The Queen's Secret: A Novel of England's World War II Queen

by Karen Harper

  “But there is a chance Churchill could become P.M.?”

  “We shall see. We have signed a pact with Poland, that if the Nazis invade there, we are at war with Germany again. Hopes are fading, my darling,” he said with a sigh and put his arm around me as the motorcar pulled up to our private entrance in the courtyard.

  I leaned close and meant to kiss him on the cheek, but he turned his head, so our lips met before we realized one of our guards had opened the door.

  “Maybe we can bring the girls back from Scotland and house them at Windsor, should Hitler attack us here,” he whispered.

  “Let’s not even say that dread name,” I said and scooted off the seat to get out. “Surely not that. Our RAF boys will shoot his Luftwaffe from the sky if he dares attack here.”

  “I’ll explain more about the way of things later. For now, let’s say a prayer we are back together.”

  * * *

  But life soon turned to nightmare. Desperate, last-minute negotiations with Germany came to an end when Hitler’s forces invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Our government tried to mediate a peace between Germany and Poland, but that was a fool’s game. Neville Chamberlain declared war with Germany, and France followed suit. Our summer season of peace was shattered. The prime minister made a wireless broadcast from Downing Street that Germany had ignored our peace overtures and we were at war.

  Our Empire quickly declared war on Germany to bolster the mother country: Australia, New Zealand, Canada supported us, so it was almost a worldwide war already. I was shocked when the Republic of Ireland dared to declare themselves a neutral nation, as British-Irish bad feelings went back a long way.

  Tears threatened as I paced our palace rooms that night, fearful of what was coming next. I came across my dear Bessie Miller, cleaning up my cosmetics table in my dressing room, perhaps because we had all been warned not to leave breakable objects about where they might be shattered and cut someone during an attack.

  “Din’t know you was still up, Your Majesty,” she said, holding a tray of empty jars and brushes to wash as she bobbed a curtsy.

  “Difficult to sleep in the silence, wondering if and when war might indeed come here. Have you had an opportunity to speak with your family?”

  “Like all us East Enders, they’re keen to get ready for a bad blow too. We’re true Cockney, through and through. My Da and my brothers working the East End docks and all. Got a cousin who’s a Pearly King, I do.”

  “I didn’t know that, my dear. And, you see, you are all dear to me. If you feel you need time to help them out, I mean more than some regular time off or your wages that you have sent them all these years, you let me know. I feel my biggest job now, besides supporting His Majesty, is to bolster everyone’s spirits, no matter what. And do keep me informed of how things are going with your people, for we are all Londoners working together through these tenuous times.”

  She curtsied and beamed as if I’d just given her the keys to the kingdom. Several of her glass pots clinked together as she went out. And what was that other piercing sound? I followed her out into the corridor, only to see Bertie running in a dressing robe from his suite, and household staff as well as guards appearing up and down the hall.

  I thought for a moment someone was screaming, but then I knew. Not the roar of planes yet, thank heavens, but the rising and falling wail of an air-raid siren shrieking from the palace roof or courtyard.

  “Not now, not yet!” I kept saying, as Bertie seized my arm and a guard hustled us downstairs to the newly built air-raid shelter. Some of our depleted staff were there too, Bessie still holding her tray, though she was shaking so hard the cosmetic jars rattled.

  We heard no planes, no bombs, for I assumed we would be able to hear them even down here. Could it have been a mistake, or just a drill?

  After what seemed an eternity but was just an hour and a half, according to Bertie’s wristwatch, a guard lit an electric torch for us, then the wailing went deathly still. The walls seemed to close in. Were Londoners in their small corrugated iron Anderson shelters in their backyards or gardens? It had seemed wise to use the tube stations underground, but that was still frowned upon. Closed in like this, I thought of Lilibet’s questions about the monster of Glamis being bricked up all those years. But even here, ghosts of the earlier war with the Germans hovered in my head.

