CHAPTER X
THE ‘COURAGEOUS SPIRIT of adventure that is the finest quality of youth’ earned Elizabeth’s commendation in the first Christmas broadcast of her reign. Under the circumstances, it was an ambiguous attribute.
A pragmatic Philip had been quick to separate the early frustrations of his consort’s role from his love for Elizabeth, steadying for the time being the marital ship. In her coronation broadcast, Elizabeth described to listening millions her sense of their partnership: ‘I have my husband to support me. He shares all my ideals.’ The Queen Mother had ‘screw[ed] [her]self up a good deal’ to re-enter public life and, at the end of June 1953, departed for an official tour of a new African federation created from Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.1 Only in Margaret’s case did equanimity remain a distant aspiration. With a heavy heart she accompanied her mother to southern Africa, nurturing in her breast a youthful spirit of adventure destined to be thwarted: an overwhelming longing for a war hero-turned-courtier who, before her return, had been exiled with Elizabeth’s agreement to a sinecure in Brussels.
From the King’s introspective cult of ‘us four’ emerged the same short-term beneficiary and long-term victim: Margaret. The youngest of the quartet, Margaret benefited as a child from adoring parents and an equally adoring sister. Her education was lighter even than Elizabeth’s, with no requirement to unravel constitutional complexities with Henry Marten and none of the weight of expectation Queen Mary lavished on her elder sister. As a result, her upbringing also lacked that single guiding purpose that ultimately shaped Elizabeth’s outlook and stamped her character. Margaret was both blessed and cursed in her miraculous beauty that did not appear to have been inherited from either of her pleasant-looking parents. She was charmingly decorative – and trained to be nothing more. But unlike Elizabeth she was also capricious and self-willed and required by none of her immediate family to check these shortcomings. The little girl whom her mother had extricated from the more arduous of Queen Mary’s ‘instructive amusements’ grew up intent on cherrypicking diversions: as one of her future hostesses noted, ‘she is not prepared to stick to the rules if they bore or annoy her’.2 She basked in the King’s wondering delight, shielded by the excuses that Elizabeth made for her from childhood. Then Elizabeth married, and what Lisa Sheridan had described as ‘the harmony which exists between the royal sisters’ necessarily changed, leaving Margaret, aged seventeen, alone in the palace. A letter she wrote to the American ambassador’s wife in October 1950 reveals the royal family’s pleasure in one another, even after Elizabeth’s marriage, and the rarity then of this sort of time alone: ‘It was such fun just being your family and my family! We all loved it, I can assure you, and it was so nice to be able to spend a delicious quiet talky evening with you.’3 Then the King died. Elizabeth emerged elated from her coronation; Margaret wept. To maid of honour Lady Anne Coke, she explained, ‘I’ve lost my father, and I’ve lost my sister. She will be so busy. Our lives will change.’4
Flotsam in the family shipwreck of her father’s death, Margaret clung to the familiarity of the old life. Over time she clung particularly to her father’s former equerry and deputy master of the household, Group Captain Peter Townsend, a wartime flying ace whom she met, as Elizabeth had Philip, when she was thirteen. The same year Margaret had met novelist Rebecca West. Of the young princess encountered so briefly, West concluded she possessed a ‘shrewd egotism’: ‘when she grows up people will fall in love with her as if she were not royal’.5 It was true of Peter Townsend, who fell in love with Margaret apparently heedless of complications. A sheltered and unhappy Margaret returned his feelings. In the spring of 1953, Margaret told Elizabeth. Townsend told Elizabeth’s private secretary Tommy Lascelles, whose response of cold fury was that he was ‘either mad or bad’. Elizabeth and Philip invited Margaret and Townsend for dinner the evening of Margaret’s revelation. Philip pointed out objections to the match; a sympathetic Elizabeth, for whom Townsend was associated with happy last years of ‘us four’, appeared not to commit herself either way. Unsupportive, Lascelles was equally opaque. Townsend was fifteen years older than Margaret. He was also divorced. Neither Margaret, brought up in the shadow of the abdication, nor the deeply religious Townsend appeared to conceive the scale of the difficulties they faced. A distraught Queen Mother discussed the relationship with Elizabeth, described herself as ‘quite shattered by the whole thing’, but otherwise looked away, ‘completely unapproachable and remote’ according to one of Margaret’s friends.6 Taken by surprise, itself a measure of the separate lives of the once inseparable sisters, Elizabeth asked Margaret and Townsend to wait a year. It was her own equivalent of her mother’s avoidance. The Queen Mother reflected that Elizabeth ‘minded what happened to people’, but any hope that time would bring about an easy resolution proved vain.7 A positive result of Elizabeth’s sympathy was a rekindling for the moment of the sisters’ closeness.
