by Anne Edwards
She had said some of this in a telephone conversation earlier that evening and the King had written as soon as they were disconnected:
... Why do you say such hard things to David on the telephone ... ? Hard things like you would prefer to have someone else with you tonight when you are sick that I would be bored that I don’t understand you and lots of others which hurt me....
Our lovely holiday did do you good and now that’s all undone. It makes me sick too. You see I do love you so entirely and in every way Wallis. Madly tenderly adoringly and with admiration and such confidence.
After he received her letter of the sixteenth, they discussed its contents in extended telephone conversations over the next four days by which time Wallis had learned that Ernest wanted to marry Mary Kirk Raffray. What had started as a close friend acting as co-respondent had backfired and, perhaps, changed Wallis Simpson’s life—and history. Ernest would not have her back. She was granted a divorce nisi (as the innocent party) on October 27. She also won all court costs, but reimbursed Ernest for the amount he had to pay.
Alan Lascelles, who had been on the cruise and with the King almost every day since their return, sensed that abdication was in the air. Nonetheless, on November 23, when the Prime Minister told him that the King was adamant in his decision to abandon the Throne, “the shock was so great that he went out and walked around St. James’s Park in the dark for more than an hour and then came back to his rooms at Buckingham Palace, which the King now occupied, and wrote his wife, Joan:
It will happen quite soon, it seems—in a week or ten days; and at present only twelve people in the world know that it is imminent.... Though I have little doubt that the change is ultimately for the best—I am inclined to think that as the years went on, the Hyde side [of the King’s character] would have predominated more and more over Jekyll.... He will be the most tragic might-have-been in all history. Nothing but his own will could have saved him, and the will was not there; no human being, other than himself—and of course, herself, could have averted this dreadful thing.
For the next two weeks the King’s staff carried on “as if nothing were happening and at the same time prepare[d] ... for what is going to happen.” The British press broke the story on December 3 of the constitutional crisis over the King’s wish to marry Mrs. Simpson. Chaos followed. With no real warning the people suddenly, and in a matter of days, had to reexamine their views of the Monarchy. “What was at stake was the power of the people through Parliament, against the power of the Monarchy.”
“Really! This might be Rumania!” Queen Mary remarked bitterly about the hysterical debates in Parliament over Mrs. Simpson, and the ugly and daily press coverage this incurred.
Besieged by newsmen, Wallis sought sanctuary at Cannes with her good friends, the Rogerses. From their villa, Lou Viei, she wrote the King begging him not to abdicate and on December 6 issued “a public statement in which she expressed her willingness ‘to withdraw from a situation which has become both unhappy and untenable [therefore to end her relationship with the King].’ ” Within twenty-four hours the King, fearing he would lose Wallis, “communicated to the Government his irrevocable decision to give up the throne.”
The day after the press had carried the story of his proposed wish to abdicate if he and Wallis could not marry, the King went to see his mother at Marlborough House. She asked him to reflect on the effect his proposed action would have on his family (Bertie’s health primarily), on the Throne, and on the British Empire. His only answer was: “Can’t you understand that nothing matters—nothing—except her happiness and mine?”
The early days of December were pure mayhem. A member of the Household would “never forget seeing Clive Wigram coming down the King’s stairs at Buckingham Palace, exclaiming at the top of his never-well-modulated voice ... ‘He’s mad—he’s mad—we shall have to lock him up!’ ” The same thought, though not expressed quite so openly, was in the minds of many of the staff.
Bertie was in a state of extreme agitation. He would, after all, be the most affected by his brother’s abdication. He had “no taste or ambition for the position of King. The idea, in fact, was terrifying and abhorrent to him.” The King knew this and also that it was their mother’s fervent wish and his sister-in-law Elizabeth’s prayer that “Bertie should never have to wear the Crown.”
For several days after his brother’s confrontation with their mother, Bertie tried to arrange a meeting with him. To his frustration and resentment, three days passed before this was accomplished. Finally, on Thursday, December 10, at “10 minutes to 7.0 P.M. [the King rang] to say ‘Come and see me after dinner.’ Bertie replied with desperation, ‘No, I will come and see you at once!’ ”
The awful and ghastly waiting was over for Bertie. He drove at top speed from Royal Lodge to the Fort where he found the King “pacing up and down the room.” Bertie now heard firsthand that his brother planned to abdicate and to marry Wallis Simpson. The finality of this decision was a severe blow and he harbored strong feelings of its unfairness to him. Each of the Royal brothers had his own reason for not wanting the responsibility of the Crown, and each thought that reason moral. Bertie considered that he was ill-prepared to be tested and he did not want to disrupt the comfortable pattern of his life; while David believed that even a King had a right to marry the woman he loved.
In truth, Bertie was as reliant on the Duchess of York as David was on Wallis Simpson, which should have given the younger brother a greater understanding of the King’s dilemma. But life had conditioned Bertie to accept (and expect) his brother’s leadership. Both were men who required strong women. It is easy to say that they searched for and found, in the women they chose, the mother they never had, harder to justify that one had the right to maintain that relationship and the other did not.
