The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

He also wrote that Elizabeth ‘bore the pre-wedding strain with great good nature and cheerfulness’.64 Sometimes, it must have been hard. To the worries of any young bride were added an uncertainty about what to expect as the first married Heiress to the Throne of modern times, and the almost suffocating attentions of the world. Crawfie, seeing her former pupil’s nervousness, tried to help – by offering some advice. This took the form of a homily on the condition of matrimony, which reveals much about British attitudes (or at any rate Scottish lower-middle-class ones) in the 1940s. It was unwise, the governess explained, even in a royal union, to be too jealous or possessive a wife. ‘When you marry, you must not expect the honeymoon to last for ever,’ she told the young woman she had helped to bring up. ‘Sooner or later you will meet the stresses and strains of everyday life. You must not expect your husband to be constantly at your side or always to receive from him the extravagant affection of the first few months. A man has his own men friends, hobbies and interests in which you cannot and will not want to share.’

Princess Elizabeth started her wedding day much as she had begun the morning of her father’s Coronation ten years before – looking out of the window of Buckingham Palace in her dressing-gown.65 Despite the cold November weather, crowds had gathered in the Mall the night before, in preparation for an all-night vigil. ‘There was a tremendous crowd reaction’, says Pamela Hicks. ‘Suddenly to see the state coach was marvellous, with Princess Elizabeth with her wonderful complexion and Prince Philip so devastatingly handsome – they were a dream couple.’66 The theme was popular monarchy. The day’s events, including the service, were broadcast to forty-two countries. The address by the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, stressed the universality of the occasion. Never, he said, had a wedding been followed with such interest by so many people, yet the ceremony was ‘in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales’.67 One of the essentials – despite a few protests from ‘extreme advocates for sexual equality’ – was the promise by the Heiress Presumptive ‘to love, cherish and obey’ her husband.68 Non-essentials included the attendants, the list of whom made no concessions to social equality. All were either royal or aristocratic. Philip’s cousin, the Marquess of Milford Haven, was best man.

The congregation of two thousand included, as Wheeler-Bennett put it, ‘one of the largest gatherings of royalty, regnant and exiled, of the century’.69 There were so many kings and queens and their off-spring, together with foreign heads of state, that other categories were squeezed – British MPs, for instance, had to ballot for places, much to their irritation. Many of the guests were unknown to either the bride or the groom. Others were known to the entire Abbey. When the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, arrived a little late, ‘everyone stood up’, as Channon observed, ‘all the Kings and Queens’.70 There were also eccentrics. Lady Munnings, wife of Sir Alfred, President of the Royal Academy, sat through the whole service with her Pekinese dog, Black Knight, concealed in her muff.71 To be invited was bliss: to be left off the list, when you thought you should be on it, was torture. ‘Miserable royal wedding day’, wrote Lord Reith, former Director-General of the BBC, in his diary. ‘Didn’t get up till 10.30. Completely out of phase with everything and everybody through not being asked to the Abbey.’72

The lucky ones felt the kind of excitement people feel when they attend events everybody else wishes they were at: they found beauty and wonder everywhere, in the building, the words, the music, the congregation, the Royal Family, the royal couple and especially the bride. There were many accounts from people eager to display their privileged access, and inside knowledge. Faces were studied for expressions, clothes critically examined for the minutest detail. Mrs Fisher, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, thought the Princess looked ‘very calm, absolutely lovely’ coming up the aisle. The effect of her outfit, she wrote, ‘was a diaphanous one with her lovely train of silk tulle and her veil’.73 Channon ‘thought Princess Elizabeth looked well, shy and attractive, and Prince Philip as if he was thoroughly enjoying himself’.74 Others were impressed by the theatricality of the event. ‘The King looked unbelievably beautiful’, Sir Michael Duff wrote to Cecil Beaton, ‘like an early French King and HRH the Bride a dream.’75

