The Queen Mother (26 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
The identity of ‘Michael’ is not clear; possibly it was Michael Biddulph, brother of Elizabeth’s friend Adèle; but her letters at this time do not mention him. Christopher Glenconner,
*
however, was indeed a new recruit to the ranks of Elizabeth’s suitors. A year older than Elizabeth and described as ‘the most straightforward and sensible member of a wildly eccentric family’,
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he lived at Glen in Peebleshire and Wilsford in Wiltshire. There his mother Lady Glenconner, formerly Pamela Wyndham, one of the poetic and literary circle known as the Souls, created an aura of romance and mysticism which Elizabeth later recalled with pleasure. Lord Glenconner’s friendship with Elizabeth probably began in early 1922. That they were ‘seldom apart’ was certainly an exaggeration, for she was at Glamis from early March until late May. But they exchanged letters. ‘I have been having a wonderful soulful correspondence with Lord Glenconner!’ Elizabeth reported to Beryl from Glamis in May. ‘He does write most excellent letters, &
most
high brow – so funny.’
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And perhaps filled with more longing than he revealed. But the letters do not survive.
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T
HE
P
RINCE
KEPT
his second proposal secret from his parents to begin with. But in early May 1922 Queen Mary wrote to tell Lady Strathmore that she and the King were ‘much disappointed that the little
“romance” has come to an end as we should so much have liked the connection with your family. My son feels very sad about it but he is quite good and sensible and they are to remain friends. I hope you and E. will not reproach yourselves in any way, no one can help their feelings & it was far better to be honest. I am so sorry to hear that you are still so far from well … With my love to you and E. and
many
regrets.’
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Both Elizabeth and her mother, still at Glamis, were ill again. Lady Strathmore had another operation on 7 May, when the surgeon discovered that an abscess had been causing her chronic raised temperature and poor health. After it was drained she made a good recovery. Meanwhile Elizabeth took to her bed with tonsillitis and a high temperature. She looked like ‘a
ghost
, so white & thin’, her mother wrote to May Elphinstone on 16 May;
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and there was no prospect of her returning to London yet. A letter from Prince Albert in mid-April, saying he hoped she would come back south soon, remained unanswered for a month.
When she did reply, telling him that she was better and hoped to be ‘hopping around in London Town very shortly’, she kept to light-hearted talk of dinners and dances, slipping in almost casually the briefest of references to what had happened between them: ‘Do you know the Queen wrote Mother a most charming letter, which was very nice of her indeed. I thought it was so kind of her.’
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As far as she was concerned, there seems to have been no more question of a romance. Writing to her sister May she said, ‘Yes, I did put an end to that affair you mentioned, last Feb: but did not tell anyone except Mother.’
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James Stuart wrote from the oilfields of Texas; she told Beryl, ‘he says it’s exactly like books there. Everybody packs a gun, & the Sheriff has got nine nicks in his for the 9 men he’s killed. It must be very uncomfortable!’
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At the end of May she received an injured letter from another admirer, George Gage, who seems to have understood that the intensity of his feelings for her was not reciprocated. ‘My dear Elizabeth, You are
awful
& don’t care how much you hurt the feelings of your friends if they don’t amuse you for half a minute. You did hurt mine the other night & I don’t pretend that I didn’t mind.’ But he went on to issue a humorous invitation to Firle in June, promising that ‘the chaperonage system will be perfect & everything will be conducted (as it always is here) on the best Victorian lines.’
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In late May Elizabeth returned to London en route to Paris to stay with Diamond Hardinge again. This time she was reluctant to go, for there were friends to see and balls to attend in London after her long absence in Scotland. But Diamond had been ill, and Elizabeth did not want to disappoint her. Of this trip no account by Elizabeth herself survives; but her visit coincided with Christopher Glenconner’s arrival in Paris. They had lunch together, and spent the afternoon at Versailles, where it rained heavily, as he recollected. He told her nine years later that he remembered every moment vividly, and that he had been deeply in love with her.
