The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

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  It was obvious to King George V and Queen Mary, and to the Prince of Wales himself, that in the post-war world the royal family had to work to keep the monarchy in existence; but they all had differing approaches. The Prince wanted to keep the wartime accessibility of the monarchy; the King, supported by Fritz Ponsonby, thought this dangerous. ‘The monarchy’, said Ponsonby, ‘must always remain on a pedestal,’ and though the King agreed that the war made it possible for the Prince to mix with people as never before, he must, he said, never forget his position. Remembering the effect his foreign progresses had had on himself, especially the magnificence of their visit to India, the King wanted the Prince of Wales to tour the Empire, not only because it would be appreciated, but because it would touch the Prince with the magic of the monarchy. As the King’s biographer, Harold Nicolson, wrote, Queen Victoria had become a legend throughout the Empire, ‘invested with almost divine qualities’. After the tour of India before their accession, King George V and Queen Mary had realized the ‘power and symbolism’ of this great office. Thenceforth the King

  had no doubt about the importance of the monarchy and the heavy responsibilities of a democratic sovereign … He saw then the extent to which the whole Empire might stand or fall by the personal example set from the Throne, and to assure the integrity of that example he was to sacrifice much that men hold dear.56

  The King, knowing how important his own happy marriage had been, hoped that the Prince of Wales would find the same support from a good wife. But the market for foreign royal brides had now closed down. As the Prime Minister told the King, the country would not now accept a German bride for the Prince of Wales. Unfortunately the Prince was showing a tendency to fall in love with married women such as Freda Dudley Ward, the wife of a Liberal MP, and showed no signs of settling down. Whereas on 28 February 1922 Mary, the Princess Royal, made a happy marriage to Henry, Viscount Lascelles, and went to live in Yorkshire.

  On 26 April 1923 Bertie, now Duke of York, married a wife who had immediately enchanted the King and Queen, and who for the rest of her life has captured the heart of the nation with her charm and beauty. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, youngest daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore, was, Chips Channon believed, ‘more gentle, lovely and exquisite than any woman alive’.57 Lady Elizabeth was the first commoner to marry a second-in-line to the throne since James II married Anne Hyde, but she was descended from the ancient kings of Scotland. Brought up in a large and happy family by exceptional parents, she had a strong, enduring spirit behind her delicate beauty. She has never forgotten her Scottish inheritance.

  On that chill April morning, as her biographer Dorothy Laird records,

  because she was not yet a royal person Lady Elizabeth rode to her wedding in a state landau, modestly escorted by four mounted Metropolitan Policemen and the troops lining the streets did not present arms to the bride on her journey to the Abbey.58

  The sun came out as the bride entered the Abbey. She wore a simple medieval-style dress gleaming with silver and veiled in old lace. Then, with a gesture so characteristic, she left her father’s side and laid her bouquet of white roses upon the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. It had been planned that she should lay her bouquet at the Cenotaph on her return from the Abbey. Perhaps her spontaneous gesture was in memory of her brother Fergus, killed at Loos.

  The Duke and Duchess of York returned to the Palace through cheering crowds and made the expected appearance on the balcony, joined by King George V, Queen Alexandra and the bride’s parents, and Queen Mary ‘magnificently regal in an aquamarine blue and silver dress and glorious diamonds’.59

  For this wedding there was no great gathering of German relations – the ‘royal mob’, as Queen Victoria had called them. A modest 123 guests sat down in the State Dining Room and the Supper Room at round tables decorated with pink tulips and white lilac. The King’s toast to the ‘health, long life and happiness of the bride and bridegroom’ was drunk in silence – according to royal custom. In the Green Drawing Room overlooking the courtyard stood the wedding cake: nine feet high, with four tiers, decorated with coats of arms and topped with symbols of love and peace. The little Duchess could scarcely reach to cut it.

  As the open landau left the Palace with its escort of cavalry, the Prince of Wales and his brothers threw rose petals over the bride and groom. One reporter noted that the new Duchess of York wore ‘a going away dress of dove grey crêpe romain … her going away hat a small affair in tones of brown with upturned brim and a feather mount at the side. She made this choice so that those in the crowd may not have their view impeded by a brim.’60 A characteristic touch!

