CHAPTER I

‘A direct descendant in the male line of our family’

THE HOUSE IN WHICH Elizabeth II was born, like many building blocks of her childhood world, has not survived. 17 Bruton Street stood part way along an otherwise unremarkable thoroughfare connecting Bond Street with Berkeley Square (quieter and more exclusive then than now). It had been the home of her kindly, conventional, family-minded, unambitious, aristocratic maternal grandparents, the 14th Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, since 1920. Its newsworthiness predated her birth. Three years earlier, on a similarly grey April day, her mother, then Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, had emerged from the tall grey house along a strip of coloured drugget to marry her moderately handsome and mostly unassuming prince, Albert Frederick Arthur George, Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killarney. Dark-painted railings onto the street held the curious at bay, holland blinds screened tall windows. It was less splendid than the family’s previous London house at 20 St James’s Square, but it was imposing enough: five storeys high, its lofty pilasters crowned by Corinthian columns, typical of the Mayfair establishments of landed families, like the unfashionable Strathmores, who lived chiefly on their estates in the country and, in 1926, retained ownership of a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s wealth.

Inside, a room had been prepared for the baby’s birth. In 1926, members of the royal family did not give birth in hospital. Royalty visited hospitals for the benefit of others: to open and inaugurate, to applaud fundraising initiatives in a pre-National Health Service Britain in which voluntary contributions built wards, bought beds, blankets and bandages and saved lives. Royal mothers gave birth at home; this occasion was no exception. Until the late discovery of the baby’s breech position that necessitated intervention by surgeon Sir Henry Simson, the pregnancy had proceeded calmly. In late autumn, the duke had informed his parents. The duchess had confirmed the appointment of a monthly nurse, Anne Beevers, on 8 January. By mid-April she had acknowledged receipt of baby clothes and quantities of the finest linen, commissions overseen by an attentive Queen Mary. Much was the work of nimble-fingered but financially distressed gentlewomen, the workforce of the Royal School of Needlework, of which the duchess was patron. Other garments were worked by the duchess herself, by her mother, by Queen Mary, homely details let slip to the press. With the nursery ready, a decision taken the preceding weekend by the King’s physician Sir Bertrand Dawson may have come as a relief: Dawson had asked the King’s permission to bring on labour early. In a letter written on 12 April, the duchess had complained of boredom, her vexation at ‘just sitting here waiting now’.¹ Three days later, she sought fleeting distraction in Archie de Bear’s RSVP, a revue at the Vaudeville Theatre. Dragonfly-like, she skimmed across life’s surface.

Then as now the birth of a royal baby prompted spikes of happiness in the national cardiogram: congratulatory telegrams from provincial mayors, colonial governors, the ‘Ruling Princes of India’.² The bulletin released by Simson and obstetrician Walter Jagger, consultant at the Samaritan Hospital for Women, that ‘Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York was safely delivered of a Princess at 2.40am this morning’, and an announcement the following morning that ‘both had an excellent night; their progress in every way is normal and satisfactory’, offered newspaper readers a distraction and editors a catalyst for syrupy outpourings. To the majority of George V’s subjects the first-born child of the Duke and Duchess of York meant no more than this. The King had four sons. He had two grandsons, following the births, in 1923 and 1924, of George and Gerald Lascelles, sons of his only daughter, Mary, Princess Royal. The monarchy did not lack heirs.

For Bertie and Elizabeth – ‘such a sweet little couple and so fond of one another’³ – their daughter’s birth represented a high-water mark in a marriage already happy. With rising impatience they had endured their three years of married childlessness. The previous August, Bertie had written to his eldest brother, the Prince of Wales, known in the family as David, ‘I still long for one thing, which you can guess.’⁴ Elizabeth’s feelings matched her husband’s. Bertie was highly strung. His nervousness and lightning flashes of temper, called his ‘gnashes’, rippled the calm surface of their marriage; Elizabeth described him gently as ‘a very nervy person’.⁵ He suspected the rumours of his infertility, attributed to childhood mumps; he inferred pressure from within the royal family, like the response of his aunt, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone: ‘I am thrilled over your news of Elizabeth’s hopes; thank God.’⁶ But his shiftlessness on the evening of 20 April, his restless, ‘very worried & anxious’ pacing about his parents-in-law’s house, was of no ordinary prompting, a reflection of more than simple devotion to his wife. As he wrote afterwards to his mother, his conviction had always been that ‘a child [would] make our happiness complete’.⁷ He would find that it did.

Did the constitutional position of their baby, who automatically found herself third in line to the throne, concern the expectant parents, as that drab April evening gave way to colourless night and reporters shuffling in the cold wrapped grateful hands around the cups of coffee sent out to them in Bruton Street? Almost certainly not. Nor would any but those of ultramontane snobbery dwell on this baby’s mixed heritage: the first legitimate baby born to the commoner wife of a king’s son in three centuries. In the aftermath of the First World War, George V’s subjects had applauded Bertie’s choice of a home-grown bride rather than a foreign princess, as Prime Minister David Lloyd George had assured the King they would.⁸ To the couple themselves the Archbishop of York had described ‘a nation happy in your joy’; the press celebrated ‘an alliance that appealed to the hearts and sympathies of every rank and class at home and beyond the seas’.⁹ Their marriage, according to the royal family’s favourite commentator, Dermot Morrah, ‘marked the [royals’] emancipation... from a tradition of political and dynastic alliances, which to many people had always been distasteful, and in the circumstances of the modern world had become manifestly out of date’.¹⁰ Instead the press made much of Scottish Elizabeth’s lofty descent from Robert the Bruce. In April 1926, it was enough that any baby of the Yorks stood in the direct line of succession. She was not born in a palace, her father was not the King’s first heir, but custom demanded the attendance at her birth of a member of the government. In 1688, prompted by spite, religious bigotry or opportunism, the future Queen Anne had chosen to believe rumours that the baby born to her father, James II, and his Catholic second wife, Mary of Modena, was not their own child but a healthy substitute smuggled into the birthing chamber in a warming pan. Ever since, the presence of a government minister at royal births had deterred skullduggery. Bertie was not alone in his nightwatch in the tall house in Bruton Street; he was joined by Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Conservative home secretary. Unlike Bertie, an exhausted Joynson-Hicks jibbed at this out-of-hours imposition. By 20 April, a long-running dispute over rates of pay and working hours between miners and mine-owners threatened industrial action on an unprecedented scale. The Yorks’ baby was born into a capital on the brink of the General Strike, in an atmosphere the right-wing press branded revolutionary: ‘an odd... unnatural atmosphere’, according to Virginia Woolf, ‘great activity but no normal life’.¹¹ Joynson-Hicks needed all his energy for struggles more pressing – and less easily resolved – than the Duchess of York’s confinement.

Like everyone else present, from the duchess down, he did his duty. While the city still slept, he informed the lord mayor of the glad tidings, a courtesy demanded by tradition. Separately messengers had conveyed the news to Windsor Castle; a telegram was despatched to the Prince of Wales at Biarritz. Queen Mary’s reaction was of ‘such... relief & joy’ when, at 4 a.m., she and the King were woken to learn that ‘darling Elizabeth had got a daughter’.¹² These were Bertie’s own feelings, as shortly he wrote to his mother; they were ‘darling Elizabeth’s’, too. Afterwards they were those of the crowd of onlookers that the Morning Post reported throughout the previous day ‘outside the big grey facade of 17 Bruton Street... oblivious of the showers of rain, waiting’.¹³ ‘The weather’, wrote novelist Arnold Bennett, ‘ha[d] been evil for a week.’¹⁴ Even at so joyful a juncture, the letter Bertie wrote to Queen Mary reveals his anxiety, shared by all of George V’s children, over the approval of his sternly undemonstrative parents. ‘I do hope that you & Papa are as delighted as we are, to have a granddaughter, or would you sooner have had another grandson.’¹⁵ On this occasion the parents shared the son’s delight. They visited son, daughter-in-law and new baby at Bruton Street on the afternoon of the baby’s birth. Their absence during labour itself was a blessing. During the Princess Royal’s first confinement in 1923, an anxious George V had ‘paced up and down, regaling [those present] with tales of the wives of his friends who had died in childbirth’.¹⁶ In her diary Queen Mary described her first granddaughter as ‘a little darling with a lovely complexion & pretty fair hair’.¹⁷ But two days passed before she wrote to Bertie of her pride in the baby, whom she labelled conventionally ‘too sweet & pretty’.¹⁸

The new parents may well have settled their choice of names before the baby’s birth, given Elizabeth’s desire for a daughter and the recent death, in December 1925, of Bertie’s much-loved grandmother, Queen Alexandra. Their wishes aligned with a sentiment voiced in the Spectator on 24 April that ‘it will be very agreeable to the nation if the child is given a characteristically English name’.¹⁹ The matter of the baby’s names required the sanction of the King rather than public endorsement. Nevertheless it was only after an interval of six days that Bertie appealed to his father. His tone was cautiously insistent: ‘I hope you will approve of these names... We are so anxious for her first name to be Elizabeth.’²⁰ The King approved. Characteristically he informed the Queen of his agreement before he replied to his son. It is unclear whether either agreed with Bertie’s romantic suggestion that ‘Elizabeth of York sounds so nice, too’ the King noted without objection the absence from the trio of names of Victoria, on which the dynasty’s long-lived matriarch had insisted for all her daughters, granddaughters and even great-granddaughters. Evidently all concerned were unaware of Queen Victoria’s view of Elizabeth as one of ‘the ugliest “housemaids” names I ever knew’.²¹ Newspapers noted ‘the initials of the new Princess are those of her mother, E A M, the name of the Duchess being Elizabeth Angela Marguerite’; they noted that three names were fewer than usual for royal babies, who typically received ‘a redundancy of Christian names’; and one provincial hack congratulated himself on his hunch, on 22 April, that ‘the choice of Elizabeth could hardly be improved’.²² The baby’s names were registered officially the following month. Mr W. R. C. Walker, the district registrar, called at Bruton Street, where the duke received him in the library, assisted by his secretary. Only a minority of papers commented on the Yorks’ choice ‘reviving in the Royal Family a name famous in the history of Britain’s Queens’.²³ Comparisons of this sort came later.

