Fat Henry sat upon the throne
And cast his eye on ham sir.
No, no, Sir cook, I do propone
I think I’ll have the lamb sir.
Nineteenth-century nursery rhyme.
The biographer of the sixteenth-century historian and philosopher, Edward, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, pointed out to the world that Henry VIII ‘laboured under the burden of extreme fat and [an] unwieldy body’. Luckily the king was dead at the time of the pronouncement, or the scribbler would have felt the edge of the axe that had decapitated two of Henry’s wives.
King Henry VIII’s reign, from 1509 to 1547, stood at the centre of a cultural revolution in England, in which food preparation was to play a prominent part at court as the country renewed itself in an age of Renaissance and Reformation. For six years a team of experimental archaeologists have studied the workings of the Tudor kitchens at Hampton Court, the palace on the River Thames which Henry acquired from his doomed Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey in 1528. Hampton Court’s kitchens formed a complex of 55 rooms, worked by a staff of around 200, serving twice-daily meals for a court of 600 people. Records show that in one year Henry’s courtiers consumed 1240 oxen, 8200 sheep, 2330 deer, 760 calves, 1870 pigs, 53 wild boar, a multitude of fish species from cod to whale, a plenitude of fowl, from swans to peacocks, washed down with 600,000 gallons of ale. Food played an important part in Henry’s profile as a sumptuous Renaissance prince and in the impressing of foreign diplomats and visitors. Henry VIII as a gargantuan trencherman exhibited a personal assertion of national independence in Catholic Europe and a front for Tudor state power. It is likely, too, that Henry increased his ‘comfort eating’ on the death of Jane Seymour, his third wife and love of his life, on 24 October 1536, twelve days after the birth of her son.
Physically Henry VIII was 6ft 2in tall and his well-built frame became massively fat as he grew older. As a youth – he was 18 when he came to the throne – he was a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, auburn-haired charmer of ‘fair countenance’; one Venetian visitor remarked ‘His Majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on’ and a vigorous player of tennis, rider of horses and a skilled wrestler. And the Spanish ambassador noted that Henry’s ‘limbs were of gigantic size’. A study of his suits of armour in the Tower of London and elsewhere show that by 1512 the king had a 32in waist, which increased in the early 1520s to 35in, thence 54in in 1545. His portraits also show his swelling to fatness, wherein Cornelys Matsys’s 1544 portrait of him shows Henry with cheeks sagging pendulously with fat, and his eyes and mouth mere slits within bulbous swellings.
From the 1540s Henry suffered from increasing periods of ill health. He endured ulcers for many years, eventually in both legs. Commentators have supposed that these were a result of syphilis, but no evidence for the diagnosis has ever been offered. Certainly the records of his chief apothecaries, Richard Babham, Cuthbert Blackeden and Thomas Alson, show no administrations of the then treatment – mercury. None of his wives or known mistresses had the disease and his children showed no evidence of congenital syphilis. In fact, the ulceration could have come about through varicose veins, or damage through jousting accidents or at the hunt. Henry had periods of remission, then agonising swelling and discharge; he also became depressed and the pain added to his scary, unpredictable temper. Henry’s biographer, Edward Hall, also pointed out that by 1528 Henry suffered from bladder trouble and water retention. In all this exercise was made more difficult and Henry put on weight rapidly. By 1546 he could hardly walk; he was carried inside and out in a set of wooden, velvet and gold-decorated specially constructed chairs called ‘trams’, probably like the later sedan chairs. He had to be winched onto his horse and his armour was cut open to accommodate his swollen legs. Leg bandages oozing stinking pus from his ulcers caused courtiers to always remember their scented pomanders.
Henry died at Whitehall Palace at around 2 o’clock on the morning of Friday 28 January 1547 at the age of 55. The king’s cadaver lay in its anthropoid lead coffin within a 6ft 10in elm chest in the Privy Chamber prior to its lowering into the vault in St George’s Chapel at Windsor; it took sixteen Yeomen of the Guard ‘of exceptional height and strength’ to manoeuvre the coffin. It is recorded that during a funeral service at the Bridgettine monastery of Syon Abbey, Isleworth, Middlesex, en route for Windsor, Henry’s coffin burst open spreading ‘offensive matter’, and filling the chapel with ‘a most obnoxious odour’. Dogs were discovered soon after licking up the monarch’s remains. In 1813 the vault was opened at Windsor and Henry’s coffin was seen to have ‘gaped open’ to reveal his ‘awesome skeleton’. It seems that the king’s heart and viscera, removed during the process of embalming, remained in London, to be buried in the chapel of Whitehall Palace.
If a death certificate had been issued for the psychotic, paranoid bully that was Henry VIII, modern medical historians would suggest that entries could include amyloid disease, Cushing’s syndrome (i.e. abnormality of the adrenal glands), chronic nephritis with uraemia and gravitational ulcer of the leg. It is estimated that Henry had a BMI of 35 and probably weighed between 25–30 stones. Thus today, Henry would be described as being morbidly obese; its cause a matter of learned opinion.
Thou, too, art subject to my command, as the land on which I am seated is mine; and no one has ever resisted my commands with impunity. I command you, then, not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet the feet and robe of your lord.
Henry of Huntingdon, History of the English.
Canute, known to modern historians as Cnut, erstwhile Viking king of Denmark and of Norway, was crowned King of England at Old St Pauls on 6 January 1017. He was the first Dane to be crowned King of England, although his father Swegen ‘Forkbeard’ had conquered the land in 1013 and was elected king. Canute was married twice; first to Elfgifu of Northampton, daughter of Alfhelm, ealdorman (i.e. district governor) of Northampton, then to Emma of Normandy, widow of Athelred II ‘The Unready’, King of the English. Canute married Emma ostensibly to strengthen his right to the English throne; this he did while married to Elfgifu, who remained his ‘handfast’ wife (i.e. common-law wife) in accordance with Scandinavian law.
Documents about Canute’s early reign are few and although the skalds of the Scandinavian world portrayed him as a great warrior, several chroniclers are prejudiced against him. He is portrayed as tyrannical, systematically murdering or banishing the prominent nobles of Saxon England. Nevertheless, he kept several Saxon nobles on his side who he elevated, such as Godwin, Earl of Wessex, to a powerful position. He also cultivated Wulfstan, Archbishop of York and Lyfing, Archbishop of Canterbury, and with the former he issued law codes based on those already promulgated by the Saxon kings.
Canute enters British folklore with the story of him sitting on his throne on the beach and commanding the tide to turn. The popular legend suggests that Canute wanted to show his people, enemies and continental neighbours that he had authority over the waves; the implications being that he controlled the northern waters of Europe. After all, he had commanded the Danish fleet in his father’s time. This would certainly be the slant given by those who wished to make him out as an arrogant, harsh ruler who wanted to rule and repress. Yet there was another and more plausible side to the story.
