5

The King at War

What was a king supposed to do in wartime in the twentieth century? Clearly George VI was not going to lead his troops into battle, nor was there really any role for him to play in the direction of the war. Neville Chamberlain dutifully kept up the tradition of the weekly audience, but that was the limit, and there were not many other links between No.10 and the Palace. Even in peacetime Chamberlain had been apt to make decisions and take important actions without reference to the king, sometimes leaving him to find out what had happened through the press or wireless; the extra demands on his time caused by the war meant that the king was even more on the sidelines. Through other sources, notably his private secretaries – Hardinge till July 1943 and after that Tommy Lascelles – the king was, however, exceptionally well informed. Scarcely anyone knew as much as he did about the perils which his country was facing and the inadequacy of its means of defending itself. He was one of the handful of people who knew about Ultra, the cracking of the German ciphers through a covert operation based at Bletchley Park – a secret so closely guarded that it was nearly thirty years after the war was over before any official admission was made of what had been achieved. He read the Ultra transcripts, was sent the Cabinet minutes and a mountain of other secret and top-secret material, met and talked freely with many of those most responsible for the conduct of the war. It does not seem, however, that Chamberlain himself made any important contribution to his knowledge.

‘It does not seem’ is an important qualification. What actually takes place at the monarch’s weekly meeting with the prime minister is one of the most jealously guarded secrets in political Britain. Marcia Falkender, Harold Wilson’s most intimate associate, remarked that Wilson had only once divulged to her what had been discussed at the Palace – and that was when the subject had been the style of riding habit the queen was to wear for the ceremony of Trooping the Colour. While Chamberlain was prime minister the silence was total. All the evidence suggests, however, that while the king admired and respected Chamberlain and felt that he was the right man for the job, there was little real warmth between them. The king never found personal communication easy, Chamberlain was by nature cool and withdrawn; the two minds may have met, but the meeting can never have achieved anything approaching intimacy.

George VI had hoped that, once war began, Chamberlain would form a government of national unity, including both Labour and Liberal ministers. Chamberlain was not minded to do anything of the sort; his greatest concession to the wartime spirit was to take back those dissident Conservatives, Churchill and Eden, into the Cabinet. Ironically, in the light of later developments, it was those same two ministers whom the king found it most difficult to like or trust. ‘I find he [Eden] does not give me confidence,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Winston is difficult to talk to, but in time I shall get the right technique, I hope.’¹ He also had his doubts about the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha. Hore-Belisha was efficient, far-sighted and imaginative and had done much to refurbish some of the more antiquated features of the British army; he was also querulous, quarrelsome and conspicuously short of charm. One of the most bitter of his quarrels was with Lord Gort, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. A situation in which the minister responsible for the army is virtually not on speaking terms with the senior soldier is obviously untenable at any time, particularly in time of war. The king knew both men well and was privately convinced that, if one had to go, it should be Belisha. How far, if at all, he allowed this view to become known to the prime minister is uncertain. Belisha for one was convinced that the king was agitating for his removal but it seems more likely that he did no more than pass on to Chamberlain the views that Gort had expressed to him in the course of a royal visit to the British troops in France. Typically, Chamberlain did not get round to telling the king that he was trying to persuade Belisha to switch to another office within the government – the war minister’s sudden resignation came as a complete surprise.

So long as the war grumbled along with nothing much happening, Chamberlain could remain safely in No.10, backed by the greater part of the enormous Conservative majority in the House of Commons. The disastrous campaign in Norway in April 1940 imperilled his position; when the Germans overran the Low Countries and the Labour Party refused to join a national government under his leadership, even he accepted that he had to go. George VI still hoped that the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, could be persuaded to change his mind and join a coalition under Chamberlain. He offered to intervene to try to bring this about: ‘I said that I felt what I call the great triumvirate, the PM, Halifax and Winston, could not be bettered.’² The offer was not accepted: the timing was not right, Chamberlain considered. Almost certainly it would have made no difference; Labour were resolved that Chamberlain must go. The king had to accept the inevitable. He did so with reluctance. On 17 May the queen wrote a personal letter to Chamberlain to express their sorrow: ‘I can never tell you in words how much we owe you. During these last desperate and unhappy years, you have been a great support and comfort to us both, and we felt so safe with the knowledge that your wisdom and high purpose were there at our hand.’³ The words were those of the queen but they reflected faithfully the feelings of her husband.

