III The Delightful Duchess (1920–1930)
Elizabeth began the 1920s as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and ended them as Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York. The journey between the two commenced with her experiences as a debutante on the London social scene.
Described by contemporaries as “an exceptionally beautiful dancer” who had “taken London by storm,” Elizabeth thoroughly enjoyed her time as a “deb.” Her childhood stood her in good stead for this. She emerged from it an extrovert, comfortable in conversation and with meeting new people. As a child, Elizabeth had chatted happily with her parents’ guests, such as the Earl of Rosebery, a former Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party. A neighbour in London noticed that Elizabeth had “the ability to listen and make everyone feel special.” A family friend, Sir Alec Douglas-Home,I recalled that, at Glamis, “She moved around the tenant farmers talking to them about their animals, the crops, their dogs and the farm life. I think if you lived in a certain part of Scotland you couldn’t avoid being to a certain extent a philosopher, competing with the elements, understanding the animals and the rhythms of life. It laid the foundation of her ease of manner with a lot of different people.” Being one of the youngest in a large group of siblings had also increased Elizabeth’s ease in speaking to people older than herself.
The Season, as it was known, originated from a time when the upper classes had returned to their London houses after spending much of the autumn and winter hunting in the countryside. During the Season, there were charity balls like the Royal Caledonian, co-chaired by Elizabeth’s mother, there were polo, cricket and tennis matches (which was how the Wimbledon tournaments initially developed), horse race meetings at Ascot and for the Grand National, lunches and regattas. The debutante component to the Season launched the young women of the upper classes into high Society’s ballrooms and dinner parties, with the goal of introducing them to potential husbands from a similar background. By contemporary standards, the ideal debutante experience should culminate with an engagement notice in The Times. And it should begin by being presented to the King and Queen, which meant wearing formal court attire, including a train, while curtseying deeply to the monarch and his wife. This was known as the debs’ “coming-out”—which, as the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire noted decades later, now has a very different meaning.II
The most famous location for the coming-out presentations in 1920s Britain was Buckingham Palace; however, as the daughter of a Scottish earl, Elizabeth “came out” at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Royal Family’s official residence in Edinburgh. She judged “it was really quite fun.” The next day, there was a garden party, after which Elizabeth and Cecilia caught the overnight train to London in time for the Royal Air Force Ball at the Ritz, where the King’s second son, Prince Albert, asked Elizabeth to dance. It was four years since they had last met at Lavinia Spencer’s tea. According to a letter Elizabeth wrote a few days later, she again thought the Prince was very nice, but she was far more enthusiastic about the next two days, which she spent with her family, including her youngest brother David, watching the Eton versus Harrow cricket match (“That was really great fun. I loved it”).
Throughout the Season, there was a round of socialising for Elizabeth to enjoy. Some events were annual traditions, such as Queen Charlotte’s Ball, a London ball first hosted in 1780 by King George III to honour his wife’s birthday. At that inaugural Queen Charlotte’s Ball, Queen Charlotte herself had stood by her enormous birthday cake while the debutantes of the 1780 Season curtseyed to her. The event was such a great success that it was repeated every year, even after Queen Charlotte’s death in 1818. Although Queen Charlotte herself would henceforth be a permanent declines-with-regrets, her birthday party kept going, with each new wave of debutantes continuing to genuflect to a multi-tiered cake. Never keen to sacrifice a good party for something as trivial as a death, an aristocratic lady was often asked to be a surrogate for Queen Charlotte to ceremonially cut said cake. Recalling the Season aged eighty-six, Ruth Sebag-Montefiore, who as Ruth Magnus made her debut in the 1930s, considered, “It was a joke. It really was a joke when you think about it. Curtseying to a cake. But it was one of those things.”
Parents typically threw a party to mark their daughter’s coming-out. Elizabeth’s first was the Earl and Countess of Powis’s ball for their daughter, Lady Hermione Herbert, at which Elizabeth was asked to dance, several times, by “a nice young American” called Sam Dickson, who worked at the US embassy. Elizabeth thought Dickson had “such nice eyes. He was so funny,” although he became jealous when Elizabeth danced with Lord Erskine, who in turn seemed irritated when she danced with Dickson. “Whenever I danced with the American, he looked furious and whenever I danced with him, the American looked furious!” she explained to a friend. “It was awful… I have suddenly taken to blushing again. I do hope it will go soon, it’s such a bore.” The day after the party, Dickson had a “huge bunch of red roses” delivered to Elizabeth at her parents’ house. Elizabeth was impressed. Red roses in such abundance were still a rarity after wartime privations.
At the Season’s dinner parties, the debs were placed next to eligible bachelors. It was dealer’s choice if they ended up next to a Hooray Henry (rich, stupid, loud), a Chinless Wonder (rich, stupid, stupefyingly dull), NSIT (“Not Safe in Taxis,” debutante code for a sex pest), a VSIT (“Very Safe in Taxis,” debutante code for gay), or someone genuinely charming and interesting (rare, though not impossible). To navigate the socialising rapids, Elizabeth and the other debs deployed games, which simultaneously helped them while measuring the eligibility of their male equivalents. The Alphabet Game was a staple for dinners or lunches. The deb would pick a topic in her head that started with “A,” then see if that interested the chap she was sitting next to. For example, “I say, have you ever been to Austria?” If that didn’t work, you moved on to “B.” Maybe “Do you keep bees?” or “Do you know the Blandfords?” No luck there? They might try, “Goodness, have you seen how they’ve redecorated Claridge’s?” The farther along the alphabet you went, the duller the gentleman and the more despairing the deb. Nobody wanted to end up like Lord Harlech’s poor daughter Katharine, who tenaciously made it all the way to “R” with a Chinless Wonder to her left. He turned out to be an enthusiastic coin collector and leapt gleefully into her suggested conversation about Roman London. Romance did not blossom, but he was so touched by her consideration that he continued to send her postcards until just before his own death, seventy years later.
