With her experiences as a debutante, the love that grew in her marriage, and the birth of her first child, Elizabeth would look back on the 1920s as the happiest time of her life. She developed an excellent relationship with her husband’s parents and his siblings. Bertie’s elder brother David told a friend over supper “how bad-tempered his father is. How the Duchess of York is the one bright spot there, they all love her and the King is in a good temper whenever she is there.” George V’s obsessive adherence to punctuality even yielded to his daughter-in-law’s flamboyant tardiness. His children were stunned when she came down to dinner a few minutes late, a faux pas for which he would have sharply criticised them, but which elicited a chivalrous “You are not too late, my dear. I think we must have sat down two minutes too early” for Elizabeth. The King told Bertie, “The better I know and the more I see of your dear little wife, the more charming I think she is and everyone falls in love with her.”
There were difficulties for Elizabeth in adjusting to life as a Windsor. Some were comparatively mild irritants, such as the evenings in which her father-in-law, to his delight, found himself funny. As the joke lumbered towards its crescendo, George V would punctuate his delivery with staccato jabs of enthusiasm to his listener’s arm as he flailed around in self-induced glee. On more than one occasion when Elizabeth sat next to him at a dinner at which George had regarded himself as king of comedians, she emerged with her arm black, blue and yellow. There were more deliberately unpleasant moments, including the King’s anger when Elizabeth, bedridden with tonsillitis, cancelled two days’ worth of engagements during a visit to New Zealand. In a surprisingly unguarded moment in a letter to a relative, she referred to her royal father-in-law as “a narrow-minded autocrat.”
She and Bertie had an active social life, including dances at Claridge’s, where fellow revellers noticed how much in love the couple now seemed. They hosted parties of their own, including one at which Elizabeth waltzed with their guest Fred Astaire, the famous American dancer then winning rave reviews for his performance in a West End musical.
Elizabeth was arguably the most popular member of the Royal Family at this point in her career, a status which surprised, and sometimes even alarmed her. An unsettling incident occurred in 1928 when she attended her brother Mike’s London wedding. As she walked into St. George’s Church on Hanover Square for the service, an eyewitness recorded in her diary, “there was a terrific crowd of stampeding women who nearly mobbed the Duchess of York who, surprised, looked tiny and nervous. The police had difficulty in protecting her, for she would have been torn to pieces by the adoring mob, who wanted to touch or kiss her.”
The 1930s was to be much more difficult for Elizabeth and, as had the 1910s, the decade began with the loss of a brother. Jock Bowes-Lyon died, aged forty-three, from pneumonia, having struggled with poor health since the trenches of the First World War. Pregnant once more, Elizabeth went to Glamis to care for her mother, who called the death of her fourth child “more than I shall ever bear.” Elizabeth stayed north for most of her final trimester and her second child was born at Glamis on August 21, 1930.
Princess Margaret Rose was the first member of a British royal family to be born outside England since King Charles I’s younger brother Prince Robert, Duke of Kintyre, in 1602, and the King was so pleased to have a granddaughter born in Scotland that he wanted a name historically associated with Scottish princesses. He thus rejected Elizabeth and Bertie’s preference for Anne, in favour of Margaret, and Elizabeth accepted her father-in-law’s choice. In a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Elizabeth wrote of her second daughter, “I am glad to say that she has got large blue eyes and a will of iron, which is all the equipment that a lady needs!” There were rumours, confidently repeated and wildly untrue, that the new princess was deaf and mute, which persisted for several years until she was heard to speak in public.
The Great Depression, one of the worst recessions in history, began in the United States in 1929 and spread throughout the world. It pulverised the British economy for the first half of the 1930s, leading to mass unemployment, mounting hardship and political radicalisation. Exhausted and infuriated by their democratically elected governments’ seeming inability to fix any of the problems caused by the Depression, millions of voters were attracted to hard-line alternatives. There was a rise in support for Communism throughout Europe, likewise for fascism, which in 1934 took power in Germany as Hitler was elected chancellor. There was already a fascist government in office in Italy.1 Both were expansionist and pro-war. Elizabeth initially thought the Nazis were absurd; she did not realise, until it was almost too late, just how serious a threat they had become, nor how dangerous was the spike in support for fascism in Britain.
At the depth of this politically fraught decade, Elizabeth became queen. Her father-in-law George V died at the start of 1936, shortly after celebrating his Silver Jubilee as king, and he was succeeded by his eldest son, who took the name Edward to reign as King Edward VIII, although in private his family continued to call him David. Ten months later, he relinquished the throne to marry socialite Wallis Simpson. With Edward’s abdication, Bertie became King George VI, deliberately taking his late father’s name in order, desperately, to suggest some sense of continuity between the old king and the new. This was despite having a younger brother already called George, the Duke of Kent.
Almost nobody expected George VI to be a successful king, as becomes very clear from reading not just the press coverage of the Abdication crisis but also the private letters and diaries of people whom Elizabeth and Bertie considered close friends.
In the 1980s, Elizabeth received a letter from David Seidler, a British playwright, with some questions about her late husband’s struggle with his stammer and speech impediment. Through his research, Seidler had discovered that Bertie had benefited greatly from treatment by an Australian therapist called Lionel Logue, whom Elizabeth first contacted on her husband’s behalf in 1926. According to Seidler, when, in response to his letter, “the Queen Mother asked me to wait and not tell this story during her lifetime, because the memory of these events was still too painful, I realized the depths of the emotions involved.” Seidler respected the Queen Mother’s request, particularly impressive since neither she nor Seidler expected that she would live for another twenty years.2 The resulting film, The King’s Speech, eventually won Seidler the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2011 and Helena Bonham Carter was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Elizabeth, with Bertie played by Colin Firth and the therapist Lionel Logue by Geoffrey Rush.3
Although certain liberties were taken with the historical details, as they inevitably must in costume dramas, The King’s Speech captured much of Logue’s therapy sessions with Bertie, including Elizabeth’s role in arranging the first meeting, her encouragement of her husband to seek professional help and her gratitude to Logue. Two decades later, she wrote privately to Logue, “I think that I know perhaps better than anyone just how much you helped [him], not only with his speech, but through his whole life & outlook on life. I shall always be deeply grateful to you for all that you did for him. He was such a splendid person and I don’t believe he ever thought of himself at all.”
Publicly, Elizabeth never deviated from devoted platitudes of loyalty to her father-in-law. Half a century after his death, she was still praising his “great kindness” to her. There is no reason to suppose that this was a complete lie, and she sincerely respected his leadership through the First World War. However, it was nowhere near the whole truth, and her low opinion of George V’s capabilities as a father is revealed in Elizabeth’s private papers. Shortly after Princess Margaret’s birth, Elizabeth composed a letter to her husband with parenting tips for their daughters, which she wanted him to read if anything happened to her. Her first instruction to Bertie from beyond the potential grave was, “Be very careful not to ridicule your children or laugh at them. When they say funny things it is usually quite innocent, and if they are silly or ‘show off’ they should be quietly stopped, & told why afterwards if people are there.”