If Chamberlain had to go, then George VI had no doubt that the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, would be the best man to replace him. Halifax was an old and trusted friend; he was a safe man, prudent, predictable; he spoke the same sort of language as the king. The only realistic alternative was Churchill; the king recognized his merits and accepted that he should remain at the Admiralty but was nervous about his potentiality as a national leader. Churchill was a maverick, adventurous, unsound. The king could not wholly put out of his mind the fact that he had been a prominent champion of Edward VIII at the time of the abdication, nor that he had been the most conspicuous opponent of Chamberlain over appeasement. But Halifax, when approached, refused to be considered for the job, pleading that in contemporary Britain, especially in wartime, the prime minister must be in the House of Commons. The king suggested that Halifax’s peerage might be put in abeyance for the duration of the war. Halifax would not contemplate the idea; he knew that he could not command the support he would need in the House of Commons and was wise enough to recognize that he did not possess the qualities needed for a wartime leader. Like it or not, it was inevitable that George VI’s next prime minister should be Winston Churchill. ‘I cannot yet think of Winston as PM,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I met Halifax in the garden and I told him I was sorry not to have him as PM.’⁴

The relationship got off to a frosty start. Though the king said nothing to Churchill to suggest that he was unhappy about the appointment, the new prime minister can hardly have been unaware that he was not altogether welcome. An early source of disagreement was Churchill’s inclusion in his government of his old crony, the powerful and somewhat disreputable Canadian press magnate, Lord Beaverbrook. George VI was horrified: in a handwritten letter he urged Churchill to reconsider his decision, which the king, rather obscurely, suggested might be ‘misconstrued’. ‘You are no doubt aware that the Canadians do not appreciate him,’ he wrote; and since Canada played a vital role in the training of pilots for the RAF, it seemed injudicious to thrust Beaverbrook upon them.⁵ He took equally strong exception to the appointment as privy councillor of the still more raffish Brendan Bracken – alleged by some, on shaky grounds, to be Churchill’s illegitimate son. In neither case did the prime minister pay much attention to his monarch’s susceptibilities; and when he compounded his sins by consistently being late for his audiences at the Palace, the king felt he had every reason to hanker for the more amenable services of Lord Halifax.

It did not last. Churchill – though accommodating the whims of the Palace might seem to come low in his list of priorities – was at heart a devoted monarchist. He quickly came to respect the common sense and balanced judgement of the king. George VI for his part realized that Churchill was indispensable as wartime leader and in time derived great pleasure from his meetings with that ebullient and immensely stimulating statesman. The formal audiences were replaced by casual lunches at which the two talked freely without any servants being present: ‘I could not have a better Prime Minister,’ the king wrote in his diary a few months after Churchill came to power.⁶

The king, too, rejoiced in the fact that at last he had a truly national government. Though he genuinely welcomed the advent of the Labour ministers, he was nevertheless at first somewhat apprehensive. Until the formation of the Coalition government in 1940 he had seen little of them; they were civil enough when met casually but he suspected that revolutionary tendencies might lurk beneath the surface. Getting to know them in wartime quickly disabused him. Nobody could have seemed less like a revolutionary than Clement Attlee; the king found him difficult to communicate with but then so did everyone else, whatever their political allegiance. It was one of the miracles of the age that a man so profoundly uncommunicative should have got to the top of a profession in which to be articulate is generally felt to be a first essential. Ernest Bevin was another matter. George VI enormously appreciated his frankness, good sense and earthy humour. Nor did Herbert Morrison seem threatening; he was less attractive a personality than Bevin but quite as far removed from being an anti-monarchist. Hugh Dalton the king disliked, but then everyone disliked Dalton, not for his political views but because he was so eminently dislikeable. The fact that George VI got to know and trust the socialist members of the coalition was to make things immeasurably easier when he found himself confronted by a Labour government in 1945.

