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PRINCESS ELIZABETH ALEXANDRA Mary of York was born on 21 April 1926 at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, in central London, the home of her maternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne. It was a Caesarean delivery. Later that day Queen Mary came to visit her first granddaughter and reported that she was ‘a little darling with lovely complexion & very pretty fair hair’. A month later the christening took place at Buckingham Palace. She was named after her mother and two queens, her grandmother Mary and her great-grandmother Alexandra, who had recently died. She wore the christening robe used by the children of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and howled loudly. It was the only occasion in a long life when her behaviour was less than perfect.
Princess Elizabeth was to be profoundly influenced by her parents. Her father, Albert or ‘Bertie’ as he was known in the family, was the second son of George V and Queen Mary. Only eighteen months younger than his brother, Edward, Prince of Wales – the golden boy idolized by the public – Bertie lived uncomfortably in his shadow nearly all his life. As a child he had developed a nervous stammer, made worse by his father’s impatient barking of ‘Spit it out, boy!’ and had had to wear iron splints on his legs because of his knock-knees. He had found brief refuge in the Royal Navy, being present at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, but had been invalided out owing to a stomach ulcer. After the war, a role was found for him as President of the Industrial Welfare Association, dedicated to improving industrial relations through social welfare and improved amenities for the workers. Conscientious, tenacious and hard-working, Bertie went to work with a will; a little later, his achievement on the domestic front was augmented by his active involvement in the Duke of York’s camps, an idealistic enterprise whereby public school boys were brought together with boys from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds in an attempt to improve understanding between the classes. Personal happiness remained elusive, until he met and fell in love with Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at a London ball in June 1920 and determined to marry her.
Lady Elizabeth’s childhood, as the ninth and second last child of her parents, had been immensely happy. The Strathmores were wealthy aristocrats. Her father Claude, 14th Earl of Strathmore, could trace his descent from Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland; her mother, Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, was a descendant of Henry VII through the unfortunate Lady Catherine Grey, but also of the redoubtable Bess of Hardwick, matriarch of the Cavendish dynasty, and connected to many of the great Whig families. Her father was a countryman through and through and a keen sportsman; her mother a gracious hostess and homemaker. The family spent its time at Glamis Castle in Scotland, St Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire, and, before the First World War, a large town house in St James’s Square, London, which they used during the season.
With her cornflower-blue eyes, petite figure and engaging charm, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was one of the most popular debutantes of her year. Unlike the shy, stammering Bertie, she had a ready wit and a talent for mimicry, but she was also kind and sympathetic, with the ability to make the person she was talking to feel he was the most important in the room. ‘You’ll be a lucky fellow if she accepts you,’ George V told his son and, indeed, when Bertie proposed Elizabeth turned him down. There was a suggestion that she was in love with the dashing Lord James Stuart, but she herself admitted to Lady Airlie that she was reluctant to embrace the restrictions on her freedom that the royal role would entail. Both mothers were sorry. ‘I like him so much,’ Cecilia told Mabell Airlie, Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting and confidante, ‘and he is a man who will be made or marred by his wife.’ Whether it was because James had been conveniently removed from the scene to Canada or because Elizabeth, who was genuinely fond of Bertie, felt the pull of duty, she accepted Bertie’s second proposal. They were married in April 1923 and three years later their first child was born.
Even though it seemed likely that the Prince of Wales would marry and have children of his own, or that her parents would yet have a son who would take precedence over her in the line of succession, there was a huge amount of public interest in Princess Elizabeth from the outset. When she was only two her mother wrote to Queen Mary: ‘It almost frightens me that the people should love her so much. I suppose that it is a good thing, and I hope that she will be worthy of it, poor little darling.’ At about this time Elizabeth’s future Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, observed in her ‘an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant’.
