The House of Lords chamber is invariably packed, a tableau vivant of peers in their red robes with white fur collars (including, for the first time in 1958, fifteen recently appointed life peers, four of them women), bewigged justices draped in black and clustered on the large red hassock called the Woolsack, military officers, ecclesiastics, and ambassadors in white tie.
The processional is led by men with quaint medieval titles such as Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, Clarenceaux King of Arms, and Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, all decked out in gold-encrusted scarlet tabards, knee breeches, and silk stockings. Lining the route are the Queen’s bodyguards, the Gentlemen at Arms in helmets waving swan plumes, and the Yeomen of the Guard (also known as Beefeaters), wearing crimson and gold knee-length tunics, crimson knee breeches, white neck ruffs, and black Tudor bonnets.
Elizabeth II, attended by four page boys and two of her ladies-in-waiting, with Prince Philip clasping her raised left hand, makes a stately progress along the Royal Gallery into the chamber. She is preceded by two dignitaries holding the sword and the cap, which dangles from a long stick, as well as two Great Officers of State, the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain, walking backward. On the dot of 11:30 A.M., she arranges herself on her ornately gilded throne beneath a golden canopy, with Philip seated to her left, several inches lower.
Black Rod, an official representing the Queen, strides to the House of Commons, where the door is vigorously slammed in his face to show the independence of the lower house. (No monarch has been permitted in the House of Commons since 1642, when King Charles I barged in and tried to arrest five members.) After three loud knocks with his ebony staff, Black Rod is admitted to the chamber, where he commands the members to “attend Her Majesty immediately in the House of Peers.” Led by the prime minister, his cabinet, and the leader of the opposition, the members of Parliament crowd behind the Bar of the House of Lords, a wooden barrier near the entrance, where they are required to stand. Squeezed into a space roughly eighteen by twelve feet, the politicians bring an earthy and slightly raffish touch to the proceedings, “looking like culprits in a law court,” wrote American ambassador David Bruce.
The Lord Chancellor climbs the dais, reaches into a red silk bag, and hands the Queen the speech that has been prepared by the prime minister and his cabinet. Seldom taking more than fifteen minutes, she dutifully recites the government’s legislative program for the coming year. “I think I have made the dullest and most boring speech of my life,” she confided to Pietro Annigoni while sitting for him after the ceremony in 1969. “But it dealt with such dry material. One tries at least to put a little expression into one’s voice, but it’s not humanly possible to produce something even remotely lively.” Wearing the heavy crown is as tiring as it looks. Hours afterward, “my neck is still feeling the effects,” she once confessed.
At two minutes and ten seconds, her speech on October 28, 1958, was one of the shortest on record, with sentences she could actually read with conviction, mostly generalities about advancing the Commonwealth and supporting the United Nations and the Atlantic Alliance. She spoke of the historic significance of broadcasting the ceremony to enable “many millions of my subjects … to witness this renewal of the life of parliament.” She mentioned as well her planned visit “with my dear husband” to Canada the following summer and later in the year to Ghana, which had declared its independence from Britain in 1957.
BUT BEFORE THEY were to leave for Ghana, Philip set off again on another goodwill tour aboard Britannia, spending four months visiting India, Pakistan, Singapore, Brunei, Borneo, Hong Kong, the Solomon, Gilbert, and Ellice Islands in the Pacific, Panama, the Bahamas, and Bermuda. He returned at the end of April 1959, and soon afterward Elizabeth II got pregnant at last. Some years later the rumor arose that Prince Andrew, the child from this pregnancy, was fathered during her husband’s long absence by Henry Porchester, her good friend and fellow thoroughbred enthusiast. But given the timing of the baby’s arrival in mid-February 1960, the conception had to have occurred during the preceding May when the Queen and Philip “were scarcely separated,” according to subsequent research by gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, the repentant promoter of the original tale.
As soon as the Queen confirmed her condition, she sent Martin Charteris on a confidential mission. “I am going to have a baby, which I have been trying to do for some time,” she told her assistant private secretary, “and that means I won’t be able to go to Ghana as arranged. I want you to go and explain the situation to [President Kwame] Nkrumah and tell him to keep his mouth shut.”
