Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (60 page)

At least she was appreciated. The king and queen utterly adored their new daughter-in-law. “The better I know and the more I see of your dear little wife, the more charming I think she is and everyone falls in love with her,” the king told Bertie. George V was notoriously brusque and blunt and had a tense relationship with his children. But Elizabeth had thoroughly enchanted him from the start, and she never found herself at the receiving end of the criticism that had so undermined her husband’s confidence.

One of their contemporaries, Henry “Chips” Channon, observed of Bertie, “He had few friends and was almost entirely dependent on her, whom he worshipped. She was his will power, his all.” Before their marriage the duke had never been self-possessed. He was always nervous in public, particularly about his stammer. His anxiety exacerbated the problem, and the problem exacerbated his anxiety. It was a vicious cycle of perpetual torment.

As an adolescent, Bertie had serious gastric problems, attributed to his being badly fed by his nurse during his infancy. And his acute stammer could have been a result of his father’s gruff insistence on breaking Bertie of his left-handedness. The duke also had an ungovernable temper, suffering fits or outbursts that his family called “gnashes.” These tantrums alternated with periods of introspection and profound melancholy. Unfortunately, his various afflictions may have had repercussions in the marital bed.

The duchess’s archnemesis, Wallis Simpson, upon being asked why she had no children with her third husband, the former Edward VIII, replied with her typical brittle wit, “The Duke is not heir-conditioned.” His younger brother evidently suffered the same or similar medical, emotional, psychological, or psychosomatic issues.
In February 1911, when they were boys at the Royal Naval College, Bertie and David both succumbed to back-to-back epidemics of measles and mumps that were so severe that two of their classmates died. The adolescent princes were at the age where a rare complication from mumps, known as orchitis, which affects the testicles and can impair procreative capacity, may have resulted in a profound effect on their virility.

Elizabeth and Bertie were very much in love but, after two childless years, turned to a radical option: manual fertilization. Only through this process of artificial insemination was the duchess able to conceive their two daughters, the Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born on April 21, 1926, and Princess Margaret Rose, born on August 21, 1930. Both infants were delivered by Caesarean section. A family friend whose mother was a goddaughter of Queen Victoria claimed that the method of the princesses’ conception was an open secret within their circle, although the press protectively and euphemistically reported only that “a certain line of treatment was successfully adopted.” But according to the Yorks’ family friend, “My mother and the Duchess…talked about it because they shared the same gynecologist…. The Duke had a slight…problem…with…a…his ‘willy….’”

Treating Bertie’s speech problem was the next step. In this, Elizabeth’s influence was profound; she persuaded him to visit speech therapist Lionel Logue’s Harley Street clinic. Logue had heard Bertie deliver his maiden radio speech at Wembley Stadium on May 9, 1925, inaugurating the opening of the British Empire Exhibition. Bertie had been terrified, aware that he would have to perform before a live audience that included his severest critic—his father. Not only that, the speech would also be broadcast to millions of listeners over the wireless.

According to Elizabeth’s diary, Bertie set out for Wembley that morning “very downhearted.” His legs trembled throughout the speech, and he had trouble articulating some of the words. The duchess listened over the wireless from White Lodge. “It was marvelously clear & no hesitation. I was
so
relieved,” she wrote. Bertie admitted after it was over that he thought it was “easily the best I have ever
done. Papa seemed pleased which was kind of him.” However, His Majesty told the duke’s brother George, “Bertie got through his speech all right, but there were some rather long pauses.”

Bertie’s first appointment with Lionel Logue did not take place until October 19, 1926. The Australian, who had trained as an engineer but took up speech pathology to help soldiers traumatized during World War I, wrote of his first session with the Duke of York, “He entered my consulting room at three o’clock in the afternoon, a slim, quiet man, with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of the man whom habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left at five o’clock you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.”