By the 1020s, Canute had mellowed his former rule and had swung towards piety. His interest in church music caused him to compose a song for the Benedictine monks to sing as he and his knights rowed past their priory on the Isle of Ely:
Merrily sung the monks in Ely,
When Cnut the king rowed thereby;
Rowed knights near the land,
And hear we these monks sing.
He gave considerable donations to the Church – particularly Christchurch (Canterbury) – in the hope of buying salvation for his soul. Thus in trying to command the waves he was piously indicating that he did not have power over nature. More than this, too, he was reminding obsequious courtiers, who had suggested that even the waves would recede at his command, of his mortality. According to Henry of Huntingdon (c. 1084–1155), in his Historia Anglorum, as the waves soaked Canute’s feet he rose from his throne and addressed his assembled companions thus: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws.’ Thereafter, noted the biographer Goscelin (fl.1099), he discarded his gold crown, as a sign of humility, and placed it on the figure of Christ crucified at Winchester Minster.
Where these events were supposed to take place is a matter of dispute. Traditionally they are sited at Bosham on England’s south coast. Yet a much earlier account by the Norman author of Lestorie des Engles, Geoffrey Gaimar (fl.1140) – who does not refer to Canute sitting on a throne – sets the events in the estuary of the Thames.
Canute died of a terminal illness at Shaftesbury, Dorset, on 12 November 1035. He was aged around 50 and his body was buried at the Old Minster, Winchester. His bones today are in one of the painted wooden chests at Winchester Cathedral on top of the choir screen in the presbytry, mingled with those of Saxon and Danish kings. As a monarch who conquered, established and ruled one of the most powerful of all Scandinavian empires, Canute showed himself to be one of the most important rulers of the day, whose potent sovereignty was universally recognised. So the story of the waves may have had an element of truth when chroniclers wished to portray the background to Canute’s authority. Today the story is cited as an instance of futility and ignorant arrogance.
A TALL DARK MAN ABOVE TWO YARDS HIGH
Rump Parliament poster appeal for the capture of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester,1651.
Boscobel House, Shropshire, lies where the old Forest of Brewood covered the area, 9 miles north-west of Wolverhampton. It was built around 1630 by John Giffard as a hunting lodge and its name derives from the Italian bosco bello (beautiful wood). The family of Giffard was Roman Catholic at a time when non-attendance of Church of England services fell foul of heavy fines and Roman priests were in danger of execution if caught. Indeed a member of the Giffard family had acted as a double-agent in the Babington Conspiracy (1586), which intended the murder of Elizabeth I and the installation in her place of the Scotto-French Mary, Queen of Scots. The plotters were duly punished and Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in 1587. At the time of Charles II’s flight from the Battle of Worcester, Boscobel House was rented to a Roman Catholic family of farmers, the Penderels, so Boscobel’s owner, Charles Giffard – one of the king’s fleeing party – suggested they make for the isolated Giffard ‘safe house’ of Whiteladies further on. By Kidderminster and Stourbridge the fleeing royal party arrived at Whiteladies (now ruined) at dawn, 4 September 1651.
The king was disguised as one ‘Will Jones’, a woodman, in a ‘green jerkin, grey cloth breeches, leather doublet and greasy soft hat’; his ‘royal clothes’ were disposed of. As Cromwellian troops were in the vicinity looking for fugitives from the battle, Charles hid in woodland, his aristocratic retainers having now dispersed. The king would be safest travelling with few retainers, one of which was Richard Penderel. By 9 September Cromwell had placed a price of £1,000 on the king’s capture. No one ever claimed the prize. As they made their way from Whiteladies in the direction of the Severn, Charles and Penderel dodged troopers and, frugally fed by trusted Penderel tenants, they decided that there were too many hazards in their path and they must make for Boscobel House and the comparative safety of the Penderel household.
What were the events that brought Charles II to Boscobel House? Charles Stuart was the eldest surviving son of Charles I and his queen Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV of France. He was born at St James’s Palace, London, on 29 May 1630. After a safe childhood in the magnificence of his father’s palaces, Charles was 12 when the Civil War broke out. Quickly he became proficient in military activities and at the age of 14 he was in command of Royalist troops in the West Country. The tide of war swung against the Royalists and, following the loss of Hereford and Chester in 1645, Charles heeded his father’s advice and fled to France via the Scilly and Channel Islands to reach his exiled mother in Paris. By 1648 he was in Holland, where his sister Mary, the Princess Royal, had married William, Prince of Orange. Here Charles had a dalliance with Lucy Walter (d.1658), who bore him a son James in 1649; the child went on to be Duke of Monmouth. While in the Hague, Charles heard of his father’s execution at Whitehall Palace on 30 January 1649.
On 16 February 1649, the month before the new (republican) parliament abolished the monarchy, Charles was proclaimed king in Jersey, and a short while later the Scottish parliament proclaimed him monarch (if he was prepared to recognise the Scottish Covenant of 1638). Ever a man to bend with the wind, Charles agreed an ambiguous treaty with the Scots and, despite Cromwellian occupation of Scotland, he was crowned King of Scotland at Scone Abbey on 1 January 1651.
While Oliver Cromwell went on to show the Scots that he meant business, in July 1651 Charles led an army into England. On 3 September they were at Worcester; nearly 17,000 Royalists under Charles, with James, the 1st Duke of Hamilton and David Leslie, Baron Newark faced 28,000 Roundheads led by Cromwell, Charles Fleetwood, Col Thomas Harrison and Col John Lambert. Fierce fighting took place at Powick Bridge, south of Worcester. Battle raged for five hours, but Charles was driven back into Worcester city. He tried to rally his straggling, defeated troops. At length Charles was persuaded to escape by way of St Martin’s Gate. The Royalist cause was destroyed, but it remained to save the person of the king.
Charles II own version of the melodramatic escape from the Battle of Worcester was recounted to diarist Samuel Pepys twice; the first time was aboard the RY Royal Charles on 23 May 1660 en route to his triumphal restoration, then again at Newmarket races in October 1680. Although Sir Walter Scott enthralled his readers in a fictional version of the escape in his novel Woodstock (1820), the main facts of the events are these: On 3 September 1651 Charles vanished into the darkness north of Worcester with a small group of Royalists including George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby and John Maitland, 2nd Earl (later Duke) of Lauderdale. They were heading for the sanctuary of Brewood Forest and then – recommended by Lauderdale and Derby – the ‘loyal house’ of Boscobel. So this is what brought Charles to the Boscobel policies.
