The Queen Mother (65 page)

N
INETEEN
-
THIRTY
-
SIX
was one of the unhappiest years of the Duchess’s life. She began it in bed with pneumonia and ended it ill again, with the virulent influenza that attacked her so frequently. She began it as the daughter-in-law of King George V and she ended it, to her astonishment and dismay, as Queen Consort to King George VI. The abdication of King Edward VIII was the most serious constitutional crisis affecting the British monarchy since the seventeenth century. There were many, and they included the Duchess of York and her husband, who feared that the institution might not survive it.

King Edward VIII came to the throne on a wave of public enthusiasm. He was a hugely popular figure of whom much was expected, and he was widely seen as a talented, exuberant and sympathetic young man who could bridge the gap between generations. People thought that as an ex-serviceman he would be able to relate to the needs of former soldiers. His travels, much wider than those of any previous Prince of Wales, would give him a special understanding of the lands of the Empire and those beyond. He would be as steadfast as his father but more up to date, more flexible.

At first he enjoyed extra sympathy because it was clear to everyone that, as an unmarried and childless man, his difficult job would also be a very lonely one. During the interment of King George V in St George’s Chapel, Lady Helen Graham, the Duchess of York’s lady in waiting, looked at the new King and said to the member of the Royal Household beside her, ‘I feel so sorry for him.
He
is not going home to a wife behind the tea pot and a warm fire, with his children making toast for him.’
¹
A similar fear was expressed by Chips Channon, who wrote that his heart went out to King Edward ‘as he will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be
almost more than his highly strung and unimaginative nature can bear.’
²

*

A
S
HEIR
TO
the throne, the Prince of Wales had had a long and not always easy apprenticeship. But he had perhaps suffered less than his younger brother Prince Albert from their father’s hypercritical attitude, being more obviously attuned to the demands of public life and not having to endure the terror of a crippling stammer.

The Prince of Wales joined the Grenadier Guards just before the outbreak of war in 1914; he had a ‘good war’, insisting that he be allowed to serve on the Western Front, but was chagrined that he was not allowed to fight in the trenches. The war over, he embarked on what was perhaps the finest public period of his life – a series of overseas tours in which his youth, his looks and his charm captivated hearts and strengthened links across the Empire. He was particularly gifted at reaching out to veterans. Lloyd George called him ‘our greatest ambassador’ and even his father wrote a rare letter of unqualified praise.
³
However, the Prince made clear from early on that he found many of his official duties irksome. Lloyd George warned the Prince that if he was to be a constitutional monarch he must first be a constitutional Prince of Wales. The King was more severe and saw in his son’s insouciance a lack of respect for manners and morals which he believed would damage if not destroy the monarchy.

The Prince had always had a much more ‘modern’ point of view. He enjoyed throughout the 1920s and early 1930s a more fashionable, and perhaps cynical, world, a society in which the colour of fingernails, the length of skirts and the height of heels were more important than middle-class virtues. In this he was quite unlike his younger brother Bertie. Nonetheless the two brothers were close and the Duchess of York loved the Prince’s rather ‘naughty’ company; their letters to each other testify to the affection that developed between them from the moment of her engagement to the Duke. During the early 1930s, however, the Prince’s lifestyle contrasted more and more sharply with that of the Yorks. While the Yorks lived in domestic bliss, the Prince of Wales was a man about town. He took up flying, he summered on the Riviera rather than on Deeside, he spent many long evenings entertaining his friends in chic London nightclubs.

His favourite home was Fort Belvedere, which he had been granted
by the King in 1929, just down the road from Royal Lodge. The Fort was a folly, a little Georgian eye-catcher at the southern end of Windsor Great Park, close to Virginia Water. It was, according to Diana Cooper, ‘a child’s idea of a fort’ with its castellated walls and tower.
⁴
In this sense it was the complete opposite of Windsor Castle, the greatest castle in the land. Under the Prince of Wales’s stewardship, the Fort became something of a byword (not in the press, of course, but among those who knew) for fun. There the Prince and his guests could relax and enjoy themselves with little protocol.
⁵

His parents dearly wanted him to marry and to have children. But the Prince was more interested in liaisons than in wedlock. During the 1920s and early 1930s, instead of searching for a bride who could eventually bring lustre to the throne, the Prince indulged in a series of affairs with married women, interspersed with many shorter relationships. The most durable of his romances were with Freda Dudley Ward, the MP’s wife who became the principal object of his affection from 1918, and then with Thelma Furness, twin sister of Gloria Vanderbilt, a pretty and gay creature who, like the Prince, enjoyed simple if not superficial pleasures.
⁶
The Yorks liked Thelma Furness and the two couples often spent time together, particularly over weekends at Fort Belvedere or Royal Lodge.

One winter weekend in January 1933, the Yorks went skating near the Fort with the Prince and Thelma Furness. Both the Duchess and Thelma were new to this sport and Prince Albert found them kitchen chairs to push before them and help them stand up straight. Thelma wrote, ‘The lovely face of the Duchess, her superb colouring heightened by the cold, her eyes wrinkled with the sense of fun that was never far below the surface, made a picture I shall never forget.’
⁷

There was another member of that skating party, a new American friend of the Prince. She was Mrs Ernest Simpson.

*

B
OOKSHELVES
HAVE
been filled with works about Wallis Warfield Simpson. And with some reason. She so fascinated the Prince of Wales that he laid down his crown for her and thus altered for ever the course of the British monarchy.

