CHAPTER IV
IN A SPEECH roundly applauded by his audience in 1932, at the opening of new headquarters of the British College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Professor William Blair-Bell had celebrated the Duchess of York’s contribution to British life. ‘Your Royal Highness has given to us all a vision of the happiness of married life, and in a very beautiful way, through the little Princesses, the people have been permitted to share your joys and show their devotion to the Crown.’1 On abdication day, newspapers reprinted Blair-Bell’s encomia. The force of his remarks, commented one, ‘is if anything even greater today’.
The beauty of family unity was a central theme of the reign begun in a spirit of make do and mend and characterized at its outset by the new King’s apologetic note to his prime minister: ‘I hope that time will allow me to make amends for what has happened.’2 A bachelor king had abandoned duty for a mésalliance; in his stead appeared a readymade family of a sort that peopled children’s reading primers. For the first time in history, a new sovereign and his consort were best known to their subjects as husband and wife, father and mother: lynchpins of a model family with happiness as its lodestar. In this light a disappointed nation tentatively embraced a second son ‘less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please’, whose chief recommendations were a serviceable doggedness and successful domesticity.3 Within weeks, loyal Cynthia Asquith had produced a new instalment of her heroine’s story; it was published under the title The Family Life of H M Queen Elizabeth. ‘No more homely British Family has ever ascended the throne than that of the Duke and Duchess of York,’ asserted the Daily Mirror on 11 December; for the new King George VI homeliness took the place of divine right. Elizabeth and Margaret, the paper claimed, had inherited their mother’s ‘simple and homely ideas’.4 Viewers of a Pathé Gazette newsreel were told that ‘above all, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth receive our hearty and humble affection because they are true home-lovers in the sense most respected by every man and woman throughout the civilised world.’
The royal family rallied behind what appeared at first an unheroic cause. David’s farewell broadcast trumpeted Bertie’s single qualification for sovereignty: ‘one matchless blessing enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me, a happy home with his wife and children’. Queen Mary echoed the call, in a message ostensibly of thanks to the nation for its support and kindness to her personally. In words written for her by Cosmo Lang, the royal widow pledged her support for her second son; she commended his wife, she reminded his new subjects that they had already taken to heart his daughters. Newspapers published a photograph that made clear her role as royal matriarch, in her daughter-in-law’s words ‘a rock of defence’:5 the old queen seated centrally, flanked by Elizabeth and Margaret, on her knee Prince Edward of Kent, the newest royal baby, a visible linking of past and future, former glories and coming hopes. To Bertie himself, his opportunist cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten articulated the loyalist line: ‘Luckily both you and your children have precisely those qualities needed to pull this country through this ghastly crisis.’6
Over time, a reeling nation mostly accepted the conjuring trick of the abdication by which domestic probity supplanted the legitimacy of primogeniture as grounds for kingship; even David himself had acquiesced. In this way, as in others, the accession of the family-minded Duke of York restored, rather than destroyed, continuity. The focus on family that characterized George V’s later public utterances had won broad approval, like the letters the King received after his Christmas broadcast of 1934 with its reference to ‘the marriage of our dear son and daughter’, the Duke and Duchess of Kent: ‘I think it was Lovely and Good of you... to think of your loving Son and Daughter in law’; ‘it was most pleasing to us all to hear your loving remarks respecting Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Kent’.7 Responses of this sort accounted for the successful reissue, the month after the abdication, of Michael Chance’s syrupy Our Princesses and Their Dogs, illustrated with Lisa Sheridan’s photographs of the new royal family taken in more carefree days. To this gossamer offering and other similar exercises a loyal press responded helpfully. ‘You see what a cheery, natural kind of life these two little girls lead,’ commented a columnist called ‘Wendy’. ‘They like to romp and play out of doors. They love the circus, they like to see a pantomime, and they simply adore parties. They can ride and dance, and Princess Elizabeth is learning to skate. They have to do lessons of course, though whether they like them very much I don’t know!’8 Here were the royal daughters as symbols of British orthodoxy: happiest out of doors, populist in their cultural choices, dog-loving, robustly unintellectual. ‘Amid the delightful surroundings of Royal Lodge they live a happy, open-air life,’ announced a cigarette card in Wills’s commemorative coronation collection. It was as if Wallis Simpson’s flaw was the time she spent indoors. She could not compete with the Yorks’ absorption in their garden or the little girls’ delight in their dogs and ponies.
On Elizabeth, though she was still too young to realize it, this compensatory approach to promoting the new reign imposed additional pressures: she must be happy at all times and conspicuously so in company with her family. Conveniently, happiness had been central to her public persona from birth. With the iron nib of the propagandist, Anne Ring acclaimed her as ‘contented all day long’ and ‘passionately fond of her parents’, in both instances truthfully.9 For a public who still required from their royal family something more than ordinariness, the Yorks’ storybook contentment elevated them above the common run. Uncle David had forfeited his throne by failing to find happiness in acceptable form; in December 1936, as the soon-to-be ex-king explained, such happiness was the Duke of York’s trump card. As a rationale, its implications would be shared with both his daughters, as well as his wife. Time would show them well equipped to satisfy this particular expectation. ‘Their joy in one another is complete and perfect,’ the Sunday Express told readers before the coronation.10 Unusually accurate for hyperbole, it was a view with which all four would have agreed.
They returned to Marcus Adams. Four days after the Duke of York became king, the family sat again for their favourite photographer, their purpose transmogrification into a ‘Royal Family’. Again the princesses’s frocks are whorls of pale organdie. Neither looks entirely at ease. Against the dark background an aureole of light illuminates the four faces. Four sets of linked arms communicate their closeness. Watching the family’s arrival at a railway station soon afterwards, reporters noted that ‘Princess Elizabeth held the hand of her sister, Princess Margaret, when they stepped down from the Royal coach’.11 Clinging on to one another was a metaphor of sorts for uncertain beginnings. Elizabeth would do her best to hold her sister’s hand for much of the remainder of Margaret’s life.