There was an air of stilted reality to most socialising in the years immediately after 1918. On the one hand, there was an attempt throughout British society to recapture something of the rhythm from the years before the war. This was understandable, yet, to a certain extent, hopeless. Too much had been lost and too many families destroyed for things to immediately go back to normal, even more so after the Spanish influenza pandemic swept the war-ravaged world, killing somewhere in the region of 35 million people. Within Elizabeth’s milieu among the upper classes, there was also a post-pandemic tension between those who wanted to return to the pre-war status quo and a new generation of young people, who preferred to shrug off many of the restrictions that had governed their parents’ lives. In London’s Roaring Twenties, the latter set were popularly nicknamed “the Bright Young Things,” their number including “flappers” who danced maniacally then spent the rest of the evening affecting a martini-fuelled ennui. Elizabeth was not one of them. This was the first of many times in her life when she was associated with a more traditional outlook. Her mother’s friend, the Countess of Airlie, loyally insisted, “Lady Elizabeth was very unlike the cocktail-drinking, chain-smoking girls who came to be regarded as typical of the nineteen-twenties. Her radiant vitality and a blending of gaiety, kindness and sincerity made her irresistible.” Often, she would be collected from Society parties by her family’s aged coachman with his long-lived horse. It happened more than once that Elizabeth would have to pop her head out the window to ask what the delay was. She had to accept their coachman’s good-natured response, “It’s quite all right, Milady, but the horse has stopped for a little sleep.”
A childhood acquaintance, who became one of the Bright Young Things and subsequently came to dislike Elizabeth intensely, noticed that, when she moved through London Society, she was already “afraid of meeting the wrong people.” Unbeknownst to her, they included her saturnine host at the evening where her future husband fell in love with her.
16. Lord Farquhar’s Ball
On June 2, 1920, Elizabeth attended a magnificent ball at the Grosvenor Square townhouse of Horace, Lord Farquhar, a consummate charmer and equally accomplished liar. Seventy-six-year-old Lord Farquhar had schmoozed his way between the worlds of old and new money through his directorship at a London bank, from where he offered excellent financial advice first to King Edward VII and later to his son, George V. Armed with the prestige of royal connections, he proceeded to dispense seemingly enriching advice to many members of the aristocracy. Secretly, he tipped off auction houses about aristocrats in financial difficulties, so they could make an early offer on their heirlooms at a good price. In return, those firms decorated Farquhar’s home gratis. Both before and after the First World War, his lavish generosity made Farquhar a leading figure in British high society. It was only after his death in 1931 that Farquhar’s clients—many of whom were his friends—realised that he had been fleecing them for years and that his glittering parties had been paid for with their money.
By the time of their ball in June 1920, the Farquhars were still at the apex of aristocratic society, their connections and their respectability seemingly unassailable. Along with dozens of fellow debs, Elizabeth danced around the Farquhars’ ballroom at 7 Grosvenor Square. One of her partners was Captain James Stuart, the Earl of Moray’s younger son and a recipient of the Military Cross for gallantry for his service during the war. One of the recurring themes in testimonies from those who knew Captain Stuart was how handsome he was. Two of Elizabeth’s friends, Alec and Helen, were engaged to one another. Alec teased, “You won’t let James cut me out, will you, Helen? He’s so attractive that there would be every justification for it,” while Helen remarked, “I wonder he isn’t spoilt with all the women making such fools of themselves over his good looks.” Elizabeth was very attracted to 23-year-old Captain Stuart. Her maid Mabel believed, “He was an absolute heart-throb, and they fell for each other in a big way.”
After leaving the army, Stuart had briefly studied Law at Edinburgh, before dropping out to serve as an equerryIII to Prince Albert, known to his family as Bertie. During the war, Bertie had served in the Navy and then in the newest branch of the British military, the Royal Air Force, where he became the Royal Family’s first fully qualified pilot. The family hoped that Stuart’s confidence would help ease Bertie’s anxiety as he began to socialise more after the Armistice, hence why Stuart had accompanied the Prince to the Farquhars’ ball. When Stuart and Elizabeth had finished dancing, Bertie leaned over to his equerry and said, “Who was that lovely girl you were talking to? Introduce me to her.” Evidently, Bertie did not remember Elizabeth from their dance a few months earlier at the Ritz.
Described by a socialite as “the hardest-working member of the royal family (but the least articulate),” Bertie was tall and thin, a heavy smoker, and an excellent tennis player obsessed with physical fitness. He had lived in such awe of his father that, aged about six or seven, he developed a strong stammer. The King’s inflexible attitude to the rules he set for his children may also have caused young Bertie’s gastric problems, although these might more likely be the fault of one of his nannies, who preferred Bertie’s elder brother, withheld food from the younger prince as a form of punishment, surreptitiously pinched him to make others think he was prone to tears and melodrama, and generally belittled or ignored a child whose confidence was already in desperate need of stimulus. She was dismissed after another of the Nursery servants felt brave enough to report the abuse to Bertie’s mother Queen Mary, by which point quite a bit of physical and psychological damage had been inflicted.
Two days after the Farquhars’ ball, the King created Bertie the new Duke of York, the traditional title for the second sons of the monarch since the late fifteenth century. Nervous about besmirching this ancient title by any inappropriate behaviour or associations, Bertie had broken off contact with an Australian socialite called Sheila Chisholm, with whom he had been besotted.IV Sheila was married to a Scottish nobleman, Lord Loughborough, who was an alcoholic more interested in gambling than spending time with his wife. Sheila had once woken up to find him sitting on the edge of her bed with a loaded pistol and the announcement that he had made such a mess of their finances that the only option left was to kill her and then himself. She managed to keep him talking until he set the gun down and she removed the bullets. Sheila was in love with neither Bertie nor her morbidly egotistical husband, but instead with Prince Sergei Obolensky, a strikingly good-looking war veteran who had escaped his homeland after unsuccessfully leading a monarchist battalion against the Communists during the Russian civil war. To complete this ménage of sexual and romantic frustration, Prince Obolensky—miserably married to Tsar Alexander II’s daughter, Princess Catherine—was not particularly interested in his wife, nor in Sheila.