Elizabeth, who accompanied Bertie to nearly every session, encouraged her husband each step of the way during his course of therapy, supporting him through the rigorous battery of exercises, from rapid-fire tongue twisters to diaphragmatic breathing exercises on the floor. Together with Logue, she gave him the confidence to deliver his speeches, where previously he’d been a self-conscious embarrassment—to the royal family, to the kingdom, and to himself.

Logue later stated that the Duke of York was “the pluckiest and most determined patient I ever had,” largely, and most likely, because his plucky and most determined duchess refused to let him become defeated.

The duke still remained anxious about public appearances, however. Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, recalled how Elizabeth would take charge of her bashful husband. After attending a public function in Leicester, the Yorks boarded a Pullman car. A crowd had gathered outside the train and “The Duke was very shy and rushed along the carriage, pulling down the blinds. I was very impressed by the way that the Duchess snapped them up again immediately, saying to her husband, ‘Bertie, you must wave.’”

Nicknamed “the smiling duchess,” Elizabeth managed to balance a pitch-perfect ear for public relations with her genuine adoration for her husband. Theirs was clearly a love match, as Duff Cooper, a contemporary who later became Secretary of State for War, wrote to his wife, Diana, after seeing the Yorks at the theater one night in 1926. “They are such a sweet little couple and so fond of each other.
They reminded me of us, sitting together in the box having private jokes, and in the interval when we were all sitting in the room behind the box they slipped out, and I found them standing together in a dark corner of the passage talking happily as we might. She affects no shadow of airs or graces.”

In the 1920s the British Empire reached its geographical zenith, covering a quarter of the world. And ever since the Prince of Wales’s successful state visit to Australia in 1920, the Duke of York had longed to follow in his footsteps. Now that he had the exceptionally popular Elizabeth at his side, the monarchs finally agreed. So in 1927, the Yorks embarked on their first official state visit: a comprehensive tour of Australia that would keep them away from their infant daughter for half a year or so, given the additional ports of call that would take them around the world. The duchess was heartbroken, but soon learned that one’s royal duties always trumped domestic yearnings.

The Yorks departed England on January 6, and did not return until June 27, 1927. After sailing thirty thousand miles and traveling many more on land, the duke and duchess came away with a few valuable lessons from their lengthy journey. With his wife at his side, Bertie had a newfound confidence; he felt respected, rather than mocked, by the world. And Elizabeth discovered that her personality was currency. Wherever they went, she could use it to win people’s hearts, not just for herself, but for her husband and his kingdom.

The state visit had also been priceless practice for what lay ahead.

At the end of 1928, George V caught a chill and nearly died. Not daring to believe that his father was as ill as the doctors feared him to be, the Prince of Wales refused to quit his African safari with Denys Finch Hatton. The king’s assistant private secretary, Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, cabled the heir to the throne. “Sir, the King of England is dying, and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to us.” The prince’s behavior was a foreshadowing of the future, when, eight years later, David, thinking of no one but himself and Wallis Simpson, would relinquish the throne.

In December 1928, and again in July 1929, the king needed an operation to drain an abscess just behind his diaphragm. In each case a rib had to be removed. As discussions were privately undertaken
about the inevitable succession, the royal household even then despaired of David. His charm and popularity were undeniable, but palace insiders agreed that he lacked the seriousness to do the job.

Many years later, Elizabeth recalled that during his convalescence the ailing king told Bertie, “‘You’ll see, your brother will never become King.’ He must have seen something we didn’t, because I remember we thought ‘how ridiculous,’ because then everybody thought he was going to be a wonderful King…. I remember we both looked at each other and thought ‘nonsense.’”

In 1935, George V celebrated his jubilee: twenty-five years on the throne. But he was not a well man. During the last weeks of his life the ailing king passionately exclaimed to Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox, “I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet [the family’s nickname for Princess Elizabeth] and the throne.” He worried that the café society in which his heir traveled, with its easy virtue, was a bad influence on the manners and morality of the monarchy. David and Bertie could not have been more different, the former a glib bon vivant, and the latter a stammering family man. Their father took a dim view of the Prince of Wales’s character. “He has not a single friend who is a gentleman. He does not see any decent society. And he is 41.”

