CHAPTER VII

‘Are we being got ready… for the betrothal of the heir to the throne?’

IN MAY 1946, bridesmaid Elizabeth was photographed with Prince Philip of Greece at Jean Gibbs’s wedding to the Queen’s nephew, the Hon. Andrew Elphinstone. The previous month Elizabeth had included Philip in the party of six she took to John Patrick’s wartime drama, The Hasty Heart, at the Aldwych Theatre. So widespread were rumours of a royal engagement by the autumn that, on 7 September, the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, known as Tommy, issued a categorical denial: ‘Princess Elizabeth is not engaged. The report is incorrect.’ At the time Philip was a guest of the King and Queen at Balmoral. Before his three-week stay ended, it seems likely that he proposed to and was accepted by Elizabeth, in her own words, according to Philip’s cousin Alexandra, ‘beside some well-loved loch, the white clouds sailing overhead and a curlew crying just out of sight’.¹ In his thank you letter to the Queen, Philip wrote, ‘I am sure I do not deserve all the good things which have happened to me… The generous hospitality and the warm friendliness did much to restore my faith in permanent values… Naturally there is one circumstance which has done more for me than anything else in my life.’² Inevitably Lascelles’s denial proved counterproductive. A housewife in the north of England commented on ‘the rumoured engagement to Philip of Greece… I imagine they have little scope in finding her a husband who would be considered worthy of the job.’³ She had reached her own conclusion, based on Elizabeth’s clothes. ‘There are comments on all sides about the too-grown-up way she has appeared since the Victory parade,’ she wrote. ‘Are we being got ready, as an Empire, for the betrothal of the heir to the throne, and is she being made to look of marriageable age, so that no one can think what a kid she looks, given as a lamb to the slaughter?’⁴

The King and Queen were tired, in the Queen’s words ‘absolutely whacked’.⁵ Six years of war had taken their toll on the monarch and his consort. Their reward was popularity verging on adulation, but it was to Elizabeth and Margaret, rather than their parents, that a nation weary of austerity, its main topics of conversation, according to the King, ‘food, fuel and clothes’, looked for vicarious excitement.⁶ The palace responded by releasing a series of photographs of the royal sisters. Lisa Sheridan pictured Elizabeth in the gardens of Royal Lodge, a wholesome girl-next-door, and in her sitting room at Buckingham Palace reading, busy with her stamp albums, smilingly business like at her large, orderly desk, and noted the new encroachments of Elizabeth’s public life: ‘constant interruptions... while we worked parcels, packets and letters were slowly mounting up on a table beside the door’.⁷ Quite different were dream-like pictures taken by Cecil Beaton in March 1945 and held back till war’s end: Elizabeth in the same Hartnell pre-war crinoline dress of the Queen’s she had worn as Lady Christina Sherwood in the 1944 pantomime Old Mother Red Riding Boots; in long-sleeved, flower-patterned chiffon in front of a painted backdrop depicting winter, harbinger of spring again; with Margaret at the foot of a palace staircase, butterfly princesses amid the glittering gilt, an updating of Marcus Adams’s soufflé vision. The wartime popularity of the royal family had confirmed Elizabeth’s status as a nation’s darling – as the Duchess of Windsor called her spitefully, the royal Shirley Temple. Unlike the American child actress, Elizabeth had not outgrown her ability to enthral. In 1946, The Times estimated an enormous crowd of 40,000 to witness Elizabeth’s traditional birthday celebrations at Windsor, while her two-day visit to Exeter in November attracted the largest crowds for any royal visitor in the town’s history. In April, thirteen-year-old Harvey Blackett met Elizabeth when she opened the Sir John Priestman Durham County and Sunderland Eye Infirmary. His eyes bandaged after a squint operation, he told reporters afterwards, ‘I would love to have seen her, her voice is so lovely.’⁸ Violet Bonham Carter described Elizabeth as ‘much prettier than any photograph because she has real bloom of youth’.⁹ In the grey, exhausted, impoverished world of peacetime Elizabeth found herself a romantic heroine by accident.

Or perhaps not. From infancy, she had existed on one level as a figment of the popular imagination, a construct of newspapers’ mythmaking and delicious photographs. By 1945 this ‘Princess Elizabeth’ possessed every blessing but romantic love: the queen-in-waiting’s single requirement was a husband. Even the timing was right. Alah’s death, at the relatively young age of sixty-seven, in January 1946, forced a break with Elizabeth’s childhood. Schoolroom lessons also ended. In May, the King underlined his elder daughter’s status as a full working royal by appointing a third lady-in-waiting, Lady Margaret Egerton, one of six daughters of the Earl of Ellesmere. Elizabeth, wrote Dermot Morrah, ‘moved into her place in the main stream of the national life as the daughter of victory’.¹⁰ To gossips and journalists, her coming of age presented an irresistible challenge.

It would not be long before they linked Elizabeth’s name with Philip’s, but they were several steps behind the couple themselves. In the spring of 1944, Philip’s uncle, George II of the Hellenes, discussed with the King Philip’s hopes of being Elizabeth’s suitor, an infelicitous impulse on the Greek king’s part that confirmed George VI’s conviction of Elizabeth’s youth and emotional inexperience. The royal reaction to Dickie Mountbatten’s Svengali-like manoeuvrings on behalf of his handsome, rootless nephew was similar. Nevertheless, Elizabeth’s fixed purpose compelled her parents to acknowledge the relationship and, in March 1945, more than a year before the press ‘revealed’ an engagement, the King instructed Tommy Lascelles to find out from the Home Office the stages by which Philip could become a British subject (part of his ‘campaign’ for Philip with which Mountbatten had been concerned for some time). In May 1946, Philip told his youngest sister Sophie that he was ‘thinking about getting engaged’.¹¹ With his return to Britain from the Far East and humdrum peacetime deployment in naval training in North Wales, Philip had recognized both Elizabeth’s feelings and his own.

