The Queen Mother by Lady Colin Campbell

Author:Lady Colin Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Compulsion and Abdication

There was a third woman at that skating party at Virginia Water. Her name was Wallis Simpson, but she was regarded by the others as a figure of scant profundity: window-dressing rather than someone central to the scenario. She regarded herself in the same light, for she had come along with her husband Ernest Simpson to fill out yet another one of David and Thelma’s house parties, which were always heavily weighted with Americans.

This was not only because Thelma was American, though of course that played a part. The Prince of Wales was an overt modernist who admired anything that was progressive. This meant that he was impressed with American get-up-and-go. Of how that emerging power had a can-do attitude to all aspects of life, unlike the ethos of his own country, where cautiousness and restrictiveness frequently functioned as a brake on progress.

The Duke of Windsor is on record as having said that he wanted to modernise the system. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll confirmed to me that, prior to his accession to the throne, David often bemoaned the strictures which he felt were preventing the national system from modernising and, in so doing, improving the lot of everyone, from the common man to the Royal Family. He felt that much of what he called ‘princing’ and ‘kinging’ were wastes of time and resources, and is even quoted in the Shawcross book stating that royal tours as they stood were a waste. Although he blamed the politicians for keeping the nation back, he did not spare his father and the Court from the part he believed they played. He felt they were partly responsible for the frustrating lack of progress the country was making, with their obsession with tradition and the ‘old ways’. He was always talking about how he would sweep away the old fuddy-duddies and their ossifying practices when his day came, which, as everyone expected, would be sooner rather than later.

As can be imagined, his words did not fall on deaf ears.

Unfortunately for him, David did not reserve his future political plans for those who sympathised with his objectives and attitudes. He made his intentions clear to people like Lieutenant-Commander Colin Buist, who was a fully-paid-up member of the ossifiers. This former naval classmate of his brother Bertie at Dartmouth and Osborne had gone on to become the Duke of York’s equerry. He and his wife Gladys were by this time close friends of both the Yorks, so Buist was a conduit to what was effectively an opposing camp, although David still had no idea that such a thing existed.

Had David just stopped to think, however, he would have realised that he was building up trouble for himself. Elizabeth had no appetite for modernism and would soon see, if she could not already do so, just how quaint and ridiculous she would look in this new world once David had acceded to the throne and swept away the antiquated practices which still proliferated at the Court of George V.

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