The Queen

by A. N. Wilson

  Elizabeth’s Uncle David reigned as King Edward VIII for less than a year. He inherited the crown on 20 January 1936, and he abdicated on 11 December. It was the shortest reign of a British monarch since that of his namesake, Edward V, one of the murdered ‘Princes in the Tower’. Although his motto as Prince of Wales had been ‘I serve’, he had evidently resented any expectations that he would perform public duties unless he happened to feel like doing so. ‘I did a bloody good job for my country, and all I got was a good kick in the ass,’ was his own rather strange view of those bachelor years, whose daylight hours had been spent so often on golf courses and whose evenings were usually passed in nightclubs with married women.18

  ‘Uncle David’ had, as everyone knows, married for love, and chosen to defy the Canon Law of the Church of England – of which he was the Supreme Governor – by marrying a woman, Wallis Warfield, who had been twice divorced. ‘You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’ So he had said in the wireless broadcast which immediately followed the Abdication.

  The historian Ben Pimlott wrote that, in the short term, British politics were hardly affected by the Abdication and that it could be argued that the crisis had very little impact. Clearly, however, for Edward VIII’s brother, who now inherited the throne as George VI, the Abdication had an enormous impact. The strain upon this shy naval officer, who was hampered by the most extreme stammer, was crippling; and it is not surprising that those close to him believed that the ‘heavy burden of responsibility’ hastened his death, at the age of fifty-six. When Harold Nicolson visited Queen Mary in 1949, she told him that George VI ‘had been appalled when he succeeded. He was devoted to his brother and the whole Abdication crisis made him miserable. He sobbed on my shoulder for a whole hour – there, upon that sofa. Even his stammer had been corrected. And now he is so ill, poor boy, so ill.’19

  The Abdication loomed over Lilibet’s life and reign like a threatened curse. Her own parents had been such dutiful and successful monarchs. But the Abdication had shown what happened when a monarch broke the rules. Then, everything unravelled.

  Had her Uncle David chosen a young, previously unmarried bride of child-bearing age, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose could have lived the comfortable lives of minor royalties, carrying out their duty, no doubt, but without the heaviness of ‘the burden’. Had she married the same person, Prince Philip of Greece, he would have been able to pursue his career as a reasonably successful naval officer while his wife, no doubt, would have spent much of her time in the country with horses and dogs. His fellow officers could have guffawed at his supposedly humorous remarks, and they would never have been treasured by journalists in search of ‘gaffes’.

  As it was, the Church, and the Establishment, decreed that the King could not plausibly remain in position. The Christian abhorrence of divorce, and, in particular, of the remarriage of the divorced, was Edward VIII’s undoing. In 1936 divorce was relatively unusual in Britain, and, whether people were Christian or not, they tended to avoid the divorce courts. In the Royal Family, however, the spectre of Mrs Simpson’s divorces would hover like a death’s head over them.

  Speaking of his brother Bertie, Edward VIII had said, in his Abdication broadcast, ‘He has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you, and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children.’ And this was true. For much of Elizabeth’s reign, at the top of the stairs as one entered the National Portrait Gallery, there hung a painting by Sir James Gunn of King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and their two daughters having tea at Windsor. It is a scene of calm happiness, of domestic virtue, an emblem of all that the Nation escaped by not having the wise-cracking, chic, ‘fast’, thrice-married Wallis as their Queen. When, in 1955, Princess Margaret broke off her affair with Group-Captain Peter Townsend, who had been divorced, she did so ‘mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth’.20 Yet her own marriage to the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones would come unstuck, as would the marriage of the Queen’s eldest three children.

  In 1933, when Elizabeth was just six and Margaret Rose two, her parents had engaged a young Scottish woman, Marion Crawford – ‘Crawfie’ – as their governess. Their homes at this time were Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park and 145 Piccadilly. The Duke and Duchess of York lived simply, seldom giving dinner parties. The four – the Yorks and the ‘little princesses’ – were close. It so happened that on the day after the Abdication, a friend of theirs, Lady Cynthia Asquith, was coming to tea. When she left 145 Piccadilly, Lilibet escorted her to the front door. She saw an envelope on the hall table addressed to ‘Her Majesty the Queen’. With a tremor in her voice, Lilibet said, ‘That’s Mummie21 now.’

