38656356325923

state visit to Paris in May 1972 designed to ‘improve the atmosphere’ for Britain’s
membership of the EEC. Shortly before the visit an anxious Sir Christopher Soames, the
British Ambassador in Paris, called in Dr Thin to discuss the state of the Duke’s health.
Nothing, the ambassador said, should be allowed to interfere with the Queen’s carefully
arranged schedule. ‘If the Duke’s death occurred during the visit, it would upset this
schedule and possibly affect the outcome of the Queen’s mission,’ the surprised and
somewhat disgusted doctor heard the Ambassador say. ‘The Ambassador came to the
point,’ Thin recalled, ‘and told me bluntly that it was all right for the Duke to die before
or after the visit, but that it would be politically disastrous if he were to expire in the
course of it. Was there anything I could do to reassure him about the timing of the
Duke’s end?’ The doctor told Soames plainly that he could give him no such reassurance
and it was perfectly possible that the Duke would indeed die during his niece’s stay in
Paris. They then arranged that after Elizabeth’s arrival, the Ambassador would call Thin
every evening at six o’clock for a bulletin. 9
In the event the Duke did not die during the visit and on the fourth day Elizabeth,
accompanied by Philip, Martin Charteris and the Duchess of Grafton, paid the expected
call on her uncle. The Duke, although still lucid, was by now extremely weak, bedridden
and on an intravenous drip, but he insisted on getting up to receive her. It was out of
the question, he told Dr Thin, that the Queen should see him in his bedroom or wearing
his bedclothes. She was his sovereign, and the least he could do was to receive her,
properly dressed, in the adjoining sitting-room which separated his room from the
Duchess’s. When Thin objected because of the drip, he simply replied ‘That’s your
problem.’ Gallantly, the Duke sat waiting for his niece, a drip tube hidden under his
shirt and attached from the back of his collar to fluid flasks concealed behind a curtain.
When Elizabeth arrived, she was greeted with extreme formality by the Duchess, who
said, ‘His Royal Highness is waiting to see Your Majesty.’ To the doctor’s horror, when
Elizabeth entered the room the old man made a supreme effort and stood up, bending
his neck in the traditional bow, oblivious to the risk of detaching the drip tube. She
asked him to sit down and ‘they chatted affectionately for about a quarter of an hour’.
The doctor noticed that as Elizabeth left the Duke’s room there were tears in her eyes;
she was deeply moved by the dying man’s gallantry and the sight of him brought back
thoughts of her own father. ‘The Queen was very shaken at how alike Uncle David was
to her father,’ an observer said. ‘She was very overcome – and would have liked to have
got out of going to see him.’ Then she went downstairs for what one of the party
described as ‘the most extraordinary tea-party I’ve ever attended’. Wallis presided over a
round table placed in front of the fireplace. Above her hung her portrait painted in the
1930s; ‘she looked like a mummified version of it,’ a member of the party recalled. On a
visit some six months previously Charles had described her as ‘flitting to and fro like a
strange bat’, unable to speak due to facelifts ‘except by clenching her teeth all the time
and not moving any facial muscles’. It was an awkward occasion; the Duchess’s hand
shook terribly when handling the tea-cups, and one was dropped. The pugs snuffled
round the company; Elizabeth, normally a dog-lover, does not like the breed. The house