The Queen Mother (121 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
The shock was perhaps the greater because the past two generations of her own family had enjoyed and celebrated long marriages. When she was three years old her grandparents had celebrated their Golden Wedding, and in 1931 she had helped her own parents do the same. Instead of being able to repeat this pattern, after only twenty-eight years of marriage, the husband who adored her had died at the age of fifty-six.
Throughout the early weeks of her bereavement she was comforted by the letters of love and sympathy that poured in from friends, relations and strangers. Churchill was eloquent as always: ‘All feel how Yr Majesty’s devotion & love made it possible for him to reach the pinnacle on wh. he stood at his death. There must be some comfort in this. But then there is the future. Boundless hopes are centred in yr daughter’s gleaming personality & reign; and these will find enduring expression in the place Yr Majesty will hold in all our thoughts as long as we live.’
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His wife Clementine was scarcely less moved, saying that she wrote ‘to express our love and gratitude to you Madam for all you both have given us all the years of your Marriage. You have shewn us what family life can be, not merely a domestic state, but a warm glowing existence full of interest and variety.’
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She was right; their obvious celebration of family life was one of the qualities which had most endeared the King and Queen to the people of Britain.
Tributes came from America, too. General Eisenhower sent a three-page letter, expressing admiration for the King and devotion to Queen Elizabeth.
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Eleanor Roosevelt wrote with understanding: ‘There is nothing one can say to lighten the burden of your sorrow. Later you may be able to think with happiness of the life of service you & the King lived together & then you may be glad to feel how many, many of us appreciated the King’s great qualities & were grateful for what you both meant to the world, as well as to your own people. May God give you faith & strength & consolation.’
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When the Duke of Windsor heard the news of his brother’s death he immediately sailed from New York, where he was staying, to attend the funeral. His Duchess remained behind and advised him less than delicately, ‘Now that the door has opened a crack try and get your foot in, in the hope of making it open even wider in the future because that is the best hope for WE [Wallis and Edward] … Do not mention
or ask for anything regarding recognition of me.’
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She urged him to see Queen Elizabeth and try to explain what he had felt at the time of the abdication. ‘After all there are two sides to every story.’
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Queen Mary added her own grieving voice on the Duke’s behalf. She wrote to Queen Elizabeth to ‘beg & beseech of you & the girls to see him & to bury the hatchet after
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whole years … I gather D. is awfully upset as in old days the 2 brothers were devoted to each other before that dreadful rift came. I feel grieved to have to add this extra burden on you 3 just at this moment but what can I do & I feel that you are so kind hearted that you will help me over what is to me a most worrying moment in the midst of the misery & suffering we are going through just now.’
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Queen Elizabeth was not enthusiastic but, together with her daughters and Prince Philip, she did see the Duke, who came to tea at Buckingham Palace on 13 February, the day of his arrival. ‘So that feud is over I hope, a great relief to me,’ Queen Mary wrote to the Athlones.
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That was perhaps over-optimistic. But, before he left, the Duke wrote to Queen Elizabeth asking to see her again, this time alone. ‘I can well understand your not wanting to be bothered by people at this terribly sad moment in your life. But I would very much like to have a talk with you alone before I return to America … I feel for you so very deeply and would like to say so in person.’
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She reluctantly agreed, and he called on her at Buckingham Palace on 27 February.
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The Duke himself made notes of his meetings with his estranged family. ‘Mama as hard as nails but failing,’ he wrote. ‘When Queens fail they make less sense than others in the same state. Cookie [the Windsors’ unflattering nickname for Queen Elizabeth] listened without comment and closed on the note that it was nice to be able to talk about Bertie with somebody who had known him so well.’ Writing to his wife, he said, ‘Cookie was as sugar as I’ve told you,’ and went on to write in bitter and insulting terms of his family’s coldness to him, describing his mother and sister-in-law bitterly as ‘ice-veined bitches’.
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Notwithstanding such private thoughts, a few weeks later, in May, he sent Queen Elizabeth another apparently affectionate letter asking to see her on his next visit to London.
