Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  A man with a strict moral outlook and a rigid code of duty, by 1927 Lascelles had come to believe that his “idol had feet, and more than feet of clay.” So serious was his concern and intense his despair over the high-spirited heir apparent’s “unbridled pursuit of wine and women and whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment” and so great his fears that “unless [David] mended his ways, [he] would soon become no fit wearer of the British Crown,” that he sought a secret colloquy with Baldwin.

  Lascelles confided to the Prime Minister his damning and judgmental views. “I expected to get my head bitten off,” he later recalled, “but Baldwin heard me to the end, and after a pause, said he agreed with every word I had said. I went on. ‘You know, sometimes when I sit in York House waiting to get the result of some point-to-point in which he is riding, I can’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.’

  “‘God forgive me,’ said Stanley Baldwin, ‘I have often thought the same.’”

  Lascelles became “strongly inclined to leave the Prince’s service; [for] one cannot loyally serve a man whom one has come to regard as both vulgar and selfish—certainly not a Prince.” But his wife convinced him to wait.

  Although Lascelles did not yet believe such a thing could occur, there is evidence that as early as 1927, the Prince of Wales was considering abdication. He had bought a Canadian ranch “‘as a place ... to retire to.’

  “ ‘You mean for a holiday, Sir?’” Lascelles had asked.

  “’No, I mean for good,’ ” he had replied. Lascelles found this a puzzling statement but dismissed it for the time from his thoughts.

  In fact, from early youth the Prince had been terrified of one day becoming King. Perhaps the most traumatic incident in his adolescence occurred when he was twelve and a Naval cadet at the Royal Naval College. A group of seniors had cornered him by an open window in an empty classroom where he had gone to retrieve a forgotten book. They grabbed him and pushed his head through the opening, “and then, guillotine fashion and with accompanying jeers and realistic sounds, banged the window down on his neck, a crude reminder of the sad fate of Charles I and the British capacity to deal with royalty who displeased. His neck bruised and pain searing through his head, he still waited [in that frightening position] until the seniors’ retreating footsteps had died away, before crying out, finally attracting a sympathetic passer-by who released him, fortunately with his head intact.”

  Although all the British Royal Family were deeply affected by the murders of the Tsar and his family in 1918, David was the most obsessed with the horror of them and suffered related nightmares for a full decade thereafter.

  His mother preached duty and gave very little evidence of her love. Being the oldest brother and heir apparent, he was expected by both his parents to be above maudlin emotion and childish fears. Neither took note of the one factor that was to become the secret key to his baffling character. Either “for some hereditary or physiological reason his normal mental [sic] development stopped dead when he reached adolescence,” Lascelles once confided to a colleague. “There was one curious outward symptom of this: I saw him constantly at all hours of the day and night. Yet, I never observed on his face the faintest indication of the bristles which normally appear, even in men as fair as he was, when one has passed many hours without shaving.” (His valet, Frederick Smith, was to confide that “HRH never shaved in the morning at all....”)

  If the Prince of Wales did, indeed, suffer from a case of arrested development, it could account for his boyish disregard of rules of behavior set by adults and his can-I-get-away-with-it? attitude. In 1928, when he was on the African tour, he was thirty-five, but his immaturity persisted. Noël Coward, who saw him socially on occasion, believed he was homosexual. The Prince, later reflecting on those years, stated that he was “full of curiosity, and there were few experiences open to a young man of my day that I did not savour.” But, unlike Albert, Duke of Clarence (his father’s older brother, whose premature and mysterious death brought his younger brother, George, unexpectedly to the Throne), he was never known to cultivate homosexual relationships or friendships. His preference almost always ran to married, older women.

  “He was never out of the thrall of one female after another,” a close observer commented. “There was always a grande affaire, and ... an unbroken series of petites affaires, contracted and consummated in whatever highways and byways of the Empire he was traversing at the moment.”