Yet no one but Elizabeth regarded these hand-holding sisters as equals, least of all in December 1936; Elizabeth’s own behaviour indicates that she, too, recognized that their roles differed. The same reporter at King’s Cross recorded that, prior to leaving the station, ‘Princess Elizabeth left her sister, walked over to the group of [station] officials and shook hands with each.’12 She was ten years old; she was now the heir to the throne and schooled in good manners. Elizabeth not Margaret was photographed by Adams on her own in a head-and-shoulders portrait striking in its maturity. She does not smile, and her gaze is unflinching: it was an image to delight her grandmother. The participation of Elizabeth, not Margaret, in her parents’ forthcoming coronation, set for the date once fixed for Uncle David, consumed the curious with questions about her robes, coronet, attendants, whether or not ‘she would lead the procession of the Princes and Princesses of the Blood Royal’.13 Rumours that Elizabeth would attend a coronation durbar in Delhi did not extend to Margaret. Elizabeth’s education would change; Margaret’s need not. Elizabeth not Margaret would study constitutional history and economic theory with specialist tutors; Margaret would remain Crawfie’s responsibility. In the abdication’s aftermath, despite, Virginia Woolf noted, ‘pictures of the Duke of York and the Princesses fill[ing] every [newspaper] cranny’ for days beforehand, Elizabeth was the focus of most avid public interest.14 It was Elizabeth’s life that had changed irrevocably. ‘With the heartfelt good wishes which pour out to her parents from millions of English-speaking people all over the world will go a hope that [Princess Elizabeth’s] childhood may still be joyous despite the seriousness of the life that lies ahead,’ offered the Birmingham Daily Gazette on 11 December.15 It was her parents’ hope, too. Thanks to a four-year difference in age, Margaret’s life threatened no such ‘seriousness’. What Elizabeth herself thought remains unknown. To her sister she did not again refer to her future role, nor did she, like the future Queen Victoria at a similar moment, utter any resolution concerning how she meant to set about it. Perhaps, in December 1936, it simply felt a long way off. If so, her equanimity would stand her in good stead. ‘I’m afraid there are going to be great changes in our lives,’ the new queen told Crawfie.16 Both girls were too young to conceive any realistic view of the nature or impact of such changes, both, for the moment, young enough to absorb themselves wholeheartedly in the business of the present.
Elizabeth’s behaviour in the coming months suggests Lady Strathmore’s claim that her granddaughter had begun ‘ardently praying for a baby brother’, reported at second hand by Lady Airlie, was a fleeting response.17 Nothing has emerged to indicate anxiety on Elizabeth’s part, or that she protested against a fate beyond her control. ‘Acceptance of inevitability’, one of her cousins has claimed, seems always to have played its part in a character fundamentally pragmatic.18
Elizabeth’s position was unique. Her father had inherited the crown accidentally. By training and inclination he was unsuited to the task that confronted him; this was his own view and, overwhelmingly, that of members of the public canvased in Mass Observation surveys.19 His first response to his altered state had been to break down in tears on Queen Mary’s shoulder, an hour-long display of acute discomfort to this emotionally costive mother and son. In a calmer moment, he insisted his only knowledge was that of a naval officer. He was diffident and lacking in confidence. Although speech therapy had circumvented the worst of his stammer, public speaking frightened him; he lacked fluency. He lacked star quality, too, and, with his shy smile, slim figure and reputedly uneven health, any visible attributes of kingship. In the short term, his good fortune lay in his charismatic wife, in Queen Mary’s assessment ‘such a darling and... such a help to Bertie’, and his pretty daughters.20
By contrast, Elizabeth at ten appeared to have been endowed with every quality of a princess. She was a beautiful child, her hair still flecked with gold, with an infectious zest for life, ready understanding, innate dignity and, in the eyes of many contemporaries, all the magnetism her father so conspicuously missed. Speculation that she would one day inherit the throne, beginning at her birth, seemed to strengthen the legitimacy of her post-abdication elevation. Her association with her royal grandparents worked to the same end. A picture of Elizabeth in Bognor in 1929, building sandcastles while nearby a convalescent George V reads a newspaper, featured in the special 1937 coronation number of the Illustrated London News; a more inventive writer likened Elizabeth to Queen Mary at the same age. ‘She is today the image of her grandmother, Princess May of Teck, in 1877. There is the same fair colouring with its robust health. There are the same blue eyes that gain in apparent size by their setting and, above all, there is the same strength in the mouth and determination in the jaw.’21 Where the new king was measured against Edward VIII and found wanting, his daughter – the inheritor of her grandparents’ strengths – became a beacon of hope in whom commentators decided they had found the reassurance required by a shaken society. Fidelity to his father’s values would be a guiding principle of the reign of George VI and, afterwards, shaped aspects of Elizabeth’s own reign. In 1936, insistence on the princess’s kinship with her grandparents seemed to suggest the long-term viability of the abdication settlement. In the House of Commons on 28 January 1937, in response to a backbencher query, the home secretary, Sir John Simon, ruled out the necessity of introducing legislation to formalize Elizabeth’s claim to the throne, as an elder daughter, by an amendment to the Act of Settlement. No doubt existed, Simon suggested, that ‘in present circumstances, Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth would succeed to the Throne as sole heir’. It was not a likelihood that provoked notable misgivings.
