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Edward VIII, walking behind the coffin was heard to exclaim. ‘That’, another MP,
Walter Elliot, remarked to a fellow MP beside him, ‘will be the motto of the new reign.’
While his father lay dying, Edward, in a gesture which was widely seen as symbolic of
his determination to turn his back on the old ways, had ordered the clocks at
Sandringham to be put back thirty minutes in line with Greenwich Mean Time.
(‘Sandringham Time’ had been instituted by Edward VII as a means of gaining extra
daylight for his shooting-parties and of countering Queen Alexandra’s chronic
unpunctuality.) At the proclamation of the new King in the courtyard of St James’s
Palace Wallis Simpson could clearly be seen seated at a window with Edward standing
beside her watching the ceremony. Uncle David was now King Edward VIII and
proceeded to fulfil his father’s prediction in just under a year: 1936 was to go down in
history as the Year of Three Kings.
The death of George V made an enormous difference in the Yorks’ life which the tenyear-old
Elizabeth cannot have failed to sense. Her parents were devastated, not only by
natural family grief but by a sense of spiritual exile. ‘Though outwardly one’s life goes
on the same, yet everything is different – especially spiritually and mentally,’ the
Duchess wrote to George V’s doctor, Lord Dawson. ‘I mind things I don’t like more than
before.’ Among the things the Duchess minded was the predominance at the new court
of ‘Queen Wallis’, as Chips Channon immediately dubbed her. From being the King’s
favourite daughter-in-law and, as far as Bertie was concerned, the closest to him of all
his sons, the Yorks were no longer welcome. Wallis returned their dislike of her with
good measure, joking about Bertie’s dullness and his wife’s dowdiness and ample figure.
In private she and the King now referred to the Duchess as ‘Cookie’. Under Wallis’s
direction the new King was busy sacking his father’s old servants; Bertie was not
consulted. He was, however, asked to do a review of how economies might be made at
Sandringham, although he apparently did not know that his brother was planning to
sell the family home. Through the King’s Principal Private Secretary, Sir Alexander ‘Alec’
Hardinge, whose wife Helen was an old friend of the Duchess, the Yorks learned of his
personal staff’s unhappiness, of his hours spent closeted with Mrs Simpson while his
private secretaries and other officials waited outside, of the government despatch boxes
containing state papers taken to Fort Belvedere and returned unopened or with the ring
marks of cocktail glasses on them.
To the public, however, Edward was still their idol. In July Elizabeth went to watch
Uncle David present the Colours at the annual military ceremony. Her father and Uncle
David were on horseback, but while she, her grandmother, uncles and aunts sat in the
Royal pavilion, the ‘new court’, Wallis and her friends, sat in a separate stand. As the
King rode off after the ceremony a lunatic pushed through the crowd with a gun in his
hand; the police knocked the man’s arm and the revolver skidded harmlessly under the
horse’s hooves. At the time Edward believed it to be an assassination attempt, but with
cool courage he rode on without flinching and, as a result, his popularity with the public
rose to new heights. At the end of the month the King took his mistress on a cruise on a
yacht, the soon to be notorious Nahlin. Photographs of the King in shorts bathing with