Keeping abreast of the course of the war was important, but did not solve the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: what was a king supposed to do in wartime? He broadcast to the nation on the evening after war was declared and was generally felt to have provided a rallying call of singular potency, but he could not repeat this feat with any regularity. Many of the traditional public appearances of the king were suspended for the duration. He visited the troops and took every chance he could to boost morale and preach the virtues of the Allied cause, but he was underemployed and acutely conscious of the fact.

Everything changed in the autumn of 1940. As the German army surged across Europe and invasion seemed imminent, the king installed shooting ranges at Buckingham Palace and Windsor where he and the queen honed their skills with pistols and tommy guns so as to confront the Germans if they came. There was talk of sending the two princesses to Canada, but the idea was postponed indefinitely; as for the king, if his country were occupied, it was his intention either to die in its defence or, if he was spared, to join the resistance movement and continue the fight. Then began the Blitz on Britain’s cities. The king and queen were indefatigable in touring the districts that had been bombed, picking their way through the debris, visiting people in their shattered homes, condoling, sympathizing, enquiring. It made not the slightest difference to the physical plight of the victims, but the knowledge that they were not forgotten, that the king and queen knew what was going on and wanted to share their misery, made an immeasurable difference to their morale.

In London the German bombers at first concentrated their attacks on the docks and the East End. A suspicion grew that this was a poor man’s war, that there was some tacit understanding between the leaders on both sides that as far as possible the more affluent areas should be spared. Fortunately for the spirit of national unity the Germans extended their attacks to the West End; more fortunately still, they made Buckingham Palace a target. Twice the Palace was hit, once by a lone bomber which some believed was piloted by the king’s cousin, Prince Christopher of Hesse. Neither the king nor the queen was injured, but they were within thirty yards of the second bomb and the windows of the royal apartments were blown in. ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed,’ the queen famously remarked. ‘It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’⁷

In all the palaces, austerity was the order of the day. Every bath had a black line painted on its side to indicate that there should never be more than five inches of water; food and drink were sternly limited – dismayingly so in the eyes of certain visitors, who had hoped that in the Palace at least they might get a decent meal; central heating was eschewed; there should never be more than one light in a bedroom. There was an element of play-acting in this – inevitably the king was better fed and more comfortably housed than the majority of his subjects – but the privations were real and the king’s wish that he should share the sufferings of his subjects was totally sincere.

Like so many of his people, the king also endured the loss of a member of his family. In August 1942 his brother, the Duke of Kent, was killed when the plane in which he was travelling to visit RAF establishments in Iceland crashed in the Scottish mountains. The king had never been particularly close to his brother, who by tastes and temperament was nearer to the Duke of Windsor, but he had got to know him better in the last few years and was shocked by his sudden death. The funeral was at St George’s, Windsor. ‘I have attended very many family funerals in the Chapel,’ wrote the king in his diary, ‘but none which has moved me in the same way.’⁸

‘I wish I had a definite job like you,’ the king had written wistfully to Mountbatten shortly after the outbreak of war.⁹ By 1942 he still had no ‘definite job’ but he had made a place for himself and was taken seriously by Churchill and the other ministers. One innovation for which he was personally responsible was the George Cross. He refused to accept the traditional view that civilians could not be fighting ‘in the face of the enemy’ and were therefore by definition ineligible for any award for gallantry. This might have been true in earlier wars, but how could it still be the case when the Blitz had brought death and destruction to so many British cities? The George Cross and the George Medal were his answer: he not only conceived the idea but was largely responsible for the design of the decorations themselves. Still more imaginative was his suggestion that a George Cross should be awarded collectively to the people of Malta, the Mediterranean island which had endured many months of bombardment and almost unbearable privations. Against the advice of his more cautious counsellors, he insisted on visiting the island himself in June 1942 in the course of a tour he was making of the Allied forces in North Africa. As with his visits to Blitzed cities, his arrival in no way mitigated the plight of the Maltese but it convinced them that their sufferings were known about and appreciated. In the Middle Ages it was believed that the royal touch could cure certain unpleasant diseases. Few would have credited it with such potency in the twentieth century, but the royal presence still had near-magical properties to raise the spirits and enhance the self-respect of those who had been left sorely battered by the war.

