Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  During a visit to Buckingham Palace in May 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt met with Elizabeth II for nearly an hour the day after Prince Charles had undergone a tonsillectomy. The former first lady found her to be “just as calm and composed as if she did not have a very unhappy little boy on her mind.” The Queen reported that Charles had already been fed ice cream to soothe his painful throat, yet it was 6:30 in the evening, and she was compelled to entertain the widow of a former U.S. president rather than sit at the bedside of her eight-year-old son.

  While the Queen certainly loved her children, she had fallen into professional habits that kept her apart from them much of the time. They benefited from nurturing nannies—for Charles in particular, Mabel Anderson was a “haven of security”—and a doting grandmother. But because of her dogged devotion to duty, amplified by her natural inhibitions and aversion to confrontation, Elizabeth II had missed out on many maternal challenges as well as satisfactions. “She let things go,” said Gay Charteris. “She did have work every day. It was easier to go back to that than children having tantrums. She always had the excuse of the red boxes.” An iconic 1957 photograph taken by Princess Margaret’s future husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, inadvertently crystallized the distance between the royal parents and their children. It shows Elizabeth II and Philip leaning on a stone bridge in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, gazing with admiration at Anne and Charles sitting on a rock below, reading a book.

  The downside of the Queen’s approach to motherhood had been clear to Clarissa Eden during a stay at Windsor Castle in April 1955 when she and her husband joined the royal family for a picnic. Six-year-old Charles flopped onto Anthony Eden’s chair, prompting the Queen to tell the boy to move. When he refused, she asked him again, “because it is the prime minister’s cushion and he is tired.” But the young prince wouldn’t budge. Then when Charles wouldn’t eat his food because he hadn’t washed his hands, the Queen Mother indulged him by saying, “Oh I do understand the feeling. Put some water in a saucer for him.” Clarissa Eden was mildly amused by the prince’s spoiled behavior, but surprised that the Queen “didn’t say, ‘Come on Charles, get up,’ but I suppose she doesn’t like scenes at all cost.”

  On that particular spring afternoon Philip, the resident disciplinarian, was enjoying himself on the nearby lake in a flat-bottomed punt. If the Queen erred toward leniency, her husband was often too tough. In his role as head of the family—“the natural state of things,” in the view of Elizabeth II—he enforced the rules, insisting, for example, that Charles make his bed each morning and arrive punctually for breakfast. Philip called all the shots for the heir apparent, who was in many ways markedly different from his father: diffident, insecure, introspective, and athletically awkward. From an early age he was, in the words of the Queen Mother, “a very gentle boy, with a very kind heart.” Although two years her brother’s junior, Princess Anne was a much sturdier character: self-confident, rigorous, and assertive like Philip.

  The most important decision for Charles concerned his education. (As was traditional among the upper classes, Anne would continue to be taught by a governess until she was ready for boarding school at age thirteen.) In an effort to create a semblance of normal life, the duke and Queen decided to send their son to a private primary school—the first ever for an heir apparent. Philip selected Hill House School in London, a five-year-old academy founded on Plutarch’s credo that a child’s mind was “not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” After Charles’s years in the nursery, being in a classroom with other boys was a novelty, and he was exposed to such leveling experiences as sweeping the floors and riding a bus to the athletic fields. But Charles had only one year in which the embers barely began to glow before his parents packed him off in the autumn of 1957, two months before his ninth birthday—the year when upper-class boys customarily went to boarding school—to his father’s alma mater, Cheam School in Hampshire.

  Philip chose a school that conformed to his vision of educating the “whole” child. But he also saw his mission to toughen up his son’s apparent softness. Describing his rationale years later, the duke wrote, “Children may be indulged at home, but school is expected to be a Spartan and disciplined experience in the process of developing into self-controlled, considerate and independent adults.”