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Back in London, June and July were filled with a delightful whirl of dances, dinners, theatres, nightclubs and country weekends for Elizabeth and her friends – including Prince Albert. For the Prince there were also foundation stones to be laid, war memorials to be unveiled and meetings of charitable organizations to attend. There were two royal weddings – the marriage of King Alexander of Yugoslavia to Princess Marie of Romania, for which the Prince travelled to Belgrade in early June to represent his father; and that of his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten to Edwina Ashley in mid-July. Then, on 25 July, he sailed to Dunkirk in a destroyer to lay the foundation stone of a memorial to the Dover Patrol.
*
On the return journey a curious incident occurred. John Campbell Davidson,
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a member of the Parliamentary delegation which had attended the ceremony in Dunkirk, was introduced by Louis Greig to the Prince and was left with him in the wardroom of the ship. Davidson later wrote an account of the meeting.
I had not been in the Duke’s presence more than a few minutes before I realised that he was not only worried, but genuinely unhappy. He seemed to have reached a crisis in his life, and
wanted someone to whom he could unburden himself without reserve. He dwelt upon the difficulties which surrounded a King’s son in contrast with men like myself, who had always had greater freedom at school and University to make their own friends, and a wider circle to choose from. We discussed friendship, and the relative value of brains and character, and all the sort of things that young men do talk about in the abstract, when in reality they are very much concerned in the concrete.
He told me that sometimes the discipline and formality of the Court proved irksome, and I sensed that he was working up to something important. I felt moved with a great desire to help him if I could. He was so simple and frank and forthcoming.
Then, out it came. He declared that he was desperately in love, but that he was in despair for it seemed quite certain that he had lost the only woman he would ever marry. I told him that however black the situation looked, he must not give up hope; that my wife had refused me consistently before she finally said ‘yes’, and that like him, if she had persisted in her refusal, I would never have married anyone else.
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Davidson’s personal experience probably explains why Greig had introduced him to the Prince and, perhaps, why the Prince confided in him. The conversation does seem to have helped embolden the Prince – he pursued his suit quietly and doggedly through the rest of 1922. He later described his tactic as ‘playing the waiting game’.
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As it happened, the day after his conversation with Davidson, Elizabeth wrote to invite the Prince to Glamis. ‘
How
sick I am of London!’ she said. ‘It is a very depressing sort of end-of-everything feeling, isn’t it?’ He should let her know when he was coming, ‘so that I can collect a few charmers & Society Beauties for the same week’.
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For herself she had unwittingly collected another admirer in London: Archibald Clark Kerr,
*
a diplomat eighteen years older than herself whom she met at a party given by Lady Islington that summer while he was on leave from his post as senior adviser to Lord Allenby in Egypt. He later wrote that he found her ‘wonderful, beautiful, and
so gentle’, and his letters to his mother and to friends show that he hoped to marry her.
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Elizabeth invited Clark Kerr to Glamis, but he felt that he had been ‘dull and inarticulate’ there. Nonetheless, ‘If anything can be perfect it must be the Lyon family. I had come to think that the type was extinct. Thank God it isn’t.’
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He wrote her long entertaining letters and she remained on cordial terms with him. Her friendliness shows that apart from the spirited young admirers of her own age, she was also drawn to older, cultivated and witty men. Arthur Penn was one such; another was Jasper Ridley, a barrister by training who became a banker, and who was a discriminating collector of contemporary art. He was to become an adviser on her own art collection.
*
A third was Francis Godolphin D’Arcy Osborne,
†
a cousin of the Duke of Leeds and thus also of Dorothy, the wife of Elizabeth’s eldest brother Patrick. Elizabeth seems to have met him first in 1919 or 1920, and they became lifelong friends, exchanging both jovial and serious letters. He remained one of the few people outside her family to whom she could express her feelings. In late October 1922 she wrote to him, ‘You seem to have spent rather a pleasant autumn – I spent the time entirely at Glamis, entertaining a series of guests, some were nice and some were NOT.’
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‡
The guests at Glamis had already included Lord Glenconner, George Gage, Prince Paul and Francis Doune, together with a succession of Elizabeth’s girl friends. Before Prince Albert arrived, Elizabeth wrote to warn him that the partridge shooting would be poor because of the wet weather, but she was looking forward to seeing him. ‘It is such ages since we met. I do hope you won’t be terribly bored here. I noticed some old chickens flying quite high down at the farm the other day, we might have a chicken drive to vary the
monotony. Wouldn’t that be fun?’