Safe for a while Charles caught up with news of the aftermath of the battle and heard that Royalist Major William Carlis was hiding in the nearby wood. Carlis now joined Charles and the pair perched themselves in a thick foliated pollard oak from where they could observe the environs of the house. Later Charles recounted to Samuel Pepys: ‘While we were in the tree we [saw] soldiers going up and down … searching for persons escaped.’ The king was able to sleep for a while in the tree; although a cushion had been provided by the Penderels, the king’s 6ft 2in frame was uncomfortably contorted. That evening (6 September), the king and Major Carlis descended from the oak and took refuge in Boscobel House. That night Charles rested in a priest’s hiding place at the top of the building but the next day Cromwell’s troopers were deemed far enough away for the king to walk in the garden.
This was just the beginning of Charles’s tortuous escape plans: from lawyer Thomas Whitgreave’s house, Mosely Old Hall, where troopers searched the house while the king hid in a secret room, to Col John Lane’s home at Bently Hall near Walsall and then on to the Cromwellian-held Bristol. Dogged by bad luck no passage was available for Charles at Bristol and it was not until 15 October at 4 o’clock in the morning that Charles embarked at Shoreham for the Continent. Subsequent biographical details of Charles II are well known. He was restored to the throne in 1660 and crowned at Westminister Abbey on 23 April 1661. Charles ruled until his death at Whitehall Palace, 6 February 1685, aged 54.
Today a descendant of the original tree marks the spot of the dramatic affairs. A spin-off for these events was once celebrated as Oak Apple Day. Until the middle of the nineteenth century it was celebrated as a public holiday on 29 May, Charles II’s birthday and the day of his restoration in 1660. Some fervent Royalists even wore oak leaves in hats and lapels, while others decorated house doorways with oak boughs. Charles also contemplated founding a new order to be called Knight of the Royal Oak, but plans were never set in motion. The tree, too, was an inspiration for the ‘Royal Oak’ inn signs.
He has been taken and I feel again very desolate, and forlorn … for what, my dear faithfull Brown … for he was in my service for 34 years and for 18 never left me for a single day … did for me, no one else can. The comfort of my daily life gone … the void is terrible … the loss is irreparable! The most affectionate children, no lady or gentleman can do what he did.
Queen Victoria to Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Osborne, 14 August 1883.
One morning in September 1866 the British Minister Plenipotentiary, the Hon. E.A.J. Harris, based at Berne, Switzerland, opened his copy of the Gazette de Lausanne and was horrified to read the following:
On dit [They say] … that with Brown and by him she consoles herself for Prince Albert, and they go even further. They add that she is in an interesting condition, and that if she was not present for the Volunteers Review, and at the inauguration of the monument to Prince Albert, it was only in order to hide her pregnancy. I hasten to add that the Queen has been morganatically married to her attendant for a long time, which diminishes the gravity of the thing.
Queen Victoria pregnant by her Highland servant! Harris nearly succumbed to apoplexy. Without consulting the Foreign Secretary, Lord Edward Henry Stanley (later 15th Lord Derby), Harris made an official complaint to the Swiss Federal Council concerning the paper’s allegations. The Swiss authorities did nothing. The Foreign Office was somewhat embarrassed at Harris’s intervention and officially withdrew the complaint through the Swiss ambassador to the Court of St James. Nevertheless, Harris had given the scurrilous nonsense the oxygen of publicity it would not otherwise have achieved. Back in Britain, not even the socialist radical weekly Reynolds’s Newspaper – certainly no supporter of Queen Victoria and the Royal Family – followed up the story. Where the allegations had come from is unclear. Some say they originated in Paris to be imported to Britain in French pornography, yet from such gossip branched a whole tree of slander and innuendo; its echoes still reverberating today.
Who was this Scotsman who earned the hatred of so many, including Queen Victoria’s eldest son the Prince of Wales? Why did Brown play such a prominent role at Queen Victoria’s court? John Brown was born at Crathienaird, Crathie parish, Aberdeenshire, on 8 December 1826, second of the eleven children of tenant farmer John Brown and his wife Margaret Leys. He was educated at the local Gaelic-speaking school at Crathie and at home, and from 1839 worked as a farm labourer at local farms and as an ostler’s assistant at Pannanich Wells. He became a stable boy at Sir Robert Gordon’s estate at Balmoral and was on the staff when Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Royal Family visited Balmoral for the first time on 8 September 1848.
John Brown is first mentioned in Queen Victoria’s journal on 11 September 1849 during the Royal Family’s visit to Dhu Loch, the year he was promoted to gillie at Balmoral. By 1851 Brown had taken on the permanent role of leader of Queen Victoria’s pony on Prince Albert’s instigation. In 1852 the Royal Family bought Balmoral and a new castle was designed by Prince Albert, to be completed in 1855. In 1858 John Brown became personal gillie to Prince Albert. Until the prince’s death on 14 December 1861, John Brown was a prominent attendant when the Royal Family were at Balmoral, particularly on the ‘Great Expeditions’ Queen Victoria and her entourage made to various locations in Scotland.
The mental decline into which Queen Victoria slipped for several years on the death of Prince Albert is well chronicled and in 1864 the queen’s second daughter and third child Princess Alice, the Keeper of the Privy Purse Sir Charles Phipps and Royal Physician Dr William Jenner, met to discuss Queen Victoria’s sustained depression and reluctance to appear in public. From this it was suggested that John Brown be brought from Balmoral to help remind the queen of ‘happier times’ on vacation in Scotland and to encourage the queen to go horse riding again. Thus, in December 1864 John Brown arrived at Osborne House as groom.
In this way began John Brown’s elevated career at court. Slowly his brusque, no-nonsense manner increasingly appealed to the queen and a pattern of daily horse rides began. When the queen became too rheumatic to sit on a horse Brown took her out in a pony cart. She loved the way he fussed and cosseted her, as E.E.P. Tisdale remarked:
He came to take her for daily drives, morning and afternoon. He pushed aside bowing lackeys in gaudy finery. He was brusque with the ladies who fluttered like frightened chickens in his way. The carriage was his preserve. It was his task to see that the Queen was settled amongst her cushions, his horny fingers which must ensure that her jacket was buttoned against the wind, his hands which must spread the shawl about her shoulders. Others had tended her as their Queen and mistress. John Brown protected her as she was, a poor, broken-hearted bairn who wanted looking after and taking out of herself.
It was not in John Brown’s nature to be subservient and his tactless, mischief-making and blunt overbearing manner soon got on the wrong side of many of the Royal Household, from the Prince of Wales’s courtiers to the secretariat under Sir Charles Grey. Brown had his own idiosyncratic way of conveying the queen’s instructions to her courtiers, often twisting her words from diplomacy to rudeness. Many were appalled too at the seemingly familiar way in which he treated the queen and was downright impertinent to the queen’s family. Whenever they or her staff complained she would find some excuse to exonerate Brown.