  From the moment he entered his dormitory, Charles was miserable. Although over the following five years he would adjust to the strict regimen and coexist with more than eighty boys in the classroom and on the playing fields, he always remained slightly apart, pining for the distant solace of home. Explaining his inability to make many friends, he later said, “I always preferred my own company, or just a one to one.”

  He became even more self-conscious about his singular position when at the end of his first year his mother gave him the title Prince of Wales—the most vivid symbol of his place in the royal succession. He had no idea what was coming as he and several other boys met in the headmaster’s study during the summer of 1958 to watch the telecast of the Queen’s message closing the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff—the quadrennial sporting competition sponsored by member nations. When she made the momentous announcement, Charles cringed with embarrassment as the crowds on the small screen cheered, “God Bless the Prince of Wales.”

  His parents were well aware of his unhappiness at school; the Queen even wrote of her son’s “dread” on returning to Cheam after a holiday. But they believed in the need for a stiff upper lip, and the Queen deflected her son’s complaints to her husband. With his brusque manner and tendency to criticize rather than encourage, Philip was notably unsympathetic, which drove an ever-widening wedge between father and son.

  As a practical matter, boarding school made sense for Charles given the busy schedules of the Queen and Prince Philip. It also kept him away from the prying eyes of the press. Until then, coverage of the monarch in newspapers and magazines—and in the hushed and impeccable voices of the British Broadcasting Corporation—had been reliably deferential to the Queen, according her praise verging on adoration while directing episodes of sensationalism at others such as her husband and her sister. The press was now for the first time publishing articles critical of Elizabeth II and her closest advisers.

  IN THE USUALLY slow month of August 1957, when the Queen and her court had decamped for their annual holiday in the Scottish Highlands, an obscure publication called National and English Review ran a piece called “The Monarch Today” by the magazine’s editor, thirty-three-year-old John Grigg, the 2nd Baron Altrincham. He was a contrarian Tory who had already attracted attention for campaigning against his fellow hereditary peers who sat in Parliament’s House of Lords, many of whom he said were “not necessarily fitted to serve.” He had also advocated the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, and fiercely criticized Anthony Eden’s Suez invasion.

  Now he was taking aim at those who served—or rather in his view failed to serve—the monarchy, which he said he supported. His title gave him instant credibility, as did his education at Eton and Oxford and his service as an officer in the Grenadier Guards—all spawning grounds for the Buckingham Palace courtier class. Altrincham denounced those advisers as a “tight little enclave” of “tweedy” aristocrats who filled the Queen’s official speeches with platitudes. “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth,” he wrote, “is that of a priggish schoolgirl,” preventing her from coming into her own “as an independent and distinctive character.” Altrincham urged the royal family to surround itself with a more racially and socially diverse group, creating a “truly classless and Commonwealth court” that could more imaginatively help the Queen achieve the “seemingly impossible task of being at once ordinary and extraordinary.”

  This line of criticism echoed a little-noticed essay by journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge in the New Statesman two years earlier. Prompted by the media circus created by Princess Margaret’s drama with Peter Townsend, Muggeridge had warned in October
1955 of the dangers of overexposure in the press. He presciently advised the royal family to install an “efficient public relations set-up” to replace “rather ludicrous courtiers” in an effort to control the press and “check some of the worst abuses.” Better advisers, he wrote, would help the royal family “prevent themselves and their lives from becoming a sort of royal soap opera.” Muggeridge, a clever polemicist, offered this sound advice in a restrained and respectful way. His most provocative observation was that the monarchy had “become a kind of ersatz religion,” and he suggested that the British royal family might consider the Scandinavian approach of living “simply and unaffectedly among their subjects.”

  Altrincham’s like-minded analysis might have attracted little more than raised eyebrows among the 4,500 readers of his journal had he not had the temerity to attack the Queen personally for her “debutante stamp” and her “woefully inadequate training” for the job of sovereign. “ ‘Crawfie,’ Sir Henry Marten, the London season, the race-course, the grouse-moor, canasta and the occasional royal tour,” he wrote, “would not have been good enough for Elizabeth I!”

