by Edna Healey
In the summer of 1934, Wallis was firmly established as the Prince’s new favourite, accompanying him on a Mediterranean holiday.
Aware that since she was thirty-nine this might well be, as she wrote, her ‘last fling’, she was determined to enjoy it until she was supplanted by a younger woman. Then she would ‘fold her tent and silently slip away’.87
Meanwhile her husband Ernest must be kept happy as her security for the future. However, when Wallis returned from holiday, it was, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘like being Wallis in Wonderland. Ernest remarked at me quizzically. “It sounds to me”, he said thoughtfully, “indeed like a trip behind the Looking Glass, or better yet into the realm of Peter Pan’s Never-Never Land.” From then on the Prince was always Peter Pan to Ernest.’88 Wallis too was becoming aware that in losing her husband she would ‘lose something noble for a boy who may always remain Peter Pan’.89
But the Prince of Wales was hopelessly and for ever infatuated. … On Wallis’s next appearance at the State Ball at Buckingham Palace, part of the Jubilee celebration of May 1935, Ernest Simpson was with her but she was wearing the Prince’s jewels. This was her third visit to Buckingham Palace. On the previous occasions she had been treated with the usual royal courtesy as an ordinary guest. This time was different: she was now a threat to the throne.
In the last year of his life King George V was haunted by the fear that after his death his son would wreck the monarchy that he and the Queen had so striven to uphold. But, though they were perfectly aware that Mrs Simpson was the Prince’s constant companion, not only at the Fort but also at York House, where she acted as his hostess, yet neither he nor the Queen had been able to discuss it with him, and the Prince himself could never find the right moment to broach the subject.
At this May ball, although King and Queen behaved with impeccable courtesy, Mrs Simpson was perfectly aware of the King’s hostility. The Prince of Wales danced first with the Queen and then led Mrs Simpson on to the floor. She wrote in her memoirs:
As David and I danced past, I thought I felt the King’s eyes rest searchingly on me. Something in his look made me feel that all this graciousness and pageantry were but the glittering tip of an iceberg … filled with icy menace for such as me.90
That summer Ernest chose to take a long business trip to the USA, while Wallis spent the summer with the Prince and other guests, first at his rented villa in Cannes, then cruising round the Greek islands and afterwards touring through Europe to Paris. After this summer the Prince realized that he could not live without Wallis and clearly was prepared to renounce the throne rather than lose her.
King George V watched his son’s behaviour with growing horror, contrasting him with his second son, The Duke of York, who he saw would make a better king. A few weeks before his death the King exclaimed with passion to their friend Blanche Lennox, ‘I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the Throne.’91
The year 1935 ended in sorrow. The loss of his sister, Princess Victoria, on 3 December grieved him deeply. Though somewhat bad-tempered in her lonely old age, Princess Victoria had adored her brother, and they had spoken every day on the telephone. She was one of his last links with his beloved mother, Queen Alexandra, who had died in 1925. Since then he and the Queen had moved into the big house at Sandringham, where Princess Victoria still lived.
The family Christmas at Sandringham was sadder this year. When the King broadcast his last Christmas message, friends noticed the hoarseness in his voice, and the emotion in his words for his family.
He made his last entry in his diary on Friday 17 January 1936. There was the sailor’s last record of the weather, then ‘Dawson arrived this evening. I saw him and feel rotten.’92
He worked, however, to the end. As he lay dying he realized that a Council of State must be appointed to act on his behalf. His Privy Council was sent for and waited in the room next to his bedroom. The Lord President read the order to him: he managed to say, ‘Approved’. But it was with infinite difficulty that he struggled to write ‘G R’ with Dawson’s help.
That night Lord Dawson, his surgeon, wrote the final, memorable bulletin. ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’93 Death came just before midnight.
