by Anne Edwards
The Royal Family left the Palace at 11:00 A.M., the sisters riding in the splendid gold-gilded Irish State Coach, accompanied by their father’s sister, Mary, the Princess Royal, and her son, their fourteen-year-old cousin George, who—as a page to the King in the Coronation—wore “knee breeches and a kind of scarlet tunic which reached to the knees and was bordered with gold braid.” Margaret’s seat in the coach had been raised so that the crowds could see through the glass windows.
The coach rocked unevenly on its ironclad wheels and the journey to Westminster Abbey through intermittent rain was constrained. Princess Mary, a woman of cool temperament, and a staunch disciplinarian, had been placed in charge of her son and two young nieces. No giggling was allowed, the sisters were to be turned away from each other and toward the crowds as they passed, and acknowledgment was synchronized into a relay system so that at least one small gloved hand was always in evidence.
In the Abbey the two Princesses were seated on either side of Queen Mary (perhaps for the same reasons they had ridden in the coach with their aunt), who was described as appearing “ablaze [with jewels], regal and overpowering.” Chips Channon recalled being “dazzled by the red, the gilt, the gold, the grandeur.” Certainly Lilibet and Margaret must have been as impressed. Their mother entered the Abbey with her procession first, “dignified, but smiling, and ... bosomy.” Then came their father, “so surrounded by dignitaries carrying wands, sceptres, orbs and staffs, as to be overshadowed.”
The silver trumpets blew and the choirboys sang out: “Vivat! Vivat! Georgius Rex!” With a rustle like the wind, the many hundreds seated in the Abbey “rose up with a flash of crimson and ermine, gold, diamonds, silver, blue, scarlet and green. The helmeted Gentlemen-at-Arms snapped to attention and down the deep blue carpet that stretched the full length of the Abbey walked George VI to his Coronation with all the pomp and panoply of a medieval ceremony more than 1,000 years old.”
It was the Middle Ages in the midst of the twentieth century—arc lamps, newsreel cameras, a radio microphone hanging high above the chancel, pneumatic tubes to speed copy from the press box to the telegraph situated in the catacombs below.
After the lengthy Royal processions (which the King thought took “hours”), there followed a recess while all the Royalties rested and warmed up (there had been “a most awful draught coming from somewhere” in the Abbey), before taking their seats or their positions in the ceremony. The various canons’ rooms had been converted to dressing rooms and equipped with long mirrors for the Royal Family. Alah was waiting for the girls and gave their hair a touch up. A cold buffet had been arranged in one of the side rooms, with sandwiches, stuffed rolls, coffee, lemonade and orangeade. However, numerous flasks were noted to have appeared from deep pockets. The King had his own robing room with his valet in attendance and the Queen hers, with her dresser. After the momentary break, the complicated ceremony began with humorous incident (reported here by the King himself):
I bowed to Mama & the Family in the gallery & took my seat. After the Introduction I removed my Parliamentary Robes & Cap of Maintenance & moved to the Coronation Chair. Here various vestments were placed upon me, the white Colobium Sindonis, a surplice which the Dean of Westminster insisted I should put on inside out, had not my Groom of the Robes come to the rescue. Before this I knelt at the Altar to take the Coronation Oath. I had two Bishops, Durham, & Bath & Wells, one on either side to support me & to hold the form of Service for me to follow. When this great moment came neither Bishop could find the words, so the Archbishop held his book down for me to read, but horror of horrors his thumb covered the words of the Oath.
But this was not to be the end of his distress. The elderly Lord Great Chamberlain shook so in his part of the service that he nearly put the hilt of a sword under the King’s chin “trying to attach it to the belt.” Then in “the supreme moment” when the St. Edward’s Crown was placed on the King’s head he suspected it might be back to front. And as he turned “after leaving the Coronation Chair [he] was brought up all standing, owing to one of the Bishops treading on [the hem of his] robe.”
