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Nothing had changed. ‘There in the window was the chair in which I sat on that
occasion, and the desk on which I had placed my script,’ he wrote. He had been moved
by an excursion to Frogmore, an elegant Regency house a few minutes down the hill
from the castle. Frogmore in its peaceful setting beside a lake had been his childhood
home when George V and Queen Mary were still Prince and Princess of Wales. It was
there that the children had enjoyed holidays with their mother while their father was off
sailing or shooting. In his absence the children and their mother had amused themselves
playing silly jokes on the tutors, like giving the French teacher, M. Hua, a tadpole
sandwich or dressing up some of the more lugubrious family busts in shooting clothes.
Frogmore had a special significance in the iconography of the royal family; it was
mausoleum territory established by Queen Victoria, whose obsession with death and
funerary mementoes was excessive even by the high standards of her age. The small hill
above the lake was crowned by the memorial built by the Queen in memory of her
mother, while the garden was dominated by the mausoleum she had erected after the
death of Albert in which the marble images of the couple lay side by side under a
canopy of stars. Walking in the romantic garden beside the lake with its water lilies
shaded by huge cedar trees and weeping willows, the Duke conceived the idea of himself
and, above all, Wallis joining the family in death as they had never been in life. With
this in mind he put in a request to Elizabeth that he and Wallis should be buried in a
private mausoleum at Frogmore, following funeral services in St George’s Chapel,
Windsor. His request, involving as it did the ultimate recognition of Wallis as a member
of the royal family, was treated with some caution but finally agreed to in December
1960.
Elizabeth took a major step towards reconciliation in March 1965 when the Duke was
in London for an eye operation at the London Clinic, where he spent three weeks. One
evening she visited him there and met the Duchess, their first sight of each other since at
least 1936. After twenty-five minutes she left, seeming in the best of spirits, no doubt
relieved that the ordeal of meeting the family bugbear was over. A spokesman described
the meeting as ‘very private but very pleasant indeed’. In family terms this was a huge
step forward; in the following days, as the Duke convalesced, he and Elizabeth began to
get to know each other, walking together in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. On 7
June 1967, four days after their thirtieth wedding anniversary, the Duke and Duchess
attended a royal family ceremony together for the first time when they stood in the
front row with Elizabeth, Philip, the Queen Mother, the Kents and Gloucesters, at the
unveiling of the memorial plaque to Queen Mary on the wall of Marlborough House
opposite St James’s Palace. All eyes were surreptitiously watching to see if the Duchess
would curtsey to her old enemy, Queen Elizabeth. She did not. An observer described the
Duchess as ‘incredibly nervous’, the Queen Mother as ‘civil’. As Philip Ziegler remarked,
it was a curious touch of irony that so intimate a family occasion, honouring the woman
who had done most to ensure that the Duchess of Windsor should never be accepted as a
member of the royal family, should be the first time the Duchess took her place in their
midst. This public reconciliation was still only partial; the Windsors were not invited to