At ten years old, Elizabeth was heiress presumptive to the throne and a worldwide empire that still, in 1937, covered a quarter of the globe. Only the birth of a baby brother could unseat her claim. At the time, short-term concerns over her parents’ suitability for sovereignty distracted attention from her own response to this daunting destiny discussed once with her sister Margaret, then set aside, unmentioned. Subsequent parliamentary discussion underlined her special status. Set before MPs in the context of a debate about the Civil List was the new king’s intention to make provision for Elizabeth from his personal income of Duchy of Cornwall revenues. It was just one way in which George VI identified his elder daughter as his heir. For her part, Elizabeth’s concerns were homelier. The death of Bobo’s father in January had encouraged her to crayon a black edge on Sandringham writing paper. ‘We are all very sad,’ she wrote to a friend. She signed herself ‘Lilibet (in mourning)’.22
‘Dear Bertie and Elizabeth will carry out things in the same way that King George V did,’ Queen Mary wrote to Lady Strathmore days after David’s departure.23 This widespread assumption proved largely correct; it extended to every aspect of Bertie’s kingship. A party at Buckingham Palace early in the reign was described as ‘on the same lines as the afternoon parties which were a regular feature of Buckingham Palace entertainment during the reign of King George V’.24 ‘The undoubted popularity of my brother Bertie, whose life is so much like that which my father led,’ reflected the Duke of Windsor in 1951, ‘suggests that... the British people are rightly pleased with his faithful carrying on of my father’s ways.’25
To Winston Churchill, on 18 May 1937, the new king wrote, ‘I fully realise the great responsibilities and cares that I have taken on as King.’26 His solution, insofar as he was able, was to deal with them as his father had. The doctrine of continuity offered the clearest rebuttal of David’s backsliding. Potentially it offered more: a conduit for inheritance of the father’s popularity by the son. As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy wrote in an essay, ‘I hope that the love of King George [V] will linger in the hearts of his people for a very long time and that they will try to love his successors.’27 His successors hoped so, too. One consequence of the abdication in court circles was the hardening of a conviction that there was a single workable approach to kingship. Bertie’s payback for greatness thrust upon him was the requirement that he behave like his father. In his case, the impulse fitted his instinctive conservatism and self-doubt: he did not consider behaving otherwise. One contemporary described him approvingly but not entirely accurately – Bertie was more sensitive, less confident – as ‘an almost exact repeat of his father both in manner and in mind’.28
And a similar expectation was extended to his daughter. Below an uncharacteristically solemn photograph of Elizabeth, a coronation guide opined sententiously, ‘In the event of her acceding one day to the Throne, there is little doubt that she will ably carry on the fine tradition established during a quarter of a century by her grandfather.’29 Little wonder, then, that two decades later, Elizabeth as queen would be criticized as out of touch. Meanwhile to her son and daughter-in-law, Queen Mary wrote, ‘What a joy it has been to me to feel that... you two dear beloved people will carry on the tradition which dear Papa & I tried to do.’30 Elizabeth was too young, and her life to date had been too straightforwardly happy, to experience fully any dread of prison shades. The abdication had determined her future: as the Western Mail explained chillingly, ‘so early in life, she has been dedicated to the service of an Empire’.31 The attitude of key players closest to the little princess also sought to shape the manner of that future.
The new king and queen left 145 Piccadilly for Buckingham Palace in February, followed by their daughters, Alah, Bobo MacDonald and Crawfie.
Though she did not remember it, Elizabeth had lived in the palace before, during her parents’ tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1927; the room chosen then for her nursery became her schoolroom now, full of sunshine on warmer days, with views across the large garden. Bedrooms for Elizabeth and Margaret were on the second floor, above their parents’ rooms overlooking the Mall, quite different from Elizabeth’s bedroom at 145 Piccadilly, with its large bay window above the quiet garden. Alongside day and night nurseries (‘repainted and done up, and… bright and cheerful’32), and rooms for Alah and Crawfie, was also a sitting room for Elizabeth. Later, Margaret remembered the move as achieved with minimal disruption, though hers was the perspective of a six-year-old, after days spent carefully strapping saddles on to toy horses and packing into a large basket grooming brushes and polishing cloths. Crawfie’s recollections were darker. Readers of The Little Princesses cannot mistake the recoiling the palace inspired in her: the ‘wearing’ distances; the ‘menace’ of vermin, especially mice; behind-the-scenes shabbiness; inconvenient plumbing, lighting, heating. Writing after the event, the ex-governess projects onto her charges her own intractability, but it is clear that the girls revelled in corridors long enough for bicycling indoors, the garden in which, the Princess Royal told them, their aunt and uncles had played summer games and the summer house, used by George V as a study, that became their outdoor schoolroom. In the centre of the garden was a large lake. Its resident population of ducks fascinated both girls. Searching for a nest, Elizabeth fell in. Dripping algae but soggily happy, she was smuggled back into the palace before her mother or Alah realized. On another occasion, Crawfie described Elizabeth’s legs as brown and scratched. Her new garden suited tomboy instincts. On wet winter afternoons, the sisters amused themselves less boisterously, gazing through the lace curtains of upstairs windows at upturned faces in the crowds outside.33
‘Sombre’ was the adjective that Cynthia, Countess Spencer, one of the Queen’s new ladies of the bedchamber, applied to the palace in 1937; the atmosphere in at least a handful of its more than 700 rooms changed surprisingly quickly.34 ‘Very little restraint placed on the children’, who, with or without attendant corgis, raced along passages, ‘one stoutish little girl panting “Wait for me, Lilibet, wait for me!”’, and the Queen’s genius, applauded by her husband and Lady Airlie, for making places ‘homelike’ wrought the difference.35 More than ever, in the spring of 1937 the Queen’s focus was her family life, which demanded, insofar as the aristocratic queen and her royal spouse understood it, a homely setting. ‘Whatever the exertions of his great office, [the King’s] natural taste for simplicity and family life will not be wholly starved,’ Cynthia Asquith suggested, ‘for, inspite of its immense size and vast staff, Buckingham Palace will remain as genuine a home as any cottage in the land.’36 As at 145 Piccadilly, it was his wife’s doing.