In this instance, however, Elizabeth could not count on Margaret’s caprice. The couple apparently took heart from the failure of any of those party to their secret to spell out to them the impossibility of their relationship, given Margaret’s proximity to the throne and Elizabeth’s position as head of a church opposed to divorcees’ remarriage. Leaving Westminster Abbey after the coronation, Margaret’s unhappiness was briefly deflected. ‘A great crowd of crowned heads, of nobles and commons – and newspapermen, British and foreign – were gathered in the Great Hall,’ Townsend remembered. ‘Princess Margaret came up to me; she looked superb, sparkling, ravishing. As we chatted she brushed a bit of fluff off my uniform. We laughed and thought no more of it…’8 But Margaret had been observed in her gesture of careless intimacy. So lightly was their secret revealed, and soon they would be forced to think much more of it. Eleven days later, ‘rumours’ appeared in the first British newspaper. The People explained as ‘quite unthinkable’ any suggestion ‘that a Royal Princess, third in line of succession to the throne, should even contemplate marriage with a man who has been through the divorce courts’ and encouraged its readers to think about this very contingency.9 In that climate of royal fever, the story caused a sensation that refused to abate, until, as Noël Coward recorded in his diary the following month, ‘everyone is clacking about it from John o’ Groats to Land’s End’.10
Theatrical impresario Emile Littler commissioned a coronation portrait of the new queen for the Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. Grace Wheatley’s congested pictorial fantasy of 1959, subsequently familiar to a generation of theatre-goers, surrounds a sun-kissed Elizabeth with people, plants and animals of the Commonwealth. It expresses a vision of an overseas role for Elizabeth that she herself shared.
In November 1953, Elizabeth and Philip departed for a five-and-a-half-month tour of the Commonwealth. An expression of the spirit of the times, the poet laureate commemorated their departure with a prayer, ‘On our Queen’s Going to Her Peoples’; he prayed for a safe return and ‘a gladness in all days and in all woes’.11 They flew to Bermuda in the Caribbean; in Jamaica they boarded SS Gothic. Through the Panama Canal they sailed to Fiji and Tonga, and onwards to New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, the Cocos Islands, then homewards via Ceylon, Aden, Uganda, Malta, Gibraltar and, on the new royal yacht Britannia, at last to London. The first circumnavigation of the globe by any monarch, this epic royal odyssey consolidated Elizabeth’s sense of herself as sovereign and demonstrated beyond any doubt her role, if she wished it, as symbolic lynchpin of the sprawling global agglomeration transitioning from Empire to Commonwealth. On the eve of departure, Lord Salisbury told the House of Lords, ‘Without the strong cement which is provided by loyalty to the Crown, it would, I believe, be only a short time before the British Commonwealth dissolved into its constituent parts.’ In the Commons, the Labour leader Clement Attlee described Elizabeth as the Commonwealth’s ‘symbol of unity’. Newspapers took their cue from a loyal parliament. ‘It may well be,’ commented one, that ‘this Royal tour [will] cement the bonds of fealty among the Queen’s lieges overseas.’12 ‘Let us recognise how immeasurable a responsibility rests upon the shoulders of our young Queen,’ Salisbury concluded, ‘for on the personal loyalties of her peoples the whole future of a free world may depend.’13
Like Archbishop Fisher’s claims at the time of the coronation, it was a considerable burden to impose on Elizabeth. The zeal of old men in predicting at the outset of her reign national revival, spiritual regeneration and Commonwealth unity as a bulwark against the threats of the Cold War both reflected and promoted widespread dizzy optimism. Such extravagant ambitions, the chimera of ‘new Elizabethanism’, underpinned the exaggerated and hagiographic response to Elizabeth herself, and proposed for her reign a programme almost certainly impossible to achieve. No evidence suggests that the modest and pragmatic Elizabeth tried, although her dedication to Commonwealth unity would survive the variable enthusiasm of governments at home and abroad and her own religious faith was central to her understanding of her role. For over a year, in a ‘courageous spirit of adventure’, Elizabeth had looked forward to her journey of more than 43,000 miles, a version of the tour twice planned for her parents and once before for herself, distracting herself at Balmoral with atlases and charts in the sad summer of 1952. Her behaviour during the tour itself suggests she was neither daunted nor deterred by ministerial puffery: in her Christmas broadcast, made at Government House in Auckland, she distanced herself from ‘the hope that my reign may mark a new Elizabethan age’, insisting that she did not feel at all like her great Tudor forebear, ‘who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores’. Henry Marten had outlined the limits of her office; she knew from long ago that the throne she inherited spanned continents – from her grandfather’s Christmas broadcasts and the wooden building blocks given to her as a birthday present by Queen Mary; from her mother’s letters from Canada, written on the brink of war, with their descriptions of remote settlements, black bears and moose, and the personal attachment of dominion subjects to their distant sovereign; from Marten’s explanation of the 1931 Statute of Westminster; from the royal family’s tour of South Africa, when Elizabeth had dedicated herself to the service of a ‘great imperial family’; from her own visits to Canada and, fleetingly, Kenya.