A letter written by her lady-in-waiting at Queen Mary’s instruction indicates the light in which the King and Queen regarded their newest grandchild. It reports the royal couple as ‘very much pleased with the baby and they think her very pretty’. Firmly it discounts for her the future pre-eminence the press had been so quick to confer. ‘The sex mercifully in this case does not matter,’ states the letter, and the decided tone suggests the Queen’s own voice.²⁴ Did not matter because, despite earlier confiding to Bertie her joy in ‘look[ing] forward to a direct descendant in the male line of our family’, the dynastically minded Queen Mary recognized that, as the daughter of a younger son, the baby princess was virtually certain to be supplanted by a child of the still-unmarried Prince of Wales, or a son born subsequently to her parents (the Duchess of York was only twenty-five). Happily for their peace of mind, neither the Queen nor her husband was privy to the contents of a letter the Prince of Wales wrote to his friend Piers Legh: ‘I’d have voted for a boy myself!! but they all seem very pleased.’²⁵ Nor could either yet countenance a suspicion already growing among the prince’s inner circle that he ‘would not raise his finger to save his future sceptre. In fact many of his intimate friends think he would be only too happy to renounce it.’²⁶

Queen Mary’s emphatic ‘mercifully’ suggests her relief at the likelihood of the baby escaping the burden of a throne. The little princess inherited fewer Victorian certainties than her immediate royal forebears. The constitutional crisis of the outset of George V’s reign, when the House of Commons successfully challenged the House of Lords over budgetary measures, a symbolic defeat of the old order by democratic forces; the cataclysm of the First World War, which unseated kings across Europe, including the horror of revolution in Russia and the murder of the King’s Romanov cousins; and the imminent unleashing of the power of organized labour in the form of the General Strike all indicated ideological shifts to challenge monarchy. Bluff, brusque, boring but (mostly) benign, George had done his best to shore up the crown’s stability. In 1917, he had changed the royal family’s name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and abolished German titles held by British royalties, among them his wife’s brothers. Deliberately he had attempted to bridge the gulf between crown and people, and the newspapers’ view that ‘[his] is no Royal house of mere pomp and circumstance; they are at one with their people’ was widely shared.²⁷ ‘He will be remembered as Britain’s greatest King and the World’s Perfect Gentleman,’ a schoolboy wrote in an essay after his death.²⁸ Despite his quarterdeck manner, his horror of change and a dislike of lawlessness amounting to incomprehension, his attitude throughout the General Strike was even-handed and carefully moderate. With some success, he urged conciliation on his ministers, his aim, in his own words, ‘the hopefulness of a united people’.²⁹ That the post-war world inspired unease in the stamp-collecting, game-shooting king-emperor his wife fully understood. Neither dared take for granted, as wrote one of George’s cousins, Prince Christopher of Greece, that ‘in England... you find this personal love of the Sovereign and his family, a sentiment that passes even fidelity; a perfect understanding… Monarchy can never die out in England, whatever its fate in other countries. It is too deeply ingrained in the hearts of the people.’³⁰ With good reason, neither grandparent wished the shackles of sovereignty for the baby in Bruton Street.

The baby princess was born under the roof of her Strathmore grandparents. The pattern of the sporting year and his responsibilities as landowner and lord lieutenant shaped the existence of cricket-loving, luxuriantly mustachioed Claude Strathmore. His fixed habits and straightforward tastes are revealed by his choice, every day he was at home, of plum pudding for lunch. In essentials his life mirrored that of his royal counterpart, George V, described by the King’s eldest son as ‘a masterclass in the art of well-ordered, unostentatious, elegant living’; stewed plums with semolina were the royal couple’s favourite pudding.³¹ Music, gardening, needlework, local charities, her large family and chows unimaginatively named Brownie, a brown dog, and Blackie, a black dog, occupied the days of Cecilia, Lady Strathmore. Husband’s and wife’s were the preoccupations of a generation and a class. Their world was one of privilege; neither cherished ambitions outside their immediate sphere. The strength of character of their youngest daughter, Elizabeth, the ninth of their ten children, in an unsympathetic assessment ‘not much better than the kind of person one met at a country house’,³² and the grateful thraldom of her husband Bertie would ensure that their unremarkable Edwardian mores left their imprint on the little princess: a focus on family and the blustery outdoorsiness of country life – dogs, ponies, picnics; a disregard for abstract speculation or high culture; benign paternalism and an attachment to the status quo; a kind of thrifty splendour, moving between large houses in Hertfordshire, London and Angus. As a preparation for leadership in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, it would prove a curious prescription.

Initially, events confirmed the baby’s royal status. The crowd that gathered in Bruton Street on 20 April knew that they awaited no ordinary birth. Over the course of the day their ranks eddied and replenished. Early the following morning, according to the Morning Post, the appearance of ‘a neat, efficient nurse’ rewarded their dank vigil. From an upstairs window she ‘looked down into the street. The upturned faces must all have asked a question, for it was with a nod and the most reassuring smile that the owner of the uniform withdrew.’³³ Some bystanders lingered to cheer the Princess Royal, the baby’s first royal visitor, who took crimson carnations to her sister-in-law, and the afternoon visit of the King and Queen. Others bought the illustrated papers that, after an interval, reproduced a first photograph of the duchess and her daughter. In this ethereal but romantically patrician image, commissioned by Bertie from the ‘Photographic Laureate of Children’s Photographers’ Richard Speaight, the tiny baby lies against a lacy pillow amid gauzy, embroidered layers; enraptured, her mother wears snowy white and swan’s down and three long necklaces of pearls. The photograph reproduced almost exactly a pose Speaight had chosen three years earlier photographing the princess’s cousin, the Hon. George Lascelles, with his mother, the Princess Royal. The later image is more diaphanous, more theatrical, more remote; it lacks the homeliness of Speaight’s Lascelles pictures. At a time when postcard writing was a national pastime, with up to a billion postcards sent annually, J. Beagles & Company issued as postcards two pictures from the sitting. Even in her cradle, the baby born to dynastic obscurity was available for public consumption.

In the majority of cases, it was affection for the duchess, with what one contemporary biographer called her ‘happy blend of delicate dignity and radiant friendliness’,³⁴ that prompted fascination with her child. ‘The popularity of the Duchess has led the nation to take an abiding interest in her personal and domestic life,’ wrote the Yorkshire Post;³⁵ later the Graphic explained ‘the glamour of [the baby’s] important position as fourth lady in the land’ as ‘strengthened by reflections from the spell cast over the public by her beautiful mother’.³⁶ Against the backdrop of the General Strike, which began on 3 May but overshadowed troubled days beforehand, the Yorks’ baby, and the comings and goings of royals and nurses in Bruton Street, provided harmless diversions. In London, incendiarists attacked the Times offices. The capital’s public transport effectively ceased, taxis struggling to replace buses and, across the city, vehicles ‘packed together like a jigsaw puzzle, unable to move forward more than a few feet at a time’.³⁷ An unnerving silence gripped the streets, ‘more like a Sunday with the shops open, but with no one shopping’.³⁸ Buckingham Palace sentries wore khaki and forage caps in place of scarlet coats and bearskins; their appearance suggested a siege mentality. To transport to Wales copies of an anti-strike news sheet the Prince of Wales lent his car and his chauffeur. ‘The pulse-beat of British power, which had throbbed across the centuries into the farthest corners of the earth, all but died away,’ the prince remembered, a statement of Establishment alarmism that was not shared by all George V’s family.³⁹ Yet this ‘revolutionary move’, unique in scale, which the Daily Mail had warned aimed at ‘destroying the government and subverting the rights and liberties of the people’, did neither and ended after nine mostly peaceful days. Many found an antidote to its climate of uncertainty and fear on the Strathmores’ doorstep. They were intent on a glimpse of the tiny princess in her nurse’s arms or, even better, taken for an outing, ‘carried, a white wisp... carefully and decorously around the quiet precincts of Berkeley Square, where the carpet of grass showed an amazing green, and the buds were beginning to throw a lace-work, like a veil, over the sooty bark of the branches’.⁴⁰ ‘There are always a few people waiting to see her,’ Bertie told his mother’s lady-in-waiting, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, when, on 14 May, ahead of the baby’s christening, she delivered a bottle of water from the River Jordan, sent specially from the Holy Land, her second visit to the new princess. Of her first she recalled in her memoirs many years later, ‘I little thought that I was paying homage to the future Queen of England, for in those days there was every expectation that the Prince of Wales would marry within the next year or two.’⁴¹ Her point of view was shared – surely influenced – by her royal employer, indeed by all the baby’s family except the Prince of Wales himself: glamorous, self-indulgent, his good sense addled by adulation, at odds with the constraints of his birthright and, according to his father’s private secretary, ‘bored with state functions and all the “outward and visible” signs of monarchy’.⁴²

