving royal princes drank much more than was good for him. The third son, Prince George, eight years David’s junior, even dabbled with morphine and cocaine.
Henry (created Duke of Gloucester, at twenty-eight, in 1928) was the family dullard, a cavalry officer and a country gentleman, who drank too much whisky, but meant well and did no harm. George (created Duke of Kent, at thirty-two, in 1934) was his mother’s favourite and the most socially adept and easy of her boys. He had an artistic temperament, a fondness for high society and low living, and a loathing for the naval career into which he felt he had been forced by his father. He was a notorious ladies’ man who was, apparently, equally at home among the homosexual set. He was once arrested, briefly, in a gay nightclub known as the Nut House. In 1934 he married the beautiful Princess Marina of Greece (granddaughter of George I of Greece, niece of Prince Andrea, cousin of Prince Philip), which may have tempered his behaviour but didn’t halt the rumour-mongering. It is often said that Noël Coward, playwright, performer, and theatrical darling of the era, was one of his lovers, but when I put the suggestion to Graham Payn, Coward’s companion for thirty years, his denial was emphatic: ‘Oh, no. That story about Noël and the Duke of Kent, it wasn’t true. We can put the record straight on that. I asked Noël about it and he was quite clear. “We did not get over-friendly.”’
Graham Payn also told me that Coward ‘always preferred the Yorks, long before there was any thought they might be King and Queen. He used to visit them quite often, much to the irritation of Queen Mary, who felt her eldest was being upstaged. Let’s face it, the Windsors [as Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson, became] were not exactly joy unconfined. The Duke, to be honest, was an extremely dull man. Noël said he even danced a boring Charleston, which is no mean feat. One evening Wallis said to Noël, “You know, I don’t understand why the British dislike me so much.” There was a terrible pause before Noël replied, “Well, because you stole their Prince Charming.” She rather liked that. On social occasions, the Duke rarely spoke, not because his mind was preoccupied, but simply because he had nothing to say. Noël used to say, “He had the charm of the world with nothing to back it up.”’
Prince George, who became the Duke of Kent, was tall and handsome. David, the Prince of Wales, who became Duke of Windsor after his abdication, and Bertie, who became Duke of York and then King, were shorter, slighter, slimmer, more athletic, more reticent, and wholly heterosexual. They were good-looking (well, they were young, well dressed, well heeled, well mannered) and they were princes (it counts for a lot) and they could pull as they pleased. It seems they did. The Prince of Wales had a series of infatuations and affairs before his obsession with Wallis Simpson cost him the crown and changed the course of royal history. His first heavy-duty love affair was with F
reda Dudley Ward, the liberal wife of a Liberal MP, and it is from their correspondence that we learn that, in the pre-marital love stakes, stammering Bertie was not as tongue-tied as earlier biographies have suggested. He lost his virginity, it seems, in Paris towards the end of the First World War. According to David, that’s where ‘the deed was done’. Back in London Bertie enjoyed the company of several chorus girls and, on at least one occasion, in 1919, entertained Jack Buchanan’s leading lady, Phyllis Monkman, star of the happily titled hit Tails Up, to a late supper in a private room in Half Moon Street.
David embarked on his affair with Freda Dudley Ward in March 1918 and evidently encouraged his younger brother to find himself a married mistress of his own. Sheila Chisholm was young, lively, Australian, and game. She was married to Lord Loughborough and she had a baby son (Anthony, born in May 1917), but, nevertheless, she was up for some fun. David and Freda, Bertie and Sheila, called themselves ‘The Four Do’s’, and certainly did. ‘What marvellous fun we 4 do have, don’t we, Angel?’ wrote the Prince of Wales to Mrs Dudley-Ward, ‘& f— the rest of the world.’ In 1926 Sheila and Lord Loughborough were divorced, but in 1919 the unfortunate cuckold appears to have been unaware of what his young wife and the two kings-to-be were up to. ‘After tea,’ David reported gleefully, ‘I managed to lure Loughie away on the pretext of wanting to play a few more holes of golf … so as to give Sheilie a chance of being alone with Bertie … I’m sure Loughie doesn’t suspect Bertie at all!’
