CHAPTER V

‘She was truly in love from the very beginning’

ELIZABETH’S NEW SILK STOCKINGS, worn at a family wedding in March 1939, caused ripples of excitement among women journalists. She wore them with a coat of ‘pale geranium-coloured velvet’, with a matching beret and low-heeled shoes; Margaret was still in white ankle socks and a bonnet.¹

Elizabeth was weeks short of her thirteenth birthday. ‘What a charming child she is,’ wrote Joyce Grenfell, after seeing Elizabeth dressed as a ‘Dutch Peasant’ at a children’s party of Grenfell’s aunt, Lady Astor, in St James’s Square. ‘She has lengthened out a lot and has now got quite a lovely little face, really graceful arms and is generally very attractive.’² The stockings were a present from the Queen, an acknowledgement that, though she continued to be dressed like her four-years-younger sister, Elizabeth was growing up.

In other ways, nursery, schoolroom, even family routines remained unbending. Elizabeth’s featherlight timetable had achieved competence in spoken French and an enthusiasm for history, the subject that surrounded her and inspired Crawfie’s best, most dramatic efforts. As her grandfather had hoped, she wrote a confident, clear hand. Queen Mary’s ‘instructive amusements’ continued on Monday afternoons; the old queen’s conversation was full of instruction, much of it related to her favourite topic of royalty. In the Bethnal Green Museum, Elizabeth and Margaret saw a selection of their grandmother’s toys, entrusted to curator Arthur Sabin. There were visits to the General Post Office in Mount Pleasant and to London Docks, including the head offices of the Port of London Authority. Margaret’s relish for these heavyweight excursions did not increase; Elizabeth worked harder at interesting herself, training for what lay ahead. In May, after the King and Queen embarked on a lengthy visit to Canada and the United States, Crawfie took the girls to the YWCA Club in Great Russell Street. The visit’s chief excitement was not tea in the self-service café, in itself a novelty, but their first, long-anticipated journey by Underground, from St James’s Park to Tottenham Court Road, in a third-class smoking compartment. For much of their outing the party of the two princesses, Crawfie and the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Helen Grahame, president of the YWCA, went unrecognized, a reminder that smartly dressed upper-class girls with their nannies were among the sights of inter-war London and that the poor quality of newspaper photographs sometimes permitted the sisters margins of leeway.

Elizabeth’s letters to her parents included an account of a visit to London Zoo; she described a baby giant panda and riding an elephant. Affectionate and loving, her mother’s replies were full of scenery and wildlife. ‘What fun the Panda sounds,’ she wrote. She was reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf; to Elizabeth, in letters that skirted European politics, she described Canadian mountains like the hills around Balmoral, sightings of beavers, baby black bears and ‘a great black shape in a little lake – a moose feeding on the water lily bulbs’. She asked about the rhododendrons in the woodland garden at Royal Lodge and new plantings of scented shrubs. ‘I am absolutely longing to see you and Margaret again,’ she told her daughter. ‘What a hug you’ll get when I get home.’³

Despite her best efforts, the Queen’s letters transcended pleasantries. Canadians’ enthusiasm convinced the royal couple of the value of dominion visits. ‘One feels how important it is that the people here should see their King, & not have him only as a symbol,’ she wrote on 27 May.⁴ A week later she described to Elizabeth crowds in the country beyond Toronto: ‘They are so happy to have “the King” with them, & sometimes I have tears in my eyes when one sees the emotion in their faces. It means so much to them to see the Sovereign who they are so loyal to.’⁵ In time, overseas visits would play a key part in Elizabeth’s promotion of the Commonwealth and her own international role, including as Queen of Canada. Her understanding of the ramifications of such trips began with her parents’ example and their fidelity to the imperial orthodoxy of the crown as the living link between diverse territories and peoples.

