YOUNG ELIZABETH

The Making of Our Queen

Kate Williams

‘It almost frightens me that the people should love her so much. I suppose it is a good thing, and I hope that she will be worthy of it, poor little darling.’

The Duchess of York to Queen Mary, Autumn 1928

‘Never mind, Margaret,’ said Elizabeth, while watching her parents and the Court wait to enter the throne room. ‘One day you and I will be down there sharing all the fun. And I shall have a perfectly enormous train, yards long.’

‘History is so thrilling.’

Princess Elizabeth

Contents

Cover

Title page

Epigraph

Prologue – Abdication Day

1 ‘A lucky fellow if she accepts you’

2 ‘Such a nice name’

3 ‘All the equipment a lady needs’

4 ‘Queen, Empress of India, the whole bag of tricks’

5 ‘Great changes’

6 ‘Who is this Hitler?’

7 ‘Do let me see what is happening’

8 ‘After all, she is only nineteen’

9 ‘A flash of colour’

10 ‘An obedient sitter’

11 ‘Came down a Queen’

12 Regina

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Author biography

Also by Kate Williams

Copyright

Prologue

Abdication Day

Princess Elizabeth in 1936

ON THE AFTERNOON OF 10 December 1936 the ten-year-old Princess Elizabeth of York was at home with her younger sister, Margaret, in the family home, 145 Piccadilly near Hyde Park. She became aware of people collecting outside her front door, cheering and shouting for her father. Mystified, the young Princess wondered if the crowds might disperse – but instead they only swelled. Over and over they were calling for the Duke, her father. Others were shouting ‘God Save the King’.

Life had been unsettled for some months in 145 Piccadilly, the Yorks’ town house. Elizabeth and Margaret were used to spending time with their mother and father, giggling in their room in the morning, playing in the garden and throwing water over each other at bath time. Their governess despaired of ever instilling a sustained education, such was the family’s enjoyment of each other’s company. But their cosy life had been much changed since the death of their grandfather, King George V, at the beginning of the year, and since the autumn their father had been shut in his study, buried in his papers. He had had no time for horseplay with his daughters; instead, trains of dignitaries had arrived to see him, including the Prime Minister and bishops in their full regalia. When their father was free, he was tired and strained, and recently their mother had been terribly unwell, confined to bed with severe influenza. Their grandmother, Queen Mary, had sometimes looked cross and Elizabeth’s beloved Uncle David, one of her favourite partners for teatime games of Happy Families and Snap, had not visited for some time – and he had even forgotten a few engagements. But, she supposed, he was King now and perhaps too busy to play cards with his nieces. What exactly the problem was she had little idea. She and Margaret had been devoting themselves to their swimming lessons at the Bath Club. ‘You look like an aeroplane about to conk out,’ she had shouted at Margaret when she slowed down. The two girls splashed and jumped about under the tuition of the engaging Miss Daly. It was easy to forget the cares at home when there was so much fun to be had at the baths.

Finally, that December morning, Elizabeth decided to ask a footman the reason for the noise. He told her that the King had abdicated his throne and her father now ruled. She hurtled up the stairs to tell Margaret the news: ‘Uncle David is going away, and isn’t coming back, and Papa is to be King.’

‘Does that mean that you will have to be the next Queen?’ came the response.

‘Yes, some day,’ answered Elizabeth.

‘Poor you,’ said Margaret.

There was no reply.

Then, refusing to be daunted by world events, Elizabeth sat down to write up her report about the last swimming lesson. At the top of the page she wrote ‘Abdication Day’.

For Princess Elizabeth, maintaining a strict routine was the way to control, even negate, the painful vicissitudes of life. It was a policy she would retain throughout adulthood, often to her disadvantage and, in 1997, to the severe detriment of the reputation of the monarchy.

Lilibet wrote her notes on swimming class in the bold, clear hand George V had insisted she learn, but her future was irrevocably changed. She was now the heiress to the throne of Great Britain and its dominions. Unless her mother had a son, an event that seemed unlikely, she would take up the crown of one of the oldest and most influential monarchies in the world. As a mere Princess of York, her parents’ sole ambition for her was that she should be happily married. But now her future was one of power, international influence, fame and great wealth, for which she would have to sacrifice privacy, intimacy and a family life. It was a role for someone able to hide her feelings and respond to duty. ‘Isn’t it lucky Lilibet is the eldest,’ said Margaret.

‘If I am ever Queen,’ the ten-year-old Lilibet once declared, ‘I shall make a law that there must be no riding on Sundays. Horses must have a rest too. And I shan’t let anyone dock their pony’s tail.’

In 2012, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, the Queen is less than four years away from superseding Queen Victoria as Britain’s longest reigning monarch, and she has been one of the most popular queens in history. It is hard to see the Queen fulfilling her duties at Parliament, opening ceremonies and touring the Commonwealth, and imagine that she was not born to the role. Yet as the daughter of the second son of George V she was never destined to touch the orb and sceptre at all. She was brought up to be a good aristocratic wife and her education was to be very much like that of her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon: casual, loving, unintellectual. As the Duchess of York said, ‘After all, I and my sisters only had governesses and we all married well – one of us very well.’

