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Cynthia Colville, whose son Jock had been Chamberlain’s Private Secretary, saying that
she hoped he would remain with Chamberlain ‘and not go on with the new Prime
Minister’. The King told Chamberlain at his farewell audience on 10 May that he
thought he had been ‘grossly unfairly treated’, while the Queen wrote personally to tell
him
how deeply I regretted your ceasing to be our Prime Minister. I can never tell you in words how much we
owe you. During these last desperate & unhappy years, you have been a great comfort and support to us
both… These last few days have been so terrible in every way… it is hard to sit here and think of all those
splendid young men being sacrificed to Hitler. You did all in your power to stave off such agony, & you were
right…
The two Princesses had listened to his farewell broadcast on 11 May with real emotion.
‘I cried. Mummy,’ Princess Elizabeth told her mother. 3
Events moved quickly and menacingly through May and June 1940. Royal refugees
began to arrive at Buckingham Palace; King Haakon’s appearance at the end of April
was followed on 13 May by that of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who had just
managed to evade a parachute force sent to capture her. On 11 May Hitler had launched
a concerted attack on Holland, Belgium and the Netherlands on a front stretching from
the North Sea to the Moselle. On 13 and 14 May seven German divisions crossed the
Meuse and drove westwards, outflanking both the French main defences on the Maginot
Line and the British Expeditionary Force. On 15 May the French Premier, Paul Reynaud,
telephoned Churchill with the stunning news that ‘the war was lost’ and the road to
Paris open to the Germans. On 31 May, as the last British and French troops who could
escape were still being ferried across the Channel from Dunkirk, the King told Hugh
Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, that the date for Hitler’s invasion of Britain was,
according to the latest information, 1 August.
On 12 May the Queen had telephoned the Royal Lodge telling Crawfie to take the
children to the safety of Windsor Castle – ‘at least for the rest of the week’. They were to
remain there for five years. Lord Hailsham wrote to Churchill of his fears that the
Germans would make the royal family, and the Princesses in particular, their target. ‘I
observe that the Nazis both in Norway and in Holland made a desperate effort to
capture the royal family,’ the former Lord Chancellor told Churchill on 19 June 1940;
‘no doubt they will do the same in this country if they can; and in the British Empire it
would be a more serious matter because the Crown is the principal link between us and
the Dominions.’ Strangely, Hailsham seemed to think that it would not matter all that
much if the King were captured since the Regency Act of 1937 would enable the
Government to put the royal power into commission in that event. ‘But so far as the
little Princesses are concerned, the same observation does not apply,’ he wrote, ‘and I
suggest that the time has come… that they should be sent to Canada… if the Nazis got
hold of their Persons they would be able to bring tremendous pressure to bear on the
King and Queen to accept intimidation by threatening death and even worse things.’ 4