Queen's House (40 page)

The scene was the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace. The screen of black morning coats suddenly parted; and I descried an extraordinary figure: a bald wizened Indian clad in a dhoti and sandals advancing towards my father. It was Mahatma Gandhi. Only nine years before, when I was in India, the Viceroy had thrown this man into jail for sedition. Now the King Emperor was shaking his hand. Standing with me … were a group of jewelled Indian Princes with whom I had played polo … one of them murmured ‘This will cost you India.'
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The King did not mince his words. At the end of the meeting he said, ‘Remember, Mr Gandhi, I won't have any attacks on my Empire.'
To which the Indian leader replied courteously, ‘I must not be drawn into a political argument in your majesty's palace, after receiving your majesty's hospitality.'

King George V did not have the breadth of tolerance of Queen Victoria, but he did strongly condemn the colour bar as practised in India. He and Queen Mary had been powerfully moved by their visit to India when they were Prince and Princess of Wales and he felt strongly his duty to India and the Empire, just as George III had felt towards his American colonies. The King considered Gandhi a dangerous if somewhat misguided figure; nevertheless, like other members of his family, he could not help being impressed by the magnetic personality of the Mahatma.

In the election of 1929 the Labour Party had been returned to office. The King sent for MacDonald, who formed the second Labour government – this time with a woman, Miss Margaret Bondfield, as Minister of Labour. When in June the Cabinet ministers went down to Windsor to be sworn in as Privy Councillors, he greeted her with surprising warmth, saying how pleased he was to receive the first woman Privy Councillor.

The new government had scarcely got into its stride before it had to face the world financial crisis of 1931, the subsequent economic crisis in Britain, and a run on the gold and currency reserves. In August 1931 the King called another all-party Buckingham Palace Conference, with MacDonald, with Sir Herbert Samuel representing the Liberal Party, since Lloyd George was ill, and Baldwin for the Conservatives. ‘I am determined,' he wrote to the Duke of York, ‘to do everything and anything in my power to prevent the old ship running on the rocks.'
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The King's own wish was for a national government headed by MacDonald, but the cuts in unemployment benefits demanded by the New York bankers who were funding the rescue were too much for nine of the Labour members of the government to accept. MacDonald was on the verge of resignation, when the King sent for him to come to the Palace late on Sunday night. Somehow, in that meeting with the King,
MacDonald was persuaded that he was the only man to lead the country in its hour of crisis.

The next morning the three party leaders met in the Indian Room at the Palace, among the symbols of imperial glory. The King, as Rose has written, ‘in his best quarterdeck manner impressed on the three party leaders that before they left the Palace there should be a communiqué to end speculation at home and abroad. Then he withdrew to his own rooms to let them get on with it.'
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So the decision was taken: there would be a national government, led by MacDonald, which would make stringent economies, including the disagreeable 10 per cent cut in the unemployment benefit. Only three of MacDonald
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s Labour colleagues agreed to join him, and it was a gloomy new Prime Minister who returned from a meeting at 10 Downing Street to ‘kiss hands' at the Palace. ‘You look as if you were attending your own funeral,' the King joked. In a sense it was, as far as the Labour Party was concerned: MacDonald was branded as a traitor, and remained so in Labour Party mythology.

The political and constitutional rights and wrongs of these events have been much discussed elsewhere. The interesting facts from the point of view of the history of Buckingham Palace are that the King had hosted once again crucial conferences at the Palace; significant decisions had been taken there, rather than at 10 Downing Street; a complete financial bankruptcy had been avoided; and above all the King had made it clear that his deepest desire was to reign over a united kingdom.

The King was no political theorist, but he had sense and could show authority when necessary. Years before he said, about his son, ‘The Navy will teach him all he needs to know,' and in his view that had certainly been true for him: the Navy had taught him not only the need for authority and discipline but also the importance of working together. Once again he showed his readiness to share sacrifice: he reduced his own income from the Civil List by
£
50,000.

But the stress of the crisis and long hours of hard work were beginning to take their toll on the King; as they did on Ramsay MacDonald, who, on 7 June 1935, resigned on the grounds of ill health. Baldwin took his place. The King bade MacDonald a sad and affectionate farewell:

I hoped you might see me through … but I do not think it will be very long. I wonder how you have stood it, especially with the loss of your friends and their beastly behaviour … You have been the Prime Minister I have liked best … you have kept up the dignity of the office without using it to give you dignity.
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These last words might have been used to describe King George V himself.

On 6 May that year the King and Queen had celebrated their Silver Jubilee. As they drove from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral with the royal family, they were overwhelmed by the immense crowds that cheered them all along the way. Chips Channon watched the procession from St James's Palace.

… the Speaker … passed at a walking pace in a gorgeous coach. Then came the Prime Ministers of the Dominions, led by Ramsay MacDonald, seated with his daughter, Ishbel. He looked grim and she dowdy. No applause. Then the Lord Chancellor, wig and all; then the minor Royalties – a few cheers. Then masses of troops, magnificent and virile, resplendent in grand uniforms, with the sun glistening on their helmets. Then thunderous applause for the royal carriages. The Yorks in a large landau with the two tiny pink children. The Duchess of York was charming and gracious, the baby princesses much interested in the proceedings, and waving. The next landau carried the Kents, that dazzling pair; Princess Marina wore an enormous platter hat, chic but slightly unsuitable. Finally the Prince of Wales smiling his dentist smile and waving to his friends, but he still has his old spell for the crowd. The Norway aunt who was with him looked comic, and then more troops, and suddenly, the coach with Their Majesties. All eyes were on the Queen in her white and silvery splendour. Never has she looked so serene, so regally majestic, even so attractive. She completely eclipsed the King. Suddenly she has become the best-dressed woman in the world.

