The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, “I serve”. Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did, but through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple.

I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong, but I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.52

What was it in this nun-like promise – about a crumbling Empire that in a few years would cease to exist – that captured the imagination of those who heard it? It was partly the youth of the speaker, the cadences of the delivery, and the confidence of the performance; partly the knowledge that a royal betrothal was imminent; partly the earnestness of the sentiment in an earnest decade.

In fact, though the Princess may not have known it, the message was highly political – directed at several distinct audiences. One of its aims was to help Smuts and the cause of English-speakers in South Africa. It was designed to help Uncle Dickie, as Viceroy, in his task of seeking to retain Indian friendship within a Commonwealth that would no longer be able to differentiate between self-governing white dominions, and imperially ruled black colonies. At the same time, the speech was for domestic consumption in Britain – it offered a population that was exasperated by restrictions, and worn out after the added hardships of a terrible winter, the bromide of Commonwealth and imperial ideals. Finally, it was a royal speech, written by a courtier for a royal anniversary: it reaffirmed the British Monarchy as the one reliable link in an association of nations and territories whose ties had become tenuous, because of war, British economic weakness, and nascent nationalism.

But it was the Princess herself, and the feeling she conveyed as an individual, which, as it was said, brought ‘a lump into millions of throats’.53 For a moment, the Empire seemed as one. In South Africa, the English-speakers could not have felt prouder, and even the Afrikaners acknowledged the effect. ‘I feel . . . a bit exhausted by the tremendous success of the whole thing,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, as he packed his bags in Cape Town, ‘and for Princess Elizabeth’s speech, on which I had lavished much care.’54 A few days later, as the Vanguard sailed for home, the King’s private secretary was able to reflect a little more on his handiwork. The tour, he concluded, had amply achieved its most important objective, as far as the Court was concerned, of demonstrating the value to South Africa of the British Monarchy. The biggest revelation had been the blossoming of the King’s elder daughter:

From the inside, the most satisfactory feature of the whole business is the remarkable development of P’cess E. She has got all P’cess Marg’s solid and endearing qualities plus a perfectly natural power of enjoying herself . . . Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun. Moreover, when necessary, she can take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill, and never spares herself in that exhausting part of royal duty. For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.

In addition, he noted with approval, the Princess had become extremely business-like: she had developed the ‘admirable technique,’ if they were running late, ‘of going up behind her mother and prodding her in the Achilles tendon with the point of her umbrella when time is being wasted in unnecessary conversation’. When circumstances required, she also ‘tells her father off . . .’ Both princesses must have found moments in the tour very dull, Lascelles concluded. But, on the whole, both had been ‘as good as gold’.55

Lascelles’s optimism about the impact of the tour turned out to be misplaced. Indeed, if the aim had been to save both Smuts and the Crown in South Africa, it was a double failure. The following year, Smuts was ousted by Malan and the isolationists, and a new government adopted a programme of racial laws that weakened still further the Commonwealth links of the Union, and led eventually to South Africa’s withdrawal from the association thirteen years later. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the trip as politically negligible. In a way it was a marker: remembered, with nostalgia and also hope, for the affirmation it had provided of more elevated values than those later imposed. The memory was still there when, nearly half a century later, Nelson Mandela’s democratic republic re-applied for Commonwealth membership. There was also a directly personal effect. Elizabeth’s first tour, which was also one of her longest, profoundly affected her outlook, helping to establish a Commonwealth interest and loyalty that became a consistent theme of her reign.

AT HOME, every paper carried a birthday profile of the Heiress Presumptive, in each case seeking to meet a public desire for as happy and as rosy a picture of the Princess as the meagre details available about her short life permitted. Descriptions highlighted the qualities an idealized princess ought to have, alongside those she actually did. Since it was an egalitarian, democratic era, much ingenuity was exercised in presenting her as a people’s princess.

