The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

Compensating for the deficiencies of a royal education was an uphill struggle. Though she appeared to read the telegrams, Colville was disappointed to find Princess Elizabeth at first uninterested in politics. However, his attempt to widen her experience continued. In February, he took her to a juvenile court for a day, in the not very optimistic hope of persuading her to improve her knowledge of the social services.15 In this, he achieved more success than he perhaps realized. At any rate, the Princess picked up enough to assist her in one of the most necessary of royal skills, that of talking brightly to distinguished guests about areas that concerned them. When Eleanor Roosevelt stayed at Windsor Castle the same spring during a visit to England for the unveiling of a statue of her husband, she was greatly flattered that the King’s daughter sought her out with a question about homes for young women offenders. She found the Heiress ‘very serious-minded’ and she was impressed ‘that this young Princess was so interested in social problems and how they were being handled’.16

There were also other horizon-expanding excursions in addition to the formal round. In May 1948, Tom Driberg complained to Lord Mountbatten that the Princess and Duke had made the wrong kind of visit to the Commons at the wrong time. Before the war, he pointed out, members of the Royal Family had dined informally in private rooms at the House with MPs of the then ruling party. He suggested taking the Princess to the House at Question Time. ‘To get the ethos, the feel, of Parliament’, he wrote, ‘she really ought to watch Bevan, Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Morrison etc. parrying the everyday cuts, often pretty effectively and wittily.’17 If this particular suggestion reached Clarence House, it was ignored. However, Driberg’s belief that the Princess had no contact with leading Labour figures was not quite correct. In fact, a meeting with a couple of the Labour politicians on his list had occurred only the month before.

This took the form of a small dinner party held by the Prime Minister and his wife for the royal couple, to which a few of the younger members of the Government, including the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, and the Minister of Fuel and Power, Hugh Gaitskell, and their wives were invited. The gathering was indeed a strange one. The politicians could not decide whether it was appropriate to admit to the kind of feelings their constituents would have had at such an intimate meeting with royalty, or to put on a show of jacobin disdain. While they waited to greet the royal guests in the drawing room at No 10, they made nervous schoolboy jokes. ‘We had been talking about capital punishment,’ Gaitskell recorded. ‘Harold reminded us that it was still a capital offence to rape a Royal Princess!’ When the Princess and Duke arrived, the ministers and their wives were faced with the problem which often seems to beset prominent socialists in the presence of royalty: whether it was sillier to bow and curtsey, or not to. Dora Gaitskell could hardly bring herself to curtsey, but Mrs Attlee, entering into the spirit of things, ‘suddenly swung round and curtsied low to the Duke.’

After dinner, each minister was summoned to the sofa, to spend a quarter of an hour in conversation with the twenty-two-year-old guest of honour, who must have found the experience as taxing as they did. Gaitskell formed the same opinion as Colville. ‘She had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally’, he concluded. She tried hard, but evidently found it more difficult to think of things to say about the fuel economy than about homes for bad girls. Gamely, she remarked that her grandmother’s house was the coldest she knew. Why? inquired the minister. The Princess replied that ‘it was because of her national duty’.18

Colville’s ambitions to extend his employer’s range (and also to extend his own) did not cease. In February, he proposed that the Princess and the Duke should visit Paris to help strengthen ties with an ally that was beginning to recover its economy and self-confidence after the war. The proposal was accepted by the Foreign Secretary and the King, but at first it encountered difficulties with the royal couple. Elizabeth was enthusiastic about the prospect of a trip that would take her to a city and country she had never visited, and which would be a good deal more exciting than speaking to women’s organizations in the provinces, or sitting on sofas with middle-aged politicians. Philip, on the other hand, who had spent most of his childhood in or around Paris, was less thrilled. He also resented the way Colville did things that affected him without getting his opinion first. There was a row, but eventually he agreed.