  “Either a drill, Your Majesties, or someone’s nerves got the best of him, and he accidentally hit the air-raid switch,” a palace guard finally informed us. “No enemy planes or bombs reported.”

  Despite that good news, disaster was on the doorstep, and Bertie and I could be trapped here and targeted as king and queen.

  Chapter Four

  Wire Netting and Glue

  My extensive wardrobe aside, today, just within the palace walls, I wore jodhpurs as I oversaw the protections for the palace. The staff was completing the final boarding up of the windows that graced the larger rooms and chambers, now quite stripped of most of their historic grandeur.

  Again, I thought of the rumors of the monster of Glamis having its chamber bricked up as we greatly closed ourselves in here at the palace. Our reduced staff—even our personal servants—were using glue and wire netting to cover the windows still in use, so if a bomb hit, the glass, supposedly, would not shatter.

  At least we were in a period the newspapers called “The Phoney War,” though Bessie had told me some were cheekily calling it the Bore War. Poland had been horribly bombed and had surrendered to the Nazis, but it seemed nothing was happening here, and all waited with baited breath. And prepared as best we could, like today.

  “Your Majesty, is the height of the crystal chandeliers suitable then?” my supervisor asked as he stood beside me.

  He gestured toward the huge cut-glass chandeliers that had been lowered to three feet above the floor lest a bomb blast shake them loose from their normal lofty height. Their fall would be much less this way, and pieces of old carpeting were piled under each.

  “Yes, that looks to be the best we can do,” I told him, and led the way into another room. But I glanced first out one of the newly netted windows. Diffused light entered, but it was like seeing the autumn trees outside through a scrim or blur of rain, even though it was a fine day—that is, a fine day to prepare for war to come to dear England.

  Poland had been taken by bombs and starvation. Hitler’s horrible Luftwaffe had struck from the air and his Panzers from the ground. Even here, Bertie had said, rationing would surely come. One more glance out the window showed me the last of the palace mews carriage horses being sent to Windsor. Come spring, they would be put to work on farms, for we must try to grow more of our own food. Starving Poles had made that warning clear enough.

  I sighed and took yet another tour of the steel shelters outside being built for the palace sentries. Back inside from the brisk autumn air, I oversaw the final packing of the many precious collections of smaller treasures, mostly gifts to the crown, not to mention some of the little collector’s pieces Queen Mary had managed to finagle as gifts.

  I saw Bessie was helping to pack them away and put a hand on her shoulder where she knelt, madly wrapping priceless treasures.

  “Oh, ma’am,” she said, startled, looking up a moment. “Well, I warrant we are all kneeling to our queen today,” she said with a little smile.

  How I admired her buoyant spirits. If my greatly reduced staff who were here for the duration with us—or wherever we ended up—could be stalwart and cheerful, so could I. I had heard some had been calling my Bessie “queen of the cosmetics”—Queen Elizabeth, at that, for my name was Bessie’s given name too.

  I bent my knees and whispered in her ear. “Do not let them tease you, for we Elizabeths shall stick together through thick and thin, shall we not?”

  She nodded and broke into another smile. Although she was so much older than my girls, I thought of them at that moment. I needed to speak to Bertie again about bringing them back at least as far as Windso
r, where protections and fortifications were also being erected. Perhaps Hitler knew we would fight, that our RAF boys would shoot down his Luftwaffe aircraft, so he dared not try an invasion. Surely, the ancient stone fortress of Windsor would be safe.

  But this dreadful waiting for the Germans to strike was torment too.

  * * *

  I became exhausted from my many public visits that autumn as we prepared for real war. Bertie and I had visited the London Air Raid Precaution Headquarters and done inspections of air-raid plans, including shelters. We took a launch down the Thames to the East End docks, which would be terribly vulnerable if we were bombed. I visited the regiments of which I had been made honorary colonel. I was appointed commandant-in-chief of the women’s services, including the Royal Navy Wrens and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

  Bertie and I had finally convinced seventy-two-year-old Queen Mary to move out of the city to Gloucestershire, where she would be safer from bombings. She stayed at the home of a niece, but her letters showed she was not happy to be “countrified.” She had, she said, passed the time by trying to rid the Badminton estate of ivy that clung to absolutely everything!