The king’s condition worsened throughout the month of January 1936. On the sixteenth, Queen Mary sent for the Duke of York. Four days later, the public was informed about the grave condition of His Majesty’s health, as the BBC announced, “The King’s life is moving peacefully to its close.”

Just before the end, the Prince of Wales “became hysterical, cried loudly and kept on embracing the Queen,” according to Lord Wigram. Helen Hardinge, wife of the king’s private secretary, judged Edward’s display of emotion to be “frantic and unreasonable.” And yet, if one is losing one’s father and inheriting the responsibility of governing an empire where the sun never sets when one isn’t particularly keen on doing so, one might cry hysterically, too.

The royal physician Lord Dawson scandalously gave the dying king a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine to help him sleep, hastening the process so that His Majesty would pass in time for his
demise to be recorded in the more respectable morning papers, rather than the evening tabloids. His time of death was recorded as 11:55 p.m. on January 20. George V’s body lay in state at Westminster Hall and was interred in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor on January 28.

The Prince of Wales, now Edward VIII, came to the throne on a tide of popularity. He had served in World War I, so it was expected that the veterans would like him. He was affable and charming and not hampered by a stammer. Yet George V had predicted, “After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months,” and he was not far off the mark. Edward made it clear early in his reign that he found his royal duties irksome and had no intentions of giving up his fast set of friends for a more staid circle of associates. There were greater concerns as well. Winston Churchill was troubled about the rise of fascism across Europe, and the king’s sympathy for Mussolini and the Third Reich. According to Lord Wigram, senior officials at Whitehall believed he was in the pocket of the German ambassador, Lord Ribbentrop. Insiders at Buckingham palace used the words “irresponsible” and “impractical” to describe the new king.

The most heinous crime of all, in the eyes of his government and his family, was Edward’s romance with Wallis Simpson, who was still married to her second husband when their affair began in 1934. Appalled that this brash American upstart was sleeping in Queen Mary’s bed at Balmoral and loudly discussing how the royal gardens should be rearranged, Elizabeth refused to accept her as Edward’s hostess. She resented the king’s shirking of his royal duties and responsibilities to accommodate “That Woman” instead. The duchess also resented seeing Wallis’s name at the top of the Court Circular with the Yorks’. From then on, whenever Mrs. Simpson’s name was mentioned, Elizabeth’s ordinarily twinkly blue eyes would harden and her smiling mouth would become tight.

But Edward was head over heels in love with Wallis. She was the one nonnegotiable element in the king’s life. On November 16, 1936, he summoned his prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and informed him that he intended to wed Mrs. Simpson and make her his queen—just as soon as her divorce proceedings were concluded and she received her
decree nisi
. Duff Cooper, the Secretary of State for War, recalled Baldwin saying, as he passed the news to his colleagues, that
“he was not at all sure that the Yorks would not prove the best solution. The King had many good qualities but not those which best fitted him for his post, whereas the Duke of York would be just like his father.”

The childless Edward’s accession had made Bertie the heir presumptive to the throne, yet the king never took the duke into his confidence throughout the debacle known as the Abdication Crisis. The Yorks did not know what was on Edward’s mind until October 20, 1936, when his private secretary, Alec Hardinge, visited them at 145 Piccadilly, their London residence, to officially inform them of the possibility of Edward’s abdication and their succession to the throne. Elizabeth was incredulous at the news; Bertie was aghast. When the duchess saw her husband’s ashen face she grew even angrier at his irresponsible brother and
her
—his married floozy. How dared Edward consider abandoning his duty and leaving Bertie, clearly overwhelmed by the mere thought of it, to pick up the pieces?

On November 17, the king finally told the Duke of York of his intentions to abdicate if he could not marry Mrs. Simpson. After this bombshell, there was radio silence from Edward.