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The ‘charmers’ and ‘Society Beauties’ she had assembled for him were ‘Fasty’ Doris, Bettine Malcolm,
*
and Rachel and Mary Cavendish.
†
Prince Paul returned for the week, and Chips Channon and Arthur Penn completed the party. Elizabeth’s brothers Michael and David were there. And there was an extra guest: Lady Airlie.
The shooting was not good but Prince Albert reported to his mother, ‘Lady Strathmore is so much better and is much stronger than she was, and does everything again now. We were not a large party but a happy one. The Lyon family were all so kind to me.’
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He made no reference to Elizabeth. But his feelings for her were hard to disguise. Chips Channon later recalled, ‘One rainy afternoon we were sitting about and I pretended that I could read cards, and I told Elizabeth Lyon’s fortune and predicted a great and glamorous royal future. She laughed, for it was obvious that the Duke of York was much in love with her. As Queen she has several times reminded me of it. I remember the pipers playing in the candlelit dining-room, and the whole castle heavy with atmosphere, sinister, lugubrious, in spite of the gay young party.’
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John Stirton, the minister at Crathie, commented in his diary that the Prince had wanted to marry Elizabeth, ‘but it is said (I do not believe this) she refuses to accept him as a husband. An understanding therefore has been made that he must not speak again on the subject. I am very sorry for him as Lady Elizabeth is the only girl the Duke has wished to marry. I do think he ought not to have gone to Glamis just now.’
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But the Duke knew what he was doing. On his return to London he carried out a small commission for Elizabeth: buying her some new gramophone records. These, she wrote, ‘arrived in record time. (Oh, a joke, accident I promise).’ She posted him ‘two crackly sovereigns’ by way of payment, which he sent back. She was particularly enjoying ‘Stumbling’, ‘Limehouse Blues’ and ‘I’m Simply Mad about Harry’, she said. He also sent her a photograph of himself and she told him she had put it up in her room.
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Prince Albert’s unhappiness in love had at least one good effect: it brought him and his mother closer, and she wrote him an affectionate letter of praise in early October. He protested that he did not deserve all the nice things she said. ‘But you have made me very happy telling me what you have, and I greatly appreciate it.’
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The Prince continued with a busy programme of public engagements throughout the autumn of 1922, and although he and Elizabeth wrote to each other, it was some time before they met again. In early November she went to stay for the first time at Holwick Lodge in County Durham, a Strathmore property which was usually let for the shooting. She wrote to tell the Prince that ‘the family are amusing themselves by shooting at huge packs of grouse that fly over the butts at lightning speed! It is rather fun, and such lovely country … From the window where I am writing, I can see about 30 miles right down a wide valley – it is all nice & wild & lovely in the daytime. But nothing to do in the evenings, so I play the records you gave me.’ She added that she was longing to hear about what he had been doing. ‘So do come around one day.’
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‘I do so want to see you as I have so much to tell you about what I have been doing & I am sure you have been doing a lot too,’
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he wrote, in a letter which crossed with hers. He came to lunch at Bruton Street on 11 November, and Lord Strathmore invited him to shoot at St Paul’s Walden for the weekend of 24 November. The Prince and Elizabeth had an enchanting time together. He wrote to her afterwards, ‘Wonderful day, wonderful shoot & wonderful time. Of all the days’ shooting I have ever had I can’t remember any I have enjoyed more than last Saturday … It was so nice of you to spend all the afternoon with me that day. I am sure it spurred me on to greater efforts.’
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Elizabeth herself, however, was troubled that their friendship had given rise to gossip. She wrote to him of her concern, and he replied asking if he could come and see her to discuss it. ‘I do not think really that people will start talking about us again as they must know by now what friends we are. But of course it is just as you wish & we can talk it over tomorrow.’
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The weeks before Christmas were filled with invitations, and Elizabeth’s anxieties centred on a house party to which she and the Prince had both been invited for the Pytchley Hunt Ball in January. She asked him, ‘Do you think it will start all these horrible people talking again?’
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