The Queen Mother (78 page)

Lady Strathmore’s funeral was arranged at Glamis for 27 June and the family asked Arthur Penn, as one of their oldest friends, to arrange a simultaneous memorial service in London. Penn was deeply affected by Lady Strathmore’s death. He recalled in a letter to the Queen the ‘incomparable devotion between mother & daughter’. He had so many ‘perfect pictures’ of her mother – ‘in days long ago at St James Square, when you were coming out & we were all friends together – at St Paul’s Walden in summer days, – & most of all at Glamis’. He pictured Lady Strathmore sitting at the head of the dining-room table, at her piano playing Scarlatti and Bach by candlelight, ‘& most of all in her white sitting room, which seemed from every corner to radiate the kindness & character of its occupant’. The last time he was at Glamis he found her in the evening ‘alone, sitting quietly by herself resting contentedly after the exodus of a tribe of her grandchildren … I thought then how happy a picture she presented, surrounded by those who loved her, & of these I know you were always foremost.’
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The Queen treasured this letter.

She concealed her misery from most and travelled with the King up to Glamis overnight on 25 June. In her childhood home she and other members of the family sat together for a time in her mother’s sitting room and, she told Penn, ‘found comfort even in that’.
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The funeral began with a short private service in the chapel where the family had worshipped all their lives. She found it ‘exquisite in its simplicity and beauty’.
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Then the coffin was borne by farm-cart to the burial ground half a mile away, followed by a long line of mourners, including the King. The Queen and her father, who was calm and buoyed by his religious faith, came in a car. When the cortege was at the graveside the heavens opened and torrents of rain soaked the mourners. The King persuaded his wife and father-in-law to remain in the car while he helped carry the wreaths to the graveside, including the cross of white carnations and blue irises from Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, who remained in London. The Queen and her father then joined the King, and they stood in the lashing wind and rain for the service of committal taken by the Bishop of St Andrews.
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The Queen liked the wildness – ‘The elements taking a part made the whole mournful affair less agonizing.’
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Afterwards she and the King went north to rest – not to Balmoral but to Birkhall. Alone with her husband in the mountains and woods, she received and wrote many letters. She told Queen Mary that her mother had had a real sense of perspective – ‘she gave things their due importance, and the things that did not matter were relegated to the background – that is so rare in women, & a great gift’. She assured her mother-in-law, ‘You have it
very
strongly darling Mama.’
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The Queen received reports of the memorial service, held at St Martin in the Fields in London at the same time as the funeral in Glamis. Cosmo Lang sent her his own address, in which he had said of Lady Strathmore, ‘She raised a Queen in her own home, simply, by trust and love, and as a return the Queen has won widespread love. Her charm and graciousness were not due to any conscious effort but the simple outflow of her spirit.’
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The Queen wrote to thank him, saying his words were ‘
perfect
 … Thank you,
thank you
, dear friend & good counsellor.’
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Arthur Penn wrote in more intimate fashion about the London service. He thought the music had lifted it out of the melancholy which Lady Strathmore would have hated. The congregation was both
distinguished and diverse and included ‘a considerable number of what Lord Curzon used to term “the rascality” ’ – which just went to show how widely she was loved. The church had been filled; Penn drew a moving portrait of Barson, the family butler, ‘who advanced down the aisle with his battered old face full of grief, making apologetic & deprecatory noises at being given the place to which his long & faithful service so amply entitled him’.
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The Queen thanked Penn ‘
from my heart
’. Birkhall had brought her solace, she said. ‘I have climbed one or two mountains, & spent my days amongst them, and feel very soothed – they are so nice & big & everlasting & such a lovely colour.’
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She picked a spray of bell heather to send to her daughters.
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After only a few days the peace had to end and it was back to London to rush through the preparations for Paris. The Queen had to make serious decisions about her wardrobe. She was in mourning and the coloured dresses that Hartnell had made were quite unsuitable. She was confronted with the possibility of having to wear only black and purple. According to Hartnell’s own account, he then pointed out that there was an alternative: white was also a colour of royal mourning – after all Queen Victoria had insisted on a white funeral.
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White was a bold proposal. But after some discussion the King and Queen agreed – instead of black, the Queen would be all in white. The couturier gathered all his seamstresses and in a fortnight all of the principal outfits had been remade. The Queen had to have endless new fittings and wrote to Queen Mary, ‘I am nearly demented with rushing up & down & trying to order & try on all my white things for Paris!’
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It was worth all the trouble. The new dresses were exquisite and their effect was mesmerizing. As a result, Hartnell became official Court dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth, designing all her important outfits for the next four decades.

