4

Becoming the King

It is undeniable that the abdication and the events leading up to it did less damage to the institution of monarchy than the new king feared would be the case, but harm was still done. The British people as a whole may have put the crisis behind them with striking speed, but there was an element among the politically conscious which was more concerned. It was estimated – by a staunch Conservative – that if a vote had been taken in the House of Commons at the end of 1936 at least a hundred members would have supported the establishment of a republic. One of these announced triumphantly: ‘Since 1914 there has been a continual building up [of support] around the throne, but what has happened recently has done more for republicanism than fifty years of propaganda could do.’¹ When the new king asked his brother whether he imagined that it was a pleasure to take on a rocking throne and try to make it steady again he may somewhat have exaggerated the scale of the challenge, but nevertheless the challenge was real and urgent.

Where George VI did err was in underestimating his own capacity to deal with it. He had for so long been accustomed to esteem his elder brother as a miracle of charm and intelligence that he found it hard to believe he could successfully take his place. He rightly felt that he understood little of the mechanics of public life, knew few of the leading politicians personally and was singularly short of experience in foreign affairs; he also underestimated the extent to which common sense and a readiness to listen to the right advice could compensate for these deficiencies. In fact one of his problems was that, at the time of his accession, the right advice was hard to come by. He had inherited Alexander Hardinge as his private secretary and respected what he knew of him, but Hardinge had been overwhelmed by the pressures of the abdication and had retired hurt for a few months’ travel in India. Alan – ‘Tommy’ – Lascelles was in time to become an indispensable member of the royal entourage, but at the beginning of 1937 he was still inexperienced and virtually unknown to his new employer. George VI was left with Clive Wigram as his counsellor and confidant. Wigram was no fool but he was of a different generation to the king and their temperaments were not easily compatible. To a striking extent the king was on his own, or would have been so if it had not been for the constant presence and support of the queen. She was no more versed than he was in public affairs but she had common sense, quick wits and a priceless ability to see things in proportion. Left to himself the king would have been prey to constant anxiety and indecision; with her by his side he knew his mind and expressed it with clarity and determination.

His first objective had clearly to be the re-establishment of the monarchy as the paradigm of all that was respectable and dignified in British life. Under Edward VIII the Palace had taken on a more raffish tinge – something alien both to the British people and to the disposition of the new king. George VI therefore needed to emphasize how different he was to his brother. Yet at the same time he knew that, though his people might dislike the idea of a court characterized by jazz, cocktails and Mrs Simpson, most of them knew little of the last king’s train of life, did not really understand why he had gone and still felt considerable affection for him. If Edward VIII had not decided to go gracefully but instead had encouraged the establishment of a King’s Party and had fought to retain both Mrs Simpson and the throne, he would not have prevailed, but he would have made things far more difficult for his brother. The thought that a considerable number of his subjects felt that his elder brother should still be on the throne did not make George VI any more confident as he addressed the problems ahead of him.

His trump card was his family. ‘I know the people of this country,’ said the former engine cleaner and now Labour MP J. H. Thomas. ‘I know them. They ’ate ’aving no family life at Court.’² By the time of George’s accession Princess Elizabeth was ten and her sister Margaret Rose six. They were attractive and photogenic children and pictures of the family, usually accompanied by a few dogs and the occasional pony, were standard fodder for the newspapers and magazines of the time. To suggest that the king consciously exploited his family so as to improve the image of the monarchy in the minds of the public would be to suggest mental processes totally alien to his character. He did not think in terms of publicity and images; if anyone had suggested that he should be preoccupied by such issues he would have been bemused and outraged. But he loved his own family in particular and believed that, in general, the united family must be at the heart of any stable society. He saw it as his duty to propagate that belief whenever he had an opportunity, and if exhibiting his own compact and contented unit to his people helped in that crusade, then he would not allow his own instinctive preference for privacy to weaken the effect.

One of the trickiest and in some ways most painful problems in the early years of George VI’s reign – indeed, to some extent throughout his reign – was his relationship with his elder brother. The question was posed even before the new reign had properly begun. How, asked Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, should he introduce the former King Edward VIII before he made his farewell address to the people? Reith suggested ‘Mr Edward Windsor’. With the common sense which marked his reign, George VI dismissed this idea as absurd. As the son of a duke his brother would anyway be Lord Edward Windsor. In that case he would, in theory, be able to stand for the House of Commons. If he were given an ordinary peerage he could sit in the House of Lords. Was this really what was wanted? Obviously he must become a royal duke; so Duke of Windsor he became.

