George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy By Sally Bedell Smith
Random House 2023

“Show me a man who gets all misty-eyed about the perfection of his home life,” said a crusty old Boston cleric half a century ago, “and sure as I’m standing here I’ll show you a liar.” This may have seemed like a fairly heady pronouncement, particularly coming from a man whose own vow of celibacy had always seemed so improbable, but its suspicion of familial piety is easy to understand. It’s especially when writers are yarning on and on about how blissful the domestic lives of their subjects were that you can most clearly hear the sound of hurled crockery.

Hence the sense of guarded alarm when approaching Sally Bedell Smith’s new book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy. On one very demotic level, the claim of that subtitle might be true; the monarchy as an institution had been rocked to its foundations by the fact that King Edward VIII had abdicated so he could marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. In terms of public perception, the accession to the throne of a solid family man like George VI – a mild demeanor, a beaming wife, two lovely daughters – probably did in some way ‘save’ the monarchy. 

Certainly the royal family knew this and marketed it for all it was worth. The danger for historians – and especially the specific subspecies typically characterized as “royal watchers” – is to buy into that marketing. Back in 1985, Christopher Warwick could write in his book King George Vi & Queen Elizabeth could write about the then-Duke (“Bertie” to his family) and Duchess (Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon) of York expecting their second child in 1930: “They were, of course, already well established in the nation’s affections as public figures, and their home life could hardly have been more harmonious.”

This is very much “royal watcher” language. Warwick had no documentation attesting to that “could hardly have been more harmonious” business, nor was he in a position to know it personally – it’s the marketing, regurgitated as history. And that marketing, now lodged under a thick patina of nostalgia, is alive and present throughout Smith’s book, which is twice as long as Warwick’s but not substantially different from it in its main contention: that the marriage and family life of George VI and Elizabeth (before and after their accession) genuinely was the wholesome miracle of the marketing. If George VI was petty and emotionally frigid, and if Elizabeth was originally in love with Edward VIII and was bundled into the winner’s box for the good of the Firm, well, readers won’t find much hint of it in these pages. 

The key saving grace of such a reality is that the marketing makes a very good story – and Smith is a first-rate storyteller. And stories – unlike family histories – can have guiding morals, larger lessons. In Warwick’s book, for instance, the marriage and family life become a prelude to the long and storied life of the Queen Mother. In Smith’s book, the target is the sterling character of the late Queen Elizabeth II. According to Smith, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth “imparted their values and sense of duty” to the young woman who would succeed them in 1952. “As Queen Elizabeth II,” Smith writes, “she became the longest-reigning monarch in British history and arguably the most popular.” That might be very arguable, but in any case the reader of the second half of this book won’t go more than three pages without a warming mention of service or duty or some such. “Crucial to the marriage of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were the qualities of duty and service they exemplified,” Smith writes, “especially during Britain’s ordeal in World War II.” 

Just like all her “royal watcher” predecessors, Smith is often willing to infer when she can’t instruct. She presents the couple out of the marketing, the moral opposite of the louche demimonde of Edward VIII (“David” to his family), and then, from the purchase of that construction, she’s free to write what that marketing couple would do in any given situation. “When Bertie and Elizabeth heard that David had lied to the King about his affair with Mrs. Simpson, they were incensed,” we’re told, for instance, and the notes for the chapter offer no source. It’s likely, but it’s extrapolation. 

Readers of books about the consistently secretive House of Windsor (including Smith’s excellent biography of Prince Charles) will already be familiar with that kind of extrapolation, and they’ll probably know how good a job Smith makes of it. To the extent that a mostly-happy family makes for page-turning reading, George VI and Elizabeth will absolutely please. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.