Her mother wrote to Elizabeth on the day of departure, ‘It must be a ghastly day for you, poor darling.’14 Like her mother as Duchess of York in 1927, Elizabeth was leaving behind Charles and Anne. For the third time, she would be separated from five-year-old Charles at Christmas. She and Philip had remained at Sandringham, finalizing plans, while Charles celebrated his fifth birthday with the Queen Mother at Windsor, but their final parting proved a strain. Elizabeth burst into tears after putting the children to bed for the last time for nearly six months on 22 November; it was a still tearful Elizabeth who, the next day, acknowledged waiting crowds at London Airport. Elizabeth almost certainly rationalized the prospect of separation as compelled by duty; that her mother anticipated its ghastliness in her letter to her suggests something of Elizabeth’s own feelings. Twice during their parents’ absence, Charles and Anne sat for Marcus Adams; photographs, including the children flanking a measuring stick to show how much they had grown, were despatched to Elizabeth and Philip overseas. At intervals parents and children spoke by ‘radio-telephone’; Elizabeth spoke to her mother, too. How much Charles and Anne missed their parents can be judged from the Queen Mother’s description of them ‘poised to snatch the receiver’ whenever she herself tried to speak to her daughter.15 Elizabeth wrote ‘family’ letters to her mother for reading aloud. Like her holiday letters to Crawfie twenty years before, these would become part of her on-tour routine; the Queen Mother called them ‘lovely “diary” letter[s]’.16 She responded with bright, lively anecdotes of the curious five-year-old and his robust and loud-voiced little sister. At Sandringham with their grandmother, Margaret and the Gloucesters, the children listened to Elizabeth’s Christmas broadcast, but the tour was a test of stamina that could not easily have accommodated them. The Daily Telegraph explained the parents’ separation from their children as ‘a real privation’: an idea of Elizabeth as a mother missing her children was interwoven into the tour’s addresses and speeches.17 At Wanganui on New Zealand’s North Island, mayor Edward Millward referred to ‘the great sacrifice you are making in the prolonged absence from your children enforced upon you by this visit.’18 Elizabeth told 600 guests at a women’s lunch in Melbourne that she and Philip were ‘greatly looking forward to seeing our children again’.19 The following day she described to her mother her excitement that she would see the children three weeks earlier than planned: they were to meet in Tobruk, in Libya.20 ‘The Queen thought it a wonderful idea, her eyes quite shining,’ wrote a friend.21 In the latest book in preparation by photographer Lisa Sheridan, Playtime at Royal Lodge, the children’s relationship with their grandmother took centre stage. Missing his parents, Sheridan’s Charles presses the Queen Mother, ‘Tell us a story, Granny, about how Mummy and Margot [Margaret] played in this garden when they were little girls.’ It was, wrote Sheridan, in text authorized by Elizabeth’s mother, ‘the story that the children are never tired of hearing’.22
Triumphs balanced the tour’s hardships, just as gentle days aboard SS Gothic offset Elizabeth’s 102 speeches and, by one calculation, 13,213 handshakes, granting husband and wife shared reprieve and rekindling the relaxed intimacy of vanished days in Malta.23 Wraparound coverage of the coronation had galvanized popular interest on a scale never to be repeated; limited television ownership made it imperative to see Elizabeth in the flesh. Turnout in Australia and New Zealand was on a vast scale. Of the million people who lined Elizabeth’s nine-mile drive through Sydney, an estimated half had slept out overnight. A million people cheered the royal arrival in Melbourne. Smaller centres saw similar levels of engagement. At Wollongong on the south coast, the crowd of 120,000 was almost double the town’s population, while 250,000 people clustered along the fifty-mile route of Elizabeth’s drive there, including a farmer who tied a cow by the roadside in a harness of red, white and blue ribbons (in a similar gesture in New Zealand, one farmer tethered sheep dyed red, white and blue within sight of the rail tracks). Greetings everywhere were rowdily affectionate, proof of the intense personal loyalty inspired by the figure of the sovereign in these dog days of Empire. New Zealand’s high commissioner referred to ‘adulation’ for Elizabeth;24 a commemorative account of the visit published in Australia described ‘a thunderous progress through thousands of miles lit to incandescence by the affection and enthusiasm of nine million devoted subjects’.25 Despite the experiences of coronation year, Elizabeth and Philip were astonished. ‘The level of adulation, you wouldn’t believe it,’ Philip commented later.26 A photographer described Elizabeth’s arrival in New Zealand as ‘like the second coming’.27 No detail was too small for rapture: the Sydney Morning Herald described the unremarkable frock Elizabeth wore to visit the Blue Mountains as ‘as blue as the Jamieson Valley... as blue as her eyes’.28