By 1865 Queen Victoria decided to keep John Brown ‘permanently’ on her immediate staff and he was given the title ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’ at a salary that rose from £150 per annum to £400 by 1872. He was also awarded the ‘Faithful Servant Medal’ and the ‘Devoted Servant Medal’. Over the years gossip, both written and spoken about Queen Victoria’s relationship with John Brown, increased and it focused on four main topics: The queen had married John Brown; she had given birth to John Brown’s child; she had gone mad and John Brown was her keeper; John Brown was Queen Victoria’s spiritualistic medium.
The nonsensical assertion that John Brown was married ‘morganatically’ to Queen Victoria was first given the light of day by the socialist republican nationalist Alexander Robertson. He produced the pamphlet John Brown: A Correspondence with the Lord Chancellor, Regarding a Charge of Fraud and Embezzlement Preferred Against His Grace the Duke of Athole K.T. of 1873.
Robertson had a running dispute with the 6th Duke of Atholl regarding the payment of a toll to cross the seven-arched bridge across the River Tay at Dunkeld, Perthshire. The bridge had been built by the 5th Duke and folks complained that they had to pay the halfpenny return toll even when they went to church. Queen Victoria was a firm friend of George Murray, 6th Duke of Atholl and his Duchess Anne. Robertson assumed that the queen was a supporter of their ‘banditry’ with regard to the toll and was therefore ripe for exposure.
Addressed to the Lord Chancellor, the 1st Lord Selborne, the pamphlet detailed several accusations against the queen and John Brown. Identifying one Charles Christie, ‘House Steward to the Dowager Duchess of Athole at Dunkeld House’, as the source of his information, Robertson stated that John Brown obtained regular ‘admittance’ to Queen Victoria’s bedroom when ‘the house was quiet’. Robertson also stated that he was told that the queen had married John Brown at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1868 with Duchess Anne as witness. On publication the duchess was quizzed about the allegation and poured scorn on Robertson’s assertion. Even more fanciful, Robertson stated that Queen Victoria had given birth to John Brown’s child. This time he said that his source was one John McGregor, Chief Wood Manager on the Atholl estates, who had told him that Brown and the queen had a love nest near Loch Ordie and there conception had taken place. The child, said Robertson, was born in Switzerland with Duchess Anne as midwife and the infant was given away to be brought up by a ‘Calvinist pastor’ in the Canton of Vaud.
Robertson’s assertions were officially noted. He was never prosecuted for his libel, although the Lord Chancellor and Foreign Secretary, George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl of Granville discussed the implications of the pamphlet.
Not only her courtiers but the queen herself believed that she had inherited from her Hanoverian ancestors a proclivity to madness. The mental instability of her grandfather George III in his later life was readily quoted. The queen did suffer from what the 4th Earl of Clarendon called her ‘morbid melancholy’, and would sometimes display a certain agitation and hysteria when beset with problems. Consequently government ministers and members of her household would be easily blackmailed into doing what she wanted to avoid upset. John Brown understood this and his determined interference in her life was a help to tackle her moods. Thus to some this was interpreted that the queen was mad and that Brown was her ‘keeper’.
With Brown being a Highlander it was presumed that he had the phenomenon known as taibhseadaireachd the ‘Second Sight’ with all its psychic attributes. As Queen Victoria was obsessed with the morbid memory of Prince Albert it was easy for gossips to conclude that the ‘psychic’ John Brown was her spiritualistic medium. All of these elements of gossip had deep roots and there were many willing to exploit them.
The gossip about Queen Victoria and her Highland servant did not just circulate among the nation’s lower classes. Republicanism was given a boost by Queen Victoria’s period of seclusion following the death of Prince Albert in 1861, and her consequent neglect of royal duty. Again there was an anti-royal prejudice that lurked in the bowels of the Liberal Party given credence by the likes of the radical MP Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke and pamphleteer Goldwin Smith. At court factions muttered against the queen and those around Albert Edward, Prince of Wales resented the supposed influence John Brown had over Queen Victoria. Furthermore, John Brown’s presence at court stirred up the anti-Scottish feelings in the Royal Household that had been present since the eighteenth century. Both Queen Victoria and her prime minister, the 14th Earl of Derby, believed that certain courtiers had leaked anti-Brown and anti-Victoria comments to such journals as Punch and Tomahawk, and Derby identified such gossips to include George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon (Foreign Secretary 1865–66) and court painter Sir Edwin Landseer. All the leftist clubs and the likes of the (Irish) Fenian Brotherhood feasted on and promoted anti-royalist feelings.
Although much of the gossip about John Brown and Queen Victoria was seen as ridiculous, steps were taken to suppress information. For instance, when Queen Victoria died her daughter Princess Beatrice removed pages from the queen’s journal ‘that might cause pain’ (ostensibly regarding John Brown); again on the queen’s death any papers and letters regarding John Brown and the queen were destroyed on the orders of the new king Edward VII. Queen Victoria often peppered her letters with such words as ‘darling one’ and ‘love’, all used in a naive way; but these could easily be misinterpreted by anyone wishing to make trouble.
It is clear, despite public gossip and ‘those horrid publications whose object is to promulgate scandal and calumny [about herself and John Brown] which they invent themselves’, wrote Queen Victoria to Lord Tennyson in 1883, the year of Brown’s death, that there was nothing immoral in Queen Victoria’s relationship with John Brown. Queen Victoria would never have contemplated sex with a servant. Furthermore, she was never alone to carry out an affair, having court ladies always within shouting distance. The significance of Queen Victoria’s attraction to John Brown was that he made a career out of her. He never married, had few holidays and devoted his life to the queen, and he was a walking encyclopaedia of her likes, dislikes, moods and needs. As a downright selfish person this greatly appealed to the queen. Brown was a true and faithful friend to Victoria, and despite his idiosyncratic attitude to his work and his drunkenness (to which she turned a blind eye), he was totally loyal to her. She liked him because she needed to be fussed, cosseted and spoiled. He told her the truth, spoke boldly to her and importantly too – unlike her family and senior courtiers – he was not afraid of her. Above all, when Prince Albert died Queen Victoria needed a male friend – she never really made close friendships with women – and someone to lean on. John Brown supplied all that.
I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.
Queen Elizabeth I to the ambassador, the
Duke of Wurtemburg.