The Queen’s letters also touched on Elizabeth’s education. At the time of her thirteenth birthday in April, Elizabeth had begun lessons in history and constitutional history with the vice-provost of Eton, Henry Marten. Marten was a contemporary of Queen Mary, with whom he shared an admiration for Queen Victoria, and a friend of Elizabeth’s great-aunt, Princess Alice. He taught Elizabeth at weekends, when the royal family was at Windsor, with Crawfie in attendance. At first her enjoyment was limited: he remembered ‘a somewhat shy girl... who when asked a question would look for confidence and support to her beloved governess’.⁶ Her pleasure increased with increasing familiarity. Over six years princess and provost read together Sir William Anson’s three-volume Law and Custom of the Constitution. Marten outlined for the future queen the relationship between the monarch, parliament and the nation. In illustrations and digressions, he enlarged on Queen Victoria’s example; he recommended a biography of her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby. He sketched for his pupil an overview of the monarchy’s thousand-year history, beginning with Egbert. He drew her attention to current developments in the communion of sovereign and subject: the role of broadcasting pioneered by her grandfather in the Christmas addresses that the Daily Express likened to ‘heart-to-heart Christmas talk[s]’; the emerging Commonwealth following the 1931 Statute of Westminster that had established ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire’ and made George V separately king of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland and the Irish Free State.⁷ The certainty ‘that education broadly speaking was to help a student to learn to appraise both sides of a question, thus using his [or her] judgement’ shaped Marten’s teaching, a lesson in itself for the future queen.⁸ ‘I do hope that you are enjoying your Saturday evenings with Mr Marten,’ the Queen wrote on 23 May with purposive underlining. ‘Try & learn as much as you can from him, & mark how he brings the human element into all his history – of course history is made by ordinary humans, & one must not forget that.’⁹

A result of the family’s seven-week separation – the longest they had been apart – was to bring the King closer to the Queen’s view of Elizabeth’s maturity. In Crawfie’s account of their reunion on the Empress of Britain, ahead of the ship’s arrival in Southampton, the Queen comments on the girls’ growth, while the King gazes in silent wonder at Elizabeth. ‘All the time the King could hardly take his eyes off Lilibet. I have a photograph which shows the Queen... holding Margaret’s hand... and the King looking at Lilibet.’¹⁰ Nevertheless, the reunion lunch was a reassuring combination of the childish and the rarefied, according to a member of the royal suite ‘a glorious absolutely riotous lunch... complete pandemonium’.¹¹ To the girls’ delight, the ship’s pink-painted dining room was hung with streamers and balloons. The ship’s orchestra, described by the Queen as ‘the little band’, played popular song tunes throughout: ‘Jeepers Creepers’ and ‘Umbrella Man’.¹² At the King’s suggestion, a sing-song before docking included his favourite ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, with actions, and ‘The Lambeth Walk’. The princesses released balloons out of portholes; in shops on the main deck they bought Canadian Mountie dolls and engraved penknives. Crew members presented them with panda-shaped nightdress cases. Elizabeth responded for both sisters. ‘She has all the graces which will stand her in such good stead in the great position she must one day fill,’ explained an unnamed ‘friend of the family’.¹³ Papers described a ‘gala’ atmosphere. It was typical of the ebullient family fun that was so important to both Elizabeth’s parents.

A rapturous reception greeted the royal party on shore, at the end of a trip regarded as a diplomatic triumph (‘If London was bombed USA would come in [to the war],’ was the King’s note on his conversations with President Roosevelt).¹⁴ As when the Queen travelled to Glasgow for the naming of the Queen Elizabeth, uncertainty intensified the atmosphere, a ‘horrible feeling’, she wrote, ‘of tension, rumour, and acute anxiety’.¹⁵ A ‘Welcome Home Pathé Gazette Special’ acclaimed the homecoming King and Queen as ‘the man and woman who have come to represent all our faith and ideals – of liberty, of peace, of toleration and freedom’, in stark antithesis to the dishonest belligerence of Hitler and Mussolini. Something of these high-flown sentiments coloured the crowds’ noisy response, as the royal family drove through packed streets to Southampton station and the train for Waterloo. In the car, a fidgety Margaret sat between her parents. Elizabeth was on her own in a row of seats in front, composed despite the cheering: as her parents recognized, older.