“I could see that nothing I said would alter his decision. His mind was made up,” Bertie wrote in his diary after his meeting with the King, and added: “I went to see Queen Mary & when I told her what had happened I broke down & sobbed like a child” (to his mother’s embarrassment, for Walter Monckton was in the room with them).
Queen Mary noted that “Bertie arrived very late from Fort Belvedere & Mr. Walter Monckton brought him & me the paper drawn up for David’s abdication of the Throne of this Empire because he wishes to marry Mrs. Simpson!!!!!! ... It is a terrible blow to us all & particularly to poor Bertie.”
Now came the crucial talks between Bertie, Queen Mary, and the King’s ministers. Before he would end the crisis, David wanted to be sure that he would retain a Royal title and that he was well compensated financially for giving up his interests in Sandringham and Balmoral (for although King George’s will had said these would pass to the next Monarch on David’s death, it made no provision for abdication). Crown property (Windsor and Buckingham Palace) was never an issue for it passed automatically from one Monarch to the next; and the Fort, at least at that time, was considered his private property.
The title HRH Duke of Windsor was chosen (someone joked, “It should be the Duke of Tipperary!”), but the exact “status and rights accorded the title would not be settled for several more weeks.” Finally, an agreement regarding the real estate matter was reached and signed in a heated meeting at Fort Belvedere. The King agreed to forfeit his rights in Balmoral and Sandringham and all their contents for a lifetime guaranteed income of £25,000 annually. In return, he was not to see Wallis Simpson for six months, or return to England, even for a visit, without the approval of the reigning Monarch.
A few days later, after his famous Abdication Speech* and his sad leavetaking for Austria (where he would remain for the next six months), he sent a cordial telegram to the new King, wishing him and the Queen “Best love and best of luck ... David.”
The morning of the abdication, December 11, a funeral pall hovered over London. Despite raw wind and pelting rain, great masses of people had stood before the grilles and gates of Buckingham Palace and at the front steps of 145 s
ince the previous night. Inside, the sisters had not yet been told what was happening, but as the morning progressed, Lilibet grew curious as to why such a huge crowd had gathered in front of their house and so many dignitaries had come to see her father. Finally, unable to get Crawfie to tell her the reason, she slipped downstairs and confronted a footman. “King Edward has abdicated,” he told her. “Your father, God bless him, is now the King.” Up the stairs she dashed to tell Margaret.
“Does that mean that you will have to be the next Queen?” Margaret asked.
“Yes, someday,” Lilibet answered.
“Poor you,” her sister snapped. (But it must have rankled because later she was heard to say, “If Lilibet doesn’t get married then I’ll be Queen!” which was, of course, not true.)
Cynthia Asquith was at 145 that day and recalled that “Lilibet’s brilliant blue eyes were dark with suppressed excitement. From time to time when a specially loud cheer [from the crowd outside] proclaimed the arrival of some other important personage [the Prime Minister and Winston Churchill had already come and gone], she would dart to the window, glance out, and excitedly whisper, ‘Thousands of people outside!’ When I rose to go, she escorted me down the stairs. On the hall table lay one solitary letter which she picked up and fingered.... The envelope was inscribed to Her Majesty the Queen ... and her face went very solemn. ‘That’s Mummy now,’ she said, with a tiny tremor in her awestruck voice.”
Their mother was in bed nursing a cold. Queen Mary arrived to see her at midmorning and when she left her bedroom, Crawfie was summoned and told what of course she already knew. Propped up among pillows, the new Queen held out her hand to the governess. “We must take what is coming to us and make the best of it,” she said in a hoarse voice. They would now, she explained sadly, have to move into Buckingham Palace. Crawfie told the girls.
“You mean forever?” Margaret said.
“Yes. And you are no longer Margaret of York.”
“Then who am I?”
“You are just Margaret.”
“But I have only just learned to write ‘York,’ now I’m nobody.” This seemed to trouble her, as though it involved some mysterious loss of her own identity. Weeks later she was heard to complain, “Since Papa turned King, I don’t seem to be anyone at all.”
On the day of the abdication, Crawfie told them that when their Papa came “home for lunch at one o’clock he will be King of England and you both have to curtsy to him as you have always curtsied to your grandparents and your Uncle David.”
“ ‘And now you mean we must do it to Papa and Mummie?’ Lilibet asked. ‘Margaret too?’ ”
“ ‘Yes,’ Crawfie instructed, ‘and she must try not to topple over.’ ” This was achieved, but so ridiculous did curtseying to their parents seem that the idea was quickly dismissed and Queen Mary remained the only member of their family to receive such obeisance. Their grandmother now became a steely influence on their lives, her dignity and sense of duty held up to them as the standard for their behavior and her ability to so swiftly transfer her loyalty and allegiance “from the son who had abandoned his country and duty to the son who had been forced to take on that burden” admired. Whatever small love Queen Mary had displayed to her sons when they were young had gone to David. She now turned with sympathy to Bertie, the son whom she believed to be making the real sacrifice.
