The Queen Mother (29 page)

The rest of the week was spent dealing with the continuing deluge of letters, seeing Diamond Hardinge, Arthur Penn, Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton and other friends, choosing new notepaper for herself, visiting her dressmaker, Madame Handley Seymour, for new clothes, dining at Claridge’s with the Duke and friends, and going with May and David to see a revue,
The Co-Optimists
^§
– to find that a verse about her and the Duke had been added to one of the songs in the show. She also paid a visit to her doctor, Dr Irwin Moore, to have her throat treated. ‘It makes one feel awfully tired.’
⁴¹
The treatment for tonsillitis, from which she suffered frequently, could be harsh in those days: she described it as having her throat ‘burnt’. She had eight more
weekly sessions until the doctor pronounced her throat better in early April.

On 25 January the Prince took the night train to Glasgow for two days of official visits. Released by their engagement from the conventions of formality, he and Elizabeth wrote to each other with a new tenderness. ‘My dear Darling, I am just writing you a very little letter,’ she began. ‘I shall be thinking about you when you get this, & hoping that everything will go off wonderfully well. I am quite sure it will. Also, I might add that I
do
[underlined several times] love you Bertie, & feel certain that I shall
more & more
. I shall miss you terribly. You are such an Angel to me. Goodbye till Sunday – may it come quickly. From your always & forever loving E.’
⁴²

This letter crossed with one written by the Duke in pencil on the train.

As soon as he reached Scotland, he wrote again in ink, ‘My darling, I have just arrived safely & am told a letter will reach you by the morning. I wrote you a line in the train in pencil which goes as well, though I know you don’t like pencil letters … I feel it terribly to be parted from you for so long darling.’
⁴³

By the weekend, when she drove with her mother and her sister May to St Paul’s Walden, the excitement had taken its toll. ‘Felt very tired & rather depressed through feeling so tired,’ she wrote in her diary.
⁴⁴
She spent Sunday morning in bed; the Duke arrived at lunchtime, in a new car. That evening they danced a little and talked a lot.

They returned to York Cottage on Monday 29 January to spend the week with the King and Queen. The days that followed were calm and predictable, as the King liked them to be, his future daughter-in-law absorbed into the routine without further ado. The men went shooting in the morning; the ladies joined them for lunch. The King
wrote to his son Prince George of Elizabeth: ‘The more I see of her the more I like her.’
⁴⁵

There were two more visits to the old ladies at Sandringham House – ‘Everybody as old as the hills!’
⁴⁶
wrote Elizabeth – a trip to Newmarket to see the King’s horses, lunch and a walk round the gardens at Holkham. The evenings were not lively. In other company she would certainly have preferred to dance to the gramophone, play games or sing, but she had evidently been advised to bring some kind of ‘work’ with her. ‘Knitted my blue thing after [dinner] until nearly 11,’ she noted in her diary on the first evening; and knit she did, for two more evenings. Her lack of skill at knitting socks later became a joke she shared with the King. Throughout the week, she and the Duke continued to reply to letters and to thank people for the gifts they had received.

The Duke wrote an affectionate letter to his future mother-in-law to tell her how very happy he was that Elizabeth was to be his wife.

Lady Strathmore responded equally warmly. ‘All I ask & pray for, is that she sh
^ld
be happy, & this I feel she will be with your love surrounding her. Dear Bertie you have been so kind to
me
too, that I know, that tho’ I must in a sense lose E. I am gaining a
son
who will always be very dear to me.’
⁴⁸

To Mabell Airlie the Duke wrote joyously, ‘How can I thank you enough for your most charming letter to me about the wonderful happenings in my life which have come to pass, & my one dream which has at last been realized. It all seems so marvellous to me & for me to know that my darling Elizabeth will one day be my wife. We are both very very happy & I am sure we shall always be.’ Her earlier letter after Christmas, he said, had been ‘an inspiration’ to them. ‘It
only wanted very little to make us both make up our minds, and I am sure it was your words that did it … we can only bless you for what you did.’
⁴⁹

Elizabeth wrote again to Beryl Poignand, saying that she had had a ‘delicious and restful week’ in Norfolk. ‘It is a bit of a strain staying with one’s future in-laws, whoever they are. Mine have been all too angelic to me, I must say.’
⁵⁰

*

O
N
6 F
EBRUARY
James Stuart, who had just returned from New York, came to call. He was very depressed, Elizabeth thought, to find all his friends ‘engaged & scattered’. She recorded in her diary, ‘He is just the same – Very slow!’
⁵¹
This private comment reveals, perhaps, that she had no regrets about him.

Later that week she had a difficult day, driving with the Queen, the Duke and Louis Greig to White Lodge to go over the house again. Queen Mary loved the house as she knew it and considered that it was ‘in excellent order’.
⁵²
It was not easy for a young bride to suggest changes.
⁵³
After touring the upper floors for two hours they had a picnic lunch; then they descended to the basement, whereupon Sir John Baird, the First Commissioner of Works, arrived with the architects and they had to go all around the house again. It was exhausting.
⁵⁴

But over the next few days a brief escape into the company of her own family and friends brought relief. With ‘les ftères Stuart’, James and Francis, and her brother Mike, she drove to Oxford to see David, stopping in Henley for a cherry brandy. After lunch and a walk at Magdalen, she drove for some of the way home; they stopped at Maidenhead and took tea at Skindles Hotel on the Thames – ‘lovely day’. That evening, however, she wrote in her diary, ‘Leef rehtar desserped.’ It was, perhaps, the painful recognition that she would soon have to put such carefree days behind her.
⁵⁵
That weekend was easier, because she and her fiancé could be with her parents at St Paul’s Walden. They relaxed. After he left her to return to London alone on Sunday 11 February, the Prince wrote to say, ‘I loved the weekend with you & hated leaving you this evening, just a month tonight isn’t it darling when you told me you loved me. What a day that was for me!!! & for you too.’
⁵⁶