Bertie’s investiture as Duke of York indicated that he had promised his father that he planned to marry and “settle down,” in contrast to his glamorous eldest brother, the Prince of Wales, who thought Bertie rather pathetic for giving up on Sheila to win their father’s approval. There was absolutely no question over the nationality of the future Duchess of York. In the political atmosphere after the Great War, Bertie would become the first British prince legally to marry a commoner since the future King James II eloped with his pregnant mistress in 1660.1 Contrary to the popular assumption that royalty could only wed each other, throughout the Middle Ages British royals had frequently married non-royals. St. Edward the Confessor, Harold II, King John, the fathers of Richard II and Henry IV, Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VIII in England had all married their or their families’ subjects, nearly all of them, admittedly, aristocrats; as had Scotland’s Duncan I, Macbeth, Lulach, Donald III, David II, Robert II, Robert III and Mary, Queen of Scots. However, after the House of Hanover inherited the British thrones in 1714, they had imported and prioritised the German upper classes’ preoccupation with “fully equal” marriages, and the British royals continued the practice until the First World War euthanised it.V During the war years, the novelist H. G. Wells famously wrote a public letter to The Times in which he severely criticised the King and Queen for their failure to publicly repudiate their many German cousins: “The European dynastic system, based on the intermarriage of a group of mainly German royal families, is dead today,” Wells observed. “It is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas. The British Empire is now very near the limit of its endurance with a kingly caste of Germans. The choice of British royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot be definitely [sic] delayed. Were it made now, publicly and boldly, there can be no doubt that the decision would mean a renascence of monarchy and a tremendous outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the empire.”
Wells was correct, if slightly overstating the case; polemic and precision are not always the happiest match. The last time an immediate member of the Royal Family had married a German was decades earlier when Queen Victoria’s youngest, Princess Beatrice, wed Prince Henry of Battenberg. Since then, the Battenbergs had sided with Britain during the Great War, serving in its armed forces, and changing their Germanic name of Battenberg to its anglicised form, Mountbatten. If shaky in detail, Wells’s point nonetheless stood in principle and it was emphatically backed up by David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, when he strongly advised George V to encourage his children to marry British citizens rather than foreign royalty. The world had changed.
Obedient to his father’s policies, Bertie seems to have considered only British options for matrimony. He had briefly harboured romantic feelings for the Marquess of Londonderry’s scathingly amusing daughter, Lady Maureen Vane-Tempest-Stewart, before she disappointed her parents’ dreams of a royal wedding by falling in love with the Earl of Derby’s younger son. It was at the Farquhars’ ball, after Lady Maureen’s engagement, that Bertie noticed Elizabeth for the first time. Within a few weeks, as they bumped into each other at more and more parties, Bertie’s feelings for Elizabeth became romantic. He confided this to his mother’s lady-in-waiting, the Countess of Airlie. As a close friend of Cecilia’s, Lady Airlie passed on the news that “he had fallen in love” with Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
17. Princes to spare
Over the next few months, Bertie became a frequent guest at Glamis, travelling over from his family’s Scottish estate, Balmoral, to spend days with Elizabeth and her friends. He was accompanied by his equerry Captain James Stuart, who had just broken off his engagement to Elfie Finlayson, daughter of a Scottish industrialist. With the end of Stuart’s betrothal to Elfie and his frequent visits to Elizabeth, rumour initially had it that the Duke of York and his equerry were guests at Glamis because of Stuart’s romantic interests, rather than Bertie’s. Both men enjoyed singalongs around the piano, a Bowes-Lyon favourite, and the generous snifters of port with which Cecilia plied any and all guests before they left for the railway station. Captain Stuart was somewhat less enthused by Elizabeth and her friends’ penchant for practical jokes, retaliating by pelting them with mud on an afternoon stroll after they had snuck into his room while he was at dinner to create an “apple pie bed,” a technique deploying a fake fold in the sheets whereby the aspiring sleeper cannot stretch out their legs. Bertie found the whole atmosphere at Glamis blissfully relaxed and happy, particularly in contrast to his father’s soul-crushing protocols at Balmoral.
At some point, Bertie’s interest in Elizabeth became too evident to ignore. Although Elizabeth liked him, she was not interested in him romantically and she hoped to avoid a conversation where she would have to hurt his feelings. Helen Gascoyne-Cecil, who had “debbed” with Elizabeth, noticed that many of the guests tried to wander off ahead, or fall behind the pair, to give the Prince a chance to express his feelings. Helen refused to do so, feeling that “Elizabeth’s signals of distress were so obvious that it would have been beastly to go away.”
He was not the only man interested in her. Among those to profess their love to Elizabeth were Lord Frederick Gordon-Lennox, heir to a staggering total of four dukedoms (Richmond, Lennox, Gordon and Aubigny) and himself later a famous racing driver; Lord Gorell (“I fell madly in love”); and Lord Gage, a well-meaning tweed-clad old soul in a young man’s body, who announced that he was “desperately fond” of Elizabeth. He admitted much later, “I loved her madly but really madly. You’ve no idea what a wag she was, so full of witty teasing and captivating jokes.” Probably unbeknownst to the Bowes-Lyons, Lord Gage was the lover of another of Elizabeth’s alleged suitors, Henry Channon, whom Gage once called “the best wife a man could possibly have.”2 Channon, nicknamed “Chips” by his friends, who included Elizabeth’s brother Michael from their studies together at Oxford after the war, was the son of a Chicago banker. He was theatrically unpatriotic; as a child, he had resented the national holiday to commemorate the anniversary of George Washington’s birth because “[I] hated anything then that savoured of America or Americanism.” After Oxford, Channon moved to London, where he became a naturalised British subject and later a Conservative Member of Parliament. His diaries are today more famous than his political record; they are an invaluable insight into life in the British upper classes between the two world wars. To describe them as free from bias would be like describing a marathon as free from leg pain, yet it is Channon’s memorable, often cruel, turn of phrase which makes the diaries memorable. Despite confessing to being “a little in love” with Elizabeth at this stage, he described one of her elderly relatives in the following terms: “dripping with jewels and bowed down by age, she looks like a ferret that has got loose in Cartier.”