Her next two pieces of advice pulled no punches regarding George V: “Always try & talk very quietly to children. Never shout or frighten them, or otherwise you lose their delightful trust in you. Remember how your father, by shouting at you, & making you feel uncomfortable lost all your real affection. None of his sons are his friends, because he is not understanding & helpful to them.”
In 1934 and 1935, Elizabeth and Bertie acquired two new sisters-in-law as his younger brothers married. Elizabeth got on very well with the second addition to the Royal Family, fellow Scottish aristocrat, the Duke of Buccleuch’s sister Lady Alice Douglas-Montagu-Scott, who had come out as a debutante at the same time as Elizabeth. Alice wed Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, an “immensely kind, potentially irritable” whisky enthusiast, noted for the piglet-like squeals of his “very infectious” laughter, which according to a dinner companion seemed “orgasmic, so much pleasure does he get from it, so sudden and enjoyable does it seem.”4 The Gloucesters’ wedding was small and their marriage was happy. Their two sons, the princes William and Richard, arrived three years apart and their parents were devoted to them. Chips Channon mused in his diary, “Alice, of course, is now Duchess of Gloucester, a lovely title. She has done little to capture the imagination of the public and hardly exists as a royalty of national character. But I hear the King and Queen like her the best of their daughters-in-law.”
That last detail may reflect Channon’s growing disenchantment with his erstwhile friend Elizabeth, whom he increasingly resented for abandoning him after she married. What Channon did not know was that King George V detested him, which made a continuing friendship difficult on Elizabeth’s part. Having given way on her daughter’s name to please her father-in-law, she was hardly likely to pick her tepid friendship with Chips Channon as her hill to die on.
Channon remained close to the youngest of the Windsor brothers, Prince George, Duke of Kent, a good-looking and charismatic bisexual pilot who had beaten a drug addiction after first being introduced to narcotics by an ex-girlfriend. In 1934, Prince George became the only one of his siblings to marry foreign royalty. Enough time had passed since the war for the Duke of Kent’s engagement to Princess Marina of Greece to prove popular with the public.5 From 1934 until her death in 1968, Princess Marina was hardly ever off the “Best Dressed” lists in British magazines. Her parents-in-law distrusted her chic Parisian wardrobe and blood-red nail polish.
“I’m afraid the King doesn’t like painted nails. Can you do something about it?” Queen Mary told her.
“Your George might not, but mine does,” Marina replied.
Daughter of a Romanov grand duchess and granddaughter of Greece’s King George I, Princess Marina was far more confident than either Elizabeth or Alice when marrying into the House of Windsor, and so she was less inclined to toe the line with the in-laws.
Chips Channon revelled in schadenfreude to see Elizabeth’s position unsettled by Marina’s popularity. Elizabeth, “the Delightful Duchess” of York, was suddenly the stuffy traditionalist, thrown into the shade by the glamour of Princess Marina, who was greeted by cries from the crowds of “Don’t let them change you!” Channon wrote in February 1934 that “The York household is jealous already of Marina, Duchess of Kent—it is time that Elizabeth of York had a little competition. She has had it all her own way for ten years.” With Marina’s arrival, Elizabeth experienced the first rotation in a cycle that has since been applied to nearly every woman who has married into the Windsor dynasty. The names change, the narrative remains the same: a new bride is going to modernise the monarchy because she is a breath of fresh air. This lasts until the next wedding, whereupon the bride who was formerly the breath of fresh air becomes characterised either as jealous and vindictive or a characterless dullard, inevitably resentful of the beauty, popularity, loveliness, intelligence, charm or charisma of the new royal bride, who is such a breath of fresh air and will really blow away the cobwebs.
The relationship between the duchesses was not helped by the fact that Marina took repeated pot-shots at Elizabeth’s “inferior” ancestry. Over a century earlier, during the dissolution of the First Reich,I through a process that lasted from 1801 to 1806, a series of German princely families had lost their status as independent rulers; these families were the “Serene Highnesses” and henceforth under the jurisdiction—and rank—of the German reigning families who kept their power. These demoted minor princely dynasties were referred to as the Mediatised Sovereign States and, for a century or so after, the devotees of “pure” royal marriages begrudgingly regarded plucking a bride from a mediatised family as the last acceptable frontier of royal spouses, a sort of bargain basement of backwater bluebloods. Discussing her sister-in-law Elizabeth, Marina giggled that Bertie had married somebody who was “not even mediatised.” The long yellow brick road into the arcane genealogy of the defunct First Reich necessary to explain Marina’s insult here indicates just how few people outside her circle cared about it, even then. Marina referred to the non-royal Elizabeth and Alice as “those common little Scotch girls,” which allegedly was the polite version, as others recall Marina referring to them as “common little Scottish tarts.” One or both of those remarks made its way back to Elizabeth, who correspondingly resented Marina for years. “The Queen Mother adored Princess Marina the moment she died,” a friend joked. “When she was alive, she hated her!”
It was an early example of Elizabeth’s Olympian ability to hold a grudge, and a dress rehearsal for the one she nurtured for her final sister-in-law.
Several months after King George V’s death, his eldest son sped through the grounds of Windsor Great Park with driving, and love, goggles firmly in place. One protected him from the sunshine, the other from even the faintest glimpse of reality. The new King had decided to surprise Bertie and Elizabeth at Royal Lodge, their house in the grounds of Windsor Castle. From inside, the Duke and Duchess of York heard David, or King Edward VIII as he had been since January of that year, barrel up the driveway in his new American station wagon. After Elizabeth sent instructions to the Nursery to have her daughters ready to meet their uncle, she forced a smile onto her face, where it would remain, with a remarkable facsimile of sincerity, for the next hour. She and Bertie went to greet the King, who hopped out of his car and introduced them to his passenger, Wallis Simpson, the chic American wife of a London-based shipbroker. Since Elizabeth and Bertie had offered so many polite excuses for avoiding Wallis’s company over the past few months, the King reasoned: why not bring her to them? After all, nothing smooths over awkward encounters like a total lack of warning.
From a down-on-its-luck “old money” family from Maryland, Wallis was the witty and elegant embodiment of an impending constitutional crisis. Even though she was still married to somebody else as of mid-1936, Edward VIII was determined to wed her. The British monarch is also hereditary Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a branch of Protestantism which did not, then, permit divorcées to remarry. Wallis, who had been divorced once before, would therefore be problematic from the Church’s perspective as a queen consort, and it was the Church’s highest-ranking bishops who would be expected to crown Edward VIII and his wife at the coronation, timetabled for May of the following year.
