Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  David and Bertie—who had been hunting in Leicestershire—arrived at Wolferton Station early on the evening of November 20, too late; their “Grannie” had died only moments before their arrival. The Big House was a great shadow against a darkening sky. The last light of the Edwardian era had flickered out.

  A flat was found for Charlotte Knollys in London, and Toria was given rooms in Kensington Palace. The King rang his sister on the telephone every day without fail; still, he did not have the binding attachment to his sister that he had had for his mother. Only one woman remained in his life, his wife, and he turned to her with greater devotion and attendance than ever. The Court instantly noted a new attitude in Queen Mary. She had, of course, always possessed her own unique and powerful personality. With Queen Alexandra’s death, she had become a more matriarchal figure, and both her Court and her personal life took on a sharper edge of formality.

  Queen Mary was now the only Queen in England. She was looked upon by the public “as a figure of superlative dignity and splendour, kindly and generous, too.” But she was never as generous as Queen Alexandra had been. From her youth, she had known the meaning of serious debt and financial worry. Tremendous wealth had not obscured her memory of bailiffs sitting in the hall of her parents’ home, or of the Tecks’ two-year meagre and humiliating exile abroad to save money simply to repay a portion of Princess Mary Adelaide’s hopeless debts. The Queen considered large parties a great extravagance. Because of this and the King’s lack of interest in society other than state occasions, there were very few galas.

  More time was now spent at Buckingham Palace, where behaviour and dress were formal. King George wore a frock coat in the daytime, and the men of the Household and Ministers and other visitors were expected to do the same. During their private tête-à-tête dinners in London, the King wore a tailcoat, Queen Mary an evening gown and diamond tiara.

  At Sandringham, the King and Queen could at last vacate York Cottage and take over the Big House. For a good part of 1926, the Queen was occupied with its redecoration, as well as sifting through the sixty years of accumulation by Queen Alexandra at Marlborough House. “You never saw such a mass of things of all kinds as there are,” Queen Mary wrote her sister-in-law Margaret, Marchioness of Cambridge. “A motley collection of good & bad things—A warning to one not to keep too much for nothing was ever thrown away ...”

  She tried desperately hard to convince David to move to Marlborough House, but, content with his home, York House, across the way, he refused, much to his mother’s long-range irritation. The Queen took a good part of six months to get Sandringham House into a livable condition. In August, David joined her at York Cottage for two days to help supervise the work being done.

  “I am delighted you & David were both pleased with the dear place. In summer it is lovely,” King George wrote Queen Mary at Sandringham just after the Prince of Wales had left. “... I am glad he took an interest in it, although he certainly didn’t stop long, but rushed off to his tiresome golf ... So you are pleased with the alterations & with the decorations of the rooms at the house, yr rooms, in fact all our rooms will I am sure be most comfortable. Hope you are gradually getting the ballroom cleared, as I do not want it to become a store room or lumber room.” A few days later he added, “The pictures want sorting out & arranging, but you must remember that there will be marks on the walls where the paper has faded.”

  Queen Mary, unable to let go the ghost of her disapproval of Queen Alexandra’s household habits, replied, “All the rooms are more airey now and less full of those odds & ends which beloved Mama wld poke into every corner of the house which was such a pity.”

  Any free day Queen Mary now had would include a trip to an antique shop or museum. She was busily engaged in the work being done at Sandringham and Marlborough House. Her insatiable fascination in rearranging and completing the great Royal collections at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle left museum directors no more protection from her obsession than antique dealers. If she saw something that she thought should be placed in a Royal residence, she requested a permanent loan of the piece. Hardly a painting, objet d’art, or piece of furniture in the remotest rooms or back passages of any of the Royal palaces and houses can be found without a label in Queen Mary’s fluid script, describing its subject and origin. Unfortunately, she was never a serious Royal collector of art, like Charles I and George IV, for with her thoroughness and diligence, Britain’s Royal Art Collection might have been greatly benefited. She was not a great arbiter of taste, nor did she exert any influence through her husband on architecture, interior decorating, or furniture design. Victoria and Edward had both contributed to the styles of their periods. Georgian style clearly referred to another King.

