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of the window of Buckingham Palace when they were changing the guard. Circulation
was extremely limited and The Snapdragon’s existence was curtailed by the outbreak of
the war; it was Elizabeth’s first and only experiment in journalism.
The King had not been able to enjoy a trouble-free holiday at Balmoral. Apart from
the routine work with his private secretaries on the red despatch boxes of state papers,
which pursued him wherever he was, he also had to cope with the traditional visit from
the Prime Minister. Chamberlain, a striking figure with a shock of white hair and dark
eyebrows over piercing eyes and a curving beak of a nose, was an abrasive politician
with strongly held views and a disdainful way of dealing with opponents. He had the
self-confidence of his great Birmingham political dynasty and was perhaps too
convinced of the Tightness of his own views. He had few friends, but those he had
appreciated his integrity and his unlikely passion for birds, trees, flowers and
Shakespeare. Like the Queen, he was a passionate angler. Both the King and the Queen
came to be fond of Chamberlain, who put himself out to charm them both and flattered
himself, as he boasted to his sister, Ida, that he had succeeded. He had shot with the King
and fished with the Queen, picnicked with the family on Loch Muick, and driven with
them and their millionaire neighbour, J. Pierpont Morgan, to the toy-like pink castle of
Abergeldie downriver from Balmoral, where the Queen had dived under the fruit nets
and ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ the gooseberries. Disapproving of the conduct of King Edward
VIII, he had gone out of his way to help his successor. The King had personal and
financial reasons for feeling grateful to Chamberlain and, being himself a novice in
politics and foreign affairs, had come increasingly to rely on his judgement.
At Balmoral that autumn of 1937, the King and the Prime Minister (after discussing
the Duke of Windsor) had turned their attention to foreign affairs, a subject of which the
King had almost no experience. From November 1936 until the late summer of 1937 the
British Government and people had been absorbed first by the trauma of Abdication and
then with the euphoria of the Coronation. While Edward VIII had been still on the
throne in March 1936 Hitler had marched into the Rhineland; the democratic countries
had reacted with no more than feeble protests (Edward VIII claimed that he had played
his part in damping down the British Government’s reaction). Since then Germany had
signed agreements with both Italy and Japan and actively backed the fascist side in the
Spanish Civil War. In November 1937 Lord Halifax, a friend of both the King and
Chamberlain, was to undertake a so-called ‘private’ visit to Germany which would
include a meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. The meeting between the lofty,
patrician Halifax, wearing the classic English gentleman’s uniform of bowler hat and
impeccably rolled umbrella, and the small, unmistakably plebeian dictator in what
Halifax would have regarded as a quaint pantomime outfit would have been comical
had it not resulted in a disastrous misunderstanding which led to Munich and ultimately
to war. Halifax looked on the Nazi leaders like Hitler and Goering as essentially
harmless figures of fun; Hitler saw Halifax as a specimen of a race whose will to fight
had been in decline since the age of Sir Francis Drake and which would certainly not
stand in the way of his European ambitions. Less than four months later, as