‘Give me a child of seven . . .’ runs the Jesuit motto. For Elizabeth, the age of ten was when her life changed. The decision of Thelma Furness, lover of the Prince of Wales, to leave for America in 1934 and ask Wallis Simpson to look after her amour had fateful ramifications. It caused shock in the country, gossip in high society, distracted the government from the rise of nationalism in Europe and led to diplomatic problems between Britain and America. Most of all, the abdication changed the life of a precise, methodical little girl whose favourite activities were playing with toy ponies and weeding the garden with her doting father.

1

‘A lucky fellow if she accepts you’

The Duke and Duchess of York

‘I DO HOPE THAT YOU & Papa are as delighted as we are to have a granddaughter, or would you sooner have another grandson?’ Prince Albert, Duke of York, wrote to his mother, Queen Mary. ‘I know Elizabeth wanted a daughter.’ His wife, the Duchess of York, had given birth by Caesarean section to their first child at 2.40 a.m. on the morning of 21 April 1926. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of York was a plump infant princess, a blessing on a happy marriage and, although officially third in line to the throne, seen as little more.

Crowds were cheering outside the house, but for others the monarchy was a hated symbol of privilege and repression, tottering at the top of an unfair system. Britain in 1926 was seized by worker unrest. In the previous spring, mine owners had informed their employees that wages would be lowered and hours increased. The union threatened industrial action. Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government authorised a royal commission into the matter and it found for the mine owners. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) declared a general strike for 3 May, calling out other workers including railwaymen, printers and dockers. It was a stand-off and they were determined to win.

In such turmoil, the advancing pregnancy of the twenty-five-year-old wife of the second son and third child of King George V, Albert, Duke of York, was an unwelcome distraction for the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. Called early on 21 April, not long before he was due to attend a vital meeting between the Prime Minister and the coal owners, he hurried to the home of the Duchess’s parents, 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair. There, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born; he assented to her legitimacy and dashed back to his papers.

The King and Queen arrived to visit their first granddaughter (the Princess Royal already had two sons). Queen Mary declared that the child was a ‘little darling with a lovely complexion and pretty hair’. The Duke and Duchess were equally happy. ‘We have long wanted a child to make our happiness complete,’ the Duke wrote. They had waited three years – long by the standards of the time.

‘We are so anxious for her first name to be Elizabeth as it is such a nice name & there has been no one of that name in your family for a long time,’ the Duke wrote to his father. Victoria was summarily discounted. ‘He says nothing about Victoria. I hardly think that necessary,’ George V said of his son to Queen Mary. The name ‘Elizabeth’ was chosen because it was her mother’s, not to recall Elizabeth I. The Princess took her names from her mother, her great-grandmother and her grandmother and, indeed, her initials were identical to those of her mother: E.A.M. She was named after consorts and wives, not ruling queens. Her destiny was to make a good marriage, possibly into a foreign royal family, and become a supportive wife and mother, just like her mother, the Duchess of York, her grandmother, Queen Mary, and her great-grandmother, Queen Alexandra. The heir to the throne would be the child of her as yet unmarried uncle, Edward, Prince of Wales – ‘David’ to his family.

‘The House of Hanover, like ducks, produce bad parents,’ said the Royal Librarian to Sir Harold Nicolson, biographer of George V, ‘they trample on their young.’ George I, the Princess’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, had arrived to rule in 1714 and began the Hanoverian line. He had made scant effort to speak English and his son, George II, had been reclusive. Despite losing the American colonies, George III had been a widely popular king both for his engagement with the country and his lengthy marriage to Queen Charlotte, and his sufferings from porphyria only increased sympathy for him. His seven sons and six daughters did not follow his uxorious example and before the arrival of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince of Wales, in 1796, they had managed to produce between them over fifty-six illegitimate children – and no legitimate heir.

George IV separated from his wife, Princess Caroline, after three days and returned to his Mrs Fitzherbert, the Catholic widow he had married in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act in 1772. William IV had ten children with the celebrated actress, Mrs Jordan, and none with his wife. The reputation of the royal family was low when George IV’s niece, Victoria, daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, succeeded to the throne at just eighteen in 1837. The tiny Queen began summarily to rescue the monarchy’s reputation, assiduously engaging with the duties of court and politics, and carefully showing herself off to the public as dignified and hard-working – the polar opposite of her misbehaving uncles. With her husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, she instigated the notion of the virtuous royal family, and prints and portraits disseminated images of the monarch and her brood around her great Empire. By the end of her reign Victoria’s position was unassailable and her disreputable predecessors were a colourful memory. She ruled a quarter of the world’s population, her nine children were married into European royalty and the British aristocracy, and her grandson by her eldest child, Victoria, Princess Royal, was the German Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Victoria’s son, Bertie, later King Edward VII, rebelled against his mother’s iron morals as a young man – but he deplored the same lassitude when it manifested itself in his own eldest son, Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence. The young Prince could not settle to life in the navy and muddled his way into the seedy corners of London’s underworld. His father consulted Queen Victoria on the matter. ‘A good sensible wife – with considerable character – is what he needs,’ he wrote. ‘But where is she to be found?’