That was in June 1919. A year later, on 10 June 1920, Bertie, now twenty-five, and created Duke of York by his father, George V, only the week before, accompanied his mother, Queen Mary, to a Derby Night ball in Grosvenor Square. Around eleven o’clock the young Duke saw a smiling girl across a crowded room. She was chatting to his equerry. The Duke asked to be introduced. Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, ninth child and fourth daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was nineteen, unattached, and pretty as a picture. Bertie later claimed it was love at first sight.
Chapter Four
‘… Never take a second mouthful before you have finished the first. Do not finish the last crumb or spoonful, or scrape your plate. When finished do not clutch your knees. General remarks. Do not read too much. Do not eat too much butter or jam. Say your prayers. Keep your hair in order.’
Rules drawn up by her sisters for Margaret Gladstone, 1882
‘It was always love at first sight. No one could resist her. No one. Everybody who met her fell under her spell. Always.’
This was the verdict of the Hon. Margaret Rhodes, first cousin, childhood playmate, and lifelong friend of Elizabeth II, niece and sometime lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Mrs Rhodes’s mother was Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, one of Lady Elizabeth’s three sisters.
Mrs Rhodes was in her late seventies when I first met her, trim and bird-like. She had a smoker’s voice and the beady eye of one who had seen the world and, on the whole, been gently amused. Her elegant, slightly faded, drawing room at the Garden House in Windsor Great Park was littered with signed photographs of assorted royals. Her small kitchen table was cluttered with old newspapers, correspondence, invitations, bills. In the downstairs lavatory, beneath the formal picture of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on their wedding day, there was a well-thumbed copy of The Prince Philip Throneside Book. Mrs Rhodes was devoted to the memory of her aunt. ‘Everybody adored her,’ she said. ‘Everybody.’
Certainly, I have met few who didn’t. Lord David Cecil, who was a childhood friend, told me that ‘even as a girl, she had a certain twinkle as well as extraordinary sweetness. She made you feel part of a delightful conspiracy.’ Woodrow Wyatt said to me, ‘She is the most truly charming person in the world.’ Sir John Mills told me, ‘No one is more captivating. I have been lucky enough to meet some of the most glamorous women of our time. She outshines them all.’ I asked one of her sons-in-law, Lord Snowdon, to sum her up in a single word and, without hesitation, he said, ‘Fun.’
In 1920, according to Mabell, Countess of Airlie, who knew her then, Lady Elizabeth’s ‘radiant vitality’, combined with ‘a blending of kindness and sincerity’, made her ‘irresistible to men’. She was pretty, not spectacularly beautiful. She was small (five foot four inches), but not petite. She had flawless skin, bright blue eyes, but shortish, rather dull, dark hair, cut in a noticeably unsexy fringe. She was anything but ‘modern’. According to Lady Airlie, ‘she was very unlike the cocktail-drinking, chain-smoking girls who came to be regarded as typical of the 1920s’. She came from one of Scotland’s oldest, grandest, families. Among her forebears was Robert the Bruce. The family properties included Glamis Castle in Scotland; another, lesser, castle, Streatlam, in County Durham; a fine, eighteenth-century country house, St Paul’s Walden Bury, in Hertfordshire; and a handsome town house in London, in St James’s Square, between Piccadilly and Pall Mall.
Her father, Lord Strathmore, was a Scottish nobleman of the old school. He was God-fearing, courteous, kindly, conscientious, conservative, and only mildly eccentric. Every day, at breakfast he made his own cocoa and at lunch he ate plum pudding. Mrs Rhodes recalled the huge dining hall at Glamis and her grandfather at the head of the table: ‘I can picture the food being sort of thrown on to the plates and him catching it. I remember, too, he had a wonderful droopy moustache and he smoked endless cigarettes. This was before the age of tipped cigarettes and we children kept watch as his cigarette burnt slowly down to see if it would set fire to his moustache. It never did.’ Lord Strathmore took his duties seriously (as a land-owner and Lord Lieutenant of Angus) and his recreations were exactly those you would expect: fishing, shooting, and cricket. He was an authority on forestry. According to Mrs Rhodes, ‘He really loved his trees. Queen Elizabeth used to tell the story of people telephoning Walden Bury and enquiring, “Is his Lordship down from Glamis yet?” “No,” the butler would say, “his lordship only comes when the sap rises.”’