Elizabeth Tudor scarcely knew her mother Anne Boleyn, who was executed when Elizabeth was 32 months old. Born at Greenwich Palace, 7 September 1533, the second surviving child of Henry VIII, Elizabeth was dispatched to Hatfield Palace, Hertfordshire, when but an infant. Her young life was a series of bitter rejections and manipulations. Her elder half-sister, who ruled as Mary I of England, disowned her, and although declared illegitimate when the marriage of Henry VIII and second wife Anne Boleyn was declared void, she was later dubbed legitimate and ‘heiress of a kingdom’ when her father used her as a barter piece towards a political alliance through marriage. Her aversion to being a pawn may have led her to view marriage with distaste.
Intelligent, precocious and very well educated for a woman of her era, Elizabeth lived through various vicissitudes in the reigns of her half-siblings Edward VI and Mary I, to be confined in the Tower of London, then Woodstock, near Oxford, when Mary took the notion that Elizabeth was plotting against her. Yet on Mary’s death at St James’s Palace, 17 November 1558, Elizabeth became monarch to general rejoicing in the land.
Elizabeth’s reign to her death at Richmond Palace at 3 p.m. on 24 March 1603, aged 69, has become known as ‘England’s Golden Age’. Yet her reasons not to marry remain a matter of conjecture and her purported lifelong virginity survives as a mystery. For Elizabeth, it seems, the marriage issue developed as a clear choice; who should she possibly marry as opposed to actually marry. As an astute ruler, Elizabeth knew that a political marriage was necessary for two reasons; to produce a legitimate heir, and to strengthen England’s role in Europe. As the most eligible woman in Europe, suitors came and went, from her former brother-in-law, Philip II of Spain to Charles, Archduke of Austria and even the bisexual transvestite Henri, duc d’Anjou, whose brother Charles IX, King of France had also been a possibility. The more she aged and the more she refused to identify an heir the more her government became nervous. They feared that if she died without declaring a successor, as a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, Mary, Queen of Scots would claim the rights of succession and plunge England into another bout of Roman Catholic oppression. In 1559 in particular parliament pressed Elizabeth to marry. The antiquary and historian William Camden – who was commissioned by James I/VI to write his cousin Elizabeth’s biography – recorded her reply: ‘I have already joyned myself in marriage to a Husband, namely, the Kingdom Of England.’
Delighting in flaunting her ‘virginity’, Elizabeth encouraged all to refer to her as the ‘Virgin Queen’, to the extent that Walter Raleigh named territory in North America in 1584 as Virginia in her honour. In all this Elizabeth flouted the opinions of the day. Shakespeare spoke for his generation when he wrote: ‘[Virgins compare to] one of our French wither’d pears – it looks ill, it eats dryly.’ Since the Reformation virginity had lost its repute. The Protestant divine Thomas Becon, erstwhile chaplain to Protector Somerset, preached that virginity was inferior to marriage, noting that the old traditions of celebacy and virginity were ‘Romish’. Publicly, at least, Elizabeth followed the ideas of Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury that chastity was a ‘gift’, and that her virginal state set her apart as a kind of ‘elect’. Nevertheless people asked: How could a daughter of lusty Henry Tudor be a virgin?
Victorian historians, novelists and film producers in particular have identified who they considered the most probable contender for the queen’s bed, namely, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532–88). Others too, like Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1566–1601), have provoked scandalous speculation, but Dudley engendered the most. His roller-coaster career as MP, supporter of Lady Jane Grey, master of the ordnance and privy councillor, brought him to Elizabeth’s court and his role of ‘favourite’. When Dudley’s wife, Amy Robsart, died in 1650, following a purported fall down some stairs, court gossips promoted the suggestion that she had been murdered to make Dudley free to marry the queen. Gossips claimed also that Elizabeth had borne Dudley a child. Was there any truth in this? To recount such stories was treason, so courtiers caught retailing them ran the risk of tongues and ears removed or the ultimate penalty of death. Elizabeth was an incorrigible flirt; during one ceremony in which she invested Dudley with his collar as earl, the foreign envoys were shocked to see her playfully tickle his neck.
Dudley’s name was entwined with Elizabeth’s once more in a curious tale set out by those wishing to prove that Elizabeth was not the virgin she purported to be. During June 1587, when King Philip of Spain was having an Armada Grande prepared for the invasion of England, a vessel bound for France was intercepted off the fortified Basque fishing port of San Sebastian. Among those on board was an Englishmen in his mid-twenties who told his interceptors that he had been visiting the Shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat in the rugged mountains near Barcelona. He was now making his way spiritually refreshed to France. Suspected of being a spy he was shipped to Madrid and imprisoned. Strangely for a person in his position his request to see Sir Francis Englefield of Englefield House, Berkshire, was granted. Sir Francis was a Roman Catholic exile from Elizabethan England at Valladolid, and had been Master of the Wards in the reign of Mary I. The young man told Sir Francis a curious story that he was the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth. In time the story was relayed by an English agent in Spain to London and officially dismissed as Roman Catholic propaganda aiming to destabilise the Protestant monarchy. Yet there were those who gave it substance.
Arthur Dudley told Sir Francis that he had been brought up by one Robert Southern, servant to Katherine Ashley, then retired governess to Elizabeth. When he was about 5 years old, Dudley said that he entered the care of John Ashley, Katherine’s husband, to be educated. It seems, despite official opposition, Dudley enlisted around 1580 as a volunteer to fight in the Netherlands.
In 1583 Arthur Dudley was called back to England as his ‘father’ Robert Southern was mortally ill. Arriving at Southern’s lodgings at Evesham, he was told that Robert Southern was not his father. Southern went on to say that he had been instructed by Katherine Ashley to go to Hampton Court where one of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Harington, gave him a new-born baby to care for in his household. The infant was said to have been the illegitimate son of an unmarried court lady, who would have been dismissed if the queen had found out about it. The infant was to be brought up as Robert Southern’s son and paid for from a source unknown to Southern. Sworn to secrecy on the pain of death Southern knew that he was almost out of reach of execution by mortal hands and his dying legacy to Arthur Dudley was the truth that his parents were the Earl of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth.
Arthur Dudley went on to describe his life to Sir Francis in great detail. If what he said was true it would hand the Roman Catholic opposition of Elizabeth a trump card. Dudley further told Sir Francis that since he had learned of his real parentage he feared for his life and sought exile abroad. Sir Francis understandably had certain doubts about the truth of what he had heard and devised a set of questions that would test Dudley on the relevant events of his life in England, details of the Ashley home and position, and on the main characters mentioned in the story. Dudley replied to all the questions with plausibility. Nevertheless, Sir Francis feared that Arthur Dudley was a credible spy and made an official report to King Philip.