The ever-resourceful Queen had her eye on the young Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, always known as May, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of her cousin, Princess Mary Adelaide, whose father had been younger brother to the Duke of Kent. The family were lacking in funds and dignity, and really hardly royal, for May’s father was the product of the morganatic marriage of Duke Alexander of Württemberg. Shy Princess May had spent her teenage years in an agony of embarrassment as fellow royals looked down on her family, and her gigantically fat mother sallied forth, pretending not to care. Queen Victoria was more interested in May’s restrained character than her lack of funds (and, indeed, the latter was perhaps desirable, for it made the family very unlikely to interfere). For her, the twenty-two-year-old Princess was a ‘superior girl’, steady, sensible and lacking in frivolity. May and Eddy were quickly betrothed, her trousseau was ordered and then, in January 1892, 5 weeks before the wedding, Eddy died of influenza. May’s bridal wreath was laid on his coffin. ‘The dear girl looks like a crushed flower,’ Victoria wrote.

Princess May was the object of great public pity (and her hopelessly indebted family were in a state of terror over the expensive trousseau they had ordered). Stranded, with no other suitors, it seemed to many that her marriage prospects were ruined. But the plump and resolute Victoria was not about to let May slip through her fingers. The Queen decided she should marry the new heir, Eddy’s brother, twenty-six-year-old Prince George. Princess May herself was distressed by the idea and decided to leave England. The Prince of Wales and George later visited her and her family at Cannes – and the two young people began to forge a genuine friendship.

Prince George was simple, disciplined, fond of the navy and very conscious of his duty. Four months after Eddy’s death, George proposed to May and the wedding took place the following July. ‘Princess May is the ideal bride,’ declared the Lady’s Magazine. ‘I am simply devoted to you,’ George wrote to his wife a few months into their marriage. In 1910 her husband ascended to the throne and the young girl from a rackety family became Queen Mary, famously dignified, calm and severe, as impressively regal as Queen Victoria had been. The role took its toll, however. At the height of the Second World War she stayed with friends in Gloucestershire and wept when she was told she could return to London. ‘I shall have to begin being Queen Mary all over again,’ she said.

Prince George was reminiscent of George III, a submissive man of straightforward interests and tastes who gained the esteem of his people. His first child with May, Prince Edward, known as David, the last of his seven Christian names, was born in 1894, large, healthy and handsome. After David, his father had hoped for a girl. Instead, eighteen months later on 14 December 1895, came a boy, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George. The birth plunged his father into panic about the reaction of his grandmother. The anniversary of the sudden death of the Prince Consort thirty-four years previously, 14 December was a date on which Queen Victoria wallowed in mourning and her family had to follow. Their notions of the seventy-six-year-old Queen’s strength knew no bounds – like a malevolent fairy godmother, she could curse a child for life.

The Prince of Wales, grandfather of the baby, was sent to Windsor to break the news. Happily, the Queen was too fond of Princess May to criticise her for being brought to bed on an inopportune date. ‘Grandmamma was rather distressed that this happy event should have taken place on a darkly sad anniversary for us,’ Edward wrote to his son, ‘but I think – as well as most of us in the family here – that it will “break the spell” of this most unlucky date.’ He most of all wished to see his mother come to view the death of the Prince Consort with equanimity, for she blamed him for Albert’s decline.

The Queen surprised everyone by receiving the news calmly. ‘I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear little boy,’ she wrote of the date. She was most gratified by the olive branch of the name Albert and promptly sent a bust of her lamented husband to the child as a christening present.

Young Bertie was born into the last days of unassailable greatness for the British royal family. He was related to every one of the twenty reigning monarchs of Europe through blood or marriage. His great-grandmother, two years short of her Diamond Jubilee, ruled a quarter of the world’s population and was the most powerful individual in her time. Her ministers and soldiers had subjugated peoples across the world, genuinely believing that the other nations benefited from and were strengthened by governance from Britain. Those who wished to please them agreed. Prince Lerothodi of Basutoland, whose father had appealed to the British for protection from the Boers, declared of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887:

We hear that Her Majesty’s subjects are an immense multitude, numbering more than 300 millions of people, that the sun never goes down on her empire, and that all glory in being her subjects.

At the time of Albert’s birth the entire royal family, with the Queen at its apex, believed in their excellence and right to rule. The family had palaces across the country and private estates at Balmoral, Osborne and Sandringham, a collection of jewels rivalled only by those of the Russian royal family, priceless works of art, a royal yacht, staunch courtiers and phalanxes of servants. They were truly, as George VI later dubbed them, a ‘family firm’. But their power was already waning. In 1895, Leander Starr Jameson, a British colonist, launched a raid against Paul Kruger’s Boer Transvaal republic. His aim was to inspire the British expatriate workers to rise up and fight against the authorities, thus allowing Britain to seize the republic. They did not, and Kruger received messages of support, including one from Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was the beginning of the crumbling of the Empire. But still the Diamond Jubilee, for which little Bertie was only two, thrilled the nation. On a Jubilee Mug the Queen’s ‘Notable Achievements’ were listed: ‘Railways 1837’, ‘Imperial Institute 1897’, ‘Afghan War 1839’. The Labour leader, Keir Hardie, wrote in the New Statesman that ‘future historians’ would look back on the Jubilee celebrations with much interest. ‘To the visitor from Mars two things might seem incontrovertible, first that the world was at peace, second that the thrones of the world were firmly embedded in the hearts of a loyal and grateful people.’ But, as he put it rather hopefully, the people would turn out for the installation of a president, the troops were compelled to be there and the statesmen cheered because ‘Empire means trade and trade means profit, and profit means power over the common people’.