To that section of the public that cared about such things, the princess’s chance or otherwise of inheriting her grandfather’s throne scarcely registered. Perhaps, as the Daily Graphic cautioned, they had no mind to ‘burden the bright hour of [the baby’s] arrival with speculation of its Royal destiny’.⁴³ Day after day the crowds massed – so many people on one occasion that baby and nurse departed for their daily walk by a rear door. Photographs record the multitude that crowded the gates and railings of Buckingham Palace’s forecourt on 29 May for the baby’s christening in the palace’s private chapel. They were women and children mostly, the men among them wearing coats against the late-spring chill, and they stood, many deep, every one hatted. Some climbed the railings for a better viewpoint. When the gates opened and the duke and duchess’s car emerged for the short return journey to a christening tea in Bruton Street, they surged forward good-naturedly through the loose police cordon. Had they looked up, an enterprising ceramics manufacturer claimed, they would have seen two magpies. ‘This luckiest of omens inspired the design of tableware for the Royal Nursery, which was graciously accepted by the Duchess of York and delighted Her Majesty the Queen,’ ran advertising copy for Paragon’s ‘Two for Joy’ magpie-patterned bone china, released the following year.⁴⁴

The christening itself had been conducted by the Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, a friend of Bertie and Elizabeth and afterwards their staunch supporter through the abdication crisis that none yet anticipated. Instructed ‘not to attempt anything elaborate in the way of decoration’, court florist Edward Goodyear had ‘contented himself by placing upon the altar a coronet of beautiful white lilies, other white blooms with just the suspicion of a pink tinge, and sprigs of white heather “for luck”’.⁴⁵ All four of the baby’s grandparents were godparents. So were Bertie’s sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and Elizabeth’s eldest surviving sister, Mary, Lady Elphinstone. The baby shared a godparent with her father: her seventy-seven-year-old great-great-uncle Arthur, Duke of Connaught, favourite and last-surviving son of Queen Victoria. Otherwise, the roster of her sponsors was less illustrious than Bertie’s, second son of a king-in-waiting, which had included Queen Victoria herself and her eldest daughter, the Empress Frederick of Germany.

Like her father, her grandfather and her great-grandfather, the five-week-old princess wore the Honiton lace and satin christening gown commissioned by Queen Victoria. Also in its fourth generation of royal service was the silver-gilt ‘lily font’ designed by Prince Albert, in which she was baptised according to the rites of the Church of England, of which her grandfather was supreme governor. At a symbolic level she was baptised into a family and a way of life. Both were bound by unwritten regulations concerning rank, opportunity and behaviour. It was a legacy mostly traceable to her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, whose credo, communicated with vehemence to her browbeaten family, included an insistence on royalty’s uniqueness: ‘our position, which is so totally different from other people’s’.⁴⁶ Too young to protest otherwise, baby Elizabeth cried lustily throughout. The formal christening photographs are lugubrious. The only smiling face is Queen Mary’s, in a photograph of baby and grandmother alone. On this occasion, the Queen wore a large diamond and baroque pearl brooch she had inherited from her own grandmother, Princess Augusta, Duchess of Cambridge, the historic jewel a link across five royal generations. Again, the photograph became a postcard. Its caption, ‘HM Queen Mary with Grand-daughter HRH Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary’, was a reminder that the baby’s claim to public attention derived from her proximity to the throne. Only the elaborate christening cake, decorated with sugar cupids holding wreaths of flowers, made concessions to childhood. On its topmost tier was ‘a sugar cradle adorned with a crown and the initials of the baby’.⁴⁷ The cradle contained a tiny doll much like the princess herself.

And she received a second christening cake, given to her by ‘the poor children of Battersea’. In her letter of thanks to the gift’s organizers, the duchess promised to tell her daughter about both cake and donors ‘when she is old enough to understand’.⁴⁸

In The Story of Princess Elizabeth, published when its subject was four and a half, the Duchess of York’s former governess Beryl Poignand, writing under the pseudonym ‘Anne Ring’, claimed of her christening, ‘Even on the day when the important question of her names was decided she remained tranquil.’⁴⁹ It was quite untrue, despite Poignand/Ring’s account having ‘the sanction of her Parents’. ‘Of course poor baby cried,’ Queen Mary noted, and Mrs Beevers, cosily acclaimed by the Duchess of York as ‘our dear Nannie B’,⁵⁰ liberally dosed the crying baby with dill water as soon as the service was over.

In the month since the baby’s birth, Anne Beevers had imposed tranquil efficiency in the Bruton Street nursery, situated, with its view across the rooftops of neighbouring Grafton Street, immediately above the duchess’s bedroom. Her methods were old-fashioned – even the sexagenarian Mabell Airlie considered them so:⁵¹ probable grounds for the Times’s approving description of the nursery’s furnishing and arrangements as ‘typically English’.⁵² The Duchess did not complain. She rewarded Mrs Beevers on her departure with a gold watch and appointed in her place her own former nanny, the equally old-fashioned, forbiddingly middle-aged Clara Knight, called ‘Alah’ (to rhyme with ‘gala’). In turn, Nannie B sent presents of knitted bootees in several colours to her most illustrious ex-charge.

Inevitably, contemporary accounts of the princess’s nursery life, emerging within days of her birth, sounded a uniformly saccharine note; photographs would support their refrain that she was a baby of sunny disposition, contented and smiling, and, shortly, ‘a curiously vivid little figure, full of life and character’.⁵³ Nannie B’s old-fashioned ways were not at variance with the household in Bruton Street run along the late-nineteenth-century lines that had characterized the first years of her grandmothers’ marriages. The nursery’s principal feature was its cot. Like Elizabeth’s christening service, it resembled those of Queen Victoria’s babies; it resembled her cousin’s cots, though without the earl’s coronet that crowned the Lascelles boys’ cradle. It compared poorly with the damask-swagged and tasselled affair in which her uncle David was photographed in 1894, or ‘the cradle for the Prince of the Blood’ designed by architect Edwin Lutyens for the night nursery of Queen Mary’s Doll’s House only a handful of years previously. To today’s reader, Anne Ring’s description – ‘neither ostentatious nor elaborate, but soft as down and white as a snowdrift’ – sounds conflicting notes of understatement and hyperbole: evidently the writer required the royal nursery to be simultaneously remarkable and ordinary.⁵⁴ So did any number of contemporary readers, their views of monarchy shaped by late-Victorian hagiography, their social outlook shifting in the democratic winds of the post-war world. The boat-shaped, canopied cot sported layer on layer of ruched white hangings, like frilly Victorian petticoats in a Hollywood extravaganza. Whether or not, as Ring claimed, the baby who occupied this snowdrift had ‘the whitest skin in the world’, she was pretty. Even Queen Mary said so. She grew quickly into a pretty, curly-haired infant. As much as her royal status and her symbolic embodiment of ‘continuity and of hope in the future’, it was her prettiness that perpetuated the baby’s news value: eulogized in print, in the pixelated photographs of newspapers and postcards.⁵⁵ Interest in her Lascelles cousins had waned. (Public curiosity at the time of Gerald Lascelles’s christening in 1924 was so great ‘that it was decided to keep the actual day and hour [of the service] a secret’.⁵⁶) Lacking royal titles and little boys of unremarkable appearance who frequently irritated their grandfather the King, they could not rival their younger princess-cousin.

Princess Elizabeth, the Spectator reminded readers, ‘was born in a house in a London street... cars and buses and taxis – all that makes up the swift and shifting life of London – [sped] ceaselessly past [her] windows day and night.’⁵⁷ For the writer in question, this was ‘the comfort of an English home’, a claim that implied domestic superiority, reassuring at such a pass in the nation’s affairs. Yet it was not her own home. By the time of Anne Beevers’s departure from Bruton Street, the Yorks’ homelessness threatened to overshadow their baby’s first summer.