  The child was aware, everyone was aware – assuming the monarchy had a future at all – that she was next in line to the throne, that Lilibet would one day be the British Head of State. Even before this, Crawfie – and old Queen Mary – had expressed anxiety about the low level of education which was being offered to the little girls.22 Queen Mary, who was a cultivated woman, bilingual in German and English, knowledgeable about ceramics and furniture, had mixed from her earliest youth with European royalties and nobility, and saw at first hand the apparent deliberation with which the British Royal Family failed to educate their children. When she met her husband’s biographer, Harold Nicolson, she complained about the inadequacy of his tutor, Canon Dalton. ‘It was disgraceful that “the King” had not been taught more. I asked whether he could speak French really well. She did not like that question. “No,” she said rather stiffly.’23

  Lilibet’s parents, however, despite Queen Mary’s urgings, continued to educate her and her sister rather as the daughters of an Earl of Strathmore might have been educated in Edwardian or late Victorian times. At least, unlike King George V, they both spoke French beautifully – Elizabeth’s French, in particular, is fluent and bell-like, with an English accent which is charming rather than being absurd. It is true that, from 1938 onwards, when she was in Windsor, Princess Elizabeth was sent to be taught constitutional history by the Provost of Eton, Sir Henry Marten. He thought highly of Princess Elizabeth’s capabilities – and saw ‘great stuff’ in her. As well as explaining the Constitution, he gave her a comprehensive course on the explorers, starting with Columbus, and ending with the present day, pointing out the new territories in an atlas. He also told her the history of the United States, pacing up and down his room, and occasionally turning to ask, ‘Is that clear to you, gentlemen?’24 It was not much, however, when one considers how relatively soon she would become Head of State and Head of what was no longer an Empire, but remained a Commonwealth of nations. The Abdication crisis could easily have destroyed the monarchy itself. Carrying forward the monarchy into an unknown future was an immense responsibility.

  Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, criticism was levelled against her parents for their apparently irresponsible attitude, and against the Queen herself for not being better educated. The historian Dr David Starkey, for example, who had accepted a ‘gong’ from the Queen – he is a Commander of the British Empire – felt the need to preserve his reputation as ‘the rudest man in Britain’, after he had curated an exhibition about Queen Elizabeth I in Greenwich in 2003. The exhibition was opened by the sovereign, and she did not impress the historian.

  ‘I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture,’ the historian told the Guardian. ‘You remember: “Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.”’

  He found her ‘more preoccupied with the late arrival of her drink (gin and Dubonnet) than the works on display. Her only comment on the exhibition was that one of the objects was hers’.

  This, said Starkey, reminded him of ‘a housewife’ who’d been left some wonderful possessions. ‘She’s
looked after them, she’s put in place much better arrangements for their care, but again – I suppose it’s this absence of any kind of – to be blunt – serious education.’

  He could not help comparing her with Elizabeth I, who also acceded the throne at twenty-five, ‘but was twenty times as well educated. And had either five or six languages.’

  He was also struck that the Queen does not seem to have any interest in those who preceded her grandfather, George V.

  Starkey said that he had read all of her Christmas broadcasts. ‘It’s quite fascinating, because her frames of reference to the monarchy, despite this 1,500-year history, are entirely her father and grandfather… There is a reference to Elizabeth I. It was in the second Christmas broadcast when – I remember vividly – there was all this talk about a second Elizabethan age. Elizabeth turns to this in her broadcast, and says: “Frankly, I do not myself feel at all like my Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores.”’25

  Ours is a generation whose belief in formal education, by which we mean schooling and universities, has reached the level of a superstition, that is, an irrational belief which cannot be questioned. Even to question it would be, to opinion-formers, civil servants or politicians, all of whom have been through the education-mill, a kind of madness. They assume that the only way in which a person can be adequately suited for life is by what Tony Blair, before becoming Prime Minister, called ‘education, education, education’. (Three excellent reasons for distrusting him.)

  In relatively recent times, however, Britain was largely inhabited by people whom Dr Starkey and Tony Blair would regard as ‘uneducated’, but who were in fact perfectly competent in their chosen spheres. Today, it is regarded as shocking in many quarters, for example, that some nurses do not possess degrees; and it is even said that such nurses are not ‘qualified’. In the past, however, nurses learnt from experience, ‘on the job’. This was true of almost all walks of life – from young barristers in chambers, to bankers, to shopkeepers, to artisans who passed through apprenticeships, to those who worked, at whatever level, in agriculture. Universities catered, not for the ‘upper classes’, who – except in a tiny number of cases throughout history – scarcely went near them – but for that much smaller category, the genuinely scholarly. During the nineteenth century, they had also been seen as useful training grounds for diplomats and civil servants. The great majority of British people, however, during all the years when Britain was most successful, either as an economy or as a world power, achieved their success without the formality of ‘education’. The Queen, when it came to it, like most of her subjects – farmers, motor mechanics, plumbers, solicitors, parish clergy, – would learn ‘on the job’.