In 1897 Queen Victoria was exhausted, lame and increasingly weary of leading the Jubilee razzmatazz. Happiest when surrounded by her tokens and memorabilia of the dead, she tyrannised her family. ‘In our position, which is quite different from other people’s, one ought not to be left alone, without a child or a near Relation.’ Her family, to her, existed to predict and fulfil her practical and emotional needs – and when they did not, she shifted her preference to her servants.

The Prince of Wales and future Edward VII loomed large in the lives of his six children and grandchildren. Pure Hanoverian, he was greedy, domineering, lascivious and ruled by the awful ‘Hanoverian spleen’. It was fortunate that his wife, Alexandra, was rather deaf. The Prince was also, like his ancestors, convinced of the right of kings to rule and the superiority of the royal family. He brought up his children to be bad-tempered and narrow-minded.

‘I was frightened of my father and I’m damn well going to see that my children are frightened of me,’ Prince George declared of Edward VII. He and May had six children – Princess Mary arrived in 1897, with three further sons, Henry, George and John, in 1900, 1902 and 1905. Prince John, an epileptic, was sadly treated, sent to a secluded villa away from the family until his death in 1919. The rest of the family lived in York Cottage in the grounds of Sandringham.

Crammed into the ugly, dark and poky York Cottage, tempers ran high. Both George and May found it difficult to express love – their early courtship was marked by letters in which they apologised to each other for seeming stiff and shy. Terrified of his sons becoming dissipated royals as his dead brother had been, George was excessively stern, and bullied and criticised his sons. Even as adults, his children were not allowed to speak in his presence unless he spoke to them first. Margot Asquith told him his harsh treatment would drive the children to drink, but he ignored her.

Princess May was so concerned about bringing up properly virtuous children that she too was overly strict and, once she became Queen, so devoted to assisting her husband that she was offhand with her children. After suffering from paroxysms of shame as a girl, thanks to her parents’ lack of decorum, she grew up always believing people were laughing at her. As a consequence she developed what Lady Airlie, her lady-in-waiting, called a ‘hard crust of inhibition’. She never embarrassed her children, but they did not feel loved by her. May busied herself collecting together old Christmas cards and reading about royal genealogy, while her husband shut himself into his study, smoking and inspecting his stamp collection.

Even worse, the royal couple hired cruel staff. The nanny of the infant Princes Edward and George attempted to make herself indispensable by pinching them before presenting them to their parents, ensuring that they cried terribly and it appeared as if they were content only with her. The children grew up miserable: Prince Edward was painfully obsessed with staying thin and Albert suffered from a nervous stammer and vicious rages. Before his marriage to the chic and gentle-natured Princess Marina of Greece, Prince George had been a rapacious bisexual with a penchant for cocaine and dubious nightspots, while Prince Henry grew up to be as dishonest and greedy as the sons of George III. The elder two were the best of the lot.

As a child Elizabeth’s father, Prince Albert, always felt second best. Lacking the easy charm of his elder brother, he was physically unprepossessing and forced to wear painful splints for knock-knees. His tutors made him write with his right hand when he naturally favoured his left. ‘Like his brother, he cannot get on without a “bit of a shove”,’ the family tutor wrote in his final report, before Bertie left the schoolroom for the Royal Naval College at Osborne. The tutor was hopeful: his charge was a ‘straight and honourable boy, very kind-hearted and generous; he is sure to be popular with the other boys’. Unfortunately, at Osborne the thirteen-year-old Albert struggled with lessons, had little clue how to play team sports like cricket and football, and his stammer meant he hesitated to answer questions – giving the impression he was slow (as, indeed, he often was). He was badly bullied. One cadet remembered coming out of the mess hall after breakfast to find Bertie tied up in a hammock in a gangway, calling out for help after being bundled in by his classmates.

Prince Albert was at Osborne when his grandfather, Edward VII, died on 6 May 1910 at the age of sixty-eight. Princess Alexandra allowed her husband’s mistress, Mrs Keppel, to visit the deathbed. Bertie’s father was now King George V. The family moved into Buckingham Palace and Princess May became Queen Mary. David, now heir apparent, was created Prince of Wales in the following year. Even more than ever, poor Bertie felt like second best to his glamorous brother. Handsome and blond, clever and outgoing, David absorbed all the attention. As Bertie later told Mrs Stanley Baldwin, he had, as a boy, ‘felt envious that eighteen months should make so much difference’. In the autumn of 1911 David went to Magdalen, Oxford – a course of study Bertie could never contemplate. He graduated sixty-first out of sixty-seven from Dartmouth Naval College, then transferred to begin work as a midshipman. Although he was eager to serve, he was initially posted to a desk job at the Admiralty.

To Bertie and his family the world was a place ruled by their relatives. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Nicholas of Russia were his cousins. But the world was changing. In 1912 King Victor Emmanuel of Italy narrowly escaped an assassination attempt and King George of Greece, brother of Princess Alexandra, was shot in the following year. At the same time Germany’s power was resurgent and the behemoths, Russia, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were in dispute over the Balkan states, namely Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. Russia was snapping at the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the ministers and people were in belligerent mood. The British, so fond of their ideology that populations were better off governed together, could not comprehend that other countries might wish for their own empires as well. By 1914 every country in Europe wanted their own set of people to rule.