Philip’s naturalization that, late in February 1947, officially transformed him from a foreign prince, in the line of succession to the Greek throne, to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN, subject of the British crown, occupied the energies of those concerned for some time, including the College of Heralds, which first coined the name ‘Philip Oldcastle’, and the home secretary, James Chuter Ede, who pressed for something ‘grander and more glittering’;¹² latterly it preoccupied Elizabeth. Philip suggested afterwards that there had been no formal proposal at Balmoral the previous autumn: instead ‘one thing led to another. It was sort of fixed up.’¹³ If true, it sounds an unsatisfactory impasse, especially for a girl deeply in love, and may explain why Elizabeth attached significance to Philip’s change of nationality, viewing it as a necessary preliminary to their formal engagement. Philip’s calculated disingenuousness was one aspect of his response to the King’s requirement, following the royal family’s acceptance earlier in 1946 of an invitation to visit South Africa the following spring, that any arrangement remain secret at least until the family’s return.

The King’s condition was not a mark of his opposition to the match, or indeed to Philip himself, whom he described as ‘intelligent, [with] a good sense of humour & thinks about things in the right way’;¹⁴ afterwards he insisted he had not been hard-hearted in forcing Elizabeth to wait. Rather, this uxorious, affectionate man experienced an overwhelming aversion to changes to the tight-knit, supportive family unit he later described to Elizabeth as ‘us four, the “Royal Family”’. Instinctively conservative, and dependent on his wife and daughters for happiness and the day-to-day emotional support that made kingship bearable, he considered it imperative, he wrote, that they ‘remain together’.¹⁵ Their comfortable shared dynamic was threatened by any addition to their ranks – in particular, a forthright young man of independent views, with a stranglehold on Elizabeth’s attention and, already, a suggestion of impatience at the court’s Victorianisms. Although the King gave every evidence of being dazzled by his younger daughter – her ravishing beauty even in her mid-teens, her laughing mischief and general air of an enfant terrible – he looked to reticent, steady Elizabeth for something more substantial. Elizabeth, Lady Airlie recorded, was his ‘constant companion in shooting, walking, riding – in fact in everything. His affection for her was touching’;¹⁶ a visitor to Sandringham described their happiness in each other’s company, ‘talk[ing] together eagerly and animatedly’.¹⁷ ‘As a family we enjoy things so, and have that saving gift of laughter which lightens any burden,’ the Queen told Ena von Coller months later.¹⁸ For the King, the family who brought him enjoyment and laughter and lightened his burden was too precious a resource to jeopardize lightly. Quite to his liking was James Gunn’s group portrait, Conversation Piece at the Royal Lodge, Windsor. Although at the time of its commission in 1950 the King had both a son-in-law and a grandson, it depicts only ‘us four’, seated or standing around a tea table, re-enacting a domestic ritual they had performed together on numberless weekends.

Opposition, however, there undoubtedly was to the match, especially in court circles. Usually accounts trace this hostility to the Queen and a coterie of courtiers. According to this theory, the Queen hoped for a homegrown candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, a British aristocrat of her own background and outlook, like the members of the Windsor ‘body guard’, and was supported in this leaning by her favourite brother, David Bowes-Lyon, and courtiers including the Earl of Eldon and Lord Cranborne. The Queen, claimed the King’s assistant private secretary Edward Ford, ‘wanted to introduce her daughter to a wide range of possibles from the higher flights of the British aristocracy... [She] wanted Elizabeth to see a lot of young men, any of whom might have been suitable if they fell for each other’;¹⁹ it was the King who took pleasure in Philip’s royal birth. A handful of factors lent credence to the theory. Given the Queen’s antipathy to Germans, Philip’s standing with his mother-in-law-to-be gained little lustre from the marriages of all four of his sisters to German princes, including, in the case of his youngest sister’s former husband Christoph of Hesse, a high-ranking Nazi officer said to have boasted of his desire to bomb Buckingham Palace. Nor did Philip benefit from the Queen’s ambivalent attitude to his cousin the Duchess of Kent, who was inclined to patronize her non-royal sister-in-law and, like Dickie Mountbatten, encouraged Philip’s suit. Accustomed to acquiescence, the smilingly determined Queen did not relish the challenge of a brisk, brusque princeling who devoted scant energies to courting her good opinion and lacked the emollient good manners of her favourites. In fact the Queen’s letters offer no grounds for this interpretation: she wrote that she thought Elizabeth had made the right decision; to Arthur Penn she joked ‘how annoyed the Grenadiers will be!’; she described Philip to Osbert Sitwell as ‘a very nice person’.²⁰ Whatever the truth of her view, she was defeated by a combination of Elizabeth’s single-mindedness and the errant emotions of the young men she might have chosen in Philip’s stead: over the course of 1946 a tiny field narrowed with the marriages of the Earl of Euston, the Earl of Dalkeith (heir to the Duke of Buccleuch), and the Duke of Northumberland; ‘body guard’ Lord Rupert Nevill had married Elizabeth’s friend Lady Camilla Wallop a year before. At Sandringham in the New Year, Lady Airlie had noted the joshing nature of the relationship between Elizabeth and Margaret and the hand-picked young men who made up their party, surprised by the way ‘both sisters teased, and were teased by, the young Guardsmen’.²¹ Such light-hearted teasing was not a hallmark of Elizabeth’s behaviour towards Philip. Its superficial intimacy was proof of her detachment.

It may or may not be true that, at a meeting arranged by Mountbatten in November 1946, Philip told executives of Express Newspapers ‘how deep was his affection for the Princess and hers for him’ (Mountbatten vigorously denied this statement by John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express).²² If so, Philip did not mention it again in public and the newspaper men were equally (and surprisingly) silent. To all save her family and Crawfie, Elizabeth kept silent, too.

