The Duke of York, or Bertie as he was known, afflicted with a bad stammer and frail of health, did not want to shoulder the responsibility of kingship. He did not believe he was up to it. He had not been trained for it, he complained. A number of senior government advisers agreed and, when it became clear that a new king was going to have to be found, there was a serious suggestion, recorded in 1947 ‘by gracious permission of His Majesty the King’, by Dermot Morrah, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, that the crown should go to his younger brother, the sexually adventurous Duke of Kent.

‘This is absolutely desperate,’ Bertie cried to his cousin, the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma. ‘I’ve never even seen a State paper.’ (Another cousin, Nicholas II, expressed the same sentiments in noticeably similar words when the imperial crown of Russia came to him: ‘What’s going to happen to me? I’m not prepared to be a czar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.’) The only real solution to the crisis threatening to engulf the House of Windsor was to pass the crown to the next in line, however reluctant he might be to accept it. Some order had to be made of the chaos David’s ill-considered affair had caused.

When the news was broken to Bertie by his mother that the uncrowned Edward VIII had done the unthinkable and abdicated the throne in December and passed his responsibilities to him, he recalled, ‘I broke down and sobbed like a child.’ The Queen was highly embarrassed by this display of weakness in yet another of her sons. ‘Really!’ she was heard to complain in the middle of the crisis. ‘This might be Rumania.’

The Duchess of York had not been quite the support she might have been as events moved towards their denouement. As the abdication approached, she retired to bed ill. Faced with a situation from which there was no retreat, however, the new Queen Consort showed her mettle. She had not wanted to be Queen, but when the role was thrust upon her she assumed its mantle with grace and natural poise. When the news came through, Margaret turned to her sister in the nursery at 145 Piccadilly and asked, ‘Does that mean you will have to be the next Queen?’

‘Yes, some day,’ the ten-year-old Elizabeth gravely replied.

Back came the riposte: ‘Poor you.’