Two decades after the end of World War II, the Duke of Windsor was invited by the New York Daily News to write an autobiographical account of how he felt his participation in the events of the war had gone. There were many potential angles he could have taken, most of them incriminating, but he erred on the safer side of conceit instead. He wrote that ‘I’d thought that my performance as a colonial governor, and the spirit in which I had gone about my duties, would have persuaded the sceptics in Britain of my desire to stay on in my country’s service, and that I had fairly earned my passage back.’
His country did not see it like this. Initial overtures to his supporters had been unsuccessful, not least because his tenure as governor to the Bahamas between 1940 and 1945 had been dogged by endless controversy, whether it was his friendship with the Nazi-sympathising mogul Axel Wenner-Gren, the (unsolved) murder of the islands’ wealthiest resident, Sir Harry Oakes, or the continued racial tensions, which the duke did little, if anything, to assuage. Nonetheless, he retained his usual Candide-like levels of optimism. ‘I was resolved, in any case, to make one more hard try at drumming up interest in the Palace and in Whitehall for putting me to work somewhere in the British Diplomatic Service, in the absence of any marked enthusiasm for making a place for me in Britain.’1
The duke had ostentatiously quit his governorship in April 1945, and had left Nassau in early May that year for New York. However, he and Wallis were unable to return to Europe until September because of an absence of any civilian transport across the Atlantic. Once, they would not have been subject to such restrictions, but now, humiliatingly, they were shown that they were private citizens, and unpopular ones at that. They based themselves at the Waldorf Towers in New York, with brief trips to Newport and New Brunswick, and, bored and underemployed, the duke occupied himself with thinking about world affairs, and what his place was likely to be in the new post-war order.
He was unafraid to speak his mind, a characteristic that had endeared him to few, but that remained a consistent feature of his life. After the death of President Roosevelt on 12 April 1945, he and Wallis offered the usual formal condolences, but he wrote to his friend Kenneth de Courcy to criticise the late president for his intervention in the war, without which he believed the conflict could have been resolved without the loss of life that subsequently ensued. Edward had form in this regard. Not only had he sighed to the journalist Frank Grimes in the Bahamas that the war could have been avoided without ‘Roosevelt and the Jews’, before stating that ‘if I’d been king, there’d have been no war’,2 but he had complained to Jock Balfour, the British minister in Washington, that ‘if Hitler had been differently handled, war might have been avoided’.3
Even when he was granted an audience with Truman in early August – shortly after the president’s return from visiting George VI – he found himself unimpressed. He had expected a vigorous reformer, but instead he was faced with a man who he described as being ‘in a state of utter gloom’ and moaning bleakly that the Japanese had refused to accept his ultimatum. ‘I now have no alternative than to drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo’,4 the duke reported Truman saying, and he left the meeting disappointed, believing that the United States had inherited yet another president who had no clear understanding of international affairs. Clearly, what the country needed was the duke’s wisdom and counsel.
By the middle of 1945, however, Edward had begun to make Job seem upbeat. He did not see a permanent future for Wallis and himself in America, unless some deputation of business leaders and politicians would offer him the sinecure that he believed he deserved. Yet he looked to Europe without any greater enthusiasm. Hitler, who he later privately described to his friend Lord Kinross as ‘not such a bad chap’,5 was dead and Germany, which he had once believed was a crucible of progress, was in chaos. In France, de Gaulle was in the ascendancy, but the duke lamented that he was ‘not the leader he is portrayed … he would do a lot better if, instead of trying to lift France’s prestige abroad by assuming high-hat attitudes, he concentrated upon exhorting the people to get on with the job of reconstruction’; a state of affairs made more difficult by his having ‘the Communists around his neck’.6
Nor was Edward wanted in France. The civil servant and diplomat Oliver Harvey wearily stated, ‘I confess I regard without enthusiasm his intention of returning to Paris. His friends there turned out to be for the most part collaborators and he will expect to live there in luxury amid general poverty.’ There was a sense of buck-passing when Harvey noted that ‘he is also a close friend of the Ambassador which will not make it easier for the latter’.7 Nevertheless, the couple eventually arrived in France in early September, after the duke high-handedly informed the prime minister (‘dear Attlee’) that ‘we are planning to visit France in September for the purposes of attending to our interests in that country’. Once in situ, he set about making a nuisance of himself there.*