Homelessness is not associated with kings’ sons. It was a dilemma neither Bertie nor Elizabeth had resolved by the time of Elizabeth’s confinement. Strictly they had a house and, to boot, a large one: White Lodge in Richmond Park. It had been Queen Mary’s childhood home and her idea that her first married son make it his own. Weekend crowds of sightseers, high levels of discomfort including antiquated plumbing and a single downstairs loo, wiring that was unpredictable and unsafe, costly staffing requirements and a lengthy journey into and out of central London made husband and wife determined to live elsewhere. To her mother-in-law, in October 1925, Elizabeth’s excuse was the fogs and loneliness of Richmond Park with the onset of autumn; she commended Mayfair’s ‘convenience’. Tactfully and astutely, she had postponed any suggestion of leaving White Lodge until news of her pregnancy had opportunity to act as bromide.⁵⁸ Unaccustomed to overruling of their plans, neither Queen Mary nor her husband had responded constructively. In the short term, the Strathmores’ generosity provided an answer of sorts. With both Elizabeth’s parents retaining use of rooms in Bruton Street, it was not an arrangement of any permanence nor conducive to feelings of settledness.

The solution presented itself in the form of a house on Piccadilly. In one direction it overlooked Green Park, with longer views of Buckingham Palace, in the other the trees and broad expanses of Hyde Park and Rotten Row, where riding schools plied a sedate trade. Described in a contemporary account as ‘incongruously modest among the palatial buildings of Piccadilly, a home among hotels, clubs and shops’, by modern standards 145 Piccadilly was colossal.⁵⁹ Agents particulars compiled in 1921 labelled it an ‘important mansion’ and directed the would-be taker to ‘spacious and well-lighted accommodation’ that included inner and outer halls, ‘a secondary staircase with electric passenger lift, drawing room, dining room, ballroom, study, library, about twenty-five bedrooms, conservatory etc’. The garden ‘consist[ed] of a lawn... and some long geranium beds’.⁶⁰ It was large enough for a nurse to push a perambulator and, later, a child to ride her tricycle; it was enclosed by railings that would afford the curious ringside seats for the baby’s time outdoors and through which, at least once, a family of ducklings escaped from the Park.⁶¹ Bertie seems to have quailed at the rent and the expense of essential repairs. The nursery required a fire escape; none of the White Lodge curtains fitted. Queen Mary offered to meet the cost of one room’s decoration but cautioned against any direct approach to the King for loans of furniture or artworks. The elder Elizabeth made up her mind quickly. Confident of her husband’s acquiescence in this as in most things, she embarked on her plans.

Despite the disparaging view of the Yorks’ wedding presents expressed by Herbert Asquith, son of former Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith – ‘not a thing did I see that I would have cared to have or give’⁶² – the couple had been fortunate in receiving on marriage the princely equivalent of a starter pack: in addition to what Asquith dismissed as ‘every kind of gilt and silver ware’,⁶³ a blue lacquer coffer on a gilded stand and, for Bertie, a handsome mahogany clothes press from a list of noblemen headed by the dukes of Devonshire and Sutherland; a Chippendale grandfather clock; and, from Lord and Lady Weir, a lavishly gilded crimson lacquer chest. A seventeenth-century Chinese jewel casket on a Queen Anne stand was a gift from Lord and Lady Waring; elaborately carved and gilded, Elizabeth’s bed had been painted by Florentine artist Riccardo Meacci with Renaissance-style angels and the coats of arms of bride and groom. In anticipation of their second move, Lady Strathmore now added a card table and, for her letter-writing daughter, a bureau. The King and Queen found surplus chandeliers at Balmoral and Osborne House.

Yet it was not to be a summer of homemaking and the simple pleasures of motherhood. Clouds massed. Partly at his own suggestion, Bertie was chosen to open parliament buildings early in 1927 in Australia’s new capital of Canberra. Elizabeth would accompany him; baby Elizabeth would remain at home, the pattern of royal tours. In 1901, the King and Queen had left behind four children, the youngest, like baby Elizabeth, less than a year old, for a tour lasting eight months. The prospect horrified Elizabeth. Queen Mary’s suggestion that the baby spend three of the six months with her royal grandparents bore the weight of a command. In early August, Bertie, Elizabeth and baby Elizabeth left London for the Strathmores’ Scottish castle of Glamis; Elizabeth parried her mother-in-law’s summons to Balmoral. Unwilling to shorten the precious interlude and unable to alter, or even query, government plans for herself and her husband, it was her sole means of safeguarding time with her baby. At Glamis she retreated into the familiar routine of the ancient house that Cecilia Strathmore had imbued with an atmosphere of almost magical happiness. ‘In a long low rambling wing... its oak boards beaming under their patina of fresh beeswax, and its diamond panes winking with delight’, her baby occupied the same nursery in which she had once slept, attended by the same nurse, and spent her mornings outdoors, asleep in her pram, among the dahlia beds of the Dutch Garden.⁶⁴ With a degree of bad grace, to sympathetic (and unsympathetic) listeners Elizabeth bemoaned the New Year’s ‘horrible trip’.⁶⁵ She steeped herself in schemes for 145 Piccadilly, ‘[giving] minute attention to every detail of... decoration, carpets, furniture and general arrangement’.⁶⁶ She chose pale colours throughout and placed the Warings’ Chinese jewel casket adjacent to the fireplace in the first-floor drawing room. Had Bertie’s pockets run deep enough, she would have supplemented wedding presents with further purchases of eighteenth-century furniture for the light, lofty rooms. She copied the chintzy classicism perfected in the Edwardian country houses of her youth, recalling, as she would in all her interiors, that gilded patrician interlude before the devastation of the First World War. The house would be fitted up during the Yorks’ overseas absence. Photographs taken on completion record rooms splendid by modern standards and, save in a certain sparseness, interchangeable with the capital’s surviving aristocratic townhouses, several of which outstripped it for magnificence (Brook House, for example, the Park Lane home of Bertie’s ambitious cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, had a dining room able to seat a hundred and a quartet of Van Dyck portraits). The baby princess’s first home closely resembled those of the tiny elite circle in which she would be raised. Its aesthetic rooted her socially and culturally, and every room she afterwards inhabited, even Hugh Casson’s workaday interiors for the royal yacht Britannia that aimed ‘to give the impression of a country house at sea’, conformed more or less to this inherited pattern.⁶⁷

Despite Elizabeth’s misery at imminent parting from her baby, the end of the summer and early autumn were punctuated by visits to friends. On each occasion Elizabeth left her daughter behind at Glamis with Lady Strathmore. It was simply the way of the world and Elizabeth’s instincts were conventional.

On the eve of departure, mother, father and seven-month-old baby visited the Children’s Studio in Dover Street for a sitting with photographer Marcus Adams. Their choice of Adams over Speaight on this occasion may have been intended as a statement of independence. In a long career Speaight had photographed both Bertie and Elizabeth as children, Bertie’s mother and his siblings, numerous crowned heads of Europe and, repeatedly, the infant sons of his sister, Mary. Adams, by contrast, in the six years since the opening of his Mayfair studio, had achieved a modest following among the Yorks’ aristocratic contemporaries. He represented a safe innovation, sharing his premises, with their distinctive, child-friendly, yellow- and blue-painted reception hall, with fellow photographer Bertram Park, for whom Elizabeth had sat the year before her engagement; Park’s clients included the British-born Queen of Spain, a cousin of the King’s. On 2 December, Adams photographed the baby with each of her parents and on her own. Squirrel-cheeked, with a fluffy cap of hair like down, she wore a white dress with a sash and large bows on each shoulder. This was the ‘dainty, fairy-like style of dress’ preferred by the duchess and commended by women journalists like ‘Yvonne’ of the Aberdeen Press & Journal.⁶⁸ Two of Adams’s pictures, in a folding leather frame, accompanied Bertie and Elizabeth on their voyage. Two more were released as postcards.

For Elizabeth, separation proved every bit as challenging as she had anticipated. ‘Feel very miserable at leaving the baby,’ she wrote, and to modern ears, mistakenly, ‘the baby’ suggests detachment. ‘Went up & played with her & she was so sweet. Luckily she doesn’t realise anything.’⁶⁹ Weeks later, baby Elizabeth returned to Adams’s studio, the first of four visits without her parents. This sitting produced a tactful photograph in which little Elizabeth gazes at pictures of her mother and father, to whom it was promptly despatched. By then, staying with the Strathmores at St Paul’s Walden Bury, in Hertfordshire, she had become ‘an ardent and very swift crawler’.⁷⁰ In Lady Strathmore’s drawing room, she amused herself ‘pulling handfuls of fluff out of the thick coats’ of her grandmother’s chows, ‘vigorously unwinding her grandmother’s balls of wool or scattering her patience cards all over the carpet; or, best of all, if someone was kind enough to hold her up... banging with all the tiny might of her doubled fists on both the high and the low notes of the piano’.⁷¹

Afterwards, she moved into Buckingham Palace for an extended visit to the King and Queen. The Duchess of York had written to Queen Mary that she missed her daughter ‘quite terribly and the five weeks that we have been away seem like five months’.⁷² The mother’s loss proved the grandmother’s gain. A new photograph taken by Adams in March corroborates Anne Ring’s assessment that ‘Queen Mary was enchanted to have her granddaughter with her, settled in... airy rooms in the north wing’.⁷³ As at the baby’s christening, the picture shows a smiling Elizabeth on her grandmother’s knee. It was published on the front cover of the Tatler on 13 April. ‘Her Majesty’, the magazine noted, ‘is devoted to her little granddaughter, who, it will be observed, has the same bright smile as her mother.’⁷⁴ A copy of the same photograph would make its way into Princess Elizabeth’s night nursery at 145 Piccadilly. The Queen’s devotion revealed itself in her particular attentiveness to the little princess’s needs. Ahead of the court’s removal to Windsor Castle for Easter, she ‘personally supervised’ the arrangement of Elizabeth’s apartments in the Victoria Tower, including ensuring that the nursery was ‘always gay with many flowers from the royal gardens’.⁷⁵

