When, at dusk on 7 February, she landed at London airport to be greeted by her ministers on the tarmac, she was composed, even managing a faint smile of thanks for their homage. But her secretary saw she had been crying, privately. Among those waiting was her Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and it was he who set the tone for the new reign. ‘Famous have been the reigns of our Queens,’ he declared.
She drove to Clarence House – where, half an hour later, Queen Mary arrived to kiss her granddaughter’s hand. It must have brought Elizabeth’s new position shockingly home. The next morning she walked to St James’s Palace for the Accession Council.
She read her declaration of sovereignty. ‘My heart is too full for me to say more today, than that I shall always work as my father did throughout his reign, to uphold the constitutional government, and to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples . . . I pray that God will help me discharge worthily this heavy task that has been laid on me so early in my life.’
Her father was not yet buried. The bringing back of his body from Sandringham for a London lying in state before burial at Windsor, saw not only extraordinary scenes of public grief but the iconic image of three queens in mourning: his mother, Queen Mary; his widow, Queen Elizabeth (now to be called Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother); and the new Queen Elizabeth II. It would be another sixteen months before Elizabeth II was crowned – but already the new reign was underway.
The first few months, and the first few years, of the Queen’s reign gave some very specific indications – both for better and for worse – of what lay ahead.
From the start, the precedents were invoked of Elizabeth I, and of Victoria. The Queen herself dismissed comparisons with the first Elizabeth, a woman who did not enjoy her own blessings of husband and family, and who ruled in an age before constitutional monarchy. But it was perhaps telling that Elizabeth II would open her first Parliament wearing Queen Victoria’s crown. The long reign of Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother had seen the monarchy through some testing times.
Now, however, the huge public optimism centred around the idea of a New Elizabethan Age. The coronation, said Princess Margaret later, was like ‘a phoenix-time’, when the world seemed reborn from the ashes of the War. All the more so when, on Coronation Day itself, came news that a British-led party had at last attained the summit of Mount Everest.
In Elizabeth’s immediate family circle, however, the mood was not so happy. By now in her mid-eighties, Queen Mary was becoming increasingly frail. But the Queen’s mother and sister also felt themselves cut adrift. Her mother was reluctant to move out of Buckingham Palace – almost as reluctant as Elizabeth’s husband was to move in.
Prince Philip had been thrown into gloom by the change in his and his wife’s circumstances – and it was not necessarily only the courtiers who made him feel excluded. Elizabeth’s determination to get to grips with her duties caused her to keep influence and information strictly in her own hands.
Recalling the period, Prince Philip said that before the Queen’s accession whatever they did was done together, and ‘I suppose I naturally filled the principal position. In 1952 the whole thing changed, very considerably.’
The Queen did announce that her husband was to have ‘place, pre-eminence and precedence’ after her ‘on all occasions and in all meetings, except where otherwise provided by Act of Parliament’. She also ended the custom whereby the sovereign’s spouse had to bow or curtsy when the sovereign entered a room. But such gestures could only go so far. In public, Prince Philip must always call the Queen ‘Ma’am’. (Small wonder if, in private, he sometimes speaks to her with a brusque frankness that is his way of letting off steam.)
There had always been debate about the role of a male consort, and his precise place in the royal pecking order. A king’s wife, after all, would not expect to be privy to the red boxes of state papers, or present at the weekly audiences with Prime Ministers. Why should it be any different for a queen’s husband?
One issue did relate specifically to Philip’s masculinity – the question of a surname. Shortly after Elizabeth’s accession, it was reported to a furious Queen Mary that Philip’s Uncle Louis had been heard boasting at a dinner party. The House of Mountbatten, he claimed, now sat on the throne. When the Queen, strongly urged by her ministers, announced that her descendants would keep the name of Windsor, Philip was deeply wounded. He was, he said, ‘just a bloody amoeba’ – the only man in the country not allowed to give his children his name.
Meanwhile, the Queen’s difficulties in juggling duty with family was visible in other ways. Three months before the coronation, old Queen Mary died. Then, at the ceremony itself, Princess Margaret was observed picking a piece of fluff off the lapel of Group Captain Peter Townsend – a tiny gesture intimate enough to alert press and public to a romance of which Margaret’s family was already only too aware.
Newspapers and magazines around the world were full of the glamorous new young Queen, and of her Coronation.
The marriage of such a close member of her family required the Queen’s consent. Townsend was a war hero, admired and trusted by the Royal Family. But he was also a divorced man, at a time when divorce was still a huge social barrier. The shadow of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson loomed large. More importantly, the Queen (who shared her mother’s sincere and traditional Christian faith) was Supreme Governor of a Church of England which did not sanction remarriage after divorce.
Princess Margaret believed that when she turned twenty-five, in two years’ time, she might be able to marry Peter Townsend without the Queen’s official sanction and still keep her place in the Royal Family. But when that time came in 1955, she found instead that she would have to relinquish all royal rights and privileges. ‘Mindful of the Church’s teachings,’ she decided, as she famously declared, ‘not to marry Group Captain Townsend.’ But perhaps the Townsend affair had revealed Elizabeth’s tendency to avoid dealing with emotional problems – and revealed, too, the refusal to put any family claim ahead of what she saw as her duty which was being displayed in several other ways.
The six-month, thirteen-country, 40,000-mile Commonwealth tour on which the Queen and Prince Philip embarked in November 1953 was a vital affirmation of the Queen’s personal and enduring belief in the value of the Commonwealth. The organization which gives her a link to some third of the world’s population seemed particularly important at a moment when nations once part of the British Empire, were claiming their independence one by one.
The trip was an immense success. In New Zealand, the UK High Commissioner reported that ‘Few, I think, could have predicted the adulation which Her Majesty and His Royal Highness . . . inspired wherever they went, or indeed the emotions which Her Majesty’s presence aroused . . . no longer is she a remote personage to her New Zealand peoples: she is now, to them, the Queen of New Zealand.’ It had, he said, brought the reality of the Commonwealth home to them in a manner ‘which no amount of writing or talking could ever have accomplished’.
But the enduring memory of the tour now is not of the Queen in Jamaica or in Tonga, Sri Lanka or Australia, in any one of the hundred outfits Norman Hartnell had designed for the ‘world’s sweetheart’. It is of the return home, in May 1954, when she met her children again, after months apart – and said ‘No, not you, dear’, to her five-year-old son, greeting dignitaries first before shaking Charles’s hand.
Princess Anne, many years later, would speak to the journalist and author Andrew Marr of having enjoyed ‘pretty good mothering’. It was a mothering exercised within a strict timetable, but that might apply to a ‘Service’ family. The fact was, Elizabeth could no longer be primarily a mother, or a sister, or a wife. She was first and foremost the Queen.
One chain of crises with which she had to deal in these early years was not personal in nature but constitutional. But perhaps they are as revealing of the Queen's personality. Winston Churchill was her first Prime Minister, and one who learned to respect her as much as s
he did him. However, Winston Churchill’s health was failing – though the young Queen Elizabeth II was understandably reluctant to play any part in forcing the great statesman to retire.
Four generations of the Royal Family. After the christening of her daughter Princess Anne on 21 October 1950, the Queen was photographed with her mother and her grandmother Queen Mary.
Churchill was succeeded in office by Anthony Eden in April 1955, but in the latter part of 1956 the Suez Crisis brought about Eden’s downfall. Britain had made a covert alliance with France and Israel to seize back from Egypt control of the Suez Canal. There are enduring questions as to just what the Queen did or did not know about this armed aggression towards a country with which Britain was not at war.
On Eden’s resignation it devolved on the Queen to invite another politician to head the Conservative Party, and to form a government. Her invitation to Harold Macmillan (rather than to the other contender, Rab Butler) was based on leading Conservative opinion – but it was seen as showing her in thrall to a limited circle of Tory grandees. Six years later the situation would be repeated when Macmillan tried to ensure that he himself would be succeeded not by Butler, but by the aristocratic Alec Douglas-Home.
One way and another the questions that arose out of the early years of the Queen’s reign were those that would dog her through the next decades.
Not long into the new reign the Italian portrait painter, Pietro Annigoni, was commissioned by a City of London livery company to paint a portrait of the Queen. It has become one of the images that define her early reign. A figure at once restrained and romanticized, she is seen in the robes of the Order of the Garter, against a faded sylvan landscape, gazing out at something the viewer cannot see. Annigoni said it was inspired by a very human story the Queen told him, of how as a child she had loved to gaze out of the window at the people below. Some complained, nonetheless, that Annigoni had painted an icon of monarchy, rather than a living monarch – but the Queen herself is known to have liked a work that the public stood ten deep to see.
Well over a hundred artists have painted the Queen – usually to commission and from life, though the image Andy Warhol made of her in 1985 was one famous exception. And we all handle portraits of the Queen every day. They jingle in our pockets on coins and send our letters on their way; through the Commonwealth as well as in Britain. The postage stamps alone are said to make hers the most reproduced portrait in history.
Her image on coins, like that on banknotes, has been updated over the years, and she is surely realistic about seeing herself age – a woman comparatively without vanity. In 2001, famously or infamously, Lucian Freud painted the Queen and the result was unpopular with many, since it showed her looking lowering, lined and lumpy. But in fact painter and sitter had got on well, bonding over a shared interest in horses.
Photographic portraits have been many, but a few stand out. Cecil Beaton photographed the Queen repeatedly in her younger years. ‘I was always impressed by, and grateful for, the exceptionally charming manners that the young princesses had in relation to the job of being photographed,’ he wrote. ‘Unlike other children, royal or otherwise, by whom I have been victimized, they never showed signs of restlessness.’
Later, Beaton photographed Princess Elizabeth in ATS uniform and as a young mother; would take the first photographs of Prince Charles, and of Princess Anne (‘an infant version of the Sleeping Beauty’, Beaton called the latter image, as Prince Charles kissed his sister on the cheek). He also, of course, took the stunning image of the Queen on her Coronation Day: composed, regal and beautiful with her crown, sceptre and orb, against a ghostly background of Westminster Abbey.
Dorothy Wilding had taken early black-and-white photographs of the Queen; Eve Arnold took her in 1968 with a black umbrella and a broad smile. Patrick Lichfield snapped her in 1971 laughing down from the deck of the Royal Yacht Britannia and in 1978 Lord Snowdon took a portrait of her holding her first grandson. A quarter of a century later, in 2004, Chris Levine’s holographic portrait unusually showed her with eyes closed, as he asked her to relax between the eight-second shots.
It was Jane Bown, herself an octogenarian, who took the official portrait of the Queen for her eightieth birthday. Soon after came the notable series of portraits Annie Leibovitz took in 2007, in advance of the Queen’s first official visit to the USA for sixteen years.
The two did not get on easily. Leibovitz arrived with an entourage, expecting far more time than the Queen was able to give, and suggested the monarch remove her ‘crown’ (actually a tiara) to look less ‘dressy’. The Queen praised by contrast the low-key style of Jane Bown, who with the monarch herself had shifted furniture around the room as necessary.
But in the end the Queen came through, as she always does. Leibovitz was able to photograph her both with and without her Garter robes, in images that consciously reflect the richness of paintings on the palace walls. And Annie Leibovitz would be invited back to take another series of remarkable images – this time, to mark the Queen’s ninetieth birthday.
It is often said that the Queen is uninterested in clothes. This is not altogether true – but it is true that for her the sheer appeal of a garment can never be paramount. She is – said one of her favourite designers, Hardy Amies – wary of clothes that are ‘too chic’. ‘The Queen’s attitude is that she must always be dressed for the occasion.’
Very often, of course, that means a lavish evening dress with elbow-length gloves and a blaze of jewellery. Relaxing at Balmoral, it may mean woollens and stout brogues, or jodhpurs and tweed jacket. Certain ceremonies require the Queen to wear uniform, and she has always been particular about correct detail and fit. Riding sidesaddle to take the salute at the Trooping of the Colour, she used to wear the uniform of the regiment whose colours were being trooped, adjusting her diet if necessary in the weeks beforehand to fit the exiguous tight jacket and full skirt.
In her youth the Queen cut a glamorous figure, her enviably slim and petite figure honed and fit from her hours of riding. In the heady post-war days of Christian Dior’s New Look the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, had been given a private view of his fabulous full-skirted creations, though in an age of rationing and austerity they could never be allowed to wear them. Instead, Elizabeth turned to the romantic but restrained designs of noted (and safely British) designer Norman Hartnell, already her mother’s favourite.
The outfits worn by the Princess Elizabeth as a child were copied around the globe. Her mother’s choice of colour for her daughter made yellow the fashion for little girls everywhere. But Hartnell said once that the adult Elizabeth had no desire to be a fashion setter. ‘That’s left for other people with less important work to do.’
All the same, with the help of Hartnell, and later Hardy Amies, she had a fashionable youth – followed, perhaps, by a less stylish middle age. She reached midlife in the 1960s, just as the clothes of the young began to deviate more sharply than at any time in history from those their parents wore. And though Princess Margaret, relaxing in Mustique, might allow herself to be photographed in flowing kaftans, that would never do for the Queen.
She suffered, too, from allowing herself still to be guided by the old-fashioned advice of her one-time nursemaid Bobo MacDonald, who became her dresser . . . and perhaps from a figure which, however suited to 1950s styles, did not lend itself to the high fashion of later years. Ironically, it is in old age that the Queen has once more come into her own as an extremely glamorous (great-)granny, aided by the advice and designs of Angela Kelly, who since 2002 has perhaps come as close as anyone could do to taking Bobo’s place.
In youth or age, however, there are rules to royal dressing which the Queen – ever comfortable with regulations and ceremonials – feels no desire to break. Colours must be light or bright, so as to show up from a distance (the same reason the Queen always wears bright lipstick). Hats – and she is said to have worn some five thousand of them – must be made so as not to hide the fac
e. Hemlines must not be too short, and hems must be weighted where necessary to avoid embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions. Angela Kelly described how the ever-practical Queen urged her to crumple any fabric she planned to use, to see how badly it creased.
Annigoni’s portrait, entitled ‘Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Regent’ soon became one of the iconic images of the new sovereign.
In so far as they are designed for public appearance and for photographs, some of the Queen’s day dresses may be made surprisingly plain. They are after all only backdrops for the jewellery she calls her ‘best bits’ – and for the hats, the gloves, the famous boxy handbags. (Designers rail against those handbags, and even against the jewels which outshine the actual garments – but the Queen knows what it is the public wants to see.)
On tours abroad, the Queen’s dress must conform to the customs of the host nation, so that a visit to the Middle East may see her covered from chin to heel, even in the heat of day. Or it may compliment that country – the Queen wore green for a groundbreaking visit to Ireland, and at Balmoral, in tribute to their Scottish blood, members of the Royal Family often appear in tartan. In a sense, all the Queen’s garments are a uniform – the bright hats and dresses as much as the regimentals. They are equipment – props – which help the Queen perform the job in hand, whatever that might be.
(Clockwise from top) The Queen and Prince Philip with their two eldest children; the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer; the Queen wearing the robes of the Order of the Garter.
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