The Yorks’ duties had already separated them from their baby daughter for six months while they made a tour of Australia and New Zealand, rather as Elizabeth would be separated from her own children soon after she became Queen, but, as a naturally serene character, she seems to have been unfazed by it. She was secure in the care of her nanny, Clara Knight, affectionately known as Allah, who had looked after her mother before her, and had two sets of doting grandparents. George V, who had been such a forbidding parent to his own children, absolutely adored her and soon the two would forge a very close bond. When he became seriously ill in 1929 and went to convalesce at Bognor, he took Elizabeth, not quite three, as his companion to cheer him up.
Elizabeth spent the first ten years of her life at 145 Piccadilly, overlooking Green Park and just across the road from the Duke of Wellington’s residence, No. 1 London. The house was obliterated by bombing during the Second World War. Elizabeth’s nursery was on the top floor, which she shared with her nanny and the nursemaid, a Scottish girl whose father was a railway worker, Margaret Macdonald. ‘Bobo’, as she was called, would remain Elizabeth’s close personal attendant – and the scourge of the couturiers who tried to address the Queen’s staid image – for more than sixty years. When she was four, Elizabeth was joined in the nursery by a sister, Margaret Rose, born at Glamis in August 1930. It seemed increasingly unlikely that there would be a son.
The Duchess of York’s education had been undertaken by her mother, who saw no need for a girl of her station to acquire any academic qualifications. What had worked for her, the Duchess reasoned, should work for Elizabeth. She was genuinely bemused when Queen Mary suggested that her granddaughters should be given a rather more challenging education. After all, the Duchess told a friend, all the girls in her family had married well, one of them – herself – very well.
A young Scottish governess, Miss Marion Crawford, who had graduated from the Moray House Training College in Edinburgh with the intention of becoming a child psychologist, was engaged by the Duchess as governess to five-year-old Elizabeth. In her saccharine account entitled The Little Princesses, for which she was ostracized by the royal family when it was published in 1950, Crawfie, as Elizabeth was to call her, described their first meeting.
Arriving at 145 Piccadilly and being admitted to the nursery, she found a small figure with a mop of golden curls sitting up in bed wearing a nightie with little pink roses on it. She had tied the cords of her dressing gown to the knobs of the bed and was busy driving her team of horses.
‘“Do you usually drive in bed?” I asked.
‘“I mostly go once or twice round the park before I go to sleep, you know,” she said. “It exercises my horses.” She navigated a dangerous and difficult corner, and went on, “Are you going to stay with us?”’
Elizabeth was already horse mad, a love encouraged by her grandfather the King. So besotted was he by Lilibet, as he called her after her first attempts to pronounce her name, that he was sometimes to be found down on the floor on hands and knees pretending to be a horse, while she led him by the beard. He gave her her first pony, a Shetland named Peggy, for her fourth birthday, and at Sandringham he would take her to see his favourite horses and the stud, awakening a lifelong interest in blood lines, breeding and racing. At home in London the York children had a whole stable of toy horses, all of which had to be exercised, fed and watered.
Crawfie found Elizabeth highly intelligent and an interesting child to teach, although she might have been concerned at her obsession with orderliness – to the extent that she would sometimes jump out of bed and line up her shoes, making sure they were exactly straight. She had already been taught her letters by her mother, who would read her Bible stories; as an adult, she was to display an impressive knowledge of the Bible. Peter Pan, Alice, Winnie the Pooh, the classics – usually gifts from Queen Mary – and anything about horses or dogs were to become favourite reading. Queen Mary was concerned that Crawfie’s curriculum contained far too much arithmetic and not enough history. After all, the princesses would never have to do their own accounts – royalty did not even carry money. But they should have a sound knowledge of the British Empire, geography, and of British and European history and culture. The latter was subsequently addressed by the engagement of Mrs Montaudon-Smith, known as ‘Monty’, who laid the foundations of Elizabeth’s excellent French.