The king’s personal relationship with President Roosevelt, though almost as imponderable as his effect on the morale of the people of Malta, was seen by the government as a potent asset, to be used with restraint but to good effect. When a somewhat reluctant Halifax was packed off on the battleship King George V to serve as British ambassador in Washington, the president personally went to welcome him. George VI wrote to thank him; it was, he said, ‘a gesture which I and my countrymen deeply appreciated’.¹⁰ The gesture was quickly reciprocated: when the new American ambassador, J. G. Winant, paid his call at Windsor Castle, the king went to the railway station to meet him. It was the first time that a British monarch had ever gone out to meet a foreign ambassador; ‘and I didn’t even have a battleship,’ wrote Winant wonderingly.¹¹ The gesture was followed up: the king took particular pains to cultivate his friendship with Winant and with the president’s personal envoy, Henry Hopkins. Good republicans and hard-boiled politicians as both men were, they were not likely to be seduced by royal amiability; but it is obvious from their reports that they appreciated the effort and found the king unexpectedly well informed, sensible and easy to talk to.

Meanwhile the king’s relationship with his prime minister became ever closer. The initial differences of opinion over Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken were quickly forgotten, increasingly Churchill consulted George VI about new appointments and on one occasion at least – involving the choice of Lord Cranborne as Dominions Secretary – changed his mind as a result of persuasion from the Palace. The king for his part accepted that this titanic figure in Downing Street was the best, even the only, man to control Britain’s destinies and that the role of the Palace must be to support him. He did not, however, assume Churchill to be immune from criticism. ‘I do not feel at all happy about the present political situation in North Africa,’ he wrote sharply in February 1943.¹² He went on to list his doubts and concluded with his need for ‘an assurance from you that they are being carefully watched’. He got it; Churchill replied with a long and thoughtful memorandum which admitted the force of the king’s misgivings and explained what was being done to counter them. The popular image is of a weak and somewhat ineffective king rubber-stamping the decisions of his dictatorial minister. The reality is more nuanced and more interesting. Churchill was obviously the dominant force in the partnership, but it was a partnership, and the king’s role in it was far from negligible.

George VI’s most significant duty was to be a figurehead, a rallying point which embodied the pride and determination of his country. The problem about this was that Churchill – through his pugnacity, his eloquence, his splendid presence – to some extent usurped the king’s role. He was the focal point: the symbol of Britain’s will to resist to the last man, whatever the odds against it. He would have been dismayed if he had been told that he was thus putting his monarch in the shade; nor did the king, even in the privacy of his diary, ever protest that he was being allotted too small a role. George VI was only human, though; it is hard to believe that he never resented the fact that it was Churchill, Churchill, Churchill all the way while the head of state was left to play a secondary role.

On at least one occasion the king confronted his prime minister and won the day. It related to D-Day, the operation that launched the Second Front in June 1944. Both men conceived the idea that they should take part in the battle, travelling with the immense armada that was to cross the Channel. Without too much difficulty the king was persuaded that this would be a futile enterprise: he would see very little and, more important, by his presence and the need to secure his safety he would distract people who ought to be totally concentrated on their great enterprise. Churchill proved more obstinate. He agreed that the king’s presence would be undesirable but insisted that he would nevertheless go himself. ‘I am very worried over the PM’s seemingly selfish way of looking at the matter,’ the king wrote in his diary.¹³ He brooded over the business for another night and then sent Churchill a further letter. He was a younger man than Churchill, he pointed out, a sailor, and ‘as King head of all three Services. There is nothing I would like better than to go to sea but I have agreed to stop at home; is it fair that you should then do exactly what I should have liked to do myself?’ Possibly Churchill had already begun to weaken in his resolve; grumblingly he gave way. ‘Since Your Majesty does me the honour to be so much concerned about my personal safety,’ he wrote, ‘I must defer to Your Majesty’s wishes and indeed commands.’ There was nobody else whose commands Churchill would have heeded; for the sake of amicable relations between the Palace and No.10 it was probably lucky that the king did not think it necessary to utter such commands on other occasions.