Just how much older, however, neither quite suspected. Within less than a month, a combination of good looks, gymnastic prowess, a heroic appetite for shrimps and, perhaps, the skirl of sea breezes set Elizabeth on the path of a love affair that would prove of remarkable longevity.

The object of her admiration was a portionless royal exile, five years her senior, ‘a fair-haired boy, rather like a Viking, with a sharp face and piercing blue eyes’: Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, like Elizabeth a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria.¹⁶ Their paths had crossed before, at the wedding of Philip’s cousin Marina to Elizabeth’s uncle George, Philip on that occasion one of ‘various small Eton-suited Princes from abroad’, Elizabeth a diminutive bridesmaid.¹⁷ Neither took note at the time. Looking back in 1947, Elizabeth wrote, ‘We may have met before at the Coronation or the Duchess of Kent’s wedding, but I don’t remember.’¹⁸ On 22 July 1939, at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, by Philip’s standards Elizabeth was still diminutive, months past her thirteenth birthday, dressed in the same clothes as her younger sister. Philip’s abiding impression, according to a conversation overheard by his cousin Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, was of her shyness.¹⁹ Elizabeth’s impressions of Philip were quite different.

The timing of the royal family’s visit to the college was fortunate for young love. Discovered at the eleventh hour, an outbreak of chickenpox and mumps prevented the princesses from accompanying their parents to a service in the college chapel. Instead, in the house of the captain of the college, they were offered as diversion a train set; there were ginger biscuits and lemonade, then there was Philip. He ate, drank, played, grew bored, suggested the tennis courts. Crawfie bridled at something brisk in his manner, but Elizabeth made up her own mind. Philip was eighteen, not an ideal age for humouring a shy, earnest, sheltered thirteen-year-old still invariably referred to as ‘little’. At the tennis courts he enjoyed himself in his own fashion, jumping over the nets. Crawfie thought he showed off: to her chagrin ‘the little girls were much impressed’.²⁰ Philip teased Margaret. Elizabeth gazed at Philip. ‘She never took her eyes off him the whole time,’ Crawfie remembered sourly.²¹ To her governess Elizabeth marvelled, ‘How good he is, Crawfie. How high he can jump.’

Philip was still in swaggering attendance at lunchtime. In the evening, he dined on the royal yacht. He did not see Elizabeth, who had gone to bed early, according to nursery routines. They met again the following day. At teatime Elizabeth played hostess. Her repeated enquiry – ‘What would you like to eat? What would you like?’ – sounds excitable. Nothing in her manner put Philip off his food: he ate ‘several platefuls of shrimps, and a banana split’. Elizabeth relapsed into contented silence, ‘pink-faced, enjoying it all very much’, watching.²² Crawfie stored up her irritation for The Little Princesses.

Her last chance of winning over Elizabeth to her own view of Philip as ‘a rather bumptious boy’ was defeated by a valedictory gesture of dashing bravado.²³ At the end of the visit, ‘while their Majesties, accompanied by Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, stood on the top deck waving farewell, the royal yacht was escorted into the Channel by an armada of 400 vessels, including every available craft from the Royal Naval College, which were manned by nearly 500 cadets’. Among this cockleshell flotilla was Philip. ‘While the green valley of the Dart resounded with storm after storm of cheering, the royal yacht steamed slowly out to sea surrounded by sailing-boats, rowing-boats, pleasure steamers, cutters, dinghies, speed-boats and motor-boats.’²⁴ One small craft continued to tail the royal yacht long after the others had turned back. At its oars was a single rower: Philip. ‘The young fool!’ the King shouted. ‘He must go back!’

Through her field glasses Elizabeth watched her hero’s progress. For her there would be no going back.