In the same letter, sent on 3 August, the duke announced that ‘it is also my intention to go to Great Britain when I am in Europe, and I therefore look forward to an opportunity of seeing you again’.8 His attitude towards the Attlee government and Labour was a mercurial one. On the one hand, he loathed anything that smacked of communism, and denounced the 1945 election victory to his friend Duncan Stewart as ‘discouraging and a great surprise’. Although he joked to his solicitor, A. G. Allen, that ‘tradition precluded any political comment on his part’, he painted himself as a lounge-bar Cassandra when he said of the result that ‘I must admit to a sense of disappointment – not so much for Great Britain herself, who is well able to control the extent and tempo of new political and economical experiments with sanity and moderation, but as regards the effect of the British Socialist victory in [the United States] and on the continent of Europe, where the spread of Communism was the greatest danger confronting us and must now be a certainty.’9
Publicly and privately, then, the duke stood against socialism in all its forms, regarding it as little more than a back door into communism. However, he was also a pragmatist. If he wanted to be treated with any favour by the new administration, he would have to charm them into submission. His subsequent ghostwriter, Charles Murphy, later wrote that ‘he had been encouraged to believe that he would have better luck with the Labour Government than he had had with the departed Tories … he hoped that his popularity with the British working man was still untarnished, and that the Socialists still cherished his words of compassion for the Welsh miners* on the eve of the abdication’.10 He retained his popularity with the working man, many of whom refused to judge him for his marriage to Wallis – and who were unaware of his complex political sympathies – and so he resolved to return to Britain, and see what he could accomplish.
Lascelles reported the news of the second coming of the duke with laconic exasperation on 12 August. ‘The King, wonderful to relate, had a letter from the Duke of Windsor (“Dear Bertie … Yours, David” – the first so begun and ended for many a long day’) in which he announced his intention of taking his Duchess to Antibes next month, and subsequently paying a short visit to this country, en garçon.’† The tidings were less of a surprise than they might have been, because Edward had already informed Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to France, Attlee (‘who showed me the letter, which he was not at all pleased to get’) and Queen Mary of his intention to return. Lascelles scorned this as his ‘usual propensity for doing everything in the order exactly opposite to that which normal people would follow’.11
The king had no especial desire to see his brother, who he had not been in the same room with since 1939. He received Allen in order to ascertain what his client’s plans were, and generally steeled himself for such an encounter. He sent Edward a non-committal telegram saying, ‘I hope to have a rest at Balmoral, but trust that there will be a chance of our meeting while you are in England.’12 Although Lascelles had informed Churchill’s private secretary, John Martin, the year before that ‘HM would not be sorry if his brother did not come to England for the next ten years’,13 the monarch’s attitude had mellowed since the end of the war, as had Queen Mary’s. After she had refused to receive the duke on his previous visit to the country, she was now able to say that ‘I need scarcely assure you what a joy it will be to me to see you once again after all these years, for I have missed you very much indeed.’ For a woman not given to emotional outpourings, this was tantamount to the fatted calf being slaughtered.*
Nonetheless, as the king wrote to his mother on 23 September, ‘it seems to me that when he does come here … we must take the line that he cannot live here … we have told him that we are not prepared to meet “her” and they cannot live in this country without even meeting us’. After the usual run-through of the duke’s perceived objections to returning to Britain (taxation, Wallis’s dislike for the royal family and vice versa, her essential obsolescence), the king sighed that ‘he seems to think that when he gave up his work for which he was trained, he could “live” it down and return here as a private individual and all would be well’. He concluded that ‘he has to consider others beside himself, and I doubt whether even now he realises the irrevocable step he took nine years ago and the ghastly shock he gave this country’.14
The duke’s subsequent return to Britain was, superficially, an amicable and peaceable one,* even if he was unable to obtain the preferment that he had sought, either from his family or from the government. It might not have helped his case that after the indifferent start to their relationship,† Attlee and the king had found common ground. Lascelles reported that the prime minister had visited Balmoral on 26 September, and that the visit had been a success, with the king getting on ‘very well’ with his premier, despite the queen being laid up with a chill. The private secretary wrote of Attlee, with some respect, that ‘I find him excellent company when he thaws out; like most men with no natural presence, he seems to be fighting a continual rear-guard action against his physical insignificance, though his mental stature is good enough.’15