‘Terrible shock for the dear old Emperor,’ recorded the King in his journal on 28 June. On that day Bertie was on board his ship when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was touring Sarajevo with his wife. Six Serbian nationalists lay in wait along his route. His motorcade was bombed, but he survived, only to be shot a little later on his way to visit the wounded. The Austro-Hungarian Empire suspected a national plot against their heir. Bertie noted in his diary only that there had been a visit from fifty Roedean schoolgirls to his ship, with dancing before tea.

‘I expect it has caused rather a stir in Germany,’ the Prince of Wales remarked of the assassination, rather more presciently than his brother. On 28 July the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, and Germany, eager to crush Russia and invade France, allied with them.

Although Queen Victoria had fretted about German nationalism since unification, the royal family saw Germany as a friend and the sudden aggression was shocking. ‘The way they have behaved will go down to history as about the worst and most infamous action of any govt!! Don’t you agree?’ wrote David to Bertie. Like everyone, he was convinced of Britain’s invincibility: ‘serve them right too if they are absolutely crushed, as I can but think they will be.’

Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. The crowds cheered outside Buckingham Palace on the announcement of war until the King and Queen appeared with the Prince of Wales, and the crowds sang patriotic songs and waved Union Jacks throughout the night. ‘The streets were full of people shouting, roaring, yelling their heads off,’ wrote Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen, who was in London at the time. It was all rather jolly.

The King saw the war as a slight inconvenience to his summer sports, because it forced him to postpone his trip to Cowes. ‘I shall indeed be disappointed if we are unable to go,’ he wrote to Bertie. ‘I had hoped to have raced in the “Britannia” four times next week.’

‘Let it be admitted without shame that a thrill of horror quickened every pulse,’ wrote David Lloyd George later in his memoirs of the announcement of war. Young men hurried to sign up and the government was besieged with volunteers. As The Times reported, so many men had arrived at the London recruiting office that mounted police arrived ‘to hold them in check’. Within four days of the outbreak, men were signing up at the rate of one hundred per hour. How could Britain fail? A short, sharp shock would put Germany in its place. Men across England hurried to be a part of the certain victory. Factories worked around the clock supplying munitions, women signed up to work in those factories and 80,000 served as non-fighting members of the three British women’s forces. Prince Bertie’s senior officer was sanguine, noting that he didn’t mind his leave being cancelled, because he would be able to take it in autumn – at an ideal time for partridge shooting.

Bertie did not cover himself in glory. Three weeks after the war began he fell ill with appendicitis. It was the beginning of a long convalescence and the end of his opportunity for active service. As thousands of men were sent to grimy trenches, the second-in-line to the throne began working at a desk job at the Admiralty. The Prince of Wales, by contrast, received a ‘wonderful and joyous surprise’ when he was told he could go to France as an officer of the Grenadier Guards, even though he would be rather shorter than the others. In France, however, he found he was kept away from the action. He begged Lord Kitchener to allow him to fight, but the response came that it was not his death that was of concern but the risk that he might be captured. Still, to his brother and the world, David was playing the hero while Bertie was retired from the action. ‘Nothing to do as usual,’ the second son wrote in his journal.

By 1915 it became clear that victory would be slow in coming. Despite the efforts of the authorities to keep the reports from the newspapers, and the practice of returning wounded soldiers to stations late at night, people became aware of the terrible casualties. Zeppelins ballooned in the sky over their houses as the Germans bombed London and the coasts. Britain was heavily dependent on imports for food and when enemy submarines began sinking merchant ships the food supply dropped. In 1916 there was only enough wheat to last six weeks – so bread was rationed, along with coal. Later butter, meat, sugar, cheese and margarine were similarly restricted. The King responded to the national emergency by declaring he would give up alcohol. The point was partly restraint, but also intended to aid industry by setting an example to the workers: Lloyd George in particular worried that factory output could be much higher if the workers did not drink. It was not just the working classes who were supposed to be devoting themselves to work. With the outbreak of the war came the end of the royal functions: Ascot, court balls, levées and the presentation of debutantes. The move was just as well: there were fewer aristocrats to participate.

Monarchs around him were falling and the King was conscious of the need to preserve his family’s rule above all. The anti-German hysteria was so intense that he himself was accused of being a spy. Lord Kitchener had to swear to the Cabinet that the lights seen flashing over Sandringham during a recent air sortie were ‘caused by the car of the rector returning home from dinner’. The First Sea Lord, Louis Mountbatten, was also seen as too German and had to stand down, even though, as George V wrote of him, ‘there is no more loyal man in the country.’

At a meeting of the Privy Council in July 1917 George V had decreed that all male descendants of Queen Victoria should bear the name of Windsor, rather than Saxe-Coburg. The Kaiser mocked his relative’s initiative, declaring he was looking forward to seeing ‘The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg Gotha’ (one of his few recorded jokes), but the move was popular with the British public. ‘Ours is by far the most solid,’ the Prince of Wales wrote to his father about the British monarchy, ‘tho’ of course it must be kept so and I more than realise that this can only be done by keeping in the closest possible touch with the people.’