‘You are always such an unselfish & thoughtful angel to Papa & me,’ the Queen wrote to Elizabeth late in 1947.²³ Elizabeth had proven her unselfishness earlier in the year. On 31 January, with her parents and Margaret, she had sailed for South Africa. The tour’s purpose was respite for the King and Queen after the strain of the war years, and a gesture of thanks to the dominion for its contribution to the Allied victory; that Elizabeth would celebrate her twenty-first birthday in South Africa was an added compliment. Crawfie noted nevertheless Elizabeth’s lack of enthusiasm for the tour. While the King fretted at abandoning Britain in a state of near-bankruptcy, severe fuel shortages worsening the coldest winter on record, Elizabeth braced herself for the effort of separation from Philip and dissembling her feelings over three months of public scrutiny, their engagement still a secret. On the eve of departure was a conventional fillip: an early birthday present in the form of a pair of diamond and pearl cluster earrings from her grandmother, previously part of a larger pair of earrings inherited by Queen Mary in 1897. Elizabeth would wear the jewels on her wedding day ten months later and during her honeymoon. Throughout the tour she wrote to Queen Mary, as well as to Philip, whose photograph in a silver frame she took with her; she also wrote to Crawfie, a habit begun in childhood.

If there was to be little relaxation for the King and Queen during a visit that criss-crossed southern Africa in a crowded programme of 7,000 miles of near-constant travel on the specially built gold-and-white White Train, there was at least, after the separations of the war, the compensation of being together. The family’s pleasure in one another was genuine and wholehearted. Currents of affection, noted the King’s equerry, were palpable ‘between father and mother, between sister and sister, between parents and their daughters’.²⁴ For Elizabeth, secretly plighted to Philip, as well as for her parents and sixteen-year-old Margaret, poignancy surely tinctured this easy togetherness: the certainty that this was to be a last adventure for the close-knit family of four. And yet, despite Elizabeth’s misgivings, moments of carefree delight marked this first overseas visit. It shaped her lifelong. Many years later, remembering, she claimed, ‘South Africa is in my blood.’²⁵ It introduced her to a fragmenting Empire and emergent Commonwealth; it revealed an unhappily riven society, the politics of race omnipresent if sometimes unspoken, black and white Africans segregated, nationalist Afrikaners stubbornly hostile to the royal junketings; at first hand she glimpsed the affection inspired by her family among many of the dominion’s diverse communities.

Even the voyage out, after early stormy seas, provided flashes of joy. Gliding towards the tropics, the royal family ‘danced under an awning on the quarterdeck beneath a star-studded sky’; Elizabeth partnered her lady-in-waiting Margaret Egerton in ‘vigorous deck tennis’ with the King and an equerry; there was shooting in the ship’s miniature rifle range and a treasure hunt in which Elizabeth and her midshipman partner came second.²⁶ In place of the traditional ducking and shaving ceremony at the Equator, sailors dusted Elizabeth and Margaret’s noses with powder. One of the best-known photographs of Elizabeth as a young woman shows her in a printed frock, breezes tugging her hair, twisting as she runs in a lively deck game with the ship’s white-uniformed officers, among whom she identified for Crawfie ‘one or two “smashers”’, eyes closed in a smile of unaffected bliss. Rounding the Cape, she and Margaret, who were sharing a cabin, opened the porthole only to be doused by an incoming wave. During the tour itself were similarly relaxed interludes, albeit snatched from an unrelenting itinerary that both her parents found punishing: travelling on the footplate of the train’s engine carriage; early-morning canters with Margaret on borrowed horses, like their very first ride, at Sandfontein, ‘for an hour through desolate country studded with prickly pear’, the sisters once again dressed identically in ‘jodhpurs, bright-yellow shirts and wide-brimmed hats’, or along the shore at Bonga Bay.²⁷ Close to Port Elizabeth, Elizabeth and her father swam in the Indian Ocean. A reporter’s description of Elizabeth in her bathing costume as having curves in all the right places marred the King’s pleasure in retrospect.²⁸ ‘Oh, the poor King and Princess, bathing with hundreds looking on,’ commented housewife Edie Rutherford. ‘Well, I call it bad management. There are heaps and heaps of lovely bathing spots round the coast and it should have been possible to whisk the whole royal family by car to some secluded cove... Human nature is the same the world over, we MUST gawp at Royalty.’²⁹ To Queen Mary, reflecting on the contrast between the warmth of South Africa and Britain’s punishing winter, Elizabeth described a sense of discomfort ‘that we had got away to the sun while everyone else was freezing… We hear such terrible stories of the weather and the fuel situation at home… I do hope you have not suffered too much.’³⁰

For the princess there were to be rigours of a different sort. ‘Princess Elizabeth will take her full share in the functions and engagements and will relieve the King and Queen of some of the arduous work of such a busy programme,’ British newspapers announced on the day of departure.³¹ For the most part, the sisters’ role was to walk in their parents’ shadow, dressed alike in Molyneux frocks of contrasting colours, the gay, smiling, youthful faces of the royal fairy tale. On 3 March, however, without her parents Elizabeth opened a new graving dock at East London in front of a crowd of 30,000 (and, as thanks, received with ‘unaffected exclamations of delight’ five large diamonds, ‘flawless stones exquisitely cut’).³² And then, in Cape Town on 21 April, she celebrated her twenty-first birthday with a day of public engagements. It was a coming of age among strangers, shared for public consumption like so many milestones that lay ahead. Celebrations culminated in two large dances: a public subscription ball for 3,000 at City Hall and a more select affair at Government House. At the second Elizabeth was presented with what she described to her jewellery-loving grandmother as her ‘biggest and most striking’ birthday present, a necklace of twenty-one exceptional graduated diamonds.³³ But the most significant event of the day took place before Elizabeth changed into her dazzling Hartnell evening gown of sequinned white tulle. At seven o’clock she made a special radio broadcast. Heard by an estimated 200 million people worldwide, it would become the defining speech of her life. For more than seven decades she has kept faith with its uncompromising avowal of service.

