The royals - Kitty Kelley [17]
Walking through bomb damage, she always wore her hat and her jewels. When asked if it was appropriate for her to wear her best dress while visiting the bomb-stricken areas, she smiled. “Of course,” she said. “They would wear their best dresses if they were coming to see me.”
She, in turn, despised Germans and declared she would shoot them before ever surrendering. Having watched the sorry parade of fallen kings and queens limping into London after their countries had been invaded, she vowed to defend herself and her crown. So she started taking revolver lessons every morning and insisted the King do likewise. “I shall not go down like the others,” she declared.
She and the King became incensed by the Windsors’ public admiration of Hitler. In April 1941, the Duke was reported as saying, “It would be very ill-advised of America to enter the war against Germany as Europe was finished anyway.” The Duchess agreed. “If the U.S. entered the war, this country would go to history as the greatest sucker of all times.” Then the Duke told the editor of the U.S. magazine Liberty, “… it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler was overthrown.”
The Queen became more irate after seeing newsreel footage of the Duchess of Windsor traveling by luxury liner while people in England stood in freezing queues to collect morsels of fresh fish and bread. With her hand-tooled Hermès handbags, the Duchess traveled in high style during the war. She wore emeralds as big as eggs and enough furs to carpet a room, while war-rationed Britons mended old coats to stay warm. The Queen became especially agitated by a newspaper story about the Duchess flying first class from the Bahamas to New York just to get her hair done.
The Queen had demonstrated stout resolve in facing other obstacles in the past; the most pressing was her inability to get pregnant during the months after her wedding. The fertility problem stemmed from the “nervousness” that afflicted her husband, producing his debilitating stutter, distracting twitches, rickety legs, and bleeding ulcers. Most disturbing to the new bride was his inability to impregnate her. This was a disorder he shared with his older brother. When the Duchess of Windsor was asked why she had no children with her husband, she joked about the disability: “The Duke is not heir-conditioned.”
Neither was his brother. For two barren years the Duchess of York was unable to conceive. She consulted several gynecologists and obstetricians about the problem. Finally, on the advice of her doctor, Lane Roberts, she and her husband submitted to the unorthodox science of artificial insemination which had been perfected by British fertility experts in 1866. The arduous procedure of mechanically injecting his sperm into her uterus finally enabled her to get pregnant. Only because of this manual fertilization was she able to produce her first child, Elizabeth, in 1926, and her second, Margaret Rose, in 1930. The only comment recorded from her doctors after the birth of Elizabeth referred to the delivery by cesarean section: “A certain line of treatment was successfully adopted.” Beyond that, the deferential British press did not report that the future Queen of England was a product of artificial insemination. “This was well-known in our circles at the time,” said a royal family friend whose mother was a goddaughter of Queen Victoria. “My mother and the Duchess of York talked about it because they shared the same gynecologist…. The Duke had a slight… problem… with… a… his ‘willy.’…” Another aristocrat, the 8th Earl of Arran, discussed the fertility procedure used by the Duke and Duchess of York. “It was over lunch at the Beefsteak Club,” recalled