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which he would not be present. He felt resentful at being parted from his wife, the more
so, perhaps, since she was in the midst of a public and much gossiped-about affair with
a homosexual playboy-about-New York, James Donoghue. ‘What I think of having to
make this ridiculous and costly trip instead of our being together in Palm Beach is
nobody’s business,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘Work [for the restoration of the allowance] on
Cookie and Shirley [the Queen],’ the Duchess commanded him. The whole family
gathered at Marlborough House the morning after Queen Mary’s death ‘for archbishoply
prayers and a last look at Mama’, as the Duke put it. ‘My sadness’, he wrote, ‘was mixed
with incredulity that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest
son for so many years and yet so demanding at the end without relenting a scrap. I’m
afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they now are in death.’ 26
He had never been able, or even tried, to understand his mother’s feelings over the
Abdication. To her, it had been the Great Betrayal; to him, the Great Renunciation. To
be fair to him, the royal family, with the exception of his sister, had not been exactly
welcoming to him during his stay in England. He had stayed either with his friend Lord
Dudley in the country or in Dudley’s son’s house in London; only after their mother’s
death did his surviving brother, the Duke of Gloucester, invite him to stay at York
House, St James’s Palace, when he returned after a brief visit to France to London for
the funeral. ‘What strange things do happen for believe it or not I’m to be the
“Unknown Soldier’s” guest,’ he told the Duchess. ‘Maybe age has softened him a little
like it has done to Mary [the Princess Royal].’ No one else softened towards him; he was
not amongst the twenty-eight royal guests invited to the dinner at Windsor Castle after
the funeral on 31 March. Estrangement seemed once again total; the Duke no longer felt
part of the royal family, as he put it, ‘beyond Burke’s Peerage and Who’s Who’. His last
letter to his wife, written on his return to London after the funeral, was bitter: ‘What a
smug, stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy worn-out bunch
of old hags most of them have become…’
Queen Mary had specifically asked in her will that if she should die before the
Coronation, mourning for her should not be allowed to affect it. The Coronation was the
occasion for a huge national party in which everybody participated, from village
carnivals to London’s East End street parties. Churchill was determined that people
should enjoy themselves; food rationing was still in force, but he insisted that a bonus of
an extra 1lb on the sugar ration should be issued to everyone – despite the dire warnings
of the Ministry of Food that this would lead to a shortage. For Coronation week caterers
would be allowed additional sugar and fat to make potato crisps, toffee apples and
other treats, and organizers of street parties were to get rations over and above the
catering scale. Eggs were to be decontrolled and sweets derationed and the traditional
practice of roasting a whole ox was to be allowed under specific conditions. Rationing
was certainly not in evidence at the Household Brigade’s Coronation Ball at Hampton
Court on 29 May. The whole palace was floodlit and the fountains surrounded by
massed flowers; the men wore tailcoats and decorations and the women ballgowns and
tiaras. ‘We danced in the Great Hall and supped in the orangery,’ Jock Colville wrote. ‘A