The Queen Mother (23 page)

The guests were a little on edge when the Prince arrived to stay and Princess Mary came with Lady Airlie for dinner. ‘Everybody made awful floaters that night, it became simply comic in the end,’ Helen wrote; but after dinner they danced reels boisterously, with the dowagers giving the lead: ‘Lady Airlie & Mrs James
^†
having sliding races up and down the extremely slippery floor was quite a good sight too!’ Afterwards Doris and Katie courted disaster by doing ‘a
marvellous
imitation’ of the royal visitors ‘when P.A. came round the screen & nobody could warn them that they were rushing on their fate!’
⁶¹

At breakfast the next morning only Helen arrived on time; she did her part in helping entertain the Prince ‘mostly by singing hymn choruses in a high falsetto which made him laugh’.
⁶²
There was tennis, and in the afternoon a service in the family chapel for which Princess Mary came over again from Airlie. Here Elizabeth takes up the tale in a letter to Beryl: ‘Afterwards I showed her & the Duke [of York] the castle, & terrified them with ghost stories! We also played ridiculous games of hide & seek, they really are babies! She didn’t leave till 6.30, & then we all played General Post, & Flags etc till dinner time – I had played tennis all the morning, so you can imagine how tired I was!! … Poor
P. Mary really did enjoy herself – she is most awfully nice.’
⁶³
At one point during the games Helen had hoped to slip away and write to Alec Hardinge, but ‘Elizabeth’s signals of distress’ at being left alone with her royal visitors were so obvious that she felt she had to stay.
⁶⁴

After dinner they sang noisily all evening ‘& it was all quite fun’, Elizabeth recorded.
⁶⁵
According to Helen the repertoire included ‘the most appalling songs’ and Prince Albert joined in ‘with more gusto than any of them’. At midnight Elizabeth and her girl friends slipped upstairs and made apple-pie beds for her brother David and for James Stuart, to whom they had just said a mocking goodnight, dropping him ‘a deep curtsey, in a row like the chorus’. Helen teased her fiancé by writing to him that Stuart was indeed ‘quite delightful … I wonder he isn’t spoilt with all the women making such fools of themselves over his good looks.’
⁶⁶

On the last day of Prince Albert’s stay the whole party went out for a walk after breakfast. ‘Elizabeth & Prince A. were allowed to go on miles ahead which agitated the former rather but
we
thought ourselves awfully tactful!’ Helen reported. The rest of the party chased each other about, the girls hiding and the men pelting them with mud to avenge the apple-pie beds.
⁶⁷
Later Helen wrote to Elizabeth, ‘Do tell me any particularly odious things that the Duke of Y. said about me when you betook yourselves to the garden. It would be such a waste if after my efforts to please him by leaving him in peace with you I didn’t hear his remarks!! I’m sure
he’s
grateful about that anyway tho’ I’m not so certain about you! I trust you will forgive me, sweet love, because you are such an angel.’
⁶⁸

The Prince would have agreed with that. He was enchanted by it all. The contrast between the formality of his own family life and the relaxed joy of Glamis whirling around Elizabeth was intoxicating. The happy relationships between the Strathmores and their children and the affectionate teasing between Elizabeth and her brothers and sisters were pure delight. The weekend seems to have convinced him that Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was the woman for him.

After her guests had left, Elizabeth wrote to Beryl that she was in bed with a cold and ‘utterly exhausted after 3 weeks of entertaining people!’ Prince Albert’s visit had ‘kept us pretty busy! He was very nice, tho’, & very much improved in every way.’
⁶⁹
The Prince wrote to thank Lady Strathmore for his stay at Glamis: ‘I did enjoy my time
there so much, & I only wish I could have stayed there longer, I hope you will forgive me for the very abrupt way in which I proposed myself.’
⁷⁰
This was echoed by James Stuart, who wrote, ‘Prince Albert really did enjoy it, I know and in no other house in the United Kingdom could it have been done so well, or anywhere near it. It was perfect. Princess Mary also has talked of nothing else but her visit. I need hardly add how much I enjoyed myself also: one could not do otherwise at Glamis.’
⁷¹
Elizabeth’s friends too wrote her letters overflowing with thanks and praise. ‘The moment I set foot in your house I feel a different person,’ wrote Doris; Helen told Elizabeth she was ‘just the most perfect person that ever was’; she and Diamond were driving the Hardinge family to distraction ‘both talking at once & all about Elizabeth & Glamis!’
⁷²
Women as much as men adored Elizabeth.

She was by now, it seems from Helen’s comments, uncomfortably aware of the Prince’s interest in her, but she did not yet mention it to Beryl. Meanwhile her autumn continued much as before, with friends to stay at Glamis, and house parties elsewhere. And she was seeing more of James Stuart. He came back to Glamis on 2 October for a week to shoot, and a few days later she drove with him to Ballathie House on the River Tay near Perth, where Doris Gordon-Lennox was staying in a house party with her sister Amy’s parents-in-law, Sir Stuart and Lady Coats. Doris wrote to her afterwards that the whole family adored seeing her, and she tried to put her mind at rest about her arrival alone with James Stuart – a rather risqué thing for a young woman to do. ‘Of course we didn’t think
anything
of you & James coming! No one thought it a bit funny. I think everyone here now realises how fashionable it is to tour round Perthshire & Forfarshire with “Les frères Stuart” & I assure you it was quite alright. I do so understand it – it is such a joy to have real friends like that.’ She ended by saying, ‘I wish I
could
thank you for your saintliness to me – perhaps one day I’ll have an opportunity – until then I can only attempt to tell you how I’ve adored the last two months –
thanks chiefly
to you.’
⁷³

