May 8 1945
Even from the private drawing room of Buckingham Palace, the jubilant pealing of bells filled the air. The war – or at least that part of it which had directly threatened London nightly for these past six years – was over; for a moment, for a night, the people could celebrate, throw off the fear, the memories of sleeping in foetid Tube stations or cowering under mesh-and-metal tables, dreading the wail of the air-raid sirens and pleading with the Lord that they lived to hear another all-clear. Tomorrow thoughts would undoubtedly turn to more pressing matters – rebuilding a war-torn nation, lending aid to the Soviets and Americans in the invasion of Japan, and the small matter of the first general election in a decade.
George VI stood at the window, regarding the glumly overcast sky and unable to keep a slight smile from his face. All that could wait until tomorrow; for today, let the people rejoice.
He turned at the sound of one of his courtiers entering the room. There was a slightly comical pause as the man made his way across the room to within earshot, and bowed.
“Your Majesty, the Home Secretary is here,” the flunky intoned.
“Ah, an unexpected pleasure,” George replied, sincere despite his jovial tone. “Show him into the-”
“No, your Majesty,” came the interruption, “Mister Attlee is here, in the palace. He is waiting at the door.” There was a graveness in the equerry’s voice that the King had neither expected nor hoped to hear; he felt his smile fade, and his good mood with it.
“Indeed? Show him in at once, please,” he managed. It must be serious, he reasoned as the courtier turned and left as quickly as protocol would allow – Attlee rarely left Whitehall if he could avoid it, with even his Commons appearances being somewhat infrequent for the holder of a Great Office of State. Rumour had it that he now spent most nights on a camp bed in his office; his agonised, limping gait made the journey back to the family home a pain-filled impossibility. It wasn’t actually just a rumour, the King knew; he had seen that bed for himself, had perched himself upon it numerous times in the past four-and-a-half years, attending meetings that existed in the shady patches on the fringes of legality when his highest-ranking ministers had deemed it necessary he know things nobody else must know about. Perhaps the truth behind those rumours explained why Attlee never seemed perturbed by them; nevertheless, George always thought it a dashed unfair way to treat a loyal minister.
So, for Attlee to come all the way to the Palace, something serious must have happened. And normally, if something serious had happened, the Prime Minister would ha-
The King actually felt his stomach knot as the full implication of that thought struck him. The Prime Minister had not been well recently, that much was an open secret in the corridors of power – and even had it not been, he had the evidence of his own eyes from that last meeting; the slackened gaze, the slight tremor of the hand, the seeming inability to comprehend the magnitude of events even at their very centre… It had reminded him of Lloyd George’s sorry state during those cold, tumultuous weeks in December ‘41 when the Americans had finally piled wholesale into the war; once the beating heart of radical Liberalism, the Welsh Wizard was gone before the daffodils bloomed the following spring. Losing him had been a blow – it had only been Attlee’s own determination to return in spite of his injuries that had saved the Home Front from complete disarray – but this, now of all times… the cruel irony beggared him.
All of this ran through the King’s mind in the few moments it took Clement Attlee to hobble into the room, cheeks blotched and brow slick from the exertion, leaning heavily on a wooden crutch.
“Your Majesty,” he called out, his raised voice carrying the rasp of exertion and embarrassment – whether at his exercised state or his need to make his voice carry, the King couldn’t say.
“Home Secretary,” George replied, crossing the room to greet him. A myriad tiny voices buzzed hornet-like in the back of his skull, chittering about Breaches Of Protocol and Centuries Of Tradition; but they had been doing that for five years, and he had long become adept at ignoring them. “Please, take a seat.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty, but no,” Attlee replied, grimacing. “I really cannot stay very long. I have come because I have… urgent news.” Even as he said this, the Home Secretary’s balance betrayed him, causing him to lurch so violently the King thought for a moment that he might be drunk. Yet no hint of inebriation could be found on his breath; likewise, behind his grimace, his eyes were clear and bright as ever.
Attlee took a moment to steel himself; he seemed to stand there before his sovereign for an age, breathing deeply, eyes closed. When he opened them again, George could see the faintest pinpricks of tears in the corners of the old man’s eyes.
“Your Majesty, the Prime Minister is dead.”
George thought he had been expecting it; but no, he realised as his stomach lurched and his knees turned to water, he had merely feared it, hoped against hope that it was not true. He lowered himself onto a nearby footstool, feeling a tremor build in his leg, heart hammering against his ribs so hard he thought one or the other about to break.