After the signing of the register in the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor, the couple returned, the Prince bowing to the King and Queen, the Princess dropping a low curtsey, her train billowing out behind her. Then they returned together in the Glass Coach to Buckingham Palace, for an ‘austerity’ wedding breakfast for 150 guests. At the end of it, the King made no speech. He simply raised his glass to ‘the bride’.76 The going-away involved an additional ritual. As Philip in naval uniform and the Princess in a coat of ‘love-in-a-mist blue’77 left the Palace forecourt for Waterloo Station, they were chased by bridesmaids and relations, including the King and Queen, pelting them with rose petals. Queen Alexandra recalled that the Monarch and his wife were hand in hand,78 Crawfie that the Queen lifted her skirts to join the farewell party by the railings, as the couple disappeared into the crowds that lined the route.79 According to The Times, ‘Roll upon roll of cheers followed the carriage’, on its journey.80

Press coverage was even greater than for the Coronation – the start of an inflation in the news value of the Monarchy which eventually took its toll. In 1947, it helped to inflame a public interest in the display of royalty which had lain dormant since before the war. Radio was the dominant medium – used by the BBC to create images in the minds of listeners that were reverential, awe-inspiring and atmospheric. ‘Into London’s gathering dusk this afternoon’, the six o’clock newsreader intoned, ‘Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh – man and wife – drove away in an open landau from Buckingham Palace for their honeymoon . . . It’s been a day which London will long remember.’ The written script was broken up, with strokes between words and phrases, to indicate pauses for solemn effect.81 Afterwards, radio and its world-wide audience became part of wedding lore, with tales of huddles of avid listeners in unlikely places – for example, it was reported that the skipper of the New Zealand ship Pamir hove to in the middle of the South Atlantic so that all his crew could listen properly to the broadcast.82 Mass Observation noted that in a typical provincial office, the radio was switched on all day. ‘We couldn’t get into the room’, reported an informant, ‘and just joined the crowd clustered outside.’83

As well as listening to the radio, a small number of people in Britain were able to watch some of the day’s events on an apparatus described by the press as ‘television’s magic crystal’ which had recently resumed broadcasting. A TV camera placed over the Palace forecourt was able to follow Princess Elizabeth’s coach as it came out of the gates, and another took over outside the Abbey. The service itself was filmed, and shown on television the same evening, while the film and other press and broadcasting materials were flown for distribution next day in the United States. So great was the international interest that the Wedding film was even screened in Allied-occupied Berlin. The 4,000 seat cinema in which it was shown in the still devastated city was fully booked, seven days a week.

For British children, the most potent symbol of the Wedding was probably ‘the cake’. Many schools celebrated with feasts of ices and buns, often (so it was reported) ‘without recourse to special supplementary permits from the Ministry of Food’, and in spite of a request from the Ministry of Education to head teachers to be as modest as possible in their spending. Universities treated it as an unofficial rag. Oxford had ‘its gayest celebration since the war,’ with community singing and fireworks in the streets, and undergraduates dancing eightsome reels.84

What was it really about? People were as puzzled then as they are now. Apart from the chance to escape austerity, if only for a day, there was what a woman in Leatherhead described to a Mass Observer as ‘a delighted sort of family feeling. I always get it when watching any sort of royal do.’85 The Archbishop of York had alluded to such a feeling in his marriage service address, and John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, displayed it in a mawkish but revealing Prayer for the Royal Marriage. ‘To those dear lands, still calling Britain “Home”,’ he versified, ‘The Crown is still the link with Britain’s past, The consecrated thing that must outlast / Folly and hate and other human foam.’ A less embarrassing version of the same sentiment was provided by the historian G. M. Trevelyan who wrote in the official souvenir of a King above politics, and a symbol of national unity, yet one ‘who appeals below the surface of politics to the simple, dutiful, human instincts which he and his own family circle represent,’ and ‘who holds the Commonwealth together by the common bond of his royal authority’.