  Worse of all, David, the former king, popped back into London to discuss his future, but I made certain I was not about at that time, so he met only with Bertie. That day that David had darkened our palace doors, I was moved to happy tears by cheers from crowds for me both outside and within when I went to meet the leaders and workers of the Red Cross and the hospitals, and the ambulance drivers, so many of those people fine, brave women. Afterward, Bertie admitted David had still acted as if he were not only older brother, but king!

  “He lorded it over m-me—well, tried to k-king it over me,” he said, alarming me with his sudden return to stuttering.

  I vow, it was as bad an attack of nerves as he’d had since just before his coronation, when he’d feared he would stammer during the crowning ceremony in the Abbey.

  “David t-tried to give me orders, so I only listened, then did what I bloody damned knew was b-best after he left.”

  And that, I knew, meant figuring out where to stash the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the immediate future so they didn’t rush back to Germany to support Hitler, or so David didn’t agree to be set up as a puppet British king in exile with promises of ruling the Empire again after the defeat of England!

  And yet, thank the Lord, no attack on England yet, which, I suppose, helped Chamberlain cling to his office—and Bertie go back to his proper speech, as he used to call it, the very next day.

  The prime minister had, however, accepted into his cabinet the “Conservative” Winston Churchill, though I had to laugh at the idea that that fierce bulldog Churchill, who insisted we prepare for a brutal war, was “conservative” in any way. Bertie agreed, though, that Churchill, whom he feared as a warmonger and a bit of a bully, could be next in line to lead the nation, and at such a perfectly beastly time.

  * * *

  Although Bertie remained tied to London, just after mid-September I went to Scotland again to see our girls. They were living at Balmoral now, and I felt a bit guilty to be reunited with my children when so many—the Scots too—were being separated from theirs. Lilibet had written that “we have hundreds of evacuee children from Glasgow living nearby,” though I was also told some families were taking their children back into the cities, since nothing dangerous had happened. But what, I thought, if the so-called Phoney War became only too real?

  I hugged both my girls as they met me at the front door of our rural Scottish home of Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire. We walked inside arm in arm.

  “Well,” Margot declared after our greetings and hugs, “we had a big sewing party, knitting for our soldiers last week, and we are having another one today, and some members of the Black Watch are coming to say thanks awfully, aren’t they, Lilibet? And wait until they get to meet the queen!”

  “That will be lovely. You know your uncle Fergus who was . . . was lost in the earlier war with Germany belonged to the Black Watch. How handsome he looked in his uniform. I still miss him terribly.”

  “Lost as in died for sure?” Margot pursued. “You mean, not lost like he could be found again somewhere, only with shell shock or something like that?”

  “Silly,” Lilibet cut in, “lost meaning died. Don’t you recall the painting of him, looking so fine at Glamis with the black wreath on it? I really would like to see how the Navy cadets look all spiffed up in their dress uniforms.”

  I had decided to ignore all blatant or veiled references to Prince Philip, so I said nothing to that. He was at sea, as far as I knew and, with the war, likely to remain there. Surely, the memory of his shining allure would soon fade in my eldest daughter’s eyes.

  * * *

  “David’s still demanding that his wife be given the HRH title,” Bertie told me in October, when we both had hopes we were finally rid of the so-called Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had lately been traveling like nomads between France and Spain. “But she’ll not have the title Her Royal Highness from me or my government!” He huffed a bit and went back to reading the newspaper. How I wished I could sit in on some of his top-level meetings, at least the ones Bertie had with his prime minister each week here at the palace.

  Yet I sighed in relief, something I had done little enough of since we began this dreadful waiting-for-war game. I could not abide David and that woman coming back to England. A Duke of Windsor solution must soon be found; the merest hint of a shadow king in exile could be disaster, almost as horrid as having him—and her—back here.