In the ballroom at Government House that evening, Elizabeth responded to her dancing partner’s question of whether she was overawed by the portraits of her ancestors that surrounded them with a brief ‘Not a bit.’³⁴ This matter-of-fact reply may have been intended to deflect further questions; it was also the response of a young woman at ease with her own prospects. To a friend Elizabeth admitted, ‘I lie in my bath before dinner and think, oh, who am I going to sit by and what are they going to talk about? I’m absolutely terrified of sitting next to people in case they talk about things I’ve never heard of.’³⁵ She worried about gaps in her knowledge; she felt less anxiety about her royal calling. ‘Your daughter already seems to be a queen, because she has so much dignity,’ the Regent of Basutoland, Mantsebo Seeiso, had told the Queen days earlier.³⁶ Happy with her family, happy in love, schooled in her royal destiny by Queen Mary and Henry Marten, gazed upon, waved at and cheered from infancy, Elizabeth at twenty-one was no longer the earnest schoolgirl who, five years earlier, had carried out her first hesitant inspection of the Grenadier Guards. She lacked her mother’s extraordinary charisma and her happy spontaneity, described by Lady Harlech as the Queen’s ‘sixth sense’ for ‘someone... feeling hurt or left out or frightened’.³⁷ ‘She was a shy girl who didn’t find social life easy’ in the words of a friend; ‘not easy to talk to, except when one sits next to her at dinner’ according to her future private secretary, a verdict others have echoed; in 1949, photographer Cecil Beaton noted her ‘hesitancy’.³⁸ She felt most at ease in small, private gatherings, like Laura Grenfell’s coming-out dance in a house in Chesham Place in February 1946: Laura described her then as ‘so absolutely natural – very dignified while you are doing presentations etc and then she opens with a very easy and cosy joke or remark and you find yourself talking more naturally than at any ordinary set piece dinner. She had everyone in fits talking about a sentry who lost his hat while presenting arms.’³⁹ Alongside the glamour of her royal birth, she possessed qualities encapsulated in the South African prime minister Jan Smuts’s description of her as ‘so human and sincere and modest’.⁴⁰ It was clear that she also possessed an unshakeable determination to be worthy of the examples of her father and grandfather. Although written for her by Dermot Morrah of The Times, a former Oxford fellow turned royal speechwriter, her birthday broadcast was her own idea. Its sentiments both expressed and shaped the conviction of her royal mission. Afterwards Elizabeth wrote to Queen Mary, ‘I felt sad when I realised that I would not spend my coming of age at home, but now I think it forms a very happy link with South Africa.’⁴¹ Even in private letters, already duty preceded self. How accurately Morrah judged her character in coupling joy and obligation: ‘This is a happy day for me; but it is also one that brings serious thoughts,’ she told invisible listening millions.

The speech was nearly lost, mislaid in the plushness of the White Train until rediscovered among bottles of spirits. The King had told Lady Airlie a year before that Elizabeth helped him with his Christmas broadcasts. On this occasion, the King and Queen, alongside Frank Gillard, in charge of BBC coverage of the tour, spent two hours working with Elizabeth on Morrah’s first version, lightening its tone. All were delighted with the finished draft; like many of Elizabeth’s listeners, they were deeply moved. ‘The speaker herself told me that it had made her cry,’ wrote Tommy Lascelles to Morrah on 10 March; Lascelles himself, ‘dusty cynic though I am’, felt similarly. ‘It has the trumpet-ring of the other Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech, combined with the immortal simplicity of Victoria’s “I will be good.”’⁴²

That Elizabeth was moved to tears by the broadcast’s text is a measure of her sincerity, and one reason its avouchments resonated so powerfully with listeners, including the formidably self-controlled Queen Mary, who recorded in her diary, ‘Of course I wept.’⁴³ ‘It left an impression of sincerity and high resolve that was deeply moving,’ commented a paper at home, ‘especially when it was remembered that this young woman was standing on the threshold of a life that must necessarily be extremely exacting in its demands.’⁴⁴ Elizabeth addressed herself to an audience of all races and nationalities. She felt as much at home in Cape Town, she said, as the country of her birth. She asked to be allowed to claim her place as the representative of ‘the youth of the British family of nations’. She expressed the love she felt for ‘this ancient commonwealth’ and a vision of its ‘powerful influence for good in the world’. And then, thrillingly, she positioned herself in the long continuum of England’s monarchs, invoking the motto borne by many of her ancestors: ‘I serve.’ She could not, she said, make a ‘knightly dedication’ similar to that of her forebears, but went on to do something remarkably like: ‘I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’ It was a simple promise of self-sacrifice. On 21 April 1947, few doubted the earnestness of her desire to make it good. A lifetime later, it is a promise she has yet to break.

Elizabeth almost certainly derived greater satisfaction from the knowledge that the important broadcast had been accomplished successfully than pleasure in the glamorous but sweltering scrimmages of the two Cape Town balls. At the end of a day of receiving the birthday congratulations of well-meaning strangers, she was reunited with Margaret and her parents. The King and Queen departed the Government House ballroom at midnight. The last recorded sight of Elizabeth on her birthday has her sitting on the ballroom staircase with Margaret. The two sisters are giggling, taking off their shoes to relieve feet tired after a day on parade and an evening of being trampled on by the nervous dancing partners mustered for them by the governor-general’s wife, Mrs van Zyl. It is the early hours of Tuesday morning. Two days later, the royal party departed for home.