  In Tanganyika the lady in question was the aforementioned Mrs. Barnes, a conquest that had taken precedence over the grave illness of his father. A fortnight elapsed between the receipt of the first telegram advising the Prince of Wales to return home and the date of his departure, although his stay in Central Africa was mainly for personal pleasure.

  “He had, in my opinion and in my experience,” a witness stressed, “no comprehension of the ordinary axioms of rational, or ethical, behavior. Fundamental ideas of duty, dignity or self-sacrifice had no meaning to him; and so isolated was he in the world of his own desires that I do not think he ever felt real affection—absolute, objective affection for any living being, not excluding members of his own family—the only possible exception was Prince George [Duke of Kent, his youngest brother] and he knew his brother’s weaknesses [alcohol and drugs] far too well ever to seek his advice.”

  At home, Queen Mary was doubly distressed. Well aware that the King clung to life by a tenuous thread, she also knew that the Prince of Wales had chosen to ignore the Prime Minister’s pleas for his return. More than family bonds, royal duty was involved, and the King’s son and heir had turned his back on both.

  The Prince and his party finally returned on December 11, to find the King barely conscious. The next evening a successful emergency operation was performed to remove potentially fatal fluid from the lung. Eight weeks later he was taken in an ambulance from Buckingham Palace to Craigweil House at Aldwich near Bogner to fully convalesce. On arrival, he made two requests: that he might be allowed to smoke a cigarette, and that Lilibet be brought to Bogner to see him.

  About this time King George began to make remarks to confidants to the effect that he wished Lilibet would one day ascend to the Throne. He told a close staff member that he believed David would “never be King. He will Abdicate.” (In fact, the Duchess of York’s father, Lord Strathmore, also was said to have confided to a friend, “[The Prince of Wales] might never come to the Throne, even if he did it might not last.”) The King’s main concern was his second son, Bertie, whom he clearly did not feel would ever be up to the task he would then inherit.

  Lilibet, too young to even suspect the internecine conflicts that raged around her, arrived at Aldwich to be with her grandfather shortly before Easter. With either the Queen or a nurse at his elbow, the King was able to walk the grounds with her. But on July 15 he was operated on again. His recovery was slow. The relationship he had previously enjoyed with Lilibet was over. For the rest of his life, King George was in ill health and terrified of catching a cold or some other illness from his grandchildren. His oldest grandchild, George Lascelles, suffered annual bouts of hay fever; and on the following Easter, 1930, while at Windsor, he started to sneeze, “either from the pollinating grass or sheer nerves, and no amount of reassurance that I had hay fever could stop [my grandfather’s] shouts of ‘Get that damn child away from me,’ which made a rather strong impression on an awakening imagination.”

  Yet the King remained devoted to Lilibet. Unable to play with her as he once had, he still favored her and enjoyed her nearness. Her fourth birthday, spent at Windsor with her Lascelles cousins and the rest of the Royal Family, coincided with Easter Monday. Allowed to choose her meals for the day, she selected fried fish for breakfast. Afterward, she took the leftover food on the King’s plate as a special treat for her menagerie of pets.

  “A basic kindness was quite lost in his gruff exterior,” George Lascelles recalled abo
ut his own relationship with his grandfather, “added to which the ritual good morning and good night peck [when staying at one of the Royal castles] had to be offered to a beard of astonishing abrasiveness....

  “We used at Windsor to come down at nine o’clock to breakfast, ... the King had an African Grey parrot called Charlotte of which he was very fond; it sat at a table by his side eating seeds or the apple core he gave it, sometimes perching on people’s hands.... [I was] scared of those pinching claws and that awesome beak, so that my grandfather shouted: ‘The parrot will see that child’s nervous—make him keep still.’ ”

  As well as remaining her grandfather’s pet, Lilibet was her parents’ pride. Guilt because of their long separation in her infancy had created a closer family circle upon their return. And unlike other royal children, Lilibet now spent a considerable amount of time with her parents. Alah brought her to their room at half past eight every morning and she remained there playing for about a half hour. She was carried down to tea with them later in the day and then her parents joined her in the nursery for bath hour and bedtime. There would be “hilarious sounds of splashing [heard] coming from the bathroom. Later, pillow fights [in the nursery] with Alah begging [the Duke] not to get Lilibet too excited.” Like his father, the Duke of York felt extremely comfortable playing childhood games.