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She agreed and invited him to tea on 27 May, as she did once again in November that year.
Despite the depth of her grief, in outward matters Queen Elizabeth showed fortitude. Less than a fortnight after the death of the King, she announced that in future she wished to be known as ‘Queen Elizabeth
The Queen Mother’, although privately she disliked the title – ‘horrible name’, as she described it.
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With the help of Tommy Lascelles, she drafted an eloquent, personal message to the nation. The left-leaning
News Chronicle
called it ‘a statement without parallel in the history of kingship’.
I want to send this message of thanks to a great multitude of people – to you who, from all parts of the world, have been giving me your sympathy and affection throughout these dark days. I want you to know how your concern for me has upheld me in my sorrow, and how proud you have made me by your wonderful tributes to my dear husband, a great and noble King.
No man had a deeper sense than he of duty and of service, and no man was more full of compassion for his fellow men. He loved you all, every one of you, most truly. That, you know, was what he always tried to tell you in his yearly message at Christmas; that was the pledge that he took at the sacred moment of his Coronation fifteen years ago.
Now I am left alone, to do what I can to honour that pledge without him. Throughout our married life we have tried, the King and I, to fulfil with all our hearts and all our strength the great task of service that was laid upon us. My only wish now is that I may be allowed to continue the work we sought to do together.
I commend to you our dear Daughter: give her your loyalty and devotion: though blessed in her husband and children she will need your protection and your love in the great and lonely station to which she has been called. God bless you all: and may He in His wisdom guide us safely to our true destiny of Peace and Good Will.
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*
H
EREDITARY MONARCHY
can be both efficient and unkind, as the old phrase ‘The King is dead, long live the King’, suggests. The real national sorrow at the death of King George VI was immediately followed by happiness at the prospect of the young Queen coming to the throne. The torch had been passed to a new generation.
But this meant that the Queen Mother was now, in effect, the
ancien regime
. She suddenly found that she was no longer the mistress of any home. Buckingham Palace was a tied cottage – as well as a tied
office – for the monarch, and the Queen and Prince Philip would need to move from Clarence House into the Palace where the King and Queen had lived since 1937. The Queen Mother would have to find another house in London and she could no longer consider Windsor Castle, Balmoral or Sandringham home.
The prospect of leaving the Palace distressed her. On at least one occasion she collapsed in tears on discussing her inevitable move with the Queen – and immediately wrote to apologize. She suggested to the Queen that she and Prince Philip should move into the Belgian Suite on the ground floor of the Palace – these were the rooms which the King and Queen had occupied during the war. That would give her time to move out of her own rooms on the first floor ‘without any ghastly hurry, and I could be quite self contained upstairs, meals etc, and you would hardly know I was there … It is so angelic of you both to tell me I can stay on for a bit at B.P., and I am most grateful for your thoughtfulness. I know that it took Granny some months to pack up everything, & I fear that I shall need some time too. But what is a few months in a lifetime anyway! Thank you darling for being such an angelic daughter.’
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Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary continued to sustain each other and, in Queen Mary’s eloquent words, they talked together ‘of much that was in our poor tattered hearts’.
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Queen Elizabeth’s doctor, Sir John Weir, sent her some homeopathic powders that he thought might relieve her suffering.
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Edward Woods, the Bishop of Lichfield, wrote to say, ‘I always
knew
that Your Majesty’s faith & encouragement would never fail in this supreme test; I have no doubt, Ma’am, that you yourself are the main human source of strength & comfort to the dear Princess Margaret & the others of the Family circle.’ He sent her a book,
Why Do Men Suffer?
by Leslie D. Weatherhead, and tried to console her with the thought that ‘suffering (“accepted” at God’s hands) is really a form of action.’
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She was concerned that she would now have nothing to do. At the age of only fifty-one, much younger than Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary when their husbands died, she did not feel ready for the relatively retired life they had led in widowhood. Although both had continued to carry out public engagements and to support their favourite charities, neither had sought any constitutional role.