The trip, Lascelles wrote, was ‘an immense success and amply achieved its only object... to convince the South African people that the British monarchy is an investment worth keeping.’⁴⁵ The King’s private secretary was mistaken. The victory of the Afrikaner-led nationalists in elections the following year opened doors to both republicanism and the evils of apartheid. More accurate was Lascelles’s suggestion that ‘the most satisfactory feature of the whole business is the remarkable development of Princess Elizabeth’.⁴⁶ He noted her ‘healthy sense of fun’ and ‘astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort’; such unselfishness, he commented dryly, was ‘not a normal characteristic of that family’.⁴⁷ In more than one sense, Elizabeth had come of age.

To Lady Airlie, Queen Mary had described ‘something very steadfast and determined in [Elizabeth] – like her father’; Rebecca West had concluded she was ‘sweetly dutiful, possibly with her father’s obstinacy’.⁴⁸ In the summer, her steadfastness and determination were rewarded. At midnight on 8 July, Buckingham Palace announced her engagement to Philip. (The same day the palace had informed Lady Serena James that she need not invite Philip to accompany Elizabeth to her daughter’s coming-out dance that evening as the engagement ‘wasn’t official till midnight’.⁴⁹) She ‘has thought about it a great deal, and had made up her mind some time ago’, the Queen wrote.⁵⁰ Public and press reaction, after lengthy, rather hectic speculation, was mostly positive. ‘Enthusiasm and affection boiled over,’ wrote Mary Grieve, editor of Woman magazine.⁵¹ ‘There is a special place in English hearts for a sailor and a sailor’s bride,’ the Spectator commented, and the newly engaged couple appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to acknowledge cheering crowds, who had waited all afternoon for a glimpse of them.⁵² Reporters quoted golden opinions from across the globe: the New York Times, Melbourne Herald, Sydney Sun. Most overlooked views like that of the Chicago Tribune that the engagement was ‘fraught with dark political implications’, though at least one opinion poll registered significant disapproval of Philip as ‘a foreigner’.⁵³ Slushier reports focused on the couple’s appearance, casting them as figures of filmstar glamour. ‘Looks as if our future Queen is going to be a humdinger for the looking part,’ wrote housewife Edie Rutherford in Sheffield.⁵⁴

‘Not long before the engagement was announced,’ Elizabeth told Betty Spencer Shew, Philip gave her an engagement ring made of diamonds from a tiara belonging to his mother, centred on a three-carat solitaire. ‘I don’t know the history of the stone, except that it is a very fine old cutting,’ she wrote proudly.⁵⁵ The stones’ provenance was a reminder that, with or without Philip’s princely title, Elizabeth was marrying within the royal fold. Queen Mary worked out the exact nature of the couple’s consanguinity: third cousins through Queen Victoria, fourth cousins once removed through collateral descendants of George III, second cousins once removed through Christian IX of Denmark.⁵⁶ These were details for private consumption: in 1917, Elizabeth’s family had sought to blur their own German heritage and did not intend to trumpet Philip’s. The Scotsman informed readers that Elizabeth’s fiancé was ‘young and handsome, a sportsman and a good dancer, unassuming by nature but allied by birth to several of the Royal families of Europe, and with active service with the Royal Navy in war-time to his credit... he has spent most of his life in this country’.⁵⁷ Potted accounts of Philip of this sort cut their cloth in line with the prevailing emotions of a population still suffering the after-effects of six years of war against Nazi Germany. Soft-pedalled were Philip’s close kinship with the recently deceased Greek king, George II, and his unpopular authoritarian regime, as well as the family name of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. A Press Association court correspondent quoted widely reported ‘on the highest authority’ that ‘when Princess Elizabeth marries she will retain her surname of Windsor as a daughter of the reigning house. Thus any children of the marriage... would be Princes or Princesses of the Royal House of Windsor.’⁵⁸ Philip’s three surviving sisters, all married to German princes, would not be invited to the wedding. Nor would the Duke of Windsor, with whom relations were mired in painful recrimination, an inability on either side to forgive or move on. ‘This one subject of the abdication never seems to lose its anguish & misery for us,’ the Queen wrote.⁵⁹

Post-war Britain remained in the darkest economic slough. Attlee’s Labour government, in power since Churchill’s electoral defeat in 1945, had embarked on the far-reaching, costly social reform that created the Welfare State. Partly funded by stringent taxation of the rich, its spirit was at odds with royal pomp. The King experienced pangs of nervousness, unsettled by his own fears of republicanism. Nevertheless, a jubilantly happy Elizabeth, reluctant to wait until the promise of good weather in the spring, pressed her father for an early wedding. King and prime minister agreed a venue of Westminster Abbey, a green light to large-scale celebrations, and a date of 20 November. The palace made nods towards current austerity: Elizabeth’s choice of the same frock that she had worn to review troops on her birthday in Cape Town for family photographs by Dorothy Wilding to mark the engagement, a wedding breakfast modest by royal standards using game from the royal estates. For the most part, it would be, said Churchill, ‘a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel’. ‘Only a curmudgeon’, offered one paper, ‘would have us match an occasion like this with the greyness of the times.’⁶⁰ Edie Rutherford recorded her husband’s cynical view that ‘[the betrothal] is only being done to boost public morale in the coming bad winter’.⁶¹ The princess whose birth had offered distraction at the time of the General Strike again inspired escapism, extensive coverage a gooey sort of popular opiate. Again Elizabeth embodied fairy-tale ideas of royalty, in love with her square-jawed Viking prince from across the seas, radiant in her happiness and everything, Duff Cooper wrote, ‘that a princess in a fairy tale ought to look like on the eve of her wedding’.⁶² She, too, played her part in promoting Philip’s distinguished war record and enthusiastic ‘Britishness’. In October she launched the White Star liner Caronia in Glasgow, with Philip at her side. Her speech informed her listeners, ‘He has served with the Royal Navy in war and peace, so that I need not dwell on his love of the sea and of all that belongs to it’, a statement greeted gratifyingly by cheers.⁶³

