Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  “We were warned by the Comptroller’s minion to present ourselves at the Castle at 6 or thereabouts and that knee-breeches would be worn [by the men],” Diana Cooper recorded. “We passed down a many-doored musty passage which led to our suite. This consists of a sitting-room with piano and good fire ... and thirteen oil-paintings of Royalty, the only charming one being an unfinished sketch of Queen Victoria drooping submissively on a merely ‘blocked in’ figure of her dear Prince, the work of Sir Edwin Landseer. Besides the oils there are about a hundred plaques, miniatures, intaglios, wax profiles, etc. of the family in two Empire vitrines, and two bronze statuettes of King Edward VII in yachting get-up and another Prince in Hussar uniform.

  “Communicating with this bower is Duff’s very frigid room with tapless long bath, inclosed and lidded in mahogany. Through this again is my throttlingly-stuffy bedroom with nine oils of the family and a bed for three hung with embroidered silk. Next a large bathroom and lu with eight oil paintings of the family ... a bronze statuette of Princess Louise on horseback and Princess Beatrice, Prince Leopold and “Waldie” (also in bronze) on the moors.”

  Nonetheless, there was “something indescribable ... an aura about the whole place ....” While Buck House had the sniff of a Government building, Windsor carried the powerful scent of Majesty. There was even a special “Windsor Castle smell—a smell like nowhere else—old furniture kept very clean.”

  Margaret and Lilibet’s apartments were in the three-story Lancaster Tower with its stone staircases and winding, echoing passages. Here, as at Buck House, Lilibet shared her room with Bobo, while Alah lodged with her sister. A sitting room, with recently built shelves for their toys and small treasures, connected their private accommodations. The castle had no central heating. Their sitting room contained a log fire and the bedrooms had electric stoves, but “to travel the icy passages ... up to bed was a feat of considerable endurance.”

  Physical discomfort was not what disturbed the girls. They recognized almost immediately that their time with their parents at Windsor would be limited and that being there meant being apart from them while they were occupied with matters of protocol and state. They had no friends outside their own family circle. They, of course, had their same loyal nursery staff and each other, and their new position—which distanced them from normal childhood relationships—drew them even closer together. They were always dressed alike—a custom that was weighted in Margaret’s favor, for Lilibet’s older years prescribed a more sophisticated fashion than Margaret might otherwise have been allowed.

  Her father spent much less time riding with Lilibet but she was allowed to go out with Owen, the groom. Occasionally, Margaret, who had developed into a fair rider, came along. But Margaret enjoyed touring the castle with Crawfie during whatever short separations she had from her sister. The number of historical artifacts stored at Windsor was overwhelming. Most of them were too sinister for the governess’s taste (the shirt in which Charles I was executed, stained black with his blood; the bullet that came out of Nelson’s heart), but Margaret found them fascinating. Horror stories had always appealed to her. At Glamis she had discovered in a discarded trunk an old book of violent pirates’ tales, pieced its torn pages together and sat reading and rereading the volume each time they visited.

  Uncle David’s name was no longer mentioned by their parents. Margaret’s memories of him would soon be dimmed by the infrequency of his past visits and her extreme youth when she last saw him. He would become, over the years, a shimmering, golden flash of something familiar but untouchable. She never forgot his smile, his uninhibited laughter, but she would have a hard time placing the man. The door to the room at Windsor in which he had broadcast his Abdication Speech was kept closed; inside, all the furniture was dust-sheeted.

  Diana Cooper recalled waiting for her husband to return to their apartments after a late evening meeting at Windsor with King George. By “the iron tongue of midnight” he had not come back and she left her room to inquire where he might be of “a butler who replied with an inscrutable face: ‘He’s with the Queen.’” Cooper rejoined her in their suite a half hour later to explain that after his conversation with the King, he had spent an hour “drinking tea with the Queen. She put her feet up on a sofa and talked of Kingship and the ‘intolerable honour’ but not of the crisis [abdication.]” (Upon returning from Windsor on this occasion, Diana Cooper told Chips Channon, “It was all very different from the atmosphere at the Fort and the last regime [Edward VIII]. That was operetta, this is an institution.”)

