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Elizabeth’s dependence on a single instructor for a range of subjects was a limitation, especially as the instructor’s own education went no further than a training college diploma. Other future Queens of England, also born out of the direct line, had been better served. Nevertheless, in the first half of the twentieth century a home-based education for upper class girls was normal rather than exceptional – the British equivalent of binding feet.
There were two rival versions of the Yorks’ approach to the education of their daughters, and we may dismiss one of them, at least in its simple form. According to the first, semi-official, account the Duchess herself closely supervised her daughters’ lessons, and personally devised a timetable which concentrated on relevant subjects, such as foreign languages, scripture, geography, imperial and constitutional history. This account was the one given to the press, especially after the Abdication. According to the second, the Duchess was quite properly concerned that Elizabeth and Margaret should not regard themselves as different from any other children of their background. ‘She never aimed at bringing her daughters up to be more than nicely behaved young ladies,’ reflected Randolph Churchill, after the war.
Sometimes the two versions were combined: the best training for a royal life, it was suggested, was a non-fussy, practical education.
Both, however, agreed on one point: the Duke and Duchess were determined, in the best traditions of the British Royal Family and aristocracy, that their children should not be intellectual. According to a newspaper report, when Elizabeth was ten, a regime which involved only seven and a half hours per week in the schoolroom had been designed with a purpose: to ensure that the elder Princess should avoid becoming a ‘blue-stocking’, with all the terrible consequences that that term of derision implied. With the avoidance of such a fate in mind, her studies had been planned ‘in consultation with the leading educationalists in the country,’ and after consideration by the Cabinet.
If Crawfie is to be believed, the truth was actually more mundane. Whether or not the topic was ever seriously discussed in the Cabinet Room, it caused little anxiety at 145 Piccadilly. The attitude in the York household towards education seems, in general, to have been one of genial casualness, undisturbed in the early years by any premonition of what lay ahead. Crawfie stressed this last point: perhaps seeking a justification for the lack of pedagogic rigour. Nothing seemed less likely, she insisted, than that the two girls would ever have to play an important role in their adult lives, and consequently their parents’ main concern was to give them ‘a happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories stored up against the days that might come and, later, happy marriages.’
If the governess had little choice but to accept the relaxed view of her employers, the same was not true of the children’s formidable royal grandmother. Queen Mary – the most serious member of the Royal Family – made purposeful forays into the Piccadilly schoolroom, and was perturbed by what she found. In an attempt to improve matters, she demanded to see a schedule of lessons, urged that Princess Elizabeth should read ‘the best type of children’s books,’ and often chose them for her. She also thought up ‘instructive amusements’ for the children, like a visit to the Tower of London. ‘It would have been impossible for anyone so devoted to the Monarchy as Queen Mary to lose sight of the future Queen in this favourite grandchild,’ recalled the Countess of Airlie.
This, however, was after the Abdication. Until then, the impact of the Queen’s concern was limited, partly because the Duke took as little active interest in his daughters’ book-learning as the Duchess.
The Duke’s relaxed attitude to female education did not mean, however, that he lacked a social conscience, or sense of royal responsibility. On the contrary: a willingness to keep his own daughters socially cocooned was combined with a strong, even progressive, interest in the plight of children from the urban slums. Before becoming King, as President of the Industrial Welfare (formerly Boys’ Welfare) Association, he was involved in schemes to benefit working-class youth, and he lent his name to the pioneering Duke of York’s Camp – a part paternalist, part egalitarian experiment much in the spirit of the East End universities’ and public schools’ settlements. Each year a hundred public schools and a hundred industrial concerns were invited to send two boys each to a summer holiday camp ‘where all would be on equal terms’.
The aim, in the words of the organizer, Robert Hyde, was to ‘tame young Bolshevists,’
by social mingling: each side of the divide would get to know the other and appreciate its qualities. The Duke made a practice of coming for a day or two and, appropriately clad in shorts and open-necked shirt, joining in the games and singsongs. ‘Class distinction was left outside the camp boundaries,’ observed an admiring journalist.
At the last of the camps, at Abergeldie near Balmoral in 1939, the princesses came daily to take part. One of the happiest and most natural of pre-war royal film clips shows the four of them, parents and daughters, sitting in a throng of laughing, chanting adolescents. It was the kind of educational activity – boisterous, slapstick, communitarian, classless – that appealed to the Duke and he was proud to show it off to his daughters.
This was as close as the princesses ever got, before the war, to any proper contact with ordinary children, middle or working class, of their own age. The question of whether a wider experience might be desirable was discussed, but discarded. For several years, there was whimsical newspaper speculation that Elizabeth might be sent to a girls’ boarding school. When she was seven, the press reported a rumour that – in a daring break with royal precedent – the Princess was about to be enrolled at a preparatory establishment near London, and, furthermore, that ‘one of our larger public schools’ would be her eventual destination.