They discussed the possibility that Arthur Dudley’s story was a ruse perpetrated by Queen Elizabeth herself to recognise Arthur Dudley as her son to thwart Philip’s claim to the English throne. The political ramifications were clear. Philip, too, had instructed his ambassadors to Queen Elizabeth’s court to pay particular attention to her health. He monitored her smallpox scare of 1562 when, desperately ill, she commanded her councillors to appoint Robert Dudley Lord Protector should she die. His servant was also given a generous pension of £500; was this to buy his silence as ‘doorkeeper’ while Dudley and Elizabeth were intimate in her chambers? Diplomatic dispatches arrived regularly in Madrid on the queen’s gastro-enteritis, varicose ulcers, various neuroses and migraines. Philip remembered that the Spanish ambassador reported that he had seen the queen to have ‘a swollen belly’. It was put about that this was the consequence of ascites (abdominal dropsy) wherein an accumulation of fluid builds up in the belly. What if, mused Philip, this had been a cover-up for pregnancy?
The king now advised that the best course of action was to hold Arthur Dudley in secure quarters in a monastery pending further investigation. State papers in Spain have only confirmed that this is what happened to Dudley, who seems to have been kept in some comfort. From this point the trail goes cold for historians; was Arthur Dudley kept there for the rest of his life? Did he ever return to England? No one knows, so the Arthur Dudley story can add nothing to the examination of Elizabeth’s claim of virginity.
The Burghley State Papers have offered historians a glimpse of what some deduce as a threat to Elizabeth’s virginity when she was 15. The noted perpetrator was ambitious malcontent the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, Baron Seymour of Sudeley (c. 1508–49). He secretly married Queen Dowager Catherine Parr in April 1547, the sixth wife of Henry VIII. Seymour, it should be said, was discontented that his elder brother Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford and Duke of Somerset had not been more generous towards him. Somerset was Governor and Lord Protector during the boyhood of King Edward VI and had great power in the land. As marrying Mary or Elizabeth was out of the question Seymour saw advantage in marrying Catherine Parr. Now Elizabeth’s step-father, Seymour visited the house in Chelsea where Elizabeth lived with Catherine Parr, and the governess Katherine Ashley, pained by the recollections drawn out of her, recalled:
Quite often, Seymour would barge into [Elizabeth’s] room of a morning before she was ready, and sometimes before she did rise, and if she were up he would bid her good morning and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or buttocks familiarly … and sometimes go through to the maidens and play with them, and so forth. And if [Elizabeth] were in her bed he would put open the curtains and bid her good morrow and make as though he would come at her, and she would go further in the bed so that he could not come at her.
Catherine Parr died on 5 September 1548 of puerpal fever and Seymour made attempts to marry Elizabeth; in time Seymour was arrested for treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1549, found guilty and executed.
Reviewing contemporary papers, particularly a dossier prepared during Seymour’s treason procedures in which governess Katherine Ashley and Sir Thomas Parry, erstwhile treasurer in Elizabeth’s household, were interviewed, modern historians have suggested that Elizabeth may have been sexually abused by Seymour. Projecting a modern analysis on what they see as Seymour’s abuse they say that Elizabeth fell in love with Seymour, after all he was something of a court stud; yet that love, they aver, was based on guilt and self-loathing. Psychologically scarred, they go on to say that in adulthood Elizabeth became an abuser, denying (sexual) fulfilment to those she had influence over, from her favourites to her ladies-in-waiting on whom she forced celibacy. Certainly she was hard on any who lapsed. When her maids of honour, Mary Fitton and Anne Vavasour, fell pregnant out of wedlock, for instance, she had the fathers imprisoned and the girls banished from court. Again, when Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, secretly married maid of honour Elizabeth Vernon, the queen had them placed in the Fleet prison because her permission had not been sought.
It is well attested that Seymour ‘snatched kisses’ from Elizabeth, and ‘stole embraces’ from her while his wife looked on. There was even suggestion of flirtatious horse-play in the bedroom and garden with Catherine Parr present, occasions on which governess Katherine Ashley remonstrated with them. In reply to Ashley’s indignation about his dealings with Elizabeth, sometimes dressed only in his nightgown, Seymour said pompously: ‘I will tell my Lord Protector [his brother Somerset] how I am slandered; and I will not leave off, for I mean no evil.’
Why Catherine Parr condoned her husband’s cavorting with Elizabeth – at times dressed only in his nightshirt – is a matter of speculation. Catherine was a pious woman, whose radical religious writings were admired; eventually she removed Elizabeth to the care of Sir Anthony Denny, MP and counsellor to Edward VI, and his wife Joan, at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. Before she left Catherine lectured Elizabeth on being careful not to harm her reputation through her conduct. Elizabeth was to admit that (uncharacteristically) she ‘answered little’ to the reproof. Had the forbidden fruit of sex been tasted? Historian and Elizabeth I biographer Dr David Starkey, writing in 2000, said: ‘I think there is good reason to believe that the affair with Seymour was sexual.’
For those who dismiss the theory that Elizabeth lost her virginity to Thomas Seymour, or anyone else, there are always the suppositions concerning Elizabeth’s gynaecological history.
As the years of her reign went by, with Elizabeth maintaining her decision not to marry, gossip grew that she had some sexual deficit that made marital relations and reproduction impossible. After her death Elizabeth’s godson the wit, author and High Sheriff of Somerset, Sir John Harrington, suggested that she had ‘in body some indisposition to the act of marriage’. Dramatist and poet Ben Jonson further gossiped that the queen ‘had a membrana on her, which made her incapable of men, though for her delight she tried many’. Again, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, once a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth, remarked to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was in the care of her husband George, the 6th Earl, at Tutbury, that Elizabeth was ‘not like other women’ suggesting that she had no periods.
The treatment of the queen’s cadaver at death remains uncertain; she left instructions that she should not be embalmed. Medical historians suggest that her death certificate might have included that she died of an infected parotid gland, bronchopneumonia, cancer of the stomach and thyroid failure. It seems that her heart was removed and was purported to be seen in a casket (along with that of her sister Mary) in the vault of George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, who was interred in the Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, in 1670 the year of Monck’s death.
So despite learned opinion there is no watertight proof that Elizabeth I was not a biological virgin all her life. And for all time she will be known as the ‘Virgin Queen’.
Alfred found learning dead and he restored it
Education neglected and he revived it
The laws powerless and he gave them force
The church debased and he raised it
The land ravaged by a fearful enemy from which he delivered it Alfred’s name will live as long as mankind shall respect the past.
Inscription on the statue of King Alfred (1877)
by Count Gleichen in Wantage town centre.
Alfred the Great, undoubtedly the most widely known of the West Saxons, was born around 847, the fourth son and fifth child of Ethelwulf and his wife Osburh; he was of the house of his grandfather Egbert, first of the great Wessex monarchs. Historians, following the lead of Alfred biographer and chaplain Asser, later Bishop of Sherborne, identify his place of birth as a royal villa, where Wantage now stands, in the Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire. Today Alfred remains a character of myth, his life venerated by chroniclers down the ages as the ‘saviour of the Saxons’ from the onslaughts of the Norsemen.