“When Mummie was Crowned,” Lilibet recorded in her diary that night, “all the peeresses put on their coronets. It looked wonderful to see arms hovering in the air and then the arms disappear as if by magic.”
The spectators cherished incidents of much greater grandeur. Chips Channon was to recall: “... the shaft of sunlight catching the King’s golden tunic as he sat for the Crowning; the kneeling Bishops drawn up like a flight of geese in deploy positions; and then the loveliest moment of all, the swirl when the Peeresses put on their coronets: a thousand white gloved arms, sparkling with jewels ...”
The Queen told her maid “that the Crown was heavy and gave her a headache,” and, indeed, late that afternoon, when she finally removed it, a dark red line marked her forehead. And, upon their return to the Palace, Lilibet confided to Crawfie, “[Margaret] was wonderful.... I only had to nudge her once or twice when she played with the prayer books too loudly.”
In the pages of her diary she added these observations: “What struck me as being rather odd was that grannie did not remember much of her own Coronation. I should have thought that it would have stayed in her mind forever.
“At the end the service got rather boring as it was all prayers. Grannie and I were looking to see how many more pages to the end and we turned one more and then I pointed to the word at the bottom of the page and it said ‘FINIS.’ We both smiled at each other and turned back to the service.”
The day’s activities did not end for the girls until after numerous and long balcony appearances followed by an hour session with photographers for the taking of Coronation portraits. The King then broadcast a short message to the people of his Empire. Finally, the newly crowned Monarchs hosted a glittering reception, after which the Queen was quoted as saying, “We are not supposed to be human.”
But, of course, they were. It is the courtiers, the panoply and the mysticism that exalts royalty into deities. Beneath their crowns and robes the King and Queen remained Bertie and Elizabeth; and as before their Coronation, they were also loyal to their private aims and held the same family grudges.
David had left England believing he had achieved an amicable financial settlement. But when Bertie learned of his brother’s large private means, he had second thoughts. Walter Monckton became the go-between, traveling to Schloss Erzfeld in Austria where the ex-King was sequestered to explain his brother’s new position. From this point a life-long enmity festered between the two. After Monckton left, David wrote Bertie that he would not reveal the extent of his wealth, and with a hint of threat, added: “ ... it would be a grave mistake if the private means of any member of the Royal Family were to be disclosed ... it would only embarrass you and your advisers if I were to put you in a position of being able to answer questions on this subject [the King’s own fortune]. I have kept my side of the bargain [his isolation from Wallis] and I am sure you will keep yours....”
A bitter exchange of letters followed and the problem plagued the King all through the month preceding the Coronation. Churchill unsuccessfully attempted to settle the dispute which he considered, if not resolved, “would be a disaster of the first order to the monarchy.” When the Civil List was reported on April 28, the Duke of Windsor was excluded and would receive no state subsistence allowance. The public was informed that the ex-King would “be supported from family sources.” Bertie seemed obliged to honor the Fort Belvedere agreement. But he still refused to do so and by June, David, newly married, wrote his solicitor furiously that “there might be legal objections to the following plan; but if you were in London now I would instruct you to inform the King that, if he does not fulfil his part of the bargain by the end of July, I will take steps to prevent ‘the court’ moving to Balmoral in August....“
Acrimonious negotiations followed. Finally, Bertie agreed to the reduced sum of £21,000 annually but only on the condition that David “
give an undertaking never to return without [the reigning monarch’s] consent.” This was in direct opposition to the Abdication Bill that guaranteed “that no condition of exile followed a voluntary abdication.” The matter would not be settled until February 1938, but the animosity it caused between the two brothers remained. However, unwilling to believe Bertie could have turned on him of his own accord, David directed his rancor more vehemently toward his sister-in-law, whom he deemed responsible.