*

O
N
19 J
ULY
THE
King and the Queen, who was still dressed in black, embarked at Dover on the Admiralty yacht,
Enchantress
. They crossed the Channel in thick mist, escorted by eight E-class destroyers –
Electra, Escort, Express, Esk, Escapade, Eclipse, Echo
and
Encounter
– and an air escort of eighteen Anson planes. In mid-Channel they were received by seven French destroyers, all flying the Union flag at their masthead,
and the fleet made its way to Boulogne. From there the royal party took the train to Paris, a city the Queen had loved since her first adventurous visits as a young woman.

They stepped into the heart of the city at the restored ceremonial railway station in the Bois de Boulogne. On the train the Queen had changed and appeared in the first of Hartnell’s dazzling white creations, a two-piece dress and coat edged with silver fox. From that moment, she captured Paris. Throughout, her dresses seemed to suit her personality exactly and were deemed to be lovely even by the fashion-conscious French. A 101-gun salute welcomed them and thousands of white doves were released. From the Eiffel Tower flew what was possibly the largest Union flag ever made, measuring 1,500 square yards.
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Public buildings were lavishly decorated and tens of thousands of shops and homes displayed the flags of the two countries and photographs of the King and Queen. In deference to the Queen’s ancestry, even the Loch Ness monster made an appearance on the Seine.
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Special apartments had been decorated for them at the Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, overlooking the river, at a cost of some eight million francs. Paintings, furniture and tapestries were brought from the Louvre and from the palaces of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Chantilly; the Queen’s bed had belonged to Marie Antoinette, the King’s to Napoleon. Silk had been specially woven – the Queen was even asked what colour she would like – for the walls of the Queen’s room. The chef from the Hotel Crillon came to cook for them in an electric kitchen built for their visit.
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Luxurious modern bathrooms had been installed, one silver and the other gold. (Only a few years later, during the Nazi occupation, Field Marshal Göring was reported to have filled what had been the King’s dressing room with cupboards for a hundred uniforms.)
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Although the French took security very seriously – King Alexander I of Yugoslavia had been assassinated during his state visit to France in 1934 – the atmosphere was joyous and seemed to some of the English officials not unlike the Jubilee or the Coronation. Cheering crowds greeted the King and Queen everywhere they went. Lady Diana Cooper wrote, ‘Each night’s flourish outdid the last. At the opera we leant over the balustrade to see the Royal couple, shining with stars and diadem and the Légion d’Honneur proudly worn, walk up the marble stairs preceded by
les chandeliers
– two valets bearing twenty-branched
candelabra of tall white candles.’ The Queen was wearing a spreading gown of oyster-coloured satin, the skirt draped in festoons held by clusters of cream velvet camellias. The Dowager Duchess of Rutland, standing with Diana Cooper and the Winston Churchills (who had been invited by the French government), said, ‘I felt proud of my nation. The French went mad about the King and Queen. Winston was like a school boy he was so delighted.’
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President Lebrun and his wife were charming. At one occasion the Queen noticed the President looking askance at her: she was wearing the Légion d’Honneur, which he had just conferred on her, on the wrong shoulder. She hurriedly changed it.
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She said later she was overwhelmed by the welcome they received everywhere, and she was struck that the French hardly talked to her about the English. ‘It was all Scottish and Scotland that they seemed to be interested in.’ She talked as much as she could in French, ‘but when I was stuck for a word I just put my hand upon my heart and they supplied me with one.’
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The visit was a triumph for them both, but in particular for the Queen. One French newspaper exulted, ‘We have taken the Queen to our hearts. She rules over two nations.’
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Another paper,
L’Oeuvre
, published a humorous article, ‘Hors d’oeuvre’, with the subheading ‘Honni soit qui mal y pense’. The writer expressed regret that protocol meant that the King & Queen had separate bedrooms, for otherwise perhaps the good food and wine and hospitality of France might have led to the birth of a ‘dauphin’ on 20 April 1939, and the Princesses would have been told, ‘C’est un petit frère que papa et maman ont acheté à Paris et qui arrive aujourd’hui.’