  What’s more, he singled out Elizabeth II’s “style of speaking, which is frankly ‘a pain in the neck.’ Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text.… Even if the Queen feels compelled to read all her speeches, great and small, she must at least improve her method of reading them. With practice, even a prepared speech can be given an air of spontaneity.” In the spirit of what he described as “loyal and constructive criticism,” Altrincham observed that once she had “lost the bloom of youth,” her reputation would depend primarily on her personality. “She will have to say things which people can remember,” he wrote, “and do things which will make people sit up and take notice.”

  His words drew a torrent of indignant criticism in the press and within the Establishment. The tabloids ran banner headlines about the “attack” on the Queen. The Sunday Times called Altrincham a cad and a coward, and Henry Fairlie wrote in the Mail that the Queen’s critic dared “to pit his infinitely tiny and temporary mind against the accumulated experience of centuries.” Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, dismissed Altrincham as “a very silly man.” B. K. Burbidge of the League of Empire Loyalists slapped Altrincham in the face during an encounter on a London street. The magistrate who fined Burbidge one pound for the assault couldn’t help sympathizing with the man’s anger, saying that “95 per cent of the population of this country are disgusted and offended by what was written.”

  Inside the Palace, the essay was taken as constructive criticism. Martin Charteris privately described it as a “real watershed for the post-war monarchy” and said the author had performed a “terrific service.” By some accounts, Prince Philip—no fan of crusty courtiers—felt the same way. With help from her husband and various professionals such as the BBC’s David Attenborough and Antony Craxton, a friend of Philip’s from Gordonstoun days, the Queen improved her delivery of speeches, mainly by lowering her voice and smoothing out her clipped accent. But she continued to read her prepared scripts rather than risk violating her neutral position as monarch with a misspoken word. Contrary to Altrincham’s prediction, even after she had lost her youthful bloom, the public respected her stolid style, along with her self-effacing refusal to “make people sit up and take notice.”

  Charteris’s gratitude for Altrincham’s wake-up call reflected other ways the Queen adapted to the times, democratizing some of her activities and eventually diversifying her staff. The following year marked the last of the elitist “presentation parties” for debutantes at Buckingham Palace, an antiquated upper-class ritual dating back to the court of George III, to be replaced by additional royal garden parties open to a wider spectrum of people.

  While these changes were beginning to take shape behind the scenes, Malcolm Muggeridge added to the imbroglio in October 1957 by writing an essay titled “Does England Really Need a Queen?” in the American weekly magazine The Saturday Evening Post. He not only expanded his earlier themes of “royal soap opera,” he raised the ante with his sarcastic tone and blunt criticism of the Queen and those who revered her.

  He reported that “those who mix socially with the royal family” are the most “contemptuously facetious” about the Queen. “It is the duchesses, not shop assistants,” he wrote, “who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal.” He said the Queen fulfilled her duties with “a certain sleep-walking quality about the gestures, movements and ceremonial.” Worse still, she was “a generator of snobbishness and a focus of sycophancy.”

  Muggeridge got an even more vehement pummeling in the press than Altrincham. He was harassed on the street, his house was vandalized, and he received vitriolic hate mail, some of which contained excrement and razor blades. The BBC even temporarily banned him from its airwaves. When he returned, he became one of the network’s preeminent broadcasters.

  ONE REASON FOR the intensity of the reaction was the article’s intentional timing to coincide with the Queen’s much anticipated visit to North America. Arriving in Canada on October 12 for a five-day visit, she made her first live television broadcast, speaking alternately in English and French to an audience of fourteen million out of Canada’s 16.5 million population. She used a TelePrompTer for the first time, which enabled her to look straight into the camera. She came across as “shy, a bit bashful and sometimes awkward,” but endearing because her performance “was so human,” according to The New York Times.