There was nothing in the story, though it is conceivable that the Duchess, who had spent two terms in her own adolescence at a day school in Chelsea, may have been behind it. A few weeks after the initial report, the Sunday Express announced under the headline ‘Will Never Go to School: Too Embarrassing,’ that the Duchess of York had asked that her elder daughter should go to school, so that she would be ‘brought up like any normal girl’. But after discussion with the King, Queen and Prince of Wales, and consultation with Cabinet ministers – according to the paper – she had been forced to back down.
Such an account is supported by the recollection of Lisa Sheridan, who remembered the Duchess telling her, just before the Abdication, that ‘she regretted her own daughters would not be able to go to school,’ and was concerned that they should grow up naturally and unspoilt.
This conversation, which took place during the brief reign of Edward VIII, coincided with fresh reports of a regal veto. The new King, it was stated, had decided against a school for Elizabeth, in accordance with the wishes of his father who had always been opposed. In addition to deference to a dead Monarch, three other arguments were reckoned to have weighed with the Princess’s uncle: the jealousy the choice of any particular school would cause among schools not so favoured, ‘the question of who would be her schoolmates’ – that is, whether she could be protected from bad influences – and, even more spuriously, her need to study different subjects from those taken by most other girls.
However, neither George V nor his eldest son deserve exclusive blame for the denial to the Princess of the mixed benefits of 1930s boarding school normality. Indeed, their attitude may have been an excuse. Although it would have been difficult for the Duke and Duchess to defy the Head of State, there is no reason why, after his own accession, George VI and his wife could not have reversed the earlier decision, either for their ten-year-old daughter or their six-year-old one, if they had wished to do so.
But there was one aspect of the Princess’s education that was not neglected: in view of the sporting pursuits of her parents, it would have been remarkable if it had been. Surrounded from earliest childhood by horses, and by servants who trained, fed and groomed, and relatives who owned, rode and talked about them, Elizabeth, like many aristocratic little girls, became a keen equestrian. Every account of her infancy suggests that an interest in horses and ponies was almost innate. George V, player of nursery equestrian games, was one influence: it may not be coincidence that Elizabeth’s early interest in horses and ponies followed her grandfather’s greatest racing success, when his filly Scuttle won the 1,000 Guineas in 1928. Her first reported riding ‘lesson’ took place in the private riding school in Buckingham Palace Mews in January 1930, when she was three and a half, under the supervision of the Crown Equerry, Colonel A. E. Erskine.
It was her parents, however, who became her first serious teachers. When she was five, the Duchess led her on Peggy, the Shetland pony given by the King, to a meet of the Pytchley Hounds at Boughton Cover. For a time the stud groom at the Royal Mews took charge of the children’s riding. ‘The Princess will undoubtedly be a keen horse-woman when she grows up,’ it was accurately predicted when she was ten.
In 1938, the royal riding instructor, Horace Smith, took over and began giving the two girls twice-weekly lessons at the Palace, accompanied by his own daughter. Training included mounting exercises, like touching their toes and leaning backwards until they were lying down on their ponies’ backs, to improve their balance and confidence. Smith found Elizabeth, in particular, a good and eager pupil – a conscientious listener, and keen to improve her skills. He also noticed something else: she was as interested in the business of looking after horses as in riding them; and she would ply him with questions about their feeding and management. ‘I think that in those days, when she was twelve years old, her chief interest in life lay in horses,’ Smith later recalled. On one occasion she told him, a sentiment often later repeated, that ‘had she not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs’.
Dogs mattered almost as much as horses: a point which also did not escape royal observers of the day. As ordinary children more often owned dogs than horses, the princesses’ canine interest provided, in some ways, a stronger bond. It quickly became established that not only did Elizabeth and Margaret Rose like dogs, they had a special feeling, and even an empathy, for them. Articles and books about royal caninism became a genre. ‘. . . [F]ew people realise the marked similarity between the unaffected sincerity that so delightfully characterizes these royal but very human children, and the cheerful contentment of their dogs,’ reflected an especially liquid work called Our Princesses and their Dogs in 1936. ‘I doubt if I have ever encountered dogs who shared with their owners a quieter or serener companionship.’
Photographs of the children mercilessly mothering plump corgis – the family’s favourite breed – filled the picture papers.
But it was the horse world that always took precedence. With Princess Elizabeth, horses were more than an interest: they became a passion, even an obsession. Rooms and corridors, first at 145 Piccadilly, then at Buckingham Palace, were filled with an expanding collection of toy and ornamental horses, of every material and size. Not just the indulgent old King but the governess as well were cajoled into the performance of equine role-play. A favourite game was to harness Crawfie with reins, as if she were pulling a grocery cart. Then she would be patted, given a nosebag, jerked to a standstill, or instructed to paw the ground. If the weather was cold enough for her nostrils to steam, so much the better. Sometimes, however, Elizabeth would weary of this ritual. She herself would become the horse, and make ‘convincing little whinnying noises’. At other times, she and her sister would sit for hours at the window at 145 Piccadilly, watching for horses in the street.