Bertie was not even a gold medallist in the niche category of princes interested in Elizabeth. That summer, she began her lifelong friendship with the King of Serbia’s nephew, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia.VI Paul had studied at Oxford, where he had shared accommodation with Elizabeth’s brother Michael and, later, a bed with Chips Channon. Prince Paul adored Elizabeth, so much so that there were rumours that he planned to marry her.3 Their friendship endured longer than any putative romance and Paul instead proposed to Princess Olga of Greece, with Bertie as best man, sponsor or koom, at their wedding in Belgrade.
During one weekend in the country, Elizabeth’s friends began bowing and curtseying to her while they addressed her as “Your Royal Highness” or “Ma’am.” This wasn’t due to Bertie’s interest in her, but rather because of a headline in that morning’s Daily Star newspaper which ran SCOTTISH BRIDE FOR PRINCE OF WALES. HEIR TO THRONE TO WED PEER’S DAUGHTER. AN OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT IMMINENT. The journalists had not directly named Elizabeth. They did not need to, since their descriptions of the “anonymous” nobleman’s estates matched nobody but Claude Bowes-Lyon’s, whose sole unmarried daughter by that stage was Elizabeth. It hardly took a genius to figure out who they were describing, hence her friends’ teasing with their curtseys and bows, all of which Elizabeth smiled through. At least one of the friends thought the smile did not extend to Elizabeth’s eyes and “she has something on her mind.”
The Daily Star’s headline was an early iteration of the long-running rumour that Elizabeth was never in love with Bertie, and that she only accepted his proposal after she had made an unsuccessful attempt to start a romance with his eldest brother, the heir to the throne, who was known to his family as David. This version of events was seemingly confirmed by David himself, five decades later, by which point he and Elizabeth detested one another. “To put it politely,” he said, the caveat immediately advertising that politeness was already dead in the water, “she wanted to marry me.”
The Elizabeth-David theory is part of a wearying trend in history that can only ever attribute a woman’s attitudes to whom she was once in love with, and that her dislike of a man is probably linked to a romantic rejection by him or to him standing in the way of another romance. In Elizabeth’s case, the narrative holds that she never forgave David for choosing another woman, that she “settled” by picking Bertie, and that this all explains why, fifteen years later, she came to hate David and his wife, Wallis. This ignores the fact that Elizabeth and David barely knew each other before she married his younger brother, and that she was perfectly civil, even friendly, with most of David’s girlfriends before Wallis. One of them, Freda Dudley Ward, commented after ice skating with Elizabeth, “If I ever had to live in a bungalow in a small town, this is the woman I would most like to have as a next door neighbour to gossip with.”
Far from wanting to marry the future king, Elizabeth did not want to marry anybody in the Royal Family. She confided to a friend that if she married a prince, for the rest of her life “privacy would have to take second place to her husband’s work for the nation.” Elizabeth was encouraged in these doubts by her father, a royalist without much interest in the royals, who had once declared, “If there is one thing I have determined for my children, it is that they shall never have any sort of post about the Court.” She was not sure she liked Bertie enough to make these sacrifices for him, and when he proposed in the spring of 1921, she said no.
18. Dickie, Diamond, and dancing the night away
Immediately after rejecting the Duke of York, Elizabeth decamped to France for a few weeks. Her host was Diamond Hardinge, a notoriously clumsy debutante who liked her lunchtime bread rolls to be baked in the shape of frogs. Diamond’s father was British ambassador from 1920 to 1922, and with the embassy as their base, the two friends enjoyed the glitz of Jazz Age Paris.
They attended “a tremendous ball” at which Elizabeth, who turned twenty-one that August, tangoed with an exile from the Russian Revolution, “Constantine Somebody,” she wrote. “I never found out his other name! It was so funny, one is suddenly hurled in the air, & then bounced on the floor till one is gaga, ooh la la! Very painful.” They were taken on sightseeing tours by the chic Lady Anastasia Cheetham, whose unhappy marriage to a British diplomat was on a downward trajectory as vigorous as that of the hollowed-out barrel Elizabeth and Diamond clambered into at the Neuilly fairground flume. This was a particularly risky move to undertake with Diamond, whose balance was so abysmal she could throw herself on the ground and miss. Luckily, the pair descended the flume with spirits, and bones, intact.
Prince Paul of Yugoslavia stopped off for two nights to see them, breaking his trip back to Britain from Belgrade on board the Orient Express. He took Elizabeth to dinner with the visiting Earl and Countess of Dalkeith since, as an unmarried debutante, it was considered improper for Elizabeth to dine out with a man who wasn’t a relative. The Countess of Dalkeith, née Mollie Lascelles, was less than a year older than Elizabeth; before her marriage, Mollie had been one of the Mad Hatters, nicknamed “Midnight Moll” for her adventurous love life, which had included a fling with Elizabeth’s beau Captain James Stuart. “It was such fun,” Elizabeth wrote of their Parisian dinner, with just a touch of poison in her politesse, “and delicious seeing Mollie again—although it felt very odd being chaperoned by her!”
There was more gossip to enjoy when Elizabeth and Diamond partied at Acacia, a nightclub co-owned by the British fashion designer, and war veteran, Edward Molyneux. The club’s other owner was the American gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, an outspoken critic of homosexuality in her columns, which was a tad ironic as it was Elsa’s Scottish girlfriend, the soprano Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon (everyone called her “Dickie”), who arranged for Elizabeth and Diamond to be added to the guest list. Also among the revellers were Edward Molyneux’s lover and investor Harold Nicolson, a millionaire’s heir from Illinois who claimed to have fallen in love with Elizabeth at first sight, and a Hungarian socialite who turned up wearing a cape made entirely of gardenias.
Elizabeth returned to London to don her family’s tartan for the Royal Caledonian Ball, yet also to the news that her mother Cecilia had been diagnosed with cancer. Elizabeth realised, too, that Bertie was still besotted. He sent several invitations to join him at tennis and asking if she had enjoyed her time in France. At the end of the summer, his mother, Queen Mary, announced that she would like to visit Glamis, despite regally declaring to her lady-in-waiting, “Mothers should never meddle in their children’s love affairs.” Queen Mary’s self-invitation to their home was not a request that Elizabeth’s parents could politely refuse.
