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public had insisted on its rights to seats at the royal spectacle, a significant beginning to
the later events of her reign.
Queen Mary was not there to see her favourite granddaughter crowned. According to
her biographer, she never recovered from the shock of George VI’s death. She had been
too frail to attend his funeral, although she watched the procession pass her windows at
Marlborough House. Clutching the hand of her old friend Mabell Airlie, and seeing in
her mind’s eye a little boy in a sailor suit, she had whispered only, ‘There hegoes.’ At this
intimation of mortality, she had drawn up a new will, going over the catalogues of her
collections, tracing the particular family connections. She left everything (apart from a
few boxes and candlesticks to the Duke of Windsor) to the new Queen, with ‘not even a
toque’, as a friend remarked, for her loyal lady-in-waiting, Lady Cynthia Colville. She
died at 10.15 on the evening of 24 March 1953, aged eighty-five. In the large crowd
gathered outside Marlborough House, women were weeping. There was a sense almost
that a national monument had disappeared, a connection with a happier time. ‘A wave
of emotion has swept over the land,’ Chips Channon wrote, ‘and there has not been a
word of criticism of the grand old lady.’
Queen Mary’s death hardly came as a shock to Elizabeth; she had been ailing since the
end of February, suffering abdominal pains and telling her friends that she did not wish
to go on living as an ‘old crock’. But her death meant yet another gloomy ceremony at
Westminster Hall and a funeral in St George’s, Windsor, a sad reminder for Elizabeth of
her father’s only just over a year before. It meant the embarrassing presence of Uncle
David, who had not been invited to the forthcoming Coronation.
The Duke had not been invited principally because Elizabeth did not want him there,
as she told the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Fisher, during a meeting on 6 November
1952, at which it was agreed that it was ‘a) altogether out of the question that the Duke
should come, and b) it was wholly and entirely undesirable that the Duke should come’,
the Archbishop noted. ‘It would create a very difficult situation for everybody, and if he
had not the wit to see that for himself, then he ought to be told it. He is coming to
England in December, and the Queen feels quite sure that he will raise the question. We
agreed that if he did, he should be told not to come, and it looked as though the Queen
would have to tell him. The Queen would be less willing than anyone to have him
here.’ 24 Fortunately for Elizabeth, Churchill took the same view and, when the Duke
consulted him on 18 November as to whether he should not be invited, told him bluntly
that it would be ‘quite inappropriate for a King who had abdicated to be present as an
official guest at the Coronation of one of his successors’. 25 The Duke apparently
accepted this and issued a press statement on Churchill’s advice. Elizabeth was not yet
prepared to heal the family rift.
The Duke had arrived in England in response to a summons from his mother’s doctor
on 11 March, accompanied by his sister, the Princess Royal, disembarking from the
Queen Elizabeth from New York. Not surprisingly he was in a rebellious frame of mind.
His niece had refused to continue the £10,000 a year which he felt was rightfully owing
to him; feeling poor he had contracted to write an extensive article on the Coronation at