The next morning at a little country school the present writer listened while the headmaster announced that the King was dead. Then, to her surprise and embarrassment, a man who normally showed no emotion broke down and sobbed uncontrollably. He wept for a simple, honest man, a King who had become much loved. Even the radical Clynes described his reign as ‘the finest example in modern times of the supremely difficult art of constitutional kingship. He took the trouble to understand his people and to progress with them through the age in which they lived.’94
After the King’s death, Queen Mary wrote in her diary with characteristic simplicity, ‘Am heartbroken … at 5 to 12 my darling husband passed peacefully away, my children were angelic’. And then she wrote, ‘The sunset of his death tinged the whole world’s sky.’95
Only those who knew her well understood the intensity of her grief; she was calm and controlled, sustained by unchanging ritual. As the old King died she was the first to turn to the new King, take his hand and kiss it in reverent homage.
There was some comfort for the Queen in the shared grief of ‘our own kind people’ at Sandringham and the thousands of mourning Londoners who filed past the great catafalque in Westminster Hall; and above all, at the thought of her sons. ‘At midnight,’ she wrote, ‘my four sons stood guard over their father’s coffin for 20 minutes, a very touching thought.’96
The new King, Edward VIII, never forgot their vigil: ‘I had been to the Hall,’ he wrote, ‘and was greatly moved by the scene. It occurred to me that here was a way in which my brothers and I might pay our respects to our dead father.’97 So he arranged that he and his brothers in full dress uniform
without the public being aware of our presence should station ourselves around the catafalque between the officers already in vigil. Even at so late an hour the river of people still flowed past the coffin. But I doubt whether many recognized the King’s four sons among the motionless uniformed figures bent over swords reversed. We stood there for twenty minutes in the dim candlelight and great silence. I felt close to my father and all that he had stood for.
From the glowing heights the great clock chimed the half hour its lingering reverberations obliterating … the sound of countless shuffling feet.98
It was in the silence of Westminster Hall that King Edward VIII must have felt the ‘uneasy sensation of being left alone on a vast stage, a stage that was the British Empire, to play a part not yet written’.
So a great partnership ended – one that had been of major importance in the history of Buckingham Palace.
King George V had used Buckingham Palace as no other monarch had done. It was his home and his headquarters; it was the setting for many a magnificent occasion enhancing the prestige of the Crown; and, above all, it was a place for conferences, which he convened with the aim of creating unity in his kingdom. In his private rooms or in the great State Rooms he had repeatedly brought together men of different political views in his intense desire for harmony and stability.
Queen Mary had made a contribution as significant as that of the Prince Consort in the reign of Queen Victoria, by being the first to organize the Royal Collection in a professional way. She awakened an interest in history and brought a sense of continuity and stability in times of great change and disturbance.
For the rest of her long life, until her death in 1953, Queen Mary remained the keeper of the flame.
* King George V had inherited a constitutional quagmire in which he was to struggle. He was not, as he admitted, a clever man, but he was conscientious, with a deep sense of his duty to hold on to such rights as the monarchy still had. When he came to the throne the Commons could pass a bill after three readings, but
the Lords could throw it out. The Liberal government had introduced the Parliament Bill, which aimed to ensure that the peers could not amend or reject any money bill, and that any other bill could be delayed only for two years, after which it would automatically go to the King for his signature. The Commons had passed the Parliament Bill; the Lords rejected it. In November 1910 the Liberal Prime Minister Asquith asked the King to promise to create enough peers to allow the ‘will of the people as expressed in the Commons to be carried out’.18
The King’s Secretaries, to whom he turned for advice, gave him contrary opinions. Knollys – whose sympathies were liberal – advised him to create more peers; Lord Stamfordham – a traditionalist – advised him to use his veto. The King, badgered and bullied by Liberals and Conservatives in turn, finally agreed to Asquith’s proposal to call a new election, to be fought on the issue of Lords against Parliament. If the Liberals won, the King secretly promised, if necessary, to create enough peers to carry the Bill through the Lords. It was not in fact necessary. The Liberals were returned with an increased majority of 126 seats. The Lords realized that further blocking would be in vain: after a great deal of backstage wheeling and dealing, at 10.40 p.m. on 10 August 1911 they finally passed the Bill.