  However, Bertie also possessed an erratic temper that he often had trouble controlling. Seldom did it erupt on Lilibet’s account; the child brought out the best and warmest aspects of his nature. But the Duchess did not travel an easy road in her marriage. She alone seemed able to deal with her husband’s unpredictable personality and to moderate his outbursts. Unabashedly feminine on the outside, she was surprisingly steely inside. She had honed charm into an impregnable armor. No matter how trying the circumstances, she managed to refrain from losing her patience. And she could always be relied upon to do the right thing. But her Household knew that her decisions were intractable, her loyalties unbending, and that when her usually dazzling eyes took on a flinty, cool glaze, this meant “beware.”

  The Queen, recognizing some of her own qualities in her daughter-in-law, had now come to respect her. With the King’s illness, the Duchess was propelled to the front, doubling her public commitments and gaining a huge amount of press coverage. She did not have to worry about Lilibet’s care; the nursery contingent saw to her every need. But there was the matter of her psychological development.

  Wherever Lilibet went in public, people stopped and smiled and said flattering things, or they cheered and waved flags. Although not without a price, her first four years had cast her as a uniquely privileged child. She was taught self-discipline, drilled in the demands and trappings of her position, and much more was expected of her than of any other child her age; nonetheless, she traveled backward and forward in limousines or in the privacy and luxury of the royal train through the most lavish of homes—the royal houses: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, Balmoral and Birkhall; and to the Strathmores’ country estates, St. Paul’s Walden Bury and Glamis Castle, all serviced by squadrons of liveried butlers, footmen, maids and chauffeurs who were obeisant in their attitude toward her. (She had to learn to accept graciously the bows and curtsies of adults and to control any childish impulse to lose her composure or become too familiar.) On birthdays and Christmas, hundreds of gifts were sent to her. Those from unknown donors were returned with a polite note, but since she was the only little girl in the Royal Family, presents were still lavished upon her. At three, she acquired her first Shetland pony, named Peggy, and began riding lessons with Owen, the King’s stud groom.

  She rode in open cars with the King and Queen to cheering throngs, and had a special position at any public entertainment. The imposing scarlet-uniformed guardsmen at the gate of Buckingham or Windsor would go through the stately exercise known as “presenting arms” when she passed in a car. Hers was a hothouse life and she was the prize rose. Then, in August 1930, her position was challenged. The Duchess of York was about to deliver her second child and had traveled to her family’s ancestral home, Glamis Castle in Scotland, for the event.

  Footnotes

  * See genealogy chart.

  * Two more sons, George and John, were to be born to the future Queen Mary and King George after this tour. See genealogy chart.

  * Chesterfield House, the far grander home of Lilibet’s small cousins George and Gerald Lascelles also opened on to Hamilton Gardens. “From there,” George recalled, “we watched the rather frequent military parades.... I once stood there (age 7) in my grey flannel summer suit and grey flannel floppy hat next to my grandmother Queen Mary, suffering agonies of indecision as to whether to take my hat off when soldiers saluted her.” Hamilton Gardens is now absorbed into London’s Park Lane traffic scheme.

  * Bertie (George VI) was later to say: “It was very difficult for David. My father was so inclined to go for him, I always thought that it was a pity that he found fault with him over unimportant things like what he wore. This only put David’s back up. But it was a pity that he did the things which he knew would annoy my father. The result was that they did not discuss the important things quietly. I think that is why David did not tell him [George V] before he died that he meant to marry [Wallis Simpson].”

  3

  Lilibet had been born in the heart of sedate Mayfair in a fashionable terraced town house. Her sister arrived during a terrifying, thunderous summer storm in the ghost-haunted Glamis Castle, situated amid the wild loveliness of Forfarshire, Scotland.

