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pretty little knees’). The King, whose favourite sister, Princess Victoria (a sharp spinster
detested for her interference by her royal nephews), had died in December, looked thin
and bent. He slept badly and frequently needed oxygen to help him breathe at night.
The prospects for the future of the monarchy weighed on him; that year he had openly
expressed doubts about his eldest son as his successor. ‘I pray to God that nothing will
come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne,’ he told his friend and confidant Cosmo
Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘After I’m gone, the boy will ruin himself within six
months,’ he predicted. The Prince of Wales was even more bored and restless than usual
and kept slipping off to telephone Wallis Simpson.
The year 1936 opened badly for everyone. While the Princesses remained at
Sandringham, their parents returned to Royal Lodge, where the Duchess developed
influenza and then pneumonia. At Sandringham Elizabeth worried about the change in
her grandfather, who would fall asleep at meals. On 16 January he stayed in bed;
Queen Mary, alarmed, summoned the Duke of York to return to Sandringham. On
Saturday, 18 January, the shooting-party invited by the King left with Elizabeth and
Margaret. Everyone remarked on how unhappy Elizabeth looked. Two days later King
George V died just before midnight on 20 January (hastened on his way by a lethal
injection of morphine and cocaine). Crawfie returned early from her Christmas holiday
to look after the children. ‘Don’t let all this depress them more than is absolutely
necessary, Crawfie,’ the Duchess of York had written to her. ‘They are so young.’ It
seems odd that Princess Elizabeth should have been so shielded from the death of her
beloved grandfather, but avoiding excessive emotion was a royal family tradition. None
the less, with her innate sense of appropriateness, the troubled little girl asked, ‘Oh,
Crawfie, ought we to play?’
Even at that age Elizabeth was made aware that the public face of royal life was a
series of staged tableaux. On 27 January, dressed in black with a black velvet beret on
her head, she was taken to see the lying-in-state of her grandfather in the sombre great
Westminster Hall with its vaulted wooden roof. Silent people filed past the purple
catafalque on which the coffin lay, the crown and sceptre glittering on top. Elizabeth
was struck by the stillness of her father and his three brothers, who, dressed in uniform,
stood vigil at the four corners of the coffin. ‘Uncle David was there’, she later told
Crawfie, ‘and he never moved at all… not even an eyelid.’ The following day, dressed in
the same new black coat and beret, she stood clutching her mother’s hand as her
grandfather’s coffin was lowered into the family vault beneath St George’s Chapel,
Windsor. ‘The British monarchy has never before stood so high in the world’s
estimation,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury’s chaplain, Dr Don, wrote in his diary in
tribute to the late King. ‘King George is mourned by myriads outside the British
Empire.’ 13
The new reign had begun with a sinister sign. As the gun carriage bearing George V’s
coffin rumbled towards Westminster Hall, the jewelled Maltese cross on the imperial
crown had broken loose and tumbled into the gutter. ‘A most terrible omen,’ Harold
Nicolson MP noted in his diary. ‘Christ, what’s going to happen next?’ the new King,