December 18: Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth the Queen Mother
Today we have a treat from historian and author Gareth Russell. Gareth's new book is "Do Let’s Have Another Drink" a biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (d. 2002) and he's sharing this Anne Boleyn-linked excerpt with us today. Thank you, Gareth!
From Do Let’s Have Another Drink, the new biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (d. 2002), by Gareth Russell
All her life, Elizabeth used affectionate terms of endearment to describe things she loved or for which she had acquired a fondness. Buckingham Palace, for instance, was “dear old BP” and Anne Boleyn, long-dead second wife of King Henry VIII, was referred to as “dear old Anne Boleyn.” Anne, of course, famously did not make it to the old stage in life. In the syntax of [the British upper classes], “dear old” means less a state of age and more an expression of affection, for something that’s always been there—or that feels that way.
In mid-July 1922, four hundred years after Anne Boleyn had made her debut at the English court, Elizabeth [then 21-year-old Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon] crossed the drawbridge to spend a few days at the Boleyns’ beautiful former home, Hever Castle, in Kent. Encircled by a moat, the castle dates from the thirteenth century, although by the time Elizabeth arrived there with her sister Mary, Lady Elphinstone, and Mary’s husband Sidney, it belonged to the Astors, the Anglo- American millionaires who once owned so much of Manhattan Island that they were nicknamed “the landlords of New York.”
Elizabeth’s hosts for the weekend were John Jacob Astor V and his wife, Lady Violet Elliot- Murray-Knynynmound (trying say that after a double gin). Elizabeth took great delight in being shown the secret door in the walls of the castle’s Morning Room, which opened to reveal “a priest hole” where the pious Waldegrave family hid on-the-run priests at a time when Catholicism was illegal in England during the late sixteenth century. From there, she was taken up the thirteen stone steps in a spiral staircase that looked exactly as they did when a young Anne Boleyn ran up and down in the 1500s. Elizabeth was shown a lock dating from Henry VIII’s reign and a hidden Catholic Oratory with an eighteenth century icon of the Virgin Mary.
Above the fireplace in the castle Library, Lady Elizabeth saw a wildly flattering portrait of the first Astor to make his riches, Johann Jakob Astor, a German emigrant who became America’s leading fur trader, then a shipping owner and property investor. She was fascinated to see a sword carried by an owner who had pledged loyalty to Bonnie Prince Charlie, the popular nickname for the Catholic prince who had returned to Britain in 1745 with an army in his unsuccessful attempt to restore his family to the throne lost by his grandfather, James II.
Supporters of the Bonnie cause were known as Jacobites and they had been particularly strong in Scotland. Like Hever’s owners at the time, Elizabeth’s ancestors had been Jacobites; they had even opened the gates of Glamis to host Bonnie Prince Charlie’s father, Prince James, during his equally futile bid for the crown. Elizabeth learned to sing Jacobite laments around the piano as a child. Once, when shown a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, the anti-monarchist general who had briefly turned Britain into a republic after he deposed Prince James’s grandfather, Elizabeth murmured, “Yes, such a difficult time for my family,” as if these were events within her living memory, rather than in the 1650s.
Elizabeth stayed in a wing jutting out of the back of Hever Castle and connected to it by a moat-spanning covered corridor. Carefully designed in a mock-Tudor style to complement the rest of the estate, it had been added on the Astors’ orders to offer their never-ending stream of weekend guests the comforts of a Billiard Room, a Music Room with fireplace, and bedrooms with all the mod cons. Elizabeth’s host, John Jacob Astor V, had been born in New York to a former Republican senator, the one-time richest man in the United States, who declared that America was no longer a place for a gentleman and emigrated to the United Kingdom. He became a naturalised British subject in 1899 and, looking for a country estate near London, bought Hever, into which he invested a huge amount of money. Sprawling out towards a fountain-sporting loggia overlooking Hever’s new man-made lake were Italian-style gardens, through which Elizabeth could walk on stone pathways to admire a lavender garden or the many pieces of ancient Roman and Greek sculpture, imported by the Astors.
Mary Spencer-Churchill, Marchioness of Blandford, was also a guest at Hever that week. Born in 1900, she was almost exactly Elizabeth’s contemporary. She had come out as a debutante at the same time, an experience that ended with her wedding to the Duke of Marlborough’s eldest son. Mary’s first child had been born in 1921 and Elizabeth felt sledgehammer pressure from friends and family to accept a proposal, set the date, get married and start a family. The Astors’ guest book for Hever contains two entries indicating that Elizabeth wandered, unknowingly, into a trap that changed her life.
Among Elizabeth and Lady Blandford’s fellow guests was 51-year-old Evelyn Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who a year earlier had returned to royal service as one of Queen Mary’s ladies-in-waiting. It seems highly unlikely that this was a coincidental invite, especially since Queen Mary herself visited the Astors the week before they hosted Elizabeth.
A few months earlier, Elizabeth had rejected a second proposal from Bertie [her future husband, George VI]. He had proposed in the immediate aftermath of his sister’s wedding, to which Elizabeth had been invited as one of the bridesmaids. Elizabeth was not one of the bride’s close friends and so the request from the Princess was likely another piece of manoeuvring by the Queen to keep Elizabeth in Bertie’s orbit. It is unclear whether Elizabeth genuinely did not realise that the royal wedding would be a prelude to another proposal or if she simply hoped to avoid it. Far less ambiguous is her distress at having to say no to Bertie for a second time. The day after he asked her, she wrote to him:
I am so terribly sorry about what happened yesterday, & feel it is all my fault, as I ought to have known. You are one of my best & most faithful friends, & have always been so nice to me—that it makes it doubly worse. I am too miserable about it, & blame myself more than I can say. If you ever feel you want a talk about things in general—I hope you will come and see me . . . I do wish this hadn’t happened. Yours, Elizabeth.
[Bertie’s mother] Queen Mary was undeterred. From her visit to [Elizabeth’s family at their castle of] Glamis in late 1921, when Elizabeth had acted as hostess while helping her mother with her battle against cancer, the Queen came away convinced that Elizabeth would be the perfect addition to the Royal Family.
