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The difficulties with the press on top of everything else brought fresh urgency to the duke’s desire for a new position. Although he realised ministers in London were preoccupied with the battle raging in Normandy, he wished to resign his commission and seek a more prestigious role. The duke knew it was a critical time for the Allied leadership. By mid-July the Soviets had crossed the border into Poland some 450 miles from Berlin while the Allies were still more than 750 miles from Berlin battling through northern France. London was reeling from Hitler’s new terror weapon, the pilotless flying bomb or V1. The fact that the duke raised the question of his employment now, of all times, highlights his increasing frustration.

In the papers he saw pictures of the king, apparently crowned in glory with the heroic troops in their moments of triumph: on the Normandy beaches in June, in Italy in July and August. Pathé showed George VI stepping down from a plane to a fanfare of trumpets, giving salutes to British and American troops in the brilliant sunshine, touring the bay of Naples, inspecting cruisers, congratulating the Eighth Army. ‘Hardly a day passes by that British propaganda does not stuff us with the extent to which the King has established himself in the hearts of the people,’ the duke commented to his solicitor, George Allen.28 Why, he reasoned, was it not possible for an ex-king of England to have a role where he, too, could hold his head up high? Even their younger brother, Gloucester, was trusted as Governor of Australia, representing the king in a loyal Dominion. Surely some sort of roving diplomatic post, perhaps in America, was not asking too much? A diplomatic post had the added advantage of conferring tax immunity. As a private individual he would pay tax in America, and there was a risk that Wallis was liable for a substantial back payment.29

The duke was delighted when he was in America in September to be invited to meet Churchill in Washington. Churchill praised the duke’s work in the Bahamas and acknowledged that of course he should feel free to resign. But when it came to a question of what future role the duke could have, the prime minister proved hard to pin down. The issue continued to be discussed during the autumn but the duke found a curious inaction when it came to finding him a job. The idea of his taking on a role within the British Embassy in Washington was discreetly dropped. The Canadians too had no diplomatic role for Windsor. Churchill mooted the idea of appointing him Governor of Ceylon, until it became apparent that a governor with imminently suitable credentials had only just settled in. Another idea was to send the duke to India as Governor of Madras until some bright spark pointed out that this put the British establishment in a tricky position since several Indian princes had been deemed unsuitable for the post on account of their marriage arrangements. The king was in favour of Latin America, but Halifax expressed his doubts. For British officialdom there was the sticky question of whether, by virtue of royal birth, he had an unalienable right to a privileged position as a diplomat? The answer was emerging as a resounding ‘no’.

Equally troublesome was where the ex-king should live. Beautiful Paris, hardly touched by bombing, was liberated on 25 August 1944. The German general, Dietrich von Choltitz, surrendered to the Allies in his Hôtel Le Meurice headquarters and Parisians lavished their Allied victors with unrestrained delight, stopping the solid flow of tanks and greeting solders like long-lost lovers. George VI reported to his mother that the Windsors’ homes in Paris and Antibes were in perfect condition and he was liaising with the Foreign Office to return any belongings which had been stored for safekeeping.30 But it was not clear to British officials that post-war France would welcome the Windsors. The duke’s greatest hope was still pinned on a reunification with his family. He was unaware when he signed the abdication papers that he was effectively committing himself to permanent exile. In anticipation of coming back to society, through Churchill he requested yet again that Wallis be recognised as an HRH. Since the monarchy was no longer in jeopardy, the duke reasoned, surely ‘family jealousy’ would not prevent him returning to his home country with some measure of courtesy extended to his wife? The duke himself considered he had ‘done everything in my power to heal the breach’.31

The palace took a different view. When the prime minister invited comments on the question of the ex-king’s future the toughest line came from George VI’s private secretary. ‘There is in the British cosmos, no official place for an ex-King,’ declared Alan Lascelles. It made no sense to him that a man who had publicly renounced the British Crown could take up a role representing either the monarch or the government. There was plenty of evidence of the duke’s ‘constitutional inability’ to understand the difference between public and private interests, he reasoned. Invoking a story from the Old Testament of Rehoboam, son of Solomon, who fought his own brothers, Windsor, he thought, had a ‘Rehoboam-like tendency to take up with undesirable and dangerous associates’. The ‘scoundrel Bedaux’ and ‘the egregious Gren’ were cited to make his point. Finally, for Lascelles, the Windsors’ presence would be ‘a constant agony to the present king’. As one of the richest men in the world, the duke could do almost anything, he concluded, ‘but there is no room for two Kings of England’.32