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There was much to rejoice about in the present because there was so much to fear in the future. The overarching theme of all the events and of the constant applause was of two democracies embattled but united against brutal threats. Every opportunity was taken by both the hosts and the visitors to emphasize their alliance and their commitment to peace. At the Elysée banquet in their honour, the King said, ‘It is the ardent desire of our Governments to find, by means of international agreements, a solution of those political problems which threaten the peace of the world and of those economic difficulties which restrict human well-being.’
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On the final day of the visit they were entertained at Versailles. The Queen was wearing another floor-length spreading dress of white
organdie, embroidered all over with open-work broderie anglaise. Her white leghorn hat was trimmed with a ribbon of black velvet.
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At Louis XIV’s magnificent Palace, they reviewed 50,000 French soldiers as they marched past the King. Churchill was much moved and spoke of the French troops as the bulwark of European freedom.
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Unfortunately, the fly-past by the French air force was delayed until the afternoon and took place during a concert in the chapel of the Palace. Suddenly the music was interrupted by the roars of wave after wave of military planes passing overhead. Rather than reassuring, the display was macabre and unsettling – certainly that was how the experience remained in the memories of the King and the Queen.
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That last night, the royal couple enjoyed many curtain calls on the balcony of the Quai d’Orsay as thousands of people in the streets below demanded, by enthusiastic cheering, to see them. Lady Diana Cooper joined the throng and wrote, ‘I can never forget it. To the French the Royal Visit seemed a safeguard against the dreaded war. That at least is what they told me but I could see nothing to allay my fears.’
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She was right. The uninvited guests, Hitler and Mussolini, loomed over all those enchanted evenings. On the last day of the visit, in a reminder of why another war seemed too terrible to contemplate, the King and Queen visited Villers-Bretonneux to unveil a memorial to the 11,000 members of the Australian Imperial Forces who fell in France during the 1914–18 war and had no known grave. After the King had laid his official wreath, the Queen spontaneously approached the memorial and laid on it a bunch of red poppies from the surrounding fields which had been given to her that morning by a schoolboy.
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The French love affair with the Queen and her husband was intense. Neville Chamberlain wrote to the King, praising him and saying, ‘the Queen’s smile as usual took every place by storm’.
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Duff Cooper congratulated the Queen, quoting a friend in Paris who had said that the visit had had an extraordinary effect in increasing French confidence. ‘Never since Armistice night have I seen such vibration of happiness and relief from an unknown nightmare … Everyone says that the Queen has something magnetic about her which touches the masses as well as the lucky few who know her.’
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In his diary, Cooper wrote that the French enthusiasm for the King and more especially for the Queen surpassed description. ‘This at least is good, but I view the
near future with great disquiet and if we are at peace when Parliament meets on November 1st I think we shall be fortunate.’
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*

B
ACK
HOME
THERE
was a heat wave. The King and Queen and their daughters went first to the Solent where the King attended Cowes Week briefly – unlike his father, he was not a yachtsman. The Queen took her daughters picnicking in the New Forest and to visit Osborne, Queen Victoria’s home on the Isle of Wight. Then, more slowly than usual, they made their way to Scotland, in the
Victoria and Albert
. The sea was calm and they could all relax; the Queen thought the officers were charming; they ‘devised all kinds of amusing things to entertain us!’ They stopped off at Southwold in Suffolk for the King to make his annual visit to his Duke of York’s Camp. He was rowed to the shore and carried aloft by the boys for a happy meal around the campfire, before returning to the yacht. North they continued, arriving at Aberdeen on a perfect hot day; the Queen remarked how pretty the harbour looked with the gaily painted trawlers bobbing on the blue sea.
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