Christopher Wilson
THE picture we carry of them in wartime is as enduring as it is heartwarming. Plucky Queen Elizabeth emerging from the bombed ruins of Buckingham Palace to declare: “Now we can look the East End in the eye”, after the harrowing blitz of the capital. The King stubbornly refusing to give in to his stutter, while bravely urging his prime minister to allow him to visit troops in the battlefield.
Princess Elizabeth, an untested teenager, already in her ATS uniform and ready to “do her bit”. And the young Princess Margaret, the shining symbol of hope for the future.
These are the images which have stayed with us down the years, reminders that the nation’s first family endured the years of conflict just like everyone else – with courage, determination, and hope. But, what happened when the photographers and the reporters went away? What were the Royal Family’s personal dreams, their ambitions?
As a royal biographer, I’ve always been a bit of a beachcomber, pacing the shoreline, seeking out untold tales from behind the palace railings – because quite often learning simple facts, such as what the King liked for breakfast, how the Queen chose her hats, or whether Elizabeth and Margaret ever had a row, tells you more about their characters than an hour-long newsreel ever could.
What was life like below stairs after bombs dropped on the Palace? Who had ambitions for the throne if George VI perished, and how far were they prepared to go to get it? Was there, in fact, a plot to assassinate the King?
Over the years I discovered enough unpublished or barely-known material to form a book about the wartime royals – but for reasons I’ll come to, I decided to fictionalise it all.
The result is my forthcoming novel Stealing The Crown – a mix of fiction and long-researched fact. Some of the stories I unearthed were charming – who knew, for example, that our present Queen’s grandmother, Queen Mary, secretly hungered for black-market sausages?
‘Three brothers had their eye on the throne should a bomb drop through the roof of Buckingham Palace’
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AS anyone outside the family aware that the Queen (later Queen Mother) enjoyed a flirtation with the director of the National Gallery? Or that Peter Townsend, the love of Princess Margaret’s life, sent courtiers into a panic by dancing round Buckingham Palace wearingWinston Churchill’s hat?
Did the famous Buckingham Palace balcony nearly fall down as the King, Queen, and Winston Churchill were about to step out on to it onVE Day?And what was the truth about the Duke of Kent’s chequered love life?
These tales come from a different age, where the strident complaints of a Prince Harry or a Meghan Markle would have been unthinkable.
Queen Mary for example, solemn-faced and unbending in her public appearances, was in private quite a handful, causing courtiers to grind their teeth many times during the war.
Dispatched for the duration to live with her niece, the Duchess of Beaufort, she turned up to her evacuation quarters with fifty – fifty! servants to look after her personal needs.
The Beauforts finally overcame the problem of feeding them all – but their wartime fare wasn’t enough for Mary, who hankered after the humble British sausage and had to be reprimanded for getting a compliant RAF officer court-martialed for supplying her with blackmarket bangers. Having been bowed and scraped to ever since being crowned Queen in 1911, Mary had a serene disregard for wartime regulations.
She had to be stopped from sending letters to relations who were on the wrong side of the conflict (most of them German), and for arranging money to be sent to Queen Ena of Spain, technically the enemy even though she’d been born in Kensington Palace.
Queen Elizabeth, in some ways the heroine of the Second World War for the way she supported her husband and with her do-or-die attitude to the Germans (“I will take one of them with me when I go,” she said grimly at pistol practice), wasn’t above a bit of harmless flirtation.The Director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark (later Lord Clark of Civilisation fame) was a bit of a ladies’ man and was so convinced of his own attractions he had the temerity to make a pass at Her Majesty in Windsor Castle. Elizabeth took it all in good spirits, laughing it off, but it sent the jealous King into one of his famous “gnashes” (rages) – not once, but twice. And, on the subject of jealousy, there was the sibling rivalry that underpinned the darker side of the House of Windsor. The King had three brothers – the Duke of Windsor, exiled in the Bahamas after giving up the throne to marry his divorced lover Wallis Simpson, the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Gloucester who, as next in line, stood to become Regent if anything happened to him.
And this is why I decided my wartime royal research had to be turned into a novel. To put it at its best, the Duke of Gloucester was a bit of a nincompoop – a public relations nightmare who could be guaranteed to put his foot in it wherever he went. Nobody knew what to do with him, and everybody at the Palace dreaded the prospect of him plonking himself down on the throne until the true heir, our present Queen, came of age.
The Duke of Windsor ached to be called back and be given a second chance as King. And the Duke of Kent had been alerted, at the time of the abdication, to the possibility of his becoming King in the event that Bertie – King George VI – wasn’t up to it. So, though you will never find this in the official history books, the three royal brothers each had their eye on the throne should a bomb drop through the roof of Buckingham Palace and carry away valiant GeorgeVI.
What were their feelings, their ambitions? How would they have behaved once with the crown on their head? Would any of them have tried to engineer a derailment of Princess Elizabeth’s rightful claim to the throne?
You have only to look at Tudor history and the novels of Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory to realise just how bloody and ruthless the succession game can be. These are the very real thoughts which went through the minds of courtiers and those closest to the Royal
WARTIME ROYALS: Queen Mary with Princess Elizabeth in 1944