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the Queen did everything possible to ease the situation.
The Queen Mother’s strength, her capacity for enjoying life and the great reservoir of
affection which she had built up with the people at large would carry her. through. She
had always swept the awkward things of life under the carpet, regally ignoring
anything nasty which reared its head. This gliding approach protected her, but it also
encouraged a tendency in her family not to face up to difficulties and this was to have
dangerous consequences. ‘Queen Elizabeth is an [emotional] ostrich,’ a courtier said.
Things would not, however, be easy for her daughter Margaret, the spoiled darling of
her father, the centre of attention at all the parties at Windsor, Balmoral and
Buckingham Palace. Unlike her mother and sister, she had never had any role to play
apart from exercising her talent to amuse and often (if you were a courtier’s wife) to
infuriate. As the sparkling leader of society she already had the air and reputation of an
enfant terrible. Some people thought that she would have liked to have been Queen. For
Margaret, the death of her father meant expulsion from a childhood paradise. ‘The
King’s death’, a friend said, ‘was a terrible thing for Princess Margaret, she worshipped
him and it was also the first time anything really ghastly had happened to her.’ Her
grief was heartbreaking – the unsympathetic John Gordon reported that she had had to
be given bromide for four days to calm her. To Nancy Astor, she wrote a touching letter
about her father in response to her condolence:
You know what a truly wonderful person he was, the very heart and centre of our family and no one could
have had a more loving and thoughtful father.
We were such a happy family and we will have such lovely memories of him to remember when the grief
of his loss has lessened. He was so kind and brave all his life.
We are thanking God for His words of comfort that make us sure he is with Him, safe and happy and
perhaps closer to us than he has ever been. 3
The psychological turmoil in Princess Margaret’s inner life and affections in the wake of
her father’s death was to have serious consequences in her sister’s Coronation year.
Elizabeth, as she had said, was borne along by her public duties and the incredible
wave of universal public sorrow and tributes to her father. ‘He was a grand man,’
President Truman wrote in his diary, ‘worth a pair of his brother Ed.’ Some people were
surprised, even shocked, by the outpourings of grief. The writer James Pope-Hennessy
described it as ‘press hysteria… this national obsession’. The journalist James Cameron,
who had travelled with the King on his South African tour, shared Cape brandy with him
and witnessed his last, lonely evening swim in the Indian Ocean, expressed the general
feeling when he wrote:
While the King lived we spoke of him as this, and as that, endowing him with all the remote virtues of an
infallible man; such men do not die. But the King died; and we found somehow a different thing: that we
loved him… the sudden shadow fell momentarily across the heart of every man; loyal men and cynics, the
rich and the dispossessed, reactionaries and radicals. 4