Wallis Simpson was one of the first major examples of Elizabeth’s policy of ignoring something difficult in the hope that it would go away: her “ostriching,” as a courtier put it. Even she could not keep pretending nothing was amiss when the problem was helped out of the car by the King and introduced. “Her justly famous charm was highly evident,” Wallis wrote magnanimously.
I was also aware of the beauty of her complexion and the almost startling blueness of her eyes. We returned to the house for tea, which was served in the drawing room. In a few moments the two little Princesses joined us. They were both so blonde, so beautifully mannered, so brightly scrubbed, that they might have stepped straight from the pages of a picture book. Along with the tea things on a large table was a jug of orange juice for the little girls. David and his sister-in-law carried on the conversation with his brother throwing in only the occasional word. It was a pleasant hour; but I left with the distinct impression that while the Duke of York was sold on the American station wagon, the Duchess was not sold on David’s other American interest.
Elizabeth’s and Wallis’s dislike of each other, even hatred at times, has become legendary, a Bette Davis and Joan Crawford of the British monarchy. Although some of their friends piously claimed that neither truly disliked the other, this was an outright lie. Wallis was an excellent mimic, as Elizabeth discovered when she walked in on Wallis performing an unflattering impression of her before a group of laughing guests. As Edward VIII brought them more frequently into each other’s company, Wallis realised that, to quote one of Bertie’s equerries, beneath Elizabeth’s “graciousness, her gaiety and her unfailing thoughtfulness for others, she possessed a steely will” and a capacity for icy disdain.6
Chips Channon, who knew Wallis well, left perhaps the fairest assessment of her in his 1936 diaries. Its benefit lies in Channon’s intelligence and in being written before hindsight coloured opinions of Wallis:
She is a woman of mixed motives and character. She is kind, warm-hearted, gay, witty, shrewd, glamorous and loyal. On the other hand she is somewhat frivolous and calculating. She has the American flair for High Society and is completely dazzled by it. When she first came to London she knew nobody and was miserable. Her first friends were not as grand as she would have liked, but whilst she quickly threw them over as she soared in the social scale she always found time to be kind to them and render them services, although she no longer saw them. She was dazzled by English life, pleased to call duchesses by their Christian names, and her reaction was very like that of any other American who arrives in London and is taken up. She is an excellent judge of character. She takes an exaggerated interest in food and drink and is interested in the culinary arts. She made the King supremely happy and he was a different being when she was in the room. On the other hand, she had no knowledge of this country, never having been out of London, until she went to stay in the houses of the Great where she was treated almost as an empress, and after all she only lived in London for about three or four years.
Elizabeth believed that Wallis hated “this dear old country” and took to referring to her as “That Woman,” rather than by her name. Wallis and Edward VIII loved to joke about Elizabeth’s weight gain, saying that she looked like an overweight frump, nicknaming her “Cookie” and her eldest daughter “Shirley Temple.”
Elizabeth and Wallis were subsequently presented by their respective critics as the Machiavellian brains behind the Abdication crisis, the name given to Edward VIII’s announcement in December 1936 that he was relinquishing the throne so that he could legally marry “the woman I love.” Either Elizabeth or Wallis is usually cast as the villain who shamelessly manipulated a weak-willed man, one who apparently would never have dreamed of hurting anybody’s feelings until his scheming wife forced him to do so. The evidence supports neither scenario. Both women were quite seriously unwell as the crisis came to a boil. Elizabeth was bedridden with another bout of influenza that developed into pneumonia, while Wallis could not get out of bed for much of the latter half of November, when a friend confided to his diary that she was “so ill (it is a form of nervous exhaustion).”
In his ten months as king, Edward VIII had managed to win the approval of many left-leaning political figures, some of whom were traditionally sceptical of the monarchy. During a visit to the mining communities in Wales, he famously said “Something must be done” to alleviate the poverty exacerbated by the Great Depression. (Years later, when his famous quote was brought up to him at a dinner party, the former king asked, “About what?”) Many of his supporters, including the Conservative politician Winston Churchill, thought that the admired King Edward should be allowed to stay on the throne and marry Wallis after her divorce was finalised. There was even talk of a compromise in the form of a morganatic marriage, whereby Wallis would legally be Edward VIII’s wife but not his queen. A different, lesser title could be used—Duchess of Lancaster was considered at one point—and any children they had would not be in line to the throne, which would one day still therefore pass to Bertie or his eldest daughter.
A variety of factors ensured that crowns were denied not just to Wallis but, in the end, to Edward VIII as well. The first, which is sometimes underplayed in modern accounts of the crisis, was the sincerity of the Church’s discomfort at the situation and what they feared Edward’s actions said about the Sacrament of marriage. The Archbishop of Canterbury became a strong supporter of the plan to see Edward VIII surrender either the throne or Wallis, allying himself with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and even, incredibly, with Edward’s Private Secretary, Alan Lascelles. Known to friends as Tommy, Lascelles had served Edward when he was Prince of Wales, a role from which he had emerged convinced that the Prince would make a terrible king. He thought Edward VIII’s work ethic was non-existent, his interest in government minimal, his charm convincing yet superficial and his selfishness on a planetary scale. In Lascelles’s scorching summation, his new king was “a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul.”
As Edward VIII reached the decision to stand down as king, he failed to communicate his plans to his family. Four days before the announcement, Bertie, who would become king the moment his brother signed the Instrument of Abdication, still could not get in contact with him. Phone calls were not returned, letters went unanswered, and requests to meet were ignored. Even the Duke of Kent, the brother to whom the King was closest, was temporarily ignored. Finally, on the evening of Monday, December 7, the King summoned Bertie and told him that he would succeed him that Thursday. Bertie asked his driver to take him to Marlborough House, the London residence of his widowed mother, where, the minute he saw her, he “broke down & sobbed like a child.” Lying in her sickbed on Thursday, Elizabeth became queen as she listened to her brother-in-law’s radio address relinquishing the throne. Before he boarded a warship for temporary exile in France and Austria, Elizabeth sent a letter to the ex-king to tell him that she prayed, “ ‘God bless you’ from my heart. We are all overcome with misery, and can only pray that you will find happiness in your new life.” Having renounced all titles on his abdication as king, a new title—Duke of Windsor—was created for him on his brother’s orders, as he went from His Majesty The King on December 10, to His Royal Highness The Duke of Windsor on the 12th.
