George Washington's Ghost

Predictably, there were a small number of gawping bystanders, eyes agog at the sight of the King and Queen being greeted by the Lord Lieutenant of Kent and the Mayor of Sevenoaks in all their regal and civic finery. Nor had the arrival of a platoon of men in the drab green of the Rifle Brigade, forming an unsmiling, albeit somewhat low-key ring of steel around the halt and hour before the 10:17 from Charing Cross had made its unscheduled stop, gone entirely unnoticed. However, in this part of the Garden of England, none of this really ruffled the tranquility of the locals, let alone impinged upon the customary routines of village life.

For the benefit of the other passengers on the train, the guard had made an announcement respectfully requesting that ‘when this service stops at Leigh Halt, would passengers be so good as to remain in their seats and to refrain from leaning out of open windows!’

By and large, most people had respected this request.

This was, after all, England.

The King, dressed in a pin-striped blue lounge suit, his head bare, and his wife, paused and waved, smiling, to the small crowd as their bodyguards guided them unhurriedly to their car and the Rolls-Royce, accompanied by several black Land Rovers drove away to the south on the road for nearby Penshurst.

In the meantime, the train had resumed its journey to Tonbridge and the Channel ports of Ramsgate and Dover.

“Now that we’re actually almost there,” Queen Eleanor murmured to her husband, for once able to sit in the back of a car without being accompanied by two or three equerries or ladies in waiting, or a government minister or local worthy, and determined to exploit the blissful privacy while she had the chance, “do you really have no idea what the Prime Minister wants to talk to us about, Bertie?”

The King had taken his wife’s hand, as he invariably did when they were, however briefly, alone in public.

He sighed.

In point of fact, his ministers had been unusually tetchy about Eleanor’s presence at this ‘audience’. This was a thing he had found a little odd; it was not as if his views on ‘one monarchy, one partnership of King and Queen’ were in any way strange. It had, after all, been the implacable mantra of his fifteen-year reign.

His wife, still strictly speaking Her Royal Highness Princess Eleanor, the Duchess of Windsor – because his father had never believed she was of sufficiently ‘high birth’ to ever be deemed otherwise – had been ‘Queen’ from the moment of his accession, regardless of whatever all that stupid, arcane protocol mandated. If it was his destiny to have become the accidental King; he was damned if he was going to attempt to bear the burden alone!

His father, the late King had passed away in May 1962 and preparations had been well in hand for the Coronation of his surviving brother Edward; until those blasted Fenians had intervened. He still missed ‘Teddy’, with whom he had always enjoyed, much to the old King’s displeasure, cordial and very amiable brotherly relations: in hindsight, probably because on his part he had never competed with, or been in any sense a threat to his elder sibling.

‘You’re a lucky beggar, Bertie!’ Teddy had said to him wistfully only a fortnight before his death. ‘You’ve got Eleanor, the Navy, and those well-adjusted, sensible boys and girls. All I’m going to end up with is the bloody Crown, which will set off my lumbago every time I put the damned thing on, a wife who can’t stand the sight of me and two siblings who can’t wait for me to shuffle off this mortal coil!’

The King still missed his life in the Royal Navy.

He had spent twenty-three happy, fulfilling years in the Service. While his three elder brothers had led unfulfilled wastrel lives readying themselves to assume, sooner or later or never at all, the full weight of the crown he, as the youngest, practically forgotten issue – his parents had been in their early forties at the time of his birth – of the house of Hanover-Gotha-Stewart, had, almost anonymously, passed through the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in 1941, and subsequently, been regarded with such negligible filial unction that he had been permitted to marry a woman of only middling aristocratic lineage whom he actually loved. The old King had acted as if he and Eleanor no longer existed, which had allowed them to raise their family out of the public eye leaving him free to pursue what in the end, had been a brilliant career sadly cut short by the combined familial predations of age, alcohol, accidents and eventually, the murderous activities of the Irish Republican Army on Empire Day in 1962.