Alfred grew up in an atmosphere of great religious devotion and made visits to Rome. He is thought to have brought a period of prosperity to England, establishing burghs (defensive strongholds), designing a navy, and as a scholar promoting a written record of his era. The monk Florence of Worcester (d.1118), wrote this of Alfred in Chronicon ex Chronicis:
Alfred the king of the Anglo-Saxons, the son of the most pious king Ethelwulf, the famous, the warlike, the victorious; the careful provider for the widow, the helpless, the orphan and the poor, the most skilled of Saxon poets, most dear of his own nation, courteous to all, most liberal, endowed with prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance; most patient in the infirmity from which he continually suffered; the most discerning investigator in executing justice, most watchful and devout in the service of god.
Some believe that Alfred actively encouraged monastic scribes to write up the annals known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Certainly the Chronicle contains an account of Alfred’s battles and forms stirring propaganda for the ruling house of Wessex upon which throne Alfred sat during 871–899. It was Matthew Parris, the thirteenth-century Benedictine monk in his Historia who identifies Alfred as the first king to reign over all England, which in Alfred’s time meant the land south and west of Roman Watling Street.
Alfred began his rule on 23 April 871 on the death of King Ethelred of battle wounds. In this year Wessex felt the full fury of the Norsemen (Danes), who pushed west up the Thames. They were defeated at the Battle of Ashdown. Nevertheless, Alfred was driven into Somerset to contemplate an effective counter-attack. Here was the scenario of the ‘Alfred and the Cakes’ story. The actual recorded tale goes like this: When Alfred was fleeing from the Norsemen and before he beat them at the Battle of Edington in 878, he took refuge anonymously in the house of a swineherd and his family. The swineherd’s wife left a batch of loaves by the fire next to Alfred who sat sharpening arrows, preoccupied with his military problems. When the woman returned she saw her loaves were smouldering. Irate she berated Alfred: ‘You wretch, you’re only too fond of them when they’re nicely done. Why can’t you turn them when you see them burning?’ A chastened Alfred meekly turned the loaves. The swineherd’s wife’s reaction when she discovered who she had been chastising is not recorded.
Where did the cakes story come from? Biographer Bishop Asser does not mention it, and the earliest traced version is in the anonymous twelfth-century Life of St Neot. The ninth-century ex-soldier-cum-monk of Glastonbury Abbey, St Neot is believed to have been a kinsman of Alfred, perhaps even his half-brother, who Alfred consulted on various matters. St Neot was a powerful influence; some of his relics appeared at St Neots, Cambridgeshire, from where St Anslem gave a portion to the Abbey of Bec, Normandy. St Neot’s life identifies the location of the swineherd’s dwelling as Athelney ‘in the remote parts of English Britain far to the west … surrounded on all sides by vast salt marshes …’ That is the Somerset levels. It was Matthew Parker (d.1575), Queen Elizabeth I’s Archbishop of Canterbury, in editing Asser’s biography of Alfred, who gave future life to the ‘cakes’ story.
In 868 Alfred married Ealhswith (d.902), granddaughter of the King of Mercia, and had five children. Three of Alfred’s granddaughters became wives of European monarchs, placing Alfred firmly in ‘the genealogy of the royal houses of Europe’. By 896 the sinister shadows of the Norsemen had been lifted and Alfred’s kingdom entered a period of peace. Alfred probably died at Winchester, 26 October 899, and modern medical historians believe that he suffered from Crohn’s Disease, in part an illness of the intestinal tract. Alfred was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester, to be later interred before the high altar of the New Minster; again his cadaver was moved to the royal tombs at Hyde Abbey, a site much despoiled in later years.
The story of Alfred and the cakes has a certain plausibility about it; yet, was it a piece of pro-Alfred propaganda? Perhaps it was to show how Arthur, the great warrior, could show the spirit of meekness so prized by his devout court. Who knows, but the famous story has probably done more to keep Alfred’s memory in the general public eye than his historical activities.
Changeling: A child substituted for another.
Chambers 20th Century Dictionary.
James had caught the first glimpse of a hope which delighted and elated him. The Queen was with child.
Thomas Babington, Baron Macaulay (1800–59),
History (1848).
In the early days of 1688, gossip began to flow through the corridors of court to the coffee houses of London that King James II/VII’s second wife, Queen Mary of Modena, now married fourteen years, was absenting herself from public ceremonies. The excuse was indisposition. Few were fooled. Her Catholic ladies were hanging sacred relics around her bed for a safe pregnancy with the added prayer that the child be a son. The nation listened to the gossip with a mixture of sarcasm and apprehension.
What was extraordinary about this? Nothing. Although the monarch was 54, his wife was 29 and in full health. Although it was five years since her last pregnancy, she had borne four children, although they had all died young. Many in the nation believed that there would never be an heir to the throne from King James’s loins, and considered the gossip to be the beginnings of a Jesuit plot.
King James had turned Roman Catholic in 1668 and his wife Mary was an ardent upholder of the faith. James’s Declaration of Indulgence of April 1687, restoring rights to Roman Catholics to service in any administrative position, and the king’s determination to overthrow the Church of England, engendered a huge anti-Catholic surge among his largely Protestant subjects. This was made worse when the pregnancy rumours were rife for triumphant Roman Catholics at the prospect of a male Catholic heir stuck in the nation’s craw. As Lord Macaulay wrote in his History: ‘The Roman Catholics would have acted more wisely if they had spoken of the pregnancy as a natural event, and if they had borne with moderation their unexpected good fortune.’
On the morning of Sunday 10 June 1688, Prince James Francis Edward Stuart was born at St James’s Palace. Detractors believed that Mary had been moved from Whitehall at dead of night to the less commodious accommodation of St James’s to suit nefarious Catholic purposes. For many Protestants, St James’s Palace was riddled with Roman Catholic priests ‘running disreputable errands along secret passages’. This birthday, though, would be kept sacred by Roman Catholics, but it set in motion another curious rumour. The gossips said that the child had been born dead and that a changeling had been smuggled into the Queen’s room in a warming pan to conceal a stillbirth; and that the whole was a Roman Catholic plot. One of the promoters and believers of such a plot was Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, who made much of it in his History of his own Times published eight years after his death in 1715.
The ridiculousness of this gossip is self-evident. Purely for political purposes, such a royal birth was a public event in which many courtiers would be present. Estimates show that there were sixty-seven witnesses in the queen’s bedchamber, of which eighteen were privy councillors; thus, too many persons to be privy to a conspiracy. Yet, the warming pan story was so disquieting that King James called two extraordinary sessions of his Privy Council to hear testimony that the new Prince of Wales was the son of Queen Mary by him.