Were animals a substitute for other children? Her governess, in describing such pursuits, clearly implied that they were – indeed the idea of a ‘poor little rich girl’ who lived a well-ordered, comfortable, but isolated life is central to her account. The two images of simplicity and loneliness are juxtaposed. On the one hand, there is a stress on the gap between the luxury people imagined royalty to enjoy, and their disciplined real lives; on the other, Crawfie often describes the yearning of the girls to be just like other children, with the same kind of fun. In her version of the princesses’ childhood, bedtimes were early, treats were few, seaside holidays rare, pantomimes visited only once a year. Other children seldom came to tea. For a time, Elizabeth made ‘rather special friends’ with the daughter of an eminent radiologist who happened to be a neighbour, but this unusual relationship ended when the child was sent away to school. It was, according to Crawfie, difficult for the children to gain other companions. The Duke of York was a private and unassuming man who, although he did not shun social life, did not seek it either. He and his wife rarely dined out or went to the cinema or theatre, and he was perfectly content to spend the evening at the family hearth, with his wife and daughters, indulging his hobby of needlework, pursued with such diligence that, during one burst of embroidering activity, he made a dozen chair covers in petit point for Royal Lodge. The impression is of cosiness, but also of domestic claustrophobia.
Perhaps such a picture of seclusion was exaggerated, and related as much to Miss Crawford’s home-sickness for Scotland as to the actual feelings of her charges. Meetings with the offspring of suitable parents, mostly relatives and courtiers, did occur. Elizabeth seemed to mix with them happily and naturally. Yet there seems always to have been a gulf, unavoidably imposed by convention, which stood in the way of equality. Patricia Mountbatten remembers Elizabeth coming to tea as a little girl of five or six with curly blonde hair, at her parents’ London home. She recalls a child like any other – except that she attracted special interest among the adults. There was a buzz of excitement among the nannies and governesses. ‘She wasn’t just another child of friends of my parents. She created a little flutter.’
An aristocratic contemporary remembers meeting Elizabeth for the first time at his birthday party when they were both three. He had received a pedal car as a present, and his father insisted that he should let her ride in it. ‘She was a princess,’ he says. ‘You knew she was different.’
AS ELIZABETH grew, interest in her increased. Visitors inspected her closely and seldom failed to remark afterwards on her beauty and poise, and on a precocious maturity achieved (so it was said) without loss of childish innocence. At the same time, a constitutionally convenient contrast was drawn between her own character, and that of her younger sister. Crawfie was later blamed for inventing this distinction, but that is unfair. Long before the publication of her book, it had been firmly implanted in the public mind. The roguishness of Elizabeth faded, especially as her destiny became apparent, and weightier qualities took over. Early in the reign of George VI, one writer compared the artistic and musical leanings of Margaret with the ‘serious turn of mind’ of Elizabeth, who also had an aptitude for languages. In disposition, it was noted, the elder Princess was ‘quiet, unassuming and friendly, yet she has inherited a dignity which properly becomes her position.’
In a book published in 1939, the journalist Beverley Baxter wrote of Margaret’s talents as a mimic, and Elizabeth’s tendency to frown on ‘her sister’s instinct to burlesque, while secretly enjoying it’.
Margaret was presented as impish and whimsical, Elizabeth as dutiful and responsible. ‘Margaret’s capacity for mischief, practical joking and mimicry,’ maintained a typical account in 1940, produced an elder-sister sense in Elizabeth.
On one point there was unanimity: individually and together, roguish and responsible, the princesses were a credit to their parents and the nation. ‘A perfectly delicious pair,’ wrote the diplomat Miles Lampson in his diary in 1934 after seeing the two girls at Birkhall, the Georgian house above the river Muick on the Balmoral Estate, lent by the King to the Duke and Duchess of York four years earlier. ‘I have seldom seen such an enchanting child as Princess Elizabeth.’
Their ageing royal grandfather felt the same. ‘All the children looked so nice,’ he wrote after the celebration of his Silver Jubilee in July 1935, ‘but none prettier than Lilibet and Margaret.’
The prettiness of the royal little girls – much more than the handsomeness of the Lascelles little boys – represented youth and renewal, and became one of the symbols of the Jubilee. It was a carnival time, but also a display of recovered national confidence, after the worst of the economic crisis. At the heart of the festivities was the King who – in his proud virtue, sound political judgement, unrelenting philistinism and limited intelligence – stood for so much in an Empire that stretched around the globe: country, deity, family and social order. The crowds were hard to contain.
The nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth was photographed in a carriage with the rheumy-eyed Monarch, grandfather to his peoples as well as to the child beside him. Not since the reign of Queen Victoria, and seldom even then, had a sovereign been so revered (and never, a sceptic might have remarked, on the basis of so modest an achievement). Yet the reverence pointed backwards: Elizabeth stood for the future beyond the present reign. Her portrait appeared on Jubilee stamps, and her personality and looks were compared with those of the erect, austere figure of the Queen. Her appearance, and character, were moulded in the press accounts to fit the requirements of the hour. ‘Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, with regular features,’ was an appropriate assessment, ‘happy-natured but serious and quietly dignified.’
Observing the enthusiasm of the massed well-wishers, the King was reported to be deeply moved. An uplifting year, however, had also worn him out. On Christmas Day he delivered his crackling wireless message to subjects all over the world, but with a noticeably weak voice. Over the next few days, he walked painfully in the estate at Sandringham, stopping every hundred yards to catch his breath. In the evenings, he had just enough energy left to play with his granddaughters.
Elizabeth had brought cheer to George V during his illness seven years earlier: once again, she appears in the stories told about him. Lord Dawson, the King’s physician, later recounted how, as the end approached, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, asked the Princess if she would like to walk with him in the garden at Sandringham. ‘Yes, very much,’ she supposedly replied, ‘but please do not tell me anything more about God. I know all about him already.’
F. J. Corbett, formerly Deputy Comptroller of Supply at Buckingham Palace, wrote that the last time he saw George V was on the private golf course at Sandringham, a few days after Christmas. ‘Out of the mist came the King, mounted on his white pony, Jock,’ he recalled. ‘Walking by the head of the pony, as if leading it along, was the little figure of Princess Elizabeth. She was taking her grandfather back to the house.’
On 17 January the princesses returned to Royal Lodge. The Duke of York had his own cause for anxiety in an age before antibiotics, for the Duchess was recovering from an attack of pneumonia. They had barely got home, however, when the Duke was summoned to his father’s bedside. On 20 January, the King died, surrounded by the Queen and his children. Three days later his body was brought with great solemnity to London, and laid in state in the Palace of Westminster, where hundreds of thousands of mourners filed past. Four officers of the Brigade of Guards stood at the corners of the catafalque. On the last night, these were replaced by the dead King’s four sons, including his successor and the Duke of York, each in uniform. Princess Elizabeth was taken by her mother to witness this extraordinary vigil, and to contemplate the coffin of her ‘Grandpa England’. On 29 January, she attended the funeral at Windsor.
The accession of Princess Elizabeth’s young, popular, forward-looking Uncle David as Edward VIII revived the monarchical excitement of the Jubilee. Such an event brings turmoil at Court, similar to the ferment at No. 10 Downing Street caused by the change of a Prime Minister. The hierarchy is turned upside down. Established officials fear for their jobs, or wonder whether the time has come to retire from them. The transition from the predictable George V to his febrile son was a particularly traumatic break, and it sent a tremor through the ranks of the old courtiers. Ancient customs were abandoned, rules and formalities were impatiently relaxed. The Queen was dispatched to live in Marlborough House, and unexpected faces appeared at the Palace.
The new reign also focused attention, with added intensity, on the Yorks. On the margins of the main performance, they continued to enjoy an adequate privacy. A few weeks into the new reign, Harold Nicolson, official biographer of George V, spoke to the Duchess of York at the house of a mutual friend. He talked to her for some time, without recognizing her.
However, such anonymity could not last long, for the death of the old King, and the persistent bachelorhood of his replacement, brought the Duke of York a step closer to the throne. It also aroused a new kind of interest in his elder daughter. There was still no publicly acknowledgeable reason for expecting Elizabeth ever to become Queen. Yet her place in the line of succession had become much more than a statistic. It began to give rise to speculation, and romantic projection.
What if the King never married? In the run-up to the Coronation, such a possibility was tentatively aired. One commentator suggested that a female Sovereign would be rapturously welcomed, and argued that this in itself was a reason why meddlers into the King’s private affairs should not seek to push him into matrimony. ‘They do not realise how many of their fellow-subjects would, however respectfully, feel half sorry at such an event, however auspicious. It might deprive us of Elizabeth II.’
A similar thought may have occurred to Archbishop Lang, who had discussed (or refrained from discussing) theology with the Princess at Sandringham in January, and who stayed as a guest of the Yorks at Birkhall in the summer. At a time when the new King was becoming a serious worry, he was reassured by what he saw. ‘The children – Lilliebet, Margaret Rose and Margaret Elphinstone – joined us,’ he recorded. ‘They sang some action-songs most charmingly. It was strange to think of the destiny which may be awaiting the little Elizabeth, at present second from the Throne. She and her lively little sister are certainly most entrancing children.’
