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great comfort,’ the Queen wrote to Osbert Sitwell. ‘Everyone has been so kind about the
announcement, & having minded so much about Mr Molotov’s “no’s”, I think that
people feel like a moment of rejoicing over a young lady’s “yes”!’ 10 At the royal gardenparty
held to celebrate the engagement Mabell Airlie liked the fact that Philip, defiantly
self-confident, wore a shabby old uniform and hadn’t tried to impress by getting a new
one.
Elizabeth’s engagement in July and her wedding on a dark November day provided a
touch of romance against a bleak backdrop. It was, as Churchill said, ‘a flash of colour
on the hard road we have to travel’. People were delighted to watch the nice, sensible,
pretty girl whom they had seen grow up enjoy her romance with the handsome naval
lieutenant in his well-worn uniform. Nineteen forty-seven, the eleventh year of the King-
Emperor’s reign, was the moment of truth for post-war Britain. The hard winter had
precipitated a fuel crisis in February, unemployment rose and production fell. There was
a serious financial crisis that summer; the dollar credits upon which the British
Government had been surviving were almost exhausted and on 20 August the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, suspended the convertibility of the pound, a serious
blow to Britain’s international credibility. Suspension of the convertibility of the pound
brought home the unpleasant truth that Britain was no longer a world power and could
no longer afford her Empire. War had hastened imperial disintegration already evident
before 1939; post-war ideology, coupled with the common-sense realization that Britain
no longer possessed the necessary resources in men and money, escalated the process.
The Victory Parade over which the King had presided in June 1946 had been the swan
song of his Empire. In 1947 George VI had gloomily surveyed a plantation of trees in
Windsor Great Park, each tree representing a colony of his Empire. ‘This is Singapore,’
he said, pointing to one. ‘There is Malaya… Hong Kong is over there. Burma too over
there. They have all been lost to the Empire Plantation. The time may soon come when
we shall have to cut out the Indian tree – and I wonder how many more…’ On 15
August, with the independence of India presided over by Mountbatten, the last Viceroy,
the King lost the ‘jewel’ in his imperial crown and the imperial ‘I’ (Imperator) in his title
bestowed by Disraeli on his great-grandmother not quite seventy years earlier. He was
no longer King-Emperor.
However keenly the King felt the loss of his patrimony in private, in public he
accepted it with a good grace. He got on extremely well with the Labour Government,
particularly with Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, whose bulldog patriotism and
earthy sense of humour he admired. The court economized; there were few
entertainments, as Queen Mary complained to Hugh Gaitskell, then Minister for Fuel
and Power, at a dinner for the Shah of Iran. ‘They don’t do enough of this sort of thing
nowadays.’ The Cold War had broken out in Europe and over all hung the threat of the
atomic bomb.
There were certain parallels between the position of the monarchy after the Second
World War and the situation in 1918. Britain had achieved a hollow victory in both long
drawn-out wars and at immense cost in blood and money. The country had turned