The Prime Minister set the tone. The simple dignity and wise understanding of the King’s elder daughter, he declared, had endeared her to all classes.56 The sentiment was echoed, universally. The News Chronicle helpfully noted that, unlike a male heir, who would have been created Prince of Wales and a member of the House of Lords, she was technically a commoner, and had appropriately simple tastes in personal adornment.57 The Times saw the point as more than technical. Elizabeth belonged to a Monarchy that had become ‘social and unpretentious,’ it declared, acting as ‘the mirror in which the people may see their own ideals of life’. From this firm base, the Princess would provide the rising generation with a model that was progressive in the widest sense, ‘standing for the aspirations of the men and women of her own age, for everything that is forward-looking, for all the effort that seeks to build afresh.’58

Such a ‘representative’ view of royalty, of course, begged a few questions: did being ‘representative’ mean representing the interests and ideals of ordinary young people in a symbolic sense, or actually being like them? Dermot Morrah, always ready with a loyal argument, claimed that the Princess was as representative in the second sense as in the first – and that her representative status came from the happy chance of her intellectual and cultural limitations. Like her father and grandfather, he pointed out, she was ‘normal’ – that is, average – in capacity, taste and training. The result was an Heiress Presumptive with normal, average values. That she was ‘simple, warm-hearted, hard-working, painstaking, cultivated, humorous and above all friendly’ helped to make her ‘a typical daughter of the Britain of her time’.59

Like the trumpeted ‘simplicity’ of the Princess’s pre-war upbringing, however, the reality was somewhat different. Most of the ‘normality’ of her early adulthood was a product of the ambition of observers to present her as somebody with whom genuinely simple and normal people could identify. The only hard, publicly available evidence was that she was untypical – in particular that she was rich and about to become richer, with a Civil List income rising from £6,000 per annum to £15,000 on her majority, a sum over which she would have full control. She was also untypically, even uniquely, famous: one newspaper suggested that the twenty-one-year-old Princess was ‘unquestionably the most publicized young woman in the world,’ easily out-distancing Shirley Temple, her nearest rival.60

Privately, the Princess felt no particular need to pretend to be what she was not. Indeed, her reluctance to step outside her own class in her social relations caused her royal grandmother, who continued to watch her progress carefully, some disquiet. At the beginning of July, Jock Colville recorded a conversation with Queen Mary in the garden at Marlborough House, in the course of which the elderly lady, nearing eighty, ‘said many wise things’ about her grand-daughter, ‘including the necessity of travel, of mixing with all the classes (H.R.H. is inclined to associate with young Guards officers to the exclusion of more representative strata of the community) and of learning to know young members of the Labour Party.’61

Yet there was also, perhaps, a quality that did not entirely belong to the categories of cliché or necessary myth. Unremarkable in capacity, abnormal in experience, wealth and friends, the Princess nevertheless possessed an attribute which radio listeners and filmgoers believed they could hear and see for themselves. This could best be described as ‘wholesomeness’ and stood in unremarked contrast to the decadence associated with the former Heir Apparent to George V. The Princess’s involvement in the Guides and ATS, her outdoor interests and pursuits, and her supposedly happy upbringing, had already been the stuff of wartime propaganda. After 1945, a belief in the Princess’s decency, straightforwardness, honesty, rather than in any visible talent, did much to elevate the idea of Monarchy during anxious years when – against ideological trends, or pre-war expectations – its psychic power seemed to soar. When Lord Templewood, who as Sir Samuel Hoare had been a Cabinet minister at the time of the Abdication, wrote of the ‘growing influence of the Crown,’ and of its ‘moral power,’ which was now ‘so firmly established that we can look forward with undoubted confidence to the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second,’62 he expressed a common feeling, for which the Cape Town broadcast had provided confirmation, that the institution would remain in clean hands.

The future of the Monarchy, however, was also linked to the question of who the Princess would marry. By now, an engagement to Prince Philip was assumed. During the South African tour, the BBC – planning ahead – began to consider a talk on the Princess ‘by someone who had known her since childhood’ to follow a betrothal announcement, and a similar one on the Prince.63 But no announcement was made, either on Princess Elizabeth’s birthday, or on the Royal Family’s return. To damp down speculation, the couple tried to be seen less together – thereby sparking rumours that the relationship had been broken off.64

One royal adviser recorded that, during a meeting with the Princess’s grandmother, Princess Elizabeth’s coming engagement had been discussed and that Queen Mary evidently had grave doubts about it.65 Perhaps there was a last minute rearguard action by opponents of the match. If so, it swiftly collapsed. Prince Philip’s small sports car began to reappear at the side entrance to Buckingham Palace,66 and on July 8th, the Palace declared its hand. ‘It had long been rumoured,’ noted Colville.67 A few weeks after the official announcement, the Princess’s private secretary wrote of the lobbying that had taken place against the Prince by his critics. Whether they had been unable to block the engagement, he wrote, ‘because, as they think, the Queen’s usually good judgement has failed her, or because Princess Elizabeth was so much in love as to overcome her parents’ antipathy to the match, I do not know’.68

* This is the Queen’s own spelling. Others have ‘Porchie’.

Chapter 7

UNCLE DICKIE had prepared the ground well. The press reaction to the betrothal, at a time when the Princess’s popularity had never been greater, was one of unqualified enthusiasm. Newspapers vied with each other to point out, not only that ‘this was clearly a marriage of choice not arrangement,’ but also that it was an extremely suitable match, made all the more so by Philip’s British bearing and attachments.1 ‘An effort had obviously been made,’ as Colville drily observed, ‘to build him up as the nephew of Lord Louis Mountbatten rather than a Greek Prince.’2 The effort came primarily from Dickie, and it worked. Glucksburg antecedents took a backseat. Profiles focused on Philip’s British relatives, education and service record, which made a neat package. As one account put it, the Prince was ‘thoroughly English by upbringing, has that intense love of England and the British way of life, that deep devotion to the ideals of peace and liberty for which Britain stands, that are characteristic of so many naval men’.3 Others tactfully suggested that, although technically a member of the Greek Orthodox Church into which he had been born, Princess Elizabeth’s fiancé had ‘regarded himself’ as a member of the Church of England since entering Dartmouth;4 that he did not look Greek; and that his royal rank was a bonus – even though the naturalization had set aside any significance it ever had. Meanwhile, in Athens, the continuing Greek royal family – which had leaked the news of the engagement the day before its official release – had no doubt about its own reaction. Philip had hit the jackpot.5

Philip himself acquired a valet and a detective, who accompanied him wherever he went. He also received a degree of public attention which he had never been subjected to before, and which he would now have to put up with for the rest of his life. His face, shown on all the newsreels, became recognizable everywhere. So did his car – suddenly everybody in Britain seemed to know that he drove a black, green-upholstered sports car with the registration HDK 99, and they looked out for it. For the time being, however, he continued to live on a lieutenant’s pay. According to his valet, his wardrobe was ‘scantier than that of many a bank clerk,’ and often didn’t include a clean shirt.6 His naval wardrobe wasn’t much better. Appraising the King’s future son-in-law at a royal garden party a few days after the announcement, Lady Airlie noted, not entirely disapprovingly, that his uniform was shabby, with ‘the usual after-the-war look’.7 For a short time, the image of the Prince as a genteelly poor, male Cinderella became a newspaper staple. Crawfie – who had been won over by the Prince from the beginning – took secret delight in the raffish style he introduced into the Palace, and in the pursed lips of servants and courtiers when he arrived hatless, with flannel trousers, and in an open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves.8

In August, after the King and Privy Council, including the Prime Minister, Archbishop of Canterbury and Leader of the Opposition, had formally approved the match (as they were required to do under the 1772 Royal Marriages Act), Lieutenant Mountbatten joined the Royal Family at Balmoral. Here the Court was able to assess, soberly, the new recruit. According to one below-stairs tale, Philip annoyed the King when they were in Scotland by bobbing a mock curtsey at him while wearing a kilt.9 Whether or not the story is true, it fits in with a picture of the Prince’s uneasy first summer in possession of the prize, regarded with caution by the King’s aristocratic friends, and potentially as dynamite by his courtiers. Jock Colville – in mellow mood, after his own first Balmoral working holiday – recorded his impressions of the royal life north of the border. He was struck by the contrasts with austerity London, even as experienced in Buckingham Palace. ‘There was luxury, sunshine and gaiety,’ he wrote, with ‘picnics on the moors every day; pleasant siestas in a garden ablaze with roses, stocks and antirrhinums; songs and games; and a most agreeable company with which to disport oneself.’ The company included Lord and Lady Eldon, the Salisburys, the Duke of Kent, David Bowes-Lyon, and Lady Violet Bonham Carter’s son Mark – several of them avowed disapprovers of the Prince.

Colville and Philip overlapped for a week, long enough for the Princess’s private secretary to form a provisionally favourable opinion, though also a cautious one. He liked the young naval officer, appreciated his difficulty in fitting into ‘the very English atmosphere that surrounds the Royal Family,’ especially when people like the Eldons and the Salisburys were around, and felt that he was intelligent and progressive, especially on the Commonwealth. But he was puzzled by the Philip–Elizabeth relationship. He recorded that the Princess was certainly in love with her fiancé. But he wondered about the apparently ‘dutiful’ appearance of the Prince.10 Perhaps Philip did not show his deeper feelings, perhaps Colville’s attitude was tinged with a little jealousy: he, after all, was the person who saw more of the Heiress than almost anybody – including, probably, her fiancé. Other impressions varied. One royal adviser remembers games of ‘murder’ at Balmoral, and bumping into the couple in the dark. ‘Somehow’, he recalls, ‘they always seemed to find each other when the lights went out.’11 Another, however, confirms Colville’s impression of a mysterious imbalance. ‘She was in love with him, you know’, he says. ‘Whether he was with her, I couldn’t say’.12

The marriage was fixed for November 20th. In the meantime, Princess Elizabeth took over from the Duke of Gloucester the function of the King’s ceremonial understudy. In October, she accompanied her father at the State Opening of Parliament for the first time, riding to the ceremony in the glass coach, with a lady-in-waiting. Royal Wedding fever – which was to reach epidemic proportions a few weeks later – had already gripped the capital: people began to line the procession route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in the early hours of the morning, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Princess as she passed.

However, the idea that the marriage of the Heiress Presumptive should be treated as a major national and imperial event was a novel one – in Eric Hobsbawm’s terminology, an invented tradition. Walter Bagehot had written a famous passage in The English Constitution, in which he declared that the women of Britain cared more about the marriage of a Prince of Wales than a ministry. Yet nineteenth and early twentieth century royal weddings had been comparatively modest occasions, and the marriages of the children of recent monarchs were essentially family events. Although the wedding of George VI as Duke of York had taken place in the Abbey, this was a departure from earlier practice. Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, had married in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor and George V, as Duke of York, had married in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. The wedding of Victoria, which took place after she had become Queen, was also at St. James’s Palace.

The choice of Westminster Abbey as the venue – made in consultation with the Prime Minister and Cabinet – was a decision to turn the day into a popular celebration of a kind, and on a scale, that had not taken place since before the war. It was to be a jamboree fit for a people’s princess, which would show that the Labour Government knew how to give everybody a good time, even in the depths of economic adversity. There were also – as at the time of George VI’s Coronation – diplomatic points to be made. In place of the restrained show of imperial might of 1937, the wedding of a decade later would be a peace-loving Empire parade, reminding people – as the South African tour had also sought to do – of the continuing strength of Commonwealth and imperial ties in the wake of Indian independence. Finally, Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to an undivorced, unforeign, relative provided both Monarchy and public with the Heir-to-the-Throne marriage of which they had been deprived in the 1930s, and which – it was fervently hoped – would blot out the memory of an unsuitable match with a suitable one, while perpetuating the new Windsor line.

Yet the arguments did not wash with everybody. Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, described 1947 – in a phrase echoed by Elizabeth in a different context many years later – as his own, and the nation’s, ‘annus horrendus’. Not only was it an exceptionally uncomfortable year because of the protracted freeze-up in the first part of it. It was also economically a catastrophic one, with a fuel crisis which stopped factories, put millions out of work, and helped to precipitate a financial collapse that stalled the Government’s reform programme. In August – a few days after the Abbey announcement – the large North American dollar loan which had helped to pay for early post-war reconstruction ran out, and the free exchange of dollars and sterling was abruptly ended. In a restructuring of the Government in September, Sir Stafford Cripps, the President of the Board of Trade, was given the powerful new post of Minister of Economic Affairs, in order to strengthen the export drive. An Emergency Budget was scheduled for November, and Dalton was expected to announce the most restrictive package of measures since Labour came to office.

Against such a background there was some feeling, especially on the left, that a major state occasion was out of keeping with the rigour of the times. The Communist MP, William Gallagher, attacked the marriage both on the grounds of Philip’s ancestry (‘I am quite certain that he has not forsaken the family politics,’ he told the Commons), at a time of Greek repression, and because of the ‘lavish expenditure’ involved.13 A group of Labour MPs added their own voice, sending a letter to the Chief Whip in protest at the likely cost.14 On October 28th, Dalton responded to the attacks by declaring that only the decorations in Whitehall and outside the Palace would be funded by the taxpayer – everything else would be financed by the King’s Civil List.15 On the eve of the Wedding, Chips Channon reckoned that Labour had got the worst of both worlds, laying itself open to criticism for spending too much, while actually appearing mean. Somebody in the Government he noted, ‘apparently advised simplicity, misjudging the English people’s love of pageantry and a show’.16

There was certainly fierce pressure on the Palace not only to limit expenditure but, above all – at a time of foreign-exchange shortage – to buy British. Indeed, such were the jitters of the Government on the subject, that it became the cause for behind-the-scenes friction. In October, Lascelles responded with extreme testiness to a request for information from the Prime Minister, who was facing a hostile question, about a suggestion that ‘Lyons silk’ was being used for the bride’s dress. ‘The wedding dress contains silk from Chinese silk worms but woven in Scotland and Kent’, replied the courtier. ‘The wedding train contains silk produced by Kentish silk worms and woven in London. The going-away dress contains 4 or 5 yards of Lyons silk which was not specially imported but was part of the stock held by the dress maker (Hartnell) under permit.’ (Norman Hartnell had his own say. Faced with the accusation that, in troubled times, the silk might be ideologically suspect, he made a firm answer: ‘Our worms are Chinese worms’, he coldly informed his accusers, ‘– from Nationalist China, of course!’17) As for the suggestion that the Palace was insufficiently careful on such matters, Lascelles tartly reminded the Prime Minister that, only recently, the Privy Purse had found it necessary to tick off the Board of Trade for recommending an Austrian ornament-maker for the wedding dress’s trimmings, a recommendation which had threatened the Palace ‘with an appreciable amount of embarrassing publicity’.18

A bigger problem, however, than the cost of the Wedding was the cost of the Princess. The marriage of an Heir to the Throne automatically involved a review of the Heir’s Civil List – and the month in which this was taking place could scarcely have been less propitious. Buckingham Palace asked for a total of £50,000 per annum for the couple – a net increase of £35,000. The Government – conscious of left-wing backbenchers whose working-class constituents had been told to tighten their belts – replied that this was politically impossible. It did not ease discussions on such a delicate matter that the Chancellor, responsible both for the Budget and for finding the cash for the King’s daughter, happened to be the son of a former tutor to George V, and – for complex domestic reasons – was heartily disliked by the Royal Family, which regarded him as a turncoat. Dalton, antiroyal since his youth, was not particularly good at concealing the wry pleasure he derived from the twist of fate that had made him royal paymaster.