In short, the Wedding was to be regarded – in the Establishment, but also in the Labour Government version – as a reminder of the direct link that supposedly existed between royal familial virtue and the constitutional and political functions of the Monarchy; and the public rejoicing as a celebration of a democratic system which worked. The whole occasion could be seen as a kind of victory parade for liberty, for a constitution, ‘still the most sea-worthy of all political craft,’ which had ‘weathered the storms of two world wars’, and for a family which provided a vital human ingredient. Trevelyan’s argument was pragmatic, yet also romantic. ‘In Great Britain the Crown is the least criticised of our domestic institutions’, he claimed; ‘throughout the Dominions and Colonies it is the point on which the eyes of loyalty are turned from across every ocean. Affection for a King’s person and family adds warmth and drama to every man’s rational awareness of his country’s political unity and historic tradition. It is a kind of popular poetry in these prosaic times.’86

What Trevelyan did not say – something which provided an important element in the Empire-wide celebration of an essentially personal event – was that ‘family’ had come in the dozen years since George V’s death to encroach still further on the other aspects of Monarchy. As the author of an internal Cabinet Office paper on the functions of the Prime Minister put it in June 1947, not only was it absolute doctrine that the King did nothing political except on ministerial advice, ‘the tendency has been to regard more and more matters as having political significance’.87 The Second World War, the election of a highly political Labour Government, and the personality of George VI, had all contributed to this tendency, which had rendered the areas of royal activity that were controversial, or open to normal criticism, nugatory, and narrowed the range of public interest in royal figures and royal lives, without removing its intensity.

Thus, the reduction of the Royal Family to picture book iconography did not diminish public enthusiasm: indeed, by removing all remaining partisan elements, it enhanced it. Appreciation of the virtues of the British system turned into an appreciation of personages from whom all hint of blame had been removed for anything that went wrong – yet who could be thanked for the things that had gone right. The biggest of these was survival. In the late 1940s, apart from the United States, British democracy had no major-state rival, and this was a point, not just for patriotic pride, but also for sober contemplation on the constitutional reasons why it should be so. The point was contemporary and urgent: amongst other things, the Wedding – the ‘splash of colour’ as Churchill called it – was a propaganda blast against totalitarianism at the start of the Cold War. ‘To every foreigner present,’ Wheeler-Bennett was able to write a few years later, the ceremonies, processions and public enthusiasm were ‘an object lesson, doubly expressive in the existing distressed state of Europe, of the stability of Britain’s political institutions, and of the unity of the nation in its respect for tradition and its loyalty to the throne’.88

Chapter 8

ANY HOPE THAT, by leaving London for a supposedly private honeymoon in the country, Elizabeth and Philip could escape national attention or at any rate pretend it did not exist, was quickly disappointed. The public hunger, raised to such a level, could not simply be switched off at the moment when it became convenient to do so. The couple were due to spend the first part of their honeymoon at Uncle Dickie’s house Broadlands, near Romsey in the New Forest. When they got off the train at Winchester, the Princess was observed to have a corgi with her – symbol of the domesticity she longed for. But the crowds would not allow it. Having learnt of the whereabouts of the Princess and the Duke, sightseers lay in wait. On the first Sunday after the Wedding, in a foretaste of what was to come, a mass of them surged into Romsey Abbey, where the couple were due to attend Matins. Some – unable to get seats in the church – carried ladders, chairs, and even a sideboard into the churchyard to stand on, in order to get a better look. After the service, less voracious royal enthusiasts queued (it was an age of queuing) outside the Abbey, in order to take their turn at sitting in the seats that royalty had sat in.1

After a week under siege at Broadlands the royal couple at last evaded their pursuers by travelling north to Birkhall.2 They returned to the Palace in time for the King’s fifty-second birthday on December 14th. ‘The Edinburghs are back from Scotland,’ Colville wrote the following day. ‘She was looking very happy, and, as a result of three weeks of matrimony, suddenly a woman instead of a girl. He also seemed happy, but a shade querulous, which is, I think, in his character.’3 One reason for querulousness was that, among all the prewedding preparations, one aspect of their future had been neglected: where they planned to live. Following their engagement they had chosen Sunninghill Park, near Ascot, as their future country home. In August, however, Sunninghill was gutted by fire. Chips Channon recorded that he had been asked if he would let or lend his house to the couple for several months while they found somewhere else, but had turned down the request on the grounds that it would mean too much upheaval.4 Instead, they obtained a lease on Windlesham Moor, near Sunningdale in Surrey. This was not immediately available, and in any case was only for weekend use. Their London residence was to be Clarence House in Stable Yard, at the south angle of St James’s Palace. This imposing four-storey mansion had been built for William IV when Duke of Clarence in 1824. Its most recent occupant had been the Duke of Connaught, who had died in 1942, since when it had been unoccupied. In addition to the neglect of an elderly royal duke, there had been serious damage from bombing. Renovations took more than eighteen months, and the couple were unable to move in until July 1949.