The notional purpose of the visit was the opening of the Exhibition of Eight Centuries of British Life at the Musée Galliera in Paris, in a ceremony to take place in the presence of President Auriol on May 14th. The real aim, however, was to give the Anglophile section of the French public a chance to show its sympathies, after a decade of confusion. It was the first official visit by British royalty since the King and Queen had been sent on a similar mission of bridge-building in 1939. The precedent was not entirely propitious: though British royalty had been welcomed on that occasion, the visit had failed in its purpose of helping to create an unbreakable bond between the two peoples. Since 1940, French attitudes towards Britain had contained a complex mixture of emotions, including those of comradeship and suspicion in equal measure.

So it was a gamble – but it worked. The French government did everything in its power to build up the diplomatic importance of the visit, and the French public – mystified and fascinated by the royal wedding – seemed delighted at the opportunity to see and cheer a newly married Princess. The royal party was escorted to Versailles and given lunch at the Grand Trianon, where the tablecloths and napkins had been embroidered with ‘E’s and ‘P’s in their honour. A triumphal progress down the Seine was followed by a dinner and reception at the British embassy, where the Princess glistened with the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels; and there were visits, through thick crowds, to Fontainebleau, Barbizon, Vaux-le-Vicomte. It was, said the papers, the Norman Conquest in reverse: Elizabeth had conquered Paris. It helped that the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue had done her work well, and that the Princess spoke almost faultless French. Even the Communist press abandoned its normal silence on such occasions, and paid the Princess the indirect compliment of complaining that the police arrangements for her security made it impossible for ordinary Parisians to get a close enough look.19

The British Foreign Office privately expressed its satisfaction. ‘The latent enthusiasm of the French people for the pomp and pageantry of monarchy was clearly revealed,’ the British ambassador, Sir Oliver Harvey, wrote to Ernest Bevin. ‘It was an unusual experience to see the townsfolk of Paris cheer an English Princess from the Place de la Bastille.’ Yet the visit caused offence to some. General de Gaulle – opposed both to the current French government and to the Fourth Republic Constitution – was left off the Embassy invitation list, for fear of offending the President, and they had to do make do with the General’s brother, who was President of the Municipal Council of Paris, instead.20 At home, some Scottish church organizations criticized the couple for visiting a racecourse and a Paris nightclub on a Sunday, and hence setting a most regrettable example to the Empire’s youth, ‘who look to their Royal Highnesses for guidance and inspiration’.21 The Princess used the trip as an opportunity to stock up with goods not available in Britain. When she got the HM Customs bill, she startled her private secretary by asking him crossly why he had made a full declaration.22

The appeal of the Princess to the French lay partly in her international celebrity following the Wedding; partly in her appearance, especially what Colville, a keen connoisseur, described as her ‘beautiful blue eyes and superb natural complexion’;23 and partly in a feeling that she stood for those who had grown up in the war, and could look hopefully ahead. In Britain too, the vision of the Princess as the ambassador, not just of her country, but of her generation, seemed to justify hopes for a freer, more fulfilling future for the war’s young inheritors. Invitations to speak to, and on behalf of, younger people proliferated. At the end of May, she attended a parade of youth organizations in Coventry; later she delighted dons and undergraduates in Oxford with a speech in the Sheldonian in which she declared that the universities were ‘a powerful fortress against the tide of sloth, ignorance and materialism.’24

Meanwhile, the idea of the Princess as standing for the future was enhanced on June 4th, Derby Day, by the announcement of her pregnancy. The Princess broke precedent by appearing the same afternoon, ‘smiling and unabashed,’ at the Epsom Downs racecourse.25 No child in utero arouses more interest than a royal one in the direct line. As Crawfie later pointed out, the only truly private period in the existence of a member of the Royal Family is between conception and the moment when the coming event is publicly known.26 For Prince Charles, that period was now over. The world’s most famous foetus became the hapless recipient of baby clothes from all over the world, together with matinée coats, bootees and pictures of storks.

PRECEDENT was about to be broken in another way: the custom that had got ‘Jix’ Joynson-Hicks out of bed in the middle of the night in 1926 was discontinued. Royal propaganda presented the decision as an independent initiative by the King and Queen, and further evidence of their modernity. In fact, it only came about after a fight, and the forces of reaction nearly won the day.