“Oh, my God,” he murmured faintly. There was a long moment where shock and grief rendered him insensible, his mind filled with nothing but sterile white fog, the stinging of tears at the back of his eyes and, under it all, a distant burning sensation that suggested he might be about to vomit. With what felt like a herculean force of will, he repressed all three; while the demands of war had certainly softened the rigid protocols that surrounded the House of Windsor, the image of a weeping monarch expelling the contents of his stomach at the feet of a member of the Privy Council would likely be a step too far.
He looked up at Attlee again; the Home Secretary seemed to swim before him for a moment, until George forced himself to see straight. The ‘stiff upper lip’ had its benefits, even if he privately loathed the term.
“How did it happen?” he asked, the slightest quiver in his voice.
“She collapsed at her desk a few minutes after we received news of the Armistice,” Attlee replied. “The doctor was sent for, but… but there was nothing to be done.”
Two identical lines of tears were running down the Home Secretary’s face now; that was what truly hammered the news home for the King. Attlee was a notorious stoic; despite the constant agony engendered by his injuries, his complaints barely rose above the occasional grunt or groan. It was said that, even when the rescuers had dug him out of the ruins of the Palace of Westminster, the first words through his cracked, dust-caked lips had been “Gentlemen, I beseech you – help the less fortunate first”. It might even be true; it certainly fit his character, though it sounded a touch too loquacious for the man George knew.
For a moment he saw again in his mind’s eye the ruins of Parliament, as it had been when he had visited it on that awful frozen dawn a week before Christmas 1940. He had been standing there, the few surviving parliamentarians clustered around him and his dear Elizabeth at his side, when the rescuers had borne out a stretcher covered in a sheet to add to the hundreds already recovered. Up until that point, the rumours flying around London said that Churchill had somehow survived the devastation, was ensconced in a bunker somewhere beneath the streets and would take to the airwaves imminently to issue another defiant broadside at the capital’s Nazi terrorisers. George hadn’t known it at the time, but that stretcher’s sad contents would prove that particular rumour heartwrenchingly incorrect.
George had wept then, amid the stench of death and dust and spent explosives, much like Attlee did now in the depths of the Palace. A photograph of the King, handkerchief raised to cover his streaming eyes, had appeared on the front page of every newspaper’s evening edition. Rothermere had written an editorial for the Mail, castigating the weakness of the sovereign and urging for ‘peace with what honour we have left’ lest Britain go the way of France and the pygmies of Vichy. George had taken some petty satisfaction in the subsequent devastation of the Viscount’s publishing empire, a nation of shopkeepers manifesting their anger through their purse.
The grief stabbed again, hotly, at his spirit, and he rose to his feet, ignoring the trembling of his calves. Attlee was trying to hide his weeping, ashamed of such weakness in the presence of royalty; George pitied him, while unable to avoid noticing how old the man looked, even for one in his sixties.
“Is there any word on a successor?” he asked. It felt disrespectful, to think of such things with the Prime Minister’s body barely cold; but even with Victory in Europe, there was still a war to fight, and this was no time for the government to lack leadership. Another voice piped up in the back of his mind, this one cold and treacherous, pointing out that he could always step into the breach himself; he slammed it back into the darkness of his hindbrain furiously. He had violated the constitution more than enough these past few years, all in the name of helping guide his country through the war; to trample it underfoot entirely, now victory was in sight, would be nothing short of tyranny. May as well put his brother back on the throne and have done with it.
Attlee, recovering himself, swallowed and turned to him. “There shall be a cabinet meeting tomorrow,” he replied, “at which the matter of a successor will be formally discussed.” He smiled thinly, with no warmth. “Between you and I, however, it is almost certain to be Morrison.”
George suppressed a grimace, years of etiquette not moving so much as a muscle in his face; there was no love lost between him and the Leader of the Labour Party – such as it still existed, squeezed between the resurgent Liberals and the insurgent Communists – but the man was Deputy Prime Minister, and having already been passed over once for the succession he had spent a long time doing his utmost to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.
“I assume there will be an… announcement of some sort regarding the… the situation.”
“Cabinet took the decision to hold off on any announcement until tomorrow.” Attlee shook his head sadly. “Disrupting the armistice celebrations… is not what she would have wanted.”