In the spring, ‘by gracious permission of His Majesty the King’, author of Elizabeth’s Cape Town speech Dermot Morrah had marked her twenty-first birthday with an illustrated version of her life story. Morrah expounded a version of Elizabeth acceptable to post-war readers: he stressed her ordinariness in an extraordinary position. In Morrah’s account Elizabeth is modest, friendly, kind, shy, humorous, simple, hard-working and, above all, unpompous. ‘The King and Queen have never encouraged her to regard herself as anything but an ordinary person, and as such she sees herself still,’ he wrote. ‘It is her position, not her personality, that she knows to be exceptional; and she fully understands that by showing the capacity of an ordinary woman to play an extraordinary part in the national life she best discharges the high task of royalty.’ For good measure, Morrah pointed out that this quality in Elizabeth was genetic. ‘Her father and grandfather before her have proved that men of normal capacity, normal tastes and normal training are equal to the highest demands of exalted rank, provided only that they are willing to devote themselves unsparingly to public service; and it is already clear that Princess Elizabeth’s direct and simple character is of a kind that fits her to walk in their footsteps.’⁶⁴ In the summer of 1947, with memories of Elizabeth’s broadcast still green, this philosophy of unremarkable, dedicated royalty won broad approval. The appointment, in June, of Elizabeth’s first private secretary, John Colville, called ‘Jock’, the son of Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Cynthia Colville, appeared to confirm her earnestness in embracing public duties.

Throughout the four-month engagement, an eager readership devoured royal tidbits: the names of Elizabeth’s eight bridesmaids, including her cousins Princess Alexandra of Kent, Margaret Elphinstone and Lady Mary Cambridge, and her childhood friend Elizabeth Lambart; the honeymoon destination of Broadlands, the Mountbattens’ house on the Test; the silk specially woven in Scotland and Kent for Elizabeth’s Hartnell-designed wedding dress; ingredients for the wedding cake donated by Australian Girl Guides. Violet Bonham Carter expressed her horror at the King’s gift to his daughter of a cumbrous grace-and-favour house close to Ascot: she referred to it in inverted commas, ‘Sunninghill Park’; others were less critical.⁶⁵ (Obligingly the house burned down a fortnight later.) Accounts luxuriated in wedding presents from across the globe: an ‘all-wool, ice-blue Australian cloak’ promised within days of the engagement by 84,000 rehabilitation trainees in Sydney;⁶⁶ from the richest of India’s princes, the Nizam of Hyderabad, a magnificent Cartier-designed diamond necklace and tiara; a fine Hepplewhite mahogany chair from the Girl Guides’ Association; and the Sultan of Zanzibar’s ebony-and-silver cigarette box for the bride who did not smoke. At home, the purchase of presents by public subscription puffed civic pride. Of the eighteenth-century porcelain dessert service presented by the people of Cheltenham, the town’s mayor wrote, ‘Certainly it is a gift of which [we] can be proud... The service is not likely to be one of those presents that after the initial inspection are left in their packing cases – as with so many wedding presents.’⁶⁷ From ‘the citizens of York’ came nine pieces of historic silver made as a wedding present for an earlier Princess Elizabeth, George III’s second daughter; Edinburgh’s gift of 450 pieces of crystal copied the design of crystal in use at Holyroodhouse.⁶⁸ In a sign of straitened times, there were practical presents: a refrigerator from the United States; a length of furnishing fabric of Elizabeth’s choice and ‘a coat length of pure camel hair’ woven by Miss Gertrude Frimstone and Miss Edith Williams of Holywell Textile Mills; food parcels amounting staggeringly to more than 2 million pounds in weight.⁶⁹ A handful of presents were overtly political, a reminder that the bride was also a ruler-in-waiting, like the engraved silver loving cup filled with soil from Independence Square, Philadelphia, from the American town’s Jewish community. The publisher of the Philadelphia Jewish Times, Philip Klein, explained that the gift was intended ‘to dramatise the present Palestine crisis to Britain’s future ruler’.⁷⁰ Other presents had a charitable purpose, like Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday gift of £100 for distribution to wartime causes: £5,500 from the government of the Bahamas to endow British hospital beds; blankets from Kenya. Of the twenty-five gowns presented to Elizabeth by the New York Institute of Dress Designers, twenty were offered to brides also called Elizabeth, also twenty-one and marrying on 20 November; the Women’s Voluntary Service administered the lottery. Tinned food came from overseas: from Toronto and Ontario and the British community in Buenos Aires; the government of Queensland sent 500 cases of tinned pineapple. Its distribution among the needy, like Mrs Stanton, a widow in Lincolnshire, who received nine tins of fruit, soups and meat, or pensioners Mr and Mrs Kenyon, of Brierfield, Pendle, whose parcel included tinned plum pudding, prunes, corn syrup, chicken stew and spinach, was accompanied in each case by a letter from Elizabeth: ‘Many kind friends overseas sent me gifts of food at the time of my wedding... I therefore ask you to accept this parcel with my very best wishes.’

The wedding presents were catalogued and placed on display at St James’s Palace. From her parents and her grandmother Elizabeth received a foretaste of her glittering inheritance. A cascade of jewels from Queen Mary included pieces she herself had received at the time of her own wedding in 1893: a large diamond bow brooch and the ‘Girls of Great Britain and Ireland’ tiara, which Elizabeth has continued to wear. From her parents came the crown pearls, two single-row pearl necklaces that had belonged to Queen Anne and to George II’s wife, Queen Caroline, diamond chandelier earrings, a Victorian necklace of rubies and diamonds and another of similar date of large sapphires; the King gave his daughter a pair of Purdey shotguns. Like Elizabeth’s engagement ring, Philip’s present of a diamond bracelet was made up of stones from a tiara belonging to his mother.

Of course, there were dissenting voices: Labour MPs, frazzled housewives interviewed by the forerunner of modern polling, Mass Observation, and, in James Lees-Milne’s diary, a company of Coldstream Guards, half of whom refused to contribute towards a present for Elizabeth on grounds that ‘the Royal Family did nothing for anybody, and... the Royal Family would not contribute towards a present for their weddings’.⁷¹

As the day approached, the carping dwindled. The autumn’s drip feed of trivia had heated public interest to fever pitch. When Elizabeth attended a ball at the Savoy Hotel, a week before the wedding, in aid of the Exeter-based St Loye’s College for the Training and Rehabilitation of the Disabled, extra police were deployed to control crowds at the hotel entrance; ahead of publication, Liverpool’s Daily Post reported ‘keen demand’ for its illustrated wedding souvenir. To Elizabeth, brouhaha on this scale was part of the royal spectacle, among her memories of her grandfather’s Silver Jubilee, her parents’ coronation, VE Day. Philip could not be expected to adapt so quickly, and did not.

From across Europe and beyond appeared a cavalcade of foreign royalties, the kings of Norway, Romania and Iraq, the King and Queen of Denmark, the Queen of the Hellenes, the ex-queens of Spain and Romania, the ex-King and Queen of Yugoslavia, the Princess Regent of the Netherlands and her husband, the Prince Regent of Belgium, members of the grand ducal family of Luxembourg, related and interrelated, a gathering rare in the post-war world to add glister (threadbare or tarnished as may be) to the government’s celebrations. ‘People who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe suddenly reappeared,’ Margaret commented; the King and Queen contributed to their travel expenses.⁷² Rowdily the royal mob crowded the corridors and dining room of Claridge’s. In their travelling cases were the impedimenta of rank: jewels, uniforms, orders. Things were not quite as they would once have been – Juliana of the Netherlands exclaimed at her fellow guests’ ‘dirty’ jewellery. ‘It must have been a nice outing for all those decayed old royals – the poor little Yugoslavs were thrilled & spent happy weeks having their jewels re-set,’ wrote Nancy Mitford; their mustering rooted Elizabeth and Philip in a distinctively royal cousinhood.⁷³ The gathering served, too, to emphasize the pre-eminence of Elizabeth’s family among ruling and exiled dynasties: as Jan Smuts told Queen Mary, their status was that of big potatoes among the little potatoes, a quality identified by playwright Noël Coward at a pre-wedding ball at Buckingham Palace as ‘something indestructible’.⁷⁴ In time for the wedding, the King conferred on Philip a roster of titles: Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, Baron Greenwich. After some discussion, including, of course, investigation of precedents, he bestowed upon him Royal Highness status; he made him a Garter knight exactly a week after admitting Elizabeth to the ancient order of chivalry, careful to maintain his daughter’s seniority. To Queen Mary he commented with qualified confidence in his decision that it was a lot for a man to receive in a single swoop.

This phoenix-like royal re-emergence within months of setting aside the Greek title of his birth did nothing to diminish wariness of Philip among courtiers of the Eldon/Cranbourne ilk: doubters inside the palace queried the sincerity of his affections. Something undemonstrative about both partners encouraged speculation. At Balmoral, Jock Colville recorded ‘sunshine and gaiety... picnics on the moors everyday; pleasant siestas... songs and games’,⁷⁵ but physical reserve was ingrained in Elizabeth’s psyche, despite her overtly affectionate upbringing, a characteristic she shared with her grandmother. Margery Roberts had noticed her dislike of physical contact during Elizabeth’s visit to Brighton in December 1945. Roberts, the daughter of the curator of historic Preston Manor, remembered, ‘As we walked along the corridor [to tea], the Mayor went to put his arm round the Princess’s waist. She made no comment, but obviously stiffened.’⁷⁶ It was an aversion Philip shared. In surviving newsreel footage of the couple, Elizabeth’s incandescent smile tells a story of its own.

As she had on the morning of her parents’ coronation, on her wedding day Elizabeth looked out of the window on to a Mall already dense with crowds, in this case streaked with the pewter shadows of a dull, cold day. By six o’clock, ‘a spiv could not have sold you an inch of kerbstone’: thousands had spent the night under the bare November trees, and ‘many women had slept peacefully in the gutter on blown-up rubber mattresses, in sleeping bags, swathed in travelling rugs or blankets’.⁷⁷ Bobo MacDonald busied herself, Crawfie hovered, in her own account overwrought at her sense of an ending. There was no Alah now, and Margaret, always Elizabeth’s closest companion and today her principal bridesmaid, is absent from records of this last unmarried awakening. Available sources do not reveal whether Elizabeth’s thoughts returned to her parents’ coronation, whether remembrances of Alah or any of the family weddings in which she had played her part as bridesmaid dimmed her view. In Crawfie’s version, she is excited, pinching herself to prove the reality of her dream come true.⁷⁸ Letters she wrote afterwards to her mother make clear that she understood the certain effect of her marriage on her immediate family. ‘As you say,’ her mother replied, ‘“we four” have had wonderful fun & much laughter even through the darkest times.’⁷⁹ Her dressing, helped by Hartnell’s fitters, occupied her for more than an hour; she wore the earrings Queen Mary had given her for her twenty-first birthday and appeared to at least one of Hartnell’s vendeuses ‘so solemn’.⁸⁰ Her mother loaned her a fringe tiara made for Queen Mary in 1919, using diamonds from a wedding present from Queen Victoria: something borrowed. With it Elizabeth wore the crown pearls. Her jewels formed a link with her mother, her grandmother and her great-great-grandmother, with the last of the Stuarts and the first and greatest of the Hanoverian consorts.