Lady Strathmore, born Nina-Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, also came from good aristocratic stock. Her father, a clergyman, was heir to the 5th Duke of Portland. She, too, took her religion seriously: the chapel at Glamis was in regular use. She was also outgoing, unpretentious, warm, practical, and creative: she was an enthusiastic gardener and an accomplished pianist. Mrs Rhodes told me, ‘She died when I was thirteen, but I can see her clearly – a lovely, voluminous figure, in a long, black dress with a lace collar. She was a heavenly, smiling granny.’ She seems to have been pretty perfect as a mother as well. According to Mrs Rhodes, ‘Queen Elizabeth always spoke of her mother with enormous warmth and affection.’ In a letter to Osbert Sitwell, she once wrote: ‘I have nothing but wonderfully happy memories of childhood days at home.’ She was ever grateful to her parents for providing ‘Fun, kindness, & a marvellous sense of security.’
In July 1920, in the run-up to her twentieth birthday on 4 August, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was, arguably, London’s most eligible debutante. She had it all: breeding, looks, intelligence, vivacity, charm. She also had a certain maturity. She had seen something of life. During the First World War one of her brothers was killed in action, at the Battle of Loos, and another was severely wounded and captured by the Germans. As part of the war effort, Glamis Castle was turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers and Elizabeth helped her mother care for the men. If Bertie, newly created Duke of York, fell for her instantly, as he later claimed, he was not alone. Other suitors also made the pilgrimage to Glamis. One of them was Ronald Barnes, 3rd Baron Gorell, who later claimed, ‘I was madly in love with her. Everything at Glamis was beautiful, perfect. Being there was like living in a van Dyck picture. Time, and the gossiping, junketing world, stood still. Nothing happened … but the magic gripped us all. I fell madly in love.’24 Gorell listed Lady Elizabeth’s principal qualities: ‘Her charm was indescribable … She was also very kind and compassionate. And she could be very funny – which was rare in those circles. She was a wag.’25
/> The list of eligible young men who took a shine to the waggish, wide-eyed, heart-faced enchantress of Glamis was a long one. It included Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, a good friend of one of her brothers, who did most of his wooing, it seems, by paying court to Lady Strathmore (not a bad stratagem); Henry Gage, the 6th Viscount, who owned Firle Place, in Sussex, plus, he liked to say, ‘about 10,000 acres’; the 10th Earl of Airlie’s younger son, Brucie, who courted Elizabeth’s attention by dancing on the dining-room table while playing the ukulele; Christopher Tennant, the second Baron Glenconner, who was a millionaire and a charmer (and whose first wife, Pamela, would produce Colin Tennant, the future owner of Mustique and friend of Princess Margaret); and James Stuart, the third son of the 17th Earl of Moray, who, at the age of nineteen, had won one Military Cross at the Battle of the Somme and a second at the Battle of Arras. James Stuart was more than a hero: he was reckoned – by many – to be the handsomest man in the kingdom. He was also the new Duke of York’s equerry and the man who first introduced Bertie to Lady Elizabeth at the Derby Night ball in Grosvenor Square.
Of her many suitors, none was better connected than HRH The Prince Albert, Duke of York, but most were more obviously attractive: more outgoing, more articulate, less inhibited, less shy. How, then, did Bertie secure his bride? In the old way, it seems: simply, by persistence.26 James Stuart was delightful: dashing, debonair, dangerous. He was a serial flirt. He was not reliable. Bertie was different. Bertie was dogged. Single-mindedly, he pursued Elizabeth for nearly three years. And he was not unattractive: he was slim, fit, well dressed, well mannered, a good shot, a brilliant dancer (this was an age in which that counted for something), a decent cove – kindly and courteous (in any age that counts for a lot) – with sound instincts and an impeccable pedigree. He was, after all, a royal duke, the second son of the King.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 10