Elizabeth was so unwell that she did not get out of bed until twelve days after becoming queen. Under normal circumstances, she should probably have rested for longer. However, Bertie—or King George VI, as he had become—needed her. They went to Sandringham for Christmas, where Elizabeth cancelled the new tradition of the monarch recording a Christmas Day radio address to his subjects, correctly guessing that Bertie was not up to it. She told the Archbishop that she and Bertie “feel our responsibilities very deeply, and though quite prepared for a difficult time, are determined to do our best.” They spent that Christmas taking stock of the situation, adjusting to the shock, and steadying George VI’s nerves.
Chips Channon worried, “I do not think that the Socialists nor—say—the miners in South Wales will ever have the same great affection for the present monarchs, or would refer to George VI as ‘Our King’ as they did Edward VIII, during his short reign. I sincerely hope I am wrong and that the present King and Queen will eventually be as loved as George V. But the spirit of the world is changing and I much doubt whether they are strong enough.” Channon also had doubts about how successful Elizabeth would be as her mother-in-law’s replacement:
[S]he is well bred, kind, gentle, and slack. She may well have deep-rooted ambition, but no surface trace of it. She is fundamentally lazy, very lazy and charming, always charming, always gay and pleasant and smiling. She has some intelligence and reads a lot, but she is devoid of all eye, and her houses have always been banal and hideous. Like all the Lyon family, particularly [her brother] David, she is superficially treacherous. She can never resist a slightly spiky remark about the person she has just left; but it means nothing, and in the long run she is loyal and kind. She will never be a great Queen for she will never be up in time!… She has few friends, only the Allendales, the Plunkets, and some respectable and dull Scotch people to whom she has ever been loyal.
That last point touched on another concern—that, with her background, Elizabeth would be a puppet for the aristocracy, “a class whose importance is every day lessened… there is something ‘tin-y’ about the present King and Queen: they are disarming, almost pathetic, not unpopular, but so obviously puppets and not the real thing. The monarchy in a sense ceased with George V and Queen Mary.”
Princess Elizabeth, ten years old and suddenly first in line to the throne, saw an envelope addressed to Her Majesty The Queen. She pointed at it and said to her six-year-old sister Margaret, “That’s Mummy now.”
One of Elizabeth’s longest-lasting friendships was with the playwright Noël Coward, who said later that he thought a statue of Wallis Simpson should be erected in every village in Britain to thank her for sparing them Edward VIII as their king. In the 1930s, there were credible rumours that Coward was in love with Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Kent, and that playwright and prince had been an item before Kent’s marriage to Princess Marina. Elizabeth subsequently dispelled any doubt that she knew Coward was gay when, one evening, they passed the tall soldiers of the Household Cavalry in their gleaming breastplates, lined up on either side of the staircase. Catching Coward staring, Elizabeth whispered with a smile, “I wouldn’t if I were you, Noël. They count them before they put them out.”
George VI’s temper could be explosive, particularly in the early years of his reign, when he was terrified of embarrassing his family or his office. Sitting on their backless chairs and holding one of their first courts at Buckingham Palace, he and Elizabeth appeared magnificent. Until she noticed that her husband-king seemed to be slipping in his chair. Wearing the thigh-high boots of a field marshal’s uniform, George VI kept trying to balance himself as he seemed, inexorably, to be sliding forward. It was as if his chair was staging some kind of rebellion, as Bertie tried to keep his dignity while acknowledging the seemingly endless stream of bows and curtseys flowing towards him and his Queen.
Standing nearby was thirteen-year-old Andrew, Lord Bruce, heir to the Scottish earldoms of Elgin and Kincardine, and to the chiefdom of Clan Bruce. He was serving as Page of Honour to Queen Elizabeth and watching her husband slide forward in his chair rather than settle backwards. The Lord Chamberlain whispered to the pages to see if they knew what on earth was happening to the King. Young Lord Bruce realised, “I think the chair’s the wrong way round.” The cleaner had put the chair in facing backwards, so it had acquired an incline that kept slowly tipping George VI towards his guests. It was too late to do anything. They had to carry on. Elizabeth’s smile was plastered on as the presentations continued and she reached out to gently touch her husband’s wrists, a loving code that said without words “Keep it together.” Under his breath, heard only by his wife and his closest attendants, the sliding King’s language became as colourful as the rainbow.
The 1937 Coronation, at which Bertie was crowned first as monarch and Elizabeth second as his consort, had taken place on a May afternoon at Westminster Abbey. A guest wrote:
[T]he sun shone through the windows and the King, abashed, looking young (all the royal family look phenomenally young), almost boyish suddenly reminded me of his brother “over the water”; and I thought, as many others, too, must have been thinking, of that sad, more glamorous wistful Edward VIII alone with Wallis Warfield (as she now is called), no doubt listening on the radio to the Coronation service of his brother, which ought to have been his own… [Elizabeth] advanced towards the altar. Once again the golden canopy was brought forward, and for a brief moment the four chosen duchesses held it over her. The second service was shorter and soon she mounted the throne.
As the shock of the Abdication wore off and she had time to think about the way it had been handled, Elizabeth’s feelings towards her eldest brother-in-law hardened into something very close to hatred. It was David who had given her husband less than seventy-two hours’ notice that he was going to become king. It was David who had kept from them any helpful details about his plans, yet told people who leaked it to the press. And it was David who, from what he thought would be a temporary exile, kept badgering Bertie to give Wallis the designation of Her Royal Highness, allowing the initials HRH to be added to her title to confirm to the world that she was a senior member of the Royal Family.
David argued that by denying the title to his new wife, Bertie was withholding from Wallis something to which she had a legal right. From her new home at Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth retaliated that since Wallis had been considered unsuitable to be queen, how on earth could she be judged fit to be an HRH? While legal opinion held that Elizabeth was wrong on this count, the King agreed with his wife. He pointed out that, in his Abdication document, Edward VIII had explicitly “renounced all rights and privileges of succession for himself and his children—including the title of Royal Highness in respect of himself and his wife. There is therefore no question of the title being ‘restored’ to the Duchess—because she never had it.” David countered that, thirteen years earlier, there had been a debate about whether Elizabeth should herself be given the title, when some of the more pearl-clutching snobs in court circles, and even in the wider Royal Family, had wondered if she deserved to be addressed as Her Royal Highness and curtseyed to, given that neither of her parents were royals. The Royal Household had responded then with a statement that “in accordance with the general rule settled, that a wife takes the status of her husband, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon on her marriage has become Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York.” These rules, set in place for Elizabeth, meant Wallis too deserved to become Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Windsor, as wife of His Royal Highness The Duke of Windsor.
