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She solidified her pedestal with more than seventy years of royal engagements: cutting ribbons, visiting regiments, christening ships, and laying cornerstones. That’s how she earned her keep, which eventually cost British taxpayers about $1 million a year. She waved gaily, tilted her head coquettishly, and smiled sweetly.

“Work is the rent you pay for the room you occupy on earth,” she said.

To the British, she was worth every shilling they paid to support her one butler, two drivers, two security guards, three castles, four maids, four ladies-in-waiting, eight footmen, ten servants, and fifteen stable personnel (to look after her fourteen horses).

“The Queen Mum is my love—the only one in the royal family I care about,” said artist Fleur Cowles. “I don’t know any of the others and I don’t care to.” Opening the door to her London drawing room, she pointed to a plush velvet love seat. “When Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother comes for dinner, that’s where she sits. And when she leaves, she always turns in the doorway, kicks up her heels like a chorus girl, and throws her arms in the air. It’s such a cute exit.”

The soft, cuddly appearance and sunny manner concealed layers of duplicity. Underneath the Queen Mother’s feathers was flint. Stout-hearted and tough, she protected royalty’s mystique by keeping its secrets. Throughout her life she was the warden who ensured that anything detrimental to the sweet myth was destroyed or buried forever. She had helped rescue the House of Windsor, and she intended to keep it standing. Even when she was well into her nineties she exercised enough influence to keep the British government from releasing the remaining evidence of the Windsors’ sub-rosa contacts with the Third Reich. For more than fifty years she had guarded documents that detailed the Duke of Windsor’s proposed separate peace agreement with the Nazis. She had kept sealed in the vaults of Windsor Castle all the King’s papers, including the captured German war documents that summarized the Windsors’ 1937 visit to Germany to meet with Hitler.

Within those documents were notes of a plan to return the Duke of Windsor to the throne after Germany’s conquest of Europe. In July of 1940, as he was considering the invasion of Britain, Hitler decided to kidnap the Windsors and hold them in Berlin, from where the Duke would appeal to the British people to change governments and seek peace with Germany. Once the treaty was signed, the Duke and Duchess would be restored to the throne as puppet monarchs. Although the plan was never enacted, the Windsors’ possible complicity with the Third Reich continued to taint the royal family.

The Queen Mother sailed into old age, smiling and undaunted. When she was ninety-six years old, she had hip replacement surgery. A few weeks after her hospitalization, she put on her blue silk hat, grabbed a walking stick, and visited an old age home. “I’m the oldest one here,” she told the enfeebled pensioners. She bestowed smiles and sweet words and then departed, leaving the elderly residents feeling almost blessed.

“She has tremendous charm,” said one woman. “All she says is ‘I know, I know’ and you feel rewarded. What a marvelous phrase. She changes inflection for every occasion: if she approves, she smiles and says, ‘I know. I know.’ If she’s consoling someone in grief, she pats the person’s arm and whispers, ‘I know. I know.’ ”

Few people—only her household staff and her immediate family—ever see the iron frame under the marshmallow.

“A steel hand within a velvet glove,” was how her husband’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, described her.

“She was tough and ruthless,” said historian John Grigg.

She herself agreed. “You think I am a nice person,” she once confided to a friend to whom she was speaking about the Windsors. “I’m not really a nice person.”

She had become the Crown’s most ferocious custodian, and having invested her life in the monarchy, she would protect it until her death. She became more royal