Lascelles later claimed to have been the instigator of change. ‘I had long thought that the practice of summoning the Home Secretary to attend, like a sort of supernumerary midwife, at the birth of a royal baby was out-of-date and ridiculous’, he wrote in 1969, after his retirement. ‘The Home Office made exhaustive researches and assured me that it had no constitutional significance whatever, and was merely a survival of the practice of ministers and courtiers, who would flock to the sick-bed, whenever any member of the Royal Family was ill.’27 The Home Office assurance was indeed categorical. ‘The custom is only a custom,’ Chuter Ede, the Home Secretary, wrote in June. ‘It has no statutory authority behind it and there is no legal requirement for its continuance.’28

It was an opportunity to do away with a time-wasting and embarrassing distraction. The matter was one for the King, but the King demurred. According to Lascelles’s later account, when he put the proposition to him in the autumn of 1948, George VI agreed at once, ‘but the Queen thought differently, seeing in this innovation a threat to the dignity of the Throne. So I was told to hold my hand.’29 However, Lascelles’s memory of what happened was not exact. Contemporary records suggest that a period of indecision preceded the royal negative. Correspondence in the Royal Archives includes a letter from Lascelles himself to the Home Secretary, written at the end of July, putting off an answer. In it he explained that the King had been particularly busy lately, ‘but hopes to give his full consideration to the question of your attendance at Princess Elizabeth’s accouchement when he gets to Balmoral next week.’ It was another month before the period of full consideration was complete, and the verdict communicated. ‘It is His Majesty’s wish’, wrote Lascelles on August 21st, ‘that you, as Home Secretary, should be in attendance when Princess Elizabeth’s baby is born.’30 There the matter rested until November when, a few weeks before the birth, the King changed his mind. The clinching factor was not a sudden progressive impulse, or a newly acquired desire to dispense with a meaningless ritual – but a shocked discovery of the constitutional implications of hanging on to it.

What turned the tables was a visit to the Palace, on other business, by the Canadian High Commissioner. In the course of the conversation with the King’s private secretary, the envoy happened to speak of the Princess’s condition. Since the Dominion governments had as much stake in the birth of a future heir as the British one, he remarked, he supposed that when the baby arrived, he and the representatives of the other Dominions would be asked to attend, along with the British Home Secretary. It was a eureka moment. The point had never occurred to Lascelles, to the Home Office, to the Dominion Governments or – apparently – to anybody at all in 1926, at the time of the Princess’s birth. However, constitutionally it was indisputable – and, at a time of Commonwealth transition, politically it was unavoidable.

When Lascelles spoke to the King later that day, he was able, quite casually, to mention that ‘as he had no doubt realized, if the old ritual was observed, there would be no less than seven Ministers sitting in the passage.’31 The perpetuation of a custom popularly believed to involve the Home Secretary attending ‘as a sort of super-inspector to guarantee that the Royal baby is not a suppostitious child!’ could scarcely be seen as an act of homage32 – least of all, if there were seven super-inspectors. According to Lascelles, the King was horrified at such a prospect, and his resistance immediately crumbled.33 On November 5th, Buckingham Palace announced the ending of ‘an archaic custom’.34

Perhaps a more personal factor also affected the Monarch’s judgement. The King had been unwell for some time, and in the autumn of 1948 his health took a sharp turn for the worse. On October 30th, a medical examination showed that he was seriously ill. Thirteen days later, his doctors firmly diagnosed early arteriosclerosis – with such a severe danger of gangrene to his right leg that they considered amputating it.

How much did the Princess know? The full significance of the diagnosis may have been kept from her, as it was from the King. However, the physical discomfort of her father, and the acute anxiety of her mother, must have communicated themselves to her during the last few days before her first confinement.35

The burdens of being a monarch were not easily shed. Despite his illness, and the concern for his survival, the King was required to perform a constitutional function which the courtiers regarded as urgent. ‘As things stand at present,’ Lascelles wrote to the King on November 9th, while the doctors were considering their provisional diagnosis, ‘Princess Elizabeth’s son would be “Earl of Merioneth”, her daughter “Lady X Mountbatten”.’ To ensure that the child would be known, instead, as HRH Prince X or Princess Y, Letters Patent had to be prepared ‘before the baby is born,’ Lascelles stressed, ‘so that the official announcements may refer to him, or her, as a Prince or Princess.’36 The King did as he was advised, and Letters Patent were rushed through and issued the same day. The move had an incidental consequence: it finally resolved, for the benefit of constitutional purists, an issue first raised after the birth of Princess Margaret, when it had been argued that the two princesses might have equal claims to the succession. By placing Princess Elizabeth in the same position as if she were the King’s son and heir, any theoretical doubt on this point was finally eliminated.37