‘ “It was,” the King said simply, “the greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life.” And, later, “I did not realise they felt like this.”‘
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Millions of his subjects had heard his voice on the radio since the BBC first recorded his speeches in 1924. In 1932 he had been persuaded to give the first Christmas broadcast from Sandringham, for which
Kipling had drafted the text: ‘I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all…' On Jubilee Night he broadcast from Buckingham Palace with even deeper emotion:

I can only say to you, my very very dear people that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts for all the loyalty and – may I say so – love, with which this day and always you have surrounded us. I dedicate myself anew to your service for all the years that may still be given me.
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Throughout these critical years Queen Mary was a tower of strength. On the twentieth anniversary of his accession King George V had written to the Queen, ‘I can never sufficiently express my deep gratitude to you, darling May, for the way you have helped and stood by me in these difficult times … This is not sentimental rubbish but what I really feel.'
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During the last years of his life, King George V was weighed down by a multiplicity of worries. Abroad, war clouds threatened. The Nazis were on the march in Germany, Il Duce and the Fascists in Italy; at home there was industrial unrest. But behind all these worries there was one growing concern: the future of the Prince of Wales.

In the last years of King George V
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s life the Prince of Wales's home was at Fort Belvedere, ‘a castellated conglomeration on Crown Land'
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bordering Windsor Great Park near Sunningdale, Berkshire. His brother, The Duke of York, and the Duchess (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) had a house near by at Royal Lodge in the Great Park. The King was aware that the Prince of Wales had had many love affairs in the past, but since 1934 he had obviously become deeply in love with a chic American, Mrs Wallis Simpson, who was a frequent visitor at the Fort.

Mrs Simpson had divorced her first husband, a lieutenant attached to the US Navy, with whom she had spent some time in China, and was now living in London with her second, Ernest Simpson, a quiet, intelligent Englishman who worked in his father's shipping business. Her elegant dinners at their small flat became famous and gradually she attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales. He noticed her

at a Court in Buckingham Palace, being presented to my parents. I was as usual standing behind their gilt thrones as Wallis approached in the slowly moving line of women, brilliant in Court feathers and trains. When her turn came to curtsey first to my father then to my mother, I was struck by the grace of her carriage and the natural dignity of her movements.
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Wallis described the event to her Aunt Bessie in Baltimore, who after her mother's death had become her confidante and later her chaperone. That night, Wallis told her, she wore a ‘large aquamarine cross' – imitation, she confessed, but effective.

In the summer of 1934, Wallis was firmly established as the Prince's new favourite, accompanying him on a Mediterranean holiday.

Aware that since she was thirty-nine this might well be, as she wrote, her ‘last fling', she was determined to enjoy it until she was supplanted by a younger woman. Then she would ‘fold her tent and silently slip away'.
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Meanwhile her husband Ernest must be kept happy as her security for the future. However, when Wallis returned from holiday, it was, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘like being Wallis in Wonderland. Ernest remarked at me quizzically. “It sounds to me”, he said thoughtfully, “indeed like a trip behind the Looking Glass, or better yet into the realm of Peter Pan's Never-Never Land.” From then on the Prince was always Peter Pan to Ernest.'
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Wallis too was becoming aware that in losing her husband she would ‘lose something noble for a boy who may always remain Peter Pan'.
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But the Prince of Wales was hopelessly and for ever infatuated. … On Wallis's next appearance at the State Ball at Buckingham Palace, part of the Jubilee celebration of May 1935, Ernest Simpson was with her but she was wearing the Prince's jewels. This was her third visit to Buckingham Palace. On the previous occasions she had been treated with the usual royal courtesy as an ordinary guest. This time was different: she was now a threat to the throne.

In the last year of his life King George V was haunted by the fear that after his death his son would wreck the monarchy that he and the Queen had so striven to uphold. But, though they were perfectly aware that Mrs Simpson was the Prince's constant companion, not only
at the Fort but also at York House, where she acted as his hostess, yet neither he nor the Queen had been able to discuss it with him, and the Prince himself could never find the right moment to broach the subject.

At this May ball, although King and Queen behaved with impeccable courtesy, Mrs Simpson was perfectly aware of the King's hostility. The Prince of Wales danced first with the Queen and then led Mrs Simpson on to the floor. She wrote in her memoirs:

As David and I danced past, I thought I felt the King's eyes rest searchingly on me. Something in his look made me feel that all this graciousness and pageantry were but the glittering tip of an iceberg … filled with icy menace for such as me.
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That summer Ernest chose to take a long business trip to the USA, while Wallis spent the summer with the Prince and other guests, first at his rented villa in Cannes, then cruising round the Greek islands and afterwards touring through Europe to Paris. After this summer the Prince realized that he could not live without Wallis and clearly was prepared to renounce the throne rather than lose her.

King George V watched his son's behaviour with growing horror, contrasting him with his second son, The Duke of York, who he saw would make a better king. A few weeks before his death the King exclaimed with passion to their friend Blanche Lennox, ‘I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the Throne.'
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The year 1935 ended in sorrow. The loss of his sister, Princess Victoria, on 3 December grieved him deeply. Though somewhat bad-tempered in her lonely old age, Princess Victoria had adored her brother, and they had spoken every day on the telephone. She was one of his last links with his beloved mother, Queen Alexandra, who had died in 1925. Since then he and the Queen had moved into the big house at Sandringham, where Princess Victoria still lived.

The family Christmas at Sandringham was sadder this year. When the King broadcast his last Christmas message, friends noticed the hoarseness in his voice, and the emotion in his words for his family.

He made his last entry in his diary on Friday 17 January 1936. There was the sailor's last record of the weather, then ‘Dawson arrived this evening. I saw him and feel rotten.'
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