British monarchs have often suffered from less than robust health. One thinks of Henry VIII, grotesquely overweight and riddled with leg ulcers, diabetes and hypertension, or Charles II, who apologised for being ‘an unconscionable time dying’ after what was believed to be a fatal apoplectic fit. Edward VII, the so-called ‘Edward the Caresser’, was afflicted with severe bronchitis in between bouts of (surprisingly athletic) lechery with actresses, and George III’s mental illness has led everyone from doctors to playwrights to attempt to diagnose what was truly the matter with him.
Yet these ailments have passed into popular consciousness because of their dramatic nature. The decline in George VI’s general well-being was nowhere near as attention-grabbing as any of his predecessors as king, but in its own way, it was an even sadder fate, not least because it would eventually result in the untimely death of a comparatively young man, and thereby plunge the monarchy into its second succession drama in less than two decades.
Compared to his elder brother, whose gilded youth seemed a carefree one, the then Duke of York struggled with a crippling stammer, and was beset by everything from severe seasickness to debilitating gastric problems. In 1916, he was diagnosed as suffering from a duodenal ulcer, which was eventually successfully operated on in November 1917, and the following decades saw him undergoing everything from a poisoned hand to rumoured fainting fits and epilepsy.* Yet it was the Second World War that led to the greatest strain on his health, as he began smoking heavily to cope with the stress and exhaustion he felt. Had he been able to rest in 1945, as Churchill eventually did when he was defeated in the election, he might have been able to recover at least some of his constitution. But kings do not have the luxury of being able to take holidays when they choose, and as his official biographer, John Wheeler-Bennett, put it, ‘his temperament was not one which facilitated a rapid replenishing of nervous and physical reserves’.1
Although the success of his daughter’s wedding in November 1947 brought personal comfort to the king, his already fragile health had been strained during the South African tour earlier that year, and by the beginning of 1948, he began to complain of severe cramp and numbness. Queen Mary sighed to the Duke of Windsor on 12 February that ‘Politics as usual are very depressing and I am so sorry for poor Bertie, & it is all such a worry.’2 The monarch was suffering from Buerger’s disease, which had been brought on by his heavy smoking; the blood vessels in his lower feet and legs expanded, making it difficult for him to walk. By August, he was said to be ‘in discomfort most of the time’,3 something that he tried to relieve by violently kicking his foot and leg against his desk, in a vain attempt to restore the circulation. The only place where he found even fleeting peace was Balmoral, which he visited late that summer; the steep hill walks made him feel more energised and gave him hope that he was recovering. Yet even so, while walking with Peter Townsend towards Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, he kept muttering, ‘What’s wrong with my blasted legs? They won’t work properly!’4
Unfortunately, upon his return to London in October 1948, the pain had become even more agonising. He found himself unable to sleep, thanks to his left foot feeling perpetually numb and the right one going in a similar direction. He was examined by the splendidly named Manipulative Surgeon to the King, Commander Sir Morton Stuart, who pronounced himself ‘gravely alarmed’ at the monarch’s condition. Yet something – protocol; concern at making too hasty a diagnosis; ignorance, even – meant that although Sir Thomas Dunhill, Serjeant Surgeon to the King, and Professor James Lear-mouth, Regius Professor in Clinical Surgery, were also consulted, Learmouth did not examine the king until 12 November.
Between his arrival in London and Learmouth’s examination, the king had undertaken the state opening of Parliament on 26 October, and was preparing to head to New Zealand and Australia on a visit that would mirror the previous year’s trip to South Africa. There had also been a Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph to attend, the Territorial Army to review, and the usual round of receptions, investitures and the general business of monarchy to attend to.
His diminished state was obvious. Channon, who had seen him on 20 October, wrote in his diary that ‘I shall remember the King looking sunburnt but snarling and I thought far from well – his figure remains young but I thought that all youth had left his drawn face.’ The diarist pronounced the monarch ‘utterly charmless’, which may have been sour grapes: ‘I thought that he glared at me and so did not approach him.’5 The idea that someone might not have wanted to talk to the ever-waspish politician seemed beyond him. Others were more concerned. The queen, who had been worried about her husband for some time, suggested to Lascelles that ‘I am not at all happy’ about the way in which his health was not being attended to, and impressed the necessity of ‘making a real break’6 for him.
