Behind the Palace Doors (39 page)

A true patriot, Edward sucked it up and stayed. Still, he insisted that the royal accommodations were unacceptable in their current state. “We found Government House quite uninhabitable,” the duke told his friend and predecessor as governor, Bede Clifford, “and fled from the place after a week’s picnic and sand flies.” While London endured the Blitz, Edward requested more money to bring the home up to Wallis’s standards. “Comment is needless,” Churchill jotted on the memo.

After the war ended in 1945 and the Windsors were free of their strenuous responsibilities in the Bahamas, they indulged themselves in a little leisure time. They managed to extend it for the next three decades, flitting between Paris, Palm Beach, and New York, always courting the wealthy and gorging on their hospitality.

Though he no longer wore the crown, Edward presided over a miniature kingdom of uniformed servants and pet pugs. Or
rather Wallis did. The duke once made the grave mistake of issuing an order to the help during a dinner party the couple was hosting. Hearing this, the duchess raised her hands high in the air and slammed them down on the table with a terrible crash. “Never,” she spat, “never again will you give orders in my house!” The guests sat stunned while the chastened duke muttered incoherent apologies.

With Wallis ruling the household, Edward was left with little to do but meekly obey her commands. In a moment of perhaps unintentional honesty, the man who had been born to rule an empire revealed the emptiness of his life to the wife of an American diplomat. “You know what my day was today?” he said. “I got up late, and then I went with the Duchess and watched her buy a hat, and then on the way home I had the car drop me in the Bois to watch some of your soldiers playing football, and then I planned to take a walk, but it was so cold that I could hardly bear it.… When I got home the Duchess was having her French lesson, so I had no one to talk to, so I got a lot of tin boxes down which my mother had sent me last week and looked through them. They were essays and so on that I had written when I was in France studying French before the Great War [World War I].… You know, I’m not much of a reading man.”

Busy as he was, Edward still managed to squeeze in some time to pressure his family into receiving Wallis and granting her the long-coveted title of “Her Royal Highness.” “I cannot tell you how grieved I am at your brother being so tiresome about the HRH,” Queen Mary wrote to her son the king. “Giving her this title would be fatal, and after all these years I fear lest people think that we condoned this dreadful marriage which has been such a blow to us in every way.”

King George ultimately realized that his brother just didn’t get it: “He has to consider others beside himself, and I doubt whether even now he realizes the irrevocable step he took nine years ago and the ghastly shock he gave this country.”

The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 was a tremendous blow to the prestige of the monarchy, and it was up to the former king’s brother, who succeeded him as George VI, to repair it. It was a task for which the new king seemed woefully ill equipped, yet with the love and support of his wife, Queen Elizabeth, George emerged as one of Britain’s great monarchs
.

“The British Crown is the greatest inheritance a man can have,” Prime Minister William Gladstone once declared. King George VI disagreed. Unlike so many of his forebears who fought and killed for the crown, this painfully shy, ill-prepared monarch dreaded the heavy weight it represented. Yet duty propelled him, and in the end he wore it well—conquering his fears and restoring the monarchy’s prestige after the ignoble abdication of his brother, then standing firm with his queen as potent symbols of British endurance during the darkest days of World War II.

“If the ‘greatness’ of a King can be measured by the extent to which his qualities correspond to the needs of a nation at a given moment in its history,” wrote the French diplomat René
Massigli, “then George VI was a great King, and perhaps a very great King.”

It was never supposed to be so. Albert, Duke of York, as King George was known before his accession (Bertie, to his family),
^*
provided a rather drab contrast to his dashing, universally adored older brother, who was destined to become King Edward VIII. With his gaunt, almost sickly appearance (which belied his natural athleticism) and the persistent stammer with which he had been cursed since childhood, the duke was a singularly uninspiring figure. He was perfectly content to live a quiet, domestic life with his wife, Elizabeth, and two young daughters. Fate intervened, however, when in 1936 the brother he loved did the unthinkable and abdicated.

It was a monstrous blow for the reluctant heir, culminating months of tension during which the duke said he felt “like the proverbial sheep being led to the slaughter.” When the inevitable end came he broke down and, by his own account, “sobbed like a child.” But that naked display of emotion only briefly betrayed a stout heart.

The new king had struggled all his life with his shyness, stammer, and unrelenting stomach ailments, yet he never surrendered to them. Even his cold and critical father, King George V, recognized his second son’s courage, especially compared with his other children. “Bertie has more guts than the rest of them put together,” the king declared. Now at his accession—“that dreadful day,” as he called it—Bertie’s mettle would be tested as never before.

Though he proved to be a far better king than Edward VIII would have been, George VI was at first compared unfavorably to his charming older brother. Yet it was up to the new king to repair the damage Edward had done. “I hope that time
will be allowed me to make amends for what has happened,” he wrote.

Many had their doubts, particularly as the coronation approached and George was due to address the nation. How could a stammering monarch ever hope to restore faith in the ancient institution? King George was determined to try. His biographer Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who also suffered from a stammer, eloquently described the ordeal he faced: “Only those who have themselves suffered the tragedies of the stammer can appreciate to the full their depth and poignancy—the infuriating inhibitions and frustrations, the bitter humiliation and anguish of the spirit; the orgies of self-pity; and the utter exhaustion, mental and physical; perhaps, above all, the sense of being
different
from others and the shrinking from help prompted by pity.”