Churchill did not agree. The duke had rights as both a British subject and a peer of the realm. ‘Nothing that I am aware of,’ declared the prime minister, ‘can stop him returning to this country.’33

When Marina wrote to Betty Lawson-Johnson on 18 November 1944 she was just one of thousands of war widows still feeling the pain of the loss of her husband. ‘“His” dear memory is so alive and oh, how he is missed in many, many things . . . there is so much that no one but him could do,’ she confided. There was always that sense of emptiness, perhaps a refrain from a song, an unintended glance at a photograph, or someone just like him approaching ensured that that dull ache was never far from the surface. She thanked Betty for her efforts in sending a Christmas parcel that had evidently failed to arrive. A newspaper clip that Betty had posted showing the Windsors ‘high gambling’ invoked a sharp response. ‘Thank you for the interesting cutting—but how painful and cheap! Really “those two” are extraordinary people—what a strange life!’ Marina’s thoughts were firmly pinned on the end of the war. ‘Oh how one longs for an end to the chaos and misery in the world.’34

Her relatives became caught in the fraught political and military complexities over Eastern Europe. Despite all the negotiations between the British, Americans and Soviets, it was becoming painfully evident that the fate of these countries would depend on the position of the armies when the war ended. The ‘Old Bear’, as Churchill referred to Stalin, adopted the viewpoint that whoever became the occupying force could determine the governance.35 British efforts to challenge the strengthening hold of Soviet ideology in Europe deepened conflicts with the Americans who saw in Britain’s manoeuvres an extension of her old imperialism. Marina understood the involved politics of her home country where Communist partisans were heralded as heroes for their role in the resistance. ‘When the fighting ceases, will it be the end of the suffering?’ Marina wrote to Betty. ‘I am afraid the years to come will be hard.’36

The fearsome struggles in Romania presaged what might follow elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Ahead of the liberating Soviet army, a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, Prince Michael of Romania, carried out a coup in August to drive the Nazis from his country. But his bravery during the liberation did not bring the freedoms he hoped as Stalin tightened his grip. George VI raised the matter with Churchill, but the prime minister could do nothing. Romania had been an enemy before, he explained, and it had now fallen into the Soviet sphere of influence. Any moves by the British in Romania would only harm negotiations with the Soviets over Greece, Poland and Yugoslavia. The king confided in his mother. ‘Poor Michael and his mother Zitta [Queen Helen] have been having a very worrying time from the Russians again,’ he told her, ‘and we can do nothing to help them for the moment.’37

As the Soviets advanced, Marina’s middle sister, Elizabeth, Countess of Toerring-Jettenbach, trapped in Munich in south-eastern Germany, did not know whether British and American or Soviet forces would reach them first. Meanwhile, their oldest sister, Olga, was still detained in Johannesburg in South Africa with British public opinion firmly set against her husband, the alleged quisling, Prince Paul. He felt his disgrace deeply and found it difficult to recover without vindication of his actions. Soviet influence in both Romania and Bulgaria that autumn strengthened the hand of Yugoslav Communist partisans led by Marshal Tito, who invited the Soviets into Yugoslavia to help drive out the Germans. Prince Paul watched helplessly from a distance as he saw the alien landscape of Soviet ideology take root in his country and found himself sinking into a deep depression. As the Soviets gained the upper hand he began to feel vindicated by his earlier pro-Nazi stance and hoped he would no longer be regarded as a quisling in England.38 But Marina could report no change in the public attitude towards her brother-in-law.

There was also little prospect of harmony in Greece where her mother was still in Athens. Churchill, apprehensive about the inexorable Soviet advance across south-east Europe and the possibility of Greek Communist partisans striking a coup against the Nazis, began to land troops in Greece in October. British soldiers entered Athens on 14 October cheered by ecstatic crowds. With the return of the exiled government a few days later, the Greek flag was carried to the Acropolis. To a fanfare of trumpets it was raised above the city, unfurling as it caught the wind above the birthplace of democracy. But factional fighting led by Communist partisans broke out and soon escalated into civil war.39 With continuing uncertainty about the future role of the Greek monarchy, George II of Greece remained in exile. Two weeks after the liberation of Athens, 700 miles away the capital of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, was liberated by the Soviets.