Learmouth’s diagnosis a few weeks later was both alarming and depressing. He confirmed that the king had arteriosclerosis, brought on by years of heavy smoking, and suggested that it was possible his right leg would need to be amputated. The news was horrifying; as the queen wrote to Queen Mary, telling her that the trip to New Zealand and Australia would now need to be cancelled, ‘I have been terribly worried over his legs, and am sure that the only thing is to put everything off, and try & get better. I am sure that Australia & NZ will be desperately disappointed – but what else could one do – I do hope they will understand that it is serious.’7
A statement had to be issued to explain both the king’s temporary withdrawal from public life and the possibility of his health declining further, and so, on 23 November, a bulletin was released to the press. It stated that the king was suffering ‘from an obstruction to the circulation through the arteries of the legs’, and that this had ‘only recently become acute’. Although the general tone of the message was as upbeat as could be expected in the circumstances, it concluded that ‘the strain of the last twelve years has appreciably affected his resistance to fatigue’.8 It was now public knowledge, amid the various other tribulations that the country faced, that its monarch was unwell. Channon remarked witheringly in his diary that ‘[the King’s illness] is the result of his restlessness and inability to sit still … he never sleeps in the afternoon, never rests – now he is an invalid’.9 The statement may have been inevitable, but it was no less humiliating for the national prestige. Or what remained of it, anyway.
There had been happier news recently, as well. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip had settled into married life with great pleasure, despite their first home being in Buckingham Palace: the necessity of their having an independent household had to be weighed up against the inevitable expense that such a move would require.* Elizabeth was sufficiently enraptured with her new husband to write to the queen that ‘Philip is an angel – he is so kind and thoughtful, and living with him and having him around all the time is just perfect’, and even went so far as to say that it seemed ‘as though we had belonged to each other for years’.10 Her mother professed her delight, saying not only that she and her husband already adored Philip as if he was their own son, but ‘that you and Philip should be blissfully happy & love each other through good days and bad or depressing days is my one wish’, as she praised her ‘unselfish & thoughtful angel’11 of a daughter.
Philip, meanwhile, regarded his marriage with a mixture of genuine happiness and concern for the future. Jock Colville described him as ‘a shade querulous’,12 even as he acknowledged that this was an intrinsic trait of his character. When the queen’s new son-in-law wrote to her a few weeks after the wedding, it was with a mixture of genuine love and determination. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in the world which is absolutely real to me, and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.’ In response to the queen’s desire that he should ‘cherish’ her daughter, the prince took issue with the term, albeit light-heartedly. ‘Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me. Does one cherish one’s sense of humour or one’s musical ear or one’s eyes? I am not sure, but I know that I thank God for them, and so, very humbly, I thank God for Lilibet and us.’13
Nonetheless, although he was very much consort rather than master in public, in private it was another matter. His wife acknowledged that Philip needed to be ‘boss in his own home’,14 and this was made difficult by the constraints of married life in Buckingham Palace. The two had separate bedrooms – faintly ridiculously for a young, newly married couple – that were linked by a sitting room, and although the Duke of Edinburgh had been given a role at the Admiralty, where he now worked as an operations officer responsible for, in his words, ‘shuffling ships around’, he felt frustrated and compromised. Lord Brabourne later said of Philip’s difficult relationships with the palace staff that ‘it was very stuffy. Lascelles was impossible … They patronised him. They treated him as an outsider. It wasn’t much fun. He laughed it off, of course, but it must have hurt.’15
The prince’s response to such condescension and rudeness was much the same as it had been on his summer visits to Balmoral: grit his teeth, refuse to rise to the bait and ignore his persecutors as far as he could. He also knew that as soon as his wife became pregnant, his place within the royal family would be doubly reinforced, and so it was with relief that, early in 1948, he and the princess discovered that she was expecting. It had been a matter of intense national speculation since the wedding – although not before, for propriety’s sake – and the princess had commented drily to Crawfie that ‘Probably we shall read about it in the papers before we really know ourselves.’ When the ‘frightfully pleased’ Elizabeth was able to confide the news to her former nursemaid, the information did indeed make it into the papers. As Crawfie observed, ‘no one knows just how it is these things leak out … there must be some form of jungle or bush telegraph that operates in the Palace and has not yet been discovered’.16
The news was formally announced on 4 June, when the pregnant princess appeared at Epsom Downs racecourse on Derby Day, and as soon as it became public knowledge, she and Philip were inundated with letters offering everything from unsolicited but well-meant advice to almost surreal invocations from the half mad, the desperate and the lonely. One woman wrote, ‘My son is in prison. He has been there three years. You who are now so happy in expecting a baby could have him released for me.’17 While it would have been infra dig for the princess to respond to this and countless other begging letters, she might have responded that her responsibilities, while admittedly numerous, did not include meddling in the criminal justice system.