  Whatever the sisters were to hear about their Uncle David was told to them years later as adults. Had he died before the abdication, his name would have been revered, portraits of him hung in every castle and the story of his reign discussed by Crawfie in their history lessons. But there were few paintings of him and neither his long tenure as Prince of Wales nor his brief reign as King was discussed. This, then, was what happened when a King (or Prince or Princess) did not do as expected. They were sent to some faroff place, away from everything familiar and all their family members and never spoken about again.

  The Coronation was set for May 12 (the date originally chosen by Edward VIII, which his brother refused to change) and the King took an immense interest in what his family and the royal attendants were to wear. He and the Queen had studied a painting of Victoria’s Coronation and were so impressed by the leitmotiv of gilded wheat used on the gowns and head wreaths of the train bearers that they decided to incorporate it into their own ceremony. The designer, Norman Hartnell, was summoned by the King to Buckingham Palace. “Cigarette in hand, he led me off to one of the picture galleries to view the paintings by Winterhalter who endowed his women ... with such regal and elegant grace .... His Majesty made it clear in his quiet way that I should attempt to capture this picturesque grace....”

  The King’s interest in his daughters’ outfits for the ceremony was just as keen. They were to wear the same white lace dresses trimmed with silver bows, silver slippers, purple velvet cloaks edged with ermine (as were their trains) and coronets made smaller and lighter especially for them. The decision on the length of their trains threw Margaret into a royal snit. Lilibet’s was to be a full foot longer than hers. At one point during a fitting, she sat down on the nursery floor, threatening not to get up until she was promised that her train would be the same length as her sister’s. It was explained to her that since she was smaller, so must her train be. When all of Lilibet’s, Crawfie’s and Alah’s reasoning had failed and she remained anchored to the spot, the Queen was called. Margaret was told to rise immediately and informed in a cold voice that Lilibet, because of seniority of birth, and no other reason, had the unearned privilege of a longer train and that was the way it must be. Faced with her mother’s refusal to bend, Margaret relented and allowed the fitting to continue.

  Lilibet celebrated her eleventh birthday at Windsor, and five days later, the King and Queen observed their sixteenth wedding anniversary. But on the weekend before the Coronation the family was able to retreat to the semi-private refuge of Royal Lodge. The week had been exhausting for all of them, but mostly for the King. These early months of his reign had been exceptionally trying. Shortly after his accession he had expressed his fears and insecurity to his cousin, Dickie Mountbatten, who was then a Naval captain: “Dickie, this is absolutely terrible. I never wanted this to happen; I’m quite unprepared for it. David has been trained for this all his life. I’ve never even seen a state paper. I’m only a Naval officer; it’s the only thing I know about.”

  His unpreparedness for Kingship overwhelmed Bertie. His father, believing only David as his eldest son and heir should be educated as a future Monarch, had refused to allow Bertie to be initiated “even into the ordinary everyday working of government.” Therefore, he was appalled “at the volume and the nature of the business which emerged day by day from those leather-clad despatch boxes which inexorably dog the life of every British Sovereign.”

  H
e was abruptly thrust into what might be called a crash course to learn in three months what should have been taught to him over many years. Never a good student (he had graduated seventy-first in a class of seventy-four at the Royal Naval College at Osborne), he could not have accomplished what he did without the additional efforts of the Queen and his mother. As the Coronation approached he had to prepare himself for the long, arduous ceremony, difficult under any circumstance, but with his speech defect, hazardous as well. To his advantage was David’s insistence at the time of his own rehearsal for his planned Coronation that Bertie attend. (“Listen well,” he had told his younger brother prophetically. “This [the rehearsal] should be for you, not me.”)