Within a few months of Prince James’s birth and the public announcement that he would be brought up a Roman Catholic, the coup of Whig aristocrats named the Glorious Revolution erupted, and eventually James II/VII fled his kingdom to permanent exile. The baby would enter history as the ‘Old Pretender’ giving birth to the movement of the Jacobites and the romance of their activities that lives on today.
Hark the Herald Angels sing,
Mrs Simpson pinched our King.
Street doggerel at the Abdication, 1936.
On the death of George V on 20 January 1936, his eldest son Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, Prince of Wales, born at White Lodge, Richmond Park, Surrey, 23 June 1894, ascended the throne of Great Britain as HM King Edward VIII. Eleven months later at Windsor Castle he uttered these famous words in a broadcast to the nation: ‘… you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry out the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’
A few minutes after 2 p.m., on Saturday 12 December 1936, two days after signing the Instrument of Abdication, the king left England aboard HMS Fury bound for France. He was now HRH the Duke of Windsor. On 3 June 1937 the Duke of Windsor married the 41-year-old twice-divorced American, Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson, at the house lent by Charles Bedaux, the Château de Candé in Touraine, France. A civil ceremony had been conducted by the Mayor of Monts, docteur Mercier, followed by a religious service celebrated by the Revd Robert Anderson Jardine, vicar of St Paul’s church, Darlington (who had volunteered to marry the royal couple in defiance of his bishop’s order not to). Thereafter, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor entered exile until the duke’s death on 28 May 1972.
When Edward VIII had become king, his brother Prince Albert, Duke of York became heir presumptive. He was not heir apparent because there was no reason why the 42-year-old king would not have children on marriage. If Edward had still been on the throne in 1952, when his brother Prince Albert (who became King George VI on Edward’s abdication) died, and if Edward had had no children, then Princess Elizabeth (the present Queen Elizabeth II), Prince Albert’s elder daughter would have become heir presumptive. What of Edward’s other brothers? The bisexual Prince George, Duke of Kent, had died in 1942, and the next male brother after Prince Albert, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, would not have become heir presumptive unless Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret had predeceased him. So Princess Elizabeth would have become Queen Elizabeth II on Edward’s death in 1972 instead of ascending the throne in 1952.
The abdication had several other consequences for the Royal Family. On the one hand the entry of Wallis Simpson, as one historian put it, ‘was to act as a catalyst in the removal of a disastrously unsuitable monarch from the British throne’; and on the other it produced an on-going ‘royal feud’ between the Duchess of Windsor and the new queen who eventually became Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. The use of the term ‘feud’ in this connection seems to have originated with the Duchess of Windsor. For some thirty years the two women never met but when George VI died at the age of only 56, psychologically worn out by the stress of monarchy, the widowed Queen Mother referred to the Duchess of Windsor as ‘the woman who killed my husband’. History records that the Duchess of Windsor’s description of the Queen Mother ranged from the ‘Dowdy Duchess’ to ‘the Monster of Glamis’.
Out of all of Edward VIII’s sisters-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, then Duchess of York, was the closest and most supportive. All that changed when Wallis Simpson arrived in his life in 1931. Apart from his devastated mother, and his puzzled sister the Princess Royal, Elizabeth had many reasons to regret the abdication. In the first place a huge lifelong burden would pass to her shy, stuttering husband who had not been trained like his brother for monarchy; there would be stress for herself too, as now a whole new complexity entered the royal equation. Elizabeth genuinely admired Edward VIII, sustained him when he was having difficulties with his father George V, and often sought to raise his spirits.
Edward VIII – dubbed Duke of Windsor after the abdication – believed that after he sojourned in Europe for a while and after his marriage to Wallis Simpson, he could return to Britain, live at his beloved Fort Belvedere, and reinvent a role for himself (on his own terms), with his new wife at his side; a wife accepted, of course, by the Royal Family as ‘Her Royal Highness’. None of this happened. It is still widely believed that the Duchess of Windsor was denied the HRH title because of Queen Elizabeth’s influence over her husband.
It was said too, that driven by hatred of the Duchess of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth was completely hostile to the Windsors. Historians feel that this is an unjust view. What Queen Elizabeth resented was what the Windsors were doing to her husband. For some considerable time the Duke of Windsor showered his brother George VI with unwelcome advice, demands, complaints about perceived snubs to himself and his wife, and bullying. Wherever they went in Europe they were an embarrassment to the Royal Family back home. All of which, in particular, made Queen Elizabeth nervous about their future effect on her husband. Should the Windsors come back to Britain, Elizabeth was afraid they would upstage the Royal Family in social circles. The Windsors did return to Britain in September 1939 as guests of Maj Edward and Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, but the duchess was not received by the Royal Family, and the duke only saw the king. In Columbia University, New York, in an archive of papers of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, there is a letter dated 2 October 1939 which makes Queen Elizabeth’s views on the Windsors quite clear:
I had taken the precaution to send [the Duchess of Windsor] a message before they came [as the Metcalfe’s guests] saying that I was sorry that I could not receive her. I thought it more honest to make things quite clear. So she kept away, & nobody saw her. What a curse black sheep are in a family.
Wallis Simpson, the duchess, had met Elizabeth for the first time at Buckingham Palace on 27 November 1934. Commenting in 1974, the Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penhurst remembered this of the encounter:
I am afraid Mrs Simpson went down badly with [Elizabeth] from the word go. It may have been rather ostentatious dress, or the fact that she allowed the Prince of Wales to push her forward in what seemed an inappropriate manner. The Duchess of York was never discourteous in my experience, but those of us who knew her well could always tell when she did not care for something or someone, and it was very apparent to me that she did not care for Mrs Simpson at all.
Later Wallis Simpson mimicked Elizabeth’s ‘voice, mannerisms and facial expressions’ during a party at Fort Belvedere. Elizabeth walked in as Mrs Simpson was giving her performance and one guest, Ella Hogg, noted: ‘… from the moment of overhearing, the Duchess of York became her implacable enemy. Mrs Simpson said she had no sense of humour.’
Queen Elizabeth certainly disliked the Duchess of Windsor’s ‘indiscretions’ as she saw it, and her ‘proprietory manner with Edward VIII’. Perhaps the Duchess of Windsor’s bitterness at the perceived ill-treatment of her husband by his family outweighed any feelings she had for Queen Elizabeth. Overall both women were strong, determined characters, vital, energetic and fun loving; and both dominated their husbands; as well as being ‘cheerfully fond of alcohol’. The Duchess of Windsor was once asked: ‘Why the feud?’ She replied that she believed Queen Elizabeth was jealous of her for marrying Edward VIII instead of him marrying her.