Naturally, they had discussed the impending visit of the duke, and Attlee had indicated to the king that he shared his scepticism about the desirability of Edward being given any kind of job.‡ The monarch wrote to his mother that the premier ‘agrees with me that [Edward] cannot live here permanently owing to his wife & he is not prepared to offer D. any job here or anywhere’. When he met his brother, along with Queen Mary, on 5 October, it was a pleasant, if pointed, encounter. The king later wrote in his diary that ‘[Edward] was looking very well & talked a great deal about America. After dinner he broached the subject of his wife. He asked Mama if she would receive her. After some moments in a strong silence she replied that she could never do so, as nothing had happened to alter the circumstances which had led to his Abdication. He could see this was final … we discussed the whole matter very thoroughly & quietly. He was very happily married and he knew he had done the right thing, as he felt he could never have done the King’s job properly without her. I told him frankly that he had profoundly shocked everyone here & in the Empire, he would not listen to his friends, family or advisers, & he had not thought out the consequences of his behaviour.’16
Another account, relayed to Channon by the Polish diplomat Alic Poklewski, was more vivid. The duke had begun the evening by saying ‘in his strong American accent’, ‘No point beating about the bush – will you receive my wife or not?’ Upon being told that this was impossible, he replied, ‘Then you cannot expect me to receive my sisters-in-law.’17
The greatest note of scepticism from the family had been struck by the queen. She had written to ‘Dearest Mama’, Queen Mary, shortly before the duke’s arrival to hope that the visit went well, ‘for whatever the sad events of the past, it is very hard for a mother to be parted from her son’. Her truer feelings about her brother-in-law could be discerned from her remarks that ‘I do trust that … he won’t have any press conferences. He ought to say that his visit is private and refuse to see the press, for it is most indiscreet to start something which the family have avoided so successfully here.’18
Needless to say, the duke held a press conference upon his arrival, albeit without the hoopla that such an event would once have attracted, and the queen’s unease was justified. Channon commented that ‘the fact is that the Queen* lives in the eighteenth century – the King in the nineteenth and the Duke in the twenty-first … none of them is in time with the present age’.19 The modernistic man also did not help himself in his dealings with Queen Mary.† She later commented to the royal librarian, Owen Morshead, that although her son had been ‘very nice … quite like old times, very well informed, knew everything that was going on’, he once again offered a not-so-enigmatic variation on the usual theme, namely the family’s treatment of Wallis. ‘Still persisting about my receiving his wife, when he promised he’d never mention the subject to me again.’ Typically, the duke’s parting words to his mother were ‘Well, goodbye – and don’t forget, I’m a married man now.’ She commented sardonically to Morshead, ‘Don’t forget, indeed; as if one ever could!’20
After the duke’s departure, Lascelles, who had had a lengthy interview with him on 9 October in which he had tried to make him see sense about his future role within the royal family, commented that ‘he has come, and gone, without a breach of the peace. I feel rather as one did on hearing the all clear after a prolonged air raid.’ This was kinder than a remark of the socialite Lady Diana Cooper’s that he reported, namely that, after seeing the Windsors in Paris, she thought they were ‘both looking as thin as if just out of Belsen … she grown a little more common, and he more pointless, dull and insipid’. Lascelles’s tut-tutting – ‘hard words from an old friend’21 – did not obscure the obvious satisfaction that he took in repeating her insults.
The duke’s visit to Britain had been a success, in that it had made future dealings with his family more harmonious. For the next few years, he was able to travel to and from his home country with far less hoo-ha than hitherto. He cemented his reconciliation with his mother by telling her on 13 October, ‘it really was wonderful to be with you again after so many years and to find you so young and well’, although he was unable to restrain himself in his sign-off. ‘The only thing I have regretted all these years is not seeing more of you, regarding which for the future I can only ask you to remember that I am no longer a bachelor.’22 Her reply was suitably tactful. ‘It was the greatest pleasure to me to see you again after all these long years, looking so well & young, and so full of energy – and so nice to have had those long talks on so many subjects in which both of us are interested.’23
When he wrote to his brother upon his return to Paris, the duke began and ended with the usual endearments (‘Dear Bertie … Yours ever, David’) and praised the king for all that he had undertaken ‘after the strain of the last six years of total war’. He acknowledged that certain issues – namely Wallis, although her name was unmentioned – had to be left alone, and then pressed on with his greater aim: securing some kind of future role for himself.