There was a strange custom relating to royal births that had begun in 1894 and had last been observed in 1926, when Elizabeth was herself born. It was considered obligatory that the Home Secretary of the day – in her case, the thoroughly authoritarian William Joynson-Hicks – should be present to observe the birth of any royal child, something that Lascelles subsequently described as ‘out-of-date and ridiculous’. The private secretary considered that in the post-war world, such an invasion of a young mother’s privacy was an unnecessary and anachronistic imposition. As he later wrote, ‘the Home Office made exhaustive researches and assured me that it had no constitutional significance whatsoever, and was merely a survival of the practice of ministers and courtiers, who would flock to the sick-bed, whenever any member of the Royal Family was ill’.18 The current Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, a Unitarian and former local government official, was similarly unimpressed by the tradition, writing in June that ‘the custom is only a custom … it has no statutory authority behind it and there is no legal requirement for its continuance’.19
It is unlikely that Ede relished the prospect of being present at the birth of a strange young woman’s first child, nor that he would have enjoyed Prince Philip’s attitude towards his presence there. Yet both the king and queen were initially in favour of this particular practice being maintained, partly out of a sense of duty, and partly because the queen feared that the abeyance of the tradition was nothing less than a threat to the dignity of the throne. After all, little connoted regality more clearly than an uncomfortable-looking middle-aged politician watching as the heir to the throne gave birth. Therefore, Lascelles was directed to inform Ede on 21 August that ‘It is His Majesty’s wish that you, as Home Secretary, should be in attendance when Princess Elizabeth’s baby is born.’ He may have wished to wash his hands, Pilate-like, at the ridiculousness of it all, but ultimately he knew that it was not his responsibility to attempt to affect change. What he needed instead was a higher authority to intervene.
This duly came, in the unlikely form of Norman Robertson, the Canadian high commissioner. On the course of a routine visit to the palace in early November, Robertson asked after the princess, who was due to give birth later that month. Lascelles alluded – probably without warmth – to the necessity of Ede witnessing the event, and the high commissioner pointed out that should the Home Secretary be present, there was a requirement that the equivalent politicians from the Dominions should also attend. It was an inadvertently hilarious image: a septet of grey-suited, grey-haired men, Disney’s Seven Dwarfs raised to bureaucratic respectability, all solemnly observing a young woman’s labour pains. Lascelles was therefore able to say to the king, not without wryness, that ‘as [you have] no doubt realised, if the old ritual was observed, there would be no less than seven Ministers sitting in the passage’.20 It was one of the more admirable qualities of George VI that he was a husband and father first, monarch second, and the idea of his daughter being subjected to this indignity was enough to ensure that on 5 November, a statement announced that the ‘archaic custom’ would no longer be observed.
Yet such moments of protocol came almost as light relief as the king’s health continued to decline. Even as he was passed from doctor to doctor for examination, he was required to attend to constitutional matters, issuing letters patent to ensure that the future child would be a prince or princess from birth, rather than the Earl of Merioneth or Lady Mountbatten. Details of her father’s condition were kept from the princess as far as possible, so as to avoid any undue anxiety as her confinement approached.
Elizabeth pronounced herself stoic about what was coming, saying to Crawfie that she had complete faith in the doctors and regarded childbirth with a mixture of equanimity and anticipation. ‘After all, it is what we are made for’, she observed. Finally, just after nine p.m. on 14 November 1948, a baby boy was born, weighing 7 lb 6 oz. Philip, who had been playing squash with his equerry, Mike Parker, to distract himself from his wife’s protracted labour – it had begun the previous day – was told the news by Lascelles, and bounded in to see his wife and son with jubilation. He ordered that bottles of champagne be opened to toast the new arrival, and summoned bouquets of carnations and roses for the princess. For a man who often struck those around him as moody or even grumpy, the uncomplicated happiness and bonhomie that he now displayed was a welcome development.