Her time was filled now. She sat for the portraitist John Singer
Sargent so that he could sketch her in charcoal, for Prince Paul’s wedding present to them;
^*
she was also sitting to L. F. Roslyn
^†
for a bust. She visited White Lodge (or ‘Whiters’ as she called it) again, with ‘about twelve architects, plumbers etc’. She was taken to meet members of the wider Royal Family. On 17 February she and her mother went to ‘Buck House’ (another nickname she had begun to use) where, in a gesture symbolic of the importance of precedent in the world Elizabeth was about to enter, Queen Mary gave her ‘some wonderful lace, in the same room that Queen Victoria gave
her
presents in’. She went to Thomas Goode’s, one of London’s best glass and porcelain shops, with the Duke to choose glass, and to Zyrot, a fashionable milliner, to choose hats: ‘Such fun! Also country suits!’ She saw her doctor for further attention to her throat. Then there were constant visitors to be entertained – and all the time there was the problem of more photographers, more crowds. Thus on 23 February she recorded in her diary that ‘a horrible photographer’ had been lying in wait for her when she went for a sitting to Mabel Hankey, the miniaturist.
^‡
‘So a crowd collected. Such a nuisance.’
⁵⁷

Everyone wanted to meet her, or to reaffirm acquaintanceship. But although she continued to see her friends, she was already expected to take part in some of the formal life of the Royal Family. On 21 February Elizabeth’s name appeared for the first time in the Court Circular as a member of the royal party at a public event, when the King and Queen took her and the Duke to the Shire Horse Society’s annual show at the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington. On Monday 5 March, at Buckingham Palace, she had her first experience of a royal ritual, standing with the Duke beside the King and Queen while
‘privileged bodies’ read addresses of congratulation on their engagement. This was the custom by which certain institutions, for example Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the Corporations of London and Edinburgh, the Church of England and the Free Churches, traditionally present loyal addresses to the sovereign in person. ‘Some very funny,’ she remarked.
⁵⁸

A week later she and Lady Strathmore took the night train to Scotland. ‘I
love
Glamis,’ she wrote to the Duke. ‘When I arrived this morning the sun was just rising over the Sidlaw hills, and made the snow on the Grampians look pink & heavenly. It was wonderful to be able to see about twenty miles instead of down one London street! It would be more delicious if you were here too – I hate to think of you in horrible London all by yourself.’
⁵⁹
This letter caught the night mail and was with him the next morning at Buckingham Palace. He replied at once to say how much it had cheered him up. He hoped she was getting a rest – there would not be much chance before the wedding. ‘Why couldn’t we be married first and do all this work afterwards?’
⁶⁰

The difficulties they faced in arranging their future home to their own satisfaction preoccupied them both. The Duke was irked by Queen Mary’s insistence on keeping control of changes at White Lodge. He praised his fiancée’s constant cheerfulness and said his own patience had been ‘tried very high on one or two occasions don’t you think? All I want is that you should have what you want & that you should get the benefit & pleasure of going round & finding them for yourself & not having things thrust at you by other people.’
⁶¹
Elizabeth tried to soothe and reassure him – as she would throughout their marriage. ‘Don’t worry about White Lodge and furniture. I am quite certain we shall make it enchanting – you and I; so please don’t fuss yourself, little darling. You are such an angel to me always, and I hate to think of you worrying about anything. “Keep calm and don’t be bullied – rest if you can” is my advice!!’
⁶²

Several busy days followed, looking for furniture, discussing the wedding cake, to be baked by McVitie and Price in Edinburgh, even attending a rugger match with the Duke. Everywhere, she made a good impression. The Duke’s papers include a letter from Jock Smith of the Scottish Football Union to Louis Greig in which he remarks that ‘HRH is d—d lucky in his choice & the couple have made a most astonishing impression on our hard-headed, hard-hearted people.’
⁶³

A crowd saw them off on the night train to London. Next day the Duke took her to both lunch and tea with his family. Everything was very formal – Elizabeth’s diary and, to a lesser extent, her letters suggest that she already well understood the constraints under which the Royal Family lived. Inevitably there were times when she found the new pomp and new circumstances of her life difficult and daunting. By 21 March she was feeling tired and depressed by the way in which her life was being circumscribed. The Duke came to dinner and she had a ‘long talk to him about interference etc’.
⁶⁴
In the morning she ‘dashed off’ to see Lady Airlie, lunched at the Palace and chose her bridesmaids’ dresses; she had decided on the design for her wedding dress at Madame Handley Seymour’s a few days earlier. Next day a series of rather formal presentations – ‘very pompous,’
⁶⁵
she declared in her diary – to the betrothed couple began at Buckingham Palace: silver dishes from the City of London, more from the Army Ordnance Corps. But there were moments alone with the Duke or members of her family that were fun, high spirited and to be treasured. One weekend at St Paul’s Walden Bury, ‘Mike, Bertie and I made a bonfire & baked potatoes. Marvellous day, sat & watched it.’
⁶⁶

More sittings, more fittings, more presents. On 28 March she and the Duke ‘ordered the wedding ring, bought a gramophone and a dressing table’. That evening Chips Channon came for cocktails and then she and the Duke and some of her siblings had a ‘very merry’ evening dancing at the Savoy.
⁶⁷
More humdrum matters brought them back to earth. They debated how much should be spent on their new linen. Mrs Greville had apparently offered to buy it, or at least to contribute towards it. They had been advised that it would cost £1,500, but Elizabeth thought this excessive. ‘Whoever is buying it for us must remember that we are not millionaires (what ho!) and don’t you think £1,000 ought to do it?’
⁶⁸