During his time in Britain, he had insisted on an audience with Bevin, and suggested a suitable post: ambassador-at-large to the United States. Although Lord Halifax currently occupied the ambassadorial position, the duke did not see any contradiction in terms between their overlapping but distinct roles. Halifax would continue to attend to the drudgery and official business; Edward, meanwhile, would concentrate on having fun.
He was, of course, too diplomatic to describe it thus. In an article he wrote many years later for the New York Daily News, he outlined what he saw as the major requirements of the role. ‘I would concentrate on the public relations aspect. Such a job would require my bringing Americans and visiting Britons together, providing a good table and a comfortable library for informal talks and helping along what Winston Churchill called the “mixing-up process”.’24 To Bevin, he added the sweetener that his presence would not be required in Washington full-time. After all, the whole point of such a roving role was to allow him to travel the world – first class, naturally – and for the bill to be picked up by someone else.
Bevin’s dealings with the duke had previously been limited to seeing him at a remove, so he approached him with neither reverence nor contempt. Instead, he viewed the proposition on its merits and drawbacks. On the one hand, if the duke was a roving ambassador, he would undoubtedly raise the profile of post-war Britain overseas. Amid the greyness and exhaustion of his country, he would convey a sense of glamour and excitement. On the other, it was unconscionable that the British taxpayer would subsidise a wealthy man’s life of leisure for the rest of his working days. Bevin sent the memorandum of his conversation to Attlee without comment, and there the matter had to rest.
The duke was, however, happy to go over the Foreign Secretary’s head in pursuit of his ambitions, and so made a similar suggestion to the king. He wrote that ‘it is only natural that I should want to place my experience at the disposal of any organisation that could use it rather than retire to a life of complete leisure. My desire therefore to offer my services to you and British interests is sincere and genuine.’ With a potential allusion to Wallis (‘I suggested the field of Anglo-American relations’), he outlined his credentials for a newly created post. ‘I am convinced that there can be no lasting peace for mankind unless the two countries preserve a common approach to international politics … I have made many useful contacts [in America] and I believe a number of converts among convinced isolationists … It is a difficult and subtle subject and one that requires a realistic approach as well as a thorough knowledge of the two peoples and their ever-changing political reactions.’25
The king replied shortly afterwards with an amicable, if distant, letter,* in which he acknowledged how good it had been to see his brother, and that he was relieved that the duke planned to take up permanent residence in America ‘in order to lead the kind of useful life which is in your mind’. He concluded, ‘I fully realise that you and I are placed in a most unique position & we must work out a plan which will make the situation as easy & workable as possible for both of us. I want you to know that I shall do everything in my power to help you in your plan for the future & I do hope & trust that this idea of yours will work out successfully for all concerned.’
This was not a platitude. The monarch had consulted Churchill – ‘He was not very helpful as to his future. He thought diplomatic status was unnecessary for any job in America; he could do more privately to improve the 2 countries relations’26 – and although the king suggested that he was prepared to help, even to the extent of sending a letter of support to President Truman – a suggestion of Lascelles’ – he remained sceptical about the idea of creating any kind of formal post, especially one that he noted ‘would appear to be invented for you alone’.27 The situation appeared irresolvable.
The duke was, however, cheered by a meeting that he had with Churchill in Paris on 14 November. The former prime minister may have been bored, or wishing to make mischief, but he promised to offer his assistance and counsel, even if Wallis commented to her aunt that ‘[he] is more helpful now that he is out of power’.28 The duke was more effusive when he wrote to Churchill to thank him the next day. ‘We were also very interested to hear your views regarding our future and the plan by which I could be most usefully employed in the service of my country, and wish to thank you for your efforts on our behalf with the present powers in Great Britain.’29
On the same day, Edward also replied to his brother, buoyed by Churchill’s support. He was robust (‘while I appreciate your suggestion of writing to the President to inform him of the project under discussion, I do not understand the difficulty of actually creating an official post for me which would appear to have been invented for me alone’) and self-assured: ‘As it is agreed my position is unique, why should a unique post not be created for me?’ He went on to suggest that Churchill – for whom the king retained a unique degree of respect* – would explain ‘how I could be appointed to work in America “within the ambit of the British Embassy in Washington” … Most of my activities would, of course, be of a private and personal nature, but any efforts of mine would be fruitless and the American press puzzled and derisively critical were my return to America not accompanied by an official statement from the Foreign Office that I was accredited to the British Embassy in the form Winston suggests.’