The steady advances of Allied armies prompted speculation that winter that the conflict might soon be over. Cecil Beaton, on a visit to see the queen at Buckingham Palace, learned that the king and queen were already making preparations for the end of the war. Cement was ordered to carry out crucial repairs to the balcony at Buckingham Palace which had suffered from bomb damage and was no longer sound—a small acknowledgement towards the day that must soon dawn when victory would ignite nations and crowds would gather at the palace.40 But until that day the king stood in the wet December weather, taking the salute at the Home Guard ‘Stand Down’ parade. Some 7,000 Home Guards, cheered by a huge crowd including their wives and children, passed before the king, queen and the two princesses.41 Britain’s ‘cheap army’, no longer needed, marched through streets in the pouring rain from Hyde Park down Piccadilly and Oxford Street to the accompaniment of eleven Home Guard bands, the large crowd encouraging them all the way. ‘You have served your country with a steadfast devotion,’ George VI broadcast later that day. ‘I know that your country will not forget that service.’

The king and queen joined the Duchess of Kent at Euston Station on 16 December to say their goodbyes to the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Alice had recently given birth and now the young family, complete with the addition of three-month-old Richard, were embarking on a new life in Australia. Despite original doubts about Prince Henry, he had shown great loyalty and common sense and was about to take on his highest office yet. ‘I hope they will be a success,’ Queen Mary confided to her brother. ‘It may give Harry a chance of showing what he is made of.’42 The Gloucesters’ journey was top secret and the small royal party at Euston, enveloped in London fog and the steam from the trains, did not attract attention. The day was grimly overshadowed by a dramatic German counter-offensive through the forests of the Ardennes. The Germans repeated their successful tactics against France in 1940 and Allied armies in Belgium and Luxemburg were taken by surprise.

The Gloucesters reached Liverpool and embarked on the New Zealand steamship, Rimutaka. The duchess was worried at the prospect of taking her two young boys through an Irish Sea still infested with German submarines. Rough seas, gale-force winds and a twisting route to avoid U-boats added to the tension. This increased still more on the second night when the duchess was hurriedly woken and instructed to dress and prepare for any eventuality. The captain of the ship had already advised her, with painful frankness, that if they had to take to the lifeboats, the new baby would stand little chance of survival from exposure. Dramatically, Richard’s nanny had told Alice she was quite prepared to go down with the ship and the new prince. Now this prospect seemed suddenly real as the ship lurched with such violence that Alice herself almost passed out with a blow to the head when a trunk was flung across the cabin. Out of the darkness came a tiny voice of protest. ‘I don’t like it,’ declared two-year-old Prince William.43 He had been promised an adventure, but this was too much. Just as they turned to face the full blast of the Atlantic Ocean, the convoy almost passed directly over a waiting U-boat. Rimutaka had swiftly changed her direction as one of their convoy attacked and sank the German submarine. The princes heard the depth charges and waited, wide-eyed.

The first leg of their journey to the Mediterranean was not one conducive to settling young children. The ship’s zig-zagging route in heavy seas made their sons so unwell that William had no interest in his third birthday when the crew wheeled in a magnificent birthday cake. Finally they reached the sanctuary of Malta. ‘The harbour area is a very sorry sight,’ Gloucester told his mother, but everyone’s spirits rose at the warm welcome, with William happily waving to everyone.44 All too soon it was time to continue their journey eastwards where they stopped in Colombo, Ceylon. Lord Mountbatten, now Supreme Allied Commander South-East Asia Command, took the royal party for an afternoon of swimming on a beautiful beach shaded with palms. Later over dinner, as the light faded, there was time to talk of the war in Asia. Maps were fetched and against the vivid backdrop of an ocean sunset, Mountbatten outlined to his cousins how the Allies repulsed the Japanese invasion of India, their offensives in Burma and the frustrations of the lack of resources as the military effort was focused on Europe.