* Many of the rough blocks were of great size, some of them, after being shaped and moulded ready for fixing in the building, weighing as much as five tons. For working and preparing the stonework in the yards, an average of about 270 men were employed. Two weeks were spent in erecting the scaffold, six weeks in fixing the main portion of the stone, and the remainder of the time in pointing and cleaning down. Six large Scots derricks were erected, five electric hoists, and two electric passenger lifts. The scaffolding was of unusual strength: 5,000 new scaffold poles and from 10,000 to 12,000 boards were used in its construction.
* In July 1924, as patroness of the Mary MacArthur Holiday Homes for Working Women, the Queen opened the first Home at Ongar. She described her visit there to Lady Crewe:
I was so glad to be able, in this way, to show my deep appreciation of poor Mary MacArthur’s untiring work on behalf of my Work for Women’ fund during the war. The visit there gave me the opportunity of meeting those workers with whom I do not often come in contact … mats for the bedrooms have already been chosen and I am also sending a few pictures to adorn the walls.
* When Bigge’s grandson, Michael Adeane, became Private Secretary to Queen Elizabeth II he brought with him a long family tradition of loyal and distinguished service to the Crown.
CHAPTER EIGHT
King Edward VIII
‘Into the realm of Peter Pan’s Never-Never Land.’1
ERNEST SIMPSON TO MRS SIMPSON
Abdication
The reign of King Edward VIII was brief, but crucial in the history of the Palace. It was only eleven months from his accession to the throne on 20 January 1936 to his abdication on 11 December 1936. During that time he kept offices in the Palace but spent little time there and did not take up residence until 1 October. He left the Palace late at night on 3 December and never returned as King. His Coronation, planned for 12 May 1937, never took place. King Edward VIII contributed little to the history of Buckingham Palace itself, but had he not abdicated, the British monarchy, and therefore the Palace, would have been fundamentally changed.
At the beginning of his reign, he set up an office in Buckingham Palace but found it dark and depressing. It was, he wrote, ‘on the ground [floor in] a small waiting-room, decorated and furnished in Oriental style. It looked out upon the Great Courtyard through two windows; on all but the brightest days I keep a light burning on my desk.’2 Now an office in the Lord Chamberlain’s department, it is still dark, but only the Chinese decoration of the fireplace remains of the ‘Oriental style’.
Queen Mary did not leave the Palace until October. After King George V’s death she found comfort in ‘filling her mind with trivial things, with the packing of objets d’art and the redecoration of Marlborough House, to shut out her loneliness and anxiety’.3 The ‘anxiety’ was for the future of the monarchy, now the responsibility of her eldest son.
King George V’ papers had to be dealt with, and there were hundreds of letters to be answered. Her own possessions had to be distinguished from those belonging to the Crown. ‘It was’, King Edward VIII wrote, ‘a melancholy task of no mean magnitude, for in the course of her active life she had assembled an immense collection of objets d’art (Tart and historical souvenirs of the Royal family.’4 It was with great regret that she locked away the magnificent royal jewels, shuddering at the thought of Mrs Simpson arrayed in them. ‘He gives Mrs Simpson the most beautiful jewels,’5 she sighed. She even suspected that the new King was giving Mrs Simpson jewellery that rightly belonged to the Crown.
For months she worked methodically, and at the same time supervised the redecoration of Marlborough House. Meanwhile she watched her son taking his father’s place. On 23 June she drove from the Palace through cheering crowds to the Horse Guards Parade for Trooping the Colour. ‘David held the parade,’ she wrote, ‘which was a lovely sight as usual, but tears were often in my eyes thinking of the past and of him we sorely miss.’6
From her window in Buckingham Palace, Queen Mary watched while her son received the guests to garden parties on 21 and 22 July, as she and King George V had done so many times before. However, King Edward VIII did things differently. During the six months of Court mourning the usual courts for the presentation of débutantes were postponed. In order to deal with what the Duke of Windsor called in his memoirs the ‘social bottleneck’, he decided to hold two garden parties when 600 débutantes could be presented.