None of this went to Elizabeth’s head. ‘It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that,’ Philip said.29 For Elizabeth, no conscious decisions were necessary. Rapacious and uncritical public interest had been a feature of her life from birth. She was only six when the Tatler told its readers that, if she were old enough to have her head turned by national adulation, ‘it would have happened long ago’. Early exposure to the unremitting attention of strangers safeguarded her from egotism: an expectation, she regarded it as neither reward nor commendation. She was unlikely to forget a childhood visit with Queen Mary to a concert at the Queen’s Hall. Her grandmother had offered a fidgety Elizabeth the option of leaving early. A swift departure was indeed the outcome of Elizabeth’s hapless response: ‘Oh, no, Granny, we can’t leave before the end. Think of all the people who’ll be waiting to see us outside.’ Vulgar enjoyment of crowds smacked of actresses. Her grandmother’s stern rebuke taught Elizabeth the impropriety, as she saw it, of crowd-pleasing. Queen Mary practised public reserve, Elizabeth public humility. At her own request, her cars and trains proceeded slowly, to allow those who had travelled long distances or endured lengthy waits the best possible view of her: only fear of the car’s engine overheating prevented her chauffeur from driving at less than ten miles an hour through a thronged Sydney. Making herself visible in this way, regardless of the discomfort of high temperatures and the strain of smiling continually, was key to Elizabeth’s understanding of her purpose. ‘What’s the point in coming unless they can see me?’ she repeated.30
In her speech to the New Zealand parliament in Wellington, she echoed the familiar theme of service, linked as so often to fidelity to her father’s memory: ‘My constant prayer is that I may in some measure carry on that ideal of service of which he gave so outstanding an example’; in an equivalent speech in Canberra she announced her ‘resolve that under God I shall not only rule but serve’.31 At such moments Elizabeth brought conviction and sincerity to sentiments written for her by courtiers who, like her crown, she had inherited from her father, including her new private secretary, Michael Adeane, who had replaced Tommy Lascelles. And there were gentle reminders from close to home that ecstatic public tributes were paid to the monarch not the individual. The sovereign was a conduit for popular feeling, her mother wrote to Elizabeth in March: ‘how moving & humble-making, that one can be the vehicle through which this love for country can be expressed’.32
Instead Elizabeth learned important lessons about the physical and emotional demands of overseas tours. She was the same young woman who had found excuses to avoid sharing a tent with fellow Guides or Sea Rangers at Frogmore and whom Margery Roberts had witnessed shrink from the mayor’s touch in Brighton in 1945. Yet for nearly six months, save intervals at sea, she was continuously on view, continuously required to satisfy the expectations of those whom she knew would remember their encounter for the rest of their lives. At a children’s rally in Brisbane, a determined four-year-old broke through the security cordon to jump on Elizabeth’s lap. On this occasion a surprised Elizabeth chatted to the girl until a bodyguard removed her. Less fugacious were relentless mayoral receiving lines and the stilted small talk of unvarying civic receptions: required to initiate every conversation, Elizabeth faced a problem familiar to her great-great-great-great-grandmother, Queen Charlotte, that she ‘not only has to start the subject but commonly entirely to support it’.33 At least once her composure faltered. ‘Why is everyone so boring, boring, boring?’ she demanded of Philip tearfully.34 Elizabeth might have taken comfort from an entertainment provided early in the tour in Fiji. Fijian schoolgirls staged ‘a fairy tale in which [Elizabeth] is Fairy Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh Prince Charming’.35 It included an ode of loyalty sung to ‘Elisipeti our Queen’ and the Duke of ‘Edinibara’. The song, Elizabeth learned, followed a traditional melody; the movements of the dance, much like the pattern of her own life, had been passed down from generation to generation.