It was dark when the Gloucesters embarked once more for the final stage of their journey. The portholes of Rimutaka were now blacked out, an ominous reminder of the proximity of the Japanese. On deck there was a constant watch in rough seas for enemy submarines. Unable to open the portholes, the Gloucesters found the heat in their cabins so stifling that they transferred to hammocks on deck. Here the strict rules of blackout still applied; not even a cigarette was permitted after dark. But the days of tension passed without incident, except for the scare when a guard tripped on the hammocks and frightened everyone, most of all himself. They were in sight of the sanctuary of Sydney harbour when news broke of a Japanese submarine close by and the Rimutaka docked hurriedly at Woolamaloo for the night. At last the next day the royal party disembarked in Australia where they were escorted along dusty roads to the capital and an ecstatic reception.45

There were some teething troubles on reaching Government House in Canberra. The residence had been renovated in anticipation of the arrival of the Duke of Kent, but little of the furniture that he had shipped over could be found. Somewhat disconcertingly the Gloucesters came across one of his sheets, a miracle as the house was bereft of furniture. Fortunately preparations for the royal family had extended to killing several snakes in the surrounding garden, but on the downside, the decorators appeared to have overlooked the need for an electric kettle, fridge or even light fittings. Even trickier the Gloucesters discovered they shared the house with rats, which the duchess, in her defence, tackled with a well-aimed book while waiting for help.46 The duke, who readily admitted that he was not a man for office work, and had ‘even laughed at it’, now recognised he had to get to grips with official papers and requested a desk. He was glad to turn to the king for advice on all aspects of the role, although it was hard to maintain the formality and dignity of Buckingham Palace. ‘Just as Harry was knighting some old gentleman a mouse dashed past with a tabby cat in hot pursuit,’ Alice wrote to Queen Mary. ‘It was . . . terribly difficult not to laugh.’47

On 23 December Logue was in the study at Windsor Castle absorbed in his customary annotations for the Christmas speech when the king made a surprising suggestion. He felt he was approaching a point where he could tackle the Christmas speech alone, without Logue by his side. For the first time since 1939 Logue could enjoy Christmas Day with his family at Beechgrove House in Sydenham. The two men pondered the idea; would it work? The queen came to join them, full of her customary reassurance. She promised Logue that she and Elizabeth and Margaret would help the king. For both men it was a critical transition. Logue felt ‘like a father who is sending his boy to his first public school’.48

On Christmas Day 1944, shortly before 3 pm, Logue knew the king would be making his way to the broadcasting room. He, too, left his small family gathering to say a quiet prayer. Logue was waiting alone, full of apprehension as the moment came. Suddenly the king’s voice filled the room; not hesitantly or awkwardly but full of assurance. ‘As always I am greatly moved by the thought that so vast and friendly an audience can hear the words I speak . . . ’ George VI began. He talked ‘proudly and gratefully of our fighting men . . . ’ He spoke of the wounded, those who were prisoners of war, and families torn apart by the calamities of war. But at last the lamps which the Germans had extinguished all over Europe ‘were being re lit . . . The defeat of Germany and Japan is only the first half of our task. The second is to create a world of free men untouched by tyranny . . . ’ For the king this was the great enterprise ‘of the human spirit—man’s unconquerable mind and freedom’s holy flame. I believe most surely we shall reach that goal . . . ’

The speech was a personal triumph. The king’s disability appeared to be in check. Logue was elated and rang to congratulate him, his guests straining to hear the king’s voice for themselves on another extension. ‘My job is done, Sir,’ Logue told the king.49

The new-found confidence of the king was perhaps reflected in the news from the front as the net was tightening around the remains of a crumbling Third Reich. The mighty Red Army attacked from the east while the Western Allies closed in from the west and south, against a diminishing German army. The tumultuous events were vividly relayed in cinema screens across the country. In January Soviet forces entered the obliterated city of Warsaw and swept westward almost 300 miles across Poland until they were just over 40 miles from Berlin. The Yalta conference in the Crimea on the Black Sea defined plans for Europe in February. Stalin held the upper hand and won concessions from Roosevelt, overruling Churchill in Poland and across Eastern Europe.

The Allied forces drew nearer to Berlin helped by concentrated bombing of German cities. In mid-February the historic city of Dresden was targeted; the tremendous firestorm sucking escaping citizens into its white-hot depths as though they were weightless. In March it was the turn of Cologne, still sitting serenely on the Rhine as it had for 1,000 years. When the terrible maelstrom was over, the ancient cathedral which had escaped the bombs presided over a wasteland. For mile after mile, rising through the clouds of dust, the once-handsome buildings had been transformed into steep cliffs and craggy heights no longer recognisable as the work of humanity.