A dash of current affairs was added with a subscription to the Children’s Newspaper and, later, Punch, while Queen Mary insisted on educational outings to such places as the Tower of London, the Mint and Hampton Court. An expedition arranged by Crawfie, by which Elizabeth was granted her wish for a ride on the Underground to Tottenham Court Road, calling in at the YMCA for tea, proved less successful. Elizabeth did not realize that it was self-service. ‘If you want it, you must come and fetch it yourself!’ the woman at the counter bawled at her. Two smartly dressed children, accompanied by a governess and a detective, were all too conspicuous and a car had to be summoned to take them home.
Artists who have painted Queen Elizabeth II often describe her staring almost wistfully out of the window of Buckingham Palace during the sittings, keenly observing the life going on outside. So it was in her childhood, when she and her sister would stare out of the nursery windows of 145 Piccadilly at the passers-by, particularly at the poor tired dray horses which returned in the evening. It was the same after she moved into Buckingham Palace. ‘They all seemed so busy,’ she later recalled to Pietro Annigoni when he was painting her portrait, ‘I used to wonder what they were doing and where they were all going, and what they thought about outside the Palace.’ She would be forever on the inside looking out, separated by an impenetrable screen. Sometimes the children of their parents’ friends and courtiers would be brought to play or share dancing lessons or the princesses, beautifully dressed in their party frocks by Allah, would be taken to children’s parties. In the park, they would stare shyly at other children, eager to be friendly, but never quite crossing the gulf. For a short time Elizabeth did have a friend, the daughter of a doctor who lived near by, until the girl was sent to boarding school.
Elizabeth was essentially cocooned. Her constant companion was her younger sister, Margaret, of whom she was always very protective. Serious and unbelievably well-behaved herself, she was amused and exasperated by the naughty child’s pranks. ‘What are we going to do with Margaret, Crawfie?’ she would say. In spite of the four-year age difference, the Duchess insisted on dressing her daughters in identical outfits, which looked increasingly inappropriate as Elizabeth entered her teens.
In the gilded cage of their childhood, the princesses saw a good deal more of their parents than other upper-class children tended to do. Theirs was a happy and devoted family. Every morning they would race down to their parents’ room for a romp before they got up. At night the Yorks would go up to the nursery for bath-time and bedtime stories, returning downstairs with the children calling after them, ‘Goodnight, Mummy, goodnight, Papa!’ Elizabeth’s father later described their close-knit family group as ‘Us four’.
The Duke of York had always looked up to his brother, the Prince of Wales, who in turn was fond of his nieces. Uncle David, as the Prince of Wales was known to them, would often call in at 145 Piccadilly for tea and games of Snap and Happy Families with his nieces – that is, until he took up with Mrs Wallis Simpson in 1933.
In May 1935 the King-Emperor celebrated his Silver Jubilee, overwhelmed by the outpouring of love from his people. Elizabeth and her sister, dressed in pink with little flowered bonnets, drove with their parents in an open carriage to St Paul’s Cathedral for the thanksgiving service. It was Elizabeth’s first experience of royal pomp and ceremony. George V had done more than any other monarch in the twentieth century to maintain the power and dignity of the British crown and save the dynasty; unlike those of his cousins, the Kaiser in Germany, the Tsar in Russia, and others, the British crown had not toppled at the end of the First World War. George had been prepared to sacrifice the lives of the Tsar and his family by refusing them refuge in England to save his own dynasty. He had dissociated himself from his German relatives – ‘I’ll be buggered if I’m an alien,’ he had said – and, at the suggestion of his private secretary Lord Stamfordham, had re-named his dynasty the House of Windsor. It was reassuringly English. George’s happy marriage to an exemplary consort, Queen Mary, had re-emphasized the family values of which Victoria and Albert had been such great proponents and for which the British monarchy, in its role as moral arbiter, stood as the prime example.
