Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Lilibet did indeed coax “a lump into millions of throats,” including Queen Mary’s. “Of course I wept,” she wrote to Queen Elizabeth. The heiress presumptive had become the royal family’s fresh face for the future, “solid and endearing,” in the judgment of Tommy Lascelles, with “a healthy sense of fun” and an ability to “take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill.” He observed that she showed “an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.”

  By the standard measures, the Africa journey was a big success for the royal family, setting the seal on their image as a force for continuity, unity, and stability during uncertain times. They had made a great effort to see every corner of the region, stopping the White Train at remote villages, the princesses sometimes in their dressing gowns bedecked with jewelry to put on a good show. The crowds in cities and bush alike had been huge and enthusiastic, the press coverage overwhelmingly positive. After boarding the Vanguard at the end of April for the trip home, “we four” stood above the forward gun turret and waved as they listened to the crowds below singing what a newsreel announcer described as “songs of hope.” Lilibet would not return to South Africa until 1995, after the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as president.

  BACK IN LONDON, Philip had been working as an instructor at the Naval Staff College in Greenwich, and with the help of Dickie Mountbatten had secured his British citizenship in February 1947, giving up his title as H.R.H. Prince Philip of Greece. Since he had no surname, Philip decided on Mountbatten, the English version of his mother’s Battenberg. As it turned out, his naturalization was unnecessary, since all the descendants of Sophia Electress of Hanover, who included Philip, were automatically considered citizens of Britain.

  The long-postponed engagement announcement came on July 9, 1947, followed by the happy couple’s introduction at a Buckingham Palace garden party the next day. Philip’s mother retrieved a tiara from a bank vault, and he used some of the diamonds to design an engagement ring created by Philip Antrobus, Ltd., a London jeweler. Several months later Philip was confirmed in the Church of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  In July 1947, Princess Elizabeth was assigned her first private secretary, a bright and energetic civil servant named John “Jock” Colville, who had served as an assistant private secretary to both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill during World War II. Colville had ambitious plans for broadening Elizabeth’s horizons. In another example of Queen Mary’s farsightedness, she advised Colville shortly after his appointment that he should arrange for the heiress presumptive to travel, to mix with people beyond her social circle, and even to get to know Labour politicians. Colville found Elizabeth to be less engaged politically than he had hoped for, but he judged her worth to be “real.” He arranged for her to see telegrams from the Foreign Office, to watch a debate on foreign policy in the House of Commons, to spend a day observing juvenile court, and to attend a dinner in the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street with up-and-coming Labour leaders.

  Philip now had his own valet and bodyguard, and spent much of his time before the November 20 wedding with the royal family, including the late summer sojourn at Balmoral. “There was luxury, sunshine and gaiety,” wrote Jock Colville, with “picnics on the moors every day; pleasant siestas in a garden ablaze with roses, stocks and antirrhinums; songs and games.”

  Elsewhere in Britain, the situation was unrelentingly bleak—an “annus horrendus,” as described by Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the exchequer—characterized by high unemployment, idle factories, and food shortages. A government financial crisis led to tax increases and further austerity measures. Under these difficult circumstances, the Palace negotiated with the Labour government an increase in the annual income for Elizabeth from the £15,000 she had been granted on reaching the age of twenty-one to £40,000 plus £10,000 for Philip. These sums were allocated under the provisions of what was known as the Civil List through arrangements between the sovereign and Parliament dating from the eighteenth century.

  William the Conqueror had seized vast amounts of English property following his successful invasion in 1066, and subsequent monarchs added holdings in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland even as they rewarded loyal subjects by giving them large tracts of land. What remained in the monarch’s possession was called the Crown Estate, which encompassed vast urban and rural holdings. When George III became king in 1760, these properties weren’t generating much revenue, so he struck an agreement with Parliament to turn over the income from the crown lands to the Exchequer (the government treasury) in exchange for a fixed annual payment called the Civil List. At the same time, he and his successors kept the income from a separate portfolio of property known as the Duchy of Lancaster.

  These two sources of funds financed the royal household as well as members of the sovereign’s family. In 1947 the Crown Estate provided the government with nearly £1 million in “surplus revenue” from commercial and residential properties, mines, farms, forests, and fisheries. That year Parliament authorized the Treasury to return £410,000 to King George VI as a Civil List stipend, plus £161,000 for family members, leaving the government with nearly £400,000 to use for general expenses.

  JUST BEFORE HIS daughter’s wedding, the King gave his future son-in-law a collection of grand titles—the Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich—and decreed that he should be addressed as “His Royal Highness.” He would be called the Duke of Edinburgh, although he would continue to be known popularly as Prince Philip and would use his Christian name for his signature. (His official designation as a Prince of the United Kingdom would not come for another decade.) The King also invested Philip with the Order of the Garter, which dates from 1348 and is the highest personal honor that a monarch can confer; Elizabeth had received the Garter a week earlier as a mark of her seniority to her husband.