As so often with the duke, the rationale for his behaviour was financial, rather than ideological. If he was allowed to return to America under diplomatic auspices, he would be saved the bother of having to pay income tax. Otherwise, he faced an embarrassing and financially ruinous situation, and although he did not hint to the king that he would be forced into acts that might embarrass the royal family – such as, for instance, writing a revelatory memoir – he nevertheless ended the letter with a warning. ‘I hope that you will make arrangements for me along these lines in the same spirit that I am willing to respect your feelings with regard to my living in Great Britain. Be assured that I appreciate your interest in my future activities, but it is not so easy to embark upon a fresh venture at the age of fifty-one, and it is important to start off on the right foot.’30
The duke and duchess found their present existence disappointing. He had complained to his brother that ‘Life in France is really quite impossible for a foreigner who has no official job, and conditions are bound to deteriorate during the coming winter months … The electric current is switched off for long periods throughout the twenty-four hours and heating is a serious problem.’31 But this was not all that vexed him.
They had returned to Paris in September, and Wallis had initially amused herself by trying to re-create the social whirl that she had fondly imagined the city wished to return to. But many of their former friends had left, or avoided the entreaties of a pair who had been mired in scandal and gossip, even if the duke’s wartime activities were yet to become public knowledge.* Their English friends were largely prevented from travelling due to currency restrictions, and their home in the Boulevard Suchet would have to be given up in April 1946.
It was not a settled or happy time. When they had arrived, one ambassadorial functionary, Edward Holman, had had an audience with the duke. He described him as ‘much older … [but] quite natural and full of charm’, and as loquacious as ever (‘It was with great difficulty that I got in a word edgewise’). Holman warned the duke to behave himself, avoid dealing in black market goods and not give the French press an opportunity to write scandalous stories about him and Wallis – ‘he might like to receive the Press officially and thus be finished with them once and for all’, he wrote optimistically – and Edward concurred, even suggesting that his main preoccupation was ‘the growing menace of Soviet Russia, which in his opinion was creating alarm in America too’.32
Edward wrote many years later in the New York Daily News that ‘of all the world’s unemployed, none can be more practiced in the art of weaving a tolerable existence from loose ends than a former King in a foreign land’, and that ‘I got to be rather good at it’.33 This was wishful thinking. At the time, he and Wallis drifted around the city, searching for a purpose but frustrated by bureaucracy. He growled to Queen Mary that ‘One is obliged to spend hours of each day pursuing functionaries in often fruitless attempts to cut one’s way through the lanes of red tape with which the simplest operations are bound!’34
An insight into Edward’s régime de vivre can be gleaned from a letter from the socialite – and mistress to Duff Cooper – Susan Mary Alsop to her friend Marietta Tree. She called him ‘pitiful’, and wrote that although he looked ‘young and undissipated’, ‘I never saw a man so bored’. He described his day to her, asking, ‘How do you manage to remain so cheerful in this ghastly place?’ Even the duke’s sternest detractors could hardly fail to find it poignant. ‘I got up late and then I went with the Duchess and watched her buy a hat, and then on the way home I had the car drop me off in the Bois to watch some of your soldiers playing football and then I had planned to take a walk, but it was so cold that I could hardly bear it. In fact I was so afraid that I would be struck with cold in the way people are struck with heat so I came straight home … When I got home the Duchess was having her French lesson so I had no one to talk to.’ As Alsop said, ‘I thought this description of a day was pretty sad from a man who used to be Edward VIII by the Grace of God of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India.’35
Diana Cooper, who was by now desperately weary of her former friend, summed up her feelings about him in an interview with W magazine over thirty years later. ‘He had such an awful life in Paris. He couldn’t speak French, he didn’t enjoy nightclubs and he had very few friends he could talk with. If only I had been Mrs Simpson, I would have bought him the most lovely house in Virginia. He was violently pro-American and he would have enjoyed it so much.’36 Had the duke been offered the quasi-ambassadorial post he longed for, he would undoubtedly have headed to America and left behind Paris for ever. But the French did not ask him to pay tax, and the Americans would, and so he and Wallis remained in limbo.