Not all of George’s relatives were so shrewd. The King’s beloved cousin, Tsar Nicholas, had made the poor decision to depart from Russia personally to direct the war effort, leaving his wife, Tsarina Alexandra, as regent. Anti-establishment feeling swelled, fuelled by anger at the privations of war as millions went hungry and the people became obsessed by the mystic Grigoriy Rasputin, the Tsarina’s self-styled adviser. After a severe winter at the beginning of 1917, strikes were convulsing the cities and the Tsar could not continue. He begged his cousin, King George, to give his family shelter. The British government was sympathetic, but although George was fond of Nicholas and also cousin to the Tsarina, he refused. He believed that harbouring the Tsar would damage his own position, even though Britain and Russia were allies. The King was afraid of appearing too foreign. All the networks of influence, created by Victoria’s project of marrying her children into the royal families of Europe, were coming to seem more of a burden than a joy.

Nicholas and his family were later executed on the orders of Lenin. The collapse of the Russian Empire undermined British morale. By 1917, both sides in the conflict were suffering: the casualties had been great and trench positions had made no significant movement since 1915. The Germans and the Allies were fighting a war of attrition.

Bertie finally escaped the sickbay to witness the Battle of Jutland from his ship as a midshipman and subsequently joined the Royal Naval Air Force, but the war ended before he could see truly active service. The entry of the United States into the conflict on the side of the Allies proved decisive. The exhausted German forces could not compete. The Allied and American soldiers drove back the enemy positions and, on 29 September, the German Supreme Command informed the Kaiser and his ministers that the military operations had failed – and the joint head of the German war effort declared that he did not think the front could hold for another twenty-four hours. Germany requested a ceasefire and soldiers began to withdraw from the Western Front. On 9 November the Kaiser agreed to abdicate and fled Berlin for Holland. The Armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany on 11 November in a railway carriage in Compiègne Forest. The King addressed Parliament in stirring tones. ‘May the morning star of peace, which is now rising over a war-worn world, be here and everywhere the herald of a better day,’ he announced. So many were dead that there was not enough space to carve all the names on the plaques and memorial stones being erected across the counry.

With the war finally over, Bertie was sent to train to fly – a rather symbolic gesture. As he took his flight exam in July 1919, the Allies were debating the terms of the new Treaty of Versailles, signed exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The huge Empires of Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans were replaced by a host of much smaller states, their boundaries created according to notions of self-determination and guaranteed by the formation of the League of Nations. Germany, the old friend of the Hanoverian kings and their hunting ground for properly Protestant spouses, was to be much reduced: the country lost territory, the army was limited to 10,000 and they were set reparations of billions of pounds (the final payment was made in 2010). The King’s ‘better day’ harked back to an old world, when Germany was a mass of princely states and Britain had the power. The new Germany was much reduced, but not vanquished.

After spending the war in the sickroom, Bertie was enjoying his new life in 1919. As well as learning to fly, he busied himself with social visits and then began a short spell of education at Trinity College, Cambridge. The rest of Britain and Europe were suffering. Three-quarters of a million Britons had been killed and millions more were dead across Europe, or had been so severely wounded that normal life was impossible. Over nine million soldiers died, eight million were declared missing and more than twenty million were wounded. Many of those who survived fell prey to influenza, which spread its merciless way across Europe. Economies had entirely collapsed. ‘We are at the low season of our fortunes,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes. The population of young men in Britain had been so decimated that even Cambridge was haunted with absence.

Many of Bertie’s compatriots at Osborne were dead and, like those who had survived, he threw himself into entertaining amusements. In 1919, he and David became Freemasons in two different lodges, following a family tradition; Edward VII had been a devoted member before his accession. Bertie declared the attraction lay in the charity work, but he was also fascinated by the secrecy and the complicated rituals of dress and performance. For a man who had been excluded from much of the action, the clandestine world of Masonry was very appealing.

Bertie, like his father and grandfather, was obsessive about dress. Edward VII had famously upbraided his Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, for appearing untidy at a drawing room at Buckingham Palace. ‘Europe in a turmoil,’ he cried, ‘twenty ambassadors and ministers looking on – what will they think – what can they think of a premier who can’t put on his clothes.’ Britain’s royal men have been traditionally much more interested in dress than the women and the young Prince could become quite fanatical about the colour of a button or the positioning of a collar. The Masonic attention to dress only added to its interest.

Few could dress with enough attention to please Bertie. One of the few was David, in his sharp suits and plus-fours. The Prince of Wales could do no wrong in the eyes of his brother. Bertie looked up to him with an intense reverence and whatever time they had together could never be enough. ‘There is a dreadful blank in my life directly you leave on one of your tours,’ Bertie said mournfully to David.

When David went away, Bertie pined for him and carried out the duties of a prince at home. The royal family aimed to be shown as engaging with the widespread unemployment and unrest caused by the depression, and Bertie was appointed President of the Industrial Welfare Association, which aimed to improve the lot of workers through canteens, social programmes and safety improvements. Bertie was in his element meeting workers and shaking hands, but the notion that the economy could be assisted by such measures seems wildly naive. By early 1921 unemployment had doubled. When the government proposed nationalisation of the mines, the miners announced they would strike, and transport and railway workers declared they would join the action. The government instituted plans for distributing food, but the strike was called off on 15 April. In such dramatic times, it was thought, Bertie’s role should be stepped up. He instituted a series of summer camps, in which young boys from public schools and factories would come together for a week of games and activities. It was a fun experience for a few lucky boys, but had little impact on the wider problems of unrest and inequality.