  The new Duchess of York quickly established a rare empathy with King George V, understanding the kindness under his gruff manner. For her he even made exceptions to his rigid rules. To be a minute late for meals was, in the King’s eyes, a mortal sin, to be met by thunderous rebuke; but when the Duchess of York was a few minutes late on one occasion, he apologized, saying they must have sat down earlier that day.

  The wedding of the Yorks was for the King, as he said, ‘a gleam of sunshine’ in a black period. There was another wedding held at Buckingham Palace itself: in 1935 the Duke of Gloucester married Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott there rather than at the Abbey because of the recent death of her father the Duke of Buccleuch.

  But there were graver concerns than weddings. The political disturbances of the period weighed heavily on a King whose health was not sound at the best of times. On the one hand, for well-to-do bright young things it was an age of frivolity; but at the same time there was deep disillusion amongst those who returned from war to find themselves homeless and unemployed. Abroad, the old world was breaking up. Monarchies and dukedoms had disappeared. In Russia the Tsar and his family had been assassinated. The German Emperor was in exile. In Germany dictator Adolf Hitler was gaining power; while in Italy Prime Minister Mussolini swaggered, and in 1935 invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia).

  For the rest of his life the King continued to wrestle with the problem of Ireland. His Buckingham Palace Conference, convened before the war to try to solve this, had been interrupted by the war, but now he tried again. In June 1921, when he went to Belfast to open the new Northern Ireland Parliament, he made a ringing appeal for peace, concluding, ‘the future of Ireland lies in the hands of my Irish people themselves.’ Queen Mary accompanied him, knowing there was danger. Their reward was a thunderous welcome from enormous crowds outside the railway station on their return home.

  At home pressure on the King mounted. These were days of bitter divisions, strikes and demonstrations.

  At a time of international and national unrest he had a quick succession of prime ministers, which increased the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. His relationship with Prime Minister Lloyd George at the end of the war was difficult. As Palmerston had bypassed Queen Victoria, so Lloyd George tended to ignore King George V. He was succeeded briefly by Andrew Bonar Law, who was fighting the cancer that was to destroy him. In May 1923 Bonar Law resigned and Stanley Baldwin, who followed him, called an election in December 1923, which he and his Conservative Party lost.

  In the election of January 1924 Baldwin was defeated by James Ramsay MacDonald, who brought in the first Labour administration – a minority government, relying on Liberal support. There were apprehensions on both sides: the Labour ministers were inexperienced; the King, with memories of his assassinated relations, feared revolution. In the event the King found his new Labour ministers friendly and refreshing, and they found the King determined to be above party and to defend their constitutional rights.

  Surprisingly, the King and his ministers established a good relationship – the King liked the directness and salty humour of the men in the Cabinet who had come from such different backgrounds. He welcomed the fierce patriotism of the new Colonial Secretary, J. H. Thomas, whose outrageous jokes set off the King in roars of appreciative laughter. In his turn, Thomas thought the King w
as ‘by God a great human creature’.61

  The ministers were surprised to find the King so human. The new Lord Privy Seal, J. R. Clynes, later recalled,

  As we stood waiting for his Majesty, amid the gold and crimson magnificence of the Palace, I could not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel, which had brought MacDonald, the starveling clerk, J. H. Thomas the engine driver, Henderson the foundry labourer and Clynes the mill-hand to this pinnacle beside the man whose forebears had been kings for so many generations. We were perhaps somewhat embarrassed but the quiet little man whom we addressed as your Majesty swiftly put us at our ease. I have no doubt he had read the wild statements of some of our extremists and I think he wondered to what he was committing his people. I had expected to find him unbending, instead he was kindness and sympathy itself.62

  King George V liked MacDonald and found him ‘quite straight’: ‘he impressed me very much.’ On 22 January 1924, the King wrote in his diary ‘he wishes to do the right thing. Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government,’ and MacDonald wrote in his diary, The King has never seen me as a minister without making me feel that he was also seeing me as a friend.’63

  Since this first Labour government had no overall majority, the King and his advisers considered that it would not be able to pursue extremist policies. In fact the government did not last long, thanks to the publication of the forged Zinoviev letter which, it was claimed, called on British Communists to persuade members of the Labour Party to work for armed revolution.