This logic proved as appealing to Elizabeth as a weak gin and tonic. She would not budge. On several occasions, she expressed disgust at the idea that anyone would feel the need to curtsey to “That Woman” if she got the HRH. Nor could there be any question of David being allowed to return to Britain to carry out occasional duties as a member of the Royal Family, as he had hoped. One was either fully in or fully out, and Bertie must have no rival.
The new Queen made it perfectly clear that she did not want members of the Royal Family to go to France for David and Wallis’s wedding, which therefore turned into a much quieter affair than the former king had hoped. His siblings’ failure to attend particularly hurt. When the couple returned for a private visit to England three years after the Abdication, David proposed bringing Wallis to Buckingham Palace, perhaps in an effort to heal the rift. Elizabeth felt no such urge to see the grudge become a bygone. She wrote to Wallis directly “before they came, saying that I was sorry I could not receive her. I thought it more honest to make things quite clear.”
Elizabeth launched a cold war against the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s supporters in London high society. To celebrate the Coronation, the Marchioness of Londonderry organised a magnificent ball at her family’s London residence and sent the proposed guest list to the Queen before issuing invitations. Elizabeth approved every name except that of Wallis’s confidante, Emerald Cunard, replying, “I know that you will not mind my telling you that Lady Cunard is really the only one that we do not want to meet just now. The bitter months of last autumn and winter are still so fresh in our minds, and her presence would inevitably bring so many sad thoughts, that we should prefer not to meet her. I can say this to you as a friend for so long, and feel sure you will understand our feelings. (Private, of course.)”7 A feud usually needs a surrogate, and other socialites, like Lady Astor, took the initiative on the Queen’s behalf by scotching invitations to anyone who had been strongly sympathetic to the ex-king; for a time, this meant a drop in the number of parties for Chips Channon and Winston Churchill.
The Queen’s dislike was reciprocated by most of Wallis’s and Edward’s friends. A disgruntled Channon recorded that, at a party for the 1937 Grand National, “no one has a good word for the Queen, who they say is ‘sugary,’ and ‘insincere’ (which she is), and badly dressed in Pont Street numbers with dyed furs, and stockings, everything to match like a middle-class matron.”
Perhaps it was therefore no wonder that the high-society photographer Cecil Beaton dreaded his commission to make several new official photographs of Elizabeth. “She looks horrid in photographs,” he lamented. When he arrived at Buckingham Palace for their shoot, the Queen was nervous, too, and it took some persuading on Beaton’s part to convince her to try a different lipstick and wear eye shadow for the first time. They struck up a rapport and Elizabeth confided to him that she thought she had looked very ugly in her Coronation photographs, which “went all over the world.” “In fact,” she admitted to Beaton, “it is so distressing to me that I always photograph so badly.”
She need not have worried. Cecil Beaton’s studies of Queen Elizabeth in the late 1930s were some of the best-received royal portraits of the twentieth century. Shot on various locations throughout Buckingham Palace, Beaton correctly guessed before Elizabeth that they had a hit on their hands. “To my utter amazement and joy,” he wrote, “the Queen looked like a dream, a porcelain doll, with a flawless little face like luminous china in front of a fire. Her smile as fresh as a dewdrop, her regard uncompromising and kindly, altogether a face that reveals what the owner is—someone with the best instincts, strict in her likes, gay, sympathetic, witty, shrewd, wistful and so well educated that she makes one full of admiration.” The photos were so successful that many British royal photographs have subtly paid tribute to their aesthetic in the years since, including Paolo Roversi’s 2022 portrait of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, for the National Portrait Gallery.
Part of the success lay with Elizabeth’s wardrobe, which consisted of an ankle-length garden party dress with parasol and a tulle ballgown with diamond tiara and necklace. While Beaton was photographing her in the latter, the Superintendent of the Royal Household walked in to check on progress and said, “Your Majesty, it’s lovely. It’s just like a Winterhalter picture.”
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a German artist who had died in 1873 and whose portraits captured an idealised version of nineteenth-century royalty and aristocracy. Dressing them in yards of fabrics, Winterhalter imbued living royals with the aura of fairy tales. Or tulle-trapped cupcakes, depending on the viewer’s sympathies. His portrait of Empress Elisabeth of Austria with diamond stars pinned into her hair is still famous, as are his paintings of France’s Empress Eugénie surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting and of Bertie’s grandmother, Alexandra. Winterhalter’s works positioned his subjects between dream and reality, and after the trauma of Edward VIII’s abdication, George VI hit upon the idea of evoking Winterhalter’s aesthetic for Elizabeth. She was never going to be chic and fashionable, in the way Wallis or Marina were. She could be magnificent instead. The monarchical makeover was entrusted to Elizabeth’s couturier, Norman Hartnell. The King asked Hartnell to visit him at Buckingham Palace, where he took the time to show him their Winterhalter collection. Hartnell understood the assignment: “His Majesty made it clear in his quiet way that I should attempt to capture this picturesque grace in the dresses I was to design for the Queen.”
While the dresses for the Beaton shoot were among Hartnell’s most famous pieces, he received his biggest commission thus far from Elizabeth when she and George VI accepted an invitation to make a state visit, their first as King and Queen, to France. Paris was, as Hartnell and Elizabeth well knew, the fashion capital of the world, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were quite popular, and the trip was not only important to Britain’s diplomatic efforts to remain close to her French allies, but also a public test of the shy and allegedly awkward new King. Elizabeth must not let the side down.
Hartnell’s original designs for the French visit never saw the light of day. “I have been dreading this moment ever since I was a little child,” Elizabeth wrote as the overnight train carried her, Bertie and Glen their golden retriever north for Cecilia’s funeral, “and now that it has come, one can hardly believe it.”
Cecilia’s death, aged seventy-five in June 1938, was in many ways a release for a woman who had suffered so many bereavements. “I have had so many great sorrows,” she confided to a friend in 1931, a few months after burying a fourth child. Her passing was not a complete surprise; she had missed a granddaughter’s wedding after suffering a mild heart attack. The Queen had continued with her engagements throughout her mother’s final few days, including visits to a naval depot and a young mothers’ charity, both of which she nonetheless tried to leave a little early. She was at Cecilia’s bedside when she passed away in the small hours, and she accompanied the coffin back by train to Glamis, where the funeral took place in the pouring rain. Cecilia’s hearse, pulled by two horses, was escorted by those who had worked on the Bowes-Lyon estate for years. Arthur Barson, the Bowes-Lyons’ elderly butler, was given a place of honour with the family, “his battered old face full of grief, making apologetic & deprecatory noises at being given the place to which his long & faithful service so amply entitled him,” according to a member of the congregation.