The Queen agreed to Margaret Lindsay Williams, responsible for her own portrait in Y Bwthyn Bach, painting a double portrait of her daughters. Three times, accompanied by Alah, the princesses visited the artist’s studio in St John’s Wood, happily distracted during sittings by her Sealyham terrier, Harriet. Newspapers mistook the Queen’s intentions, suggesting she had requested from Lindsay Williams a picture of the two princesses to harmonize with her decorating plans: ‘The white satin drapery behind the figures and the pale silvered frame will make the picture a feature in the Queen’s sitting room in the palace, which is being redecorated in peach pink and white.’37 In fact, the picture was not destined for Buckingham Palace but a gallery in South Africa. Nevertheless the Queen did ask that this latest portrait make no reference to her daughters’ status. ‘At the special wish of the Queen, neither child wears any jewellery, not even a ribbon in her hair... While the younger princess clasps a bunch of primroses, the elder has a few fallen flowers on her dress.’38 The cosy but canny new queen commissioned an image of her daughters as harbingers of spring. For a decade Elizabeth’s iconography echoed this theme. Stilted to the point of kitschiness to modern eyes, Lindsay Williams’s picture – widely reproduced in women’s magazines – achieved instant popularity. Like Lisa Sheridan’s photographs, it played its part in consolidating support for the new regime with its ‘simple’ focus on family and home; it celebrated the little girls as icons of hope – in Christopher Hassall’s poem ‘The Princesses’ of similar date, ‘Two folded roses... Buds of a royal Spring’, whom Hassall labelled unequivocally ‘England’s pride’.39
Yet at Buckingham Palace the illusion of ordinariness, so carefully fostered by the Queen as Duchess of York, could no longer be sustained. Here even private life was public, lived within sight of administrative as well as domestic staff, in a building that was simultaneously the headquarters of a worldwide empire, monarchy’s offices and an official residence of the crown. Here there could be no chance acquaintanceships, like that Elizabeth struck up with Sonia Graham Hodgson, based on a meeting in Hamilton Gardens, and little that was unregulated or unplanned. Here there were no next-door neighbours like the Allendales to encounter on terms of near-equality, nothing that suggested parity between Elizabeth and Margaret and any other children. At 145 Piccadilly and Royal Lodge, the Yorks had appeared to Crawfie to occupy an ivory tower, a term she imbues with nostalgia. It was at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle that the girls really became princesses in a tower. Equable Elizabeth does not appear to have been troubled; a friend of her own age shortly described her as ‘above all untemperamental’.40 Perhaps she had always understood, albeit unconsciously and only up to a point, that her ‘ordinary’ family life was at best a partial truth, this little girl photographed on every outing, to whom unknown bystanders had waved handkerchiefs and hats from her first ride in Hyde Park; who had stood between her parents and grandparents on the balcony at Buckingham Palace overlooking a sea of cheering faces; who had ridden through the crowds of the Silver Jubilee and driven along narrow East End streets crepitating with lusty cries for George V and Queen Mary; who had learned to wave before she could walk and to curtsey before she could read; who sat for portraitists and sculptors; whose birthdays were marked by messages of congratulations from unknown bodies, like the Chalfont St Giles Methodist Sisterhood, who sent ‘hearty birthday greetings and love’ in April 1937.41 All of this Elizabeth knew.
At one end of the garden at Buckingham Palace was a hill. From its summit, Elizabeth, Margaret and Crawfie ‘could look out into the wide world’.42 Their view showed them cars, buses, ‘people passing, and other children, with their nurses, bound for the park’. Sometimes, from beyond the garden walls, the trio heard snatches of conversation. ‘These children were a source of interest,’ Crawfie comments, like the crowds the girls watched from palace windows on rainy afternoons. She does not choose to offer further details. Elizabeth has remained interested in those beyond palace railings. ‘I loved watching the people and the cars there in the Mall,’ she told portraitist Pietro Annigoni in 1954. ‘They all seemed so busy. I used to wonder what they were doing and where they were all going, and what they thought about outside the palace.’43
Elizabeth’s best-known comment on her parents’ coronation in Westminster Abbey in May is the ‘haze of wonder’ she glimpsed covering the arches and beams of the roof at the moment of the King’s crowning. This mystical response suggests the imaginative hold the coronation exercised over her, and perhaps, too, since the eleven-year-old concluded that it was ‘all very, very wonderful’, the degree of ease she felt at her family’s change in fortunes. For the King and Queen and both their daughters, thoughts of the coronation had overrun their lives since December. Alongside coronation planning was a roster of special events. At a concert for children organized by philanthropist Robert Mayer on 6 April, the princesses heard a new orchestral fantasy, Big Ben Looks On, dedicated to them by its composer Sir Walford Davies. It began with ‘two small dedicatory tunes, one for each Princess’; Elizabeth obligingly beamed when her own was played.44 Like Davies’s dedication, the size of the crowds at Windsor Castle later in the month for her birthday indicated Elizabeth’s increased prominence as heiress presumptive. On this occasion, more than a thousand people gathered at the castle gates. They watched the changing of the guard; they cheered the royal family of four, visible in a doorway; and they cheered Elizabeth and Margaret, when, without their parents, they walked out into the Grand Quadrangle and ‘stood in the centre of the lawn acknowledging the greetings’.45 Elizabeth had taken part in a variant of this pageant since her third birthday; photographs suggest she felt almost comfortable. From it she absorbed an understanding of herself as public spectacle: her part was to respond appropriately to acclaim that was hers by dint of rank. Evidently she did so. Bystanders agreed she displayed ‘a dignity which she seems to have got from her grandmother, Queen Mary... a very pleasing dignity, and with it there is a certain thoughtfulness’.46 ‘She has a quiet poise that makes her remarkable among... other children,’ wrote another observer.47