At the same July 1917 meeting of the Privy Council in which George V had decreed that the family’s name would be Windsor, the King said he had decided that his children should be allowed to take British spouses. The Princes and Princesses were not obliged, as their parents had been, to marry members of the Protestant royal families of Europe. The war had changed even the outlook of the King. Previously, a bride to the second son would be expected to be of royal blood. Not only did such a bride ensure properly royal heirs, but it was thought that only those brought up in the confines of overseas royalty could comprehend the duties and constrictions of life at a palace. Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, had pleased her subjects by marrying the Marquess of Lorne, though the marriage had been a failure. But the King’s act was a necessity: no British royal could take a German bride, now they were the great enemy, and there were few other Protestant royals still in existence.

Bertie, thus, could look anywhere for a wife. In this he followed, as he often did, his beloved elder brother. The Prince of Wales was his model in everything and David loved attached married women. He was in love with the petite, vivacious Freda Dudley Ward, the daughter of a Nottingham lace manufacturer, a splendid golf and tennis player, and unhappily married to an MP sixteen years her senior. Not long after the war Albert met and became infatuated with Sheila, Lady Loughborough, who was also married. George V was deeply concerned at the friendships of both his sons. He offered to make Bertie Duke of York in June 1920 and a condition was that he gave up Lady Loughborough. Bertie agreed, delighted by the dukedom and the independent household it brought – but pining for Sheila.

In the aftermath of the war the social life based at the palace had begun once more, with Royal Ascot, levées and balls. Still, Bertie complained that it was all too dreary and, as he told Lady Airlie, his mother’s lady-in-waiting, ‘no new blood ever introduced’. He would have to find the ‘new blood’ for himself.

In summer 1920 the Duke met the nineteen-year-old Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at a ball. Small, with dark hair and bright blue eyes, she had entranced dozens of men already with her innocent vivacity and enthusiasm for life – particularly cocktails, sweet foods and hats. Unlike Bertie, Lady Elizabeth, the eighth child of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, was bubbling with fun and vitality, a noted mimic and brimming with the confident knowledge that she had been a much loved child. Her father had inherited his title when she was just four, along with the great Glamis Castle, and Elizabeth lived a highly privileged life between the castle and her family’s other properties – Streatlam Castle in County Durham, a spacious town house in St James’s Square and her principal home, St Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire, a Georgian red-brick house. ‘I have nothing but wonderfully happy memories of childhood days at home,’ she would say. Lord Strathmore was a kindly man, a good landlord and all was right in the world if he lunched on plum pudding, and Lady Strathmore was easygoing and loving with her children. Glamis was a gigantic and atmospheric house, with ghosts round every corner. ‘No electric light here,’ one governess reported to her mother, ‘all nooks & corners & stairs & down long passages.’ On one occasion a visitor saw water pouring down a wall in St Paul’s Walden Bury. ‘Oh dear, we’ll have to move the sofa again,’ sighed Lady Strathmore.

Her mother’s favourite, Elizabeth spent her days in outdoor sports and games with her host of brothers, dressing up in costumes at the castles and dancing. She was rather too fond of the tea table and had a terrible sweet tooth – her brothers filled in her diary to tease her with long details about ‘Cream, honey, jam, buns, & tea. Eat too much’. There was little time for lessons around all the fun, but the Earl and Countess were unconcerned, believing it more important for girls to develop excellent manners and confident sociability than knowledge of history or geography. ‘I’m afraid I’m uneducated on the whole,’ Elizabeth confessed.

The Great War had broken out on Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday and it forced her to become an adult. Glamis, which had once rung with the shouts of her brothers racing around the grounds, became a convalescent hospital for soldiers. Too young at fifteen to train as a nurse like her sister Rose, Elizabeth busied herself running errands around the hospital and walked to the village shop to buy the men cigarettes. Four of her brothers went to fight. Fergus was killed at the battle of Loos. Michael was imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp for officers and did not return until early 1919.

In the aftermath of the war there were two million surplus women, painfully denied the future of marriage for which they had been intended. Most girls of Lady Elizabeth’s age were desperately seeking husbands. She, pretty, rich, well-connected, was spared such concerns. ‘I danced with Prince Albert, who I hadn’t known before, he is quite a nice youth,’ Lady Elizabeth wrote in 1920. She could afford to be cool because she was surrounded by admirers. ‘I fell madly in love,’ recalled one young man. ‘They all did.’ Bertie was captivated by Lady Elizabeth. She had the confidence and vivacity he lacked, and he was entranced by her carefree and playful nature. Most of all, unlike Sheila, she was just the type of girl to please his parents.

Elizabeth grew weary of the second-in-line to the throne. ‘Prince Albert is coming to stay here on Saturday. Ghastly!’ she wrote to a friend. Bertie was entranced by the hearty informality of a Glamis weekend. The jokes and games, warm-hearted family teasing and eager spontaneity were very unlike the chilly dignity that prevailed at the palace. Elizabeth’s utter lack of enthusiasm only fired his ardent desire to win her.

George V was pleased by the cheery Scottish aristocrat. ‘You’ll be a lucky fellow if she accepts you,’ he said to his son. Elizabeth was just the type of traditional girl he liked. ‘The things that my father found wrong with the “Brave New World” would have made a long list,’ the Prince of Wales later remarked. ‘He disapproved of Soviet Russia, painted fingernails, women who smoked in public, cocktails, frivolous hats, American jazz and the growing habit of going away for weekends.’ Although fond of a cocktail or two, Lady Elizabeth was very unlike the modern ‘flapper’ girls with shingled hair and short skirts that the poor King found so terrifying.