  MacDonald’s government fell, and in November 1924 Baldwin was returned again. But the new ministers caused the King trouble. Winston Churchill at the Home Office handled the miners’ strike of 1926 with insensitive vigour, causing lasting resentment.

  King George had a heated argument with Lord Durham … about a week before the strike was called. When the King said he was sorry for the miners, Lord Durham replied that they were a damned lot of revolutionaries. At that his Majesty exploded, ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them,’ and some high words followed.64

  It was business as usual at Buckingham Palace during the strike. Only the changed uniform of the sentries at the gates marked the emergency. Khaki and forage caps replaced red coats and bearskins.

  The strike ended on 13 May but as Lady Airlie wrote, ‘There was no jubilation over the defeat of the strikers … As Lord Salisbury said in the House, “it was not a time for triumph.”’65

  But sixteen days later there was cause for celebration. The Duke and Duchess of York brought their first baby to be christened in the Private Chapel at Buckingham Palace. She was named Elizabeth after her mother and

  cried so much all through the ceremony that immediately after it her old fashioned nurse dosed her well from a bottle of dill water – to the surprise of the modern young mothers present and the amusement of her uncle the Prince of Wales.66

  The King, low and depressed, longed for peace. The accumulated stress of this period undoubtedly helped to cause the serious illness which almost killed him in November 1928. On 21 November Lord Dawson of Penn, the King’s surgeon, was summoned to the Palace and, realizing that they were in for a serious illness, sent for the young pathologist Dr Lionel Whitby, whose tests showed the King was suffering from a streptococcal infection of the chest.

  Just as Buckingham Palace had been turned into a hospital before, when Edward VII had an operation for appendicitis, so now a room in the Belgian Suite was prepared and an X-ray machine was delivered in a lorry and the cable brought through the King’s bedroom window.

  In the makeshift hospital in Buckingham Palace Queen Mary was a tower of strength: Queen Alexandra had been brave, but Queen Mary was ‘as practical as Florence Nightingale’. As the King’s biographer Kenneth Rose recorded,

  When Dawson asked for moistened muslin to filter the air of the sick room, the Queen knew … where to find it. She led Dawson along corridors and up back stairs to a small room at the top of the Palace; made him climb on a chair and hand down a bundle from a cupboard, untied it to reveal some curtains of Queen Victoria’s which years ago she had thriftily brought down from Balmoral and stowed away.67

  The King’s chest was X-rayed – it was the first time X-rays had been available to a patient outside the big hospitals – but it failed to show the cause of the trouble. By the afternoon of 12 December, all hope seemed gone. But at the crucial moment, when the King’s life was slipping away, Lord Dawson of Penn came into the room. Will you give me a syringe,’ he said. ‘I think I will make one more try to find that fluid.’ 68 By intuition he found the abcess, inserted the syringe and drew off the poisonous fluid.

  It tookmonths of convalescence – aMediterranean cruise, three months at Bognor and weeks at Windsor – before the King recovered. Lord Dawson had shown his skill, but ‘It had been’, said the forthright Labour minister J. H. Thomas, ‘his bloody guts that pulled him through.’69

  In 1931, the King lost his faithful friend and secretary, Lord Stamfordham, who died, still in harness, at the age of eighty-one. Lord Stamfordham had been in royal service since 1880 when, as Colonel Arthur Bigge, he had been appointed Assistant Private Secretary to Queen Victoria. He had been brought to the Queen’s notice by the Empress Eugénie, wife of the deposed French Emperor, Napoleon III. She had been much taken by the kindness and sensitivity of the young officer Arthur Bigge, who had accompanied her to South Africa to visit the scene of the death of her son, the Prince Imperial, during the Zulu War. Bigge had been a close friend and fellow officer of the Prince Imperial, though he had been in hospital during the action in which the Prince had been killed. Eugenie had warmly praised Bigge to Queen Victoria, who had therefore brought him on to her staff. From then until her death he had been a great source of strength to her. After her death, Edward VII made him Private Secretary to George, Prince of Wales, whom he continued to serve faithfully when the Prince became King.