But then came news from America. The unthinkable had happened. One of the triumvirate, President Roosevelt, was dead. The king knew that his health was delicate but his death from a stroke on 12 April was a shock. The great patrician was much mourned. ‘We shall all feel his loss very much,’ the king said to his mother.50 He was convinced that the president’s frailty was ‘entirely through overwork due to the war’.51 For the king and Churchill grief was entwined with concern. Who would replace him?

Central to the belief of King George and Queen Elizabeth that they were fighting a righteous war was the conviction that ‘the Nazis are the forces of Evil’.52 Soviet troops fighting their way across Poland did indeed come across something that broke all previous records of human bestiality: Auschwitz. The largest of the concentration camps was a well-guarded private world where life had no price at all. Its remaining citizens were little more than walking skeletons hardly able to express their joy at being free at last. They were surrounded by the dead; mountainous piles of naked bodies, in death so intimately placed, awaiting what appeared to be ovens. There were children, too, not rosy and plump-cheeked, but terrified, stripped of all humanity. Evidence of horrific experiments on children began to emerge. Living or dead, the same agonisingly tight skins and protruding bones marked them all. A pall hung over the place, and the overwhelming stench of illness and death. The precise organisation of this incomprehensible cruelty was also apparent to the Soviet soldiers. Some 348,000 men’s suits and 836,000 women’s dresses were neatly folded, along with piles of eye glasses, shoes, dentures and even seven tons of human hair near the gas chambers and crematoria which had been hastily dismantled by the departing Germans.53

The scale of the horror continued to unfold before a stunned world that spring: American troops entered Buchenwald, Dachau and Mauthausen, the British drove into Bergen-Belsen, the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt . . . and still there were more: Treblinka, Sobibór and Belzec. Labour camps with their cavernous underground chambers where prisoners never saw the light of day were discovered. Many of the liberators themselves were so overwhelmed they could not find the words to express what they saw. ‘I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency,’ Dwight Eisenhower wrote later. ‘I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.’54 The king too was appalled. He was told of camps where the troops had ‘found bodies littered about the camps & the ovens where they were cremated . . . & we found bodies already stacked in the ovens’. How could this ‘bestial maltreatment’ have happened? He gave vent to his feelings in his diary: ‘the German people are all guilty in allowing these things to happen’.55 But was this really true? The next day he wrote in more considered terms to his mother: ‘The German people don’t seem to know what they have allowed their leaders to do.’56

The king’s cousin, Philipp of Hesse, became an unwitting witness to the Nazis’ desperate efforts to disguise evidence of their crimes. At Flossenburg concentration camp during the last months of the war, there were many more hangings on the gallows outside his window. Stripped of their identity, even their clothes, Jews and other prisoners were taken naked from the guard room to the place of execution. In April, Philipp was herded on to a transport van with other notable prisoners and taken south to Dachau concentration camp.57 But with the advance of the Americans at the end of the month he was ordered into a truck and driven around the Alps as the Nazis made a last frantic effort to evade the advancing enemy. In a particular refinement of cruelty he was finally informed of the fate of his wife, Mafalda, who had been imprisoned at Buchenwald. During an Allied bombing raid on the nearby armaments factory the previous summer her barracks had caught fire. She had been trapped under burning wreckage for some time before rescuers could reach her, still alive, but with her arm ‘burned almost to the bone’.58 An attempt was made to amputate her arm, but she died soon afterwards. Her horrific death took its toll of Hesse as he was shunted from place to place by the Germans. He and the other prisoners were told they would be killed before they could be captured. But he was caught by the Americans in the Italian Tyrol, and promptly arrested. George VI would learn of the fate of his cousin and other prominent German prisoners which was reported in the British papers in the closing days of the war.

Soviet soldiers shook hands with the Americans on the River Elbe on 25 April and the electrifying finale to the war was captured in newsreels for the world to see. On 28 April Mussolini and his mistress were shot by Italian partisans. Their battered bodies were hung upside down on meat hooks in a petrol station the following day before a vengeful crowd. The all-powerful would-be Caesar was strung up by his heels, his face beaten to a grotesque disfigurement.