  Glamis is one of the names that Shakespeare has immortalized: “Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore ... Macbeth shall sleep no more!’ ”* The oldest inhabited house in the British Isles, it rises spectrally from the Strathmore (or “great valley”), a massive complex of weathered red sandstone. Two staunch towers and remnants of the nine original walls that once encircled the castle cast giant skeletal shadows across the surrounding fertile plain. In the distance loom the purple heather-covered hillsides. Superstition and legend lurk in the castle’s stone courtyard and corridors. Glamis came into the Bowes-Lyon family over six hundred years ago as a dowry for Princess Jean, daughter of Robert II of Scotland, who married Sir John Lyon. For the building as it now stands, Patrick, First Earl of Strathmore (1578–1615), was largely responsible.

  In the oldest part of the fortress a huge circular stone staircase ascends ominously. A vault-like coldness, caused by the immense thickness of its walls, chills the air. Up these solid stone stairs that have defied time and countless generations of footsteps, the wounded King Malcolm was carried bleeding to die in the room still called King Malcolm’s Room. Stains, believed to be his blood, mark the drab gray stone. Trapdoors, windowless rooms and secret passageways are concealed in the denseness of the walls, and “a grisly-looking well [now filled in] connects with the vaulted crypt beneath the Great Hall.”

  The Hangman’s Chamber, the grimmest room in the castle, was so named because two of its occupants had, indeed, hanged themselves. In 1611, the same Patrick had retreated for unknown reasons to a dank and gloomy cell-like chamber known only to four people, and lived there until his death. A misshapen monster of a child born to Charlotte and Thomas Lyon-Bowes, Lord Glamis, in 1821, although recorded as a stillbirth, was said to have been entombed in another of the castle’s hidden rooms for over seventy years. And, as a youngster, the Duchess had been told a story about “a guest, who, strolling on the lawn after dinner one night, saw a girl at one of the upstairs windows, gripping the bars and looking white-faced out into the darkness. As he watched, she disappeared. There was a piercing scream; then silence. It was one minute to midnight. A few minutes later the door of one of the towers opened and a hideous old woman ‘with a fiendish face’ staggered out with a sack on her back. At the sight of the guest she [disappeared] into the woods, her black coat billowing....

  “Years later, in a convent in Italy, the guest came
across ‘the girl at the Glamis window.’ Her hands had been cut off and her tongue cut out—it had been discovered that she had stumbled on a family secret.” The young Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was warned by a kitchen maid that “if she dared to look out of the night nursery window late at night, she would see the tongueless woman running across the park, pointing in agony to her bleeding mouth.” Stories were also told about “the Room of Skulls, in which a number of Ogilvys (early enemies of the Bowes-Lyon family) had been immured until, after eating the flesh off their own arms, they died of starvation and crumpled into a heap of bones.”

  Yet with all the echoes of its grim past and the presence of ghostly companions, Glamis had a strong hold on the Duchess of York. Remembered by one contemporary as “heavy with atmosphere, sinister, lugubrious,” to the Duchess the medieval castle recalled a time in her life when she and her beloved brother David played hide-and-seek through its maze-like chambers and corridors and the large Bowes-Lyon family sat down each evening at dinner as “two pipers marched round and round the table playing their wild music.” If home would always be the agreeable, but less dramatic, St. Paul’s Walden Bury, Glamis was the enchanted palace of her secure and contented childhood and it kept calling her back.

  The family occupied a wing of the house rebuilt in the nineteenth century, overlooking a Dutch garden that was somewhat less forbidding than the rest of the remote fortress. With the exception of the World War I years when Glamis had been converted into a hospital, the Strathmores and, at various times, their married children and their families had spent three months a year there, most usually July through September. While the bloodstains on the stone floors of the unoccupied wings still remained, Lady Strathmore filled their rooms with masses of flowers both real and printed on fabrics and the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon’s fondest memories were of “carriage-loads of visitors [who] streamed through the lofty front door.”