19. Dear old Anne Boleyn
All her life, Elizabeth used affectionate terms of Received Pronunciation endearment to describe things she loved or for which she had acquired a fondness. Buckingham Palace, for instance, was “dear old BP” and Anne Boleyn, long-dead second wife of King Henry VIII, was referred to as “dear old Anne Boleyn.” Anne, of course, famously did not make it to the old stage in life. In the syntax of Received Pronunciation, “dear old” means less a state of age and more an expression of affection, for something that’s always been there—or that feels that way.
In mid-July 1922, four hundred years after Anne Boleyn had made her debut at the English court, Elizabeth crossed the drawbridge to spend a few days at the Boleyns’ beautiful former home, Hever Castle, in Kent. Encircled by a moat, the castle dates from the thirteenth century, although by the time Elizabeth arrived there with her sister Mary, Lady Elphinstone, and Mary’s husband Sidney, it belonged to the Astors, the Anglo-American millionaires who once owned so much of Manhattan Island that they were nicknamed “the landlords of New York.” Elizabeth’s hosts for the weekend were John Jacob Astor V and his wife, Lady Violet Elliot-Murray-Knynynmound (try saying that after a hefty gin).
Elizabeth took great delight in being shown the secret door in the walls of the castle’s Morning Room, which opened to reveal “a priest hole” where the pious Waldegrave family hid on-the-run priests at a time when Catholicism was illegal in England during the late sixteenth century. From there, she was taken up the thirteen stone steps in a spiral staircase that looked exactly as they did when a young Anne Boleyn ran up and down to her bedroom on the floor above.VII She was shown a lock dating from Henry VIII’s reign and a hidden Catholic Oratory with an eighteenth-century icon of the Virgin Mary. Above the fireplace in the castle Library, Elizabeth saw a wildly flattering portrait of the first Astor to make his riches, Johann Jakob Astor, a German emigrant who became America’s leading fur trader, then a shipping owner and property investor. She was fascinated to see a sword carried by an owner who had pledged loyalty to Bonnie Prince Charlie, the popular nickname for the Catholic prince who had returned to Britain in 1745 with an army in his unsuccessful attempt to restore his family to the throne lost by his grandfather, James II.
Supporters of the Bonnie cause were known as Jacobites and they had been particularly strong in Scotland. Like Hever’s owners at the time, Elizabeth’s ancestors had been Jacobites; they had even opened the gates of Glamis to host Bonnie Prince Charlie’s father, Prince James, during his equally futile bid for the crown. Elizabeth learned to sing Jacobite laments around the piano as a child. Once, when shown a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, the anti-monarchist general who had briefly turned Britain into a republic after he deposed Prince James’s grandfather, Elizabeth murmured, “Yes, such a difficult time for my family,” as if these were events within her living memory, rather than in the 1650s.
Elizabeth stayed in a wing jutting out of the back of Hever Castle and connected to it by a moat-spanning covered corridor. Carefully designed in a mock-Tudor style to complement the rest of the estate, it had been added on the Astors’ orders to offer their never-ending stream of weekend guests the comforts of a Billiard Room, a Music Room with fireplace, and bedrooms with all the mod cons. Elizabeth’s host, John Jacob Astor V, had been born in New York to a former Republican senator, the one-time richest man in the United States, who declared that America was no longer a place for a gentleman and emigrated to the United Kingdom. He became a naturalised British subject in 1899 and, looking for a country estate near London, bought Hever, into which he invested a huge amount of money. Sprawling out towards a fountain-sporting loggia overlooking Hever’s new man-made lake were Italian-style gardens, through which Elizabeth could walk on stone pathways to admire a lavender garden or the many pieces of ancient Roman and Greek sculpture, imported by the Astors.
Mary Spencer-Churchill, Marchioness of Blandford, was also a guest at Hever that week. Born in 1900, she was almost exactly Elizabeth’s contemporary. She had come out as a debutante at the same time, an experience that ended with her wedding to the Duke of Marlborough’s eldest son. Mary’s first child had been born in 1921 and Elizabeth felt sledgehammer pressure from friends and family to accept a proposal, set the date, get married and start a family.
The Astors’ guest book for Hever contains two entries indicating that Elizabeth wandered, unknowingly, into a trap that changed her life. Among Elizabeth and Lady Blandford’s fellow guests was 51-year-old Evelyn Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who a year earlier had returned to royal service as one of Queen Mary’s ladies-in-waiting. It seems highly unlikely that this was a coincidental invite, especially since Queen Mary herself visited the Astors shortly before they hosted Elizabeth.
A few months earlier, Elizabeth had rejected a second proposal from Bertie. He had proposed in the immediate aftermath of his sister’s wedding, to which Elizabeth had been invited as one of the bridesmaids. Elizabeth was not one of the bride’s close friends and so the request from the Princess was likely another piece of manoeuvring by the Queen to keep Elizabeth in Bertie’s orbit. It is unclear whether Elizabeth genuinely did not realise that the royal wedding would be a prelude to another proposal or if she simply hoped to avoid it. Far less ambiguous is her distress at having to say no to Bertie for a second time. The day after he asked her, she wrote to him:
I am so terribly sorry about what happened yesterday, & feel it is all my fault, as I ought to have known. You are one of my best & most faithful friends, & have always been so nice to me—that it makes it doubly worse. I am too miserable about it, & blame myself more than I can say. If you ever feel you want a talk about things in general—I hope you will come and see me… I do wish this hadn’t happened.
Yours, Elizabeth.
Queen Mary was undeterred. From her visit to Glamis in late 1921, when Elizabeth had acted as hostess while helping her mother with her battle against cancer, the Queen came away convinced that Elizabeth would be the perfect addition to the Royal Family. Queen Mary has a reputation for being cold, aloof and intimidating, something that she acquired in her lifetime; Chips Channon thought that, standing still, she resembled a Swiss mountain and, in motion, a battleship at full steam. Privately, Queen Mary was far more complex and interesting. When a German cousin gave birth to the illegitimate child of a married palace servant, Queen Mary defied customs at the time by backing her traumatised female relative to the hilt.4 The oft-repeated anecdotes that Queen Mary refused to pay her tailors’ bills on time or repeatedly asked families she visited about their heirlooms until they felt pressured into “gifting” them to her are untrue, seemingly born from chatter around London dinner-party tables and accepted as fact the more often they were repeated.