  The attention the press gave the Queen and Lilibet helped bridge the King’s own less appealing public image, but he still had a difficult barrier to overcome. His predecessor had been charming, good-looking, loved by a public who had followed and admired him all during his long tenure as Prince of Wales. They might never forgive him for abdicating but they still remembered him fondly as a man with a bouncing walk and a wide, open smile, who had gone down into coal pits and traveled to all the Dominions to talk to his future subjects. The new King was hesitant, stiff and seemingly humorless, and his severe shyness had kept him private and a stranger to the people.

  “A wave of idle and malicious gossip” swept through London early in March. The cancellation of a planned trip to India the coming winter for the holding of a Durbar gave credence to the rumors that the King was in such frail health that he might not be able to support the fatigue and strain of the Coronation at all and that if “he succeeded in getting through the ordeal ... [he] would never be able to speak in public, and that he would be a recluse or, at least a ‘rubber stamp.”

  The King’s supposed bad health created concern about Lilibet. As she was a minor heir presumptive it was necessary to appoint a new Regency Council. A controversy followed in which it was even suggested in the press that Lilibet and Margaret share the position and eventually rule jointly. This was never seriously considered by the Government, but there was “a lengthy and stormy debate in the House of Commons on who should decide whether a reigning monarch was capable of performing his duties.”

  By the weekend before the Coronation, the Dominion Prime Ministers had arrived and an enormous luncheon on Friday, May 7, was arranged in their honor at Westminster Hall. This was to be the King’s first public address since his accession. “The old Hall was warmed for the occasion, and there were about 100 tables,” Chips Channon wrote in his diary late that evening. “Soon trumpeters in new liveries blew on silver bugles to announce the arrival of the King. He walked alone, a trifle awkwardly, but not without charm, and we watched the great dignitaries being presented to him. . . A short meal, but the spectacle was brilliant; 700 men in morning clothes and a few Socialists in flannels ... then Hailsham stood, proposed His Majesty’s Health, and the King rose. The amplifier was put in front of him, and for a few seconds there was dead silence, as he could not (that is his trouble and failing) get the words out. A feeling of uneasiness came over the crowd; but soon the King, controlling himself, read out a short speech of thanks .... [Later] I thought of ... the King, faltering, with his halting speech and resigned kindly smile and everyone pretending that he had done it well.”

  The apprehension caused by his speech problem intensified as the week progressed, filled as it was with overwhelming panoply (the welcoming of foreign dignitaries) interspersed with repeated rehearsals of his difficult role in the Coronation ceremony, which included many convoluted, archaically phrased replies. He included Lilibet in some of these rehearsals, as his brother had done with him. She watched the proceedings with Dickie Mountbatten, whose presence in this difficult transition period was a clever stroke of public relations.

  Mountbatten had been David’s close friend and ally and in the past “had seen [Bertie] through the eyes of [the ex-King]—‘Dear old Bertie, honest, loyal, a little stupid.’” Mountbatten’s background had been fraught with inconsistency. Charming, handsome, but the younger sibling of a more intellectually brilliant brother and married to the provocative Edwina Ashley, whose affairs were often the scandal of the Court, Mountbatten was privately insecure but professionally ambitious. A cousin to the King, he nonetheless was determined to insinuate himself more inextricably into the close conclave of the Royal Family, although they had been responsible for what had been his father’s humiliation.

  During the First World War all public officials with German backgrounds were suddenly considered suspect and the greatest clamor arose around Britain’s First Sea Lord, Mountbatten’s father, Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg. Although born in Germany, Prince Louis had become a British subject when he entered the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen. Bonding himself closer to England, he married Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Victoria. His younger brother, Prince Henry of Battenberg, wedded the Queen’s youngest daughter, Beatrice, making the family connection very strong.

  A smear campaign in 1914, attacking Prince Louis and his German birth and spreading rumors that he was a spy, became so vitriolic that it finally reached the floor of Parliament. Fearing the wave of anti-German hysteria in Britain might reach a point when even the Royal Family could become suspect (Victoria, after all, was half-German, and Albert was Prince of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha), George V felt obliged to agree to the dismissal of Prince Louis as First Sea Lord, and a brilliant officer was lost. Prince Louis, then sixty, was never able to recover from this blow, and died a few years later. It was at this time that the Royal Family officially changed their name from the House of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha to the House of Windsor, and the Battenbergs anglicized theirs from Battenberg to Mountbatten.