Money figured strongly in Bertie’s thoughts during this time. He set up a Balmoral Trust that named David Bowes-Lyon and his cousin George Cambridge as its trustees. Bowes-Lyon had helped him in his financial affairs throughout the years. Now, he enlisted him with “a very special case ... a sum of £2,000 to be invested for Margaret Rose ... at Coutts Bank.”
A short time later Bertie wrote again to Bowes-Lyon asking a favor from him “in the money line.” Although Lilibet was taken care of under the Civil List Act, and had a trust already, he wanted another trust to be set up for her where the capital and the income would go to her on her marriage or when she became twenty-one. He had £7,000 to invest in it and would assign a thousand pounds a quarter. (“This would be a good moment to buy as all stocks are down,” he wrote his brother-in-law.) His letters to Bowes-Lyon were always written in his own hand and signed simply, “Ever yours Bertie.” He obviously did not care for any member of his staff to know about his private financial dealings. He adds in one letter written from Sandringham and dated December 28, 1937, that he was glad Christmas was over as “the Broadcast [the King’s annual holiday speech] spoilt it for me entirely!!”
Every occasion that called for him to speak publicly continued to be painful. To prepare him for a speech, the Queen would learn the address first and, knowing what words prompted his hesitation, would rehearse him so that a natural pause, whenever possible, came in that spot (words starting with the letter C were his greatest obstacles).
But internecine feuds, financial negotiations and even the dread struggle of public speaking had been swept aside by the end of 1938. That March, German troops had goosestepped into Austria, and the union of Germany and Austria, which had been specifically prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, became a fact. By May, Britain and France were faced with their first decision whether to stand by Czechoslovakia according to the treaty or to let it be devoured by Germany. Stanley Baldwin had resigned, and the new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, a strong proponent of appeasement, attempted to negotiate with Hitler. At the instigation of Duff Cooper, on September 27 the Royal Navy was mobilized. “For a brief moment it appeared that Britain might steel herself to resist Hitler’s demands.” But Chamberlain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s mercy. In protest, Duff Cooper, now First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned.
Lilibet had a keen interest in politics; and when famous men, whose names appeared on the dispatches her father showed her, came to the palace, she enjoyed meeting them. Margaret much preferred the gala garden parties at Buck House, which often had as many as three thousand guests. “And if you do see someone with a funny hat,” Lilibet once lectured her sister, “you must not point at it and laugh, and you must not be in too much of a hurry to get through the crowds to the tea table. That’s not polite either.”
Crawfie had become concerned at Lilibet’s increasingly reprimanding attitude to Margaret. She also found her “too methodical and tidy” for a child of eleven. “She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes [set out for morning] arranged just so.” Her father spoke to her more seriously than he did Margaret, treating her as an adult. Whether she was ready to understand it or not, Lilibet knew “shadows were closing in on England.” Such dark predictions were not discussed with Margaret.
In May 1939, despite the likelihood of war, the King and Queen carried through with a prearranged visit to Canada and the United States, whose cooperation, if the worst should come, was of imperative importance. Lilibet and Margaret would, for the first time together, be separated for a lengthy period (six weeks) from their parents. They were accompanied to Southampton (“in pale and watery sunshine”) to see them off by Queen Mary, who stood on the jetty waving her handkerchief as the Empress of Australia pulled out to sea. Their grandmother dwarfed them as they stood at her side. “I have my handkerchief,” Margaret was overheard to say. “To wave, not to cry in,” Queen Mary sternly warned.
The King and Queen were a smash hit in the United States. The Queen had put aside the somewhat fussy clothes she wore at home in favor of a superb new collection by Hartnell. “Her eyes looked astonishingly bright and blue,” said a member of the American press, “her figure slim ... the snob issue passed off without difficulty. American men bowed as low as they wanted to or could.”
In Britain, The Times, delighted by its Sovereigns’ success, said, “The event must hold the imagination of anyone with a feeling for history—King George VI entering as honoured guest, with floodlights and music and cheering, the great territory from which the last representative of King George III withdrew in bitterness and defeat more than a century and a half ago,” and added: “No political motive prompted this visit.”