However, Queen Mary was every bit as firm—sometimes even as ruthless—as the popular image of her would suggest. She demonstrated this quite clearly in the months after her visit to Glamis. Having concluded that Elizabeth was “the one girl who could make Bertie happy,” Queen Mary moved to weed out the competition. Not long after Glamis, Captain James Stuart was allowed to resign his position as Bertie’s equerry upon unexpectedly receiving an extremely lucrative job offer in the oil industry. It came via a family acquaintance, Sir Sidney Greville, a major shareholder in a company with oil fields in Oklahoma, where they offered to take Stuart to learn the proverbial ropes. Their timetable was tight, unusually so, since it required Stuart to resign royal service then cross the Atlantic in January, one of the worst months for a voyage, when storms were more common than calm. Waves and gales would toss cocktails in faces and hurl passengers from their feet as the ships’ slow lurch forward with the swell, then back up again, sent wicker chairs sliding, chandeliers jittering and stomachs churning in the Palm Courts and ballrooms of even the largest luxury liners.
It was only once he reached his temporary accommodation in an apartment on New York’s East 55th Street that Stuart began to suspect that this career change had been part of a wider plot to get him out of Britain—and away from Elizabeth. Sir Sidney Greville’s sister was one of Queen Mary’s ladies-in-waiting, and by the time a train was bearing him towards the Oklahoma oil fields, Stuart was certain he had been played. “That bitch Queen Mary,” he fumed years later, “that cow, she ruined my life! I was in love with the Queen Mother and she with me, but Queen Mary wanted her for the Duke of York.”
James Stuart features in Elizabeth’s story as “the one who got away,” a narrative that Stuart himself encouraged and which he likely believed. Elizabeth’s maid Mabel thought, “It was obvious when you saw them together that they were madly in love.” Although there can be no doubt that Elizabeth and Captain Stuart had very strong feelings for one another, it was not an unblemished relationship. Stuart, with timing so brutal it has to be read as intentional, proposed to Elizabeth’s friend Lady Rachel Cavendish the day before Elizabeth’s wedding and married her on Elizabeth’s birthday. He proved persistently unfaithful to his wife, a situation that some generously blamed on him being denied the happiness of marrying his “true love.” Yet he had done the same to Elizabeth. When they were apparently blissfully in love, he had, at least twice, had a secret fling with Elizabeth’s friend Mollie Lascelles. When Elizabeth found out, she was deeply hurt. She did not speak to Mollie until they were reunited by Prince Paul for their dinner in Paris. Had Elizabeth married James Stuart, there is precious little evidence that he would have remained faithful to her for much longer than he did to Rachel Cavendish.
With the competition catapulted across the Atlantic, Queen Mary went to Hever Castle to stay with friends who were preparing to host her quarry at a long weekend in which she was joined by Mary’s lady-in-waiting. Whatever was said to Elizabeth by the Astors and the Duchess of Devonshire is unknown, but it proved a turning point, and the pressure was augmented by Elizabeth’s mother. Cecilia, having recovered from her hysterectomy, made it perfectly clear that she thought Elizabeth had made a mistake in rejecting Bertie. She wrote, “I do hope he will find a nice wife who will make him happy. I like him so much and he is a man who will be made or marred by his wife.” Within a few months of the Hever visits, Queen Mary’s plan had worked.
Elizabeth thus became the second future queen to retreat to Hever Castle in order to ponder her options, and she remained fascinated by Anne Boleyn for the rest of her life.VIII Anne had a sense of humour so darkly irrepressible that on the night before her execution she made a joke to her attendants about the daintiness of her neck; four hundred years later, when helicopters were introduced as a mode of transport for British royals, Elizabeth announced, “The chopper has made more difference to my life than it has to any queen’s since dear old Anne Boleyn’s.”
20. Cocktails with Fenella
According to her diary, on her way back from the dentist on January 15, 1923, Elizabeth “called on Fenella—told her the news, & had a cocktail.” Over this drink with her brother Jock’s wife, Elizabeth told Fenella that she had accepted Bertie’s proposal, his third, the day before.
In the aftermath of Hever, there had been signs that Elizabeth’s feelings for Bertie had changed. He found her favourite music on gramophone records, they played tennis together often and seemed more relaxed in each other’s company. One evening at the fashionable London hotel of Claridge’s, mutual friends noticed a new ease between them as Bertie teased Elizabeth about her perpetual tardiness. Her mother saw how often they were laughing together, and “lately I noticed that she liked dancing & talking to him more than anyone else.”
As soon as Bertie told his parents that Elizabeth had said yes, the Royal Household released the news, prompting speculation that the royals had issued the announcement before Elizabeth had a chance to change her mind. The next day, Elizabeth was preoccupied with answering letters from friends congratulating her on her engagement and explaining that there were “hundreds of reporters clamouring” outside her parents’ home in London. Among her thank-yous was one to Queen Mary “for your most kind letter, welcoming me as your future daughter-in-law. I do hope I shall make Bertie very happy, as he deserves to be, and my greatest wish is to be a real daughter to your Majesty. I shall look forward intensely to my visit to Sandringham on Saturday, and I do hope you will think I shall make Bertie a good wife, we are both so happy, and it is all wonderful. I remain, Your Majesty’s humble & obedient servant, Elizabeth Lyon.”
As the engagement announcement appeared in newspapers across the empire and the world, Elizabeth told her brother David, “I could hear a door clanging behind me—never to open again.”
21. The Old Ikon
About 140 miles from Windsor, the Sandringham estate in the Norfolk countryside had been bought privately by Bertie’s late grandfather, Edward VII, king from 1901 until his death in 1910. Bertie loved it almost as much as had his father and grandfather. When they went to Sandringham, Bertie’s parents resided in the relatively cramped quarters of a smaller house in the grounds called York Cottage, since King Edward’s widow, Queen Alexandra, still lived in “the Big House,” as the red-brick residence at the heart of the estate was known.