  Perhaps the criticisms of Altrincham and Muggeridge had already sunk in, because she uncharacteristically began her seven-minute speech by telling her viewers, “I want to talk to you more personally.” She went on to say, in almost confidential fashion, “There are long periods when life seems a small dull round, a petty business with no point, and then suddenly we are caught up in some great event which gives us a glimpse of the solid and durable foundations of our existence.”

  The following day she was the first sovereign to open the Canadian parliament. So Canadians could feel they were “taking part in a piece of Canada’s history,” she also agreed to television coverage of her speech from the throne in Ottawa’s Senate chamber.

  The Queen was especially looking forward to her second trip to America. Writing to Anthony Eden, she said, “there does seem to be a much closer feeling between the U.S. and ourselves, especially since the Russian satellite [Sputnik] has come to shake everyone about their views on Russian scientific progress!” Unlike her lightning visit in 1951, this would be a full-dress affair: six days in Washington, New York, and Jamestown, Virginia, where she would celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first British colony in America.

  She had an affectionate relationship with the sixty-seven-year-old American president that dated back to World War II when Eisenhower was in London as Supreme Allied Commander. He had enjoyed a “devoted friendship” with her parents, and he liked to recount how they had once arranged for him to have a special tour of the private areas of Windsor Castle. To ensure the general’s privacy, they had decided to remain in their apartments. But on the appointed day George VI had forgotten, and he and his family were on a terrace above the rose garden having tea with Margaret Rhodes at a table covered to the ground with a white tablecloth. As Eisenhower and his group approached, the King knew that their presence would stop the tour. “We all dived under the table and hid,” the Queen said years later. “If [Eisenhower] and his party had looked up … they would have seen a table shaking from the effect of the concerted and uncontrollable giggles of those sheltering beneath it,” recalled Margaret Rhodes. When George VI later recounted the story to Eisenhower, the general “was so staggered by the King of England hiding,” said Elizabeth II.

  A crowd of ten thousand greeted the Queen and duke on their arrival in Virginia on October 16 for a day-long celebration in Jamestown and Williamsburg. They were accompanied by an entourage of sixty-six, including the British
foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. In Williamsburg the Queen gave a brief speech from a balcony at the College of William and Mary, praising the “enlightened and skilled statesmen” who founded the American republic. “Lord what’s-his-name was way off base,” wrote The Washington Post. “She is no orator, but those who heard her today thought that there was a nice lilt to her voice.”

  The following morning they flew to Washington on Eisenhower’s aircraft, the Columbine III, a swift and sleek propeller plane with four powerful engines on its long wings. As they waited to take off, Philip immersed himself in the sports section of the newspaper while Elizabeth II unlocked her monogrammed leather writing case with a small gold key and began writing postcards to her children. “Philip?” she suddenly said. Her husband kept reading. “Philip!” she repeated. He glanced up, startled. “Which engines do they start first on a big plane like this?” Her husband looked momentarily perplexed. “Come on now,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t wait until they actually start them, Philip!” He offered a guess, which turned out to be correct. (They went in sequence, first on one wing from the inner engine to the outer, then the inner followed by the outer on the other wing.) “He was flustered,” recalled Ruth Buchanan, wife of Wiley T. Buchanan, Jr., Eisenhower’s chief of protocol, who sat nearby. “It was so like what an ordinary wife would do when her husband wasn’t paying attention.”

  Riding into the capital with the president and his wife, Mamie, in a bubble-top limousine accompanied by sixteen bands, they were cheered along the route by more than a million people who were undaunted by intermittent rain showers. The royal couple spent their four nights in the most elegant guest quarters in the recently renovated White House—the Rose Suite furnished in Federal style for the Queen (later the Queens’ Bedroom and Sitting Room, named in honor of all its royal guests) and the Lincoln Bedroom, with its eight-foot-long carved rosewood bed, for the Duke of Edinburgh.