  The fashionable world meant nothing to Queen Mary, nor did she have the least desire to be an innovator. Her great passion was preservation and restoration. And, of course, her nature was too conservative to spend fortunes on acquiring new Royal possessions, when for almost no outlay she could reshuffle or request the return of the old.

  Queen Mary also had a passion for miniature objets d’art; they were, in fact, some of her few frivolous purchases. The English called it “tiny craft.” Glass cases were installed at Sandringham to display her collection of exquisite golden tea sets, the cups the size of a thumbnail; tiny, intricate mother-of-pearl chairs; and gilt and tortoiseshell carriages that could be held in a baby’s hand. Princess Marie Louise (King George’s cousin) suggested the idea of building Queen Mary’s Doll’s House to be decorated to scale by the leading craftsmen and artists of the day. When complete, it “would enable future generations to see how a King and Queen of England lived in the twentieth century and what authors [miniature books were to be included], artists, and craftsmen of note there were during their reign.” The plan could not help but please the Queen, for, of course, all the contents were to be given in the form of gifts.

  Princess Marie Louise did an exhaustive job of supervising the project, along with Sir Edwin Lutyens, who drew the plans.* The façade was Georgian. Inside, the house was to be a replica of the private apartments of the King and Queen, as well as of some of the rooms at Buckingham Palace that were used for ceremonies. In the ceremonial hall, six-inch-high knights in medieval armour stood on a marble-and-lapis lazuli floor guarding the grand marble staircase that had miniature replicas of fifteenth-century tapestries and tiny bronze models of sculpture by the world’s greatest sculptors. Every appliance in the house, down to the kitchen scales and vacuum cleaner, worked. Dumb-waiters and elevators were installed, and a fully operational parlour grand piano gilded and hand painted. The wine cellar had a superb collection of spirits, beer, and wine in inch-high bottles, among them Margaux ’99, Romanée ’04, Yquem ’74, and an 1854 brandy.

  In the Royal garage were parked a Rolls-Royce, two Daimlers, a Lancaster, a Vauxhall, and a Sunbeam, all with gasoline engines that ran; as well as a 6¾-inch motorcycle, a bicycle, gas pumps, and a fire engine.

  The full Royal china service had been copied, as had Queen Mary’s simpler white china bearing her cipher crowned. Paintings were reduced to one-twelfth their original size without any loss of detail. The dozens of clocks all ran, the fireplaces worked, and the many exquisite crystal chandeliers were all electrified.

  Perhaps the most amazing room was the library; the leather-bound books, like everything else made to the scale, were filled with handwritten entries by Rudyard Kipling, A. A. Milne, Somerset Maugham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Max Beerbohm, and other great contemporary writers.† George Bernard Shaw was, in fact, the only author who refused to contribute—and wrote a reply to the request “in a very rude manner.”

  The Queen had few intimate friends. King George, however, had many. The closest was perhaps Sir Charles Cust, his equerry and constant companion. Lady Cynthia Colville tells a story about the two men, just before the move from York Cottage to Sandringham, that gives a fine insight into the King’s relations to those close to him but not a
part of his family. The King had a parrot named Charlotte (after Charlotte Knollys), given to him by his sister Toria. “Charlotte had the freedom of the house,” Lady Cynthia wrote, “and one of her less agreeable habits was to walk about the dining room table during breakfast at York Cottage and dig her beak in the boiled egg of some guest or member of the Household. This was too much for Sir Charles Cust and I remember him giving his views on Charlotte in terms which were to say the least an unusual method of addressing one’s Sovereign. I don’t think the King resented it, but equally I don’t think Charlotte mended her ways.”