It was a rare moment of unalloyed good tidings, for both the royal family and the nation. When the birth was publicly announced, there was spontaneous cheering from the crowds of thousands of well-wishers gathered outside Buckingham Palace, and renditions of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Across the country, bonfires were lit, and congratulatory telegrams and letters arrived in their thousands. Within a couple of days, the boy’s name was announced – Charles Philip Arthur George – and Cecil Beaton was summoned to the palace to take official photographs of the proud, if exhausted, mother with her baby. He wrote in his diary that ‘Prince Charles, as he is to be named, is an obedient sitter … he interrupted a long contented sleep to do my bidding and open his blue eyes to stare long and wonderingly into the camera lens’, something that Beaton described, all too accurately, as ‘the beginning of a lifetime in the glare of publicity’.21
Crawfie, who saw the infant Charles within the first few days, noted his strong resemblance to George V – or perhaps a reflection of the late king’s affinity with newborn babies – and spoke approvingly of his ‘absurdly mature look … he was very healthy and strong, and beautifully made, with a flawless, silky skin’.22 The queen, relieved and joyous at the safe arrival, mused to Queen Mary that ‘one has lived through such a series of crises & shocks & blows these last years, that something as happy & simple & hopeful for the future as a little son is indeed a joy’.23 As for the princess herself, she was able to write to her aunt, May Elphinstone, of her pleasure in her ‘too sweet’ boy, and that ‘I can still hardly believe that I really have a son of my own – it seems quite incredible – and wonderful!’24
Yet for all the excitement and happiness at the birth, there was no concomitant relief for the king. The damage to his leg was sufficiently severe for him to be confined to bed, clamped in a fiendish-looking device known as an occlude that was designed to improve his circulation. Crawfie economically conveyed the shock that those in the royal household felt when they discovered the extent of his indisposition, as well as remarking, indiscreetly, that the queen was ‘quite distraught with anxiety’. She continued, ‘[we] had thought the King looked tired and ill, but had put it down to the excitement of the wedding, and the birth of his first grandchild. So the news of how ill he really was came as an immense shock to all of us. He must have known for some time how ill he was, and as usual he had refused to face it, had carried on till the baby was safely born, and then, probably, had hoped he would somehow manage to get through the Australian tour. But the time came when he had to listen to his doctors, and give in.’ As his younger daughter, Margaret, was said to have remarked, ‘When Papa decided he could no longer struggle to keep going, he went to sleep for two days.’25
Friends offered what support they could. Churchill wrote to the king on 22 November to support the cancellation of the trip, saying, ‘I had been concerned to think of the instances of prolonged exertion the tour would have demanded from both Your Majesty and the Queen. They would have “killed you by kindness”! The distances are enormous and everywhere there will have been delighted & loyal crowds. One must not understate the strain of such enjoyable contacts with enthusiastic friends.’ He reflected on the national situation, and expressed a hope that they would soon be in partnership once more: ‘I trust that the rest & relief will restore your health, and enable you to add long years to your reign. It has been a time of intense stress & trial. It may well be that history will regard it as “our finest hour”! I am proud to have been your First Minister in all these great adventures. I can hope in spite of my age to stand at your Majesty’s side once again.’*26
Even Edward was shocked out of his usual self-absorption to offer his brother some sympathy. He wrote on 6 December to say, ‘What bad luck that your leg has gone back on you and laid you up for a while. I could not be more sorry for you or think of anything more boring for an active man like yourself. However, you are very wise to take your tiresome ailment in hand in good time and give yourself all the requisite rest and treatment.’ He expressed his regrets for not having written before – ‘I [have been] laid low with a severe gastric attack’ – and inadvertently acknowledged his own detachment from events by saying, ‘The newspapers report an improvement, so I hope you are not in too much pain and that you will get well much quicker than you expect and be able to spend Christmas at Sandringham.’ The man who had once been monarch was now reduced to reading the newspapers for information about his brother’s condition.