Emboldened by his family’s affection for her, Bertie proposed in early 1921 – and was turned down. ‘We can be good friends, can’t we?’ she wrote anxiously to him. ‘Please do look on me as one.’ Elizabeth was all too aware of the burden of royalty and unsure that she wished to spend her life in the public eye. She was also fond of a family friend, James Stuart, son of Lord Moray, who had become equerry to Bertie in 1920. The Strathmores themselves were not ecstatic at the prospect of a marriage. Lord Strathmore had always been adamant that none of his children should be a courtier and the prospect of being drawn into royal circles held no particular appeal. Lady Strathmore once remarked that ‘some people have to be fed royalty like sealions fish’. At times, the Strathmores were even grander than the royals, and, although they liked Bertie, they thought he was weak. ‘He is a man who will be made or marred by his wife,’ Lady Strathmore wrote of him. Elizabeth had the strength to take him in hand but she had no desire to do so.

Bertie refused to be dissuaded and he roped in his family to his cause. When Princess Mary became engaged to Viscount Lascelles in 1921, she invited Lady Elizabeth to be her bridesmaid as a favour to her brother. Lady Elizabeth took her duties seriously, writing to Bertie about how difficult it was to walk up the aisle in Westminster Abbey in high heels. Weddings showed royalty at their best and Bertie hoped Lady Elizabeth might be dazzled by the glamour, rather than weary under the heavy lace of her gown. In the spring of 1922 he proposed again. She refused. The relationship was at an end.

Finally, in early 1923, Bertie rekindled the friendship and made one last stab at his ambition. ‘This is the last time I’m going to propose to her,’ he told the Duchess of Devonshire. By happy coincidence, James Stuart had left his service as an equerry for America. The Duke tried another proposal and, to his great delight, Lady Elizabeth accepted. Bertie was elated. He dispatched an immediate telegram to his parents, declaring the engagement ‘my dream which has at last been realised’. The King decreed that the ‘arrangements must be of as simple a character as possible’, although the planned venue of Westminster Abbey was hardly an inexpensive location. Still, the wedding of Bertie was seen by the nation as a rehearsal for the most important ceremony of all – the marriage of the Prince of Wales to his future queen.

The news was announced and Lady Elizabeth was besieged. ‘Telegrams poured in all day, letters & reporters tumbling over each other.’ It was all rather exhausting. ‘I am so tired already – I think I shall probably die long before I get married.’

The title of the future Duchess of York caused some uncertainty – and was, as the Press Association reported, ‘a matter for the King’s decision. Recent times supply no precedent.’ The problem was that most royal wives had already been princesses by birth when they married. Would Elizabeth be a princess after her wedding? The Home Office suggested that she definitely would, which was fortunate. Mrs Windsor hardly had much cachet.

Lady Elizabeth and her future husband travelled to visit the McVitie & Price factory in Edinburgh, which would supply the giant, nine-foot, 800 lb wedding cake. Elizabeth was fitted for her simple, rather unflattering wedding dress of ivory chiffon moiré. The British Broadcasting Company, only a year old, asked if they might transmit the service on the radio but the Chapter of Westminster decided against it. It could simply not be guaranteed that the audience would listen with due respect and some of them might even do so ‘sitting in public houses with their hats on’.

On Thursday 26 April Lady Elizabeth woke at her family home in 17 Bruton Street to the shouts of well-wishers outside and terrible rain. After travelling to the Abbey, the bride paused on her way towards the altar to lay her bouquet on to the grave of the Unknown Warrior – a gesture that has been repeated by every royal bride since. As The Lady noted, at the altar the clouds cleared, the sun broke out and ‘it was wonderful and dramatic and unforgettable’. The new Duchess of York was quite satisfied. ‘Did not feel very nervous,’ she wrote in her diary that evening. ‘Bertie smiled at me when I got up to him – & it all went off very well.’ She was, she concluded, ‘very tired and happy’.

‘I do wish he was not Royalty,’ wrote Lady Strathmore rather sadly. The young couple set off on a five-week honeymoon, first to Polesdon Lacey in Surrey, then to Glamis Castle. Elizabeth fell ill. ‘So unromantic to catch whooping cough on your honeymoon,’ Bertie wrote to Queen Mary. He was so in love with his new wife that he could not bear anything that separated him from her, even whooping cough.

On their return from honeymoon the young couple occupied White Lodge in Richmond Park, the house chosen for them by the King and Queen. They found it uncomfortable, dilapidated, and too far from London, and spent much of their time at the houses of friends or 17 Bruton Street, where the Duchess had stayed the night before her wedding. It was a pleasant way to pass the early years of their marriage.

‘What a fate for a daughter of Glamis,’ sighed the chaplain of the castle chapel to the Archbishop of Canterbury some years later. But against the expectations of many, the marriage was very contented. Elizabeth’s freshness and refusal to be daunted by royalty stood her well in strait-laced regal circles. The King, in particular, was devotedly fond of his daughter-in-law. Usually an obsessive stickler for punctuality, he was gentle with her. ‘You are not late, my dear,’ he would say to her, much to the amazement of his children. ‘We must have sat down two minutes early.’ The couple’s only remaining desire was for a child. In August 1925, finally, the doctors confirmed that Elizabeth was pregnant.