“Thank you for the information, Home Secretary,” he replied. “I think, in light of the circumstances, it would not be appropriate for me to attend on this occasion; my role as Sovereign outweighs my obligations in Cabinet.” Normally, he would have followed such a response with a joke about the Foreign Secretary’s wheelchair; but he would have made those jokes to the Prime Minister, and her absence stung his heart again.
Attlee nodded silently. “In that case, your Majesty,” he continued, “I feel I should inform you that I intend to offer my resignation as soon as the new Prime Minister is in place.”
“I see.” George found himself disheartened, but not surprised; Attlee had long said he would leave government and Parliament when the war was over, and his personal antipathy to Morrison had likely tipped his hand. “In that case, Home Secretary, may I thank you for your service and wish you all the best in your life as a private citizen.”
“Thank you, your Majesty,” replied Attlee. “It has been… my privilege to serve. And now… I must get back to Whitehall… Duty calls.”
“Farewell, Clement.”
That might have been a touch too far, George thought to himself; but there was a flash of gratitude in the old Major’s eyes as he turned and hobbled to the door.
Alone now in the chilly, ill-lit drawing room, George sat in an armchair, nothing but his thoughts for company. He saw nothing, heard nothing; only the haphazard dripping of tears on the back of his hand marked the passage of time.
The face of Eleanor Rathbone, resolute beneath her wide-brimmed hat, floated in his mind’s eye. They were in the Cabinet Room, just a few hours after that visit to the ruins of Parliament; they and the other survivors of Hitler’s monstrous assault on the Empire and her government. Parliament had sat there in its entirety that day; all told, the great table had been only two-thirds full.
“We need you, Your Majesty,” she was telling him. “Look at us – a bare handful, fated to guide this nation through its darkest hour! We need all the help we can get. Your help, specifically.”
“Me?” he had scoffed; he had felt rage on his tongue then, remembering the crisis of his brother’s abdication that had brought him to the throne in the first place. That had been controversy the like of which England had not seen since the days of James II; and here they were, begging him to become a new Charles I. “You ask me to tear down the Constitution, and with it the Kingdom itself?”
“If you do not,” came another voice from behind him, “Hitler will do it for you – and I doubt somehow he will have your best interests at heart.” The voice, mellifluous though it was, carried the grain of weariness, shock, age; when he turned, he saw David Lloyd George regarding him baldly, eyes sunken in his waxen face like the holes of a death mask.
“Your Majesty,” Rathbone had pleaded, “the Government is weakened as it is. Without you, Hitler will break us – and the war will be lost. We beseech you; do what is best.”
And he had. He had flown across the globe, meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin and the leaders of every Dominion and colony. He had visited the bombsites and the hospitals, seen the coffins coming home by train and by boat. He had fumbled his way through the constitutional quagmire, learning by trial and error how far he could push the bounds of the constitution, coming to loathe its disparate, uncodified nature.
And one unseasonally warm day in February 1942, with a nation still grieving for the Welsh Wizard and the government tottering, leaderless, he had stood in the gardens outside and turned Rathbone’s words to him back on her.
Unlike him, she had been far more ready to listen.
She hadn’t been Churchill – and wasn’t it amazing the effect that man had had, considering he was a washed-up backbencher who had held power for all of six months? – but she had been magnificent. She had finally managed to start the rebuilding of Parliament, as an institution if not a building, finally getting by-elections on some sort of schedule, and she had convinced men like Attlee and Douglas-Home to return to Cabinet in spite of their injuries.
He remembered now how, when his daughter Elizabeth had been caught in an accident at the depot where she volunteered, and confined to a wheelchair. The nation had grieved with George and his wife; but it was Eleanor who had consoled them all, pointing out that the young heir’s sacrifice was emblematic of that of all the Free World, and her courage in the face of adversity should give them all hope. She had even invited the Princess to Downing Street to meet the Cabinet; Megan Lloyd-George had given her a guided tour, explaining wittily that she was much easier to push up the myriad ramps than the oft-cantankerous Douglas-Home. Elizabeth had grown to idolise the Prime Minister, devouring her writings and speeches on everything from women's suffrage to family welfare to the plight of the Jews during her long convalescence, had even worked, unofficially, in her office for a time; George wondered to himself whether she might rather be a politician than a monarch. It had begun as a worry; now he was beginning to think it might be for the best.
And now he was remembering the liberation of Norway… And now the Baku Conference… And now… and now, and now, and now…
Beyond the walls, unknowing, the bells continued to ring out the coming of peace.