Yet, at first, life for ‘the little ladies of 145 Piccadilly’ did not alter. It may have been a symptom of her upward mobility that a marble portrait bust of Princess Elizabeth was commissioned in the spring of 1936. Over the next two years, Miss Crawford accompanied the child no fewer than eighteen times to the studio of the Hungarian sculptor Zsigmond Strobl in Pembroke Walk. Lajos Lederer, a Hungarian journalist employed to make conversation with her during these tedious sessions, recalled her as highly talkative, and extremely knowledgeable on the subject of thoroughbred horses.
Otherwise, the only direct effect on the princesses of the accession seemed to be that they saw less of their uncle, previously one of the Yorks’ few frequent callers. The Duke and Duchess, though aware of gathering clouds, continued to ride, garden and embroider, much as before. Lisa Sheridan, visiting their London house before they left for Scotland, was led by a footman into the garden, where she found Princess Elizabeth and her mother feeding a family of ducklings which had wandered in through the railings from the adjoining park.
There was no immediate mention of Wallis Simpson. When, eventually, the King’s American companion was invited to tea at Royal Lodge, nothing was said about the significance of the visit. But Uncle David seemed to have lost interest in his nieces.
For some time, there had been ‘King-tattle’ – gossip which, as one loyalist claimed indignantly, ‘rages without respect to decency and perhaps probability,’ but which did not get into print.
The reason was not so much the laws of libel, as the fear of breaking a taboo. Editors and proprietors calculated that the opportunity was not worth the short-term boost in sales. ‘No respectable paper would have thought it good circulation policy to print scandalous news about the Royal Family,’ observed the anti-monarchist editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, afterwards. ‘It would no doubt have sold for the moment, but it would have led to a storm of protest from readers.’
There was also a gap between the business side of running newspapers – whose circulation policy made use of incentives like free gifts and insurance policies to attract readers – and the editorial side, which held aloof. ‘Editors were a traditional lot,’ says Sir Edward Pickering, then on the Mirror, and later a leading editor and newspaper director. ‘They didn’t look on circulation in the way they do today. They felt themselves above all that.’
On this occasion they were also afraid of a backlash, in view of the popularity of a Monarch who, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, ‘was idolized as few men outside the Orient ever have been’.
Yet the gossip was pervasive, the more virulent because of the gap between what those in the King’s circle knew and the messages of the headlines and newsreels. ‘Those who most strenuously maintained a decorous loyalty in public,’ recalled Martin, ‘were the most avaricious of scandal about the Monarchy in private.’
Princess Elizabeth may have been ignorant of what was going on, and the Duke and Duchess never spoke of it, but according to Crawfie, ‘it was plain to everyone there was a sudden shadow over the house’.
The whole Royal Family, together with the whole political and Church Establishment, and many ordinary people, were shocked and appalled by the prospect of an abdication, which seemed to strike at the heart of the constitution. But nowhere was it viewed with greater abhorrence than at 145 Piccadilly. According to his official biographer, the Duke of York viewed the possibility, and then the likelihood, of his own succession with ‘unrelieved gloom’.
The accounts of witnesses suggest that this is a gross understatement: desperation and near-panic would be more accurate. To succeed to a throne you neither expected nor wanted, because of the chance of birth and the irresponsibility of a brother! Apart from the accidents of poverty and ill health, it is hard to think of a more terrible and unjust fate.
Alan (‘Tommy’) Lascelles, assistant private secretary to Edward VIII and later private secretary to George VI, wrote privately that he feared Bertie would be so upset by the news, he might break down.
There were lurid stories: that the Duke of York had refused to succeed, and that Queen Mary had agreed to act as Regent for Princess Elizabeth.
Rumours circulated in the American press that the Duke was epileptic (and that Princess Margaret was deaf and dumb).
There was also a whispering campaign, in which Wallis Simpson played a part, that he had ‘a slow brain’ which did not take on ideas quickly and that he was mentally unfit for the job.
On 27th October, when Mrs Simpson obtained a decree nisi, the shadow darkened. The Duke braced himself for the catastrophe, as he saw it, that was about to befall his family and himself. ‘If the worst happens & I have to take over,’ he wrote, with courage, to a courtier on 25 November, ‘you can be assured that I will do my best to clear up the inevitable mess, if the whole fabric does not crumble under the shock and strain of it all.’
Meanwhile, Crawfie and the children took refuge from the atmosphere of tension by attending swimming lessons at the Bath Club, with the Duke and Duchess sometimes turning up to watch.