As in South Africa, there were sporadic, uncomfortable reminders of empire’s exclusions: in Australia and New Zealand the tour’s organizers made few efforts to satisfy Elizabeth’s requests to meet Aboriginal and Maori communities. And there were foreshadowings of a new world, in which local sensibilities could not be ignored, including the call by Buddhist monk Thalpawila Seelawansa that his fellow monks ‘stand outside the temples at Kandy during the Queen’s visit to Ceylon and show that they do not wish her to occupy the temple octagon unless she pays homage to the Buddha’s tooth’.36 (In the event Elizabeth did visit the Sacred Shrine at the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy without the embarrassment of a monks’ boycott, removing her shoes to do so.) As she would throughout her reign, Elizabeth used dress to woo and flatter her hosts. Included in her eight tonnes of luggage for the tour was a Hartnell gown of mimosa gold tulle with sparkling embroidery of wattle flowers, Australia’s national flower. Elizabeth wore it on her first and last evenings in Australia. It was one of her favourites, Bobo revealed. It was one of Australians’, too, and Elizabeth wore it again that winter for sittings at Buckingham Palace with Australian painter William Dargie. Dargie’s ‘Wattle Portrait’, one of the most successful of the reign, became an Australian icon. It was reproduced on the naturalization papers of a generation of Australian immigrants and displayed as a print in schools, libraries, hospitals, church halls and local, state and federal government offices across the country; the painting itself was exhibited at Sydney’s David Jones department store. Australia returned the compliment by presenting Elizabeth with a wattle flower brooch of white and yellow diamonds.
The fervour of Elizabeth’s welcome home, wrote the New Yorker’s London correspondent Mollie Panter Downes, might have encouraged an uninformed observer to conclude ‘she had returned from a voyage of six years, not six months, and that her land had been under foreign occupation in her absence’.37 A Pathé newsreel, ‘The Queen Comes Home’, showed banks of the Thames dense with crowds and the dark river pocked with little craft like a view by Canaletto, for the first appearance in British waters of the new royal yacht Britannia, carrying the royal family. Parents and children had been reunited in Libya, after a courtesy call on King Idris; together they visited Malta and Gibraltar. ‘The children are enchanting and it is so wonderful to be with them again!’ a relieved Elizabeth wrote to her mother; like her mother before her, she had worried they would not recognize her.38 Off the Isle of Wight Churchill joined the royal party: nearing home, he described the Thames to them as ‘the silver thread which runs through the history of Britain’. Seeing it as a ‘dirty commercial river’, Elizabeth concluded ‘one was looking at it in a rather too mundane way’.39 She was neither fanciful nor imaginative and she did not, she knew, regard the world in the ‘very romantic and glittering way’ of her elderly premier. But her own ‘mundane’ way was useful as well as limiting, one of her shields against adulation and flattery. Waving from the palace balcony at the end of a procession through decorated London streets in a landau drawn by six Windsor greys, Elizabeth appeared relaxed and happy. Criticism had been nugatory compared with her extraordinary success in stimulating sentimental bonds of loyalty and embodying for distant subjects a concrete understanding of royalty, in her sumptuous Hartnell evening gowns, with the sash of the Order of the Garter and magnificent jewellery, what Charles would later describe as ‘dressing up and Queening it’. In December, Labour MP Cyril Bence had questioned the expense of equipping SS Gothic; inevitably journalists criticized the cost of the new royal yacht. For the majority, Elizabeth’s tour had been a triumph, extensive coverage at home a reminder of how far across the globe British influence still stretched, and the fulsome encomium of society magazine The Queen did not provoke raised eyebrows: ‘Millions of her subjects all over the world have recently been made aware... of the sincerity with which that wonderful dedication was made in her twenty-first birthday speech at Cape Town in 1947, so selflessly implemented as her reign continues.’40 For Elizabeth, 173 days away had given her, she said, ‘visible and audible proof’ that monarchy was ‘living in the hearts of the people’.41 The Queen Mother and Margaret, who had never previously been parted from her sister for so long, hosted a welcome-home party at Royal Lodge.