Alongside each consignment of pictures by Adams, Alah dutifully enclosed updates on the baby’s progress. A note on 8 March was written in the third person as if from Elizabeth herself: ‘If Mummy looks into my wide open mouth with a little magnifying glass, she will see my two teeth.’⁷⁶ Two more teeth appeared over the next three weeks. Elizabeth learned to say ‘By-ee’; she was struggling to raise herself upright on Alah’s knee. Queen Mary’s letters to her daughter-in-law aimed at conveying the liveliness a black-and-white photograph missed. She described Elizabeth’s interest in the King’s African grey parrot: ‘she was delighted with the parrot Charlotte this morning at breakfast & watched the bird eating pips with an air of absorption’.⁷⁷ To Bertie, in early April, reporting a shared car journey with the baby, she noted an interest that would last lifelong: ‘your adorable child... was awfully good, giving shrieks of delight at each dog she saw’.⁷⁸

The palace nursery had been redecorated for George and Gerald Lascelles; according to the Westminster Gazette, it contained ‘toy treasures that formerly amused the Prince of Wales’.⁷⁹ Save for breakfast or teatime visits to her grandparents and outings to Hyde Park in a carriage of the Royal Mews, it was here that the baby spent her days. With a degree of affectionate unbending that surprised his second son, the King remarked happily on her enjoyment of her drives, bonneted and accompanied by Alah and, sometimes, as on her first birthday, the Lascelles boys and Alexander Ramsay, seven years older than Elizabeth, a grandson of her godfather, the Duke of Connaught, and afterwards inspiration for the naming of her canary ‘Sandy’. ‘From her first appearance in public, the affection felt by the nation for the Princess Elizabeth was apparent,’ wrote the publishers of a commemorative album of Wills cigarette cards in 1937. Popular affection was manifest that London spring, when the tiny princess, temporarily orphaned like the heroine of a fairy tale, drove royally under the budding, sooty branches of the plane trees. It was Alah, not the baby, who noticed it – in the knots of smiling onlookers who waved at the passing carriage. With practice, and at Alah’s prompting, Elizabeth learned to return their greetings; she did not understand their significance. Nor was she aware of her mother’s unhappiness, a world away. To the King the duchess wrote simply, ‘I have missed her all day and every day.’⁸⁰ The princess again appeared on postcards issued by Beagles & Co. One showed her in a carriage in the park. The same photograph was reproduced in the Sketch. The princess, the paper told readers, ‘is the most discussed and most important of little ladies, and is constantly to be seen driving in the Park, where her appearance rouses great interest’.⁸¹ A postcard issued later in the year depicted first attempts by the passenger-princess to acknowledge bystanders. Beagles captioned it ‘The Princess Waving to Admirers’.

No one ever pretended that Elizabeth was an ordinary baby: not the onlookers in Hyde Park, not the purchasers or recipients of postcards, not the crowds who greeted her parents in Jamaica, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia with three tonnes of presents for the unseen child. While the King and Queen provided carriages and a parrot at home, her parents amassed from wellwishers, civic and corporate bodies across the antipodes a collection of so many ‘toys, ornaments, knick-knacks and gewgaws of every imaginable kind... several dolls far larger than the Princess herself, and a whole battalion of giant Teddy bears’ that the ship’s hold in which they were stowed required a guard of its own.⁸² This was the dominions’ tribute to the princess they hailed as ‘Betty’. Australians’ affectionate nickname, never used by ‘Betty’s’ family, reflected the fictionalization of the child whose public life began at birth, and made clear to her parents the scale of popular interest in the baby they missed desperately. ‘It is extraordinary how her arrival is so popular out here,’ wrote Bertie to his mother. ‘Wherever we go cheers are given for her as well & the children write to us about her.’⁸³

‘Betty’ herself was too young to identify this dual existence, public and private, or to recognize wellwishers’ bounty or be spoiled by it. At any rate, spoiling was strongly discouraged. Alah’s regime imposed a one-at-a-time rule for toys: indeed, Alah’s attachment to strict rules was central to her child-rearing. Elizabeth’s nursery world would be conspicuously orderly, a habit the child retained into adulthood, and less luxurious than that of a number of children of wealthy parents. It lacked, however, any spartan element, which was alien to her comfort-loving mother. Its apparent straightforwardness by aristocratic standards – journalists praised the unaffectedness and common sense of the royal nursery, its simple food, the duchess’s decision to dress Elizabeth in short rather than full-length smocked white cambric frocks – went some way to balancing unusually high levels of public interest.

The Yorks’ return in June was marked by the Illustrated London News with a full-page photograph of a sturdily smiling Princess Elizabeth under the banner ‘The Home “Magnet” of the Duke and Duchess of York’. ‘As our photograph shows,’ ran the caption, ‘she is a charming child.’⁸⁴ Dressed as always in white, crossed bare feet emerging from rows of frills, her tousled hair a backlit halo, lips parted in a smile, and wearing round her neck the string of coral beads her mother had worn as a child, the baby presented readers with an image of generic irresistibility. She had been reunited with her parents in the company of all four of her grandparents and members of the Royal Household in the Grand Hall at Buckingham Palace, and only the duchess’s spontaneity had imbued this courtly set piece, stage-managed by Queen Mary, with conventional intimacy. Afterwards there had been a balcony appearance, Queen Mary shading mother and baby under her parasol, and another the following day, at the Yorks’ new home, 145 Piccadilly. There an oriental carpet draped the balcony balustrade; mother, father and child offered themselves, a secular Holy Family, to waving crowds who raised their hats high in the air. Their public welcome was rapturous; the length of their absence sharpened its intensity. ‘Much of the affectionate enthusiasm shown on the return of the royal travellers was doubtless due to sympathetic rejoicing with them on this happy end to [their] separation,’ asserted the Illustrated London News.⁸⁵ This focus on royalty’s human dimension, at this stage positive, was to be the dominant note in the relationship between crown and country throughout the baby’s life. It was shaped in the first instance by the duchess’s commoner birth that enabled the Yorks to present themselves as an idealized version of an ‘ordinary’ family, centred on ‘the universal recognition that their marriage had been a love match’;⁸⁶ by the Duke of York’s limits as a public performer, thanks to his nervous stammer, which encouraged a compensatory celebration of his domestic virtues; and by the Yorks’ distance from the throne that exempted journalists from the awestruck tone with which they treated the King and Queen and, in lesser measure, the Prince of Wales. Even the Times appeared moved by the straightforward joy of a mother reunited with her child: ‘Twice the Duchess, her face radiant with smiles, brought the Princess forward.’⁸⁷ After a parting of almost half her baby’s life, the duchess’s anxiety revealed itself in a letter to Nannie B. Elizabeth, she wrote, ‘was nice to me at once, which was a great relief’.⁸⁸

Three days after their return, duke, duchess and fourteen-month-old princess sat again for Marcus Adams. How much her parents had missed her is clear in a photograph of Elizabeth on her own, standing beside a damask-covered stool. In an indigo-printed envelope, postcard-makers Raphael Tuck & Sons issued ‘six charming studies from portraits by Marcus Adams’ of mother and daughter.⁸⁹ The two Elizabeths appeared on the front cover of the Tatler at the end of July. A caption stated that the photograph by Adams that the magazine reproduced was ‘a quite exclusive portrait of two of the most popular ladies in the land, one of whom might some day be Queen of England’.⁹⁰ It was not an outcome that anyone realistically anticipated. Through frequent repetition it played its part in shaping public perceptions of the baby and maintaining her prominence.

In 145 Piccadilly, into which Queen Mary and Lady Strathmore had moved Elizabeth and her nursery staff, the family of three settled on the Yorks’ return. To minister to them were a butler, Mr Ainslie, noted for his ‘beautiful manners’,⁹¹ Mrs Evans the housekeeper and a cook, Mrs Macdonald. An under-butler, two footmen, three housemaids, three kitchen maids, a nightwatchman, a steward’s room boy, an odd-job man and a chauffeur provided further help. There was a dresser for the duchess, the duke’s valet and their comptroller, Captain Basil Brooke. A boy scout operated the telephones; a clock-winder visited weekly. A young woman from the Black Isle, Margaret MacDonald, a railwayman’s daughter whom Princess Elizabeth learned to call ‘Bobo’, joined the staff as nursery maid and remained in attendance on her tiny charge for seven decades. Proof that the duchess’s manners matched the beauty of Mr Ainslie’s, she troubled herself to learn everyone’s names. On rarer occasions, she apparently troubled herself ‘to visit the still room to revive her Scotch skill in the making of scones and cakes’.⁹²

Into the large rooms newly painted went the wedding presents disparaged by Herbert Asquith, removed from White Lodge. To these were added a selection of the presents for Princess ‘Betty’ that Bertie and Elizabeth had brought back from their tour. Homes were found elsewhere for the two kangaroos, ‘two singing canaries and twenty squawking macaws’; only a parrot called Jimmie was installed in the Picadilly mansion. Charities and children’s hospitals benefited from the enormous haul.⁹³ For Elizabeth’s day nursery Queen Mary added a present of her own: a picture by Margaret Tarrant, popular illustrator of children’s scenes. Tarrant worked chiefly for the Medici Society, which supplied artistic reproductions to nurseries across Britain. Her pictures shaped the aesthetics of a generation; Medici Society prints after Old Masters provided cradle-side exposure to the best-known works of western art. One of the princess’s contemporaries remembered the nursery passage of her family’s Scottish castle ‘lined with brightly coloured Medici prints of Old Masters and coffee-coloured pre-Raphaelite ones’.⁹⁴

Elizabeth’s top-floor domain consisted of day and night nurseries, a nursery kitchen and pantry, and bedrooms for Alah and, in time, a governess. Each was furnished simply. All opened off a cherry-carpeted circular landing, lit by a large skylight in the form of a dome. Here, with views down into the stairwell of comings and goings below, was ‘plenty of room to push a perambulator, run a race with yourself, or pretend to be a train’.⁹⁵ At the front of the house, overlooking Piccadilly and the mounted policeman on the pavement, the day nursery resembled a modest, miniature version of her parents’ sitting rooms: armchairs and a two-seater sofa loose-covered in striped chintz; matching curtains with frilled pelmets; a quantity of polished dark wood and, above the open fireplace, eighteenth-century-style wall lights flanking a mirror. Vases of flowers and leather-framed photographs of Bertie and Elizabeth stood on tables and on the chimneypiece. Only her rocking horse and a clothes horse for drying tiny nightdresses spoke explicitly of babyhood. From the outset, the baby princess was being prepared to inhabit her parents’ world, with no apparent anticipation of change.

It was an impulse that played a key role in her childhood. The same year, ‘with the personal approval of Her Royal Highness’, Lady Cynthia Asquith produced a biography of the duchess; she described mother and daughter as ‘this enchanting pair of smiling Elizabeths’.⁹⁶ An Establishment figure – daughter-in-law of a former prime minister, secretary to the author J. M. Barrie and, like the Duchess of York, the daughter of a Scottish nobleman – Lady Cynthia identified as the reader’s long-term hope that ‘the daughter may grow to resemble her mother’.⁹⁷ No more. It was a conventional and conventionally circumscribed aspiration, and typical of the time; it must have seemed appropriate for an infant for whom only intemperate journalists anticipated glittering prizes. As a child and beyond, Elizabeth would repeatedly experience pressures of this sort: an expectation that she conform to the mould of a royal parent or grandparent, which in due course shaped her approach to monarchy. In this instance half of a ‘pair of smiling Elizabeths’, and for the foreseeable future the junior partner, she was denied independent identity. Only later did the requirement to resemble her mother constrain her. It originated in a widespread belief that the future would demand no more of her than the modest programme of engagements currently carried out by the duchess, as well as in her father’s willing uxoriousness, which transformed the duchess into a paragon.

Over time, the younger Elizabeth’s presence inside 145 Piccadilly was felt more strongly – in toys that found their way into the drawing room, with its painted and gilded panelling and Brussels tapestry, or Tommy, the pony on wheels, stabled behind a coromandel screen in the morning room; in her portrait by Edmond Brock hung above the fireplace in her mother’s ground-floor sitting room; in a little voice described as crystalline; in the sounds of running feet, audible even from her third-floor sanctuary, and occasional missiles (teddy bears or dolls) dropped from above onto visitors’ heads. In the summer of 1927, it was her parents’ house. The photographs on a sofa table in the drawing room were of her grandparents and the duke and duchess’s golden labradors; the most prominent portrait was of her mother, by Russian artist Savely Sorine, painted the year of the Yorks’ marriage and displayed on an easel. Elizabeth’s nursery world and the grown-up realm of her parents were physically distinct, albeit the Yorks’ affectionate and informal parenting style blurred boundaries between the two (whenever possible both parents shared nursery tea and bathtime). Despite partings, like the Australian tour of 1927, Elizabeth would never experience the everyday emotional severance that characterized the nursery upbringing of many of her contemporaries. None of those in a position to influence her childhood ever anticipated that she would or should. A domestic martinet incapable of expressing affection for his wife and children except in his letters, even the King was concerned for the Yorks’ happiness. He wrote to his son on Bertie and Elizabeth’s reunion with their baby, ‘I trust yr sweet little baby begins to know her parents now & likes them.’⁹⁸

That summer, when the duchess’s decidedly light programme of public engagements left her free to concentrate on her husband and her child, Bertie and Elizabeth again departed London for Scotland. In Scotland baby Elizabeth learned to walk. She inspired in her adoring mother a feeling the elder Elizabeth called ‘swelled headed[ness]’;⁹⁹ she continued to enchant her royal grandparents. To Bertie, the King described her as ‘more delightful than ever’.¹⁰⁰ His ‘pleasure in his little granddaughter was touching’, wrote Mabell Airlie; ‘Lilibet always came first [of his grandchildren] in his affections.’¹⁰¹ She in turn loved the gruff old man. The following Christmas, she responded excitedly to carol singers. ‘Glad tidings of great joy I bring to you and all mankind,’ they sang, and Elizabeth shouted, ‘I know who Old Man Kind is!’; she called him ‘Grandpa England’.¹⁰² At a fête in the grounds of Balmoral in the summer of 1927, the informal royal procession was led by Princess Elizabeth, pushed in her pram by Alah, followed by her grandparents and her parents. Elizabeth’s place of honour in the royal affections would persist. So, too, the habit of Scottish summers, common to royals and Strathmores, the baby’s incarceration in a world of her elders and her frequent display to doting crowds.

In the autumn, the infant princess received an unorthodox visitor. Ahead of a charity ball, at which society women were to donate for auction dolls dressed in miniature versions of their own clothes, a toymaker arrived at 145 Piccadilly. As guests of honour at the ball, the Yorks had agreed to present a doll modelled on their daughter. For the lifesize ‘Princess Elizabeth’ doll ‘the maker had been allowed to view his model in her nursery, so as to get the right shade of her hair and eyes’.¹⁰³ More conventional portraiture was the marble bas-relief of Elizabeth and her mother completed ahead of her second birthday by sculptor Arthur Walker. This unlovely piece failed to please the King, who ‘saw a photograph of the plaque in a newspaper, and in conversation raised the question whether the work did justice to Baby Elizabeth.’¹⁰⁴ Only the duchess’s intervention, following an interview between Walker and Royal Academy president Sir Frank Dicksee, prevented the plaque’s removal to Buckingham Palace for closer royal inspection.

Enchanting photographs of the two-year-old princess emerged from a sitting with Marcus Adams in July 1928. Once again, inspiration lay in the past. In 1857, Queen Victoria had commissioned from a Florentine photographer Leonida Caldesi a study of Elizabeth’s godfather Prince Arthur as one of the putti in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Adams revisited the same conceit. Caldesi’s picture of a naked Arthur has a stark, solemn, vulnerable quality. By contrast, Adams’s marshmallow-soft images of the plump-cheeked, plump-armed, frilly-frocked Elizabeth, her hair a mop of pale curls, a smile revealing full rows of teeth, suggest the impish vitality that journalists delighted in attributing to her. Of course, images were made public. One postcard was entitled ‘A Royal Smile. HRH Princess Elizabeth’. The Illustrated London News chose a photograph from the same sitting of Elizabeth standing on a carpet of leaves for its cover on 27 October. As its caption, it borrowed a tag from Cynthia Asquith’s biography of the duchess: ‘The “Golden-Crested ‘Little Friend of all the World’”’. To its readers, the paper pointed out that the princess had ‘left behind the days of toddling babyhood’.¹⁰⁵

Yet she remained uncertain on her feet. At Glamis in August, the duchess introduced her daughter to an upholsterer who had worked at the castle for many years. ‘The upholsterer had the honour to be presented to her little Royal Highness, [who]... clasped his huge hand and showed no intention of letting it go.’¹⁰⁶ In September, Elizabeth, the duchess and Alah joined the King and Queen at Balmoral. Photographs in Queen Mary’s private albums show the white-frocked toddler watching from the banks of Loch Muick as the King helps drag a large fishing net from the water; Alah stands close by, and Queen Mary bends down as if to steady the princess from behind. In photographs taken in front of the castle, Elizabeth’s attention is divided between Charlotte the parrot and Snip, a Cairn terrier given to the King by the Princess Royal. Despite the monarch’s attachment to a cigarette in a long holder, King and Queen take it in turns to hover over the diminutive figure. When Cynthia Asquith visited 145 Piccadilly in the autumn, she encountered a determined and talkative toddler. ‘I remember,’ she wrote later, ‘that on this occasion she was still at the stage of having to plant each foot in turn on the same step all the way down the stairs, swaying in her gait.’¹⁰⁷ Childish chatter accompanied her faltering progress: at two and a half Elizabeth had begun to talk about herself in the third person. Asquith noted traits that would endure: her independence, ‘a radiant smile’, a talent for mimicry, ‘lightning powers of observation [for]... anything out of place: an unfastened hook, a lace untied, an obtrusive safety-pin’.¹⁰⁸ She also noted a self-coined nickname, a child’s corruption of Elizabeth: ‘Lilibet’. This, not Betty, was the name by which her family would know her.