  The Battenberg/Mountbatten connections with Europe’s royal families were astonishing: Henry of Battenberg was Queen Victoria’s son-in-law, his daughter was Ena, Queen Consort of Spain; Dickie Mountbatten’s second sister, Louise, was Queen Consort of Sweden, and other members of the family had also married into many of Europe’s leading monarchies.

  From youth, Mountbatten had been his cousin David’s most loyal friend and supporter, often accompanying him on his world travels and always an integral insider of the “Prince of Wales set.” Now, it appeared, he had switched his allegiance from David to Bertie “with indecorous haste.”

  Fond of children, he was a devoted father and a concerned uncle to his sister Alice’s thirteen-year-old son, Philip, who lived in the south of France and was “stateless, nameless and not far from penniless.” Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, had led an empty life in his years of exile and his mother, along with her speech and hearing problems, was at that time in bad health and was “ill-equipped to look after the interests of her son.” Mountbatten’s brother, who had inherited the larger part of the family’s money, was paying for Philip’s education. Mountbatten felt this was not enough. The boy, rightly considered short on prospects, should come to England, live with Mountbatten and his family, become a British subject and go into the Royal Navy.

  Lilibet, at eleven, displayed the soft, early bloom of the attractive young woman she would become; she was rich and certainly her future was secure. Mountbatten could well have considered the idea—even at this early stage—that an alliance between a Mountbatten and the future Queen of England would bring certain advantages to him and reestablish the Battenberg/Mountbatten line in the British Monarchy. Lilibet was charmed by the ingratiating Mountbatten and much impressed by his dashing Naval uniform with its Nelsonian hat.

  The Sunday night of the Royal Family’s return to Buck House from Royal Lodge, they received the Archbishop of Canterbury and a special prayer service was conducted. Monday evening was the scene of an immense State banquet for over 450 guests which even the largest State room could not accommodate. Therefore, “the King sat as host in the ballroom [and] the Queen presided over a more intimate gathering in the adjoining supper room.” The palace was brilliantly lit. A full band played in the recepti
on hall and its music was amplified. The gowns and jewels and gold-braided uniforms were dazzling. Lilibet and Margaret were allowed to stay up and watch through their nursery windows the arrival of the guests.

  In the nursery, the prime concern was six-year-old Margaret, who her sister and the staff feared might not come through the long, tedious service without embarrassing them in some way. “I do hope she won’t disgrace us all by falling asleep in the middle. After all she is very young for a Coronation,” Crawfie claimed Lilibet told her. And Margaret was given repeated lectures on how to sit and what to do and not do. By Coronation Eve, the girls were whipped up into a tremendous state of anticipation. Crowds such as they had never seen before stood before the palace and thronged the Mall. Suddenly it seemed, in the momentum of the week’s stepped-up activities, the King had become a popular figure.

  Lilibet was awakened at five o’clock on Wednesday morning, May 12, the long-awaited day, “by the band of the Royal Marines striking up outside” her window. “I leapt out of bed and so did Bobo,” she wrote in a letter to her parents that day. “We put on dressing-gowns and shoes and Bobo made me put on an eiderdown as it was cold and we crouched in the window looking on to a cold, misty morning. There were already people in the stands [set up for the procession] and all the time people were coming to them in a stream....”

  By now Margaret had joined Lilibet in the nursery sitting room where “there was a great deal of squealing and laughing and peeping out of the windows at the crowds.” After their breakfast, Bobo and Ruby dressed them and, hitching up their long skirts so as not to trip, the girls hurried through the corridors to see their parents in their magnificent Coronation robes. Their father was in a “nerve-racking” state. Both parents had been awakened “about 3: A.M., by the loud speakers which had been placed in Constitution Hill, one of them might have been in our room,” the King wrote. “Sleep was impossible. I could eat no breakfast & had a sinking feeling inside.”