Pale and haggard, the traces of the tension of the last days deeply etched in his face, Bertie attended his Accession Council at St. James’s Palace on the morning of December 12. With many painful hesitations he made his first address to his Privy Councillors as their Sovereign.* The following day, a Sunday, prayers were offered for him “in every place of worship throughout the Empire.... A prayer for the King’s majesty, our most gracious Sovereign Lord King George [Bertie had styled himself George VI] ... so replenish him ... endue him ... grant him ... strengthen him ... bring him ... A prayer for the Royal Family ... our gracious Queen Elizabeth ... the Princess Elizabeth ... endue them ... enrich them ... prosper them ... ”
Almost all the Sunday papers had stories and an accompanying portrait of “Our Princess Elizabeth.” Margaret was relegated to family group photographs. After all, Lilibet was the sister who one day would become Queen.
Footnotes
*See Appendices.
*See Appendices.
6
Their privacy having been left behind at 145, the new Royal Family was installed in Buckingham Palace within six weeks of the abdication. Lilibet wistfully suggested they dig a tunnel from the Palace to their old house. This could have indicated a taste for archaeology, but more likely she longed for the simpler life they had so recently led.
Buck House was as homey as a monstrous, antiquated museum. The vast corridors were mostly unheated and it was a full five minutes’ walk from the girls’ bedrooms to the garden. Food had to travel about half a mile, up and down stone steps, along winding unheated passageways, invariably arriving cold and served tepid despite the battery of heating trays in the various dining rooms. Wherever the sisters wanted to go “there were those interminable corridors,” almost always trafficked by some member of the palace staff of over seven hundred. One man worked a full day, every day, to wind the three hundred clocks, six full-time florists arranged and watered the hundreds of floral bouquets, ten electricians tended the over two hundred thousand electric light bulbs in need of constant replacement, a dozen postmen made their daily rounds delivering about fifteen hundred letters to the Royal Family and the Palace staff: the various equerries, ladies-in-waiting, private secretaries and the nursery contingent of the Royal Household, the Palace’s many office and domestic workers, along with gardeners, telephone operators, police and security and vermin controllers.
The Royal Apartments faced north and overlooked the Mall. Lilibet shared her bedroom with Bobo (Mrs. MacDonald) and—just up a corridor lined with their collection of miniature horses—Margaret shared hers with Alah. (Ruby and Crawfie had their own quarters.) The children’s wing also included a schoolroom and a nursery where the sisters played on inclement days and where they had their supper, brought to them by a nursery footman. They sometimes lunched with their parents in a comfortable dining room on the second floor with the King’s collection of horse pictures newly hung on the walls.
The State Apartments and banquet rooms were all on the ground floor overlooking the garden, “the best part of the Palace” as far as the girls were concerned. A lake in the center of the garden had a large population of ducks. One day Crawfie heard “a splash and a shriek.” She ran over to the water’s edge just as “Lilibet, covered with green slime,” stepped out from its shallow rim. She had fallen in, she explained, looking for a duck’s nest.
By the end of April the Royal Family had settled in. Life was not the same as it once had been, but there was an excitement about living amid the busy, cold magnificence of Buck House: the many uniformed and splendidly dressed dignitaries who constantly came and went, the handsome horses and carriages in the Royal stables, and the guards in their tall bearskin hats, whose changing they could see from their second-story nursery windows.
Not only did they have to readjust to living in a palace with a constant flow of people bustling through its miles of corridors, they also had to sacrifice some of their treasured weekends at Royal Lodge in favor of Windsor Castle’s fusty interior. The castle had seen little change since Victoria’s occupancy. But although it lacked the classical splendor of Continental palaces such as the Château de Versailles and the excitement of the activity generated at Buck House, it enjoyed a mystical position: its massive, turreted gray silhouette rising majestically above the town named for it, the verdant Great Park spreading to the south, the Thames winding slowly through it.
During their father’s childhood, the corridors of Windsor had been used by his brothers, sister and him for “boisterous pursuits, running races and playing hide-and-seek among the marble busts.” Windsor had also housed Queen Victoria’s
large brood and, in the days of George III, had been “a free-for-all playground for the schoolchildren of Windsor.” But it had been several decades since children had occupied the castle and it took Lilibet and Margaret time to overcome their initial intimidation.
Their parents’ private apartments “with their gilded woodwork and plaster, their elaborate doors ... their rich brocaded walls of green and crimson” were even more sumptuous than at Buck House and separated from their own rooms by a three-hundred-foot-long corridor built by George IV to accommodate his huge Royal Collection of pictures and “to save the walk [in bad weather] across the courtyard from one part of the castle to another.”
The Secretary of State for War, Duff Cooper (who had survived the bitter purge of the ex-King Edward’s close associates), and his wife, Lady Diana, spent the night of April 16 with the Royal Family at Windsor. Although good friends and generally harmonious, Duff Cooper and Edward VIII had not been in accord on the subject of Germany. The ex-King had hoped that England would be able “to come to terms with the new [German] regime,” and he was not pleased with Cooper’s attitude [expressed to him on the Nahlin cruise]. But Cooper was certain that war was approaching, and that “there was only one way of preventing it, and that was to convince the Germans that if they fought they would be beaten.” Now, he wanted an opportunity to assure the new King of the rightness of his beliefs.
