The royals - Kitty Kelley [74]
The Duke of Windsor felt outrage toward the establishment that had forced his niece to make her announcement. “The unctuous hypocritical cant and corn which has been provoked in the Times and Telegraph by Margaret’s renunciation of Townsend has been hard to take,” the Duke wrote to his wife. “The Church of England has won again but this time they caught their fly whereas I was wily enough to escape the web of an outmoded institution that has become no more than a government department….”
Many others felt profound sympathy for the Princess, and a few letters of protest were published, but the vast majority of the public accepted the sad fact that she had done the right thing in putting duty first. The church was omnipotent. “A picture has been built up in some quarters that the church started bullying a lonely girl into doing something she did not want to do,” said the Reverend Peter Gillingham, one of the Queen’s chaplains. “That is false. All the church did was to make plain what the church’s rules are.”
Embittered, Peter Townsend returned to Brussels, resigned from the Royal Air Force, and remarried a few years later. He lived in self-imposed exile in Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, and vowed never to return to England. In his autobiography he wrote that he would like his ashes scattered in France. “And if,” he concluded, “the wind, the south wind on which the swallows ride, blows them on towards England, then let it be. I shall neither know nor care.” Thirty-seven years later when he was dying of cancer, he slipped into London to have a quiet lunch with the Princess at Kensington Palace.
“It was a kind of good-bye,” said one friend who was present. Townsend, then silver haired but still handsome at seventy-seven, was suffering from stomach cancer, which he gallantly dismissed as “a little gastric disorder.” He died three years later with no regrets.
“Once a thing is behind you, you don’t look back,” he said. “Life might have been otherwise—but it wasn’t.”
The inflexibility toward divorce in royal circles had softened by then, but not the courtiers’ attitude toward that particular romance. “Quite simple, really: Duty before diddling. Country before courting,” said a former courtier. “We did what we had to do to protect the Crown, and, after that, we had to launch the first royal tour.”
After her coronation, the Queen had agreed to spend six months traveling forty thousand miles around the world to greet 750 million of her subjects who inhabited one-quarter of the earth’s surface and conducted one-third of the world’s trade. She planned to visit twelve countries, six colonies, four territories, and two dominions. She would hear 276 speeches, receive 6,770 curtsies, and shake 13,213 hands.
Eventually she would become the most traveled monarch in British history. But in 1953 her first royal tour was a stupendous undertaking that had never been attempted by any head of state. The Queen wanted to be the first, because she was determined to present herself to her subjects as something more than a figurehead.
“I want to show that the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity,” she said in her Christmas Day message from New Zealand, “but a personal and living bond between you and me.”
“That tour was a grueling, merciless trip for everyone,” recalled reporter Gwen Robyns, part of the small press contingent accompanying the Queen. “I was working for Evening News, the biggest circulation newspaper in the world at the time, and I watched the Queen every single day, every night, hourly sometimes. I can tell you that she could not have possibly survived that trip without the help of the Duke of Edinburgh.”
Highly disciplined, Elizabeth could stand for hours in the sun and ride a horse sidesaddle for miles. But interacting with people and having to make small talk with strangers for any extended period of time was a burden. She had grown up alone at Windsor Castle, spending her time with her sister, their servants, and their governess. She