A Royal Love Story
Here’s the curtain raiser for Royals Extra, my newsletter taking readers behind the scenes of the British royal family over the last century.
Sally Bedell Smith
March 25, 2023
This first installment is drawn from my research for George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy, which will be published on April 4th. Future posts will be supplemented by what I learned while writing previous biographies of Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III, and Diana, Princess of Wales. George VI and Elizabeth is the origin story of the late Queen’s mother and father. He is popularly known today for his struggle with a stutter in the movie The King’s Speech; she is widely familiar from her long widowhood as the Queen Mum. I envision Royals Extra as a way for me to write in a personal way to interested readers, offering fresh insights into the modern history of the monarchy and making links to current royal events and personalities. I hope you enjoy reading about the Royals as much as I have enjoyed piecing together their stories.
Long before The King’s Speech, there was a love story. It began in June 1920 when the second son (not yet known as “The Spare” in those days) of King George V and Queen Mary watched a pretty young woman being whirled around the dance floor at the Ritz Hotel in London by a handsome young Scotsman named James Stuart. She was nineteen-year-old Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the daughter of a high-ranking Scottish aristocrat. The keen observer was twenty-four-year-old Prince Albert, the Duke of York, who was known by friends and family as Bertie.
Bertie had no idea that Elizabeth was besotted with James, who had recently become his equerry—an aide-de-camp who accompanied him on royal rounds. When Bertie asked for an introduction to Elizabeth, they danced for the first time, and Bertie fell head over heels for the vivacious aristocrat. It would take him more than two years and three proposals to win her over. Fourteen years later, by an accident of history, he would become King George VI and she would be Queen Elizabeth. Together they would save the monarchy after the traumatic abdication of Bertie’s older brother.
A peek into Lady Elizabeth’s diaries
I was enchanted by the way the story of their courtship and marriage unfolded in the letters and diaries that I read in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle with the permission of Queen Elizabeth II. The royal family’s papers kept me riveted for six hours a day over three months in 2018 and 2019—wrapping up just before Covid-19, which locked down much of the Western world, and shuttered the Royal Archives for two years. I was also fortunate to read additional private family papers at Glamis Castle, Elizabeth’s ancestral home in Scotland.
Elizabeth began her first adult diary—a small leather-bound book embossed with “E.L.” for Elizabeth Lyon— only two days before Bertie’s final proposal on January 3rd, 1923. She evidently knew her life was about to change dramatically, so she took up her pencil to record her comings and goings. Elizabeth had a petite and meticulous hand, and many entries filled an entire page, while others were quite brief. At first she seemed be holding back--in contrast to her animated letters to friends and family. But over time she expressed surprisingly strong opinions and vented her emotions, sometimes trying to disguise them with what she called “mirror writing,” which was easy to read, since she was only writing words backwards.
Bertie makes his first moves
Bertie and Elizabeth crossed paths several times during the summer social season of 1920. Once the shy prince even tentatively held her hand during a boat ride on the Thames. That September, he grew more assertive, inviting himself for a weekend at Glamis Castle—something a royal duke could pull off without criticism. He arrived with James Stuart—an awkward situation, to say the least-- and Elizabeth’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, welcomed them both. It was a rollicking three days of tennis, dancing, singing, and silly games with Elizabeth’s friends and her siblings. After the stiffness of his own upbringing, Bertie fell in love with them all. But Elizabeth was happy enough with her large family and its lively circle. She was not the sort to swoon for a young man just because he was second in line to the throne.
His correspondence with Elizabeth began in December. The tone was restrained and proper: his to Lady Elizabeth from Prince Albert, hers to Prince Albert from Elizabeth Lyon. His letters were touchingly earnest, hers were more informal and sometimes playful. They met again before Christmas and the following February at the London wedding of her friend Helen Cecil to George V’s assistant private secretary, Alexander Hardinge.
A gentle rejection
Two weeks later, Bertie invited himself to lunch at St. Paul’s Walden Bury, the Strathmore home in Hertfordshire, and popped the question. She turned him down, gently but firmly, and in letters afterward she emphasized that she valued their friendship. James Stuart was still very much in the picture for Elizabeth, although even members of James’s own family were uncertain whether he had actually proposed marriage. His grandson Dominic, the third viscount Stuart of Findhorn, told me he thought James might well have asked.
Queen Mary’s sly maneuvers
Behind the scenes, Queen Mary began pulling strings as soon as Bertie confided in her about his love for Elizabeth. The Queen was helped by her lifelong friend, Mabell, the Countess of Airlie, who met with the young couple separately to take soundings. Queen Mary invited herself (a family trait, it seemed) to Glamis, where she assessed Elizabeth’s skills as a hostess, and she included the Strathmores among the guests at a lavish State Ball at Buckingham Palace, providing a foretaste of royal life.
Using Mabell Airlie as a discreet go-between, she even managed to invite Elizabeth to meet her privately at Buckingham Palace. And although she left no fingerprints, Queen Mary’s fine hand was likely behind a lucrative job in the United States offered to James Stuart in the autumn of 1921. As the younger son of an earl, James needed to make money, since he couldn’t count on an inheritance. The field had been cleared for Bertie.
Elizabeth turns him down again, but…
Scarcely six weeks after James boarded the Aquitania bound for New York City, Bertie proposed again, in early March 1922. Once more, Elizabeth said “No.” By then the letters between Bertie and Elizabeth had turned a shade more familiar. She wrote to “Prince Bertie” and signed off as “Elizabeth.” He began with “my dear Elizabeth” and signed “Albert.” She continued to speak in terms of friendship, yet she kept the door slightly ajar for the possibility of romance. Bertie was on the verge of giving up in the summer of 1922, but Louis Greig, the prince’s loyal mentor, prevailed on him to persist. For the third year in a row, Bertie sent Elizabeth a well-chosen gift that Christmas. For the first time, she reciprocated smartly with a set of books by a best-selling humorist. Bertie was thrilled by her thoughtfulness.
Twelve indecisive days
The rest of their courtship played out during the twelve days in January 1923 that began with Bertie’s third proposal during a dance in the elegant foyer of Claridge’s hotel in London. The next day, she had a long talk with Lady Airlie, who felt her persuasive efforts had failed. What did concentrate Elizabeth’s mind was a false gossip item in the press implying that Elizabeth was engaged to Bertie’s older brother Edward, the Prince of Wales. She scarcely knew Edward, whose playboy antics were familiar to the aristocracy and London café society.
Her diary revealed her conflicted emotions and recounted many hours of conversations with Bertie, her brothers, her mother, and her friends. She also raced around London and from one stately home to the next. She danced until dawn at glamorous balls and had her picture taken for Vogue magazine. She read, wrote letters, and knitted. But mostly she fretted. She saw Bertie only once, for tea, before they traveled together for a weekend at St. Paul’s Walden Bury, where she promised to give him her final answer.
Flipping the switch
Shortly before midnight on Sunday January 14th, after two days of talking, Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon finally said “Yes.” It had been nearly two years since Bertie’s first proposal in the very same place. Intriguingly, Elizabeth didn’t describe the denouement in her diary, although her mother filled in the blanks in a letter to her daughter May. It was almost as if Elizabeth had flipped a switch, and now she and Bertie were positively giddy with excitement. George VI and Elizabeth offers more about who said what and why, what happened to James Stuart, and how Bertie and Elizabeth’s engagement and marriage blossomed into mutual devotion and admiration—and ultimately deep love.
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