  Such a relaxation of Royal regard was unthinkable to Queen Mary, and it kept her back from making very close associations. She may have dressed in tweeds in the country, but she was never the countrywoman. And, in truth, she was more at home now in Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace, where life had something ceremonial about it. Female members of the Household were expected to carry gloves at meals, even to their private dining room. The Queen never let anyone forget that Windsor Castle had been the home of English kings for hundreds of years and, in a sense, was symbolic of all that the Monarchy stood for. Her Household and contemporaries always looked upon her as the Queen of England, not as the Consort of the King of England. Such an attitude was not meant in any way to diminish the power or lustre of the Monarch himself. Queen Mary, in fact, would have been quite horrified to have found even a hint of truth to that.

  England was on the brink of industrial chaos during most of 1926. Longstanding trouble in the coal industry had ended in a general strike. Lady Airlie relates that she “... spent a morning in one canteen working with a team of voluntary helpers ... the great tent was filled with gaunt men eating ravenously ... It struck me as a terrible indictment against our social system that they should have been labelled ‘unemployable’ ... The teams of amateur waitresses serving them were all what were called ‘society girls,’ looking exactly like working girls; no prettier, in fact rather more untidy. They were very tired—some of them had been on duty fourteen hours a day behind the enormous tea urns—but they were determined to carry on. The whole country had one fixed resolve—to break the ‘tyranny’ of the strike.”

  At Buckingham Palace, the sentries at the gate had exchanged their red coats and bearskins for khaki and forage caps. Inside, except for “a great scurrying of messengers,” Queen Mary had commanded “business as usual.” No one, however, was allowed to use the telephones, which meant that a vast number of letters had to be written and delivered by hand. On May 13, the strike ended in the humiliating defeat of the strikers, who had surrendered unconditionally. A more happy note had been heard when at 2:40 the morning of April 21, the Duchess of York gave birth to her first child, a daughter, who was third in succession to the Throne. Queen Mary motored to London that afternoon to view her first granddaughter,* born at the London home of the Duchess’s parents.

  “At 2.30 we went to London to 17 Bruton Street,” Queen Mary wrote in her diary, “to congratulate Bertie & we found Celia Strathmore there, saw the baby who is a little darling with a lovely complexion & pretty fair hair.”

  On May 29, in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of York was christened.†

  “Of course poor baby cried,” Queen Mary commented with a touch of matriarchal condescension.

  Footnotes

  *Michael Claud Bowes-Lyon (1893–1954) married Margaret Cator. David Bowes-Lyon (1902–1961) married Rachel Pauline Spender-Clay.

  *The Honourable Mrs. Ronald Greville, “Maggie” to her friends, was the daughter of a whisky magnate and extremely rich. She had only recently been instrumental in the match between Lord Louis Mountbatten and Edwina Ashley.

  *Sir Dighton Probyn had recently died.

  *Lord Knutsford.

  *Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944). Leading English architect responsible for many famous buildings constructed in England from the 1890s onward. He also was the architect of eight square miles of New Delhi.

  †The contents of these books were short excerpts of the authors’ works.

  *Princess Mary and Lord Lascelles had had a son (the present Earl of Harewood) born to them February 7, 1923.

  †Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926).

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Queen Mary had a growing horror of illness, her own or that of anyone close to her. With great discipline, she had managed to control her fear during the war years so that she could make her weekly rounds of the injured in hospitals. Shortly thereafter, she turned almost completely away from such duties. Members of her Household have variously said that the Queen did not have a stomach for hospitals any more than she had for the sea. The illness of anyone of her immediate family was even more difficult for her to bear.

  On November 21, 1928, King George confided to her that he was feeling feverish and not at all well. He went directly to bed. Sir Stanley Hewett, the King’s physician, was summoned. Alarmed at what he found, he in turn sent for Lord Dawson of Penn, a specialist in lung diseases. The King had acute septicemia at the base of the right lung, not a typical pleuro-pneumonia “but a case of severe general blood infection and toxemia.” His condition became so grave that within a few days he was too weak to deal with matters of state. A warrant was prepared nominating six Councillors of State (the Queen, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Prime Minister) to act for the King during his illness.