Elizabeth’s beloved grandfather had been ailing for some time, however. The old King had come to recognize that of all his sons Bertie, in his very ordinariness, was most like himself; thanks largely to the confidence he derived from his wife, Bertie was steady and reliable, a safe pair of hands. Restless, erratic, selfish, impatient with tradition and exhibiting dangerous modernizing tendencies, the Prince of Wales had been at loggerheads with his father for years. Fully aware of his entanglement with a twice-married American, the King despaired that he would ever make a suitable marriage. ‘I pray to God that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne,’ he confided in his friend Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, predicting, ‘After I’ve gone, the boy will ruin himself within six months.’
The royal family spent Christmas 1935 at Sandringham as usual. A few days later a household official recalled: ‘Out of the mist came the King, mounted on his white pony, Jock. Walking at the head of the pony, as if leading it along, was the little figure of Princess Elizabeth. She was taking her grandfather back to the house.’ It was a touching sight: the one a king who had been born in the nineteenth century and known his grandmother Queen Victoria well, the other Victoria’s nine-year-old great-great-granddaughter, who would steer the monarchy into the twenty-first century. On 20 January, two days after Elizabeth returned to London, King George V died. When Elizabeth was taken to Westminster by her mother to see him lying in state, she was struck by the stillness of his four sons keeping vigil by the coffin – just as her own sons and Margaret’s would keep vigil by the coffin of their grandmother over sixty years later.
Edward VIII fulfilled his father’s prophecy: 1936 was the Year of Three Kings. Before the year was out, Elizabeth’s uncle had abdicated in order to marry Mrs Simpson and was living abroad as Duke of Windsor and her father had become King George VI. At the time, Elizabeth was probably protected from much of the anguish her parents felt at what they saw as David’s betrayal of the family, his dereliction of duty, and his thrusting the unwelcome responsibility on his ill-prepared brother. Elizabeth’s mother never forgave him or Mrs Simpson, believing that the undue strain, particularly during the war years, shortened her husband’s life. Relations between the brothers quickly deteriorated into an acrimonious dispute over money – Elizabeth’s father, never having enjoyed the Duchy of Cornwall revenues Edward had accrued as Prince of Wales, yet obliged to pay his brother a substantial allowance, was left rather badly off – and unceasing bitterness on the Duke’s part at George VI’s withholding the HRH title from his wife.
The new Queen did not care to dwell on the unpleasant so that, ostrich-like, the family never spoke of the matter – a trait Elizabeth tended to adopt when crises arose in her own family – but the bitterness of the abdication, the disgrace of it and the danger in which it had placed the dynasty, went deep. Elizabeth, who was to keep her own strong emotions under iron control, would have deduced from Uncle David’s fate that this is what happened when a sovereign allowed the indulgence of personal feelings to come before duty. It was an unpardonable loss of control.
In the aftermath of the abdication crisis, George VI felt a need to provide reassurance. There must be no more rocking the boat. Partly because of what had happened, partly because of his personality, the acceptance of a cipher-monarchy, cautious of political interference, began in 1936. To know George VI is to understand Elizabeth; she was to admire and emulate her father, to model herself on him. In many ways, he was the ideal constitutional sovereign; not too imaginative, prepared to put in the hours on the paperwork that his brother had found so tedious, dogged in his devotion to duty, and an exemplary family man. Knowing what her father’s accession meant, Elizabeth, according to her grandmother Strathmore, was earnestly praying for a baby brother, but there was really no question now that she would one day be Queen.
At ten she was young enough to take it in her stride. Had she had a choice, as she once told her riding instructor, she would like when she grew up to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs. A straightforward, almost phlegmatic character, with a wry sense of humour, conformist and amenable, she accepted her destiny with equanimity. Unlike any of his predecessors from George I to Victoria, who were always at war with their heirs, Elizabeth’s father began to inculcate her in her future role. He was immensely proud of her and Crawfie noticed that he spoke to her as to an equal – not least, perhaps, because she had always shown a maturity beyond her years.