She and Philip went ahead with their six-week trip across fifteen thousand miles of Canada, which included stops in every province and territory. As part of the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway with the United States, they invited the Eisenhowers to join them for luncheon aboard Britannia on June 26. Ten days later the royal couple touched down in Chicago for fourteen hours, and once again the president provided them with a limousine, this time a convertible. Mayor Richard Daley rolled the red carpet across Lake Shore Drive, introduced Elizabeth II to his seven children, and proclaimed, “Chicago is yours!” Eisenhower wrote the Queen that his chauffeur reported that “he had never witnessed greater enthusiasm among the crowds lining the streets.”
She was suffering from morning sickness that she managed to conceal, although during her journey through the Yukon Territory she took to her bed for several days. Her press office said she had a minor stomach ailment, and once she had rested, she resumed her travels. A week after her return to London on August 1, the Palace announced that she was expecting, and she headed to Balmoral for her annual holiday.
Harold Macmillan, who had delayed calling an election until the Queen’s return, used her as a lure to pressure Eisenhower to visit Britain as part of his planned world tour. The prime minister knew that a visit from the American president could help bolster his party’s prospects in the coming campaign. When Eisenhower wavered, Macmillan sent word that if he bypassed the United Kingdom, “this will be an insult to the Queen.” She had no intention of returning to London, so Eisenhower took up her invitation to spend two days at Balmoral.
Prince Philip met Ike, Mamie, and their son John at Aberdeen airport on August 28 and accompanied them to Balmoral. The presidential party quickly fell into the rhythms of the Highlands, socializing with the Queen’s family as well as friends including the Earl of Westmorland, Lord and Lady Porchester, and Dominic Elliot, son of the 5th Earl of Minto and a friend of Princess Margaret.
“The Queen and Eisenhower got on famously,” Elliot recalled. “The President was quite a character, a marvelous chap, and he fitted in very well.” While Ike didn’t join the men shooting out on the grouse moors, the Queen did treat him to a picnic luncheon near Loch Muick, including drop scones that she prepared on a griddle, drawing on the lessons she had learned from the cook at Windsor Castle during the war. He was so impressed that he asked for the recipe, and several months later she obliged, writing everything out in longhand and apologizing that the quantity was for sixteen people. “When there are fewer I generally put in less flour and milk,” she wrote helpfully, adding that “the mixture needs a great deal of beating.”
The Queen Mother gave the Eisenhowers a jolly cocktail party at Birkhall before they departed. The president declared the trip “perfect in every respect,” and thanked the Queen in particular for her parting gift of grouse from the day’s shoot. He and the prime minister had the birds for dinner the following evening at Chequers.
Macmillan and the Tories won a decisive victory six weeks later in the general election. The prime minister wrote the Queen, who was by then nearly five months pregnant, that there was no reason for her to return to London prematurely. Because of her condition, she missed the State Opening of Parliament, and the Lord Chancellor read the speech instead.
While her own trip to Ghana was necessarily postponed, Philip went as her representative in late November, in part to assuage Nkrumah, who w
as deeply disappointed by the loss of the sovereign’s visit. Philip gave eight speeches in six days, ranging across promoting academic freedom in universities, encouraging scientific research, and inspiring young people to become doctors and nurses. His praise for the country’s “great national awakening” went down well, and he promised to return with his wife in 1961.
Once the Queen hit the six-month mark in her pregnancy, she withdrew from her official duties. But one bit of unfinished business needed to be resolved. When Macmillan visited her at Sandringham in early January 1960, she told him that she needed to revisit the issue of her family name that had been irritating her husband since she decided in 1952 to use Windsor rather than her husband’s Mountbatten. “The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband—with whom she is desperately in love,” the prime minister wrote in his diary. “What upsets me … is the Prince’s almost brutal attitude to the Queen over all this.” Somewhat cryptically he added, “I shall never forget what she said to me that Sunday night at Sandringham.”