  A telegram was sent to the Prince of Wales in East Africa where he was on tour, and he started back immediately on the long 7,000-mile nine-day journey to England. En route he received word that his father’s condition had worsened and that the King’s heart had been affected.

  On December 6, when the Prince of Wales had finally reached France, Bertie wrote him, “There is a lovely story going around which emanated from the East End of London that the reason of your rushing home is that in the event of anything happening to Papa I am going to bag the Throne in your absence!!!!! Just like the Middle Ages ...”

  The brothers met two days later at Victoria Station. Bertie’s face was white and drawn. “You will find Papa greatly changed,” he told David as they drove to Buckingham Palace. “And now Dawson says that an operation will be necessary in a day or two. Mama has been amazing. Through all the anxiety she has never once revealed her feelings to any of us. She is really far too reserved. She keeps too much locked up inside of her. I fear a breakdown if anything awful happens ...”

  Queen Mary was standing when her two older sons entered her sitting room. Bertie had been right. Her composure was remarkable. She kissed David perfunctorily on his cheek and then quickly stepped back. Her attitude, if anything, was more restrained than ever toward him.

  David, from a lifetime’s observation of his mother, knew what Bertie had not been able to discern. Queen Mary was already preparing herself for the possibility of moving down the rung one step to Queen Mother, and she was treating David in the manner not of a woman whose husband might be dying, but as a son who might soon be her King. She led him into his father’s dimly lit bedroom and withdrew into the shadows.

  The Prince of Wales later wrote that his father recognised him instantly and mumbled feebly about hoping he had had good sport in East Africa. Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, who was also present, tells quite another story:

  “[The Prince of Wales] was told that he might not on any account go near his father, who was, we all thought, near death, for at least 48 hours [the fear being that the King would know he was dying if his heir had travelled 7,000 miles to see him]. He simply took no notice, damned everybody and marched in. The old King,* who had for nearly a week been practically unconscious, just opened half an eye, looked up at him and said:

  “ ‘Damn you, what the devil are you doing here?’ ”

  Baldwin’s memory could well have been faulty. In any event, his niece Monica Baldwin, who recorded this incident for him, might have played up the scene. The presence of a Prince
of Wales to any English King was a constant reminder of his mortality. And to a Prince of Wales, a dying King was the final rung on his ascent to power. One is reminded of the scene in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, when Prince Henry tries on the crown while his father, the King, lies dying nearby.

  The King’s will to live never deserted him. On the evening of December 13, the needed operation was performed. The King’s chances of surviving it were slim; death, however, was certain without it. For a fortnight thereafter, he wavered on the edge of life and death, the country unaware of the true seriousness of his condition. From the time that King George took ill, Queen Mary had maintained his diary. On January 6, 1929, she was finally able to write, “After tea G. sent for me, he was perfectly clear & we had a talk for 20 minutes which cheered me much after not having spoken to me for practically six weeks. George signed his name just to show me he could do so.”

  His recuperation was slow. Added to his weak condition was a dramatic loss of hearing. He looked an invalid, an old man, and he was still not strong enough to handle any public business. The Prince of Wales, with the aid of the other five Chancellors, was, in effect, acting-King. The situation did not help the relationship between father and son.

  On the ninth of February (the Queen travelling separately in her own motorcar), King George was transported by ambulance from London to Bognor,† where he was to convalesce at Craig-well, a house beside the sea that he loved. Looking haggard and worn, his long face thin, all eyes, he nevertheless “had the blinds up on the drive & waved to the people en route ...” The King and Queen remained at Bognor until mid-May, when they motored to Windsor. Two weeks later, a new and unsuspected abscess broke through the scar left by the King’s operation. For months he suffered an open wound that would not drain properly. On July 15, he was operated upon again. The doctors were not confident that he was on the road to full recovery until the end of September.