Her studies were augmented to include constitutional history. Twice a week Elizabeth would go to the Vice-Provost, Sir Henry Marten, at Eton College for a tutorial. Like her grandfather and father before her, she methodically worked through Bagehot; her copy of The English Constitution is heavily underlined and annotated. Like her, Marten was an admirer of Queen Victoria, whom Elizabeth was to resemble in some ways. He taught her that the secret of the British monarchy’s survival was its ability to adapt – a lesson she obviously took to heart. The Vicomtesse de Bellaigue was engaged to take her for French, French literature and European history. She was invited to join her parents when they entertained, being encouraged to sit beside visiting foreign dignitaries, politicians and diplomats and converse intelligently with them.
Shy and introverted like her father, this cannot have been easy for Elizabeth. Sir John Colville, private secretary to Churchill and then to Princess Elizabeth between 1947 and 1949, recalled that she ‘has the sweetest of characters, but she is not easy to talk to, except when one sits next to her at dinner, and her worth, which I take to be very real, is not on the surface’. At first he found her uninterested in politics. No intellectual and shying away from those of academic achievement, clever enough to know the limits of her education, Elizabeth, like Victoria before her, never wanted to get into a conversation too deep, but as she grew older she became extremely well informed about political and world affairs and could rely on a retentive memory. Like Victoria, too, she was endowed with considerable common sense.
Elizabeth was only thirteen when she met the man she was going to marry. By her own admission to her father’s best biographer, she fell in love with him at their first meeting. Always reserved and quiet about her feelings, according to Crawfie, if ‘you once gained her love and affection you had it for ever, but she never gave it easily’. Young as she was, Elizabeth seems to have had a clear-eyed view of her future; there was never to be anyone but Philip for her.
Like her, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark was a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria. His mother, Princess Alice, was the daughter of Victoria of Hesse, whose husband Louis of Battenberg was First Sea Lord before he was compelled to resign, owing to his German background, during the First World War. Philip’s father was Prince Andrew of Greece, whose grandfather Willy, the Danish Prince who had been given the throne of Greece in 1863, was Queen Alexandra’s favourite brother. There was also Romanov blood through his grandmother. Royal on both sides of his family, unlike Elizabeth, Philip was never going to be overawed by her status, but he had not had the benefit of a happy, secure childhood. Much of it had been spent in exile and in relative poverty. His family had been forced to flee Greece and later, after his mother suffered a breakdown, his parents had separated. Homeless, Philip found refuge with his mother’s brothers, first the Marquis of Milford Haven, then with Lord Louis Mountbatten, but the insecurity of his childhood would have a profound effect on him and on his relationships with his own children.
Only five years older than Lilibet, Philip was already a young cadet at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. When the King and Queen and their daughters visited the college in July 1939, Philip’s uncle, Louis Mountbatten, ever ambitious for his family, made sure that it was Philip who entertained the two princesses. First they played with a train set and then they went to the tennis court to see who could jump the nets highest. Crawfie, while applauding Philip’s blond Viking good looks, decided he was a bit of a show-off. Elizabeth thought he was wonderful. Gradually they began a correspondence, so that in the course of the war, as Philip served in the Royal Navy with gallantry, Elizabeth had a sweetheart in the armed forces to write to, just like other girls. She kept a photograph of a bearded Philip on her mantelpiece. He was also invited to Windsor when on leave.
At the outbreak of war a couple of months later, the King would not hear of his daughters being sent to Canada, like other privileged children. The children will not leave me, said the Queen, and I will not leave the King. The family would stay together, emphasizing the values for which Britain was fighting. If politicians and people were a little unsure of George VI’s suitability when he came to the throne, he emerged a hero. His quiet stoicism and courage and determination to share the fate of his people won their hearts. Elizabeth and her sister spent almost the entire war at Windsor; as Princess Margaret later put it: ‘We went for the weekend and stayed for five years.’ Once again, they were comparatively isolated. At Buckingham Palace they had mixed with other children, albeit those from exclusive families, in the Girl Guides and Brownies, but at Windsor they were once more thrown on each other’s company. For the first time the family was spending time apart, with the King and Queen braving the bombs in London during the week.
