38656356325923

the Castle for high-level discussions about the Duke of Windsor’s proposed visit to the
United States. He found the King, the Queen and Tommy Lascelles, the King’s Private
Secretary, obsessed with the Duke’s behaviour: ‘he was trying to stage a come-back, and
his friends and advisers were semi-Nazis,’ they told the Ambassador. Lindsay’s private
comment in a letter to his wife was:
It interested me to notice that really the King does not yet feel safe on his throne, and up to a point he is like
the medieval monarch who has a hated rival claimant living in exile… in some ways the situation operates
on the King just as it must have done on his medieval ancestors – uneasiness as to what is coming next –
sensitiveness – suspicion… 12
The Queen was fiercely protective of her vulnerable husband; since she had become
Duchess of York in 1923, she had regarded her principal role as being to support him.
‘She brought all her qualities into play to help [him] through all his public life, to
overcome his difficulties and to bring out his best qualities,’ a friend said. The Duke of
Windsor was the principal threat to her husband’s peace of mind at that moment and
she was determined that he should be kept at bay. She felt even more strongly about this
than either her husband or Chamberlain, who had initially insisted that payment of an
allowance to the Duke should be contingent on his returning to England only with the
Government’s consent. Walter Monckton, who was involved in the negotiations, wrote:
I think the Queen felt quite plainly that it was undesirable to give the Duke of Windsor any effective sphere
of work… she naturally thought that she must be on her guard because the Duke of Windsor… was an
attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new King who
was less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please. 13
After the outbreak of the Second World War, when it became essential to remove the
Duke from German-dominated Europe, she lobbied the Government to keep him as far
away as possible. In one letter, which has since disappeared, she went so far as to say
that if the Duke returned, the King would have a nervous breakdown.
Her uncle remained a problem for the future as far as Elizabeth was concerned. She
and Margaret always looked forward to the annual holiday at Balmoral. ‘It was the
chief landmark in their calendar,’ Crawfie wrote. Of all the royal homes, Balmoral was
the one at which the spirit of her great-great-grandmother was most in evidence.
Victoria and Albert had fallen in love with the area known as Deeside on their first visit
there, mainly because it reminded them of Albert’s native Thuringia. Between 1852 and
1859 they had built their own castle in a scaled-down version of the Scottish baronial
style on the banks of the River Dee, where the dark brown water rushes constantly over
boulders. The Dee valley itself is peaceful with green fields fringed by dark pine woods
and silver birch trees. Victoria created the Riverside Walk upriver from the castle, which
is punctuated at intervals by graceful white-painted miniature suspension bridges. She
also bought the Ballochbuie Forest of Native Caledonian Pines with its wild cats, mounds
of heather and blueberries and strange ant-heaps. Heather-covered hills surround the