Happily, dignity did not colour all of Elizabeth’s existence; it never would. In the account of the coronation she wrote for her parents on sheets of lined paper tied together with pink ribbon, a sense of awe contends with puppyish enthusiasm and a prosaic diligence that may have been Crawfie’s doing: a requirement that Elizabeth note and record every impression, regardless of relative significance. She describes her early awakening by the Royal Marines band; cosily crouching in the window with Bobo, wrapped in an eiderdown against the chill as both ‘look[ed] onto a cold, misty morning’ and the first spectators in the stands; the breakfast she was too excited to eat. She describes her dress: ‘white silk with old cream lace and... little gold bows all the way down the middle... puffed sleeves with one little bow in the centre. Then there were the robes of purple velvet with gold on the edge.’ She describes the ‘very jolty’ carriage that she and Margaret shared with the Princess Royal and the duchesses of Kent and Gloucester. And she describes the first instance that day of her public ‘princessing’, when the sisters ‘showed ourselves to the visitors and housemaids’, a spectacle once again. In Elizabeth’s account, details trip over one another. In the rapturous wonder she felt at her parents’ crowning is a sense of a personal epiphany. ‘When Mummy was crowned and all the peeresses put on their coronets it looked wonderful to see arms and coronets hovering in the air and then the arms disappear as if by magic. Also the music was lovely and the band, the orchestra and the new organ all played beautifully.’ Fleetingly, wonder, magic and beauty combined to create a transcendent moment. For a child on the cusp of adolescence, it was a thrilling demonstration of the extraordinary power of royal theatre at its most sublime, and, for Elizabeth, its glory shimmered all the brighter when, bathetically, Queen Mary revealed to her granddaughter how little she remembered of her own coronation. Elizabeth was astonished. She enjoyed the picnic lunch eaten in a dressing room before departing the abbey more than the lengthy prayers with which the service ended. On the palace balcony, ‘where millions of people were waiting below’, her excitement was palpable.48 In his diary, Chips Channon had recorded his view of the princesses arriving at the abbey ‘excited by their coronets and trains’.49 Excitement was the order of Elizabeth’s day. Unlike her grandmother, she did not mean to forget a single detail. Her view resembled that of the Times writer who described Elizabeth and Margaret processing towards the Royal Gallery, ‘all eyes... upon them, small figures advancing with a pretty wonder into a reality as fair as any fable’.50 But footage and photographs reveal more than wonder in Elizabeth’s demeanour. About her is ‘an air of unwonted seriousness and quiet dignity’. As one observer suggested, the service brought home to her beyond doubt something of ‘her realisation of the destiny awaiting her’.51
For Elizabeth, her parents’ coronation occurred at exactly the moment likely to impress her most powerfully. She was young enough to be thrilled by its magic, old enough to grasp something of its life-changing significance. In witnessing her parents’ ritualized transformation into anointed sovereigns, she surely glimpsed them in that moment heroically, as more than ‘Mummie’ and ‘Papa’. Into their relationship crept at intervals a suggestion of reverence, a deeper respect than that of a child for parents, especially towards her father. Over time it increased her predisposition to follow in their footsteps, her values their values, her ways their ways, her view of monarchy shaped by their example. Her admiration for her king-father never wavered. In his coronation broadcast the new King told his subjects ‘the highest of distinctions is the service of others, and to the Ministry of Kingship I have in your hearing dedicated myself... in words of the deepest solemnity’, a sentiment that would reverberate through Elizabeth’s thoughts of sovereignty ever after.52
Queen Mary, however, intended leaving nothing to chance. She embarked on a deliberate, partly covert process of supplementing Elizabeth’s education: her particular focus was the princess’s royal heritage. Through the intermediary of a lady-in-waiting, Lady Cynthia Colville, she had requested from Crawfie details of Elizabeth’s timetable. More history, including genealogical and dynastic history, Bible reading, poetry learning and physical geography, especially of imperial possessions, were the dowager’s suggestions. Ahead of the coronation, Crawfie read Elizabeth an account of her own coronation written by Queen Victoria; Queen Mary arranged for a coloured panorama of George IV’s coronation procession to be displayed in the palace schoolroom, and explained to both sisters the role of its 700 participants and the traditions they represented.53 By the time of the service itself, Elizabeth was steeped in coronation history. This picturesque immersion, in addition to her parents’ apotheosis and less lofty thrills like her specially made lightweight coronet and, for the first time, her own train fringed with ermine, contributed to the potency of the spell cast over her.
After the hullabaloo of coronation summer, which included a visit to Edinburgh – ‘The Royal Company of Archers are very picturesque in their green uniforms and big eagles’ feathers,’ wrote Elizabeth, with the family eye for details of uniform54 – Balmoral’s remoteness offered respite from constant attention. For Elizabeth there were friends to hand: daughters of members of the royal household Diana Legh and Winifred and Elizabeth (‘Libby’) Hardinge, in houses on the King’s estate. The name chosen for the magazine the friends began together was The Snapdragon. Elizabeth wrote a piece about looking out of the window at Buckingham Palace during the changing of the guard, another instance of her curiosity about the world outside or perhaps her sense of herself as an observer behind glass.55 The girls enjoyed time together without grown-ups nearby. ‘Winifred made buttered eggs and the rest of us did odd jobs,’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘Libby and I fried potatoes and cooked sausages.’56 When they stayed with the Elphinstones at Carberry Tower, there were pillow fights and sturdy nursery teas.
