It's Honeymoon Time

One hundred years ago today, Bertie and Elizabeth--the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth--enjoyed some much-needed tranquility at the famous Polesden Lacey estate in Surrey

After the excitement of their Westminster Abbey wedding on Thursday April 26, 1923, the Duke and Duchess of York settled into a cozy routine at the opulent estate owned by Maggie Greville, a wealthy widow who had been currying favor with the royal family since the days of King Edward VII. Queen Mary enjoyed dropping by Maggie’s “delightful” honey-hued mansion, where she inspected the gilded rooms that had been created by the designers of the Ritz Hotel in London.

Diarist Chips Channon, a consummate snob, dismissed the house as “too luxurious and constipated…It cannot digest so much rich furniture, rare tapestries, buhl, and objects de vertu.” The acid-tongued American expatriate also described Maggie as “skillfully malicious.”

The illegitimate daughter of a very rich self-made brewer from Edinburgh, Maggie had parlayed her fortune into respectability by marrying one of Edward VII’s friends, Captain Ronald Greville, the good-looking but dull grandson of a duke. After Ronnie’s death in 1908, she made herself an indispensible hostess. She was a cunning social climber who could have fit comfortably into a novel by Henry James or Edith Wharton.

Maggie Greville in her prime

Everyone in the royal family adored her for her many kindnesses. During Bertie’s thirty-month courtship of Elizabeth, Maggie had played a prominent role by nudging them together at dinner parties in her Mayfair mansion. It was only natural that she would give them the use of her country house for the first week of their planned five-week honeymoon.

Elizabeth saw through Maggie’s machinations—”so shrewd, so kind, and so amusingly unkind, so sharp, such fun, so naughty,” she once observed—but Elizabeth and Bertie gladly accepted her hospitality. She described Polesden Lacey to her mother as “a delicious house & the food is too marvellous.”

They stayed in the “King’s Suite” (named in honor of Edward VII), one of seven guest rooms that boasted the unusual luxury of en suite bathrooms. On their first night, Bertie reported on his conjugal success to his trusted longtime-adviser, Louis Greig.