For at least one jobbing seer, it had been written in the stars. The unnamed astrologer quoted in the Woman’s Magazine in March 1932 foresaw it all. His or her prediction for six-year-old Elizabeth was ‘an alliance after her own heart at the age of eighteen, eventually leading to one of the oldest European thrones’.²⁵

Elizabeth married Philip, of a cadet branch of the Danish royal house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, months after her twenty-first birthday, in November 1947, Philip by then a naturalized British subject. With her parents’ consent she would have done so sooner. Chips Channon considered the match a given as early as January 1941, when Elizabeth was not yet fifteen, a view shaped by gossip in Continental royal circles.²⁶ Philip’s own memories parried any such suggestion. Afterwards, he dismissed the whole of his fitful wartime acquaintance with the princess: ‘I thought not all that much about it. We used to correspond occasionally... If you’re related... it isn’t so extraordinary to be on kind of family relationship terms. You don’t necessarily have to think about marriage.’²⁷ It was a characteristically brisk evasion on the part of a man disinclined to explain himself to third parties, and at odds with Elizabeth’s authorization in 1958 of a statement by her father’s official biographer that she had been in love with Philip ‘from their first meeting’.²⁸ ‘She was truly in love from the very beginning,’ remembered her cousin Margaret Elphinstone.²⁹ ‘Mummy never seriously thought of anyone else after [their] encounter when she was 13!’, one of Philip’s family explained later.³⁰ The astrologer had been correct at least in predicting ‘an alliance after her own heart’.

Accounts of Elizabeth’s marriage to Philip typically identify a puppetmaster’s role for Philip’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, known as Dickie, the younger brother of his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg. In attendance on the King at Dartmouth on 22 July 1939, Mountbatten emerges from this version of events as a man of Brobdingnagian ambition, who orchestrated the meeting of these high-ranking teenagers with the sole aim of gratifying his own overweening family pride, the participants themselves powerless against his plotting. And indeed a letter written later by Philip to his uncle specifically warned him against overplaying his hand in this way: ‘It is apparent that you like the idea of being General Manager of this little show, and I am rather afraid that she might not take to the idea quite as docilely as I do... don’t forget that she has not had you as Uncle loco parentis, counsellor and friend as long as I have.’³¹ By 1947, the year of Philip’s letter, Mountbatten was exceedingly anxious that the marriage come off. His family pride was also excessive, as the eleven years he devoted to the privately printed The Mountbatten Lineage: The Direct Descent of the Family of Mountbatten from the House of Brabant and the Rulers of Hesse indicates. In 1939, Mountbatten may have entertained only the germ of an idea. In his diary, in the briefest of references, he links Philip with both Elizabeth and Margaret: ‘Philip came back aboard V and A for tea and was a great success with children’.³² That he drew no distinction between the sisters, despite the discrepancy in their age and prospects, does not suggest he identified either at this stage as a romantic lead in a drama of his own devising. Perhaps his aim was simpler then: advancement of any sort for a penurious nephew. It was Mountbatten who, ahead of the royal visit, had suggested the ‘messenger’ role that kept Philip continually in the royal line of vision.

There is no reason to assume that Elizabeth required the prompting of her father’s worldly kinsman to fall in love with Philip. Boys had played scant part in her life: they were creatures, Crawfie explained, out of another world.³³ Teenagers fall in love: Elizabeth had had neither opportunity nor focus for her affections. Philip was strikingly handsome, funny and boisterous, ‘Prince Charming in every sense of the word’ according to Elizabeth’s elderly cousin Princess Marie Louise.³⁴ Towards the sombre princess he was neither deferential nor tongue-tied by shyness. He was royal and a distant relative. Lady Anne Glenconner described him later as ‘ideal – good looking and a foreign prince’.³⁵ Her view that Philip’s royalty qualified him as a partner for Elizabeth was one that Elizabeth, at thirteen, could share. Until her parents’ generation, most members of her family had married within the royal fold. Only five years earlier, she had been a bridesmaid at the wedding of her father’s youngest brother to the glamorous foreign Princess Marina, Philip’s cousin. In 1939 ‘royal marriages’ were still usual among European dynasties, grounds for Philip’s inclusion, in January 1937, in a list of possible suitors for the then eleven-year-old Elizabeth compiled by Literary Digest.³⁶ Frequently the parties were related, like Elizabeth’s grandparents, both great-great-grandchildren of George III.