The intense, idolatrous affection of coronation summer lingered yet awhile. At the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in May 1955 were new portraits of Elizabeth by Pietro Annigoni and Simon Elwes, and Terence Cuneo’s painting of the coronation. Popular and critical opinion favoured the first. This was posterity’s verdict, too, for its combination of ‘queenly dignity with youthful freshness and sincerity’, its depiction of its subject as ‘regal, natural and the essence of youthful dignity’.42
That Annigoni had revealed little of Elizabeth’s interior life beyond her evident ease with her position and the curiosity about the world glimpsed through palace windows that, in French, artist and sitter discussed together, as Elizabeth had with Laura Knight, did not provoke comment. Elizabeth’s inscrutability, giving nothing of herself away, was not yet established as a given; for a still deferential society hauteur was part of the royal condition. Elizabeth herself admired Annigoni’s picture, content that it play its part in shaping public perceptions. In the year since her return, the qualities of detachment and regal self-containment highlighted by the Florentine portraitist had shaped her behaviour twice over.
Irresolution had awaited Elizabeth on that cold May morning in 1954, when Britannia passed through Tower Bridge and bunting fluttered on barges and the royal aunts lined up to greet her. Unresolved were Margaret’s romantic dilemma and a question over the future of the ailing and aged Churchill, contentious issues at the heart of Elizabeth’s family and her government. Elizabeth did not initiate the unravelling of either; in each case ideas of her wellbeing were invoked. Churchill left office in April 1955; at the end of October Margaret renounced Peter Townsend. Both decisions were overdue. In each case, Elizabeth might have acted decisively or sooner to precipitate the necessary closure.
Churchill had suffered a stroke in June 1953, three weeks after the coronation. Secretly Jock Colville, once Elizabeth’s private secretary, now Churchill’s, informed the palace. If, as expected, Churchill had died, Elizabeth’s right was to choose the candidate to succeed him to ensure continuity of government. Instead, against the odds, Churchill rallied. Elizabeth invited the Churchills to spend their forty-fifth wedding anniversary with her at Doncaster races; she invited them to Balmoral afterwards. Kindly overtures were not an endorsement of her faith in his continuing ability, although they could be construed as such; as much as his cabinet and his doctors, Elizabeth expected Churchill’s resignation, even if, on a personal level, she did not wish it. No resignation was forthcoming. With Elizabeth’s departure in November, Churchill postponed any relinquishing of power until her return. She returned, and he did not resign. Early in 1955, cabinet hostility appeared to force his hand; he made up his mind, wavered, then resigned on 5 April. ‘I’ve had my turn – a good turn. I can’t keep others waiting about for ever,’ he told Violet Bonham Carter with partial conviction.43 Sincerely Elizabeth conveyed ‘the greatest personal regrets’; Michael Adeane wrote on her behalf that ‘she would especially miss the weekly audiences which she had found so instructive and, if one can say so of state matters, so entertaining’.44 His resignation accepted, Churchill declined to recommend a successor, mindful of constitutional proprieties and the prerogative right that belonged to Elizabeth, not the outgoing prime minister, of nominating a new leader. Elizabeth ‘chose’ foreign secretary Anthony Eden, in line with assumptions within the Conservative Party, as well as those of Eden himself and indeed Churchill (Eden had described himself as the party’s ‘crown prince’, while Churchill labelled him his ‘Princess Elizabeth’). It was another instance of Elizabeth’s compliance with expectation. The royal line was unassertive and, in its predictability, non-interventionist. It appeared to express no view of matters on Elizabeth’s part: instead it legitimized assumptions made by those more closely involved. Elizabeth had exercised her prerogative power with the same apparent detachment with which Annigoni’s Elizabeth stares beyond the canvas, a butterfly touch whose lightness might in future spark questions about the need for her involvement. A courtier of the time described her as ‘a person who accepts what has to be done with so little question’.45 Ideally suited to the limitations of smoothly functioning constitutional monarchy, it is an approach liable to falter in a crisis.