Among the telegrams of condolence Elizabeth received on her mother’s death was one from Kaiser Wilhelm II, the deposed German emperor who had been living on a small country estate in the Netherlands since losing power at the end of the Great War. Elizabeth had never met the former emperor, and considering that she and Cecilia had once raised toasts of “To hell with the bloody Kaiser,” she was not exactly thrilled to hear from him now. To give Wilhelm credit where it is due, as the years passed he had attempted to re-establish contact with his British cousins, and by contemporary standards, he did the kind and proper thing in sending his condolences to the Queen. Many in the House of Windsor were delighted at these signs of rapprochement with the Hohenzollerns, none more so than Queen Mary, who still dreamed of living long enough to see the German monarchy restored. She invited the Kaiser’s grandson, Prince Friedrich-Georg von Hohenzollern (“Fritzi”), to tea when he visited London. Queen Mary, and those who shared her views, thought that the new Nazi government in Germany consisted of criminals, morons and monsters who would, like most revolutionary radicals, eventually destroy each other. Once that happened, there seemed to be little chance of Germany reinstating the weak republic which the Nazis had buried at the first available opportunity. Instead, a coup would depose the weakened and bloody Nazis to restore the monarchy and its pre-1918 constitution, as “Fritzi” acceded to his grandfather’s throne as Kaiser Friedrich IV.8
Elizabeth shared neither this confidence in, nor sympathy for, a restored monarchy in Germany. During an official visit to Berlin in 1929, she and Bertie had been given a tour of the imperial family’s former homes, and on seeing what had once been their private quarters, she thought it “was most interesting & rather sad.” She was careful not to write down her full feelings, instead rounding off a letter to her friend Sir D’Arcy Osborne with the words “I will reserve my opinions (if you care to hear them) of our late enemies until I meet you again.”
Nazi Germany was the reason why the King and Queen’s visit to France could not be cancelled, despite Cecilia’s death. Given the international situation, the friendship between Britain and France needed to be advertised in unambiguous terms. Preparations were reorganised for later in the summer by the two governments, while the Queen mourned her mother in Scotland. She wrote to a friend a week after Cecilia passed away:
It is a curious thing, but I have always been terrified of my mother dying, ever since I was a little child, and now that it has come it seems almost impossible to believe. But she has left so much behind her, and her influence will be strong with us, her children, all our lives. At Glamis this week we congregated in her sitting room & found comfort even in that. Her perspective of life was so wonderful, each event was given its true importance, and that is a rare gift. I was thinking today of how incredulous, slightly amused and so touched she would have been if she could have heard some of the appreciative things that her friends have said of her this week. She was modest to a fault, very proud & sensitive, and her judgement was never at fault… I am writing too much about her, but I know you won’t mind. I have climbed one or two mountains, & spent my days amongst them, and feel very soothed—they are so nice & big & everlasting.
The King’s shoulder slammed into the stubbornly locked door of a train bathroom as they tried to free the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland. After several moments of trying to jimmy the lock herself, the Duchess, Elizabeth’s chief lady-in-waiting for just over a year, had to cry for help. The door defeated every champion sent against it, including the King, as the train hurtled through the French countryside. Just before they reached the station at Amiens, it gave way and the Dowager emerged onto the platform, dignity firmly intact, as if she hadn’t just been shaken about like a cocktail, behind a head-to-toe-in-Hartnell Elizabeth.
Still in mourning for Cecilia, Elizabeth nonetheless could not go to Paris wearing black. The government felt it would send a depressing message. Nor could she wear Norman Hartnell’s original designs, most of which were so colourful that they would be interpreted as an insult to her mother’s memory. Having had its first revolution in 1789, monarchy had come and gone in France like the Spring collections. There had been revivals, or rebranding, in 1804, 1814, 1815, 1830, 1848 and 1852. There had been failed talks of another in the 1870s and the 1910s, and there would be again in the 1950s. Through his research, Hartnell discovered that, in centuries gone by, the queens of France had not worn black for mourning. They had worn white. Every one of Hartnell’s dresses for the trip was thus remade in white. They were a sensation; Christian Dior said later that Elizabeth’s wardrobe in 1938 contained some of the most beautiful pieces of clothing he had ever seen. A Parisian newspaper ran the headline, TODAY FRANCE IS A MONARCHY AGAIN, as the streets of the towns and cities were jammed with cheering crowds.
The government in London were relieved, and hoped forlornly that this testament to Anglo-French friendship would give Germany pause for thought. Duff Cooper, the future British ambassador to Paris, thought that the royals’ rise in popularity throughout 1938 had steadied the couple’s nerves, which he noticed when he sat next to the Queen at a dinner: “I got on with her better than ever and found her more than ever charming,” he told his wife. “There is nobody to whom I enjoy talking so much.”
On September 27, 1938, the Queen arrived at the John Brown and Company shipyard in Scotland to launch a luxury liner named in her honour. The 83,000-ton Queen Elizabeth would be the largest passenger ship built until 1996 and she was timetabled to make her first commercial voyage from Southampton to New York in 1940. Four years earlier, when Elizabeth’s mother-in-law christened the Queen Mary, she had been accompanied to the ceremony by her husband George V, and George VI was expected to do the same for the Queen Elizabeth. There was a great deal of excitement about the launch. The Queen Mary was already a commercial success, fully booked on most of her voyages, during which she had captured the Blue Riband award for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic. Press attention and public interest were enormous, as there was a sense that these ships symbolised Britain’s recovery from the worst years of the Great Depression.
When the Queen stepped out of her car at the shipyard, she was followed by her two identically dressed daughters. The King had decided to stay in London as the government waited to see if war would break out in Europe. The next day, Adolf Hitler’s ultimatum to the Czechoslovakian government was due to expire. The German Chancellor had announced his intention to incorporate the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, into Germany and the President of Czechoslovakia had until September 28 to give Hitler what he wanted—or he would take it by force. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was about to fly to negotiations in the German city of Munich, where he hoped to broker a deal that would prevent a war over the issue. The Sudetenland’s population was predominantly German, many had wanted to be a part of Germany since the 1870s, and there were many who felt Nazi Germany was therefore justified in trying to take the province. As some cynics in the West argued, who wanted to go to war over the borders of Czechoslovakia, a landlocked republic that had only existed for nineteen years? Was it, they asked, even really a country with a coherent sense of identity? Why should anyone care if Hitler tried to dismember it, a little?