Back in London, both princesses were dragooned by Queen Mary into a series of visits to historic sights, including Hampton Court, Greenwich Palace and the Royal Mint. Their grandmother’s intention was to increase the sisters’ understanding of a royal past to which they themselves were linked by consanguinity and living tradition. Of an excursion in October to the Tower of London, the Queen wrote tactfully to her mother-in-law, ‘the children were thrilled at the idea of going to the Tower, & I am sure, adored their visit there with you’.57 Queen Mary described these Monday afternoon sallies as ‘instructive amusements’. Less devoted than Elizabeth to her grandmother, Margaret would remember much instruction but little amusement, the sisters hurrying in the old queen’s wake, ‘absolutely exhausted by hours on end of walking and standing in museums and galleries’.58 On Elizabeth the visits’ effect or otherwise is unclear. Many years later, excusing a frail Frederick Ashton from standing in her presence, she explained, ‘Our grandmother taught us to stand. We’re used to it.’59 The excursions did not diminish her love of history, which she described to Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria known to her as ‘Cousin Louie’, as ‘so thrilling’. Nevertheless, the pictures that most engaged her (and possibly Queen Mary too) on a trip to the National Portrait Gallery were those of her immediate family: Lavery’s group portrait of the family of George V and a bronze bust of George V, a Silver Jubilee commission by Felix Weiss.60 At the same time, inspired by the glittering kaleidoscope of the coronation and its aftermath – a palace dinner for leading Indian princes, a naval review at Spithead, at which she was presented with an HMS Victory souvenir brooch – Elizabeth had conceived a romantic enthusiasm for the world she glimpsed around her: the time-warp lushness of her father’s court en fête. Crawfie described both sisters’ excitement at the evening courts at which debutantes were presented to the King and Queen. Through the window they watched arrivals in the palace forecourt; in their rosebud-patterned pink quilted dressing gowns, they watched their parents in full regalia lead the royal procession to the Throne Room. What Elizabeth called their ‘fly’s-eye view’ was tantalizingly inadequate. With the reassurance that ‘one day you and I will be down there sharing all the fun’, she comforted herself as well as her sister. ‘And I shall have a perfectly enormous train, yards long,’ she added, a princess longing in that moment to be a grown-up princess.61
At Royal Lodge, where the Royal Family spent as many weekends as possible, the spirit of their former lives could be rekindled. ‘Court etiquette was forgotten, and ceremony left behind. We were just a family again,’ wrote Crawfie, suggesting solid foundations to the narrative of images like Lisa Sheridan’s, taken the previous year in the grounds of Y Bwthyn Bach.62 The King and Queen busied themselves with their garden; their daughters helped heap bonfires, assisted by the butler, chauffeur, Crawfie. The princesses rode their ponies, swam in the outdoor pool completed in time for Easter 1938, played with their dogs, played inside and outside Y Bwthyn Bach and, most of all, played with one another. On wet days, they rode the pair of rocking horses that stood outside the King’s study, they painted, drew, read and knitted; there were jigsaw puzzles and, as previously, teatime games of Racing Demon and, appropriately, Happy Families. Elizabeth and Margaret were as devoted as their mother could have wished. Prominent in Elizabeth’s feelings for her younger sister remained a protective instinct. She had been five and Margaret eighteen months old when an alarmingly buck-toothed clergyman called at Royal Lodge. Mesmerized, Elizabeth had gazed at the rise and fall of his jaw as he spoke. Eventually he had asked to see Margaret, a misplaced politeness. Firmly Elizabeth had refused. She had explained, ‘I think your teeth might frighten her.’63
In Crawfie’s account at intervals is a maddening superiority in Elizabeth’s attitude: ‘After all, she is very young for a Coronation, isn’t she?’ she supposedly asked her governess.64 Despite this no doubt kindly condescension, at seven Margaret regarded her sister with an element of hero worship and a touching trust. In their daunting and highly unusual public lives, it was Elizabeth who guided her, their parents too often occupied elsewhere, Queen Mary a fearsome figure, for whom Margaret felt small attachment. The gossipy Crawfie recorded Elizabeth’s instructions to Margaret on how to behave at a palace garden party: ‘If you do see someone with a funny hat... you must not point at it and laugh. And you must not be in too much of a hurry to get through the crowds to the tea table. That’s not polite either.’65 By turns the sisters bickered and squabbled, no more strangers to sibling fractiousness than any other children; they fought over toys. Both hated wearing hats; elastic chin straps were pulled and painfully twanged. With her father’s formidable temper, Elizabeth was not above a well-aimed punch. Margaret responded by biting. Although both Crawfie and Queen Mary detected wilfulness behind Margaret’s impish mischief, her parents placed responsibility on Elizabeth for maintaining harmony. ‘You mustn’t forget that [Margaret] is really very little, & sometimes you must control yourself when she is a little teasing. I know it is difficult, but you can do it, & I know you will,’ the Queen wrote to Elizabeth when Margaret was eight.66 Cynthia Asquith told a meeting of the Women’s Institute in Sussex that ‘from the time that the possibility of her future position dawned upon her, [Princess Elizabeth] was taught to prepare for it in every way, especially by self-control’.67 Elizabeth’s rare bursts of naughtiness increasingly gave way to the requirement that she always play the elder sister. Gently the Marchioness of Cambridge scolded her for cheating at cards. ‘I can [cheat],’ she responded, ‘because I’m a princess.’68 It was a rare instance of pulling rank. Acquired early, self-control became a defining characteristic.
The sisters were united by isolation. Formality, court etiquette, security measures and inexhaustible public interest in any and every aspect of their lives distinguished their everyday experience from that of their aristocratic contemporaries. They inhabited a world quite different even from that of their nearest royal cousins, Edward and Alexandra of Kent, both of whom, when old enough, attended conventional boarding schools and lived in a modest country house in the Home Counties. The traditionalism of George VI’s court cocooned the King’s daughters: princesses of the blood, they were set apart; in a culture of deference treated as royal rather than real. The journalist who, in April 1937, claimed that Elizabeth had already mastered ‘the task of developing a kind of double personality... to keep her two selves quite separate. One is concerned with her important duties as princess and the other with her private life as a normal, happy little girl’ cannot possibly have had access to Elizabeth’s thoughts or observed her private life.69 But the strangeness of both girls’ lives since their father’s accession made the development of compartmentalized on- and off-duty personae a realistic and almost certainly necessary mechanism. To herself and her family Elizabeth was ‘Lilibet’; to the wider world, as she would become increasingly aware, she was next in line to the throne. In March 1937, the Sketch’s ‘Mr Gossip’ reported a rumour that plans were afoot to send the quinqualingual nine-year-old Princess Josephine-Charlotte of Belgium ‘to be privately educated with our own Princesses’ as a ‘suitable’ friend.70 If there ever were such plans, they came to nothing. Neither Elizabeth nor Margaret had close royal friends whose experience of childhood mirrored their own. Instead, in a bid to maintain vestiges of normality, the King’s private secretary Alan, or ‘Tommy’, Lascelles wrote to the editor of The Times asking that ‘a concrete effort be made’ to prevent press attention ‘from spoiling these two, at present, delightful & sensible children’.71 Press interest did not diminish, and only Elizabeth remained unspoiled, delightful and sensible.