By October 1940 Britain stood alone and Princess Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast, ostensibly directed at British children who had been evacuated, not least those who had been sent overseas. It was actually a propaganda exercise to influence adult opinion in the United States, as American help was desperately needed. Elizabeth was fourteen and a half when she made the broadcast and some winced at the sentimental tone and content of the speech that had been created for her, but the broadcast was considered a triumph, attracting widespread media attention and public sympathy in the States for the plight of Britain’s children.
The war gave Elizabeth the only chance in her young life to fulfil a role outside the palace. As a royal princess, she was already Honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, but now she did what every eighteen-year-old girl in wartime Britain was bound to do: she signed up, joining the ATS as a second subaltern early in 1945. She began training in driving and vehicle maintenance at Aldershot but, unlike the other recruits, returned home to sleep at Windsor Castle every night. On VE Day, 8 May 1945, she appeared in her uniform on the balcony at Buckingham Palace when the royal family and Mr Churchill were loudly cheered by the crowd below. That night after dinner the princesses, together with their uncle David Bowes-Lyon and a group of young Guards officers including Lord Porchester, who shared Elizabeth’s passion for horses and was to become a lifelong friend, ventured out into the streets and celebrated victory along with everyone else. It was a rare moment. Generally speaking, and to Queen Mary’s concern, Elizabeth was not interested in broadening her social circle beyond the narrow confines of her class.
Having chosen Prince Philip and remained single-minded in her intention to marry him, Elizabeth never seriously looked at another man, despite her mother’s best attempts to introduce her to the most eligible scions of the great noble families. The King liked Philip; the Queen, not overly keen on Germans, less so. They were not actually opposed to the marriage, but they worried that she was too young, had too little experience of life to make such a decision. It was decided that Elizabeth and her sister would accompany the King and Queen on a tour of South Africa in 1947, which would give her time for reflection. It was the first time she had left British shores and she felt guilty that she was not sharing the post-war discomforts of her countrymen in the severest of winters. Worst of all, she was leaving Philip behind. Anticipating an engagement, the American press had already made Princess Elizabeth their idol, their pin-up girl; around the world the heiress presumptive to the British crown was seen as a beautiful young woman of exemplary character who represented hope for the future, particularly among young people.
It was only fitting, then, that she should take the opportunity of her twenty-first birthday to make a broadcast to the British Empire and Commonwealth, in which she made a solemn vow to dedicate her life to the service of her people. The speech, written by the courtier Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, brought tears to Elizabeth’s eyes when she first read it and to those of many of her listeners.
‘Although there is none of my father’s subjects … whom I do not wish to greet, I am thinking especially today of all the young men and women who were born about the same time as myself and have grown up like me in the terrible and glorious years of the Second World War. Will you, the youth of the British family of nations, let me speak as your representative?’ She spoke of the British Empire which had saved the world, and ‘has now to save itself’, and of making the Commonwealth more full, prosperous and happy. She then made her dedication:
There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, ‘I serve’. Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did, but through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple.
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, but I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.
The South African tour had shone the beam on empire. One of the reasons Britain had fought the war was to preserve the British Empire. Minds were briefly distracted from Britain’s near-bankruptcy and post-war depression and the imminent loss of India – whose independence Lord Louis Mountbatten was negotiating in Delhi – by the royal tour and Elizabeth’s professed hopes for the future. Her first overseas tour made a tremendous impression on her. It highlighted for her the significance of the British imperial family of nations; like her father, she could not agree with the Smuts’s government’s segregation of the black population of South Africa. George VI was King of all the people, not just the whites. During the long tour she spent a great deal of time with her father and thoroughly absorbed his vision for a new Commonwealth, in which the ties linking the countries of the former empire to the crown and kinship to each other would be maintained. Loyalty to the Commonwealth and its preservation would be a consistent theme of her reign.
Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN, as the newly naturalized Prince was known before the King created him Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merrioneth and Baron Greenwich, on 20 November 1947, injected what Churchill described as ‘a splash of colour’ into the post-war gloom. The Labour government made a conscious decision to make the wedding a full-blown state occasion. People were tired of rationing and shortages, which were worse than they had been in wartime, and they saw no end in sight. There was some resentment that Elizabeth was to have the splendid white wedding that was denied so many others. Her pearl-studded silk dress alone would cost £1,200 and 300 coupons, not to speak of the trousseau with its calf-length hemlines. On the other hand, thousands queued along the Mall for hours just to have a chance to view the 1,500 wedding presents and, later, the dress on display. In retrospect, the Westminster Abbey wedding, broadcast on the wireless by the BBC in the tones of reverence and awe it then reserved for royalty, was seen to be the moment when Britain’s fortunes began to rise again. It was considered a good omen.
The fairytale wedding of the Princess and the handsome war hero, in which being a traditional girl she promised to ‘obey’ her husband, was a reminder of the crown’s representation of the sanctity of marriage and the virtues of family life. The monarchy was a mirror in which the people could see their own ideals of life. They were ideals that Elizabeth, with the shining example of her own parents ever before her, held dear. Harking back to pre-war ceremonial, the extravagant wedding was a reminder to a world just entering the Cold War of the value of tradition, of the stability of Britain’s constitutional monarchy and institutions, and the underlying strength of a nation drawn together by loyalty to the crown.
Following the wedding, Elizabeth was even more of an international celebrity, if that were possible. She was the most publicized young woman in the world. Small, at only five feet four inches, she had the regal carriage and natural dignity that observers had remarked in Queen Victoria, while Annigoni, when he painted her, admired the lovely poise of her head. With her vivid blue eyes, delicious cream and roses complexion, and graceful figure, finely complemented by her couture clothes, Elizabeth was not just a figure of glamour, but seen as an ambassador both for her country and her generation.
Ever the perfect princess, Elizabeth fulfilled her duty as heir presumptive by giving birth to a son and heir, Prince Charles, at Buckingham Palace on 14 November 1948. A daughter, Princess Anne, followed in August 1950. For a short time, Elizabeth was able to live a comparatively normal existence as a naval officer’s wife in Malta, although not so normal that it meant bringing her children, who were left in England in the care of their grandparents. Supremely happy in her marriage, she would always be a woman who would place husband before offspring. Elizabeth undoubtedly loved her children and there are home movies taken of her and Charles which touchingly capture her delight and joy in him, but even before she took up the burden of queenship, she was not particularly maternal. Already the calls of duty seemed to be taking precedence over those of mother. The King’s deteriorating health was a nagging worry. Elizabeth, a Counsellor of State since she had turned eighteen, took on an increasing number of her father’s duties, especially during the Festival of Britain in 1951 when there were increased demands for a royal presence.
That year, the King was too ill to attend the Trooping the Colour ceremony and Elizabeth took his place – ‘a woman alone’, as The Times described her, at the centre of an all-male military event. Like Victoria, Elizabeth rode side-saddle, a fine, erect figure in the scarlet tunic of a colonel of the Grenadiers; subsequently, she would diet vigorously in the weeks leading up to the ceremony and put in hours of dedicated practice. Her superb horsemanship was put to the test years later when an attention-seeker fired several blank bullets from a replica pistol and her horse Burmese, startled not by the shots but by two officers of the Household Cavalry spurring their horses forward to protect their sovereign, became agitated. Although irritated with the cavalrymen for upsetting her horse, Elizabeth remained calm and in control.
On 31 January 1952 George VI, old beyond his years and in the grip of lung cancer, whatever the doctors would have him believe, braved the foggy chill at London airport to see Elizabeth and his son-in-law off on the first leg of an Antipodean tour they were undertaking on his behalf. He must have known that he had not long to live as he took leave of his beloved daughter – one sovereign to the next – staring after her with that fixed, strained look that betrayed his deep emotion at their final parting.