Managing a Formidable Mother-in-Law

As the Duchess of York, Elizabeth had a deft touch with Queen Mary

The Duke and Duchess of York with Queen Mary at Balmoral-Popperfoto/Getty Images

No mother-in-law jokes capture the delicate relations within the royal family. After marrying Bertie, the Duke of York, on April 26, 1923,  the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon lacked a royal playbook on how to deal with her husband’s formidable mother, Queen Mary.  But by dint of confidence and pluck, flattery and subtle resistance, Elizabeth navigated some tricky territory that included the matriarch’s ordering her to help strip moss from gravestones near the royal family’s Scottish estate at Balmoral.

The evolution of their relationship played out in the diaries and letters I read at the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle. Throughout Bertie’s thirty-month courtship of Elizabeth, Queen Mary had been pulling strings behind the scenes. She wanted the marriage to happen, and showed exasperation when Elizabeth twice turned down Bertie’s  proposals. 

Ten days after he asked for her hand the first time, Queen Mary used a trusted intermediary to summon Elizabeth to meet her at Buckingham Palace, although there’s no record of what may or may not have been said. Two months after Elizabeth’s second rejection a year later, Queen Mary wrote to Elizabeth’s mother, Lady Strathmore, who was about to have abdominal surgery.  The imperious queen expressed her great disappointment that the “little romance” had ended, and she couldn’t resist playing the guilt card, saying “I hope you and E. will not reproach yourselves  in any way. No one can help their feelings & it was far better to be honest.”

Once Elizabeth said “yes” to Bertie’s third proposal (after delaying her response for twelve days), Queen Mary showered her with praise and precious gifts—starting with a sunburst diamond brooch pendant—and she invited Elizabeth’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, for a weekend at the King’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk. “We are simply enchanted with your darling little Elizabeth,” she wrote to Cecilia Strathmore afterward.

But Queen Mary’s savvy lady-in-waiting Joan Verney summed up the situation in a letter to another lady-in-waiting, Mabell Airlie: “I can’t tell you how sorry I am for the parents. I don’t believe they had really the least realised before coming here how different things really are & that gild the lily as you may she will be royal now.