The two sides of Elizabeth’s life overlapped: her ‘princessing’ happened in a family context. At the end of October she attended the King’s first State Opening of Parliament. Her parents travelled by coach, they were enthroned in the House of Lords in full royal fig; Elizabeth made the journey by car and watched her father’s speech from the Lord Great Chamberlain’s box as a spectator but not a participant. Reports of the ceremony noted that she did not occupy the chair of state reserved for the heir to the throne; her attendance was for her own interest and because the King was also her father. Again, in the middle of December, she iced the cake her mother sent to unemployed young men in the Welsh town of Blaina. The letter that accompanied the cake, although written by a lady-in-waiting, conveyed something of Elizabeth’s liveliness and curiosity: ‘The Princess Elizabeth asked me to tell you that Her Royal Highness did the icing entirely on her own account and also the decorations. Her Royal Highness would like to know how many people have slices of the cake at the tea and wish you to have a very happy time. I am sure she put many happy wishes into the cake, as she thoroughly enjoyed doing it for you.’72 When Elizabeth and her mother attended a performance of the children’s play Where the Rainbow Ends at the Holborn Empire at Christmas, the audience sang a special children’s verse of the National Anthem in her honour: ‘We who are children weak, We for the future speak’.73
So often the margins of public and private blurred. In September 1937, at his parents’ house in Kincardineshire, Elizabeth planted an ash tree ‘in honour of the Master of Carnegie’s eighth birthday’.74 Overseen by the head gardener and her fellow guests, and the moment obligingly recorded by a photographer, it was an out-of-the-ordinary coda to a family party. Earlier in the spring, Elizabeth’s friend and cousin Lady Mary Cambridge had opened the Princess Elizabeth Boating Pool in Bognor Regis. The pool commemorated Elizabeth’s visit to the seaside town with her grandparents eight years earlier.75
Much that happened was an inevitable consequence of the family’s new position. From the outset, prompted partly by the King’s conviction of his own unreadiness for high office, Elizabeth’s parents recognized the importance of preparing her for what lay ahead: nothing diminished the Queen’s determination that her daughters’ happiness be sacrosanct. Fresh air and animals continued to feature largely in the princesses’ days. They acquired a rabbit each; for her Christmas card in 1937 Elizabeth chose a pastel drawing by Lucy Dawson of Dookie the corgi; on 10 December, the girls and their mother enjoyed a ‘cinema-lecture show’ on Canadian wildlife by a ‘Red Indian’ naturalist called ‘Grey Owl’, who was later exposed as Archibald Belaney from Hastings.76 And then Elizabeth became a Girl Guide and Margaret a Brownie. Crawfie claimed credit for the idea. Since the Princess Royal was president of the Girl Guides Association and, in 1920, the Queen had started a Guide troop at Glamis, the suggestion could just as easily have been their aunt’s, their mother’s or indeed their own. The plan almost failed to come off. The chosen company captain, future national Guide commissioner Violet Synge, queried the possibility of princess-Guides, given the movement’s democratic principles: ‘Guides must all treat one another like sisters,’ she expostulated.77 Her misgivings were overruled. Elizabeth and Margaret were enrolled by their aunt in the 1st Buckingham Palace Company of Girl Guides and Brownies, Elizabeth second in control of the Kingfisher patrol, under a cousin, Patricia Mountbatten. They met on Wednesday evenings at five o’clock in a variety of locations in and around the palace, including the swimming pool and George V’s summerhouse; they practised fire lighting and laid tracking signs. Later they undertook expeditions in Windsor Great Park. Both sisters’ enjoyment can be measured from the company’s long survival.
As an essay in ‘normal’ girlhood, the palace Guides company is easily pooh-poohed. Even one of its own members decried her fellow Guides as ‘all dukes’ daughters and Mountbattens – it wasn’t at all democratic’.78 Social inclusion, as currently understood, was not among the King and Queen’s aims: their focus was their daughters’ inclusion, which was successfully achieved. Family, friends and daughters of members of the household made up the troop. Shared elite status undoubtedly helped these particular Guides to treat one another as ‘sisters’, though the failure to waive the requirement to curtsey to Elizabeth and Margaret was a stumbling block of sorts, and Crawfie noted among these courtiers’ daughters ‘a tendency to let [the princesses] have an advantage, win a game, or be relieved of the more sordid tasks’, like washing up.79 Fellow Guides included Elizabeth’s cousins Lady Mary Cambridge, the Hon. Margaret Elphinstone and Patricia Mountbatten; her former neighbour the Hon. Ela Beaumont; Lady Elizabeth and Lady Joanna Lambart, with whom the princesses had shared singing lessons in Prince’s Gate, and the Hon. Alathea Fitzalan Howard; Winifred and Libby Hardinge, daughters of the King’s private secretary, and Diana Legh, daughter of the master of the household; and Elizabeth’s friend Sonia Graham Hodgson. Accurately, the Tatler described the royal troop as ‘a special company formed of [the princesses’] personal friends’. It informed readers that ‘they find this new play-time occupation very absorbing’.80 Patricia Mountbatten described Elizabeth the Guide as ‘really efficient, very organised and very responsible, keen and enthusiastic’, a description that, in different contexts, others would echo over a long life with more than its share of responsibilities.81
At the funeral of their grandmother Lady Strathmore, at Glamis in June 1938, was a wreath of blue irises and white carnations from Elizabeth and Margaret; the princesses remained in London. From Birkhall, their mother sent them a spray of heather, enclosed in a letter to Elizabeth, but it was a summer that would challenge the Queen’s impulse to shield her daughters from shadows.
Day after day, the sun blazed. The King visited Cowes Week, the Queen showed her daughters Osborne House. At Portsmouth, all four boarded the royal yacht Victoria and Albert for a journey on millpond seas to Aberdeen and, from there, across country to Balmoral. ‘All this week there have been war scares,’ Chips Channon recorded in his diary on 8 August;82 Hitler’s unbridled aggression towards Czechoslovakia threatened the outbreak of Europe-wide conflict. Of the crisis averted, on 28 September, by the Munich Agreement and prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s promise of ‘peace for our time’, the Queen wrote that it was ‘a nightmare of horror & worry’.83 With some success she concealed her anxiety from her daughters. Their timetable of morning lessons followed by reading was maintained by Crawfie; she was joined again by the girls’ French holiday governess, Georgina Guérin. Elizabeth and Margaret rode their ponies. As long as he remained with them, they joined the King and other guns for lunch in the surrounding hills. They played barefoot in the haystacks; with their cousin, the Master of Carnegie, they attended the Braemar Gathering, an annual royal fixture. Respectful crowds tailed their shopping expeditions to Ballater and Aberdeen.