On the Saturday after their engagement, Bertie brought Elizabeth to the Big House to introduce her to his grandmother. Elizabeth noticed that the door was guarded by an enormous Russian Cossack. Inside, Bertie bowed to Alexandra and Elizabeth sank into her deepest curtsey. It had been sixty years since Queen Alexandra—then Alexandra of Denmark, and described as the most beautiful princess in Europe—had arrived in Britain to harbours and streets thronged with cheering crowds ahead of her marriage to Queen Victoria’s eldest son. Alexandra’s husband, although intelligent and charismatic, was also extravagant and promiscuous, with the result that there had been several scandals during which his popularity with the British people fluctuated. Alexandra’s never did.
By the time Elizabeth met her at Sandringham in 1923, Queen Alexandra was living an increasingly reclusive life. She had struggled with her hearing and her mobility ever since a rheumatic fever that had nearly killed her when she was pregnant with her third child. She had been so admired for her sense of style that, after the fever stiffened her right knee, it became the trend to mimic her new style of walking—to the extent that “the Princess Alexandra Limp” briefly became all the rage at London balls and garden parties in the late 1860s, as completely healthy socialites fashionably hobbled across parquet floors and croquet pitches.
As she aged, the widowed Alexandra hid the signs with heavier and heavier make-up; she was particularly embarrassed by her deafness, worrying that people were talking about her behind her back. By the 1920s, she could only hear—and even then, faintly—with the help of an enormous ear trumpet. Her eyesight was failing and she hardly ever left Sandringham. T. E. Lawrence, better known later by his sobriquet Lawrence of Arabia, saw Queen Alexandra around the same time as Elizabeth and described her memorably, if not exactly kindly, as “a mummied thing, the red-rimmed eyes, the enamelled face, with the famous smile scissored across all angular and heart-rending.” He continued: “I nearly ran away in pity. The body should not be kept alive after the lamp of sense has gone out. There were the ghost of all her lovely airs, the little graces, the once-effective sway and movement of the figure.”
After Alexandra, Elizabeth curtseyed to the woman sitting next to the Queen. She was Alexandra’s younger sister, the Dowager Empress Marie of Russia. Marie, whom Bertie called Aunt Minnie, had been evacuated with her two daughters and their husbands by a British warship not long before the Crimea fell to the Communist armies. Had there been a delay, the Dowager Empress would undoubtedly have been executed, just like her sons, Grand Duke Michael and Tsar Nicholas II, shot by revolutionaries within weeks of one another.
Diminutive in stature, rigid in posture, and in better health than Alexandra, the Dowager Empress extended her hand for Elizabeth to kiss. The Cossack outside the door was Marie’s devoted bodyguard, the remnant of a time when she had been married to the most powerful man in the world. In the Russian monarchist community, the Dowager Empress was nicknamed “the Old Ikon,” a living relic of a way of life that had gone for ever. Seventy-eight years later, when Elizabeth had become the embodiment of a depleted generation, her last public audience was granted to a historian studying Marie’s family; Elizabeth was by then the only person left alive who could clearly remember her.
22. Belfast
Moments before Elizabeth and Bertie disembarked via a gangplank at the Northern Irish port of Larne, their warship’s mooring rope swayed in the wind and took out the top hats of the entire welcoming committee, who had been waiting on the pier to greet them. The same gust looked, just for a moment, as if it had intended to pitch Elizabeth into the water along with the hats now bobbing away from their owners, out towards the champagne cork popped from the warship’s bridge mid–Irish Sea for a thirsty Elizabeth and Bertie.
The Duke and Duchess of York’s first visit to Northern Ireland took place in July 1924, fifteen months after a million people had lined the rain-spattered streets of London to cheer them on their wedding day. Since then, Elizabeth had started her royal work as patron of various charities and attended official functions as Duchess of York, including her first state banquet, held at Buckingham Palace to honour the visiting King of Romania. Elizabeth was popular with most of the public and certainly with the press, where she was nicknamed “the Smiling Duchess,” “the Delicious Duchess,” “the Delightful Duchess.” Privately, despite this applause, Elizabeth was intensely worried about making a mistake in Northern Ireland. She had to be buoyed up by her husband, who had already conducted several royal tours before his marriage.
Northern Ireland was only three years old on the day Elizabeth stepped off the swaying gangplank. While the southern twenty-six counties of Ireland had won de facto independence in 1921, after a considerable struggle, the north-eastern six had remained part of the United Kingdom. There had been a great deal of violence throughout Ireland, on either side of Partition, and when Elizabeth reached their accommodation she noticed that a police officer had been stationed on watch from every window in the house. The Yorks and their entourage stayed for several days at Clandeboye, the Georgian country home of the Marquess of Dufferin, which became the royal couple’s base for their trips into Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital city.
The Belfast population was predominantly unionist,IX and so the Duke and Duchess received a rapturous welcome from cheering crowds. Elizabeth was joined by one of her closest friends, fellow Mad Hatter Lady Katie Hamilton, whose father the Duke of Abercorn served as Governor of Northern Ireland, a largely ceremonial post with no great practical power. Katie was unimpressed by the Belfast crowds; she described their clamouring to get closer to Elizabeth as “hideous. Their manners were appalling.” Elizabeth disagreed, and it was during this Belfast tour that she began to take more active control over her role. As she left Belfast City Hall, she was thoroughly unamused when her handlers tried to hurry her past the crowds and towards the waiting limousine. She felt that by rushing her, her retinue had not left her enough time to shake hands or talk to many of the people who had waited outside for hours to see her. It was not to happen again, she ordered, since “When I do a thing I do like to do it well and feel people are satisfied.” She even managed to keep a poker face through one of her favourite moments of the Northern Irish visit when, during his wildly enthusiastic welcome speech over an official dinner, the mayor’s gesticulations ended with his sleeves catching fire over a disobedient candelabra.