After a number of rehearsals, which did not go particularly well, the newly anointed king sat down at the microphone to address millions of listeners on the evening of his coronation, which took place on May 12, 1937. It was a feat of extreme concentration and endurance, and it was a triumph. “It is with a very full heart I speak to you tonight,” King George intoned in a voice
Time
magazine described as “warm and strong,” without a stammer. “Never before has a newly crowned King been able to talk to all his peoples in their own homes on the day of his Coronation.… The Queen and I will always keep in our hearts the inspiration of this day. May we ever be worthy of the goodwill which I am proud to think surrounds us at the outset of my reign.”

Robert Wood, a BBC engineer retained to help the king become a good broadcaster, recalled the effort in his memoir. “It was hard for the King,” he wrote, “because you could see how he had suffered all his life because of his impediment and you could not help but feel sorry for him.… Little by little I helped him with tone formation and lip formation, and showed him how he could let the microphone do the work.” It was an arduous process, but, Wood wrote, “the King struggled without let-up. I was
full of admiration for his perseverance, his resolution.” George VI eventually became a decent broadcaster, and it was his voice that would give comfort and reassurance to a nation staggered but unbowed in the midst of a ferocious Nazi onslaught.

War created an almost mystical bond between George VI and the British people. With his wife and children, he stood beside them throughout the conflict, unwavering, sharing many of the same dangers and deprivations they did. And in so doing he came to represent, with Churchill, the indomitable spirit of embattled Britain.

“The … King lived every minute of this struggle with a heart that never quavered and a spirit undaunted,” Churchill said in a speech before the House of Commons in 1952. “But I, who saw him so often, knew how keenly, with all his full knowledge and understanding of what was happening, he felt personally the ups and down of this terrific struggle and how he longed to fight it, arms in hand, himself.”

George VI did serve on the front lines during the German blitzkrieg that began in September 1940, because at that time London and other British cities
were
the front lines. Despite all danger, the king and queen were present at countless scenes of devastation to lend their support and encouragement to those whose lives had been ruined. “Never in British history,”
Time
magazine declared, “has a monarch seen and talked to so many of his subjects or so fully shared their life.”

The king’s stalwart companion throughout the conflict was his beloved wife, Elizabeth (who would later become known as Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, during the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth II). It was because of her brave spirit in boosting British morale that Hitler reportedly dubbed her “the most dangerous woman in Europe.”

After one visit to London’s East End, Queen Elizabeth wrote movingly about what she had witnessed: “All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the
poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left.… One could not imagine that life could become so terrible. We must win in the end.”

The connection between monarch and people during these visits only deepened when Buckingham Palace was itself hit in an air strike. “I’m glad we’ve been bombed,” Queen Elizabeth said. “I feel I can look the East End in the face.” The king, who was nearly killed in the blast, also saw the advantage to his home being hit: “I feel that our tours of bombed areas in London are helping the people who have lost their relations & homes & we have both found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, & nobody is immune.”

In solidarity with the British people, as well as contributing to the war effort, King George instituted stringent conservation measures at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Rooms were kept frigid, with only one lightbulb allowed, and bathtubs were painted with a black or red line at the five-inch level as a reminder to save water. The food the royal family ate was, like everyone else’s, horrible.

Eleanor Roosevelt stayed at Buckingham Palace during a visit in 1942 and was astonished to find the king and queen shivering in the bomb-shattered residence, enduring the same wartime deprivations as those in the humblest home. The first lady wrote about the experience in her autobiography:

The conduct of King George and Queen Elizabeth during the war contrasted vividly with that of the former king, who was serving as royal governor of the Bahamas and complaining most vociferously about his accommodations there (see
Chapter 31
). Churchill, who had actually backed Edward VIII in the abdication crisis, certainly recognized how fortunate it was that George VI now wore the crown. “This war has drawn the Throne and the people more closely together than ever before recorded,” the prime minister wrote to the king early in 1941, “and Yr Majesties are more beloved by classes and conditions than any of all princes of the past. I am indeed proud that it [should] have fallen to my lot and duty to stand at Yr Majesty’s side as First Minister in such a climax of the British story.”

King and prime minister worked closely together throughout the war, and their mutual respect and friendship flourished in the process. “I made certain he was kept informed of every secret matter,” Churchill later said; “and the care and thoroughness with which he mastered the immense daily flow of State papers made a deep mark on my mind.”

Though his powers as sovereign were limited, King George did exercise fully his constitutional rights to advise, encourage, and warn, which made him far more than a mere figurehead. Indeed he was, in his own way, a warrior-king, even if that role was defined differently than it had been for his ancient ancestors. He and Churchill stood side by side as wartime leaders, each with his own vital functions, and often with one sustaining the other. The exchange between the two men after the defeat of German forces at El Alamein well illustrates their relationship. Addressing his letter to “My dear Winston,” King George wrote: