CHAPTER II

‘Two folded roses, hush’d and still, Buds of a royal spring’

THE BABY, OF COURSE, was a girl. Nameless for three weeks, after George V vetoed the Yorks’ suggestion of ‘Ann Margaret’, she was born after a lengthy delay at Glamis Castle on 21 August 1930. Newspapermen imagined the aftermath: ‘The Duchess, with a happy smile on her face, listened to the heavy rain beating on the mullioned windows of the ancient Royal castle, and flashes of summer lightning lit up the sky.’¹ A purpose underpinned this whimsy: to ward off any suggestion of parental disappointment in the birth of a second daughter. It was not quite true.

Certainly the duchess had suspected her unborn baby of being another girl. To Queen Mary she wrote on 21 July, ‘I... only hope that our new daughter (?) will not delay too long.’² A letter from the duke to his wife suggests both had hoped for a son: ‘I would have liked a boy & you would too I know.’ He contented himself that the new baby was a playmate for Elizabeth.³ Queen Mary, arch dynast, faltered in her response. As in all things she was guided by the King’s reaction, his delighted view that one could play longer with girls than boys. The duke’s conclusion that ‘we still have plenty of time, we are still young’ may have been intended to lessen his wife’s self-reproach; alternatively it points to the couple’s tentative awareness of the possibility that responsibility for the next royal generation lay with them. At thirty-six the Prince of Wales appeared no closer to marriage; his newest mistress, Thelma, Viscountess Furness, was married to her second husband. Neither Bertie nor Elizabeth had forgotten a conversation with the King during his convalescence the previous year, in which his father had told Bertie, ‘You’ll see, your brother will never become King.’ ‘We both looked at each other and thought “nonsense”,’ Elizabeth remembered afterwards.⁴ Nonsense or not, for the present it was their own children who peopled the line of succession. The public was satisfied that it should be so. Following the birth of the baby, who, on 30 October, was christened Margaret Rose, the Morning Post stated unequivocally, ‘Let us say that the people of this Realm are happy in the birth of a second daughter to the Duchess of York. Thus the succession to the throne, already amply secure, is strengthened.’⁵

For Princess Elizabeth, the birth of her sister brought changes within the nursery and beyond. Monthly nurse Nannie B returned to the Yorks, again to be replaced on her departure by Alah, with Elizabeth’s care now chiefly Bobo MacDonald’s responsibility. On the washstand in the night nursery at 145 Piccadilly appeared a second flower-patterned ewer and basin for washing: like the belongings of the three bears in the story of Goldilocks, baby Margaret’s was appropriately smaller than Elizabeth’s. Equally significantly, Margaret’s arrival encouraged predictions about Elizabeth’s future that had first been voiced at her own birth. ‘By [Margaret’s] birth,’ ran one, ‘the chances are increased that some day, in the natural sequence of events, another Queen will wear the British Crown.’⁶ With the continuing absence of a male heir, a technicality in the laws of succession provided a diversion. ‘The question arises... as to whether the law gives a sister precedence over another sister or whether they become co-heirs. It has been generally assumed that of the two sisters the elder would be heir as in the case of two brothers, but this assumption is one that might be challenged.’⁷ George V requested clarification; to his pleasure, precedence was granted to Princess Elizabeth. To those who took note of such things, the Yorks’ difficulty in conceiving – their three-year wait for Elizabeth, the four-year interval before Margaret’s birth – cast doubts on the probability of a third pregnancy and a son to displace Elizabeth.

From the outset, Elizabeth delighted in her sister. Queen Mary described her as ‘enchanted’ by the four-days-old Margaret; ‘even though not allowed to wash the baby’, she watched her in her bath.⁸ Elizabeth, ran claims, had a new game called ‘copying baby’: ‘it consists of solemnly imitating on a favourite doll all Nurse Beever’s ministrations to the younger Princess’.⁹

Elizabeth was ready for companionship. An anecdote recorded by Cynthia Asquith, of a curly-haired boy invited to Windsor Castle to play, demonstrated her enjoyment of the company of other children. ‘Attracted by his irrepressible fuzz of curls, she instantly took off her gloves to – what she called – “feel his hair”. This personal inspection having successfully broken any ice... she then led him up to Mr Baldwin [the prime minister]... and said, “Quite nice, isn’t he?”’¹⁰ Baby Margaret provoked a similar response. ‘That wonderful child Elizabeth is very excited,’ wrote a guest at Glamis. ‘[She] thought first of all that it was a wonderful Dolly & then discovered that it was alive. She then took each of the three doctors by the hand & said “I want to introduce you to my baby sister.”’¹¹ As when she introduced Mairi Vane-Tempest-Stewart to watching crowds in Hamilton Gardens, the princess’s instinctive, if formal, courtesy guided her behaviour. At the end of the first week of September, the duke took Elizabeth with him to Balmoral, leaving behind at Glamis the duchess and their baby. At Elizabeth’s dictation he sent a letter to his wife that ended with a page of pencil kisses: half ‘For Mummy’, half ‘For our new baby’.¹² The letter itself did not refer to Margaret: instead Elizabeth related the excitement of feeding biscuits to the King’s terrier Snip at teatime. In a second letter, two days later, Elizabeth wrote that she was looking forward to her coming return to ‘my Mummy & my baby’, but it was the duchess that she admitted she had ‘been missing... very much indeed’.¹³

Her parents pre-empted jealousy of the new arrival by providing Elizabeth with a series of diversions. At Glamis they organized a children’s garden party, with Elizabeth as hostess, twenty guests, balloons and hide-and-seek; it was Elizabeth’s idea that the afternoon culminated in a visit to the nursery to see Margaret. The following week, Elizabeth played hostess to a children’s house party. The duchess’s nephews and nieces loomed large among her guests, including her sister Rose’s children Mary and Granville Leveson-Gower, and daughters of her brother Jock, who had died of pneumonia at the young age of forty-three earlier in the year. Hide-and-seek was again on the programme, ‘and all manners of out-of-the-way hiding places have been found in the long stone corridors and the sombre rooms’.¹⁴ A week later, more playmates arrived at the castle: Andrew and Jean Elphinstone, children of Elizabeth’s godmother Mary, another of the duchess’s sisters.

A circle of friends dominated by her aristocratic Strathmore cousins represented narrow social exposure for the little princess. Until her position as heiress to the throne was confirmed, this was the world in which her parents anticipated her spending her life, with little expectation of contact outside this gilded coterie. With its possibility of rough and tumble and cheerful informality, it provided a counterweight of sorts to Elizabeth’s royal experiences. Already Elizabeth was aware of another world outside the castle’s gates. On walks with Alah in the village, she had asked to stop to watch children in the school playground.¹⁵ Alah humoured her; the princess looked on. For the most part, it was she herself who was the object of attention. Even in distant Forfar, watchers jostled. While Elizabeth chose books in Mr Shepherd’s bookshop, ‘a large crowd of townspeople and children... gathered round the car, clamouring for a glimpse of the girl Princess, and when she emerged from the bookseller’s with her grandmother, they followed her along the street to the confectioners’.¹⁶ Status and celebrity transformed little Elizabeth into a spectacle to be glimpsed and followed; ‘clamouring’ has a predatory ring. Even at the age of four, ‘normal’ social contact was impossible.

In the short term her promotion to elder sister status did not overwhelm entirely her high spirits or her ‘roguish’ mischief. She was discovered, on a wet afternoon that September, in her father’s dressing room. To hand was an empty brilliantine bottle. ‘Her golden curls were dripping and on top of the dressing table sat four dolls and a Teddy Bear similarly treated.’¹⁷ New photographs of Elizabeth taken by Marcus Adams on 22 January 1931, her first sitting in over a year, suggest no lessening of her puckishness. Toothily she grins. She is bright-eyed, dressed as always for the camera in a frou frou of pale frills.¹⁸

Elizabeth’s next visit to the Children’s Studio took place only a fortnight later, on 2 February. On this occasion, she was photographed with her mother and baby Margaret. It was an unremarkable image that suggests Adams’s struggle to evolve a composition with any of the magic of his earlier ‘Raphael’ pictures, a challenge he would not fully resolve for several years. With moderate success, he photographed all four Yorks early in the summer. One of the pictures from that sitting, of the duchess with her daughters, was released as a postcard.

Happiness in their daughters and as parents drew the Yorks to Marcus Adams with such frequency. Resulting images undoubtedly contributed to the public’s view of them as an ideal family. Traditional trappings of royal portraiture were set aside in favour of photographs that celebrated the affection the couple felt for one another and their children. In part it was a choice that reflected their reluctance to consider themselves potential sovereigns, despite the King’s prediction during his convalescence. ‘It always irritates me, this assumption that the Prince of Wales will not marry – he is quite young and it is rude to him in a way too,’ the duchess wrote to her lady-in-waiting.¹⁹ She was also determined to recreate for her daughters the uncomplicated happiness of her own childhood, including loving ties between parents and children and the bonds of feeling of the Bowes-Lyon siblings. In a memo she entitled ‘Hints to Bertie in case of anything happening to me’, written at some point after Margaret’s birth, all three of her ‘hints’ aimed at maximizing affection and ‘delightful trust’ between children and parents.²⁰ ‘Please give [Lilibet] the enclosed from Margaret Rose – she held the pencil for the kisses specially for Lilibet. Will you give it to her & tell her this?’ the duchess wrote to her husband, when Margaret was three weeks old.²¹ From the outset her aim was her daughters’ closeness.

On the surface the unemphatic plushness of Adams’s pictures - the duchess’s pearl necklaces, the princesses’ frothy frocks – lay within the grasp of many wealthier middle-class British families. In the early 1930s, the Yorks’ espousal of polished ordinariness made sense, given their remoteness from the throne and, measured against those of the King or the Prince of Wales, the modesty of their means. In troubling economic circumstances, following the stock market crash of 1929, the impulse was tactful and shrewd (and perfectly safe, since few contemporaries were ever likely to treat them as ordinary); caricaturist Osbert Lancaster identified at this period ‘a nasty feeling about the upper classes’ among those less fortunate.²² Such understatement was in line with the couple’s requirement that Elizabeth give up abandoned and surplus toys to children’s charities. On 27 February 1931, the Rugby Advertiser carried ticket information for a children’s dance and party in aid of Hamilton (Children’s) Home in the town. ‘One outstanding feature of this party will be the sale of HRH Princess Elizabeth’s toys, by Lord Cromwell,’ the paper announced.²³ If an approving public noticed that the Yorks’ ‘ordinariness’, courtesy of Marcus Adams, was rather closer to perfection – never a hair out of place, no glimpse of fatigue or frayed tempers – few protested. For the foreseeable future, the joint purpose of duke, duchess and their two princesses was to embody make-believe.

Alah was responsible for Elizabeth’s early education. For two hours each morning the nursery was transformed into a schoolroom; using picture books, letter blocks and beaded strings, Elizabeth was taught to read and spell and count. A workman-like approach was encouraged. Elizabeth wore a morning uniform of ‘printed cotton overall dresses with capacious pockets and pearl buttons down the front’; ‘silk “affairs” in flower designs’ were saved for afternoons, for outings, for tea with her parents.²⁴ ‘Apt and interested’, on the cusp of her fifth birthday she learned quickly.²⁵ Tidbits offered to family friends quashed any suggestion of excessive enjoyment of her lessons; intellectualism inspired widespread mistrust, not least among her family. Instead, Elizabeth’s diligence was attributed to a nascent sense of duty, an explanation that, variously applied, would become a cornerstone of her public image and afterwards defined her approach to sovereignty. ‘When sums become a little tedious, or the spelling lesson seems a little long, Mrs Knight... has only to remind her that no real Princess could grow up without knowing how to count and spell, and the Royal pupil immediately becomes attentive.’²⁶ Her lessons formed a new daily routine. Claims that this was maintained whatever the Yorks’ whereabouts served as further evidence, despite her own lack of formal education, of the duchess’s sensible parenting, her understanding that ‘a Princess who, later on, will have to take her share in public life, must have a training from childhood’.²⁷ Again, it was not quite true.

Alongside lessons in reading, writing and maths were French lessons. As proof of the up-to-dateness of the royal nursery, a set of gramophone records provided Elizabeth’s instruction. Her progress was described as ‘rapid’. Soon, it was claimed, she was able to spell ‘chat’ and ‘jardin’ as freely as she did ‘cat’ and ‘garden’. She performed these feats for her grandparents. Tactfully overlooking the King’s own limits as a linguist, newspapers pronounced him ‘especially pleased to hear her repeating her latest Linguaphone lesson from the gramophone’.²⁸ There were piano lessons: Elizabeth’s teacher was Mabel Lander, whose other pupils included the Russian concert pianist Prince George Chavchavadze. The first lesson consisted largely of ‘screwing the music stool up and down’.²⁹ Published accounts preferred to focus on evidence of Elizabeth’s aptitude, and in time princess and pianist became friends, Elizabeth referring to Miss Lander as ‘Goosey’. When she was six, Elizabeth fared less well with a miniature set of bagpipes.

At the same time, Elizabeth was trained in tidiness and thrift. Bobo MacDonald encouraged her to save ribbons and wrapping paper, smoothed and carefully folded into a box. Alah concentrated on Elizabeth’s toys and her clothes. She arranged the little girl’s big mahogany wardrobe so that frocks hung alongside their corresponding coats and hats, with matching shoes placed immediately below. ‘To impress on her the need for tidiness, Princess Elizabeth has to assist her nurse to put her clothes away every time they are changed.’³⁰ In this, too, Alah found Elizabeth a willing, even zealous pupil. Later, her governess Marion Crawford labelled her ‘a very neat child’, who ‘would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes arranged just so’.³¹ Among her favourite toys were horses on wheels, of which the two princesses eventually acquired more than thirty. Every night, these were ‘stabled’ on the nursery landing, placed with absolute precision, as tidy as the shoes beneath the night nursery chair, tack gleaming, coats smoothed.

The latest stage in Elizabeth’s ‘training’, Alah’s lessons formed only one element of her days. Her life continued to include features and events that marked Elizabeth out from the most privileged of her peers. Many were the result of time spent with her royal grandparents: Christmas at Sandringham in Norfolk, Easter at Windsor, summer visits to Balmoral, where Elizabeth ‘rejoice[d] in the freedom [given] to her exuberant spirits’ and respite from her goldfish bowl world with its curious onlookers.³² At Christmas 1931, she shared dancing lessons, or ‘hops’, with her mother and Queen Mary in the Sandringham ballroom; all three learned to polka. Afterwards, as she lay in her bed, according to an authorized account, ‘she heard the stirring strains of the bagpipes, for the King’s Scotch piper always came into the dining room at the end of dinner in full Highland dress and walked with swinging kilts round and round the table playing his wild music.’³³ In June, when the Queen took Elizabeth to the Royal Tournament at Olympia, they were escorted by uniformed officials, their visit commemorated in a full-page Country Life frontispiece. That autumn, the two princesses received their own mention in the Court Circular, the formal record of the royal family’s activity. Then, as now, it did not fall to many children’s lots that their comings and goings were reported as matters of note in The Times. Still the duchess’s friend Anne Ring asserted in October 1932 that Elizabeth knew ‘nothing at all of that other side of her life, that aspect of herself as a Royal Princess’.³⁴ In the face of unrelenting public attention, the claim was untenable. Unlikely, too, following her parents’ present to her of her own stationery, blue paper stamped with an ‘E’ below a coronet, and a little bag, like a reticule, also decorated with a coroneted monogram.³⁵

Beyond the confines of home and family life, the little princess had another existence. This was her life as a figment of the collective imagination, a ‘sunny-haired figure of charm, a nation’s idol’: the public’s ‘Princess Elizabeth’.³⁶ Attitudes towards this golden child lay outside her control and mostly, at this stage, her ken. This ‘Princess Elizabeth’ was an imaginary creation, invented and reinvented by gushing journalists and Marcus Adams, a metaphor for infant perfection, an opiate, and her name was bandied in connection with wide-ranging enterprises: charitable, commercial, patriotic. The Artificial Silk Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in February 1932 included a commercial display by Edmund Halstead Ltd of ‘Princess Elizabeth’ taffetas: a design of ‘a moss rose spray in pastel shades for children’s and lingerie wear in 100 per cent artificial silk’.³⁷ The following month, at the Queen’s Hospital for Children at Bethnal Green, the Duchess of York opened a new ward of twenty-six cots for children under the age of five, the Princess Elizabeth Ward. The same week the naming of a new-found territory in the Antarctic was formalized. Sir Douglas Mawson, leader of the expedition that discovered it, called it Princess Elizabeth Land. On the other side of the globe, the princess made her first appearance on a postage stamp. The six cent stamp issued in Newfoundland, in Canada, a territory of her grandfather’s far-flung Empire, featured an image of Elizabeth based on a photograph taken by Adams in November 1929. It was framed by drawings of an English rose and the Scottish thistle. Unsought by the child-princess, such tributes augmented her prominence. Implicitly they contributed to the expectation that she be exemplary.

This ongoing blurring of her public and private worlds was made clear during Elizabeth’s parents’ visit to Cardiff in March 1932. On behalf of their daughter the duke and duchess took formal receipt of a remarkable present. Y Bwthyn Bach to Gwellt (‘the little cottage with the straw roof’) was a child-size, thatched and white-stuccoed play house, a sixth birthday present to the princess from the people of Wales. To her parents Cardiff’s lord mayor explained, ‘The inception of the idea of this gift house is to be found partly in a desire to express in a concrete manner the loving loyalty and affection which the people of the Principality feel for the little Princess. In no less a degree it was felt that the house should in the fullest manner represent and further the arts and industries of the Welsh nation and give them the impetus which they needed and deserved.’³⁸ Elizabeth’s present was in equal measure a commercial undertaking: its makers gambled on the alchemy of royal association.

With four rooms, a small hall and landing, ‘well heated and lit, equipped with bells, telephone and every modern device for cooking and housekeeping’, Y Bwthyn Bach was the perfect plaything.³⁹ It included an electric fire, a grandfather clock and, in the bathroom, a heated towel rail. Above a chimneypiece hung a portrait of the duchess by Margaret Lindsay Williams, who had previously painted Queen Alexandra and the Prince of Wales. Crested and monogrammed linen covered the half-tester bed, there was scented soap beside the basin, and the design of the curtains’ blue chintz had been shrunk to the scale of the diamond-pane windows. In the kitchen cupboards the china was of buttercup yellow; the bookcases housed Beatrix Potter’s tales, including one in Welsh. Everything worked, from the ticking clock to the wireless set; the house had its own fire insurance policy and miniature deed of gift. Y Bwthyn Bach was a costly and extravagant present for a child whose world included as a matter of course every material blessing; on the dressing table were engraved silver brushes. At a moment of considerable economic hardship in Wales’s mining and industrial communities, it was a shop window for a workforce struggling to survive and its makers took pains that the gift was publicized as widely as possible; newspapers referred to ‘the Welsh cottage’. ‘The Duchess and I are especially pleased to know that the house should have been the means of raising funds for the relief of sickness and the terrible distress which has been so prevalent in these hard times,’ the duke informed its donors.⁴⁰ Elizabeth did not receive her present until the middle of May. By then it had gone on show in a handful of locations between Cardiff and London. Its last stop before handover was the Empire Hall of the Ideal Home Exhibition. Its 100,000 visitors contributed £5,000 to charitable causes.

A doll’s house version of the cottage, by Lines Bros, appeared in toy shops in 1933; Queen Mary claimed that Elizabeth had set a fashion for doll’s houses. Each room was wired for lighting and included a tiny battery-powered bulb. These miniature Y Bwthyn Bachs gave lucky children across Britain tantalizing glimpses of a small corner of the princess’s world. To these were added, in the years ahead, numerous photographs of Elizabeth at the cottage, sometimes alone, sometimes with Margaret, her parents, her grandparents. Like Adams’s photographic portraits, Wales’s gift came to symbolize the Yorks’ cultivated ordinariness: a setting for family life on a diminutive scale, perfect in every detail, unshowy and necessarily informal given the restrictions of its size. Even the house’s appearance, a country cottage that resembled the mock-Tudor semis of inter-war suburbia, chimed with contemporary aspirations. In the public imagination its royal chatelaine became an image of the wholesomeness of British family life, an association that would prove troublesome sixty years later with the unravelling of her own children’s family lives. Less strenuously publicized by the Yorks was the present that stood in front of Elizabeth’s thatched cottage at the Ideal Home Show: a miniature car ‘worked on the pedal system despite its powerful-looking exterior’, the princess’s very own Rolls Royce.⁴¹

At first, Elizabeth played in the cottage alone, dusting and washing up; Margaret was too young to join in her games. In the nursery she played schoolroom games alone, too, taking Alah’s role as instructress, toys as her pupils, using the blackboard and easel bought for her by her mother. According to one account, ‘when there [was] no other “class” to be had, a woolly toy terrier with a large tartan bow... ha[d] to sit up and be “instructed”’.⁴² Instead Margaret joined her sister in her daily carriage rides in Hyde Park and Windsor Great Park; accompanied by Alah and Bobo MacDonald, she joined her on walks to see the ducks in St James’s Park. These outings continued to attract interest, with no detail apparently too trivial for comment. Even a new hat with ‘a shady [brim] of buttercup yellow’, or rumoured fittings for new riding clothes (‘brown breeches with a little velveteen jacket and cap’), merited mention.⁴³ Beagles issued a postcard of five-year-old Elizabeth driving in a carriage, dressed in a fur-trimmed coat and beret; opposite her, a bonneted Margaret sat on Alah’s knee. Beagles captioned it ‘a charming snapshot of the children of TRH the Duke and Duchess of York taken at Windsor whilst out for a drive’. In 1932, charm was their birthright as princesses. Photographers and postcard publishers were the price they paid for publicity they did not seek.

Elizabeth’s socializing continued to be confined mostly to members of her family. Bar Margaret, her principal contact with her own generation was her Lascelles cousins and, in lesser measure, the duchess’s many nephews and nieces; each autumn in Scotland she attended the birthday party of her second cousin, James, Master of Carnegie, like Elizabeth a great-grandchild of Edward VII. In October 1931, she was one of twelve bridesmaids at the wedding in Sussex of Queen Mary’s niece, Lady May Cambridge. Her fellow bridesmaids included members of the extended royal family: Princess Ingrid of Sweden, a granddaughter of Elizabeth’s godfather the Duke of Connaught, and Princess Sybilla of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. From childhood this sorority of princesses has played a smaller role in Elizabeth’s life than those of her predecessors. Most of her close friends have been British rather than royal, an outcome shaped in the first instance by her non-royal mother’s preference for her own family. Preoccupied by royal genealogy, Queen Mary surely unpicked for her granddaughter the cat’s cradle of her relationship to the other bridesmaids. Learning to be royal, and to recognize herself as such, was an aspect of Elizabeth’s upbringing, and a significant contribution to her development on her grandmother’s part. Elizabeth also played with the children of aristocratic London neighbours, like Lady Mairi Vane-Tempest-Stewart, or the Hon. Mary Anna Sturt, a goddaughter of the duchess’s, whose parents’ London house was at 13 Bruton Street. In May 1932, the return from the country to 144 Piccadilly of the Yorks’ next-door neighbours, Lord-in-waiting Viscount Allendale and his family, was reported from Elizabeth’s perspective: ‘This will be good news for Princess Elizabeth. The Allendale children [the Honourable Wentworth, Ela and Richard Beaumont] are her playmates during the London season. She and they play in the railed-in garden which faces Hyde Park.’⁴⁴ At Elizabeth’s sixth birthday party at Windsor the previous month, her guests were all family members: her parents and sister, the King and Queen, the Prince of Wales (her ‘favourite’ uncle), the Princess Royal and George and Gerald Lascelles. Elizabeth had sent out the invitations herself: her special treat was ‘for the first time... to write little letters of thanks to her grandfather and grandmother, and to others who have sent her presents’ in what was described as ‘a very legible round hand’.⁴⁵ Hopefully, the pink-iced cake with six candles baked by the King’s chef compensated for this corollary to what threatened to be a staid entertainment.

Elizabeth’s presents from her family included a large doll – inevitably in her role as universal representative she was credited with ‘all a little girl’s love for dolls’ – and a number of books for her to read to herself; Nannie B sent a knitted scarf.⁴⁶ Presents from members of the public unknown to her parents, ‘in accordance with the invariable rule of the Royal Family’, were returned to their donors. This year the rule was bent for a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland signed for the princess by Lewis Carroll’s model for Alice, the elderly Alice Hargreaves, but the lively, pony-loving Elizabeth did not enjoy Carroll’s perplexing fantasy.⁴⁷ Writing in 1947, Betty Spencer Shew stated that the first book Elizabeth read to herself was ‘a collection of simple stories bearing the appropriate title “Tales for Me to Read to Myself”’.⁴⁸ Like much in Elizabeth’s early life, this was a late-Victorian offering, written, according to its preface, ‘to supply the want which is sometimes felt, of a book sufficiently easy for this purpose, and yet more entertaining than the short sentences in spelling books’. Markedly more exciting was a new bicycle which replaced the tricycle on which the princess had first navigated Hamilton Gardens independently. It was a present from members of the British Cycle and Motor Cycle Manufacturers’ and Traders’ Union, and Elizabeth rode it in company with a new friend she had made for herself. Sonia Graham Hodgson was the daughter of George V’s radiographer, Harold Hodgson. Elizabeth encountered her for the first time playing in Hamilton Gardens. ‘One day this little girl came up to me and said, “Will you have a game with me?”’ Sonia remembered.⁴⁹ They played French cricket for an hour, and Sonia became Elizabeth’s ‘particular girl friend... always invited by the Princess to her tea parties and... her companion on many occasions such as walks in St James’s Park or a game in the gardens behind the Piccadilly House’.⁵⁰ Only eight months separated the girls. Sonia was the elder, she was taller and, in her own estimation, bossier. Quickly, princess and doctor’s daughter began to see one another ‘virtually every day, except for holidays’ until Sonia went away to school.⁵¹ Sonia wore white gloves to ride her bicycle, her clothes resembled Elizabeth’s, but despite her father’s professional connection with the royal family, her background, unlike that of the Bowes-Lyon cousins, rooted her outside the golden circle.

At Balmoral, late in the summer of 1931, Queen Mary had introduced her granddaughter to her newest woman of the bedchamber, Lady Victoria Forester. Elizabeth’s reported response, ‘Victoria? I seem to have heard that name before!’, was widely quoted as an example of a witty bon mot on the part of the five-year-old princess.⁵²

It was impossible that, even at five, Elizabeth should not have heard of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. In so many ways the old queen, dead only thirty years, imprinted her descendants’ consciousness. Balmoral remained recognizably Victoria’s Highland retreat; the calendar of the royal year was modelled on her own; her doctrines of moral rectitude and imperial unassailability continued to colour the royal outlook. To the King and Queen and a generation of courtiers and palace workers, memories of their redoubtable predecessor were still green. The Prince of Wales claimed that ‘it was to her... that [the King] looked for a model of the Sovereign’s deportment. His Court retained a Victorian flavour to the end’,⁵³ while the prince’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, denounced the King as ‘bigoted... with his early Victorian ideas’.⁵⁴ It was not the case that the young Elizabeth’s familiarity with Victoria’s name represented a coded reference to dawning awareness of her destiny. Instead, the apparently self-assured princess, reported as ‘rul[ing] her playmates with a firm will’, put a number of those she encountered in mind of Britain’s previous queen regnant.⁵⁵ The Duke and Duchess of York denied the possibility of the throne for themselves, but it was the duke who told writer Osbert Sitwell, ‘giving me at the same time a very direct look, to see if I understood the allusion he was making to Queen Victoria, “From the first moment of talking, she showed so much character that it was impossible not to wonder whether history would not repeat itself.”’⁵⁶

The duchess had no intention of allowing such suspicions to cloud Elizabeth’s horizon. Her ambition for both her daughters was altogether simpler: ‘a happy childhood which they can always look back on... with lots of pleasant memories stored up against the days that might come’.⁵⁷ She was determined, wrote Cynthia Asquith in another royally approved account, that ‘no shadow from the future should invade the bright present’.⁵⁸ Although she did not again confide in Queen Mary her concerns over public interest in Elizabeth, rumours circulated of her intermittent anxiety. ‘The Duchess of York... is rather concerned at the unavoidable publicity which attaches to all the movements of little Princess Elizabeth,’ wrote one columnist in the summer of 1932, citing no sources. ‘The little girl is now old enough to be observant and she is getting somewhat self-conscious under the influence of all the lionising she encounters. Every time she goes out for a drive in the park everyone seems to recognise her and hats are raised and handkerchiefs waved from all quarters.’⁵⁹ The duchess may have tried to offer her daughter simple explanations, though her preference was for avoiding taxing subjects. Perhaps Alah, who, from Elizabeth’s infancy, had instructed her when to wave at omnipresent bystanders, attempted a similar explanation or, indeed, Queen Mary, self-appointed custodian of royal mores. Elizabeth’s subsequent behaviour, her refusal throughout a long life to court acclaim or publicity, suggests she learned early on that public interest was an adjunct of royal status. Her self-consciousness was not always obvious. In July, she visited the studio of portraitist Philip de László during his sittings with the duchess. ‘There was no sign of shyness,’ de László commented, ‘and she was greatly interested in the portraits of her parents and made some very amusing remarks.’⁶⁰ Like her father, Elizabeth was shy, just as, like his, her temper was formidable. She would learn to copy his efforts in mastering both handicaps.

In the short term, there were two results of her mother’s concern: conversations about the next stage in Elizabeth’s education, and a deliberate decision that, despite the difference in their ages, Elizabeth and Margaret’s upbringing be shared as closely as possible. The duchess was reported as hoping that Elizabeth beginning education proper would help in some degree to withdraw the Princess from so much public adulation’, a hope that proved vain.⁶¹ The second outcome was signalled visually. In May, a journalist calling herself ‘Sylvia Mayfair’ had introduced her readers to ‘a Royal fashion lead that will undoubtedly be followed by many mothers’: the duchess’s decision to dress her two daughters alike. ‘When I saw them driving in the Park,’ Miss Mayfair offered, ‘the two little Princesses were dressed in exactly similar raspberry pink serge coats with bonnets trimmed with rosebuds while neither wore gloves.’⁶² They would continue to wear matching clothes for the next decade and beyond, one friend recording in her diary 7 June 1940 as the first time she saw Elizabeth and Margaret not dressed alike.⁶³ It was a decision that linked the sisters as siblings; as princesses, it suggested equality between them. It did indeed confirm a trend for sisters dressing alike, as Sylvia Mayfair had predicted, though their particular shared wardrobe nevertheless distinguished Elizabeth and Margaret from other little girls in 1930s Britain. In suggesting parity between the King’s granddaughters, either of age or status, it perpetrated a kindly illusion. As a second son, the Duke of York had lamented the impact of an age gap of eighteen months in his own childhood. Even before their accession, neither he nor his wife meant their younger daughter to experience similar feelings of inconsequence. That they failed in the long term was not entirely their fault, albeit their determined overcompensating, which spoiled Margaret, engendered its own unhappy outcome, its consequences as troublesome for Elizabeth as for Margaret.

The princesses not only dressed alike, they did the same things, and not only at home. In July, Elizabeth attended a children’s party in London given by Viscountess Astor. She was accompanied by Alah and Margaret. For Margaret, on the eve of her second birthday able to walk and talk, it was her first party outside the family circle. Invitations henceforth invariably included both princesses. From the outset Elizabeth’s concerns were twofold: to enjoy herself and to look after her sister. The second would occupy her on and off until Margaret’s death, her role as elder sister a facet of her identity. It was partly forced upon her. Anticipating the Yorks’ departure for Glamis that summer, newspapers suggested, ‘Princess Elizabeth is explaining to her sister the joys of a holiday in Scotland, where they can play as they please.’⁶⁴ Aside from its inference concerning the restrictions of the girls’ London life, this explanation and others like it imposed on the older princess, still only six, the responsible role of tutor; protector and guardian would be added later. Elizabeth’s enjoyment of the Astor party was described as more ‘sedate’ than Margaret’s, ‘as became the dignity of a lady of six’.⁶⁵ Margaret, observers decided, was ‘naturally more impetuous and irresponsible than her more meditative elder sister had ever been’.⁶⁶ From first emergence of Margaret’s capricious, quicksilver personality, this polarizing of the sisters’ attributes, rooted in fact, justified Elizabeth’s nearer proximity to the throne, with its requirements of good behaviour and self-discipline. A pattern had been set.

Elizabeth became aware of it only gradually; her life remained sunny. ‘I have never met a child who seemed more in love with life,’ wrote Cynthia Asquith.⁶⁷ Preparations for her grandfather’s birthday parade, Trooping the Colour, had provided an exciting diversion at the beginning of June. Elizabeth’s love of horses, shared with the King, was already deeply ingrained. From the windows of the day nursery she watched the mounted Life Guards passing down Piccadilly on their way to rehearse, in one account ‘her face pressed close to the glass... She was so excited that she kept waving her hand and smiling at the soldiers.’⁶⁸ A fortnight later, the Yorks spent Ascot week on the Kent coast. The princesses played on the pebbled beach at Sandwich Bay; Elizabeth rode her bicycle.⁶⁹ Plans were afoot for the girls to have ‘their own garden plots to tend’.⁷⁰ Here was the truth of the Yorks’ ‘ordinary’ family life: horses, the seaside, bicycles and gardening. Elizabeth enjoyed them all.

By 1932, however, one York family tradition was over. The duke had sold all six of his hunters. The previous March, her parents had taken an enthralled Elizabeth to a meet of the Pytchley Hunt at Kelmarsh Hall; they had been spending a number of weeks at Thornby Grange, near Rugby. But in the aftermath of an economically struggling Britain abandoning the Gold Standard that autumn and a decline in the value of sterling, George V had ordered a fifty per cent reduction in the Civil List moneys he received from the government, with cutbacks for other members of the royal family, including his sons. Hunting became too expensive for the Duke of York. He gave up his horses and the hunting boxes, like Thornby Grange, that he had rented in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.

For Elizabeth, though she was too young to recognize it as such, it was a rare indicator of change in her parents’ well-ordered and comfortable existence. So much in her upbringing suggested the survival of an inherited status quo, her grandparents’ world of strict hierarchies, landed wealth, domestic staff: the assumptions and privileges of an aristocratic elite. The King’s decision that his family participate in the national tightening of belts implied royal accountability and an acknowledgement that royal freedoms, notably of expenditure, were circumscribed. Over coming decades, the Yorks’ world and the rarefied world of the Pytchley – also at the Kelmarsh meet were Grand Duke Michael of Russia, the Earl and Countess of Rosebery and the Yorks’ London neighbours, the Allendales – would continue to overlap, but the social, political and financial hegemony of the landowning classes, in decline for decades, increasingly faltered. It was a change for which no one in Elizabeth’s family thought to prepare her.

For the Yorks, however, there was to be a happy consequence of economic downturn: a house of their own in the country. This was Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park. In the autumn of 1931, it was offered to the duke and duchess by the King, following the death of its most recent occupant, the manager of the royal Thoroughbred Stud, Major Fetherstonhaugh. By royal standards it was a small house: its builder, George IV, had described it as a cottage. In 1931 it was ramshackle, ill-planned, inconvenient, partly demolished, added on to and altered, its chief beauty – Sir Jeffry Wyatville’s long Gothic saloon or drawing room – divided any old how into three. It stood in large, unkempt gardens three miles from Windsor Castle and a similar distance from the Prince of Wales’s country house, Fort Belvedere; the overall impression was of neglect and want of comfort. To Queen Mary, the duchess described it as ‘the most delightful place & the garden quite enchanting’. She decided ‘it would be wonderful for the children, and I am sure that they would be very happy there’.⁷¹ Briefly the Queen protested. Royal retrenchment notwithstanding, the duke commissioned a costly programme of knocking down and rebuilding. His aim, according to his official biographer, was to create a ‘real home’ for his tight-knit family of four.⁷² It was an appropriate undertaking for the prince increasingly promoted as ‘the “family man” of the Royal family’.⁷³

By the New Year of 1933, work was complete, ‘very 1930s, all cream and sweet pea colours’, as it struck a later visitor.⁷⁴ In place of an old conservatory, a new wing had been added on to the south side of Royal Lodge, and two nurseries fitted up for Elizabeth and Margaret.⁷⁵ In a secluded corner of the grounds, in a garden neatly hedged, a site was chosen for Y Bwthyn Bach. The duchess made plans for a herb garden, modelled on the herb garden at Glamis; miniature garden plots were carved out for the princesses. Here the sisters’ fifteen blue budgerigars found a home. Like Elizabeth’s Welsh cottage, Royal Lodge provided a setting for the Yorks’ glossy ordinariness: only its name asserted its occupants’ rank. This was grandeur in miniature, and its small(ish) size and the duke and duchess’s absorption in its garden perpetuated the myth of the King’s second son, his wife and daughters as the archetypal inter-war nuclear family. Columnists who suggested ‘the Duchess of York intends both her little daughters to have a thorough training in all housewifery arts’ based their assumption simply on conventional appearances.⁷⁶ Elizabeth was happier riding than laying the table. Among her seventh birthday presents was a new, larger pony called Gem. ‘And a real gem he is, too!’ she declared.⁷⁷ A present to all the family was Rozavel Golden Eagle, a Pembroke corgi puppy known as ‘Dookie’; he was shortly joined by a second puppy, Rozavel Lady Jane, called Jane. For eight decades there would be at least one corgi never far from Elizabeth’s side. Dookie and Jane joined the duke’s golden labradors and Choo-Choo the Tibetan lion dog. All frequently featured in family photographs taken both at Royal Lodge and Y Bwthyn Bach, an aspect of the Yorks’ easygoing intimacy reflecting the influence of the Strathmores.

In the autumn, the rebuilt Royal Lodge welcomed another new arrival, a recent graduate of Moray House teacher training college in Edinburgh. She received a bedroom and a sitting room of her own. Her name was Marion Crawford. She was twenty-two, the daughter of a mechanical engineer’s clerk from Ayrshire, and her stay with the Yorks lasted fifteen years. They called her ‘Crawfie’. Their delight in one another was sincere while it lasted.

It was unavoidable that Elizabeth’s education should have become a topic of eager speculation: every aspect of her life was newsworthy. Briefly newspapers suggested a preparatory school on the Suffolk coast at Southwold; hastily the rumour was denied. ‘There is no intention of the princess’s elementary tuition being undertaken at a private school,’ wrote the female author of ‘Mayfair Gossip’. ‘She is already being taught simple lessons in the three Rs, and in due course a governess will be engaged for her to have extended instruction. This plan is approved by the Queen, who takes the closest interest in the welfare and upbringing of her granddaughter.’⁷⁸

Crawfie was the governess in question. She had made a trial visit to her would-be employers at Easter, before beginning work proper later in the year. Despite her youth, her references were of a sort guaranteed to appeal to the duchess: she had previously served as a temporary governess to the duchess’s niece, Mary Leveson-Gower. ‘I had certainly never intended to become a governess,’ Crawfie wrote later; she had hoped to specialize in child psychology.⁷⁹ She had not counted on quirks of fate or the duchess’s smiling determination. Her knowledge of English and the humanities was adequate, even enthusiastic. Less assured was her grasp of mathematics, which Queen Mary discounted as irrelevant in the circumstances, insisting that Elizabeth and Margaret ‘will never do their own household books’.⁸⁰ The duchess would make manageable demands on Crawfie’s abilities and her imperfect fund of knowledge. Even after her husband’s accession, her focus was her daughters’ happiness and physical wellbeing. She wanted for both girls an education like her own, intended as a preliminary to a suitable marriage, an unexacting requirement comfortably within Crawfie’s capabilities. In the event, Crawfie’s unambitious curriculum may have suited Elizabeth’s future as a constitutional monarch in the second half of the twentieth century, a remit with little scope for inconvenient curiosity or imaginative flights. If so, this was as much a happy accident as a considered plan. As an approach, it would prove more frustrating for Margaret, whose future was less fettered than her sister’s. Among key skills Crawfie taught Elizabeth was the ability to read quickly. Her youth made her an unintimidating teacher: she was only sixteen years older than her pupil. She appears to have taken pains to preserve Elizabeth’s self-confidence.

At first Crawfie’s appearance in the princesses’ lives served to maintain the distinction between the two girls that the difference in their ages naturally imposed and to emphasize that Elizabeth was growing up. In 1933, Elizabeth, not Margaret, was Crawfie’s pupil. Despite their wish that their younger daughter should not feel herself at a disadvantage, the Yorks themselves occasionally reinforced this discrepancy. The Master of the King’s Music, Sir Edward Elgar, had dedicated to Elizabeth, Margaret and the duchess jointly a new composition to commemorate Margaret’s birth. This was his ‘Nursery Suite’, performed at a concert on 4 July 1931 in front of an audience that included Elizabeth and her parents but not, inevitably, baby Margaret. The following autumn, Elizabeth went to a charity matinée with the duchess, with whom she also attended Sunday-morning church services. The Daily Mail described these outings as ‘semi-public’.⁸¹ To observers they were a reminder of Elizabeth’s pre-eminence among the King’s grandchildren. Newspapers delighted in mother and daughter’s appearances together; they spared no truck for the duchess’s anxiety about her daughter’s lionizing. And, invariably, cheerful and polite Elizabeth acquitted herself commendably. ‘The little Princess, who has been coached by her mother in the art of proper deportment, thoroughly enjoys being thus “taken out”,’ asserted the Mail’s ‘Onlooker’.⁸² Photographs of a smiling Elizabeth on her mother’s arm point to the accuracy of this prim assessment. This was the happy, golden-haired child Crawfie inherited. At three, Margaret remained Alah’s charge.

Crawfie recorded her first impressions of Princess Elizabeth in The Little Princesses in 1950. By then, almost two decades had passed since the evening she described. For much of this time, including at the time of writing, Elizabeth had been firmly established as heir to her father’s throne. That this was not the case in 1933 does not invalidate the cosy glow of Crawfie’s retrospective account of a ‘small figure with a mop of curls’, sitting up in bed driving an imaginary team of horses ‘once or twice round the park’, the cord of her dressing gown a substitute for reins.⁸³ ‘From the very beginning I had a feeling about Lilibet that she was “special”... with so much character at so young an age,’ Crawfie remembered, and her version of the seven-year-old princess aligns with other first-hand accounts.⁸⁴ Henry Owen, the duke’s groom responsible for Elizabeth’s riding lessons, wrote to Cynthia Asquith, ‘Words really fail me to thoroughly explain how very nice Princess Elizabeth really is.’⁸⁵ That year, Philip de László painted Elizabeth’s portrait and was dazzled by the child he described as ‘a most intelligent and beautiful little girl’. He reported her telling him confidentially that, like him, she also painted, ‘and I’m a very good painter. I’ll bring some of my work next time and show you.’ De László also explained, ‘she is enormously popular and... at present looked upon as the future Queen of Great Britain’.⁸⁶ This last view was not one the duchess encouraged at 145 Piccadilly or Royal Lodge, and the portrait the Yorks commissioned from de László, a romantic exercise in chocolate-box prettiness akin to the best of Marcus Adams’s photographs, excluded explicit markers of rank.

Crawfie’s challenge was to fit into the relatively small number of hours the duchess allowed her elements of a rudimentary education. Sacrosanct in Elizabeth’s days was the time mother, father and two daughters spent together: a post-breakfast romp in the duchess’s bedroom, card games after tea (racing demon, rummy, happy families, snap), bathtime, nursery games like pillow fights, then bedtime with its ritual of story-reading. Everything else, lessons in particular, was liable to disruption. Hairdressers and dressmakers called at 145 Piccadilly, there were dental appointments to be kept. That winter, papers reported that the house had ‘become the meeting place for a number of small people who attend a weekly dancing class there, and afterwards have tea with the little Princess’.⁸⁷ These sessions, shared with the Yorks’ next-door neighbours and the three sons of the duchess’s friend Lady Plunket, were led by Marguerite Vacani, ‘famous teacher for the little people of society’, recommended by the British-born Queen Ena of Spain. She directed her royal pupil ‘to walk well, curtsey gracefully,... [and] dance on her toes’ and later recalled her first impression of a ‘little girl, bright blue eyes, smiling face and so pleased to see you’.⁸⁸ That Madame Vacani’s lessons consumed an entire afternoon was of no consequence. Afternoons were for time off, preferably spent outdoors: drives in the park, feeding time for Elizabeth’s Japanese blue tortoise, Madame Butterfly, bicycle rides in the garden, including, in one account, a game Elizabeth and Margaret called ‘pedestrians’, in which Elizabeth rode up and down the gravel paths on her tricycle, watched by Margaret, until ‘suddenly Princess Margaret steps forward and holds up her hand. Obediently Princess Elizabeth slows down and stops and Princess Margaret walks sedately across an imaginary pedestrian crossing in safety.’⁸⁹ There were weekly singing lessons at 32 Prince’s Gate, the home of the Countess of Cavan, lady-in-waiting to both the duchess and the Princess Royal. Elizabeth shared her singing lessons with the countess’s elder daughter, Lady Elizabeth Lambart, two years her senior and named after the duchess. Crawfie had no choice but to work around these distractions. In the short term, in the two and a half to three hours available to her each morning, she instructed Elizabeth in history, literature and arithmetic, ‘the first two by far the favourite, as with all children’.⁹⁰ She took out a subscription to the Children’s Newspaper (safely conservative with its mantra of Empire and Christian goodness); always to hand were copies of Punch. Her ‘innovations’ included ‘dirty’ playtime: games of hide-and-seek, sardines and Red Indians in shrubberies grubby with London soot. She writes dismissively of the ‘quiet ladylike games in Hamilton Gardens, keeping to the paths’, encouraged by Alah, for whom princesses ‘should be princesses always... dear little figures like dolls’, and the brief she set herself included encouraging her charges to be more than ‘princess dolls’.⁹¹ In London, Crawfie’s lessons took place in a small room off the drawing room. There were plenty of opportunities for disturbances, including leisurely elevenses: for Elizabeth a special, and specially disliked, milk pudding. At Royal Lodge, the schoolroom was sunny, with bright chintz curtains, in line with the duchess’s doctrine of joy. Occasionally Elizabeth’s reward for ‘working very industriously at her classes and... a good week’s work’ was permission to invite a friend to Royal Lodge for the weekend.⁹²

The duke and duchess did not interfere (‘No one ever had employers who interfered so little’ was Crawfie’s comment⁹³): the value they attached to the substance of their daughter’s learning, Crawfie suggested, was not always apparent to Crawfie. Since Elizabeth was taught alone, neither she nor her parents had any means of assessing her progress: as with other children educated similarly, direct comparison was impossible. This did not concern either duke or duchess. A rare opportunity for measurement against her peers was provided by Elizabeth’s knitting. Her contribution of an orange and grey scarf she had knitted for an appeal for Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild was reported in papers under the headline ‘Boy Cousin Does Three’. Elizabeth disliked knitting, as she disliked the family hobby of needlework at which her father and her grandmother excelled; the scarf was ‘the result of much patient work’. It was eclipsed by Gerald Lascelles’s efforts. ‘Not only has he knitted three scarves, but he has finished them with elaborate tassels,’ the Daily Telegraph reported devastatingly.⁹⁴