In November, back in London, Elizabeth sent a cryptic note to Beryl which indicates that Prince Albert came to call on her when she had been expecting to see Beryl. She asked why Beryl had not come, adding: ‘As a matter of fact our
Bert
stayed till 7, talking 100 to 20, or even 200 to a dozen. I am just off to a smart dance, & I
know
I shan’t know a soul, & will be miserable. I
must
see you some time – when
on earth can it be? I do wish he hadn’t come this evening, but I simply couldn’t stop him, & I am longing to see you.’
⁷⁴

She and Beryl did get together, and had a long talk, catching up on all that had happened. Writing to her friend afterwards, she had an urgent request:

One can but conclude that the Prince had begun to pay court to her in earnest, and that it worried her. At about this time she and the Prince began to correspond: her first surviving letter to him was written on 13 December 1920, in answer to one from him (which does not survive). She had been invited to a dinner which was to be given for him on 15 December, the day after his twenty-fifth birthday, by a well-known society hostess. She wrote:

In the event she enjoyed Mrs Greville’s party,
^*
as she told him in her next letter, written from St Paul’s Walden. Prince Albert sent her a
a little box for Christmas, for which she thanked him ‘a thousand times’. Her mother was unwell and she did not expect to go to another dance for months – ‘I lead such a deadly existence here, that there is simply nothing to tell you – oh except that I have just fallen into a pond!’
⁷⁷

On the last day of 1920 she wrote to Beryl saying she had been very worried about her mother. Although Lady Strathmore’s health was now improving the doctor said it would take a long time for her to recover her strength. Ironically Elizabeth seems once again to have been waiting in vain for a visit from Beryl when James Stuart had called to see her. ‘It was rather funny, that evening that you might have been coming round, James Stuart came in.’ She added: ‘he is an angel, and I should like you to see him, as you hardly know any of my friends now.’
⁷⁸

The dances resumed in January 1921. One was given by Lord Winterton at Shillinglee Park in Surrey, for which Elizabeth stayed with the Leconfields at Petworth.
^*
In a letter to Prince Albert the next day she wrote, ‘I am quite mad this morning, as we danced till 3 last night, and I didn’t go to sleep till 5, so you must forgive me if this letter is rather odd!!’ There was an enormous party of people staying at Petworth, ‘some nice and some nasty! At the moment I feel, that if anybody even
spoke
to me, I should bite them, so I hope nobody will!’ As a postscript along the side of the page she wrote, ‘This is an awful letter – I really believe I am going mad.’
⁷⁹

The next day she was at the other side of Sussex, staying with George Gage at Firle, for the Southdown Ball at which she danced until five in the morning. She returned, exhausted, to St Paul’s Walden. Sitting in the billiard room, listening to the gramophone playing ‘all the most delicious tunes – I feel most sentimental!’ she wrote to Beryl. ‘Swanee always makes me feel worst. Such memories!! Tut tut Elizabeth, compose yourself.’ She loved Firle but it was ‘such a funny visit. Because apparently all the servants & people there, think he [Lord Gage] is going to marry either Doris or me, and they were
intensely excited! I don’t think it’s either of us personally, he is merely a great friend of us both, but it was so funny.’
⁸⁰

That month the Prince came to St Paul’s Walden for the first time. Replying to his letter proposing a visit, Elizabeth invited him to lunch on 17 January:

She gave him directions, telling him to ‘keep to the right all the way, till you come to a tumbledown old white gate on the left. Then you go up a bumpy road full of holes, and eventually reach an even more tumbledown old house, and a tumbledown little person waiting on the doorstep – which will be
ME
!!! … I am Sir, Yours sincerely, Elizabeth Lyon.’
⁸¹

No account of the lunch survives, but they met again on 8 February when Elizabeth was a bridesmaid to Helen Cecil at her marriage to Alec Hardinge. ‘I bet you I look too disgusting at it,’ Elizabeth wrote to Beryl, as her dress was to be blue, a colour she then disliked.
⁸²
Diamond Hardinge, Doris Gordon-Lennox and Mollie Lascelles were also bridesmaids, and Arthur Penn was best man. The King and Queen, Princess Mary and Prince Albert were guests.

Each time he saw Elizabeth the Prince evidently fell more in love. Early in 1921 he told his parents that he was planning to propose to her. Queen Mary consulted Mabell Airlie about her son’s choice and was reassured;
⁸³
thereafter, as both friend of the Strathmores and lady in waiting to the Queen, Lady Airlie became a valued mediator between the two families.
^*
On 16 February the Prince went to tea with Lady Airlie; Lady Strathmore was there too.

The Prince asked himself to lunch again on Sunday 27 February. There were no servants, Elizabeth warned him, except the ‘all-important’ cook. ‘So if you come to luncheon there would be nobody to wait on us! So if you have something more amusing to do, please don’t worry to come. Otherwise if you don’t mind having no servants & things, do come! This is extremely ill expressed I’m afraid, but I thought I’d just let you know about Sunday.’
⁸⁴

It was scarcely a pressing invitation; it may even have been a hint that he should not come. If so, the Prince ignored it. That afternoon he evidently proposed to Elizabeth and she refused him. It was upsetting and the next day she wrote: