Elizabeth the Queen

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The woman who only sixteen years earlier was at the center of the same ceremony smiled throughout, but Beaton also caught in the Queen Mother’s expression “sadness combined with pride.” “She used to say it was like a priesthood, being a monarch,” said Frances Campbell-Preston. “I imagine seeing your daughter go into the anointing must be unusual.” Princess Margaret had a slightly glazed look, and by one account, during the Queen’s investiture “never once did she lower her gaze from her sister’s calm face.” But at the end of the service, she wept. “Oh ma’am you look so sad,” Anne Glenconner said to the princess with the red-rimmed eyes. “I’ve lost my father, and I’ve lost my sister,” Margaret replied. “She will be so busy. Our lives will change.”

  The lengthy ceremony ended after a parade of noblemen paid homage, and the congregation celebrated Holy Communion, as the Queen knelt to take the wine and bread “as a simple communicant.” Elizabeth II and her maids of honor took a short break by retiring into the Chapel of St. Edward the Confessor, where she shed her golden vestments, put on her jewelry, and was fitted with a new robe of ermine-bordered purple velvet, lined in white silk and embroidered with a gold crown and E.R. She also exchanged the St. Edward’s Crown, which is worn only once for the coronation, for the somewhat lighter—at three pounds—Imperial State Crown that she would use for the State Opening of Parliament and other major state occasions. This celebrated crown contains some of the most extraordinary gems in the world—the Black Prince’s Ruby, which Henry V wore at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the Stuart Sapphire, and the Cullinan II diamond weighing over 317 carats. Before leaving the chapel, the archbishop produced a flask of brandy from beneath his gold and green cope. He passed it around to the Queen and her maids so they could each have a sip as a pick-me-up before the processional.

  Carrying the two-and-a-half-pound orb and two-pound scepter, with her maids holding the eighteen-foot train of her robe, the newly crowned Queen walked through the nave of the Abbey to the annex, where she and her attendants had a luncheon of Coronation Chicken—cold chicken pieces in curried mayonnaise with chunks of apricot. Afterward Elizabeth II and Philip settled into the Gold State Coach for two hours in a seven-mile progress through London, this time in the pouring rain.

  Back at the Palace, the Queen had a chilled nose and hands from the drafty carriage. But she was ebullient as she relaxed with her maids in the Green Drawing Room. “We were all running down the corridor, and we all sat on a sofa together,” recalled Anne Glenconner. “The Queen said, ‘Oh that was marvelous. Nothing went wrong!’ We were all laughing.” Elizabeth II took off her crown, which Prince Charles put on his head before toppling over, while Princess Anne scampered around giggling underneath her mother’s train. The Queen Mother managed to subdue their wild excitement. She “anchored them in her arms,” Beaton wrote, “put her head down to kiss Prince Charles’s hair.”

  It was a day of jubilation not only over the coronation’s success, but because that morning had brought the news that Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and his Tibetan Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, members of a British mountain climbing team, had been the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest. The “Elizabethan explorers” toasted the Queen with brandy and flew her standard atop the highest mountain in the world, five and a half miles above sea level.

  As Earl Warren reported to President Dwight Eisenhower, “the Coronation has unified the nation to a remarkable degree.” An astonishing number of people saw the ceremony on television. In Britain an estimated 27 million out of a population of 36 million watched the live broadcast, and the number of people owning television sets doubled. Future prime minister John Major, then ten years old, fondly recalled seeing the ceremony on his first television, as did Paul McCartney. “It was a thrilling time,” McCartney said. “I grew up with the Queen, thinking she was a babe. She was beautiful and glamorous.” About one third of Americans—some 55 million out of a total population of 160 million—also tuned in, either on the day when they saw only photographs accompanied by a radio feed, or the next day for the full broadcast.

  One notably alert viewer in Paris was former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated before he was crowned (an important distinction: as one of the Queen’s friends put it, “he was never anointed, so he never really became king”) and had last attended a coronation in 1911 when he was the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales and his father was crowned King George V. Now dressed in a stylish double-breasted gray pinstripe suit, the Duke of Windsor watched at the home of Margaret Biddle, a wealthy American who had a “television lunch” for one hundred friends. She positioned three television sets in one room filled with rows of gilt chairs, and the duke sat in the middle of the front row, where he observed the entire telecast “without a sign of envy or chagrin.” At the conclusion of the coronation, he stretched his arms in the air, lit a cigarette, and said coolly, “It was a very impressive ceremony. It’s a very moving ceremony and perhaps more moving because she is a woman.”

  “She would especially miss the weekly

  audiences which she has found

  so instructive and, if one can say so

  of state matters, so entertaining.”

  Winston Churchill saying goodbye to Elizabeth II after his farewell dinner on stepping down as prime minister, April 1955. Associated Press

  FIVE

  Affairs of State

  AUREOLE, THE SPIRITED THREE-YEAR-OLD CHESTNUT COLT THAT HAD been the Queen’s preoccupation in the hours before her crowning, was one of the favorites in the Coronation Derby Day on Saturday, June 6, 1953, the 174th running of the Derby Stakes at Epsom Downs. His sire was Hyperion and his dam Angelola, but his name derived from his grand-sire, the stallion Donatello, named for the Italian Renaissance artist who carved bold halos around the heads of his angelic sculptures.

  The Queen relishes choosing names for her foals. With her aptitude at crossword puzzles and parlor games such as charades, she is imaginative and quick to make combinations—the filly Angelola, for example, by Donatello out of the mare Feola, and Lost Marbles out of Amnesia by Lord Elgin. “She would pull on all sorts of knowledge, including old Scottish names,” recalled Jean, the Countess of Carnarvon, whose husband, Henry Porchester—later the Earl of Carnarvon, but known to the Queen as “Porchey”—was Elizabeth II’s racing manager for more than three decades.

  The Queen was driven down the Epsom Downs track with her husband in the open rear seat of a Daimler to the cheers of a half million spectators, a record for the course. From the royal box she peered through binoculars as her racing colors (purple body with gold braid, scarlet sleeves, and gold-fringed black velvet cap) flashed along the mile-and-a-half course with twenty-six other galloping thoroughbreds. Aureole held second place, but couldn’t catch Pinza, the winner by four lengths. In her sunglasses and cloche hat, the Queen smiled and waved despite her disappointment. The victorious jockey, forty-nine-year-old Sir Gordon Richards, had received his knighthood (the first ever for a jockey) from the Queen only days earlier. After being invited to meet the Queen, he said she was a “marvelous sport” and “seemed to be just as delighted as I was with the result of the race.”

  Also in the royal box was Winston Churchill, the Queen’s most ardent booster throughout the coronation festivities. In the sixteen months—to the day—since she took the throne, she had developed a close and unique bond with Britain’s most formidable statesman. His fondness for both of her parents, along with the shaping experience of World War II, gave them a reservoir of memories and a common perspective, despite their five-decade age difference. She appreciated his wisdom, experience, and eloquence, and looked to him for guidance on how she should conduct herself as monarch.

  Churchill was also great company, not least because he shared his monarch’s love of breeding and racing, a passion that came to him late in life. For his Tuesday evening meetings with the Queen, he always arrived at the Bow Room in a frock coat and top hat. The rules of the prime minister’s audience called for
complete discretion, so few details of the discussions emerged. Years later when Elizabeth II was asked whose audiences she most enjoyed, she replied, “Winston of course, because it was always such fun.” Churchill’s reply to a query about their most frequent topic of discussion was “Oh, racing,” and his daughter Mary Soames concurred that “they spent a lot of the audience talking about horses.”

  Palace courtiers escorted the prime minister to the audiences, waited in the room next door, and afterward enjoyed whisky and soda with him while chatting for a half hour or so. “I could not hear what they talked about,” Tommy Lascelles recorded in his diary, “but it was, more often than not, punctuated by peals of laughter, and Winston generally came out wiping his eyes. ‘She’s en grande beauté ce soir,’ he said one evening in his schoolboy French.”

  The relationship between the Queen and Churchill prompted comparisons with Queen Victoria, who took the throne at age eighteen, and fifty-eight-year-old William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, her first prime minister. Melbourne’s manner, wrote Lytton Strachey, “mingled, with perfect facility, the watchfulness and the respect of a statesman and a courtier with the tender solicitude of a parent. He was at once reverential and affectionate, at once the servant and the guide.” Yet when asked directly by former courtier Richard Molyneux early in her reign whether Churchill treated her as Melbourne treated Victoria, Elizabeth II said, “Not a bit of it. I find him very obstinate.”

  Nor was she shy about catching out her prime minister when he hadn’t adequately prepared, as happened when Churchill failed to read an important cable from the British ambassador in Iraq. “What did you think about that most interesting telegram from Baghdad?” the Queen asked him that Tuesday. He sheepishly admitted he hadn’t seen it, and returned to 10 Downing Street “in a frightful fury.” When he read the cable, he realized that it was indeed significant.

  “If it was a case of teaching her, it was not done in a didactic way,” said Mary Soames. “She was very well versed in her constitutional position. My father knew very well what the position of constitutional monarch is vis à vis prime minister, cabinet and parliament. So it was a great advantage for her first prime minister to be somebody who really did know that. Most of them don’t, and his massive experience in government would surely have been a help. They talked about the present. They must have talked about people. Young though she was, she had experience. She traveled. She probably knew some of the people better than he, so she would have told him about them. What struck my father was her attentiveness. She has always paid attention to what she was doing. He never said she was lacking confidence.”

  One small glimpse of Elizabeth II’s growing self-assurance came when Churchill was finishing his memoirs of World War II and asked her permission to publish two letters he had written to her father. She granted his request but observed that his language was “rather rough on the Poles” and asked that “in the interests of international amity” his words “be toned down a bit.” Churchill readily changed the original version of the letter he had written a decade earlier.

  In the weeks before the coronation, the seventy-eight-year-old prime minister had assumed a greater workload than usual when Anthony Eden had a botched gall bladder operation, causing him to fly to Boston for extensive repair surgery and a long recovery in the United States. Although Eden was foreign secretary, he functioned as Churchill’s deputy. In the view of Clementine Churchill, “the strain” of the additional burdens “took its toll” on her husband. While Eden was overseas, Churchill suffered a stroke after a dinner in honor of the Italian prime minister on June 23. Amazingly, since his mind remained sharp, Churchill and his aides were able to conceal his paralytic symptoms as “fatigue,” keeping the truth about his illness under wraps.

  The Queen kept informed about Churchill’s condition, writing a lighthearted letter to buoy his spirits, and inviting him in September to join her at the Doncaster races to watch the St. Leger, followed by a weekend at Balmoral. He made a surprisingly rapid recovery, although his condition was still frail. When the prime minister lingered in the rear of the royal box at the racetrack, the Queen said to him, “They want you.” He appeared at the front, he later told his doctor, and “got as much cheering as she did.”

  After a period of rest in the south of France, Churchill was back at work by October, making speeches and presiding over cabinet meetings. But he tired easily, and his memory had slipped. It was obviously time for his retirement, but the Queen declined to use their weekly audience to apply any pressure. Churchill made a series of pledges to Eden that he would step down on a certain date, only to find one excuse after another to extend his time in office. In the view of Eden’s wife, Clarissa, the prime minister “prevaricated continuously for nearly two years.”

  BESIDES DEALING WITH Churchill’s illness and recovery, the young Queen became embroiled that summer in a highly sensitive family matter with constitutional implications. Princess Margaret had fallen in love and was determined to marry one of the royal household’s most trusted employees, thirty-eight-year-old Group Captain Peter Townsend, who had been working for the family since 1944. Not only was he sixteen years her senior, he was the divorced father of two sons.

  Handsome and mild-mannered, Townsend had been a highly decorated Royal Air Force pilot in World War II, a dashing hero who had brought down eleven German planes in the Battle of Britain. He had originally been assigned to Buckingham Palace for three months as an equerry, who is an aide-de-camp who assists the monarch at events, organizes logistics, and helps look after guests. Lascelles noted that Townsend was “a devilish bad equerry: one could not depend on him to order the motor-car at the right time of day, but we always made allowances for his having been three times shot down into the drink in our defence.” Yet Townsend’s calm and empathetic temperament endeared him to George VI, who made him a permanent member of the staff, first as equerry and then as Deputy Master of the Household, overseeing all private social engagements.

  Although Margaret was just thirteen when Townsend arrived, her sparkling personality made her the center of attention in the royal family. “Lilibet is my pride, Margaret my joy,” their father used to say. Margaret had always been the impish counterpoint to her sister, the witty entertainer who knew how to brighten her father’s moods, with a quicksilver mind that ran in unpredictable directions and didn’t yield easily to discipline. She was willful and competitive, and she would always remain resentful that her older sister received a better education. She had asked to join Lilibet’s tutorials with Henry Marten, but was told by the tutor, “It is not necessary for you.” Perhaps to compensate, her father indulged and spoiled his younger daughter, which only encouraged her mercurial tendencies. “She would not listen ever,” recalled her cousin Mary Clayton. “She would go on doing something terribly naughty just the same. She was so funny she didn’t get scolded, which would have been good for her.”

  Her younger sister was often vexing, but Elizabeth invariably stood up for her. “Margaret was an awful tease,” said Mary Clayton, “which helped her sister in her own way to control difficult situations.” She also kept Elizabeth humble. “The Queen never shows off, unlike Princess Margaret, who was always pirouetting,” said historian Kenneth Rose. Despite their different natures, the two sisters could laugh at the same jokes, although Elizabeth’s wit is gentler and more dry. Both excelled at mimicry and enjoyed singing popular songs together at the piano, which Margaret played with great flair.

  As Margaret matured, Townsend was drawn to her “unusual, intense beauty.” At five foot one, she had a voluptuous figure and what Townsend described as “large purple-blue eyes, generous sensitive lips, and a complexion as smooth as a peach.” He was struck by her “astonishing power of expression” that “could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure, to hilarious uncontrollable joy.” And he saw that “behind the dazzling façade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sinceri
ty.”

  By the time Margaret turned twenty in August 1950, Townsend’s marriage had come apart after his wife, Rosemary, strayed into several affairs. The princess and the equerry with blue eyes and chiseled features found themselves in long conversations, and by August 1951 on the Balmoral moors the King spotted his daughter gazing lovingly at Townsend dozing in the heather. Yet both he and his wife averted their eyes, engaging in the royal penchant for “ostriching,” an almost congenital ability to ignore unpleasant situations.

  Margaret turned to Townsend for consolation in the months following her father’s death when she was “in a black hole.” That June he initiated divorce proceedings against Rosemary, citing her adultery with John de László, son of the portrait artist who had painted Lilibet as a child. After his divorce from Rosemary was granted in November 1952, Townsend told Tommy Lascelles that he and the princess were “deeply in love” and wanted to get married—a plan the couple had shared only with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.

  The following day Lascelles had the first in a series of conversations with the Queen describing the “formidable obstacles” posed by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was designed to prevent unsuitable matches from damaging the royal family. The act specifies that no member of the family in the line of succession can marry without the consent of the sovereign, but if the family member is over the age of twenty-five, he or she could marry one year after giving notice to the Privy Council, unless both houses of Parliament specifically disapproved of the proposed marriage. The problem for Margaret was that marriage to a divorced man would not be recognized by the Church of England, of which her sister was the Supreme Governor—a circumstance that would cause the Queen to forbid the union. Princess Margaret was third in line to the throne after the Queen’s two children, but because Charles and Anne were both so young, she could plausibly serve as Regent. The issue remained unresolved, and was swept temporarily out of mind by the all-consuming coronation preparations.