  On November 18, the King and Queen had a celebratory ball at Buckingham Palace that dramatist Noel Coward called a “sensational evening.… Everyone looked shiny and happy.” Elizabeth and Philip were “radiant.… The whole thing was pictorially, dramatically and spiritually enchanting.” As was his habit, the King led a conga line through the state rooms of the palace, and the festivities ended after midnight. Philip was in charge of distributing gifts to his fiancée’s attendants: silver compacts in Art Deco style with a gold crown above the bride’s and groom’s entwined initials and a row of five small cabochon sapphires. With typical insouciance, “he dealt them out like playing cards,” recalled Lady Elizabeth Longman, one of the two non–family members among the eight bridesmaids.

  The morning of the wedding two days later, Philip gave up smoking, a habit that had kept his valet, John Dean, “busy refilling the cigarette boxes.” But Philip knew how anguished Elizabeth was by her father’s addiction to cigarettes, so he stopped, according to Dean, “suddenly and apparently without difficulty.” Patricia Brabourne, who was also with her cousin that morning, said that Philip wondered if he was being “very brave or very foolish” by getting married, although not because he doubted his love for Lilibet. Rather, he worried that he would be relinquishing other aspects of his life that were meaningful. “Nothing was going to change for her,” his cousin recalled. “Everything was going to change for him.” Before he left Kensington Palace, where he had spent the night in his grandmother’s apartment, Philip indulged in a favorite royal ritual by downing a gin and tonic.

  Outside Westminster Abbey, tens of thousands of spectators gathered in freezing temperatures to welcome the princess and her father in the Irish State Coach. Two thousand guests enjoyed the splendor of the 11:30 A.M. ceremony in the Abbey, an event that Winston Churchill called “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.” Elizabeth’s dress by Norman Hartnell was of pearl-and-crystal-encrusted ivory silk satin, with a fifteen-foot train held by the two five-year-old pages, Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Mich
ael of Kent, who wore Royal Stewart tartan kilts and silk shirts. Her tulle veil was embroidered with lace and secured by Queen Mary’s diamond tiara, and Philip’s naval uniform glinted with the new Garter insignia pinned to his jacket. The men in the congregation wore morning dress or uniforms, while the women were resplendent in long dresses, elbow-length white gloves, splendid jewels, and either tiaras or hats, many bedecked with feathered plumes. The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, presided, telling the young couple that they should have “patience, a ready sympathy, and forbearance.”

  After the hour-long service, the bride and groom led a procession down the nave that included five kings, five queens, and eight princes and princesses, among them the crowned heads of Norway, Denmark, Romania, Greece, and Holland. Philip’s mother was present, but his three sisters and their German husbands were pointedly not invited. Also noticeably absent was the king’s brother, former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, and his wife the Duchess, for whom he had abdicated the throne. The estranged Windsors were living in Paris, unwelcome in London except for periodic visits. Although their exile may have seemed harsh, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and their advisers had seen no alternative. A king and former king living in the same country would have resulted in two rival courts.

  While the bells of the Abbey pealed, Elizabeth and Philip were driven to Buckingham Palace in the Glass Coach, preceded and followed by the two regiments of the Household Cavalry on horseback, wearing full ceremonial dress: the Royal Horse Guards in their blue tunics, the Life Guards in red, all with white leather breeches, black thigh-high boots, shiny steel cuirasses, and gleaming helmets with either red or white plumes. It was the most elaborate public display since the war, and the crowds responded with cheers and thunderous applause. More than 100,000 people broke through police lines to surge toward the Palace railings, shouting, “We want Elizabeth! We want Philip.” When the royal family stepped out on the balcony to smile and wave, they received a “tumultuous expression of good will.”

  As a concession to Britain’s hard times, only 150 guests attended the “wedding breakfast,” which was actually luncheon in the Ball Supper Room. The “austerity” menu featured Filet de Sole Mountbatten, Perdreau en Casserole, and Bombe Glacée Princess Elizabeth, served on plates of silver gilt (solid silver covered with gold) by footmen in scarlet livery. The tables were decorated with pink and white carnations, as well as small keepsake bouquets of myrtle and white Balmoral heather at each place setting. The bride and groom cut the wedding cake—four tiers standing nine feet high—with Philip’s Mountbatten sword.

  The King didn’t subject himself to the strain of making a speech, celebrating the moment instead with a raised glass of champagne to “the bride.” After being showered with rose petals in the Palace forecourt, the newlyweds were transported in an open carriage drawn by four horses—“the bride snugly ensconced in a nest of hot-water bottles”—to Waterloo Station, crossing the Thames on Westminster Bridge, illuminated by streetlights in the gloaming. As they alighted on the red carpet at the station, Elizabeth’s beloved corgi, Susan, hopped out as her owner handed the leash to Cyril Dickman, the footman, who would accompany the couple on their honeymoon, along with John Dean, Bobo, and a detective.

  They spent the first week at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, and more than two more weeks in snowbound seclusion at Birkhall, an early-eighteenth-century white stone lodge on the Balmoral estate, set in the woods on the banks of the River Muick. With its Victorian decor—pine furniture, tartan carpets, walls covered with Landseer paintings and Spy caricatures—and memories of childhood summers before her parents became King and Queen, Elizabeth could relax in a place she considered home. Dressed in army boots and a sleeveless leather jacket lined with wool, Elizabeth went deer stalking with her husband, feeling “like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles,” she wrote to her cousin Margaret Rhodes.