Macmillan left shortly afterward for a trip to Africa, leaving the resolution of the Queen’s tricky family problem to Rab Butler, his deputy prime minister, and Lord Kilmuir, who served as the government’s legal arbiter as the Lord Chancellor. Butler sent a telegram to Macmillan in Johannesburg on January 27 saying that the Queen had “absolutely set her heart” on making a change for Philip’s sake. By one account, Butler confided to a friend that Elizabeth II had been “in tears.”
Following discussions among her private secretaries and government ministers, a formula emerged in which the royal family would continue to be called “The House and Family of Windsor,” but the Queen’s “de-royalised” descendants—starting with any grandchildren who lacked the designation of “royal highness”—would adopt the surname “Mountbatten-Windsor.” Those in the immediate line of succession, including all of the Queen’s children, would continue to be called “Windsor.” It seemed clear-cut, but thirteen years later Princess Anne, at the urging of Dickie and Prince Charles, would contravene the policy on her wedding day by signing the marriage register as “Mountbatten-Windsor.”
Elizabeth II told Macmillan that the compromise was “a great load off her mind.” She announced it in a statement on February 8 saying, “The Queen has had this in mind for a long time and it is close to her heart.” On February 19, 1960, she gave birth to her second son at Buckingham Palace, with the usual crowds along the railings to cheer the news. In a gesture of wifely devotion, Elizabeth II named the boy after the father Philip had lost fifteen years earlier.
Macmillan was enchanted
by “those brightly shining eyes
which are her chief beauty.”
Elizabeth II with Harold Macmillan, her third prime minister, at Oxford University, November 1960. © Popperfoto/Getty Images
SEVEN
New Beginnings
ELIZABETH II WAS TWO MONTHS FROM HER THIRTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY when she gave birth for the third time. Unlike the arrivals of Charles and Anne in the early years of her marriage, she now had the sovereign’s obligations competing for her postpartum time. “Nothing, but nothing deflected her from duty,” recalled assistant private secretary Sir Edward Ford. “She’d go into labor and have a baby, so we knew we weren’t going to see her for a while. But within a very short time, twenty-four or forty-eight hours at most, she’d be asking whether there were any papers and would we care to send them up?”
Andrew Albert Christian Edward, second in the line of succession, was barely a week old when twenty-nine-year-old Princess Margaret seized the limelight by announcing her engagement to the prominent photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, also twenty-nine. Since the bitter disappointment of her dashed romance with Peter Townsend more than four years earlier, the Queen’s sister had cut a showy figure among London’s smart set. Her hairstyles changed with her moods, and she displayed her curvy figure in flamboyant outfits featuring vivid colors and leg-revealing skirts. (Dismayed by her un-aristocratic open-toed shoes, Nancy Mitford called her “Pigmy-Peep-a-toes.”) A heavy smoker, Margaret was known for her ten-inch cigarette holders, and for drinking Famous Grouse whisky, often to excess.
While the Queen would engage people in conversation, Princess Margaret would address them in what museum director Roy Strong described as a “slightly explosive drawl.” She was more insistent on formalities than the sovereign, rebuking friends when they unwittingly violated protocol with a word or a gesture. “If you missed the ‘royal’ in ‘Your Royal Highness,’ she would rip you to shreds,” said one of her friends. “She would say, ‘There are members of Arab states who are highnesses. I am a royal one.” One slyly believable moment in the film The Queen had Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II remarking, “I don’t measure the depth of a curtsy.… I leave that to my sister.”
Since 1953 Princess Margaret had been enjoying a prolonged adolescence while living with her mother at Clarence House, where she often slept late after long evenings at parties—frequently exhausting the other guests, who knew it was impolite to leave before a member of the royal family. To the embarrassment of their friends, Margaret could be cavalier with her mother, walking into the room where she was watching television, for example, and changing the channel, or criticizing her food at a luncheon party. “You mustn’t worry,” the Queen Mother said to her friend Prudence Penn, who expressed concern about Margaret’s rude treatment. “I’m quite used to it.”
The Queen adopted a similarly phlegmatic approach, even when Margaret was an hour and a half late to her tenth anniversary party at Buckingham Palace. “I felt the Queen was not served well by her sister, who was not a good advertisement for the monarchy,” said Patricia Brabourne. “The Queen dealt with it by acting in private as the sister giving support she needed and probably giving the hard advice that probably wasn’t followed.”