  As Kenneth Rose points out, ‘Most courtiers of the Victorian Age came of aristocratic family; Grey and Ponsonby, Phipps and Knollys. Bigge was the son of a Northumbrian parson.’70 Slight of stature and unassuming in appearance, he was, nevertheless, physically and morally brave. His comparatively humble origins in no way gave him a sense of inferiority among his aristocratic colleagues. Though charming in his dealings with high and low, he could be extremely firm and outspoken – as he was, for example, to Edward, Prince of Wales. And though his political judgement was by no means always infallible, it was always given honestly and directly, after clear and careful thought. He could always be relied upon to tell the truth, however disagreeable.

  To the end he kept the habit, acquired in the reign of Queen Victoria, of writing much of his immense correspondence entirely by hand. Queen Victoria had disliked typewritten communication: even after the late 1880s, when typewriters were introduced into government offices, she insisted on having all communications in handwriting. This was especially difficult in her last years when her eyesight failed. Then Bigge learned to write large in thick black ink.

  To King George V, Bigge was invaluable. Many monarchs have been deeply indebted to their Private Secretaries, but perhaps none acknowledged the debt so movingly as gruff King George V. On Christmas Day 1907, when he was still Prince of Wales, he wrote to Bigge:

  Fancy, how quickly time flies, it is nearly seven years already since you came to me. You have nothing to thank us for, it is all the other way and we have indeed much to thank you for. As for myself during these seven years you have made my life comparatively an easy one, by your kind help and assistance and entire devotion to work connected with me. What would have happened to me if you had not been there to prepare and help me with my speeches, I can hardly write a letter of any importance without your assistance. I fear sometimes I have lost my temper with you and often been very rude, but I am sure you know me well enough by now to know that I did not mean it…

  I offer you my thanks fro
m the bottom of my heart. I am a bad hand at saying what I feel, but I thank God that I have a friend like you, in whom I have the fullest confidence and from whom I know on all occasions I shall get the best and soundest advice whenever I seek it.71*

  While at home and abroad there was ‘change and decay’, riots and revolution, at Buckingham Palace life had slipped back into the old formal round. The traditional protocol was still observed: above all the King and Queen expected correct formal clothes to be worn to the Palace, and the King’s eagle eye spotted immediately any discrepancy, such as a medal wrongly placed. ‘Have you come in the suite of the American Ambassador?’ he would ask if any of his family or household appeared in unfamiliar garb. The King dressed as he had always done: his trousers were always creased at the side. He thought turn-ups were vulgar; ‘Is it raining outside?’ was his customary query – as though the offender had appeared with his trouser legs rolled up.

  There were some relaxations, but the King expected his ministers to wear top hats and morning coats when calling on him in the daytime, and white tie and knee breeches at dinner. Even when he and the Queen dined alone he would wear white tie and his Garter Star, and Queen Mary would always be splendid with jewels and a tiara. Old customs were still kept: forks were always laid with their prongs facing downwards, a relic of the days when gentlemen wore lace cuffs in which the forks might get entangled.

  Before the war visitors to the Palace had been happy to conform, but the younger officers who had slept in their clothes in the rain-soaked trenches and drunk out of tin mugs found the formality of the Palace stifling.

  Ever since the reign of Queen Victoria much time and diplomatic energy had been expended on questions of protocol and, particularly, what should be worn to Buckingham Palace. Republicans, both American and British, had been unduly exercised about what they considered to be the outward signs of subservience and the same objections to wearing court costume had been made by some British radicals and socialists over the years. When John Bright, in 1868, a minister in Gladstone’s government, insisted that as a working man he felt it morally wrong to wear court costume. Queen Victoria accepted his compromise – an old-fashioned black velvet suit. She even permitted him to stand instead of kneeling when he kissed hands.