A week later, the press’s self-imposed embargo on ‘King-tattle’ broke, and the headlines blazoned the name of Mrs Simpson. The Royal Archives contain a chronicle, written by Bertie, which shows the extent of his misery, bordering on hysteria, as he awaited what felt like an execution. In it, he describes a meeting with his mother on December 9th, when the Abdication had become inevitable, and how ‘when I told her what had happened I broke down and sobbed like a child’. There are few more poignant testimonies in the annals of the modern Monarchy than George VI’s account of the occasion he most feared, but could do nothing to prevent:
‘I . . . was present at the fateful moment which made me D’s successor to the Throne. Perfectly calm D signed 5 or 6 copies of the instrument of Abdication & then 5 copies of his message to Parliament, one for each Dominion Parliament. It was a dreadful moment & one never to be forgotten by those present . . . I went to R.L. [Royal Lodge] for a rest . . . But I could not rest alone & returned to the Fort at 5.45. Wigram was present at a terrible lawyer interview . . . I later went to London where I found a large crowd outside my house cheering madly. I was overwhelmed.’
A kind of fatalism took over the Duke, now the King, as the Court which had surrounded – and sought to protect and restrain – his brother, enveloped him, guiding him through the ceremonies of the next few days. There was nothing he could do, except what he was told, and nothing for his family to do except offer sympathy. According to Crawfie’s account, the princesses hugged their father before he left 145 Piccadilly, ‘pale and haggard,’ for the Privy Council in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet.
To Parliament and the Empire, and the man now called Duke of Windsor, the Abdication Crisis was over. But for King George VI and, though she did not yet appreciate it, his elder daughter, Heiress Presumptive to the Throne, it had just begun.
Chapter 3
SIXTY YEARS LATER, it is still hard to assess the impact of the Abdication of Edward VIII. Arguably it had very little. In the short run, politics was barely affected; there was no last minute appeal by the resigning Monarch for public support, as some had feared there might be; no ‘King’s party’ was put together to back him. Indeed, the smooth management of the transition was a cause for congratulation, and was taken to show the resilience of the Monarchy, and the adaptability of the constitution. Even social critics regarded it as evidence of English establishment solidarity. ‘To engineer the abdication of one King and the enthronement of another in six days,’ wrote Beatrice Webb, ‘without a ripple of mutual abuse within the Royal Family or between it and the Government, or between the Government and the Opposition, or between the governing classes and the workers, was a splendid achievement, accepted by the Dominions and watched by the entire world of foreign states with amazed admiration.’
Nevertheless, it has always been treated as a turning point, and in an important sense it was one. It broke a spell.
In the past, public treatment of the private behaviour of members of the Royal Family had contained a double standard. Since the days of Victoria and Albert, the personal life of royalty had been regarded as, by definition, irreproachable; while at the same time occasionally giving cause for disapproval or hilarity – as in the case of Edward VII when Prince of Wales, and his elder son, the Duke of Clarence. Not since the early nineteenth century, however, had it been a serious constitutional issue. The Abdication made it one – giving to divorce, and to sexual misconduct and marital breakdown, a resonance in the context of royalty, which by the 1930s it was beginning to lose among the upper classes at large. At the same time the dismissal of a King provided a sharp reminder that British monarchs reigned on sufferance, and that the pomp and sycophancy counted for nothing if the rules were disobeyed. During the crisis, there was talk of the greater suitability for the throne of the Duke of Kent – as if the Monarchy was by appointment. It came to nothing, but the mooting of such a notion indicated what the great reigns of the past hundred years had tended to obscure – that Parliament had absolute rights, and that the domestic affections of the Royal Family were as much a part of the tacit contract between Crown and people as everything else.
In theory, the British Monarchy was already, and had long been, little more than a constitutional convenience. How could it be otherwise, with a Royal Family whose position had so frequently depended on parliamentary buttressing, or on a parliamentary decision to pass over a natural claimant in favour of a more appropriate minor branch? ‘If there was a mystic right in any one,’ as Walter Bagehot put it dryly in 1867, ‘that right was plainly in James II.’
Yet, in practice, there had been accretions of sentiment and loyalty which had allowed the obscure origins of the reigning dynasty to be forgotten. As a result, a traditional right or legitimacy had replaced a ‘divine’ one, and a great sanctity had attached to laws of succession unbroken for more than two centuries. The Abdication cut through all this like a knife – taking the Monarchy back as far as 1688, when Parliament had deprived a King of his throne on the grounds of his unfitness for it.
On that occasion, the official explanation was that James II had run away – though in reality there were other reasons for wishing to dispose of a monarch who caused political and sectarian division. In 1936, the ostensible cause of the King’s departure was his refusal to accept the advice of his ministers that he could not marry a divorced woman. Yet the Government’s position was also regarded as a moral, and not just a technical or legalistic one. The King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson was seen as symptomatic. The nation, as one commentator put it, took a dim view of tales of frivolity, luxury and ‘an un-English set of nonceurs’, associated with the new King and minded seeing its throne ‘provide a music-hall turn for low foreign newspapers’.
Although the decision to force Edward VIII to choose between marriage and his crown was reluctant, it was accompanied by a hope and belief that his successor – well-married, and with a family life that commanded wide approval – would set a better example.