On his last night in office, Churchill hosted a farewell dinner for the sovereign with whom, Colville claimed, he was ‘madly in love’. Photographs taken at the end of the evening show a genial premier escorting Elizabeth to her waiting car. His expression is avuncular, admiring, affectionate. He had told her that ‘never have the august duties which fall upon the British monarchy been discharged with more devotion than in the brilliant opening of Your Majesty’s reign’.46 From the outset, Elizabeth had visibly embraced devotion to her ‘august duties’: neither she nor those closest to her had countenanced an alternative. It was the path she would tread for seven decades. Her understanding of those duties was traceable to the fearful embarrassment that, in the wake of the abdication, shook both her father and the whole royal apparatus.
Were memories of the abdication at the forefront of Elizabeth’s mind in the slow unravelling of Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend? Certainly those closest to her who opposed the marriage, beginning with Tommy Lascelles, invoked that dread spectre, albeit with careful obliquity; Lascelles wrote to both Elizabeth and Margaret of the possibility of Commonwealth governments’ hostility. Margaret can be forgiven if she failed to take fully seriously warnings of opposition. All her life, she had overturned unpleasantness through charm and what Queen Mary called her ‘espièglerie’ or roguishness; twenty-three is a late age at which to learn the inevitability of thwarting. If Elizabeth had hoped that Townsend’s overseas posting would lessen either Margaret’s attachment or press fascination, she was mistaken. Attention focused on Margaret’s twenty-fifth birthday in August 1955. It was the age at which she could marry without Elizabeth’s agreement, according to the terms of the 1772 Royal Marriages Act. As the anniversary approached, the Queen Mother forced herself to discuss matters with her headstrong daughter. ‘I feel such a deep sense of responsibility as your only living parent,’ she wrote to Margaret. Margaret almost apologized for ‘hav[ing] blown up at intervals when we’ve discussed the situation’.47 She told Anthony Eden that she would finalize any decision only after Townsend’s return from Brussels in October and in the meantime would remain at Balmoral, valued by the royal family for its ‘soul-refreshing quality’, where a clamorous posse of up to 300 journalists maintained a mawkish, sometimes sanctimonious vigil.48 Eden and his wife Clarissa – ironically his second wife, following a divorce in which, like Townsend, he was the innocent party – travelled to Balmoral in October. Elizabeth and Philip discussed the princess’s predicament with the prime minister, discussions that would inform a later conversation between Elizabeth, Philip and Margaret that left Margaret ‘in great distress’ and almost certainly impacted on her final decision.49 Elizabeth’s distress may well have equalled Margaret’s. She remained devoted to her sister and had been determined ‘that nobody should influence [Margaret] over her decision, and that she should be free to make up her own mind’.50 As Establishment opposition to the marriage coalesced, it seems likely that Elizabeth’s conviction grew that Margaret would resolve for herself in the only way permissible the conflict between personal fulfilment and the dictates of duty. It was an assumption based on the closeness of the sisters’ shared upbringing and Elizabeth’s belief that both had absorbed similar lessons from their parents’ example.
Margaret and Peter Townsend were reunited at Clarence House on 24 October, Margaret still shaken by her conversation with Elizabeth and Philip at Windsor the day before. They knew now that the cabinet would not support their marriage: Margaret’s only option was to renounce her royal status, including her place in the line of succession and her Civil List income. Afterwards both were at pains to stress that their decision was mutual; together they wrote the statement that Margaret released to the press on 31 October. The interval between its writing and public release confirmed their certainty that their decision was the right one; Margaret wrote to a sympathetic Toni de Bellaigue that the outcome was of God’s ordaining.51 Publicly, she explained her decision: she was ‘mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth’.
