The King's Speech - Mark Logue [6]
In the eleven years since his arrival on the boat from Australia, Logue, from his rented room in Harley Street, in the heart of the British medical establishment, had become one of the most prominent figures in the emerging field of speech therapy. For much of that time he had been helping the then Duke of York tackle his speech impediment.
For the past month they had been preparing for the great day, rehearsing over and over again the time-honoured responses that the King would have to give in the Abbey. In the years they had worked together, whether at Logue’s little surgery, at Sandringham, Windsor or Buckingham Palace, they had developed a system. First Logue would study the text, spotting any words that might trip the King up, such as those that began with a hard ‘k’ or ‘g’ sound or perhaps with repeated consonants, and wherever possible, replace them with something else. Logue would then mark up the text with suggested breathing points, and the King would start practising, again and again, until he got it right – often becoming extremely frustrated in the process.
But there could be no tampering with the words of the coronation service. This was the real test – and it was about to begin.
The various princes and princesses, both British and foreign, had started to be shown to their places at 10.15 a.m. Then came the King’s mother, walking to the stately music of the official Coronation March, followed by the various state representations and then the Queen, her marvellous train carried by her six ladies-in-waiting.
‘A fanfare of trumpets, and the King’s procession was soon advancing, a blaze of gold and crimson,’ wrote Logue in the diary in which he was to record much of his life in Britain. ‘And at the end the man whom I had served for 10 years, with all my heart and soul comes, as he advances slowly towards us, looking rather pale, but every inch a King. My heart creeps up into my throat, as I realise that this man whom I serve, is to be made King of England.’
As Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, led the coronation service, Logue was listening probably more intently than anyone else present in the Abbey, even though the toothache from which he was suffering kept threatening to distract him. The King seemed nervous to him at the beginning, and Logue’s heart missed a beat when he started the oath, but on the whole he spoke well. When it was all over, Logue was jubilant: ‘The King spoke with a beautiful inflexion,’ he told a journalist.
In fact, given the pressure the King was under, it was a wonder he had spoken his words so clearly: while holding the book with the form of service for him to read, the Archbishop had inadvertently covered the words of the Oath with his thumb. Nor was that the only mishap: when the Lord Great Chamberlain started to dress the King in his robes, his hands were shaking so much he nearly put the hilt of the sword under the King’s chin rather attaching it to the belt, where it should have been. And then, as the King sat up from the Coronation Chair, a bishop trod on his robe, almost causing him to fall over until the King ordered him pretty sharply to get off it.
Such hitches were an inevitable accompaniment to a British coronation; one of the King’s main preoccupations was that Lang wouldn’t put the crown on back to front, as had happened in the past, and so he had arranged that a small line of thin red cotton be inserted under one of the principal jewels at the front. Some over-zealous person had obviously removed it in the meantime, and the King was never quite sure it was the right way round. Coronations of earlier monarchs had bordered on farce: George III’s in 1761 was held up for three hours after the sword of state went missing, while his son and successor George IV’s was overshadowed by his row with his estranged and hated wife, Caroline of Brunswick, who had to be forcibly