By long arrangement, the Queen was due to launch the world’s largest ship, the Queen Elizabeth, named after her, on 27 September, in Glasgow. She carried out the engagement with her daughters. The King, who ought to have been with her, was in London, where preparations for war were hastily enacted: schoolchildren evacuated, air raid shelters dug in Hyde Park, the Privy Council summoned to agree the mobilization of the fleet. A nation overwhelmed by dread held its breath. In Glasgow the naming ceremony was filmed by Pathé. Commentary informed viewers that for many this was the first time they had heard the Queen’s ‘soft and mellow’ voice. It was a moment at which softness and mellowness were at a premium. On the banks of the Clyde, 300,000 people came to witness the ceremony: a show of pride in the city’s shipbuilding, as well as the reassurance of togetherness. The royals’ noisy reception was one of heightened emotion. ‘The great event for which the Queen had come to her native land was overshadowed by the thoughts surging through everybody’s minds, but it provided the hour and the opportunity for her subjects to give expression to their emotions,’ reported the Northern Whig.84 After the Silver Jubilee and the coronation, Elizabeth walked beside her mother apparently undeterred by the crowd’s scale. The Queen’s speech included a message from the King that ‘the people of this country... be of good cheer in spite of the dark clouds hanging over them and indeed over the whole world’. ‘We cannot foretell the future,’ she read, ‘but in preparing for it, we show our trust in a divine providence and in ourselves.’ Similar rhetoric would characterize royal pronouncements throughout the coming conflict. The princesses whom their mother had sheltered at Balmoral learned from her own lips of ‘the dark clouds hanging... over the whole world’.
Five months later, the King launched the first British battleship built in over a decade. It was named after his father, King George V. Elizabeth and Margaret attended a march-past of a thousand Girl Guides at Windsor Castle. Elizabeth wore her Kingfisher Company blue tunic and dark-blue pleated skirt, Margaret her Brownie equivalent. In a sign of the times, press attention focused on the sisters’ appearance for the first time in public in uniform.85
Elizabeth recognized war’s imminence, like the abdication, in its impact on her parents. The King’s workload escalated, he appeared tired but purposeful; there was a common theme to a number of royal engagements as well as visits to and from allies and would-be allies. In the early summer of 1938, the King and Queen made a state visit to Paris, its purpose Anglo-French amity; Elizabeth and Margaret remained at home. The French prepared a splendid gift for the absent princesses: a pair of dolls, ‘France’ and ‘Marianne’, each a metre high, with accessories including a florist’s stall complete with watering cans and artificial flowers, and a wardrobe that, for sumptuousness, rivalled the Queen’s: ‘gowns for the morning, for the tea party, 5 o’clock aperitifs, for Ascot, for the opera, the theatre, smart tailor-mades for the shopping expedition, stout tweeds for the country, pyjamas for lazy mornings on the beach, mackintoshes for rainy days, bathing suits, lingerie, frocks for all sports, sunshades and umbrellas’.86 The dolls had eight fur coats, including a baby leopard swagger coat, twenty bottles of scent, ostrich feather fans, embroidered scarves, gloves in a dozen colours and a jewel case each: in total, £5,000 worth of infant-size French finery. Elizabeth and Margaret formally accepted the present from the French ambassador at Buckingham Palace in November. As the Daily Mirror pointed out, it was their first official reception of an ambassador of a foreign power.87 They thanked Monsieur Corbin in French; he complimented Elizabeth on her accent. ‘I will now have to speak French to my Paris dolls,’ she returned tactfully. Plans were made to exhibit the dolls the following month at St James’s Palace in aid of the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital for Children, Shadwell. Elizabeth described the encounter matter-of-factly in a letter to her grandmother: ‘M[onsieur] Corbin came yesterday to hand over the dolls on behalf of the French people and we showed him all their clothes.’88
Foreign visits to the palace peppered the royal diary; their parents frequently introduced Elizabeth and Margaret to their guests. They were at their mother’s side to welcome King Carol of Romania and his son, Crown Prince Michael, at the start of the king’s winter state visit to London. The following spring Elizabeth joined the King and Queen for lunch with Poland’s foreign minister, Colonel Beck; she talked to the colonel in French. In French she delivered a carefully rehearsed speech of welcome to President Lebrun and his wife, who, in March, returned her parents’ visit. More informally, the princesses dipped in and out of the visit to Windsor Castle of the new American ambassador, Joe Kennedy. Their participation in their parents’ official lives became a distinctive feature of the new court’s entertaining. Part of the King and Queen’s training for Elizabeth, with whom the King had begun discussing current affairs and politics, it was also a reflection of the King’s view of his family as an indivisible unit, ‘us Four’ as he described them afterwards, a tight-knit quartet.
No one could doubt the strength of the bonds of affection between them. On 20 December 1938, Marcus Adams photographed the royal family for the first time at Buckingham Palace. In a country and empire on the brink of war, the resulting image achieved immense popularity. Framed in a doorway, Elizabeth and Margaret flank their parents, Dookie at Elizabeth’s heel. All four figures are linked, arms intertwined, hands held, a more confident reprising of Adams’s family portrait taken two years earlier. Against the magnificence of the palace – waterfall chandeliers, columns with gilded capitals – the pale frocks of the Queen and her ‘fairy’ daughters shimmer. Previously Adams had invested his royal sitters with would-be ordinariness; on this occasion they appear serene. To their contemporaries, it was an image to inspire pride as well as reassurance.
At the same sitting, Adams photographed Elizabeth alone with Dookie. As in Lisa Sheridan’s photograph taken at Y Bwthyn Bach, the princess’s attention is entirely and happily absorbed in the dog. Over time, such images would be interpreted as revealing the loneliness of Elizabeth’s position, her turning to dogs and horses for companionship uncomplicated by the barrier of her rank. It was not true yet.