The King and Queen hoped desperately to avoid another war. It had been German incursions into a small neutral country that had brought Britain into the Great War in 1914. Then it had been Belgium, now it looked very much like it would be Czechoslovakia. Elizabeth, who had endured one brother killed, another held for years as a prisoner of war, and three psychologically brutalised by the trenches, was at this stage an ardent Appeaser. Appeasement, a British foreign policy directive whereby it was hoped to prevent a war by giving the Nazis some of what they wanted, is now justly notorious, a byword for diplomatic cowardice. Broadly speaking, there were two types of Appeasers in 1930s Britain. The first category, into which Elizabeth arguably falls, were those who, remembering what had happened in the first great war, were determined that it should not happen again. Their support for the policy fell away at different points of Nazi aggression; for some in 1936, for others in 1938 or 1939. The second, and far more insidious, group were those who promoted Appeasement less because they feared another war and more because they sympathised with Hitler. Many were pro-German, others were part of the British fascist movement, and practically all of them were virulently anti-Semitic.
Elizabeth’s speech as she prepared to launch the Queen Elizabeth was captured by the Pathé newsreel cameras, and you can hear the worry in her voice. As the ship’s enormous prow looms over her and her daughters, Elizabeth is much more sombre than she usually was during her public appearances. The breeze off the Clyde can be seen ruffling her fox-fur wrap as the Queen barely looks up from the notes for her speech, which was the first time most people had heard her voice. Many in Britain felt later that this moment, between the King’s last-minute absence and the Queen’s words, was also the first time they felt that there was a real chance of another terrible war in their lifetimes.
“This ceremony,” she began, “to which many thousands have looked forward so eagerly, must now take place in circumstances far different than those for which they had hoped. I have, however, a message for you from the King. He bids the people of this country be of good cheer, in spite of the dark clouds hanging over them—and, indeed, over the whole world. He knows well that, as ever before, in critical times they will keep cool heads and brave hearts. He knows, too, that they will place entire confidence in their leaders who, under God’s Providence, are striving their utmost to find a just and peaceful solution to the grave problems which confront us. The launching of a ship is, like the inception of all great human enterprises, an act of faith. We cannot foretell the future but, in preparing for it, we show our trust in a Divine Providence and in ourselves. We proclaim our belief that, by the Grace of God and by man’s patience and goodwill, order may yet be brought out of confusion and peace out of turmoil. With that hope and prayer in our hearts, we send forth this noble ship.”
The Queen Elizabeth began to move too early towards the water and so the Queen quickly pressed the button to let loose the bottle of Australian red wine that smashed over the bow before it slid beyond reach. Two years later, the Queen Elizabeth made her maiden voyage on schedule, with no luxuries on board, all of them having been moved into storage as the largest ship in the world, painted in camouflage grey to avoid Nazi submarines, began her five-year service as a British military troop transport.
Elizabeth crossed the Atlantic for the first time herself in May 1939 on board a 22,000-ton Canadian passenger ship, the Empress of Australia. Accepting that war was now probable rather than simply possible, the King and Queen were going to Canada to increase ties between it and Britain. From Canada, they would travel to America in the hope that a royal visit would stimulate pro-British sympathies and undermine the isolationist lobby, who wanted to keep the United States out of another European war.
It was wonderful publicity for the Empress of Australia’s owners that one of their ships had been selected to carry the King, the Queen and their entourage on the first leg of their tour. It was a slightly less pleasant experience for the King’s Private Secretary, Tommy Lascelles, who had already made the transatlantic trip twice that year. The first had been when he was sent ahead to inspect the proposed sites, safety and accommodation for the tour. The New York Herald Tribune informed its readers that Lascelles’s mission was so top secret that he had kept to his cabin on board the Queen Mary until he reached New York. Unfortunately, his failure to mingle with his fellow passengers was less a result of dramatic royalist subterfuge and more to do with the powerful wave of nausea that crashed over Lascelles about six minutes after they left England, and which left him ashen-faced on his bed as his stomach did somersaults until they passed the Statue of Liberty. “I have no doubt that the North Atlantic is the foulest and dreariest spectacle on this earth,” he lamented.
The Atlantic continued its vendetta against Lascelles on the Empress of Australia, by delivering more seasickness via choppy weather on the first two days of the voyage and on the third by wrapping the ship in a blanket of fog so thick that she had to slow almost to a halt. She took three days longer than planned to reach Canada. As Lascelles told his wife in a letter home:
[T]he fog began on Tuesday—it came down like a blanket, as thick as I have ever seen; and for three days we sat motionless on the Atlantic (which was luckily as placid as a pond), seeing nothing except for a brief half-hour after tea on Friday, when the curtain rolled back as if by magic, and revealed a handful of really formidable icebergs all round us. Then down it came again… the ship could nose her way forward at the pace of a rowing boat, with her siren, and those of the two escorting cruisers, roaring in a head-splitting symphony every two minutes. Our three fog-marooned days were really very curious. MichaelII said he got the feeling we had all been dead quite a long time. It was rather like that—a strange sensation of being suspended right outside the world, with no dimensions. Space was limited to the grey wall outside, and time was non-existent—we might have been there three days or three months.
Spirits were not lifted by the trivia-spouting courtier who, over dinner, informed them how interesting it was that they had also passed so many icebergs, considering that they were now very close to the spot where the Titanic had gone down. To which Elizabeth allegedly replied, “How reassuring.”
Elizabeth saw a silver lining in the delay, in that it gave Bertie a chance to rest nerves increasingly frayed by his fear that they would be at war by the end of the year. “The foghorn moans hoarsely every minute or so,” she wrote to Queen Mary, “such a melancholy noise, & I much hope that we shall get better weather soon. The ship is quite comfortable, the food is good, but there are too many stewards & liftboys & messengers about—one falls over them at every turn. But they are so obliging & eager to do anything that we haven’t the heart to send them away, poor things. We felt very sad leaving you all on Saturday—it was nice that you all came to see us off.”
Having run out of reading material because of the delay, Elizabeth went to find something in the ship’s first-class Library, on the shelves of which she spotted a suspiciously hefty edition of Hitler’s political testament, Mein Kampf. Published early in his career, it had been translated into English shortly before he won his first major election. It was so rambling and repetitive that the British edition cut out almost half of it, including most of the anti-Semitic and expansionist passages. The Canadian and American editions of Mein Kampf in contrast translated it almost word for word. As the Empress of Australia crawled past the icebergs and through the fog, Elizabeth told her mother-in-law, “I am starting to read the unexpurgated version of Mein Kampf—it is very soap box, but very interesting. Have you read it, Mama?”
As she slogged through Hitler’s testimony, Elizabeth was fascinated and appalled in equal measure. When the Nazis first came to power, she had laughed at them, mocking their salutes and the unison goosestepping on display at their rallies. She had giggled and joined in at dinner party impressions of Hitler and Mussolini. The unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf left her in no doubt that she had been laughing at something that was not funny. It is possible to overstate this as a Rubicon moment; Elizabeth had been increasingly disillusioned with Appeasement following the Czechoslovakian crisis. Hitler had not stopped at the Sudetenland. Instead he had annexed the whole country, and there were fears he was planning to do the same to Poland.