Even from the private drawing room of Buckingham Palace, the jubilant pealing of bells filled the air. The war – or at least that part of it which had directly threatened London nightly for these past six years – was over; for a moment, for a night, the people could celebrate, throw off the fear, the memories of sleeping in foetid Tube stations or cowering under mesh-and-metal tables, dreading the wail of the air-raid sirens and pleading with the Lord that they lived to hear another all-clear. Tomorrow thoughts would undoubtedly turn to more pressing matters – rebuilding a war-torn nation, lending aid to the Soviets and Americans in the invasion of Japan, and the small matter of the first general election in a decade.
George VI stood at the window, regarding the glumly overcast sky and unable to keep a slight smile from his face. All that could wait until tomorrow; for today, let the people rejoice.
He turned at the sound of one of his courtiers entering the room. There was a slightly comical pause as the man made his way across the room to within earshot, and bowed.
“Your Majesty, the Home Secretary is here,” the flunky intoned.
“Ah, an unexpected pleasure,” George replied, sincere despite his jovial tone. “Show him into the-”
“No, your Majesty,” came the interruption, “Mister Attlee is here, in the palace. He is waiting at the door.” There was a graveness in the equerry’s voice that the King had neither expected nor hoped to hear; he felt his smile fade, and his good mood with it.
“Indeed? Show him in at once, please,” he managed. It must be serious, he reasoned as the courtier turned and left as quickly as protocol would allow – Attlee rarely left Whitehall if he could avoid it, with even his Commons appearances being somewhat infrequent for the holder of a Great Office of State. Rumour had it that he now spent most nights on a camp bed in his office; his agonised, limping gait made the journey back to the family home a pain-filled impossibility. It wasn’t actually just a rumour, the King knew; he had seen that bed for himself, had perched himself upon it numerous times in the past four-and-a-half years, attending meetings that existed in the shady patches on the fringes of legality when his highest-ranking ministers had deemed it necessary he know things nobody else must know about. Perhaps the truth behind those rumours explained why Attlee never seemed perturbed by them; nevertheless, George always thought it a dashed unfair way to treat a loyal minister.
So, for Attlee to come all the way to the Palace, something serious must have happened. And normally, if something serious had happened, the Prime Minister would ha-
The King actually felt his stomach knot as the full implication of that thought struck him. The Prime Minister had not been well recently, that much was an open secret in the corridors of power – and even had it not been, he had the evidence of his own eyes from that last meeting; the slackened gaze, the slight tremor of the hand, the seeming inability to comprehend the magnitude of events even at their very centre… It had reminded him of Lloyd George’s sorry state during those cold, tumultuous weeks in December ‘41 when the Americans had finally piled wholesale into the war; once the beating heart of radical Liberalism, the Welsh Wizard was gone before the daffodils bloomed the following spring. Losing him had been a blow – it had only been Attlee’s own determination to return in spite of his injuries that had saved the Home Front from complete disarray – but this, now of all times… the cruel irony beggared him.
All of this ran through the King’s mind in the few moments it took Clement Attlee to hobble into the room, cheeks blotched and brow slick from the exertion, leaning heavily on a wooden crutch.
“Your Majesty,” he called out, his raised voice carrying the rasp of exertion and embarrassment – whether at his exercised state or his need to make his voice carry, the King couldn’t say.
“Home Secretary,” George replied, crossing the room to greet him. A myriad tiny voices buzzed hornet-like in the back of his skull, chittering about Breaches Of Protocol and Centuries Of Tradition; but they had been doing that for five years, and he had long become adept at ignoring them. “Please, take a seat.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty, but no,” Attlee replied, grimacing. “I really cannot stay very long. I have come because I have… urgent news.” Even as he said this, the Home Secretary’s balance betrayed him, causing him to lurch so violently the King thought for a moment that he might be drunk. Yet no hint of inebriation could be found on his breath; likewise, behind his grimace, his eyes were clear and bright as ever.
Attlee took a moment to steel himself; he seemed to stand there before his sovereign for an age, breathing deeply, eyes closed. When he opened them again, George could see the faintest pinpricks of tears in the corners of the old man’s eyes.
“Your Majesty, the Prime Minister is dead.”
George thought he had been expecting it; but no, he realised as his stomach lurched and his knees turned to water, he had merely feared it, hoped against hope that it was not true. He lowered himself onto a nearby footstool, feeling a tremor build in his leg, heart hammering against his ribs so hard he thought one or the other about to break.