But the Monarchy would never be the same again. ‘All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,’ Jimmy Maxton, leader of the left-wing Independent Labour Party, reminded the House of Commons, ‘could not put Humpty-Dumpty back again.’
Not only was the experience regarded, by all concerned, as chastening: there was also a feeling that, though the Monarchy would survive, it had been irrevocably scrambled. Even if George VI had possessed a more forceful character, the circumstances of his accession would have taken from the institution much of its former authority. As it was, the Monarchy could never again be (in the words of a contemporary writer) ‘so socially aggressive, so pushy’ as under George V;
nor could it be so brash as under Edward VIII, whose arrival ‘hatless from the air,’ in John Betjeman’s words, had signalled a desire to innovate. After the Abdication, George VI felt a need to provide reassurance, and to behave with a maximum of caution, as if the vulgar lifting of skirts in the autumn of 1936 had never happened. Yet there could be no simple return to the old position of the Monarch as morally powerful arbitrator, a role played by George V as recently as 1931. Under George VI, royal interventions, even minor ones, diminished. The acceptance of a cypher-monarchy, almost devoid of political independence, began in 1936.
If the Abdication was seen as a success, this was partly because of an accurate assessment that the genetic dice had serendipitously provided a man who would perform the functions of his office in the dutifully subdued way required of him. Indeed, not only the disposition of the Duke of York but the familial virtues of both himself and his wife had been a key element in the equation. The point had been made by Edward VIII in his farewell broadcast, to soften the blow of his departure, when he declared that his brother ‘has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children.’
It was also stressed by Queen Mary, when she commended her daughter-in-law as well as her second son to the nation. ‘I know,’ she said with feeling and with meaning, ‘that you have already taken her children to your hearts.’
Everybody appreciated that if the next in line had happened to be a footloose bachelor or wastrel, the outcome might have been very different. As it was, the Duke of York – despite, but perhaps also because of, his personal uncertainties – turned out to be well suited to the difficult task of doing very little conscientiously: a man, in the words of a contemporary eulogizer, ‘ordinary enough, amazing enough, to find it natural and sufficient all his life to know only the sort of people a Symbol King ought to know,’ and, moreover, one who ‘needs no private life different from what it ought to be.’
To restore a faith in the Royal Family’s dedication to duty: that was George VI’s single most important task. There was a sense of treading on eggshells, and banishing the past. As the Coronation approached, the regrettable reason for the King’s accession was glossed over in the souvenir books, and delicately avoided in speeches. The monarchist historian Sir Charles Petrie observed a few years later that there was a tendency to forget all about it, ‘and particularly has this been the case in what may be described as official circles’.
It was partly because the memory of the episode was acutely painful to the King and Queen, as well as to Queen Mary, but it was also because of the embarrassment Edward VIII’s abdication caused to the dynasty, and the difficulty of incorporating an act of selfishness into the seamless royal image. Burying the trauma, however, did not dispose of it, and the physical survival of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – unprotected by a Court, and often teetering on the brink of indiscretion or indecorum – provided a disquieting shadow, reminding the world of an alternative dynastic story.
By contrast, the existence of ‘the little ladies of 145 Piccadilly’ gave the new Royal Family a trump card. If, in the eyes of the public, the Duchess of Windsor was cast as a seductress, the little ladies offered cotton-clad purity, innocence and, in the case of Princess Elizabeth, hope. It greatly helped that her virtues, described by the press since babyhood, were already well-known. What if she had inherited her uncle’s characteristics instead of her father’s? Fortunately the stock of attributes provided by the sketch-writers did not admit of such a possibility. The ten-and-a-half-year-old Heiress Presumptive, it was confidently observed, possessed ‘great charm and a natural unassuming dignity’. The world not only already knew, but already loved her, and hoped that one day she would ‘rule the world’s greatest Empire’ as Queen.
The discovery that she had become a likely future Monarch, instead of somebody close to the throne with an outside chance of becoming one, seems to have been absorbed by Princess Elizabeth gradually. Although her father’s accession, and the elimination of doubt about the equal rights of royal daughters, placed her first in line, it was not yet certain that she would ever succeed. When Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent was told of her expectations at almost precisely the same age in March 1830, she was reported by her governess to have replied ‘I will be good’. According to Lady Strathmore, when Princess Elizabeth received the news, she ‘was ardently praying for a brother’.
It was still imaginable: the Queen was only thirty-six at the time of the Coronation in May 1937, and shortly before it a rumour spread that she was pregnant.
Increasingly, however, a view of the future with Princess Elizabeth as Monarch was widely accepted. There was even some speculation that Elizabeth might be given the title of Princess of Wales.
According to her sister, the change of status was something they knew about, but did not discuss. ‘When our father became King,’ recalls Princess Margaret, ‘I said to her, “Does that mean you’re going to be Queen?” She replied, “Yes, I suppose it does.” She didn’t mention it again.’