Margaret could also be affectionate and warmhearted—the “rare softness” that Peter Townsend had observed—as well as caring and kind, notably to those who were ill. She had a keen interest in theater and the performing arts, principally ballet. She enchanted her loyal friends with her quick wit and vivacity, enhanced by a sharp intelligence.
When Margaret fell in love with Tony Armstrong-Jones, it came as a relief to the Queen, who wanted above all for her sister to be happy. He was not an aristocrat but his background was privileged. His father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a barrister with deep roots in Wales, and his beautiful mother, Anne Messel, came from a family of wealthy bankers who had made their original fortune in Germany before converting from Judaism to Christianity in London, a genealogical fact that the royal family chose to disregard. The Armstrong-Joneses had divorced when Tony was just five, and his mother had acquired aristocratic cachet when she married the Earl of Rosse. An education at Eton and Cambridge gave Tony entrée into upper-class circles where he found clients for his growing photography business.
He was several inches taller than tiny Margaret, and good-looking, with a dazzling smile and a hint of vulnerability from a slight limp caused by polio that he contracted at sixteen. Sophisticated and charming, he moved easily from the raffish world of artists and writers to the rarefied atmosphere of the Queen’s court. Equally important, he could match wits with Margaret, and he shared her taste for the high life. He also captivated both the Queen Mother and the Queen, who offered him an earldom before the wedding. He initially declined the title, only to accept it the following year when he became the Earl of Snowdon (after the highest mountain in Wales) before Margaret gave birth to their first child, David, ensuring that the Queen’s nephew would receive his own title—Viscount Linley—rather than being known as Mr. Armstrong-Jones.
Elizabeth II provided generously for the couple. Two days before their marriage, she and Prince Philip hosted a sumptuous court ball at Buckingham Palace, where the “whole atmosphere,” wrote Noel Coward, conveyed “supreme grandeur without pomposity.”
The wedding day on Friday, May 6,
1960, sparkled with sunshine. White banners bearing the initials A and M woven in gold fluttered over the Mall, where an estimated 100,000 people crowded the route to Westminster Abbey, resembling “endless, vivid herbaceous borders,” wrote Coward. “The police were smiling, the Guards beaming, and the air tingled with excitement and the magic of spring.”
Margaret was the image of a fairytale princess, dressed in an artfully simple gown of white silk organza, nominally a Norman Hartnell creation but in fact designed by Tony. The three-inch-high Poltimore diamond tiara encircled her chignon and anchored her long silk tulle veil. Prince Philip walked his sister-in-law to the altar, where Tony waited, looking “pale” and “a bit tremulous.” Eight bridesmaids aged six to twelve, led by nine-year-old Princess Anne, followed in floor-length white silk dresses.
Noel Coward watched the Queen, elegant in a pale blue gown and matching long-sleeved bolero jacket, “scowl a good deal,” and wondered whether this “concealed sadness or bad temper.” Close observers of Elizabeth II understood her expression meant she was straining to contain powerful emotions. “When she is deeply moved and tries to control it she looks like an angry thunder-cloud,” wrote Labour politician Richard Crossman.
As with other royal spectaculars, the Duke of Norfolk organized the day’s pageantry, and the BBC presented the first televised royal wedding ceremony. The Glass Coach—the traditional conveyance for royal brides for the previous five decades—transported the smiling couple back to Buckingham Palace, where they had a wedding breakfast for just 120 of the two thousand Abbey guests. The Queen gave her sister and brother-in-law Britannia for their six-week honeymoon. The £26,000 cost of the wedding was paid by the Queen Mother, who was in turn heavily subsidized by the Queen, although the Macmillan government picked up the £60,000 tab for the honeymoon. On their return to London, Margaret and Tony moved into a twenty-room apartment on four floors of Kensington Palace provided by the Queen and refurbished at a cost of £85,000, £50,000 of which was allocated by the government’s Ministry of Public Works to repair structural damage caused by bombs during the war.
Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch Page 17