“Oh, my God,” he murmured faintly. There was a long moment where shock and grief rendered him insensible, his mind filled with nothing but sterile white fog, the stinging of tears at the back of his eyes and, under it all, a distant burning sensation that suggested he might be about to vomit. With what felt like a herculean force of will, he repressed all three; while the demands of war had certainly softened the rigid protocols that surrounded the House of Windsor, the image of a weeping monarch expelling the contents of his stomach at the feet of a member of the Privy Council would likely be a step too far.
He looked up at Attlee again; the Home Secretary seemed to swim before him for a moment, until George forced himself to see straight. The ‘stiff upper lip’ had its benefits, even if he privately loathed the term.
“How did it happen?” he asked, the slightest quiver in his voice.
“She collapsed at her desk a few minutes after we received news of the Armistice,” Attlee replied. “The doctor was sent for, but… but there was nothing to be done.”
Two identical lines of tears were running down the Home Secretary’s face now; that was what truly hammered the news home for the King. Attlee was a notorious stoic; despite the constant agony engendered by his injuries, his complaints barely rose above the occasional grunt or groan. It was said that, even when the rescuers had dug him out of the ruins of the Palace of Westminster, the first words through his cracked, dust-caked lips had been “Gentlemen, I beseech you – help the less fortunate first”. It might even be true; it certainly fit his character, though it sounded a touch too loquacious for the man George knew.
For a moment he saw again in his mind’s eye the ruins of Parliament, as it had been when he had visited it on that awful frozen dawn a week before Christmas 1940. He had been standing there, the few surviving parliamentarians clustered around him and his dear Elizabeth at his side, when the rescuers had borne out a stretcher covered in a sheet to add to the hundreds already recovered. Up until that point, the rumours flying around London said that Churchill had somehow survived the devastation, was ensconced in a bunker somewhere beneath the streets and would take to the airwaves imminently to issue another defiant broadside at the capital’s Nazi terrorisers. George hadn’t known it at the time, but that stretcher’s sad contents would prove that particular rumour heartwrenchingly incorrect.
George had wept then, amid the stench of death and dust and spent explosives, much like Attlee did now in the depths of the Palace. A photograph of the King, handkerchief raised to cover his streaming eyes, had appeared on the front page of every newspaper’s evening edition. Rothermere had written an editorial for the Mail, castigating the weakness of the sovereign and urging for ‘peace with what honour we have left’ lest Britain go the way of France and the pygmies of Vichy. George had taken some petty satisfaction in the subsequent devastation of the Viscount’s publishing empire, a nation of shopkeepers manifesting their anger through their purse.
The grief stabbed again, hotly, at his spirit, and he rose to his feet, ignoring the trembling of his calves. Attlee was trying to hide his weeping, ashamed of such weakness in the presence of royalty; George pitied him, while unable to avoid noticing how old the man looked, even for one in his sixties.
“Is there any word on a successor?” he asked. It felt disrespectful, to think of such things with the Prime Minister’s body barely cold; but even with Victory in Europe, there was still a war to fight, and this was no time for the government to lack leadership. Another voice piped up in the back of his mind, this one cold and treacherous, pointing out that he could always step into the breach himself; he slammed it back into the darkness of his hindbrain furiously. He had violated the constitution more than enough these past few years, all in the name of helping guide his country through the war; to trample it underfoot entirely, now victory was in sight, would be nothing short of tyranny. May as well put his brother back on the throne and have done with it.
Attlee, recovering himself, swallowed and turned to him. “There shall be a cabinet meeting tomorrow,” he replied, “at which the matter of a successor will be formally discussed.” He smiled thinly, with no warmth. “Between you and I, however, it is almost certain to be Morrison.”
George suppressed a grimace, years of etiquette not moving so much as a muscle in his face; there was no love lost between him and the Leader of the Labour Party – such as it still existed, squeezed between the resurgent Liberals and the insurgent Communists – but the man was Deputy Prime Minister, and having already been passed over once for the succession he had spent a long time doing his utmost to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.
“I assume there will be an… announcement of some sort regarding the… the situation.”
“Cabinet took the decision to hold off on any announcement until tomorrow.” Attlee shook his head sadly. “Disrupting the armistice celebrations… is not what she would have wanted.”
