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I think that those years after the war were terribly anxious & frustrating and it was all very hard & grinding
work, and I longed for him to have some peace of mind. He was so young to die, and was becoming so wise
in kingship. He was so kind too, and had a sort of natural nobility of thought & life, which sometimes made
me ashamed of my narrower & more feminine point of view. Such sorrow is a very strange experience – it
really changes one’s whole life, whether for better or worse I don’t know yet… 1
Queen Elizabeth, however, was a woman of inner strength and considerable
resources. On 17 February she issued a statement to the people. She would be called
‘Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’ and she commended to them ‘our dear daughter;
give her your loyalty and devotion; in the great and lonely station to which she has
been called she will need your protection and love’. She seemed uncertain about what
her own future role would be: ‘My only wish now is that I may be allowed to continue
the work we sought to do together…’ In the event she found consolation in her native
country, Scotland. Staying with her friends the Vyners, near Ullapool on the coast of
Caithness, she came upon the ultimate retreat, a dilapidated castle standing in a bleak
landscape by the sea. She bought it, renaming it the Castle of Mey. In Scotland she
found the peace to recuperate and to comfort herself reading, as she wrote to Edith
Sitwell thanking her for sending her an anthology of poems:
I started to read it, sitting by the river, and it was a day when one felt engulfed by great black clouds of
unhappiness and misery, and I found a sort of peace stealing round my heart as I read such lovely poems and
heavenly words.
I found a hope in George Herbert’s poem, ‘Who could have thought my shrivel’d heart, could have
recovered greennesse. It was gone quite underground’, and I thought how small and selfish is sorrow. But it
bangs one about until one is quite senseless, and I can never thank you enough for giving me such a delicious
book wherein I found so much beauty and hope, quite suddenly one day by the river. 2
For Elizabeth, the huge reversal in position between herself and her mother posed
problems. Apart from her grief at the loss of her husband, the Queen Mother could not
help feeling jealous of her daughter, who had suddenly become the focus of all the
attention and the possessor of the power that had recently been hers. From now on
Elizabeth would always have to undertake a careful balancing act, conscious of the
need, even though she was now the Queen, not to upstage her mother in public. At
public functions such as premieres, she would try to ensure that they went in together,
and on more intimate occasions such as tea at Sandringham when she had lent her
mother the house, sensitive to any appearance of usurping her mother’s position as
hostess, she would leap guiltily away from the teapot which she had been about to pour
when she saw the Queen Mother approaching. The situation was particularly delicate at
Windsor that Easter of 1952:
It was the first time they had lived under the same roof since the King died [a courtier said], and there was
an awkwardness about precedence, the Queen not wanting to go in front of her mother and the Queen
Mother being used to going first. According to Lascelles, the Queen Mother couldn’t bear it – she was so
young to be widowed and it wasn’t likely she’d marry again and she minded the change of position although