In the depths of his safe and well-appointed underground bunker in the centre of Berlin, where the roar of the fast-approaching front line was dulled, Hitler was told of the vengeance wreaked on the body of his former ally. He had a plan to avoid the reckoning. The German people had fallen short of the task that was required of them. Himmler had betrayed him. The glorious Third Reich which he had created so brilliantly was crumbling all around. The Soviets were mere yards away, fighting to the death, revelling in laying Germany waste. It was time to leave the mess to those who had failed him. The mood in the bunker was calm but sombre as Hitler married his faithful mistress, Eva Braun. She did her best, wore the dress that charmed him most and, smiling, pledged to share his fate. They both took cyanide, and to be sure, he shot himself and that was that. No self-doubt, no laments, no remorse for the 60 million sacrificed to his dreams. His secretary, Traudl Junge, later recalled his extraordinary dissociation from the almighty calamity of Europe that he had caused. ‘His face was like a mask,’ she said. He appeared to have a complete mental disconnection from the chaos, making his exit with the ease of putting on a new jacket and leaving the room.59

The world was waiting as the loathed Nazi leadership was hunted down. Joseph Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six young children and then killed themselves in the bunker shortly after Hitler’s death. Heinrich Himmler attempted to flee but was eventually detained by the British and killed himself. Hermann Goering surrendered to the Americans on 6 May; Robert Ley was arrested in his pyjamas ten days later. Somehow, in the chaos, Joachim von Ribbentrop, a key architect of this immense catastrophe, slipped through the net of the foreign armies, still on the run in the crumbling ruins of his country.60

The Windsors, about to leave their safe wartime island, saw the fall of Germany, the flattened cities, the concentration camps with their ghostly skeletal inhabitants, and the architects of the Third Reich, caught on camera, desperate to escape. They could see for themselves the full horror of Hitler’s Germany in the newsreels. The duke was in the wilderness, setting out with his wife on 3 May to Miami and an unknown future. Such was his fear of the Communists he was no longer sure if France was a safe refuge and his welcome in Britain was uncertain.

The end was near. Peace would soon be declared. So much hope was embodied in that word, yet it was hard to know what ‘peace’ would feel like after six years of war. The queen confided to a friend that she felt ‘numbed’ and ‘stunned as well’.61 Gradually the idea of peace, and all it meant, filtered through the collective psyche. The great triumphant finale was in sight. No detail was overlooked to prepare for the great day. In the royal stables the BBC Forces Programme was repeatedly played to the horses to acquaint them with unfamiliar sounds for state victory parades.62 At the palace, the king had the repaired balcony tested for safety.63 The Archbishop of Canterbury issued guidelines for appropriate forms of service to give thanks. Almost everyone in the country was planning a street party. There would be music and dancing and the lights would come on again. There was a last-minute rush for flags and bunting.64 The king, who suddenly seemed very worn, prepared his victory speech.

And suddenly Britain woke up to the wonder of it all. The announcement of the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany on 8 May was a day so long awaited, so well deserved, like no other. Victory Day had arrived. Tens of thousands descended on the capital. At 3 pm Big Ben struck and London fell silent. The prime minister broadcast to the nation from the War Cabinet Office, the very place where six years before Neville Chamberlain had announced the start of the Second World War. Churchill’s voice was magnified to the waiting multitude through loudspeakers set up across central London. It was all over. The evil doers ‘are now prostrate before us’, he declared. ‘Advance Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom. Long live the King.’

Bells rang out across London, tugs on the Thames sounded their horns, and the vast mass of people began to sing the National Anthem. When Churchill tried to make his way back from Downing Street to the House, he received such an ovation that his car was brought to a standstill, engulfed by a devoted crowd who pushed him all the way. People wanted to see their leader, to touch him, to let their babies see him, as though something of Churchill’s spirit, embodied in that recognisable frame and broad smile, might be passed on. Eventually he arrived, responding to the elation in the House with his characteristic half bow. MPs cheered and waved handkerchiefs; some were moved to tears.65 Later he appeared on the balcony at the Ministry of Health in Whitehall, puffing on a cigar, his hand raised in his VE sign. ‘My dear friends, this is your victory . . . ’ he told the crowd. ‘No, it is yours . . . ’ roared the reply.

The Mall was jammed with people drunk on victory, as though the high spirits were intoxicating. People were massing outside Buckingham Palace. They wanted to see their king, to share in that rich communion: six years of suffering, anguish and deprivation, and now hope, exploding at last into near hysteria. ‘We want the King . . . We want the king,’ they chanted. At last the feeling of peace was real. In memory this night could never fade.