The child described as ‘bright as an atom of radium’ was present at a reception the Yorks gave for Australian cricketers at 145 Piccadilly;¹⁰⁹ in pristine white silk, she attended the King’s Christmas party for workers on the Sandringham estate. ‘Baby was too sweet & threw crackers & joined in the fun,’ Queen Mary recorded, after the toddler threw at her fellow guests crackers handed to her by her mother.¹¹⁰ To Bertie, in the aftermath of this Christmas visit, Queen Mary wrote with a grandmother’s fondness that would never falter, ‘I don’t think you & Elizabeth realise what a great joy your child is to us & how we love having her with us now & again in the house, she is so sweet & natural & so amusing.’¹¹¹ With no conscious effort, the baby had made devoted admirers of the royal couple who, a generation earlier, had failed so spectacularly as parents. Their view was that of Winston Churchill, who, encountering Elizabeth that year at Balmoral, concluded that she was ‘a character’ and noted prophetically, ‘She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.’¹¹² The result was a closeness to the King and Queen that exposed little Elizabeth from earliest infancy to the formalities of the court, its intricacies of ceremony, etiquette, hierarchy and loyalty; its culture of deference bordering on reverence; its hive-like structure centred on the queen bee figure of the sovereign, in line with George V’s view that his ‘people wanted him to keep up the state of a King’.¹¹³ Before her second birthday she had already learned to curtsey. Her growing up was twofold: as child and as princess. Only later did she realize it. For the meantime she moved apparently easily between nursery and royal drawing room.

Elizabeth was not present at the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph on 11 November, at which the King caught what, ten days later, he called a ‘feverish cold’ and his doctor described as ‘mischief in the lung’: a streptococcal chest infection that developed into septicaemia, bronchial spasms, blood poisoning and a toxic, pus-filled abscess behind the diaphragm.¹¹⁴ For weeks George V’s life hovered in the balance. Sandringham remained empty that Christmas. The King’s subjects prayed for his recovery in churches kept open specially. In London, Bertie and his younger siblings rallied to their mother’s side. To her eldest sister, the Duchess of York described the anxiety as ‘very wearing to mind & body’.¹¹⁵

Elizabeth’s time would come during the King’s lengthy convalescence. On 9 February 1929, the King left London for Craigweil House on the Sussex coast outside Bognor, loaned to him by Sir Arthur du Cros. At the same time, the Queen made a request of the Duke and Duchess of York that reveals the extent of the royal couple’s attachment to their only granddaughter: an invitation to Princess Elizabeth to join them, to cheer the King’s recovery. It was Bertie who replied to his mother: both Elizabeths were battling chest infections. Not until the second week of March did the princess make the journey to the seaside – impatiently, according to her mother’s description of her ‘looking forward wildly to digging in the sand’.¹¹⁶ Ahead of her arrival, Queen Mary purchased at Burgess’s Bazaar in Waterloo Square ‘sand moulds’ in the shape of bananas, pineapples, oranges and apples. ‘I am told’, a columnist of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph wrote winsomely, ‘that soon after Princess Elizabeth arrived at Bognor, she said to the King, “Come and dig with me, Grandpapa. I’ll lend you a spade.”’¹¹⁷ Wearing a cardigan against the March chill, Elizabeth spent breezy half-hours on the sand and shingle, accompanied by Alah and her nursery maid; ‘much to the King’s pleasure’, she walked alongside him in his wheelchair on Craigweil’s sheltered northwest terrace;¹¹⁸ when cold winds confined the monarch indoors, he ‘spent the morning in his bedroom and had another long chat with his granddaughter’.¹¹⁹ Her conversation, claimed the Sunday Dispatch, contained ‘the most amusing and original comments on people and events’.¹²⁰ At other times, the princess’s ‘great joy’ was ‘to be with the Queen, for whom she has a very tender affection’.¹²¹ Postcard issues inevitably recorded the visit: the princess with her grandparents in Craigweil’s garden, the princess alone making sandcastles. The latter was entitled ‘Our little Princess’, a tag that suggests a nation’s affection and pride. While she was away, her nursery was redecorated. ‘She will return to a suite with cream woodwork, soft blue walls, rose carpets, and chairs covered with pink and blue chintz. A grandfather clock has been introduced so that the little Princess can learn to tell the time,’ enthused a writer at pains to make clear that, in the princess’s surroundings, comfort and instruction combined.¹²² After her seaside demonstration of her tonic qualities, reported in newspapers the length and breadth of her grandfather’s kingdom, Elizabeth would return to London with prominence and prestige enhanced.

At the time of Elizabeth’s birth, a gossip-columnist called ‘Mariegold’ had prophesied ‘plenty of adulation in store for the fourth lady in the land as soon as she is old enough to receive it’.¹²³ The full extent of this adulation, which began in the cradle and revealed itself months later in three tonnes of presents from New Zealanders and Australians, seems first to have troubled her parents in the spring of 1929. While Elizabeth remained at Windsor Castle with her grandparents, the Duke and Duchess were carrying out engagements in Edinburgh. The Scots’ reception was particularly enthusiastic, the absence of ‘our dear Princess Elizabeth’ noted with regret. ‘It almost frightens me that the people should love her so much,’ the duchess wrote to Queen Mary. ‘I suppose that it is a good thing, and I hope that she will be worthy of it, poor little darling!’¹²⁴ The idea that the public might take at face value Cynthia Asquith’s description of Elizabeth as the ‘Little Friend of All the World’ caused her mother belated disquiet. At intervals it would continue to do so.

The extent of the duchess’s anxiety on this occasion is not clear. Her own childhood outside the royal fold provided a benchmark for measuring the clamour of Elizabeth’s upbringing. Press accounts exaggerated, like the American columnist who claimed ‘the child spends her life in the limelight... A great crowd cheers whenever she appears. When she goes out with her nurse, guards and other soldiers stand at attention. She lifts up her little hand, which means they may relax.’¹²⁵ In the lush distortions were partial truths. Newspapers described 145 Piccadilly as ‘the women’s Mecca’: ‘All through the Season, indeed, nearly all the year round – her admirers wait outside the Duke of York’s house in the hope of seeing her go in or out.’¹²⁶ The duchess’s letter to her mother-in-law identified perennial challenges of royal life: the parent’s powerlessness to lessen public fascination with her child; a requirement that the child merit the ‘love’ so indiscriminately lavished upon her by strangers. For her part, inevitably, the Queen had no answers.

It was a period in which aristocrats remained the celebrities of the day and members of the royal family the ultimate cynosure. Although the Yorks were less prominent than the Prince of Wales and, according to interwar biographer Hector Bolitho, ‘still able to guard their domestic life from the splendour and fuss associated with high station’,¹²⁷ as the King’s only granddaughter and his first ‘royal’ grandchild, Elizabeth occupied from birth a unique position. Nothing in her life was too trivial for publication: her appearance, surrounds or nursery routine; antics labelled ‘dainty’ or ‘rogueish’; party frocks in ‘sapphire blue’, ‘primrose yellow or delicious flower-like pink’;¹²⁸ her car sickness, taste for toffee, enjoyment of splashing in puddles; her ‘shining’, ‘twinkling’, ‘bubbling’, ‘sunny’, ‘vital’, ‘engaging’, ‘quicksilver’ personality. All was reported with treacly obsessiveness in a format that balanced celebration of her liveliness with an insistence on goodness (or its contemporary near-synonym ‘sweetness’); and Elizabeth was four when her first biographer suggested that ‘after a while, Princess Elizabeth will be aware that the eyes of all the other children are upon her, that they are looking to her with love and admiration – as to an Example’.¹²⁹ ‘Because our likenesses seldom appeared in the Press, we were not often recognised on the street,’ stated Elizabeth’s uncle, the Prince of Wales, of the previous generation of royal children.¹³⁰ Postcards, cinema newsreels and, above all, photographs in newspapers and magazines lessened Elizabeth’s chances of anonymity; commentary like Ring’s imposed on her an expectation of exemplary behaviour, even as a four-year-old. The duke and duchess made what may have seemed a pragmatic compromise in collaborating with writers like Cynthia Asquith and Beryl Poignand (‘Anne Ring’), whom the duchess had known since childhood; both submitted their manuscripts for royal approval. The outcome was a higher level of accuracy within the cloying bilge and, of course, a spur to the curiosity they sought to slake.