But this was just the start of it. It was taken for granted by everyone who thought about the matter that the Duke of Windsor would leave the country for a while, and he did so with professions of goodwill on all sides. Things quickly turned sour. It became embarrassingly obvious that the duke had lied about the state of his finances, professing that he was far poorer than in fact he was and thus extracting a more generous allowance from his brother. The discovery never led to an open breach but it meant that George VI was far less sympathetic than he would otherwise have been when the expectations of the ex-king clashed with the facts of life in London. One of the first and most painful of these conflicts arose over the form of address for the former Mrs Simpson. The Duke of Windsor as a royal duke was automatically styled His Royal Highness. When Mrs Simpson married him – as she did in June 1937 – most people assumed that she would then too become HRH. She had her doubts, fearing the hostility of Queen Mary: ‘York, guided by her, would not grant me the extra chic of creating me HRH.’³ Her use of the word ‘chic’ in this context demonstrates vividly the gulf between her and her brother-in-law. It was a word of which George VI would hardly have been aware, still less have used about a matter which seemed to him of such moment. As it turned out, her doubts were justified – she never was formally granted the right to style herself HRH. Still worse, no member of the royal family attended their wedding; even Mountbatten, who at one point had volunteered himself as best man, found it inexpedient to make the journey.

The greatest bitterness, however, was generated by the duke’s wish to return to Britain. He did not plan to have a permanent home there – at any rate not for several years; but he took it for granted that he would be free to visit this country, stay with friends and be received at court. The king saw things very differently. He believed that his brother’s presence in Britain would automatically make him a focal point for a rival monarchy: ‘You see, you can’t have two Kings,’ Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, explained many years later.⁴ This belief that the ex-king retained potent attractions for a substantial part of the British people was exaggerated from the start and became increasingly illusory as time wore on. It continued to haunt the king, however, long after it had become clear to everybody else that the new inhabitants of Buckingham Palace were firmly established on the throne.

An additional grievance of the Duke of Windsor was that, though the duke himself was told he would be welcome at the coronation, it was made clear that his wife would not be invited. Preparations for the coronation were already well advanced by the time of the abdication and it was decided that it would be better to stick to the agreed date – 12 May 1937 – rather than start the process all over again. Coronations were no more to George VI’s taste than they had been to his elder brother’s – processions and fancy dress, he accepted, were a necessary part of public life but should be kept to a minimum. The significance of the rite, however, he took with extreme seriousness: publicly to dedicate himself to the service of the nation was a sacred duty which he would perform with dignity and a certain reverence. His Christian faith was strong, if inarticulate: at the heart of the pomp and circumstance of the coronation was a simple religious ceremony; let those responsible dress up the rest of the affair with gorgeous pageantry, it was that intimate moment at which the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the crown on his head that to the king symbolized all that really mattered about the day’s activities. It was a moment which he wished to share with his people; against the instincts of his more cautious advisers he insisted that the service should be broadcast and filmed for later exhibition. Left to himself he might even have allowed television cameras into the abbey, but the medium was very much in its fledgling days and he was persuaded without too much difficulty that this would be a step too far. All passed off well; one of the few setbacks occurred when one of the bishops trod on the king’s robe, bringing him to an abrupt halt as he left the Coronation Chair. ‘I had to tell him to get off it pretty sharply,’ the king recalled in his account of the ceremony, a lively narrative which showed that, though he took the affair with proper seriousness, he was not beyond detecting the ridiculous in even the most solemn undertaking.⁵

If the king had had his way, the glories of the coronation would have been followed by the still more refulgent splendours of an Indian durbar. A visit to India had tentatively been planned for the winter of 1937–8 and George VI’s imagination had been captured by the thought of being crowned king-emperor in this, the grandest and most populous of his territories. The secretary of state, Lord Zetland, had at first strongly favoured the expedition, but as it seemed more and more likely that the Congress Party would take the opportunity of a royal visit to foment protest against British rule, he changed his mind and pressed for indefinite postponement. Ministers were disconcerted when the king took exception to the new advice. He wanted to go, he considered that the cancellation of the visit would be a sign of weakness on the part of the imperial power, he did not believe that there would be any serious disturbances in India or that his life would be in danger. He could not ignore the advice of his ministers but he made it clear that he thought them over-cautious and pusillanimous and that he was not disposed to accede automatically to advice that he thought ill-judged or that was contrary to his wishes.