Born in 1896 into a good Baltimore family, her early life was penniless. Her father died when she was only two and her mother for a time ran a boarding house. From childhood onwards she understood
that security came with money. Her first husband, Winfield Spencer, was a handsome pilot but he turned out to be an alcoholic, and she divorced him in 1922 to lead a rackety life which took in China as well as New York. In 1928 she remarried. Her new husband was Ernest Simpson, a kindly Anglo-American, also good-looking, and they settled in London.

She was socially ambitious, and a friend of Thelma Furness, through whom she met the Prince of Wales. He was attracted by her glamour and her sharp wit. She was clever, she was brusque, she was self-possessed and, unlike any of the English women the Prince knew, she was completely unimpressed by royalty. She was probably the first person he had ever known who talked down to him. She said what she wanted, and what she wanted she generally got.

In early 1934 Thelma Furness made a three-month trip to the United States and, apparently, asked Wallis Simpson to keep an eye on the Prince in her absence. Lady Furness had chosen her chaperone badly. Within weeks of her departure the Prince had become enthralled by Wallis Simpson and frequently invited her and her husband to weekends at the Fort, while taking her dancing, during the intervening weeks, often without her husband. When Thelma Furness returned from America she found that her friend had usurped her position as favourite.
⁸
She and Freda Dudley Ward were cut off.

The Prince’s own family soon had similar reasons for concern. Prince George, the closest of all the family to the Prince of Wales, lived with him at St James’s Palace and spent many weekends at the Fort. He realized quickly that Mrs Simpson was intent on dominating his brother and isolating him from his family. He later said that after she came into the Prince of Wales’s life, his family never saw him ‘as in days gone by’.
⁹
Through 1934 and 1935 the Prince grew ever more bold in displaying his infatuation with Mrs Simpson. Although the British press still observed a total and astonishing silence on the affair out of deference to the monarchy, the American press rejoiced in the story and in London society the whispers grew louder. People in and around the Court talked of Mrs Simpson’s total control over the Prince.
¹⁰
The King confronted his son, who denied any impropriety.
¹¹

Unlike most people, the King took him at his word. Nonetheless he was dismayed by his son’s conduct. ‘He has not a single friend who is a gentleman. He does not see any decent society. And he is 41.’
¹²
Some months before his death the King is reported to have said, ‘I
pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.’
¹³

By 1935 it was clear to his family and close friends that the Prince was in thrall to Mrs Simpson. There was private speculation at the time – and much more later – that her hold was at least partly sexual. His biographer considered that this may well have been true but there was more to the relationship than just sex. ‘Until the day he died his eyes would follow her around the room; if she went out he would grow anxious … It was her personality, not her appearance or her sexual techniques, which captivated him.’
¹⁴

There were those who came to believe that, even before the death of his father, the Prince had already decided to renounce his right to the succession and abscond with Mrs Simpson. That was certainly the opinion of two of King George V’s Private Secretaries, Alan Lascelles and Alec Hardinge.
¹⁵
Lascelles later stated that King Edward himself told him in the summer of 1936 that he had not wanted to become king.
¹⁶
His brother confirmed this: shortly after the abdication, the new King George VI remarked to Owen Morshead, perhaps relying more than he realized on hindsight, ‘he never meant to take it on … You see Papa’s death fell wrongly for his plans … It would have been easy, comparatively, to chuck it while yet he was P. of Wales; he would have had a rough crossing with Papa, but he would have faced up to that.’
¹⁷
In fact it would not have been simple for the Prince of Wales to ‘chuck it’: legislation would have been required, in Britain and the Dominions, to alter the line of succession. But it is true that, with his father’s death, he was trapped – by the Court, by ceremony and by the whole machinery of government. Perhaps it was no wonder that, though less close than the Duke of York to their father, he reacted to the moment of his death with a far greater display of emotion.

His anguish was deepened two days later when the late King’s will was read to the family. He discovered that his father had left him a life interest in Sandringham and Balmoral but, unlike his siblings, he was to receive no money. Clive Wigram and the King’s solicitor, Sir Bernard Bircham, explained to him that King George V had expected that (like previous Princes of Wales) he would have built himself a nest egg out of his Duchy of Cornwall revenues, and that his siblings had had no such income. (It was indeed later discovered that he had accumulated a considerable fortune.) The Prince was furious – and
with a face like thunder, according to Lascelles, strode out of the room to telephone the bad news to Mrs Simpson.
¹⁸

Senior members of the Household soon began to despair at the priorities of the new King. Sir Godfrey Thomas, his Private Secretary for many years as Prince of Wales, was convinced that he was ‘not fitted to be King and that his reign will end in disaster’.
¹⁹
Alec Hardinge, who had been Assistant Private Secretary to George V and whom the new King was soon to appoint his private secretary, found it even more difficult than he had expected to adjust. His wife Helen’s diary entries reflect his problems:

*

F
OR
THE
D
UCHESS
of York the death of the King brought vast changes, both private and public. In a personal sense it created a void. She wrote revealingly of her relationship with her father-in-law to Lord Dawson:

She was now the wife of the heir presumptive. Since the new King was unmarried and since Queen Mary, in mourning, would inevitably withdraw from public life for some time, her responsibilities were bound to increase. But whereas the Yorks had been an essential part of King George V’s Court, they were not nearly so close to that established by Edward VIII. The new King quickly seemed to withdraw from his family and into the bosom of his friends. That, if anything,
made the relationship between Queen Mary and the Yorks closer than ever. The Queen had conducted herself during her husband’s last illness and since his death with her usual reserve and dignity. It was clear to those around her that she missed the King immensely, even though she remained quite calm.