The handsome, brisk ‘Viking’ was both more and less royal than Elizabeth, whose mother was a British noblewoman: her superior in bloodlines, his royal prospects negligible in comparison with those of Britain’s heiress presumptive. Recent family history linked Philip to reigning and exiled dynasties across Europe. On his father’s side he was the nephew and grandson of kings of Greece, a great-grandson of Christian IX of Denmark and the great-nephew of Britain’s Queen Alexandra; on his mother’s side a nephew by marriage of Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, a great-nephew of the last Tsarina of Russia and a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria through the marriage of Victoria’s second daughter Alice to Grand Duke Louis of Hesse. When Philip was twelve, the headmaster of his British preparatory school concluded that he ‘would make a good king’, as he had ‘two vital qualities, leadership and personality’. He based his view on Philip’s family background: he was thinking of him then, he explained subsequently, not as a husband for Elizabeth but ‘as King of Greece’.³⁷

It was an unlikely outcome, especially for the youngest child of a hapless fourth son. In the first half of the last century, few thrones teetered as precariously as that of Greece. A suitcase ready-packed, claimed one member of Philip’s family, was a prerequisite for every Greek royal. Philip’s own exile had begun when he was months old: in 1922, the family was rescued by a British battleship at the request of George V. He spent the early part of his peripatetic childhood in St Cloud, outside Paris, in a modest country house provided by a wealthy aunt, Princess Marie Bonaparte. Seven years younger than the youngest of his four sisters, Philip lived in a household dominated by women and financial anxiety. He was educated in Paris, England, Germany, then Scotland, and holidayed across the Continent with Romanian, Hessian and British royal relatives. His parents, Prince and Princess Andrew of Greece, lacked fortune and influence, lucky to have escaped revolutionary Greece with their lives. In material terms, Philip’s ‘royalty’ had a threadbare quality, fragile as cobweb. Splendid connections and astrological predictions aside, the eighteen-year-old naval cadet who leaped tennis nets for the British princesses possessed few solid expectations; even his scant wardrobe had been provided by his extended family. His principal legacy was emotional and deeply chequered. For much of his childhood his mother had been absent, confined to an asylum following a nervous breakdown in 1929 when she declared herself a saint and ‘the bride of Christ’; she did not communicate with her son at all, not even birthday cards. His father withdrew to the French Riviera, later settling on a yacht with an actress-mistress who called herself Comtesse Andrée de la Bigne. Unlike Elizabeth, Philip was of his own making, a survivor of family wreckage and royal dispossession, stateless, throneless and homeless, orphaned by circumstances: determined, strong and forward-looking, encased in the thickest skin, self-contained, a sensitive bully, ripe for iconoclasm. To the Queen he explained elliptically that he ‘had always played a lone hand, and had had to fight [his] own battles’.³⁸

In London in July 1939, Elizabeth and Margaret returned to 145 Piccadilly. Their visit with Crawfie and one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting to see an exhibition of ‘royal treasures’ in aid of the Heritage Craft Schools in Chailey lasted an hour. Like a detail in a children’s story, Elizabeth picked up a bracelet of Queen Victoria’s and found it fitted her perfectly; she admitted she had tried on the old Queen’s spectacles before. The sisters revisited their night nursery. In Elizabeth’s former bedroom at the back of the house was a collection of their favourite toys. Exhibits were insured for an estimated £1 million.

For the princesses, the display, like works in a museum, of toys so recently cast aside offered further proof of the public aspect of their childhood – like Queen Mary’s toys arranged in glass cases in Bethnal Green Museum when they visited in February. For a modest fee even their former bedrooms were available to view. But escape from prying eyes was not the only reason for their particular concern that their Scottish holiday go ahead as usual this year. Balmoral inspired feelings of security, remote from London and the shadows that had continued to cluster all summer. Europe shuddered on the brink of war. After some uncertainty, the royal family departed London for the Highlands, arriving on 7 August. For the King it would be a sadly brief stay.