  “You know,” he went on from behind the paper, “I never told you this, but there was quite a scurrilous report explaining Wallis’s hold on poor David years ago, when it became obvious she had her hooks in him, so to speak. David mentioned it again to me, still quite put out about it, for he blames it for turning many of the so-called movers and shakers against Wallis.”

  He crunched the paper down into his lap again and looked at me just as I jerked alert. “It came to be called the ‘China Dossier’ and was terribly titillating and sexual in nature—a smear from the days she lived in Hong Kong and toured China before her divorce from her second husband. No one knows the source of the dossier, but it was someone who had the inside, intimate story on Wallis, that was for certain.”

  My heartbeat kicked up so hard I could hear it. I looked away, down at the photos of our girls I had been sorting through. “Sexual in nature?” I said, hoping that would not bring up the fact that, since our honeymoon, we had lived an affectionate but chaste life as man and wife. Oh, a few knew that both of our girls were conceived through artificial insemination, but we were indeed their parents. After my own past with a double mother, I had made certain that their births were properly observed and registered.

  Of course, my preference for affection with celibacy had meant turning a blind eye to Bertie’s occasional short-lived liaisons, but I knew he loved me, and it was worth it to avoid what everyone called duties of the marriage bed. I had guilt attacks for this at times, but I had not realized I felt this way so strongly at first. Indeed, I did my duty on our wedding night and honeymoon, but I’d become ill for a while and after that it seemed easier to avoid sexual intercourse. We had a strong union in every way but that, indeed we did, but . . . why must he bring up the China Dossier now? Surely, in these terrible times where I supported and held him up every way I knew how—but one—he did not need to use something he had learned about the dossier to pressure me into deeper intimacy. I suddenly felt as if I were looking again through a window blurred by wire netting and glue.

  “I never discussed it with you,” he said, putting the paper completely aside and lighting another cigarette. Its smoke enveloped me, clung to my clothes, but I had long learned to ignore that. Yet I could not ignore the topic of the dossier. How much could he know about it, and why bring it up now?

  “What sort of hold on David did she supposedly have?” I asked, for I must appear
to be curious. “I always thought he was simply attracted to domineering, sometimes abusive women because your mother had been a hands-off mother, or else he needed someone strong to tell him what to do.”

  “Be that as it may, this scandal sheet suggested that Wallis’s hold on David was that she’d learned some sort of sexual trick—some sort of hold—the Shanghai Grip or Squeeze, I believe it was called, from Chinese whores during her earlier days.”

  “How . . . outrageous!” I said, trying to look a bit outraged myself. Here our worry was bombs over Britain, and a bombshell had just exploded on me here!

  I tried to calm myself and sound rational. “I mean, David would have been better off without her, but, well—but,” I nearly stammered, “did people believe that, and did it get back to David and that woman?”

  “It evidently did, though its source was never discovered, even though I warrant they had their suspicions.” He blew out a perfect smoke ring that rose and then dissipated. “Rather a shocking claim, but people were rabid to know how she had such a hold over him. Darling, I knew you hated Wallis for her cruel mockery of you, so I didn’t even mention the dossier to you at first. Besides, the content wasn’t for a lady of your taste and standing. Believe me, if Winston couldn’t find the source of it, it’s not to be found.”

  “Winston Churchill tried to track down its source?” I was beginning to wish I had not concocted all that, but the woman needed to be stopped—not that it had stopped David from wanting her. I knew Bertie would be shocked if he knew what I had done, mostly because I had removed myself from the libido part of his life.

  “Yes, Churchill told me so at a party a good while ago,” he said. “The point is, David’s original insistence on making Wallis HRH and, no doubt, queen has made him a lot of enemies. Unfortunately, Adolf Hitler is not one of them. Well, darling, I didn’t mean to get off on that tack. Perhaps I’m just gearing myself up to deal with Winston should he become P.M. But, especially after Chamberlain, we need a strong hand at the tiller of our ship of state.”