The accession of Princess Elizabeth’s young, popular, forward-looking Uncle David as Edward VIII revived the monarchical excitement of the Jubilee. Such an event brings turmoil at Court, similar to the ferment at No. 10 Downing Street caused by the change of a Prime Minister. The hierarchy is turned upside down. Established officials fear for their jobs, or wonder whether the time has come to retire from them. The transition from the predictable George V to his febrile son was a particularly traumatic break, and it sent a tremor through the ranks of the old courtiers. Ancient customs were abandoned, rules and formalities were impatiently relaxed. The Queen was dispatched to live in Marlborough House, and unexpected faces appeared at the Palace.
The new reign also focused attention, with added intensity, on the Yorks. On the margins of the main performance, they continued to enjoy an adequate privacy. A few weeks into the new reign, Harold Nicolson, official biographer of George V, spoke to the Duchess of York at the house of a mutual friend. He talked to her for some time, without recognizing her.40 However, such anonymity could not last long, for the death of the old King, and the persistent bachelorhood of his replacement, brought the Duke of York a step closer to the throne. It also aroused a new kind of interest in his elder daughter. There was still no publicly acknowledgeable reason for expecting Elizabeth ever to become Queen. Yet her place in the line of succession had become much more than a statistic. It began to give rise to speculation, and romantic projection.
What if the King never married? In the run-up to the Coronation, such a possibility was tentatively aired. One commentator suggested that a female Sovereign would be rapturously welcomed, and argued that this in itself was a reason why meddlers into the King’s private affairs should not seek to push him into matrimony. ‘They do not realise how many of their fellow-subjects would, however respectfully, feel half sorry at such an event, however auspicious. It might deprive us of Elizabeth II.’41 A similar thought may have occurred to Archbishop Lang, who had discussed (or refrained from discussing) theology with the Princess at Sandringham in January, and who stayed as a guest of the Yorks at Birkhall in the summer. At a time when the new King was becoming a serious worry, he was reassured by what he saw. ‘The children – Lilliebet, Margaret Rose and Margaret Elphinstone – joined us,’ he recorded. ‘They sang some action-songs most charmingly. It was strange to think of the destiny which may be awaiting the little Elizabeth, at present second from the Throne. She and her lively little sister are certainly most entrancing children.’42
Yet, at first, life for ‘the little ladies of 145 Piccadilly’ did not alter. It may have been a symptom of her upward mobility that a marble portrait bust of Princess Elizabeth was commissioned in the spring of 1936. Over the next two years, Miss Crawford accompanied the child no fewer than eighteen times to the studio of the Hungarian sculptor Zsigmond Strobl in Pembroke Walk. Lajos Lederer, a Hungarian journalist employed to make conversation with her during these tedious sessions, recalled her as highly talkative, and extremely knowledgeable on the subject of thoroughbred horses.43 Otherwise, the only direct effect on the princesses of the accession seemed to be that they saw less of their uncle, previously one of the Yorks’ few frequent callers. The Duke and Duchess, though aware of gathering clouds, continued to ride, garden and embroider, much as before. Lisa Sheridan, visiting their London house before they left for Scotland, was led by a footman into the garden, where she found Princess Elizabeth and her mother feeding a family of ducklings which had wandered in through the railings from the adjoining park.44
There was no immediate mention of Wallis Simpson. When, eventually, the King’s American companion was invited to tea at Royal Lodge, nothing was said about the significance of the visit. But Uncle David seemed to have lost interest in his nieces.45 For some time, there had been ‘King-tattle’ – gossip which, as one loyalist claimed indignantly, ‘rages without respect to decency and perhaps probability,’ but which did not get into print.46 The reason was not so much the laws of libel, as the fear of breaking a taboo. Editors and proprietors calculated that the opportunity was not worth the short-term boost in sales. ‘No respectable paper would have thought it good circulation policy to print scandalous news about the Royal Family,’ observed the anti-monarchist editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, afterwards. ‘It would no doubt have sold for the moment, but it would have led to a storm of protest from readers.’47 There was also a gap between the business side of running newspapers – whose circulation policy made use of incentives like free gifts and insurance policies to attract readers – and the editorial side, which held aloof. ‘Editors were a traditional lot,’ says Sir Edward Pickering, then on the Mirror, and later a leading editor and newspaper director. ‘They didn’t look on circulation in the way they do today. They felt themselves above all that.’48 On this occasion they were also afraid of a backlash, in view of the popularity of a Monarch who, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, ‘was idolized as few men outside the Orient ever have been’.49
Yet the gossip was pervasive, the more virulent because of the gap between what those in the King’s circle knew and the messages of the headlines and newsreels. ‘Those who most strenuously maintained a decorous loyalty in public,’ recalled Martin, ‘were the most avaricious of scandal about the Monarchy in private.’50 Princess Elizabeth may have been ignorant of what was going on, and the Duke and Duchess never spoke of it, but according to Crawfie, ‘it was plain to everyone there was a sudden shadow over the house’.51
The whole Royal Family, together with the whole political and Church Establishment, and many ordinary people, were shocked and appalled by the prospect of an abdication, which seemed to strike at the heart of the constitution. But nowhere was it viewed with greater abhorrence than at 145 Piccadilly. According to his official biographer, the Duke of York viewed the possibility, and then the likelihood, of his own succession with ‘unrelieved gloom’.52 The accounts of witnesses suggest that this is a gross understatement: desperation and near-panic would be more accurate. To succeed to a throne you neither expected nor wanted, because of the chance of birth and the irresponsibility of a brother! Apart from the accidents of poverty and ill health, it is hard to think of a more terrible and unjust fate.
Alan (‘Tommy’) Lascelles, assistant private secretary to Edward VIII and later private secretary to George VI, wrote privately that he feared Bertie would be so upset by the news, he might break down.53 There were lurid stories: that the Duke of York had refused to succeed, and that Queen Mary had agreed to act as Regent for Princess Elizabeth.54 Rumours circulated in the American press that the Duke was epileptic (and that Princess Margaret was deaf and dumb).55 There was also a whispering campaign, in which Wallis Simpson played a part, that he had ‘a slow brain’ which did not take on ideas quickly and that he was mentally unfit for the job.56
On 27th October, when Mrs Simpson obtained a decree nisi, the shadow darkened. The Duke braced himself for the catastrophe, as he saw it, that was about to befall his family and himself. ‘If the worst happens & I have to take over,’ he wrote, with courage, to a courtier on 25 November, ‘you can be assured that I will do my best to clear up the inevitable mess, if the whole fabric does not crumble under the shock and strain of it all.’57 Meanwhile, Crawfie and the children took refuge from the atmosphere of tension by attending swimming lessons at the Bath Club, with the Duke and Duchess sometimes turning up to watch.58
A week later, the press’s self-imposed embargo on ‘King-tattle’ broke, and the headlines blazoned the name of Mrs Simpson. The Royal Archives contain a chronicle, written by Bertie, which shows the extent of his misery, bordering on hysteria, as he awaited what felt like an execution.