With Clarence House not ready and Windlesham Moor unsuitable, arrangements were made for the Princess’s confinement to take place at Buckingham Palace, just below her second floor bedroom, looking out towards the Mall. The American press reported ‘medical reasons’ for expecting the baby to be a girl38 and a Ceylonese astrologer sent a horoscope – which Lascelles passed to the King for his amusement – promising a boy.39 The astrologer was right. The Princess went into labour early in the evening of November 14th, and – attended by four doctors – gave birth to a baby boy shortly after 9 o’clock. Her husband, who played a game of squash during her contractions, was summoned from the Palace court immediately after the delivery to hear the news.40 According to the official statement, the Duke ‘went into the Princess’s room to see her’ and then ‘went to see his son, who had been taken to the nursery.’41 Meanwhile, the crowd outside the Palace, far greater than the little gathering in Bruton Street twenty-three years before, became so large that the police had to cordon off the road. Despite appeals for quiet, the cheering continued until after midnight. ‘The bells rang, and a man going down the street outside our flat called “It’s a boy,”’ recorded Hugh Dalton. Pondering the future for such a child, and the future of the British Monarchy, he added: ‘If this boy ever comes to the throne . . . it will be a very different country and Commonwealth he’ll rule over’.42

Few others looked so far ahead. Most newspaper commentary combined anodyne leading articles about the value and virtues of royalty with sentimental descriptions of the baby’s appearance. Crawfie thought he looked like George V,43 John Dean described him as ‘a tiny red-faced bundle, either hairless or so fair as to appear so’.44 A few days after the birth, Cecil Beaton was called to the Palace to take the first official pictures of mother and baby. ‘Prince Charles, as he is to be named, is an obedient sitter,’ he noted. ‘He interrupted a long, contented sleep to do my bidding and open his blue eyes to stare long and wonderingly into the camera lens, the beginning of a lifetime in the glare of publicity.’45 As a royal gesture, the Princess instructed that food parcels made up from gifts received at the Palace should be distributed to mothers of all children born on November 14th.46

The baby Prince was placed in a gilt crib, with lace frills around it, and the entire Palace staff was invited to visit the nursery to take a peek. A royal pram was brought out of storage, along with a royal rattle once used by the Princess.47 According to Crawfie, in order ‘to give him as good a foundation as possible,’ for the first few months the Princess breastfed him.48 Before the Prince had reached the age of two months, however, there was an unfortunate hiatus. In January, it was announced from the Palace that Princess Elizabeth had contracted measles. There were no complications. Nevertheless, it was feared that the baby might catch the infection. It was therefore decided that mother and baby should be separated, until the disease had run its course.49

IF THE PERIOD following the Wedding was a happy one for the Princess, the immediate aftermath of her first confinement was tense and anxious, as the full gravity of her father’s illness – with its terrible implications, not just for him, but for her as well – was brought home to her. Two days after the birth, the King yielded to the advice of his doctors that a long-projected tour of Australia and New Zealand, similar to the one he and the Queen had undertaken as Duke and Duchess of York in 1927, should be postponed. The decision was a bitter disappointment, but he had no choice – he had been told that such a journey might delay his recovery, and even endanger his leg.50

The moment was a turning point. From this time on, the Heiress Presumptive and her young, healthy family became the present, as well as the future – her energy and composure linked in the public mind to the visible fatigue of the ailing King. Though still in his early fifties, the King looked and behaved like a man much older, and had become increasingly difficult for his family and advisers to handle. He remained a loving and deeply devoted father, who enjoyed nothing so much as a private family occasion. In matters of state, he was punctilious, honest, and stoical to a fault. But his ability to deal with complicated matters, never great, diminished still further under the impact of his illness. Although, ultimately always willing to take advice, he became increasingly obstinate.