To Elizabeth, the outcome could only have come as a relief. On a personal level, in stating her willingness to put duty first, Margaret appeared to validate the beliefs that were cornerstones of Elizabeth’s existence. Her decision, which won widespread approval, also had a public dimension. As the crisis gathered pace, a stentorian Times had described Elizabeth as the ‘universal representative in whom her people see their better selves reflected’; it had insisted that Elizabeth’s family had a part to play in a popular ideal of family life. It was, said the Daily Mirror, a ‘bullying ultimatum’ from ‘a dusty world and a forgotten age’, but Margaret played her part, hostage to the legacy of the royal sisters’ assiduously publicized happy childhood: Marcus Adams’s sfumato vision of the devotedness of ‘us four’, the winsome domesticity of Lisa Sheridan’s photographs of Royal Lodge and Y Bwthyn Bach. Elizabeth was enabled to continue to reflect the ‘better selves’ of her people.52 Margaret paid a high price for her proximity to the throne: in the event, five years of what she described as ‘travell[ing] unhappily, bumping about’ until she married in 1960.53 Elizabeth would not always be so well served by her family. In the meantime, Margaret ensured that her sister did not forget the sacrifice made on her behalf: sniping rudenesses, omissions interpretable as snubs. Her nemesis Tommy Lascelles claimed she became ‘selfish and hard and wild’.54
In an emerald-green coat with a black astrakhan collar, Elizabeth was in Birmingham the week after Margaret’s announcement. The city was en fête. Streets along the royal procession ‘were gaily decorated with flags, bunting and garlands’. In a special detail, lampposts were topped ‘with models of galleons and jet aircraft to depict the two Elizabethan eras’.55 In Bristol the following April, where Elizabeth opened new council offices and a reservoir, the plans of local officials echoed Elizabeth I’s visit four centuries earlier. ‘Following the example of her illustrious namesake,’ reported the Illustrated London News, ‘Her Majesty... arrived in the centre of Bristol by water... The royal party landed at the Narrow Quay, where the first Queen Elizabeth had disembarked during a visit to the city in 1574.’56
The achievements of the new Elizabethans had yet to match those of England’s golden age. News that a Commonwealth expedition had successfully scaled Everest, the world’s highest mountain, had been released on coronation morning, and Elizabeth herself had captured hearts at home and across the globe. Churchill’s last premiership suggested superficial links with imperial glories, but British power globally was illusory, and the domestic economy remained fragile to the point of collapse. Yet in Birmingham on a wet November morning and in spring sunshine in the southwest, the illusion of this second age of progress held. It did not matter that Elizabeth had denied any personal connection in her Christmas broadcast in 1953; in other ways she played her part. Her new private secretary, Martin Charteris, described as ‘just what we want for Nigeria’ photographs taken by Cecil Beaton in November. Beaton had been pessimistic about the sitting. It was a cold, dull day. ‘There was not only no sunshine filtering through the windows to give a lift to the scene, but there was an ugly foggy pall coming into the Palace rooms,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘The Queen brought no sunshine with her... In the cold afternoon light the Queen looked cold. Her complexion extremely white – her hands somewhat pink. She did not look her best.’57 He photographed Elizabeth in three-quarters profile, wearing her coronation necklace and earrings, the George IV diamond diadem, Garter sash and family orders, in a chair of state in the palace ballroom. The photograph was released the day of Elizabeth and Philip’s departure for Nigeria in January 1956. It was an appropriately ‘royal’ image for a tour in which, it had been announced, ‘at ceremonies which the Queen attends on foot... a standard bearer will walk immediately behind her carrying a silk standard’.58 There were visual affinities between Beaton’s portrait and images of an elderly Queen Victoria, and the presence of a uniformed bearer carrying the royal standard brought to Nigerian garden parties the bright flummery of the coronation. But the world had changed since Victoria’s reign. At the Oji River Leper Settlement, where, Victoria-like, Elizabeth was greeted with a traditional welcome, ‘Our Mother is coming’, she shook hands with Nigerian lepers who had been cured.59 ‘We cannot express enough our joy and happiness at seeing you here,’ one of them, John Aguh, told her. Elizabeth shaking hands was a progressive, modern gesture that contributed to changing attitudes about this contagious and frightening disease, and she and Philip also each financially adopted a leper child. But there was no suggestion, as in centuries past, that Elizabeth’s touch could cure. Nor would her nominal leadership, despite her qualities of dedication and personal grace, halt the decline in British fortunes at home or overseas. The Daily Mail had suggested at the time of the coronation that ‘with Elizabeth as our guiding star... there is every prospect that this island and its sister countries will go forward into a future better even than the best of the past’, but by instinct as well as training Elizabeth inclined not to guide but to follow.60
Elizabeth flew to Corsica shortly after her return from west Africa. She went to join Philip, busy on fleet exercises in the Mediterranean, for a week-long cruise of appalling weather on Britannia. As in their Malta days, she did not take with her Charles and Anne. In their place was her nineteen-year-old cousin, Philip’s first cousin once removed, Princess Alexandra of Kent. Alexandra would become one of Elizabeth’s closest friends in the royal family. Rumour of the sort that clung to Philip through the second half of the 1950s would claim, without proof, that she played a part in Philip’s life, too.