  One footnote to Dr Starkey. It is a mistake always to assume, as he evidently does, that limitations are always a disadvantage in life. The history don was dismayed that ‘the Queen does not seem to have any interest in those who preceded her grandfather, George V’.26 No doubt, if the Queen had been applying for a place as a mature student at university to study British history, this would be a serious handicap. Given her role in life, however, there is a certain aptness in her looking back no further than to ‘Grandfather England’. For it was with him that, in effect, her story began. Not only was he the King when she was born. He was her role model. He had redefined what it meant to be a constitutional monarch in what was, for most of Europe, a post-monarchical age. For this reason, Elizabeth did not need to look back further than to him, when she was learning her ‘trade’. When so many hereditary monarchies, all over Europe, had toppled, during the decade which preceded Elizabeth’s birth, the British one had remained. It did so by the delicate balancing act of, on the one hand, remaining ‘the same’, and on the other, adapting. One obvious example of this was the alacrity with which George V took to making a broadcast Christmas message on the newly invented wireless. His reclusive grandmother, Queen Victoria, even assuming that the wireless had been invented in her day, would never have been persuaded to make a broadcast. For her, the constitutional monarch was an essentially aloof figure – she would not even read the ‘Queen’s Speech’ at the State Opening of Parliament – it was read for her by the Lord Chancellor. ‘Grandfather England’ was, by the end of his reign, a popular figure, and the willingness to engage with the most up-to-date media was one of the reasons for this. He had sensed the PR value of broadcasting.

  No one, when Elizabeth was a young child, could have foreseen quite how much ‘image’ and ‘presentation’ would mean in the unfolding decades. Had they done so, perhaps some attention would have been given to the way in which Princess Elizabeth and her sister were taught to speak the English language. Or then again (given the character of her mother), perhaps not. The Duchess of York was a strong-minded, jolly woman who would have mocked any idea of teaching her children a more demotic way of pronouncing words. The Queen’s mother spoke an English which was a throwback to country houses pre-1914; her upper class voice was of a particularly uncompromising timbre; though both her daughters were less high-pitched than their mother, it was this voice, rather than that of their father’s, which they inherited. George VI, when he could get words out at all, had recognizably the ‘royal cockney’ twang of his father and brother, with perhaps a hint of the Royal Navy officer in his voice. Had Elizabeth II spoken like ‘Grandfather England’, her public image in the early years of her reign would undoubtedly have been different. In 1957, in an attempt to puncture some of the sycophancy and idolatry which the young Queen Elizabeth II was larded by the press, the young journalist-historian John Grigg (Lord Altrincham) described her voice as ‘a pain in the neck’, which gave the impression of ‘a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for Confirmation’.27 Certainly, what neither her mother nor father, who lived cocooned in a very limited social sphere, could possibly have foreseen was the extent of social change which would come to Britain during and after the Second World War.

  While Celia Johnson was having a smut removed from her eye by Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter (‘Are you engry?’, ‘Not engry, just disappointed’), it was still possible for figures in public life to speak in the version of English classified by Nancy Mitford to be ‘U’. By the time Harold Macmillan had become Prime Minister in 1956, it was becoming quaint. By the time Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964, it was undoubtedly the fact that he spoke with a Yorkshire accent which helped to propel him to victory over the 14th Earl of Home (Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he became), who spoke with an Etonian drawl, interrupted by rather engaging giggles. Thereafter, those who spoke with even traces of ‘posh’ on radio or television sounded increasingly odd. What would have been ‘Received Pronunciation’ in 1950 sounded distinctly upper crust by 1980, and most politicians or figures in public life who have tried to sell their ‘ordinariness’ to the rest of us have done so by neutralizing their voices. (Tony Blair’s glottal stops come to mind.) The Queen’s voice has changed a little since she was crowned. When she says ‘off’ the vowel is some way closer to the way in which it is spelt than it was when she said the same word in 1950. But she still says ‘heppy’ for ‘happy’ and ‘orphan’ for ‘often’. ‘Coffee’ rhymes with ‘Crawfie’. Queen Victoria’s house on the Isle of Wight is pronounced ‘Uzb’n’. Much as it has been mocked, the voice is now so much part of the Queen that it is unimaginable to think of her speaking in any other way.

  The voice might be a throwback to house parties in the era of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, where the past was another country. The Queen, however, did not grow up in country-house luxury; though her mother might have employed the equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse’s Anatole the Chef for her celebratedly sybaritic widowhood, the Queen retained, as so many did who had lived through the Second World War, what must have amounted to an enjoyment of austerity. Someone who went for an interview at Balmoral in the late 1990s for a job as a minor offi
cial in the royal entourage was delighted to be invited for luncheon with his sovereign. No alcohol was offered, and the menu consisted of macaroni cheese with mashed potato.28 During the war years – when a German bomber scored a direct hit on Buckingham Palace – the King and Queen insisted upon staying in London. When possible, they went to Windsor to see their daughters who were immured in the castle. A high point of the princesses’ week was the egg which they were each allowed to consume on Sunday mornings – they ate it fried until lard became scarce.29

  Lilibet was a serious child and adolescent, and, without being pompous, she was aware of herself, from an early age, as a being set apart. Some of the earliest bombs of the war fell on Windsor. During the first of the raids, alarm bells rang in the castle, and Miss Crawford, the governess, ran to the air-raid shelter where she met Sir Hill Child, Master of the Household. Where were the Princesses? They were in the nursery with Mrs Knight (‘Allah’30), their old nurserymaid, who remained with Lilibet until her death from meningitis in 1946. (She had been the Queen Mother’s nanny before that; ‘Allah/Alah’ was a childish attempt to pronounce her first name, Clara.)