There was also an intensifying of some long-established traits: and in particular his bad temper. ‘He had his explosions,’ says one of his former advisers. ‘He would explode if he read something in the paper that the Prime Minister hadn’t told him about. We used to call them his “gnashes”. When they occurred Princess Margaret was very good at defusing them.’51 One friend of the princesses, who used to stay at Sandringham and Balmoral, recalls the King’s ‘prep-school sense of humour,’ and rollicking enjoyment of practical jokes. He also remembers his ‘Hanoverian bark’ if something annoyed him. The subject of his displeasure was often politics. However, everyday incidents could also provoke an outburst. Once, when they were shooting at Sandringham, a man walked past and the King said, ‘He didn’t take his bloody hat off.’52 According to another ex-courtier, the Monarch ‘used to lose his temper with anyone around.’53

Some people wondered whether he had a touch of the petit mal. Others put it down to the frustration caused by his own intellectual limitations, and the need to cover up. Alec Vidler, a canon at Windsor who often dined with the Royal Family, found him ‘really very simple,’ and also ‘difficult to get on with because he talked in an excitable manner’.54 Another aide, meeting the King for the first time in 1947, was taken aback by his irascibility and apparent inferiority complex. It was as if, he recorded, the Monarch’s displays of wrath and emphatic manner were devices to hide his ignorance and weakness.55

In March 1949, the King underwent major spinal surgery to restore circulation to his leg, carried out in a surgical theatre constructed at Buckingham Palace. He was well enough by June to be driven in an open carriage to watch the Ceremony of Trooping the Colour, while his elder daughter rode confidently at the head of the parade. Pictures of him, however, show a drawn, tired old man. He was now a semi-invalid, and the rest of his life was to be a series of alarms, remissions and new alarms, with alternating episodes of relief and anxiety, against the background of an unspoken foreboding. His wife and two daughters admired, adored, and felt protective towards him – as they always had. But as his health deteriorated and his ability to cope diminished, his dogmatism grew, and so did the pressure on those around him. It was heightened by a desperate resistance to the truth. ‘The Queen never allowed you to contemplate the fact of the King’s illness,’ recalls a former aide.56

The result was a collective self-deceit at Court, which made a realistic look into the future impossible to discuss. The King’s ill-health also had the effect of increasing his elder daughter’s sense of independent responsibility, as she assumed more and more of his functions. Outwardly, the Princess showed no sign of strain. Indeed, she and the Duke – with a male heir promptly provided, and efficiently nurtured by a retinue of helpers – embarked on a brief episode of social gaiety. As pre-war Society began to re-emerge from hibernation, the royal couple were to be seen at the houses and events frequented by others of their kind, or in the company of show business personalities, for whom both princesses had a particular penchant. Ordinary citizens bought photos of their favourite film stars. The King’s daughters invited them to dinner, or to stay. When Princess Elizabeth celebrated her twenty-third birthday in April 1949 at the Café de Paris, a fashionable restaurant in Coventry Street, following a visit to The School for Scandal at the New Theatre, the royal party was joined by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, the leading actor and actress of the show. Together, the royal and theatrical party ‘tangoed and sambaed, waltzed and quick-stepped’ the night away, before going on to a nightclub for more of the same.57

For a time, both princesses took up with Danny Kaye, then at the height of his fame. John Dean recalled seeing the American comedian ‘capering round Princess Elizabeth’ on the lawn at Windlesham Moor.58 At grand social occasions, the Princess and the Duke were inevitably the main attraction, and they learned to play their parts. In June 1949, Chips Channon recorded his impression of the couple at a ball at Windsor Castle, mainly attended by the clever, artistic, smart members of the emerging ‘Princess Margaret set’. Elizabeth was wearing a very high tiara and the Garter, and Philip, also with the Garter, was in his naval uniform. ‘They looked like characters out of a fairy tale’, wrote Channon, ‘and quite eclipsed Princess Margaret, who was simply dressed.’59 This was one kind of fancy dress. There was also another. At a ball given by the American ambassador in July – in a curiously snobbish piece of royal whimsy – the Duke appeared as a waiter, wearing a white apron, and his wife as a maid.60