  She also sent her parents tender letters thanking them for all they had given her, and the example they had set. “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,” she wrote, adding that she and her new husband “behave as though we had belonged to each other for years! Philip is an angel—he is so kind and thoughtful.” Philip revealed his carefully cloaked emotions when he wrote to his mother-in-law, “Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me.” He declared that his new wife was “the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me, and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.”

  “The Queen in her own way

  is immensely kind, but she

  had too little time to fulfill

  her family care.”

  Princess Elizabeth with her first child and heir apparent, Prince Charles, November 1948. Photograph by Cecil Beaton, Camera Press London

  THREE

  Destiny Calls

  THE HONEYMOONERS WERE BACK IN LONDON IN TIME FOR THE fifty-second birthday of King George VI on December 14, ready to begin their new life. Elizabeth and Philip chose to live in Clarence House, the nineteenth-century residence adjacent to St. James’s Palace, just down the Mall from her parents. But the house needed extensive renovations, so they moved temporarily into an apartment in Buckingham Palace. For weekend getaways, they rented Windlesham Moor in Surrey, not far from Windsor. Philip had a paper-pushing job at the Admiralty on the other end of the Mall, where he would walk on the weekdays. Elizabeth was kept busy by Jock Colville, whose tutorial seemed to be yielding results. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had first spotted Elizabeth’s ability to ask “serious questions” during a visit to England in 1942, was delighted six years later when she came to Windsor Castle and found that the princess showed a keen interest in “social problems and how they were being handled.”

  Colville’s biggest project was organizing Elizabeth and Philip’s first official visit to Paris in May 1948. During their four days in the city, the glamorous young couple proved effective at generating goodwill for Britain among the wary French. The crowds along the Champs-Élysées were so passionate in their cheering that Elizabeth’s eyes were “brimming with tears.” The British ambassador, Sir Oliver Harvey, noted that even the usually contemptuous communist newspapers “published good photographs and sympathetic accounts of the visit.”

  Unknown to either the French or the British, Elizabeth was four months pregnant, and behind closed doors was suffering from nausea. Even so, she and Philip kept up an active social life. They went to the races at Epsom and Ascot and joined friends at restaurants, nightclubs, and dances. For a costume party at Coppins, the home of the Duchess of Kent, Elizabeth dressed “in black lace, with a large comb and mantilla, as an Infanta,” wrote diarist Chips Channon, and “danced every dance until nearly 5 a.m.” Philip “was wildly gay,” Channon observed, in a “policeman’s hat and hand-cuffs. He leapt about and jumped into the air as he greeted everybody.… He and Princess Elizabeth seemed supremely happy and often danced together.” When they were with friends such as Rupert Nevill and his wife, Micky, the former Camilla Wallop (who had been in Elizabeth’s Girl Guides troop), and John and Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple showed an easy affection toward each other. During a visit to the Brabournes in Kent, John said to Philip, “I never realized what lovely skin she has.” “Yes,” Philip replied, “she’s like that all over.”

  In the early evening of November 14, 1948, word went out that Princess Elizabeth had gone into labor in her second-floor bedroom at Buckingham Palace, where a hospital suite had been prepared for the baby’s arrival. In attendance were four physicians led by gynecologist Sir William Gilliatt, and a midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Philip passed the time playing squash with three courtiers, beating each of them in turn. Around 9 P.M. senior members of the
household gathered in the Equerry’s Room, a ground-floor drawing room that was equipped with a well-stocked bar, and shortly afterward were told that Elizabeth had given birth to a seven-pound, six-ounce son at 9:14. They set to work writing “Prince” on telegrams and calling the Home Office, Prime Minister Attlee, and Winston Churchill, the leader of the opposition. “I knew she’d do it!” exclaimed Commander Richard Colville, press secretary to the King, exultant over the arrival of a male heir. “She’d never let us down.”

  Ainslie, the Palace steward, phoned for “any spare pages to put their flippin’ skates on” as family members converged on the Equerry’s Room. Eighty-one-year-old Queen Mary brought her brother, the Earl of Athlone, and his wife, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone. “Glad it’s all over,” mumbled the earl. “All for the best, I suppose—horrid business.” After the elderly trio had been taken to see the newborn, they returned with the King and Queen as well as the doctors for a round of champagne. Sir John Weir, one of the official physicians to the royal family, confided to Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary, Major Thomas Harvey, that he’d “never been so pleased to see a male organ in all his life.” Queen Elizabeth was “beaming with happiness,” and George VI was “simply delighted by the success of everything.” Queen Mary, sitting in “the straightest-backed chair we could find,” was busy grilling Sir William Gilliatt “from A to Z.” Philip, still dressed in sneakers and sports clothes, joined his wife as her anesthesia wore off, presented her with a bouquet of roses and carnations, and gave her a kiss.