“Thank you for the information, Home Secretary,” he replied. “I think, in light of the circumstances, it would not be appropriate for me to attend on this occasion; my role as Sovereign outweighs my obligations in Cabinet.” Normally, he would have followed such a response with a joke about the Foreign Secretary’s wheelchair; but he would have made those jokes to the Prime Minister, and her absence stung his heart again.
Attlee nodded silently. “In that case, your Majesty,” he continued, “I feel I should inform you that I intend to offer my resignation as soon as the new Prime Minister is in place.”
“I see.” George found himself disheartened, but not surprised; Attlee had long said he would leave government and Parliament when the war was over, and his personal antipathy to Morrison had likely tipped his hand. “In that case, Home Secretary, may I thank you for your service and wish you all the best in your life as a private citizen.”
“Thank you, your Majesty,” replied Attlee. “It has been… my privilege to serve. And now… I must get back to Whitehall… Duty calls.”
“Farewell, Clement.”
That might have been a touch too far, George thought to himself; but there was a flash of gratitude in the old Major’s eyes as he turned and hobbled to the door.
Alone now in the chilly, ill-lit drawing room, George sat in an armchair, nothing but his thoughts for company. He saw nothing, heard nothing; only the haphazard dripping of tears on the back of his hand marked the passage of time.
The face of Eleanor Rathbone, resolute beneath her wide-brimmed hat, floated in his mind’s eye. They were in the Cabinet Room, just a few hours after that visit to the ruins of Parliament; they and the other survivors of Hitler’s monstrous assault on the Empire and her government. Parliament had sat there in its entirety that day; all told, the great table had been only two-thirds full.
“We need you, Your Majesty,” she was telling him. “Look at us – a bare handful, fated to guide this nation through its darkest hour! We need all the help we can get. Your help, specifically.”
“Me?” he had scoffed; he had felt rage on his tongue then, remembering the crisis of his brother’s abdication that had brought him to the throne in the first place. That had been controversy the like of which England had not seen since the days of James II; and here they were, begging him to become a new Charles I. “You ask me to tear down the Constitution, and with it the Kingdom itself?”
“If you do not,” came another voice from behind him, “Hitler will do it for you – and I doubt somehow he will have your best interests at heart.” The voice, mellifluous though it was, carried the grain of weariness, shock, age; when he turned, he saw David Lloyd George regarding him baldly, eyes sunken in his waxen face like the holes of a death mask.
“Your Majesty,” Rathbone had pleaded, “the Government is weakened as it is. Without you, Hitler will break us – and the war will be lost. We beseech you; do what is best.”
And he had. He had flown across the globe, meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin and the leaders of every Dominion and colony. He had visited the bombsites and the hospitals, seen the coffins coming home by train and by boat. He had fumbled his way through the constitutional quagmire, learning by trial and error how far he could push the bounds of the constitution, coming to loathe its disparate, uncodified nature.
And one unseasonally warm day in February 1942, with a nation still grieving for the Welsh Wizard and the government tottering, leaderless, he had stood in the gardens outside and turned Rathbone’s words to him back on her.
Unlike him, she had been far more ready to listen.
She hadn’t been Churchill – and wasn’t it amazing the effect that man had had, considering he was a washed-up backbencher who had held power for all of six months? – but she had been magnificent. She had finally managed to start the rebuilding of Parliament, as an institution if not a building, finally getting by-elections on some sort of schedule, and she had convinced men like Attlee and Douglas-Home to return to Cabinet in spite of their injuries.
He remembered now how, when his daughter Elizabeth had been caught in an accident at the depot where she volunteered, and confined to a wheelchair. The nation had grieved with George and his wife; but it was Eleanor who had consoled them all, pointing out that the young heir’s sacrifice was emblematic of that of all the Free World, and her courage in the face of adversity should give them all hope. She had even invited the Princess to Downing Street to meet the Cabinet; Megan Lloyd-George had given her a guided tour, explaining wittily that she was much easier to push up the myriad ramps than the oft-cantankerous Douglas-Home. Elizabeth had grown to idolise the Prime Minister, devouring her writings and speeches on everything from women's suffrage to family welfare to the plight of the Jews during her long convalescence, had even worked, unofficially, in her office for a time; George wondered to himself whether she might rather be a politician than a monarch. It had begun as a worry; now he was beginning to think it might be for the best.
And now he was remembering the liberation of Norway… And now the Baku Conference… And now… and now, and now, and now…
Beyond the walls, unknowing, the bells continued to ring out the coming of peace.