In Britain, the duke’s activities were discussed far more often than he might have imagined. Lascelles wrote on 8 November that Churchill had proposed ‘an ingenious expedient whereby the Duke can be settled in USA on some quasi-diplomatic basis’,37 but a wider problem was what could be done about his present behaviour. Duff Cooper had written to the private secretary on 8 November to say that Edward was being ‘a bit of a nuisance, “talking big” to various French officials whom he meets at dinner, and telling them how to run their own country, which naturally they don’t like’. Lascelles saw this as par for the course. ‘He was always given to holding forth, and indeed, as long ago as 1926, showed increasing signs of becoming a hearth-rug bore; with increasing years, he may be developing George IV’s tendency to arrogate to himself capabilities, and performances, which are actually beyond him.’38 He did not mention that this included an ambassadorial role,* but the implication remained clear.
On 30 November, Bevin and Lascelles met at the Foreign Office to attempt to discuss the possibilities of a position for the duke. Bevin was sceptical about the idea of any American ambassador being prepared to work alongside him, and saw Churchill’s solution of the so-called ‘silken thread’ as being impractical.* As he asked, ‘What would be his personal relationship with an ex-King, either on the same plane as himself or under his orders?’ The Foreign Secretary then suggested that the major problem was that ‘if any sort of diplomatic status, however carefully camouflaged, were given to the Duke of Windsor, the Americans would immediately say that the chief reason for it was to get the Windsors immunity from taxation’. As Lascelles pointed out, ‘the Americans would not be far wrong’.
It was a sign of British inability to deal with the duke that Churchill’s cousin Shane Leslie – a committed advocate of Irish Home Rule – was now asked to step into the breach and receive Edward at Castle Leslie, ‘to study the Irish background of Anglo-American relations’ with a view to his taking some role in Ireland, if he so wished. Lascelles denounced this ‘bazaar [sic] rumour’ as ‘a good judgement of the D of W’s irresponsibility and lack of political and personal judgement … It is a crazy idea, the execution of which would certainly do him harm, besides infuriating the Ulstermen – and, if he had any contact with de Valera, many people in this country.’ Even Churchill considered this ‘a most dangerous plan, which ought to be stopped at all costs’.39
The king, fearing chaos, now tried to make a case for his brother being given some kind of semi-formal role in America, with the assistance of Lascelles and the lawyer and politician Walter Monckton; the private secretary even wrote on 6 December that ‘we have contrived a rational solution of the Windsors’ move to the USA’.40 On the same day, the king had an interview with Bevin, who suggested that Edward should go to the USA with all the embassy facilities but with no ‘diplomatic status’. As the monarch wrote in his diary, ‘He said it work [sic] with Halifax but he would not like to make it a condition for future ambassadors.’41
As Wallis complained to her aunt that ‘we are always waiting results of the Duke’s visit to London which though won’t be anything grand (if anything at all) would be better than having nothing to do for the moment’, they were visited by Monckton. He attempted to provide good cheer and reassurance, but without any actual grounds for so doing: the king had briefed him to tell Edward that he could do no more than he had already done. After Monckton’s visit, the duke wrote to him testily to reiterate his disappointment at not being offered the post he sought, saying, ‘My retiring nature should be sufficient guarantee that I possess the goodwill, tact and experience of State affairs to prevent any infringement on the important and exalted post of British Ambassador in Washington.’42
It did not. As Wallis and Edward fell into dejected inertia (‘the Duke thinks everything is dull after the American parties … [he] is for pulling up all stakes here as there is really nothing for him to do and no men who would be congenial to him’,43 she told her aunt), the problem of what to do with them only got worse. The paradox was best expressed by Duff Cooper, who informed Lascelles on 20 December that ‘any form of outward liaison between the Duke of Windsor and our Embassy in Washington would be impracticable’, but, as the private secretary noted, this was set against Cooper’s anxiety ‘to get the Duke out of his own bishopric, Paris’.44
Eventually, a solution of sorts was arrived upon. The duke would visit Britain early in 1946, and the matter could be discussed again then. It was difficult, but at least it meant that the issue could be forgotten about over Christmas, which for the royal family was a jolly house party at Sandringham, in Norfolk: seventy-eight-year-old Queen Mary was said to be ‘youthful, skittish and generally rejuvenated … really full of fun and giggles. She dances given any chance at all, coming out shooting (with stick and umbrella) and generally contributes to any jolly fun.’45 If 1945 had been a year of both triumph and sorrow, the former had outweighed the latter. As Lascelles mused, closing his diary for the year, ‘1945 [may], as I wrote to the King today, prove to have been the most exacting year of his whole reign. It has been a tough year for me too.’ Still, there was one abiding consolation. ‘But we beat the Boche.’46 One enemy was defeated. But other adversaries would emerge.