Contemporaries, however, judged successful the Yorks’ efforts to bring up a child worthy of public adoration and unspoiled by attention. ‘If Princess Elizabeth were old enough to have her head turned by the absolute adulation of a whole nation it would have happened long ago,’ the Tatler commented on her sixth birthday.¹³¹ ‘The British are wise, and British Royalty... is particularly wise,’ was the conclusion reached by one American. He argued that the modesty of George V and Queen Mary, their personal lack of arrogance, meant that ‘Princess Elizabeth is safer from spoiling than the average rich American son or daughter’.¹³² British readers would have seconded this flattering view. That the princess invited such approbation testified to the emotional anchor the Yorks were seen to provide for their daughter and Alah’s stern common sense. For the moment, her innate sunniness enabled Elizabeth to take as they came the extraordinary trappings of her childhood world. The verdict of Time magazine, in 1929, that ‘she does not know that she is but three removes from the Throne’, was correct and, in the short term, remained so.¹³³ In 1932, a visitor to the Royal Academy described her portrait by Edmond Brock, painted when she was five, as ‘quite devoid of self-consciousness’.¹³⁴

Public interest – waving onlookers in Hyde Park, worshippers at ‘the women’s Mecca’, the nosey parkers who pressed their faces between the railings of Hamilton Gardens behind 145 Piccadilly, to watch the princess at play – was simply a fact of her life. On at least one occasion, newspapers suggest, she demonstrated that, as a young child, acceptance was second nature to her. In February 1930, Elizabeth was playing with a friend, Lady Mairi Vane-Tempest-Stewart. Nearly five years separated Elizabeth and the older Lady Mairi, a daughter of the 7th Marquess of Londonderry. An acquaintanceship between their parents and the proximity of their gardens supplied grounds for the girls’ friendship: the gardens of palatial Londonderry House on Park Lane were visible from 145 Piccadilly. ‘Princess Elizabeth takes a friendly interest in the people who watch her playing in the garden,’ reported the Lancashire Evening Post. ‘The other day she adopted the attitude of one who had a pleasant surprise for them. She ran away and came back leading Lady Mary [sic] by the hand and brought her proudly to the railings. “This is Mary,” she said. So then they all knew one another.’¹³⁵ On the surface an insignificant vignette, possibly fabricated, it encapsulated the openness of character and instinctive courtesy on which, accurately, writers insisted for the princess-exemplar.

By 1930, the press had a new story about the golden-haired princess whose buoyant spirits had aided her grandfather’s recovery: Elizabeth was growing up. Outside fairy tales, even princesses cannot halt time. For Elizabeth, an only child surrounded by adults, the process began by emulation. ‘She always loved pretending to be grown up,’ Cynthia Asquith wrote. ‘[She] used often to play at going into a small cupboard and holding, through an imaginary telephone, long conversations in tones that were a quaint blend of all the grown-up voices and intonations familiar to her. She also loved impersonating her mother at the dressing table, and liked to engage some super to act the lady’s maid and hand her hair-pins, powder puff, et cetera.’¹³⁶ She enjoyed raids on Lady Cynthia’s handbag, removing lozenges, loose change; ‘spectacles were popped on to the tiny nose... the mirror ogled, and face powder dexterously applied’.¹³⁷ Marcus Adams photographed her on her mother’s knee. The two Elizabeths wear similar floral prints, and one of the duchess’s pearl necklaces encircles both their necks, binding them together. In May, the Yorkshire Post reported an anecdote about Elizabeth’s love of the telephone. The paper’s concern was not the story’s improbability, but its evidence of ladylike politesse, key attribute for a princess. ‘Princess Elizabeth is already showing charming independence,’ it announced, and the shift from roguishness to independence indicated her abandonment of early childhood. ‘When the news reached her that the Hon. Mrs David Bowes-Lyon (her mother’s sister-in-law) had just had a baby, she went to the telephone and herself rang up to send congratulations.’¹³⁸ Most of all, it was the summer trip to Scotland that offered four-year-old Elizabeth opportunities for demonstrations of maturity. For the first time, on arrival at Glamis station, the princess made the short journey from the platform to the station exit, across the railway bridge, holding her mother’s hand. ‘The trip across the bridge was by way of an adventure for Princess Elizabeth, who has always hitherto been carried across the bridge by Stationmaster Buchan,’ reported the Forfar Herald.¹³⁹ The paper underlined its point: ‘on this occasion she was treated as quite a grown-up Princess, and successfully negotiated the steps herself, aided only by the clasp of her mother’s hand.’ Not content with scaling railway bridges, the following day Elizabeth navigated the business of purchase and payment in a local bookshop. It was an incident ideally suited to the press’s new narrative. ‘Princess Elizabeth yesterday demonstrated in decided fashion that she is no longer the baby princess when she visited Forfar on a shopping visit with her grandmother the Countess of Strathmore.’ The report emphasized the princess’s good nature and financial good sense; it drew attention to her knowledge and love of nature. After ‘smiling sweetly’, she asked to be shown books about animals. ‘She examined numerous books with an expert eye, and several were rejected with the remark, “I have seen that already.” At length one met with her approval but the Princess’s Scottish blood, perhaps, made her cautious and before deciding on a purchase she asked the price.’¹⁴⁰

The little princess’s passion for dogs and ponies, her sorties with her grandmother into Forfar to buy books or, at Peter Reid’s Rock Shop in Castle Street, chocolate or sweets, as well as a certain vigilance over pocket money, were characteristics to bring her closer to her grandfather’s subjects, and more than a press invention. At the British Industries Fair at Olympia, in February 1931, her mother chose for Elizabeth an inexpensive present of ‘a little toy Aberdeen terrier, with a Stewart tartan bow’; she also bought her a child-size blackboard and an easel of a sort popular in nurseries nationwide.¹⁴¹ But in so many ways Elizabeth’s was far from an ordinary childhood. On 22 May 1929, she sent a cheerful note to her mother in Edinburgh, written for her by Alah: ‘Do come here [Windsor Castle] and see the soldiers and the band I am very well and very busy.’¹⁴² Among photographs in Queen Mary’s albums, taken that month, are pictures of Elizabeth in the castle quadrangle. In one, a tiny figure, with neither nurse nor grandparent close by, salutes the commanding officer of a company of Guards. The soldiers and their band are her grandfather’s, her ringside position privileged, but the salute must have been a daunting requirement for a toddler. At Windsor on her fourth birthday again there were soldiers, again a salute for the princess; there were crowds of onlookers and her Lascelles cousins for company. Spectators noted a new way of dressing her hair, the ‘little curls all over her head... transformed into large shining golden waves’.¹⁴³ The day’s events began at half past ten, when soldiers appeared for the changing of the guard. ‘Simultaneously the Princess came out into the Grand Quadrangle with her small boy cousins, now Lord Lascelles and the Hon Gerald Lascelles. After the ceremony she went over to the pipers and admired them, then she returned to her place, and as the Guards marched back to the barracks, very gravely she stood to attention to take the officer’s salute.’¹⁴⁴ Next the birthday princess had to acknowledge the ‘hundreds of laughing and cheering people who were thronging the Norman Gate and St George’s Gate’. She walked towards them and waved; she blew kisses. Only then was she wheeled away in her perambulator. ‘Princess Elizabeth... is never allowed to take part in public ceremonies,’ the duchess’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Helen Grahame, had replied to an invitation in July 1929.¹⁴⁵ In the infant Elizabeth’s life, the line between public and private would prove infinitely permeable, and few ‘private’ ceremonies could have been as public as Elizabeth’s annual birthday parade of Guardsmen, with its attendant crowds clustering the castle gates.

Among fourth birthday presents from her father to his ‘adorable Lilibet’ were another two pearls to thread onto the thin platinum chain he had given her on her first birthday.¹⁴⁶ Like much in her childhood, the tradition of a daughter of the royal family receiving two pearls each birthday was traceable to Queen Victoria; precedent rooted the recipient among descendants of the great queen. The little Elizabeth who played at pretending to be her mother, coiffed, powdered and jewelled, attended by an imaginary lady’s maid, wore her necklace proudly. Dutifully she played with the building blocks given to her by Queen Mary: they were made from fifty different woods garnered from across the Empire. Three months after her first riding lesson, in the private riding school in Buckingham Palace Mews, neither present could rival the King’s offering that year. This was Elizabeth’s first pony, a Shetland called Peggy, about nine hands and ‘full of latent mischief’.¹⁴⁷ Peggy and her rider inspired a new exhibit at Madame Tussaud’s, unveiled in the summer: a bare-headed Elizabeth astride a dark pony and attended by a groom. ‘This, set on a stand to itself, drew the biggest crowds,’ the Daily Mirror reported. ‘“Isn’t she sweet” was the general criticism in many dialects.’¹⁴⁸

In the summer of 1930 there were pressing reasons for this new narrative of pony-loving maturity imposed on Elizabeth. For several months the Duchess of York had played no part in the public life of the royal family. Pregnancy explained her withdrawal. Elizabeth’s period as an only child was drawing to a close. A new maturity and the impulse to coddle and tend implicit in her love for dogs and ponies were appropriate characteristics for an elder sister. At stake was her status as the highest-ranking of the King’s grandchildren, his heir in the second generation. ‘Should the new arrival be a boy he will stand third in the direct succession to the throne, ranking after the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York,’ explained the Western Gazette on 8 August 1930.¹⁴⁹ It was, as the Gazette stated, the ‘position at present occupied by Princess Elizabeth’.