Behind the scenes in Buckingham Palace, the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, prepared to face the crowd with the king and queen. The king as usual looked smart in his naval uniform; Princess Elizabeth wore her ATS uniform: the formal dress perhaps a private bond between father and daughter. The queen and Princess Margaret were dressed in pale summer colours. Outside, beyond the doors, was the unmistakable sound of public clamour. As the balcony doors opened, a mighty roar came from the crowd, and as they stepped out on to the balcony, the ecstatic crowd roared louder still. This was the quintessential moment of victory.

Below was a sea of upturned faces, a throng that filled the streets down the Mall and beyond. The princesses hesitated slightly at the vast crowd, but these were the people of England, loyal and enraptured with their king and queen, and it was thrilling. People were in their best dresses and brightest clothes; babies had red, white and blue ribbons in their hair; even dogs had victory bows. Some people had climbed on lamp posts or statues for a better view; one man was scrambling up the palace gates. Down the Mall the press of people blurred into a mass of colour stretching into the distance. The cheering would not stop. The family came out again, and yet again, with Churchill beside them at 5.30. And still the crowds would not disperse. Eight times the royal family emerged on the balcony that day.

Lionel Logue at the palace witnessed their last appearance. Suddenly, and for the first time in years, the floodlights were switched on. Surrounded by the drabness of wartime London, the scene at the palace looked magical: like a ‘fairyland’, he thought. The clamour of the crowd intensified. The royal family stepped out once more, and Logue noted the queen’s diamond tiara glittered in the lights as she turned to wave.66

Princess Elizabeth years later recalled that day. ‘The excitement of the floodlights being switched on got through to us. My sister and I realised we couldn’t see what the crowds were enjoying . . . so we asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves . . . After crossing Green Park we stood outside and shouted, “We want the King,” and were successful in seeing my parents on the balcony, having cheated slightly because we sent a message into the house to say we were waiting outside. I think it was one of the most memorable nights of my life.’67

As night fell there was dancing in Piccadilly Circus, bonfires were lit, barrel organs played and the young princesses, escorted by officers, scarves on their heads, slipped unrecognised among the people. ‘London was an amazing sight,’ observed one nineteen year old in the crowd. ‘Like an enormous Christmas party.’68 The jubilant scenes in the capital were being repeated across the country. Even Queen Mary abandoned her dignified reserve and left Badminton House for the local club where the village was celebrating, she told Gloucester, ‘and we sang songs with them while they drank beer and cyder, a most friendly affair’.69

Inside the palace, the king and Logue went to the broadcasting room, now elevated from the shelter to a room on the ground floor overlooking the garden. In the gathering dusk, the floodlights falling across the lawn gave the place an air of enchantment, Logue observed. The queen, looking radiant, came to wish the king well. Then came the cue light.

‘Speaking from our Empire’s oldest capital city, war-battered but never for one moment daunted or dismayed, speaking from London, I ask you to join with me in that act of thanksgiving . . . ’ began the king.

To Logue, the strain on George VI was quite suddenly apparent. He had been beside the king for every wartime speech, but now found himself helpless as engrained fatigue appeared to overtake his former student. The king’s monotone delivery lapsed into heart-stopping pauses and audible gulps, his efforts to control his speech showing visibly on his face. The words seemed to overwhelm him. ‘Germany, the enemy who drove all Europe into war,’ continued George VI, ‘has been finally overcome . . . There is great comfort in the thought that the years together, that the years of darkness and danger in which the children of our country have grown up, are over, and please God, for ever. We shall have failed, and the blood of our dearest will have flowed in vain, if the victory which they died to win does not lead to a lasting peace, founded on justice and good-will . . . This is the task to which now honour binds us. In the hour of danger we humbly committed our cause into the hand of God and He has been our strength and shield. Let us thank Him for His mercies and in this hour of victory commit ourselves and our new task to the guidance of that same strong hand.’70

When he finished the crowd was still roaring its approval. Noël Coward summed up the mood of the day. ‘We all roared ourselves hoarse . . . I suppose this is the greatest day in our history.’71 On this triumphant day words hardly mattered. Elation filled the air. The island race had won and claimed ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’.