The royals - Kitty Kelley [57]
The Queen greeted her grandmother as always: by kissing her on both cheeks and curtsying. Queen Mary frowned and shook her head, insisting that she be the one to pay homage. Despite crippling arthritis, she dropped to the ground in a deep curtsy to her twenty-five-year-old granddaughter, who was now her sovereign. Then, standing upright, the elderly Queen chided the new Queen.
“Lilibet,” she said, “your skirts are much too short for mourning!”
After seeing her grandmother, the Queen was led to St. James’s Palace, where she made a poignant accession proclamation. “My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than that I shall always work as my father did,” she said.
At Sandringham her mother and sister waited for her, mired in their own grief. Princess Margaret had locked herself in her room, almost inconsolable. “It seems that life has stopped forever,” she told her mother. “I wonder how it can go on.” The fifty-one-year-old Queen, not yet in black, resisted wearing widow’s weeds. She returned to her room and began writing letters. She knew that she was now consigned to the role of Queen Dowager, a title that made her shudder. Ignoring protocol, she insisted on being called Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Her biographer, Penelope Mortimer, suggested that she had devised the title because she could not cope with the sudden demotion she suffered from her husband’s death. “In this way,” wrote Mortimer, “she managed to be called ‘Queen’ twice over.”*
Almost forgotten inside the big, hushed house at Sandringham was the King’s three-year-old grandson, Charles, who was playing by himself, sliding a green toy crocodile up and down the great mahogany staircase.
“What happened, nanny? What happened?” he asked his nurse, Helen Lightbody.
“Grandpa’s gone to sleep forever,” she said, bowing to the bewildered little boy, who was now Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Great Steward of Scotland. As heir apparent, he now outranked his father. Nanny took her royal charge by the hand and led him to bed for his nap.
Upstairs, the King’s body was moved from his bedroom to the small family church of St. Mary Magdalene, where it was guarded around the clock by his estate workers, who wore the same green tweed knickerbocker suits they wore when hunting with their King. They laid his royal purple standard over the coffin they had built that morning from Sandringham oak. Next to it they placed a white wreath from Winston Churchill. In his own hand, the Prime Minister had written: “For Valour.” The Queen’s flowers for her father arrived soon after and were placed on top of the coffin with her card: “To darling Papa from your sorrowing Lilibet.” When she curtsied to her father’s body at the funeral, it was the last curtsy she ever made.
Historians assessed the King as an important symbolic leader for the British during World War II, but they noted that his reign marked the end of the British empire. No longer King and Emperor, George VI was reduced to head of the Commonwealth of Nations and sadly watched Great Britain evolve into a welfare state. But France’s Ambassador said the King had left his daughter “a throne more stable than England has known almost her entire history.” To his countrymen the King remained a hero worthy of homage, a sovereign deserving respect. Soldiers wore black armbands after his death, and people contributed money for a memorial fund. Parliament voted $168,000 to pay for an elaborate state funeral on February 16, 1952, which included spreading purple cloth on the pavements so the white nylon ropes binding the King’s coffin to the catafalque would not touch the ground.
On that day, two minutes of absolute silence were observed in memory of the monarch. A man, who defiantly slapped his feet on the street, was arrested for insulting behavior. Crowds of angry Britons mobbed