The unedited Mein Kampf provided a confirmation of the Queen’s fears rather than a revelation. It shocked her enough that after reading it, she sent copies to several fellow Appeasers, with a half-joking apology that Hitler was such a bad writer that “you might go mad.” Nonetheless, the full text was important, she urged, since “even a skip through gives one a good idea of his mentality, ignorance and obvious sincerity.” Too many, including Elizabeth, had been willing to believe that Hitler’s bombast was bluffing and posturing to get what he wanted, rather than the sincere goals of a brutal dictator. Mein Kampf revealed what he had always been, had they been willing to pay attention.
Five days after picking up Mein Kampf, the Queen was still on the ship. She wrote to her eldest daughter, at home in Britain with her grandmother and little sister:
My darling Lilibet, here we are creeping along at about one mile per hour, & occasionally stopping altogether, for the 3rd day running! You can imagine how horrid it is—one cannot see more than a few yards, and the sea is full of icebergs as big as Glamis, & things called “growlers”—which are icebergs mostly under water with only a very small amount of ice showing on the surface. We shall be late arriving in Canada, and it is going to be very difficult to fit everything in, and avoid disappointing people. It is very cold—rather like the coldest, dampest day at Sandringham—double it and add icebergs, & then you can imagine a little of what it is like… I do hope that you are enjoying your Saturday evenings with Mr. MartenIII—try & learn as much as you can from him, & mark how he brings the human element into all this history—of course history is made by ordinary humans, & one must not forget that. Well, my darling, I am longing to see you both again, & I send you lots & lots of kisses and some pats for Dooks [their corgi]—Your very very loving Mummy.
Four days later, with the sun having broken through, the Empress of Australia reached Canada, where the King and Queen were greeted by crowds judged larger and more enthusiastic than at their coronation.
Tommy Lascelles did better by rail than by sea, becoming the first British person to be knighted on American soil as the royal party crossed by train into the United States. The royals were nervous about the American reception after their success in Canada. American isolationists were displeased and suspected, correctly, that President Roosevelt had invited the King to the United States to increase support for his administration’s interventionist foreign policy. Furthermore, many Americans sympathised with the ex-king and his American wife, and the US press thus tended to characterise George VI as a mean-spirited bully, addled by jealousy of his brother and egged on by his “excessively ambitious” wife, who was herself demented with envy of Wallis. As one magazine put it, “As for Queen Elizabeth, by Park Avenue standards she appears to be far too plump of figure, too dowdy in dress, to meet American specifications of a reigning Queen. The living contrasts of Queen Mary (as regal as a woman can be) and the Duchess of Windsor (chic and charmingly American) certainly do not help Elizabeth.”
By the end of the tour, a Washington newspaper ran a headline bidding farewell to Elizabeth or, as they called her, the QUEEN OF HEARTS. The visit was a triumph in terms of its own aims, with tens of thousands thronging the streets of DC to see the visiting royals. Elizabeth’s ability to talk easily to people proved a huge public relations boon to this mission on the eve of the war. Editorials appeared in the New York Times arguing that if British political values were destroyed by her enemies, America’s too would be damaged, a stance that the anti-isolationists were keen to encourage. The King and the President got on very well and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, commented on the Queen: “My admiration for her grew every minute she spent with us.” They joined the Roosevelts on the presidential yacht and at their New York country estate at Hyde Park, where the Queen was able to place a transatlantic call to her daughters. “It was such fun talking to you both on the telephone today,” she wrote that evening, “and directly after we had spoken we went off for a picnic luncheon. There were a lot of people there, and we all sat at little tables under the trees round the house, and had all our food on one plate—a little salmon, a little turkey, some ham, lettuce, beans & HOT DOGS too!… Everyone was so kind & welcoming, & one feels really at home here.”
With Tommy Lascelles shuddering at the thought of completing his tenth, eleventh and twelfth thousand nautical miles in five months, the royal party went back to Canada to travel home on another Canadian ship. This time, the owners were keen to maximise publicity for their newest and glitziest flagship, the Empress of Britain. From her suite on board, Elizabeth reflected that “Our chief emotion is gratitude.” A few years later, she looked back on those two months with the conclusion, “That tour made us.”
As the countdown to war continued, so did the London social calendar. In 2014, Betty Morton could still remember being a debutante and missing a date in 1939, an opportunity unintentionally denied her by Elizabeth’s attendance at the same ball. “It was a bit awkward because if the Queen came into the room, you all had to stand up, when you’d be sitting with some delicious young man,” Morton reminisced. “However, she was very sweet and said we could all sit down again, but you couldn’t leave the room [while the Queen was there], so if you’d got a date with somebody else when she walked in, you couldn’t leave!” Other debutantes remembered sitting in their cars, queued along the Mall to Buckingham Palace while they waited to be formally presented, as crowds of people peered through the vehicles’ windows to compare the debutantes. Twenty-two-year-old Ruth Magnus was less than thrilled to hear, “Oh, that one’s not as pretty as the one in the other car!” A clique of four debs including Katharine Ormsby-Gore and Princess Alice’s niece Elizabeth (the future Duchess of Northumberland) had been pre-emptively banned from that year’s Queen Charlotte’s Ball on the suspicion that they would get a fit of the giggles while curtseying to the sacred cake. “They thought we were a disruptive influence,” Katharine explained later. “They were right.”
Everywhere in Britain that summer, life continued much as normal, with millions hoping Germany would not invade Poland. “Who is this Hitler, spoiling everything?” eight-year-old Princess Margaret asked her governess. Although Appeasement was dead and discredited to all but its most zealous champions, its acolytes resented Elizabeth’s sudden lack of support and blamed her anti-German friends for “dripping poison into the Queen’s ear.”
On the morning of Sunday, September 3, 1939, Elizabeth looked down and thought that this is “my last cup of tea in peace!” She sat next to her husband “with tears running down my face” as they listened to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s broadcast, containing the fateful words, “This country is at war with Germany.” The King and Queen went into a drawing room in Buckingham Palace, where they knelt down and “prayed with all our hearts that Peace would come soon—real peace, not a Nazi peace.”
On the first day of the Second World War, the King addressed the country by radio, beginning: “In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, for the second time in the lives of most of us, we are at war. Over and over again we have tried to find a peaceful way out of the differences between ourselves and those who are now our enemies. But it has been in vain. The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead and war is no longer confined to the battlefield.” He quoted a poem, “The Gate of the Year, or, God Knows,” by Minnie Louise Haskins, which was apparently brought to his attention by his thirteen-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth. Sixty-three years later, its words meant so much to the Queen Mother that they were included in the order of service for her funeral.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.