When that first afternoon I joined my guests in the garden, I found pitched near the lake the huge silken Durbar canopy with hammered silver poles that my parents had brought back from India. Under it was a large gilt chair for me to sit on. Members of the Royal Family, the Diplomatic Corps, and the Household were seated directly behind; a Guards’ band alternating with the pipers of a Highland regiment played under the trees a little distance away. The scene was undeniably charming as the attractively dressed women advanced down the red carpet to make their curtsies to the King.7
However, on 21 July a sudden storm blew up:
If only the tempo of the curtsying could have been speeded, the day might have been saved. But these Court presentations, like an assembly line, have a cadence all their own: ten seconds for each debutante to make her curtsy and pass on. Meanwhile the wind came up; and the first big, wet drops began to fall. Then came the downpour. Prudently, the other guests who were not being presented scampered into the protection of the tea tents. But with scarcely a waver the debutantes came on. Their costly hats and dresses, which had taken weeks to make, became progressively more bedraggled; and their expressions increasingly woebegone. From the shelter of the embroidered Durbar canopy…
the King decided to stop the presentations.
The Lord Chamberlain agreed that it would be the most dignified and sensible thing to do. Rising from the gilt chair, I made a bow in the direction of the still unpresented young ladies, and with a gesture intended to convey my regret over the inadvertent shower that had necessitated cutting the garden party short, I retired to the Palace.8
Although the rain stopped the King did not return. He could never understand why his guests were so offended. This insensitivity and selfishness were typical. King George V and Queen Mary would not have behaved so.
At last the Queen left Buckingham Palace. ‘I took leave of my lovely rooms with a sad heart,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘David kindly came to see me off.’9 As always, she found it difficult to talk to her son, but she wrote to him: ‘I feel sure you realized that I felt very sad at leaving those lovely comfortable rooms which have been my happy home for 25 years and that I was terribly afraid of breaking down.’10 She had transformed the cold building that she had found so ‘ungemUtlkh’. into a gracious friendly home.
Of the many tributes paid
to her, one gave her deep pleasure to the end of her life. In May 1924, at the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, the most popular exhibit had been Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. One of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, Princess Marie Louise, had had the brilliant idea of persuading the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens to design a dolls’ house for Queen Mary. Lutyens, who was building New Delhi at the time, agreed with enthusiasm – the contrast would be refreshing; and Queen Mary decided it should ‘enable future generations to see how a King and Queen of England lived in the twentieth century‘.11 So it became a perfect replica of a Georgian house, with real minute paintings and a library of miniature books contributed by great authors of the day. Bathrooms and kitchens were perfect in all details; the dining table could be laid with gold plate or Royal Doulton. There were costly replicas of the royal Daimlers in the garage and a Pipe Major and five Guardsmen stood at attention in sentry boxes. After the exhibition it was moved to Windsor, where Queen Mary often came to look at it, and to arrange and rearrange the rooms. She kept a key so that she could come alone without her servants. The Dolls’ House was her dream palace where all was perfection: where there was no war, no children with problems and the only sound that of the gramophone in the nursery playing ‘God Save The King’. Here time stood still while she remembered a marriage of deep, though often unspoken, love and happiness.
While Queen Mary was in residence the new King planned rooms for himself with little enthusiasm. The new King hated Buckingham Palace with an intense loathing. ‘The dank musty smell I had always associated with the building assailed me afresh the instant I set foot inside the King’s door.’ He told friends that he and his brother ‘always froze when they entered the gates’.12
The Fort was his new home which he loved with an equal intensity. He gave York House at St James’s to his younger brother, Prince George, and until October, when he moved into the Palace, he held his official receptions at St James’s Palace. The Duke and Duchess of York had their London home at 145 Piccadilly.