Piccadilly, Regent Street, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall ‘and many streets miles from the route [were] gay with flags and bunting’ as Elizabeth drove with her father in the Irish State Coach to the abbey.⁸¹ Powerful emotions stirred the King: in truth he was not ready to lose this daughter so like him in outlook and temperament, whose companionship suited him so well. Walking beside her in the abbey, he described himself as proud and thrilled, Elizabeth as ‘so calm and composed’; Crawfie detected no sign of nervousness in either. Meagre sunlight through the abbey windows transformed Elizabeth into a shimmering white vision. ‘The wedding was most moving and beautifully done,’ wrote Noël Coward.⁸² ‘I have had really touching & wonderful letters from people saying how deeply moved they were, and even people who one might have thought would not have been touched by beauty or religious feeling,’ the Queen wrote afterwards to Elizabeth.⁸³ Both the King and Queen Mary came close to tears during the signing of the register: to the Archbishop of Canterbury the King explained, ‘It is a far more moving thing to give your daughter away than to be married yourself.’⁸⁴ Aspects of these heightened emotions swayed the crowds who lined the streets, starved of spectacle and unalloyed hopefulness through almost a decade of deprivation and fear. Elizabeth’s dress induced trance-like wonder, ‘a gown which was a mist of dewy satin... minute pearls and crystals afire and shimmering in the soft light... a swirling skirt designed in all the beauty that Botticelli could bring to a canvas’: it invested its wearer with the same magical aura.⁸⁵ On this occasion it was Elizabeth’s elderly cousin, Princess Marie Louise, who made the inevitable comparison: ‘No fairy Princess could have been more lovely than this young girl in her bridal beauty.’⁸⁶

‘It is lovely to think that your happiness has made millions happy too in these hard times,’ wrote the Queen, ‘& it is a wonderful strength to the country that we can feel like one big family on occasions.’⁸⁷ Happiness was bittersweet for the King. In the letter he wrote to Elizabeth following her departure for her honeymoon, he told her that when he gave her hand to the archbishop he felt he ‘had lost something very precious’.⁸⁸ Elizabeth, by contrast, excused herself as ‘so happy and enjoying myself so much’, fearful she had behaved selfishly in her joy.⁸⁹ But she was quite sincere in telling the Queen, ‘I think I’ve got the best mother and father in the world, and I only hope that I can bring up my children in the happy atmosphere of love and fairness which Margaret and I have grown up in.’⁹⁰ The following year, she told listeners in Cardiff, ‘I can speak with feeling of the advantages which a happy family life can bring to a child.’⁹¹ Had she read the diary of a thirty-something writer in Berkshire, she would have felt no shadow of apprehension: ‘One wishes them a long and happy life together, to set an example to the nation of what marriage can be like.’⁹² Elizabeth had been setting an example for as long as she could remember.

More than three hours before it opened to the public, queues eventually extending to several thousands began to form outside Westminster Abbey the morning after Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding. They came the next day, too, and the following week to see the signatures of husband and wife in the abbey register, and to look at Elizabeth’s bouquet of white orchids, laid at her request on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Until the end of February, daily crowds of several thousand people converged on St James’s Palace for the exhibition of the royal wedding presents. They were mesmerized by Elizabeth’s dress and her jewels and, in a sign of the times, the kitchen and labour-saving equipment.⁹³

Wedding mania was slow to subside: Elizabeth would remain the fairy-tale princess of that vivid November pageant for years to come. So often she had been associated with spring: in her marriage she seemed to embody for willing millions a spring-like spirit of renewal and rebirth, a pennant of hope. At Broadlands, sightseers laid siege to house and gardens. Philip reacted in a manner characterized by Jock Colville as querulous. Without his exasperation, Elizabeth may have been better able to ignore the snoopers in shrubs and hedgerows or perched on tombstones, chairs, ladders, even a sideboard in the churchyard for their Sunday attendance at Romsey Abbey; later she acquired for the Royal Collection one of the snooper’s photographs: herself, Philip and Susan the corgi walking through wintry sunlight and a silver palimpsest of dry leaves underfoot. In letters to her parents she expressed the depth of her contentment and the wonder of first togetherness: ‘Philip is an angel – he is so kind and thoughtful, and living with him and having him around all the time is just perfect.’⁹⁴ She expressed her gratitude for the family life of ‘us four’ in which, Crawfie claimed, ‘no doors banged, and voices were never raised in anger’.⁹⁵ ‘No parents ever had a better daughter,’ the Queen replied feelingly, ‘& we are so grateful for all your goodness and sweetness.’ The Queen’s letter acknowledged the extraordinariness of Elizabeth’s position, in which the choice of a spouse had involved unique considerations: ‘Papa & I are so happy in your happiness, for it has always been our dearest wish that your marriage should be one of the heart, as well as the head.’⁹⁶

Harried by sightseers, the couple remained at Broadlands less than a week, before travelling north to a snowy Birkhall, stopping en route in London. Elizabeth collected from the palace a favourite dog lead; jointly they issued a statement. ‘We want to say that the reception given us on our wedding day and the loving interest shown by our fellow countrymen and well wishers has left an impression which will never grow faint. We can find no words to express what we feel, but we can at least offer our grateful thanks to the millions who have given us this unforgettable send-off in our married life.’⁹⁷ It bore Philip’s imprint. That ironic ‘loving interest’ found no echo in the stately blandishments of the King and Queen’s public pronouncements or in Elizabeth’s well-mannered compliance. That the husband’s should be the whip hand is not a surprise. Opening a new women’s college at Durham University in October, Elizabeth had reminded listeners of women’s ‘traditional duties in the home’, warning that her sex ‘must not forget that before all else we are women’.⁹⁸ Instinctively conformist in a conservative era, Elizabeth inevitably gave ground within her marriage. With hindsight the couple’s honeymoon statement sounds a note of warning. Elizabeth’s submission to Philip’s testiness compromised her own politeness, for the subtext was discourteous, lacking royal restraint, a ‘them and us’ mentality none in Elizabeth’s family would find they could cultivate safely. As she had vowed in her wedding service, Elizabeth intended to ‘obey’. The statement was signed ‘Elizabeth and Philip’. But she, not Philip, was the heir to the throne.