It was one of the first indications that ministers had been given that the king had a mind of his own and was prepared to voice it emphatically. He was well aware of the constitutional limits to his role and would never strive to exceed them; equally, he knew his rights and would fight tenaciously to retain them. Ministers had grown unused to this. Edward VIII had been so preoccupied with his personal problems that he had taken little interest in the activities of his government: he had made fitful incursions – usually injudicious – into the world of foreign policy but had made no serious efforts to acquaint himself with, still less influence, the day-to-day activities of his ministers. Now they were confronted by a king who read his papers, formed opinions about them and did not hesitate to express those opinions forcibly. It was clearly a change for the better, but there were times when ministers hankered after the casual insouciance of the previous regime.

George VI was in temperament closer to his father. He was prudent yet determined, forming his own conclusions and, once having done so, slow to change them. He shared his father’s obsession with detail, particularly when it came to points of dress: even the most distinguished officers of his court were likely to find themselves sharply rebuked if some medal ribbon was in the wrong place or a sartorial blunder had been committed. At a gillies’ ball at Balmoral he sent for the pipe major and rebuked him for allowing one of the pipers to wear a kilt with the pleats pressed the wrong way. ‘I noticed it as soon as I came into the ballroom,’ said the king. But he was in general far more reticent than his father; he was more likely to listen to others than to air his own opinions. Conversation with him was never easy, partly because he had little use or aptitude for small talk, partly because he passed from topic to topic with disconcerting speed. Superficially he would seem – indeed was – unassuming but, again like his father, he never for a moment forgot that he was on the throne. Dignity, decorum, reliability were back; innovation and casual informality eschewed. ‘Thus the Court, thank God, will revert to the old, well-tried ways,’ wrote Canon Don, the archbishop’s chaplain.⁶ His relief would have been shared by almost anyone whose role it was to serve the monarchy.

George VI’s first prime minister was Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin had played a large part in stage-managing the abdication. Some of his colleagues had doubts about the capacity of the Duke of York to replace his brother; Baldwin felt more sanguine, George would be just like his father, he told a colleague – than which he could hardly conceive higher praise. The two men were wholly compatible and if Baldwin had been five or ten years younger they would have formed a most harmonious partnership. As it was, however, he was resolved to retire as soon as the coronation was over. ‘I would like you to know with what real sadness I accepted your resignation,’ the king wrote to him; the words might have been written by any monarch to any prime minister, but there was real feeling behind them.

In his place came Neville Chamberlain, in some ways chipped off the same old block as his predecessor yet in character colder, less tolerant, more decisive. The king esteemed him from the start but did not at first feel the affection that had existed between himself and Baldwin. It was foreign affairs that convinced him that Chamberlain was not merely competent and safe but a heroic figure to be backed to the hilt. As Hitler’s Germany became ever more belligerent and outrageous in its demands on its neighbours, those who influenced the making of policy in Great Britain fell ever more sharply into two camps: those who felt that Hitler should be confronted and checked, even at the risk of war, and those who believed that everything possible should be done to appease the dictator and persuade him to moderate his demands. No one who remembered the horrors of the First World War could be blamed for feeling that almost anything would be better than a return to arms. History today judges the appeasers to have been wrong. An opportunity, it is believed, was lost to stop Hitler before he was fully ready to go to war. At the time things seemed less clear: to many Churchill seemed an irresponsible warmonger and Chamberlain the voice of humanity and common sense. To support appeasement now seems to have been misguided, but those who did so then should not be condemned for cowardice or credulity; not many of us today can say with total confidence that we would have resisted its dulcet blandishments.

George VI was a convinced appeaser. He offered to intervene himself with a personal appeal to Hitler. When in September 1938 it seemed that the Germans were on the point of invading Czechoslovakia, he rejoiced when his prime minister flew to Germany to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden and try to persuade him to hold his hand. When Chamberlain returned in triumph, flourishing his ‘scrap of paper’ and claiming that he had secured ‘peace with honour … peace in our time’, the king was the first to praise him. Some thought that he went too far. If he had not been strongly discouraged by his advisers he would have gone to the airport to welcome Chamberlain home; as it was, he invited the prime minister to the Palace and appeared with him on the balcony. If a referendum had been held that night the vast majority of his subjects would probably have endorsed his conduct; within only a few months things looked very different.