Crawfie’s long stay with the Yorks is a measure of her liking for all four. As a teacher, she implied, she experienced frustrations. Unfairly her account deliberately portrayed Elizabeth’s parents as uninterested in her education, more concerned, for example, with Elizabeth’s ‘promise of one day being an excellent dancer’ and ‘the grace and enthusiasm with which she perform[ed] Scottish dances’, described as ‘the admiration of all her friends’.⁹⁵ The education of aristocratic daughters by private governesses in this period seldom targeted academic distinction. The prominence in Elizabeth’s patchy timetable of ‘ladylike’ accomplishments – dancing, drawing, riding – paralleled her contemporaries’ experience, less surprising then than now. George V’s best-known requirement of Elizabeth and Margaret’s schooling was that they learn ‘to write a decent hand’, which both did.⁹⁶ Unsurprisingly, it closely resembled their mother’s, the handwriting they saw most often. As long as Elizabeth remained an outside contender for the throne, with an assumption that a tardy Prince of Wales would do his duty and provide a male heir, the nation at large shared the duchess’s pleasure in Elizabeth’s ‘extracurricular’ diversions. And Crawfie was not to know that, more than once, dancing would prove a key skill in Elizabeth’s arsenal later on. She was aware simply of the time denied her in the classroom and the progress hampered by parental laxness. Elizabeth’s undoubted ability redoubled her governess’s irritation. Crawfie commended her ‘bright quickness of mind’; she noted that she ‘was quick at picking anything up, and one never had to do a lot of explaining to her’.⁹⁷ She noted, too, a biddable quality in Elizabeth, ‘from the start... a certain amenability, a reasonableness rare in anyone so young’: under different circumstances, an ideal prescription. She would remain mostly amenable to what was expected of her.

Crawfie did not fight her battles single-handed. She discovered a supportive ally in Queen Mary. The attachment that both King and Queen felt for their elder granddaughter was genuine. Neither with his own children, nor any other grandchild, did the ageing sovereign retrieve on hands and knees hair clips lost beneath the royal sofas; he pointed out to her the crowded details of William Powell Frith’s holiday panorama, Ramsgate Sands, hanging in his study. In Queen Mary’s case, her attentiveness to Elizabeth transcended simple affection. The devotion to the British monarchy cherished by this great-granddaughter of George III was the guiding philosophy of her life. Any possibility of Elizabeth inheriting the throne placed her, in her grandmother’s eyes, on the loftiest pedestal; her Olympian destiny required proper preparation. ‘It would have been impossible’, Lady Airlie wrote, ‘for anyone so devoted to the Monarchy as Queen Mary to lose sight of the future Queen in this favourite grandchild.’⁹⁸ The Queen was ‘very anxious for Princess Elizabeth to read the best type of children’s books, and often chose them for her’: Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, Austen.⁹⁹ She found herself ‘more interested in the education of the two Princesses than she had been in her own children’s’.¹⁰⁰ French lessons were an early focus. To follow Elizabeth’s gramophone course, the Yorks employed a visiting mademoiselle; she insisted on the ‘endless writing out of columns of verbs’. ‘Goaded by boredom to violent measures’, Elizabeth rebelled. She turned upside down over her head a large silver inkpot. The result was ‘ink trickling down her face and slowly dyeing her golden curls blue’ and the departure of the mademoiselle.¹⁰¹ Queen Mary suggested a holiday governess: the duchess chose Georgina Guérin, her own French governess’s daughter, who, from 1935, stayed with the family at Birkhall and Balmoral. (Elizabeth’s response was less than enthusiastic. ‘Mademoiselle arrived safely,’ she wrote from Birkhall, ‘which was a pity.’)¹⁰² The Queen encouraged learning poems by heart as ‘wonderful memory-training’.¹⁰³ Elizabeth’s repertoire included ‘London Snow’ by the recently deceased poet laureate Robert Bridges, Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and a handful of poems by Walter de la Mare. But it was the duchess who requested Latin lessons for Elizabeth, beginning in 1935, and the duchess who insisted Elizabeth write thank you letters as soon as she was able. To her grandmother in February 1934, Elizabeth wrote with childish inconsequence, ‘We loved staying at Sandringham with you. I lost a top front tooth yesterday morning. Margaret and I went to a fancy dress party at Lady Astor’s.’¹⁰⁴

Elizabeth herself was unaware of tensions surrounding her education, politely concealed below the surface. The duke and duchess did indeed create for their daughters the carefree family life on which they were set, as though, Crawfie commented unironically, ‘the season was always spring’.¹⁰⁵ Happiness was consistently uppermost among the duchess’s motives. It prompted the family’s first trip to the circus, in January 1934; it guided the duchess’s choice of books and poetry to read aloud to Elizabeth and Margaret: ‘Fairy stories... Black Beauty, At the Back of the North Wind, Peter Pan – anything we can find about horses and dogs, and gay poetry like “Come unto these yellow sands”’; she also read them Bible stories, as her mother had to her, first spur to Elizabeth’s strong religious faith.¹⁰⁶ Together the sisters read Thackeray’s fantastic royal dystopia, The Rose and the Ring. Among presents to his niece from the Prince of Wales were copies of A. A. Milne’s Christopher Robin poems. Elizabeth’s favourite was ‘Buckingham Palace’, about the changing of the guard, with its final question, funniest of all to this particular reader: ‘Do you think the King knows all about me?’ In the short term, Queen Mary mostly contented herself with a grandmother’s treats, like the winter afternoon of brilliant sunshine when she and Elizabeth drove from Sandringham to Hunstanton beach and ‘the little Princess, equipped with a toy pail, began collecting shells, and was helped by the Queen, who pointed them out to her, and they waded through puddles to secure them’.¹⁰⁷ She supervised the duke and Elizabeth stripping ivy from walls around the estate.¹⁰⁸

Her parents, her grandparents, baby Margaret, Alah, Bobo MacDonald, Owen the groom, Crawfie, Elizabeth Lambart to share her singing class, the Plunket boys in her dancing class: Elizabeth’s was a tight-knit world full of a child’s certainties. For the time being, it continued its accustomed round. Elizabeth’s seventh birthday that spring had been celebrated as previously at Windsor. There were presents after breakfast, a morning’s grace from lessons and the changing of the guard by the Welsh Guards in the castle quadrangle, watched not only by Elizabeth and her Lascelles cousins but ‘a very large crowd... including a party of 200 Belgians who were visiting the Castle and Eton College’.¹⁰⁹ After an hour’s riding, family tea – the King and Queen, the Princess Royal, the Prince of Wales – included the usual iced cake made by the King’s chef. And there was an announcement, too, a rearguard action to safeguard for another year semblances of childhood. ‘It was stated today that the Duke and Duchess of York have decided that their daughter is still much too young to take on public work. Not for another year at least is the Princess likely to be seen in public save on occasions like the Royal Tournament or the Royal Horse Show when she accompanies her mother.’¹¹⁰