A train bore the Yorks north-west across the length of Northern Ireland to the city of Derry, where Elizabeth and Bertie pretended not to notice the posters calling for an end to the union with Britain. Even what to name this stop on their tour reflected the minefield of Northern Irish politics. The original city of Derry had been burned down in the early seventeenth century on the orders of an Irish rebel leader called Sir Cahir O’Doherty. To secure the necessary funds to rebuild it, city officials had appealed to London-based guilds of merchants, with the incentive of adding their city’s name, London, to the old name, Derry, to form the portmanteau Londonderry. Over the centuries, the fact that this new name had been the consequence of a Jacobean version of commercial branding faded from memory. It was assumed that “London” had been added in enforced tribute to the British Empire’s capital, for which reason many nationalistsX understandably refused to call the city Londonderry, while some unionists—also mistakenly believing it was a politicised name—refused to call it Derry. Nearly everyone in the city itself, regardless of political views, called (and continues to call) it Derry. Eventually weary of offending somebody by calling it Londonderry/Derry, Northern Irish journalists later decided they may as well offend everybody by half-jokingly referring to it as “Stroke City.”
Londonderry’s population in 1924 was the demographic inverse of Belfast’s unionist majority and nationalist minority. There had thus been some who thought sending the young royals there at all had been a mistake, given the security risks, and a compromise seems to have been reached whereby they would not stay overnight. According to Elizabeth, “Arrived at Derry at 11. Considering that more than half are Nationalists, we had a marvellous welcome.” Having initially been the one reassuring her, Bertie wrote to his father, “I am so lucky to have her help as she knows exactly what to do and say to all the people we meet.”
They then went south once more, this time as guests of the Marquess and Marchioness of Londonderry at their loughside estate, Mount Stewart, one of the most splendid private homes in the United Kingdom. Lord and Lady Londonderry had dreamed of being Bertie’s parents-in-law until their eldest daughter, Lady Maureen, rejected him. There were no hard feelings, and after a dinner in which Elizabeth sat between her host and the Archbishop of Armagh, she and Bertie danced at Mount Stewart until two o’clock in the morning. En route to England on a warship, they celebrated with another couple of bottles of champagne.
23. Drinky-poos
Elizabeth enjoyed cocktails, but eventually decided that she disliked their name. Feeling “cocktail” was too harsh a word, she suggested, “Can’t we call them ‘drinky-poos’ instead?”
In the name of historical research, I whipped up several batches of her favourite drinky-poo—gin and Dubonnet—the making of which did not require me to become a skilled mixologist. It is one part gin to two parts Dubonnet—which, by way of context, is a fortified wine that was initially developed to treat malaria in early nineteenth-century France. While I have come to have a fondness for them, it must be said that after one gin and Dubonnet you’ll need a taxi, after two you’ll need an ambulance, and after three you’ll need a priest.XI
24. Naindikwa
Elizabeth stretched her feet in the Ugandan countryside. Wearing khaki shirt and slacks, and a red neckerchief, she seemed “a little pathetic,” according to one of the accompanying hunters. “I don’t think I look too bad in my trousers,” she concluded of the first occasion she had appeared in public in anything other than a dress. Since setting off from their camp at Naindikwa earlier that morning, Elizabeth’s feet had blistered so badly in her boots that eventually the whole party had to stop for a couple of hours until she could put her socks and shoes back on.
Rather than admit a blister-inflicted defeat, Elizabeth breezily lied to her mother back home in Britain, “I walk nearly twenty miles a day sometimes, & feel most frightfully well… I love this life.” That latter part, at least, was true. Elizabeth had fallen in love with Kenya, which was then part of the British Empire, and Uganda, a self-governing protectorate, almost from the moment she and Bertie disembarked from the passenger liner Mulbera, which had carried them from Marseilles to Mombasa. It was the first time that Elizabeth had left the British Isles since her childhood holidays to Italy and the first time in her life that she had left Europe. The Mulbera brought them across the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, then into the Red Sea where, in a letter to her mother, Elizabeth appreciated that “though it is hot enough to wear thin clothes, there is always a little breeze & plenty of electric fans. The evenings are too lovely, with a huge moon. I am not sure whether you will get this message very long before Xmas, so I will wish you a very merry one darling.”
25. Lilibet
Elizabeth was four months pregnant with her first child when her grandmother-in-law died. As Elizabeth’s friend Chips Channon noted in his diary entry for the day of Alexandra’s death, “The Kingdom is plunged into grief, no one had any idea how loved the old Queen was. People are weeping in the streets.” Elizabeth attended Queen Alexandra’s funeral, after which her public appearances were cut back as her pregnancy progressed.
Elizabeth and Bertie were overjoyed at the pregnancy. As he told his parents, “We always wanted a child to make our happiness complete.” Only two and a half years passed between the Yorks’ wedding and the pregnancy, which had not prevented pressure on Elizabeth to conceive and speculation as to why she hadn’t. The fact that Elizabeth was not expecting a child within weeks of her wedding prompted untrue rumours, at the time, that Bertie was impotent and untrue rumours, later, that the children were conceived through artificial insemination, even though this was not available in Britain until the late 1930s, when its technology was woefully ineffective.
Rather than giving birth in one of the royal residences, Elizabeth chose her parents’ London house, 17 Bruton Street, the townhouse in Mayfair that they had started renting after the lease expired on their place on St. James’s Square. It was a difficult labour. The baby, described by Queen Mary as “a little darling with a lovely complexion,” arrived via Caesarean just before three o’clock in the morning on April 21, 1926. Bertie wanted her christened Elizabeth after his wife, Alexandra to commemorate his late grandmother, and Mary in honour of his mother the Queen. As she learned to speak, Princess Elizabeth could not pronounce her first name, instead rendering it “Lilibet,” which became her nickname within the family.
When Lilibet was only a few months old, her parents left her as they conducted a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand on behalf of the bronchitis-felled King. Newspapers at the time praised the Duchess of York for leaving her baby to support her husband on his duties. The prevailing wisdom in the 1920s was that taking an infant on such a trip would have been selfish, as children need the stability that comes from routine. Knowing all this and believing it, too, did not make the moment of separation any easier for Elizabeth. She sobbed so hard at leaving Lilibet that she had to ask the chauffeur to drive their car around Victoria Station several times until she could compose herself, hide any signs that she had been crying, then step out to the platform, people and press with a smile on her face.