In the meantime, they lived in Buckingham Palace. Crawfie believed that this was a mistake, that the Princess needed to get away from her parents.5 Philip – beginning to experience the brutal consequences to his own life of such a marriage – may have felt the same. However, as the popular papers eagerly pointed out, the Palace was convenient for the office: Philip had been given a desk job working for the Director of Operations at the Admiralty, and was able to walk there every morning along the Mall, despite the stares of passers-by.

It was an odd period for both of them: Elizabeth at first living a life which on the surface had altered remarkably little since before her engagement, Philip undergoing the profound change of outlook, circumstance and expectation that accompanied his choice of mate. Both worked, though neither of them very strenuously. They took a keen interest in the Clarence House renovations, often visiting the initially gloomy building. Sometimes they joined in – Elizabeth amusing herself by mixing the paints for the walls of the Adam-style dining-room, which was hung with Hanoverian portraits, and by furnishing the house with wedding presents. When eventually they moved in, the Princess and her husband had separate but communicating bedrooms, with the dressing-tables only a few feet from the joint door, so that they could talk through it when they were getting ready for dinner. According to the Duke’s valet, John Dean, when Bobo MacDonald was helping Elizabeth and he was helping Philip, the couple ‘would joke happily through the left-open door.’6

Getting settled into suitable accommodation took some time to sort out. Money was quicker – though by no means automatic. The Select Committee report on the Civil List was delivered promptly on December 11th, and discussed on the floor of the House six days later. The debate – as the Manchester Guardian put it – was of ‘peculiar interest’.7 Against the background of the Wedding on the one hand, and the split vote in the Committee on the other, it provided the first opportunity since the Abdication for a proper public exploration of the role and function of the Monarchy. It was also an exercise in temperature taking: for the vote was a free one, and the House, with its large Labour majority, was as far tilted away from automatic monarchism as at any time since 1918.

Conservatives and Liberals supported the report proposals. The difficulty was on the Government side. Sir Stafford Cripps, moving the acceptance of the report, spoke of the importance of the functions the Princess and Duke had to perform, and of the proof of that importance provided by ‘the intense interest and enthusiasm displayed by all sections of the population at the time of their marriage’. For the Conservatives, Anthony Eden reminded the House that the British ambassador in Washington spent £20,000 a year just on entertaining. Labour left-wingers responded with arguments that were to become staple fare on such occasions. There was talk of the excessive cost of the ‘servants and hangers-on of the Court,’ and of ‘spivs and drones and butterflies’ around the royal couple. A Scottish MP compared the Duke’s £10,000 (‘in addition to a cushy job at the Admiralty’) with the forty shillings a week paid to men blinded in the war. Others suggested that the ‘Scandinavian type’ of monarchy was cheaper and better.

In addition, there was a ‘moderate’ opposition to the CrippsLascelles package – not republicanism, but a belief that (in the words of Maurice Webb, a Select Committee member) the country both wished to retain the Monarchy ‘and desired it to be simple, austere and democratic’. From the Palace’s point of view, such an argument was much more dangerous than that of the Monarchy denigrators, because it struck a genuine chord among the loyal but luxury-denied public; and because it sought, in reasonable tones, to reassert parliamentary control of royal expenditure. The decisive group, however, was the powerful body of Labour MPs who both believed in the Monarchy as a useful device, and felt – with Nye Bevan – that if it was to be done at all, it had to be done in style: in the words of Arthur Greenwood in the debate, ‘with proper dignity’.

It was to this group that the Prime Minister appealed when he spoke in support of a ‘ceremonial’ monarchy – whose value, he implied, derived both from its ability to meet a need for public theatre, and from the exemplary behaviour of the principal actors. In what amounted to a Labour theory of Monarchy, Attlee spoke of the need for ‘simple lives and approachable people’ at the heart of a democracy, and of royal ceremonials as an alternative to the sinister rituals of totalitarianism. The financial details before the House, he suggested, were intended to make such ceremonials and necessary symbolism possible, by giving ‘these young people the facilities for doing the kind of work the general public wanted them to do, of visiting and getting into contact with people in the United Kingdom’ and outside, especially in the Dominions.

Attlee’s advocacy worked, but it failed to supply the all-party support for the Select Committee recommendations which the Palace would have liked. Although no more than thirty-three MPs voted for a left-wing amendment to give no increase in the Civil List at all, an amendment proposed by Webb to limit the couple’s total to £40,000 was defeated only by 291 to 165 – indicating a large dissentient vote among Labour backbenchers, and a significant rate of abstention among ministers. A mere 122 Labour MPs opposed Webb’s amendment, while 106, including eleven ministers, were unaccounted for. In short, if Labour had voted on its own, the Webb reduction to the List payments would have been carried. As it was, the Princess and Duke got their increases in spite of, not because of, the votes of the governing party.8

‘There was much criticism of the sums proposed but none of the Monarchy as such,’ noted Colville who, with other courtiers, keenly watched the proceedings from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery. ‘There was, however, a large school on the Labour backbenches which said the country wanted a “Scandinavian monarchy” with less pageantry and pomp rather than a “ceremonial monarchy”. Cripps spoke admirably and was most effective in debate and Eden was also telling.’9 Chips Channon blamed the Palace for the tactical error, as he saw it, of failing to invite enough ordinary MPs to the Wedding, which had resulted in a lengthy and embarrassing debate. He concluded that ‘the Royal Family had, I think, a deserved jolt.’10

THE FIRST DUTY and ambition of an Heir to the Throne was swiftly accomplished: early in the New Year, Princess Elizabeth became pregnant. The announcement was not made until the summer. In the meantime, the publicity created by the Wedding, combined with the Princess’s new status, helped to increase her list of engagements.

With the marriage, as Ziegler has written, ‘the monarchy gained a new and incomparably brighter focus of attention. The King was in no sense forgotten . . . but in a curious way he was written off. Elizabeth was the future.’11 The young Princess who signed no documents, made no decisions and uttered few words in public that were her own, continued to have a hypnotic effect wherever she went. As time passed, however, there was a shift in the tone and quality of the adulation. By chance, the marriage had coincided, not just with a crisis, but with the nadir of the nation’s peacetime fortunes. Thereafter, both the economy and living conditions began to improve. It was as if the Wedding had been a good omen; and the Princess – a healthy, composed, pretty, wifely symbol of post-war youth and possibility, with her exquisitely designed couture that made imaginative use of clothing coupons, and her picture-book war-hero husband – stood for a new alternative to drabness.

It was an enjoyable life, and less demanding than the frequency of her newsreel appearances made it appear. Yet it was also – as Colville perceived – a remarkably aimless one, devoid of any content apart from pleasing and being seen. The Princess’s private secretary, an ambitious and high-flying diplomat on secondment, had had a more exciting life than this, and he determined to inject some element of purpose, or at least of understanding, into the repetitive royal round. Once the Wedding was out of the way, he set himself the task of extending his employer’s political education.

He found the Princess easier to instruct than her husband. After going through some paperwork with both of them, he noted that Philip became impatient if his interest was not immediately aroused; and that Elizabeth concentrated better on details.12 In order to advance the Princess’s knowledge, though possibly also to increase his own, he hit on the idea of getting her included in the distribution of Foreign Office telegrams. The less technical ones, he wrote to Lascelles, ‘would give HRH an idea of world affairs which she cannot possibly get from the newspapers.’13 The Foreign Office consented, as did the King, and the first box of telegrams arrived on January 16th. In addition, rather like Crawfie and Queen Mary before the war, Colville decided to take the Princess on educational trips. Shortly after the arrival of the first FO box, they sat and watched a Foreign Affairs debate in the House of Commons. As the Princess entered, ‘all eyes there turned in her direction,’ according to the press.14 The Princess sat demurely, while the Duke, who accompanied them, made lively comments.