The letter was typical of the duke. It contained brisk ‘David-knows-best’ advice (‘I was very relieved when you abandoned the Australasian tour … it’s too far for the King to absent himself with the world in its present explosive condition’), recommended some quack chicanery that bore the imprint of Wallis (‘a French professor, Leriche … internationally known as the inventor of a special new operation for the relief of circulatory ailments’) and, sympathy extended, made a despairing comment on the horrors of the world they inhabited. ‘News from all fronts gets worse and worse wherever one looks. Truman’s victory was very discouraging, although the leftist trend of the world in mind I personally thought that the Republicans were over optimistic.’27 What it lacked, as ever, was an iota of real empathy.
The king did not recover his health sufficiently to be able to head to Sandringham for several weeks, and his Christmas broadcast to the nation struck an appropriately rueful tone. Calling the past year ‘a memorable one’, he played down his illness, describing it merely as one of several ‘vivid personal experiences’, and saying that ‘I have been obliged to submit, for reasons of health, to a spell of temporary inactivity.’ Yet he put an optimistic spin on it. ‘Even this, like every other cloud, can have a silver lining … [and this] is the grateful recollection of the volume of good will and affection that they brought from all over the world to me and mine.’
He acknowledged the inevitable disappointment that the cancellation of the Australian and New Zealand tour had brought –‘by an unkind stroke of fate, it fell to me a month ago to make a decision that caused me much distress’ – but he tried to be positive, saying, ‘against my own disappointment, and my regret at the disappointment that I knew I was causing others, I can see the wave of sympathy and concern which flowed back to me not only from the Australians and New Zealanders themselves but from friends known and unknown in this old country and in every one of the great brotherhood of nations to which we all belong’.
The broadcast concluded with the king advancing a Christian belief that the adversity he had faced had given him a new lease of life. ‘[My experiences] have left me with a fuller understanding of the work which I have been called upon to do. They have shown me that kingship is no isolated, impersonal function, no abstract symbol of constitutional theory; they have shown me that it is, rather, one pole of a very real human relationship, depending on ties that are invisible, and unaffected by changes in internal form. These ties may be difficult to explain, but are none the less powerful for good. Our Commonwealth – the British Commonwealth – has been subject to the laws of evolution; we would not have it otherwise. But it is stronger, not weaker, as it fulfils its ancient mission of widening the bounds of freedom wherever our people live, and for myself I am proud to fulfil my own appointed share in that mission.’
The sentiments, presumably written by Lascelles, were heartfelt, but also, in the year that the king’s first grandson was born, indicated fresh engagement with the future of the monarchy. A year earlier, on 17 December 1947, Channon had written in his diary that ‘I don’t think that the royal family is popular; certainly not the King and Queen who are tolerated. Nobody hates them; nobody loves them.’ This may have been the usual sniping of a man who was increasingly disappointed with both his country and himself, but Britain was changing. When Hugh Dalton learnt of the arrival of the future king, he wrote in his diary that ‘if this boy ever comes to the throne … it will be a very different country and Commonwealth he’ll rule over’.28
With the birth of his grandson, his daughter’s pre-eminence as a public figure and his own declining health, George VI was faced with looming obsolescence in his lifetime. He did not deal with it with the calm equanimity that his public appearances might have suggested. He was given to outbreaks of temper – his ‘gnashes’, as they were known – at anything from the failings of politicians to insufficient deference; he once lost his composure because a man walking past him at Sandringham did not remove his hat in his presence. At his worst, he could be as irritable, petty and demanding as his elder brother, displaying a lack of curiosity in others and the wider world that indicated his family’s limited intellectual horizons all too clearly. Channon’s sneering opinion that he was ‘a dull little man, admired, liked by nobody … there is hardly anything to hate’29 was not uniquely held.
Set against this, his virtues as a husband and father were not simply ephemeral niceties, but tribute to the way in which he had absorbed his parents’ teachings of duty and principle and managed to pass them on to his own children with a human face, rather than the unchanging facade of monarchy. And it was the next generation that he now looked to. There had been two spectacular successes for the royal family as an institution in the post-war years – the wedding, and now the birth of Charles – and neither had involved him directly. The duke’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, even suggested that around this time, ‘in a curious way, he was written off … Elizabeth was the future.’30 As the king confronted his mortality, and the creeping knowledge that he was unlikely to see his grandson grow up, there was one consolation. He had hoped to revitalise the monarchy, but would run out of time before he could do so. It now seemed clear that his successor would have to continue the job for him.