There was also the matter of where they lived. According to Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth reacted with horror when she was told that they were moving to Buckingham Palace. ‘What – you mean for ever?’ According to Princess Margaret, the element of physical disruption was limited. 145 Piccadilly was only a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, and they had often gone over to see their grandparents, and to play in the garden.
Perhaps the distrust was more in the mind of the governess, who likened setting up home in the Palace to ‘camping in a museum’.
The living quarters were, in any case, soon domesticated after the long era of elderly kings and queens. Elizabeth’s menagerie of toy horses acquired a new setting; and a room overlooking the Palace lawns, which had briefly been her nursery in 1927, was established as a schoolroom.
More important than the change of location was the ending of a way of life. In the months before the Coronation, public attention became unrelenting. Outside the railings at Buckingham Palace, a permanent crowd formed. Inside them, it was impossible to keep up the illusion of being an ordinary family. At 145 Piccadilly, there had been few visitors, most of whom were personal friends. At the Palace, the King had to see visitors or take part in functions for much of the day, and the Queen was busy every afternoon. Before, the little girls had been able to take walks in the park and play with the children of neighbours. At the Palace, royal headquarters of an Empire, there were no neighbours and different standards applied. A famous anecdote illustrated the change. Princess Elizabeth discovered that merely by walking in front of a sentry on ceremonial duty, she could make him present arms; and having made the discovery, she could not resist walking backwards and forwards to see it repeated.
There was a sense of constraint, as well as of power. According to Lajos Lederer, the accession brought an immediate change to Princess Elizabeth’s previously relaxed sittings for Strobl. A detective now accompanied her everywhere, a policeman was always outside, and she ‘no longer referred to Mummy and Papa, but spoke of the King and Queen’.
The Queen seems to have been responsible for taking customary formalities seriously, and seeing that her children did so too. According to Dermot Morrah (a trusted royal chronicler), she insisted ‘that even in the nursery some touches of majesty were not out of place, an argument that had the full approval of Queen Mary’.
One ‘touch of majesty’ involved the serving of nursery meals by two scarlet-liveried footmen. In addition, though nursery food was mainly ‘plain English cooking,’ the menu, for some reason, was in French.
The biggest strain for the Royal Family, however, was the almost intolerable pressure placed upon the new King as he came to terms with his unsought and unwelcome role. ‘It totally altered their lives,’ according to Lady Mountbatten. ‘To begin with, the King would come home very worried and upset.’
George VI’s speech impediment, always a handicap, became a nightmare, and every public appearance a cause of suffering. Although British journalists tactfully avoided mentioning it, foreign ones were less reticent. To the American press, suspicious that the real reason for the Abdication was Mrs Simpson’s American nationality, he remained ‘the stuttering Duke of York’.
The Queen had always taken pleasure from public occasions, and continued to display a much-admired serenity: but the King at first seemed so gauche and unhappy that doubts were raised about whether he could get through his Coronation.
HE MANAGED it none the less. In the early spring of 1937, British newspapers which had loyally kept silent about Mrs Simpson, now loyally built up George VI as a ‘George V second edition’.
Yet there was a sense of him not just as the substitute but also as a reluctant Monarch. Kingsley Martin summed up the mood thus, apostrophizing the thoughts of a supposedly typical member of the public: ‘We would still prefer to cheer Edward, but we know that we’ve got to cheer George. After all, it’s Edward’s fault that he’s not on the throne, and George didn’t ask to get there. He’s only doing his duty, and it’s up to us to show that we appreciate it.’
Martin noted a feeling of relief and sympathy, as much as of rejoicing, and of healing a personal wound.
The Coronation itself had a wider function than the consecration of a new King. It was also Britain putting its best face to the world – the more urgently so because of the international crisis which overshadowed the royal one. Many commentators, viewing the celebration with its hotch-potch of religion, nostalgia, mumbo-jumbo and military display, saw it simultaneously as a reminder to potential aggressors of British imperial might and a reaffirmation of British freedom. For such purposes, the Empire was unblinkingly described as if it were a democratic, almost a voluntary, association.
Comparisons were proudly drawn between the symbols of liberty parading through the streets of London, and the choreographed vulgarities of European fascism. One fervent royalist saw George VI’s Coronation as ‘a pageant more splendid than any dictators can put on: beating Rome and Nuremberg hollow at their own bewildering best, and with no obverse side of compulsion or horror’.
The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski reckoned it a sound investment, as ‘a ceremonial display of the greatness, power and wealth of Britain,’ generating ‘an increased feeling of security, of stability, and the permanence of the British Empire’.
Even the Left was impressed. Kingsley Martin agreed with the view that the British Establishment had upstaged Goebbels – and suggested that the propaganda purpose of the procession and festivities was to show that the Empire was still as strong and united as in 1914, and that Britain suffered from less class conflict than any other nation.