Queen Elizabeth, however, was anxious at least to be able to act as a Counsellor of State when the Queen was away, as she had during
the King’s reign. She told Lascelles, ‘Naturally I would like this, as it would give me an interest, & having been one, it seems so dull to be relegated to the “no earthly use” class.’
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But, under the existing legislation, after the death of her husband she was no longer eligible to serve in this capacity.
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Lascelles thought that it would be both right and popular to change the law in the Queen Mother’s favour and, with the agreement of the Queen, he immediately wrote to the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor to ask if it could be done.
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It could, and in April the Queen approved a submission from the Prime Minister proposing to amend the Regency Act to include the Queen Mother’s name following that of the Duke of Edinburgh and before the other Counsellors.
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It was a slow process, and the new Regency Act did not pass into law until November 1953. It contained another new departure: the Duke of Edinburgh was designated regent in case Prince Charles should succeed before the age of eighteen, instead of Princess Margaret, who under the 1937 Act would have become regent.
†
The position of the Duke of Edinburgh was a matter about which the Queen Mother showed concern – she asked that he be able to play a part in the Coronation. Lascelles suggested that the Prince should be made chairman of the Coronation Commission, and this was done.
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But she found herself in conflict with her son-in-law over the name and style of the dynasty. The Prince’s destiny and his day-to-day existence had been changed massively by the accession of his wife. Her premature transformation from heir to reigning monarch made his life in every way more difficult. He had been head of his young family. Now his wife was taken over by the venerable Court of her father. The Private Secretary, the Lord Chamberlain, the Keeper of the Privy Purse and Treasurer, the Master of the Horse, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures – all of these and many more wanted to serve their new monarch and wanted her to see them do so. They wanted access to the Queen, not to her husband.
Prince Philip saw himself as a man first and a prince second, and
as such he wanted recognition as head of his family. He thought that, in accordance with the normal practice, his children should take their father’s name. He had taken the family name, Mountbatten, when he became a naturalized British subject but he now proposed Edinburgh as an alternative. However, behind suggestions of any name change, some members of the Cabinet suspected the hand of Earl Mountbatten, who was reported to have said that since 7 February a Mountbatten had sat upon the throne. Queen Mary was dismayed – she believed that her husband had founded the house of Windsor for all time, and she was not prepared to see the name changed to Battenberg or Mountbatten.
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The Queen Mother seems to have agreed – Harold Macmillan, then the Conservative Minister for Housing, commented in his diary that she ‘of course favours the name of Windsor and all the emphasis on the truly British and native character of the Royal Family. It is also clear that the Duke has the normal attitude of many men towards a mother-in-law of strong character, accentuated by the peculiar circumstances of his position.’
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The Cabinet took the same view as the two dowager Queens and insisted to the new young Queen that her family must still be known as Windsor. It was not easy for Prince Philip. In the end, largely due to Dickie Mountbatten’s insistence, a compromise was agreed – the name Mountbatten-Windsor was adopted, to be used in future for those of the Queen’s descendants who were not entitled to be called Royal Highness. The name of the royal house remained Windsor.
The Queen Mother had to contemplate changing not only her residence but also her Household; as was customary, everyone formally resigned at the end of the reign. But she was anxious to keep many of the same people around her. She invited Lord Airlie to remain as her Lord Chamberlain – he accepted, ready to serve at her pleasure, but reminded her, ‘Your Majesty will not forget the telegram – “Be Off” – when Your Majesty has had enough of me.’
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Similarly, she wrote to her Treasurer Arthur Penn, ‘
Please
do continue, & I expect that there will be less to do in the future, or do you think that there will be much more, with
less
money & more to spend it on! I fully expect to be bankrupt, & would very much like to have you at my side when that happens!’
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There would indeed be much more for her to do, and money would always be a problem. On her widowhood, her Civil List allowance, for her official duties, was fixed at £70,000 a year; it remained at this level for the next twenty years.