However anxious the king might have been that war should be averted, he undertook two state visits in these years which directly contributed to the solidarity of what would one day be the alliance against Germany. The first, in July 1938, was to France. It seemed at one moment as if he might have to make the journey without the queen. Lady Strathmore died only a few days before the visit was due to start. Some frenzied pother followed; the queen, who was particularly close to her mother, must have been tempted to let her husband go to Paris alone but she knew how much he counted on her support. In the end the visit was postponed by some three weeks. It was fortunate for Anglo-French relations that this was done: the king alone would certainly have been well received but it was the queen who was the star of the show. Her beauty and her spontaneous charm made a startling impact on the notoriously unsusceptible Parisian crowd. The king had been well briefed as to what he should say. In all his public statements, he took pains to stress his hope that the international problems of the day would be solved by negotiation and goodwill. Many of the French who heard him may have considered that such hopes were slight; few if any can have foreseen that within two years victorious German troops would be marching along the Champs-Elysées.

The visit was complicated by the fact that the Duke of Windsor was now living in Paris and made it clear that he would take it much amiss if his brother did not call on him and include him in some at least of the official junketing. George VI, however, had been fed with a catalogue of offensive comments which the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were said to have made about the royal visitors. He was not disposed to reciprocate generously. ‘State visit a most unsuitable moment for meeting,’ he minuted. ‘… Official invitation would help their position in both countries … Their behaviour has not been polite to us.’⁷ It is a sad comment on the relationship between the two brothers, who had once been so close, that the belief that an official invitation would help the Windsors’ position in Parisian society was seen as a reason for not issuing one.

By the time that the king embarked on the second of his major trips abroad, to North America in May 1939, little hope was left that war might finally be averted. It did not seem possible that the United States could be induced to join a coalition against Germany, but it was essential that it should at least be well disposed towards the Anglo-French alliance and be ready to give it preferential treatment when it came to economic support and the supply of arms. The royal visit therefore formed part of a campaign to influence the hearts and minds of the American people. The operation had to be conducted with great delicacy. The American tour was presented as – indeed, was originally conceived as – an appendage to a royal visit to Canada. To avoid any accusation that the king was seeking to make political points he was accompanied, not by the British foreign secretary but by the Canadian prime minister. The visit was low-key, informal and yet designed to secure as much publicity as possible. It was largely due to the dexterity, as well as the obvious enthusiasm and goodwill, of the king and queen that the aims of the mission were accomplished.

The tour got off to an inauspicious start when the king’s ship, The Empress of Australia, lost more than three days because of the inordinate number of icebergs along the route. The captain, the queen told Queen Mary, was driven almost demented by helpful passengers pointing out that his ship was close to the spot where, at much the same time of year, the Titanic had met its end. No such disaster occurred on this occasion and the visit to Canada was triumphantly successful. ‘I realise now more than ever,’ wrote the Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir – more widely known as the novelist John Buchan – ‘what a wonderful mixture [the king] is of shrewdness, kindliness and humour. As for the queen, she has a perfect genius for the right kind of publicity.’⁸ That is the sort of thing governor generals are supposed to say, but there is enough evidence from other sources to suggest that Tweedsmuir’s flattering words were fully justified.

The American public was a harder nut to crack. A large part of the population was both anti-imperialist and opposed to anything that they felt might embroil them in a European war. There was no overnight conversion as a result of the royal visit but in Washington they were greeted by enormous crowds, who may have come out of curiosity but, according even to the more anti-British elements of the American press, formed a most favourable impression of their visitors. What mattered more was the bond that was forged between the king and queen and President Franklin Roosevelt. They stayed with Roosevelt at Hyde Park, the president’s family home on the Hudson River. The two men spoke long and seriously and George VI’s record of their conversation reveals how frank the president was about the United States’ attitude towards the forthcoming war and his hopes of influencing it in favour of the Allies. Indeed, he promised more than he was able to fulfil, for he told the king that, if the Germans were to bomb London, America would enter the war. A firm if unlikely friendship was established between the two men. For the five and a half years between September 1939 and his death in April 1945, Roosevelt, from the point of view of the future of Britain, was the most important man in the world. The fact that the king was able to write to him informally, reflecting the views of his government but in personal terms and free of the trammels of official communications, must, at the very least, have been a useful extra weapon in Britain’s diplomatic armoury.

So it was back to Britain at the end of June, with Germany growing ever more belligerent and the inevitability of war becoming more obvious by the moment. George VI was one of the last people to abandon hope that Hitler might experience a last-minute change of heart. He offered, once more, to make a personal appeal; this time through his cousin, Prince Philip of Hesse. Chamberlain turned down the idea; he was probably right to do so, it would have achieved nothing and might merely have fortified Hitler in his belief that, when it came to the point, Britain and France would baulk at going to war.

That point came on 3 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. As his father had been a quarter of a century before, George VI found himself monarch of a country which was at war.