The royals - Kitty Kelley [49]
“Before we do this operation, we’ve got to cut down on the smoking,” said James Learmonth, England’s top expert on vascular disease. Learmonth did not have the nerve to tell his sovereign that he was killing himself with cigarettes, but by then nicotine had become the Windsor family curse: Queen Mary, the Duke of Windsor, and Princess Margaret were all addicted, and even the Queen smoked eight cigarettes a day, although never in public.
In addition to lung cancer, the King also suffered from arteriosclerosis, which caused him painful leg cramps. In 1949 he underwent lumbar surgery to relieve the pain and prevent gangrene, which would have meant amputating both his legs. Cardiac complications so weakened him that he had to curtail his schedule and postpone the royal tour of Australia and New Zealand.
The Queen wanted to hide her husband’s illness, so she began applying makeup to his face to camouflage his pallor during public appearances. Each time she rouged his sunken, wan cheeks, she cursed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “None of this would have happened,” she said, “if Wallis hadn’t blown in from Baltimore!” On her orders, the Palace denied that the King was camouflaging his ill health with cosmetics.
The Queen possessed the most engaging personality of the royal family. She usually demonstrated intelligence and forgiveness. But since the abdication in 1936, she remained implacable in her animosity toward the Windsors. Now, filled with bitterness, she blamed them for leaching life away from her husband. “If only Bertie hadn’t had to worry so much during the war,” she wrote in a letter, bemoaning the abdication that put her husband on the throne. “If only he hadn’t had to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.” In her mind, and that of her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, the cause of the King’s alarming deterioration was directly attributable to “that damnable Simpson woman.”
Distracted by her husband’s failing health, the Queen did not pay close attention to a letter she received from Ladies’ Home Journal, soliciting her comments and corrections on excerpts from a manuscript entitled The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford. She was stunned to learn that her children’s governess was publishing a memoir about her seventeen years of royal service. The Scottish schoolmarm, who retired in 1949, said she had postponed marriage until she was forty years old to take care of the Queen’s children. The governess said she waited until Lilibet, twenty-three, and Margaret Rose, nineteen, no longer needed her on a daily basis. Only then did she decide that she could in good conscience accept Retired Major George Buthlay’s proposal of marriage. The royal family did not rejoice. In fact, Queen Mary was horrified.
“My dear child, you can’t leave them,” she told Crawfie. “You simply cannot.”
The Queen, too, was appalled by Crawfie’s intentions, especially when she said she was going to be married three months before the royal wedding. The Queen, whom Crawfie described in her book as “always sweet,” “usually charming,” and “unfailingly pleasant,” stared at her coldly. After a moment of stony silence, the Queen recovered her composure.
“You must see, Crawfie,” she said, “that this would not be at all convenient just now.” Her dulcet tone had hardened into the sound of a woman discovering a dog’s mess in the middle of her living room floor.
The King, who usually agreed with his mother and his wife, flew into an imperial rage. Only when Crawfie promised to stay through the royal wedding was he pacified. He agreed then to make her a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. This honor, established by Queen Victoria in 1896 for members of the royal household who had rendered extraordinary personal service to the sovereign, was not good enough for Crawfie, or so the Queen maintained. She said the governess had expected to receive the highest household honor—Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, which truly separated the upstairs from the downstairs. Because she didn’t