The last statement was, of course, untrue. The trip was planned strategically to further cement British-American relations with the hope that the United States would soon come to Great Britain’s aid. But the Americans remained reluctant to be engaged once again in a war on foreign soil only twenty-one years after the end of the First World War.
Within two months of the King and Queen’s return, Hitler’s army was poised to march into Poland. Britain was stunned at this new threatened act of aggression. “... It means that we are humbled to dust,” Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary (referring to Chamberlain’s ill-conceived attempts at appeasement). Britain began to mobilize. Londoners were ordered “to black out their windows at night until further notice.”
The weather was suffocatingly hot on August 24, when the Royal Family, having just celebrated Margaret’s ninth birthday, returned from Balmoral to Buck House. The next day Bertie, solemn, his face drawn, “plunged immediately into a series of discussions with his principal Ministers, whom he left in no uncertainty that he approved the policy of determined opposition to Germany which they had adopted.” A joint ultimatum by Britain and France: Either Hitler withdraw his troops or a state of war would exist between the two countries and Germany. Ten days later, air-raid sirens shattered a deceptively bright, calm London morning. The seventeen-minute alarm sent the inhabitants of the city scurrying to shelters. At Buck House Margaret and Lilibet were taken down into the basement where they were taught how to put on a gas mask. The alarm had been only a test, but it was to be “a harbinger of things to come.” War with Germany had been declared.
Before the week’s end, and under Government order, three million children, invalids and the elderly were evacuated to the country. To her great irritation, Queen Mary went to Gloucestershire to stay at Badminton House with her niece and nephew-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. For the moment the sisters remained at Buck House. But it was feared that the Palace would be a major German target, placing them in serious jeopardy. A plan was considered to send them to Canada for the duration of the war. This was abandoned after the Queen and her mother-in-law insisted that the Royal Family should exhibit “no-nonsense courage” and persuasively convinced the King and the Government that Lilibet should be close at hand in the event that the unthinkable occurred and the King died.
Balmoral was first considered as a place for their evacuation. Windsor Castle was chosen because of its deep underground basements, the absence of other major targets in the near vicinity and its proximity to London, where their parents would remain.
For the next five and a half years, Lilibet and Margaret would live under the stress of war and face the same anxieties as all other subjects under the sovereignty of their father, King George VI.
7
As far as the wodd knew,
Britain's heir to the throne and her younger sister had been evacuated to “a house in the country.” They arrived at Windsor the early evening of May 12, 1940, having been told they would be there for the weekend. The blackout was in force and the great hulking castle, its lights masked, rose sullenly out of the shadows looking every bit the stone fortress it was. Lilibet and Margaret stayed close to Crawfie’s side as they started down the dim passage to the worn stone steps that led to their usual quarters in Lancaster Tower.
The castle had been stripped of its grandeur; its paintings removed from the walls, the brilliant glass chandeliers taken down, the State Apartments “muffled in dust-sheets, their glass-fronted cup-boards turned to the walls. Shadowy figures of servants and firemen attending to the blackout” came and went in the dim light of the winding passageways, their footsteps echoing throughout the night as they made their rounds.
” ‘By the time we’ve blacked out all the windows here, it’s morning again,’ ” one of the staff complained.
A bell system operated by the wardens had been installed, as well as a telephone hookup with air-raid watchers on the roofs. The nursery contingent was informed that, in case of approaching aircraft, a bell would clang, signaling them to go as quickly as possible down to the shelter.
At 9:00 P.M., two nights later, the alarm sounded. Aircraft had been sighted close by. Crawfie had been at dinner with the Household staff at the time of the alert and when several minutes passed and Alah (who was responsible for the girls at night) did not appear with her charges, she ran up to the nurseries, exploding bombs too near for comfort, to see that all was well.
“Alah!” she shouted as she turned the bend to the nursery landing.