George VI mourned the loss of his younger brother; his elder brother he could well have done without. When war broke out he offered to send a plane to the South of France to collect the Windsors; some unspecified job would then be found for the duke so that he could at least appear to be serving his country. The duke found the offer unappealing and refused it, then thought better of his decision and begged the use of a destroyer to return to England. Any hopes he had that there would be a real reconciliation and that his wife would be received at court were quickly extinguished. Neither the queen nor Queen Mary had any intention of meeting the woman whom the queen still rather uncivilly referred to as ‘Mrs S’. After a few days the duke called on his brother at Buckingham Palace; conveniently, the queen was out of London so no women were included in the meeting.

Remarkably, the king seemed still to labour under the illusion that his brother was a potent force who would gather much popular support if he remained in Britain. To Hore-Belisha he remarked regretfully that all his ancestors had succeeded to the throne after their predecessors had died, but ‘Mine is not only alive, but very much so.’¹⁴ The duke was packed off to France, to serve on a military mission under the command of Major-General Howard Vyse. No one seemed very sure what the mission was supposed to be doing, still less what part in its activities the duke was intended to play. In fact he made himself modestly useful and wrote some quite perceptive reports on the state of the French units which he visited. He quickly concluded, however, that he was wasting his time and that the ruling that he should not be allowed to visit British units not merely made his job impossible but was deliberately insulting. ‘Maybe you hate me and always have,’ he told the king. ‘You have certainly disguised it very well in the past, especially when I was King.’¹⁵

Things changed in May 1940 when the Germans broke through the French lines and put the Allies to rout. Having had little to do before, he now had nothing; he conducted a personal retreat and ended up in Spain. His behaviour up to that point had been, if not commendable, then at least possible to justify; when he now refused to return to Britain without a guarantee that he and his wife would be received at court he had unequivocally gone too far. The king was outraged and at first was inclined to let his brother sink or swim by himself. In the end Churchill suggested that the duke should be made Governor of the Bahamas. He must have some sort of job, the king conceded, ‘and though there may be criticism and the Bahamian ladies won’t like it,’¹⁶ it was at least better than having him at home. It was October 1945 before the two brothers met again.

By that time the Japanese had surrendered and the war was over. The king could congratulate himself on having had what could fairly be called ‘a good war’. He had done everything that had been asked of him and more besides. He had travelled widely, and though his face might not have been the most famous in the country it was known by almost everyone. His broadcasts had moved the nation, not by their eloquence but by the patent sincerity and deep feeling which permeated every sentence. Far more of his subjects than had ever been the case before knew the king and queen, not just as distant images but as live human beings. With the continent in chaos and communism rampant and threatening to take over in France and Italy, it was critically important that there should be political stability in Britain. It was not just thanks to the king that such stability existed, but if the monarchy had been unpopular, if there had been a republican movement of any significance, the task of those who battled to keep Britain on an even keel would have been immeasurably harder.

In wartime it had been evident what everyone had to do; there might be terrible perils to overcome but the path of duty was clearly signposted. With peace the king accepted there would be new and more complicated problems. He would have been superhuman – or plain foolish – if he had not felt apprehensive about the future. In the meantime, though, there was a moment for rejoicing. As always at the climactic moments of modern British history, huge crowds assembled in front of Buckingham Palace, calling for the king. Eight times the king and queen appeared on the balcony to vast applause; they could have done the same eighty times without any abatement of the enthusiasm. Under the escort of a few young Guards officers Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were allowed to venture out to mix with the exultant crowds. ‘Poor darlings, they have never had any fun yet,’ was the king’s final entry in his wartime diary.