In 1936, she learned of her future title – the next 16 years made our Queen in waiting
For the poet Christopher Hassall, they were “two folded roses… buds of a royal springˮ and “England’s prideˮ. On 10 December 1936, cheers from a crowd of several thousand clustering the pavement outside 145 Piccadilly greeted Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret each time they approached the windows of their third-floor nursery. At lunchtime, Edward VIII had signed the Act of Abdication that passed the crown to his brother, the girls’ father, Albert, Duke of York.
“Princess Elizabeth’s chance of sitting on Britain’s throne in the future is a fairly long-odds chance,ˮ the Sphere had told readers in February. Ten months later, those odds shortened dramatically. “Poor you,ˮ was six-year-old Margaret’s response to Elizabeth’s confirmation that, with their uncle’s departure for France, she would in time succeed their father as Britain’s next Queen.
Elizabeth’s own reaction, a cousin suggested later, reflected her characteristic “acceptance of inevitabilityˮ, an uncomplaining pragmatism she would demonstrate repeatedly.
A provincial newspaper wished that “Princess Elizabeth’s childhood may still be joyous despite the seriousness of the life that lies aheadˮ, a hope realised thanks to her mother’s genius for family life.
Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, described “wonderful fun and much laughterˮ among the loving, tight-knit quartet whom George VI cosily labelled “us fourˮ; for Princess Elizabeth her parents were “the best mother and father in the worldˮ.
Theirs was an existence, wrote royal governess Marion Crawford, in which “no doors banged, and voices were never raised in angerˮ. For King, Queen and two Princesses, Lady Cynthia Asquith’s improbable assertion in 1937 that, “in spite of its immense size and vast staffˮ, Buckingham Palace would prove “as genuine a home as any cottage in the landˮ, was largely true.
With her father’s accession, Princess Elizabeth’s status changed. Over time, her behaviour changed, too. Described, as a little girl, as “bright as an atom of radiumˮ, she was soon impressing observers with “a very pleasing dignity, and… a certain thoughtfulnessˮ, “a quiet poise that makes her remarkable among other childrenˮ.
Public bodies took more notice of her: typical were the “hearty birthday greetings and loveˮ sent to her, on her 11th birthday in 1937, by the Chalfont St Giles Methodist Sisterhood. When she attended a performance of Where the Rainbow Ends at the Holborn Empire that Christmas, members of the audience greeted her with a new verse of the National Anthem composed in her honour.
Queen Mary suggested expanding her granddaughter’s curriculum, including lessons in the physical geography of British imperial possessions, genealogical history and Bible reading; absorbed from her parents, Elizabeth’s religious faith would sustain her lifelong.
Outside the classroom, she remained passionately fond of ponies and the family’s many dogs, and devoted to her younger sister: on rainy Saturdays, she and Margaret rode the pair of rocking horses that stood outside the King’s study at the family’s weekend bolthole, the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, and they continued to dress in identical clothes.
From 1937 contact with the world beyond the Palace lessened: Elizabeth’s friends were mostly cousins, or daughters of members of the Royal household. These were the girls invited to join the Princesses in the 1st Buckingham Palace Company of Girl Guides: fellow guide Patricia Mountbatten described Elizabeth then as “really efficient, very organised and very responsible, keen and enthusiasticˮ, a verdict others would echo over her long life.
Isolated by rank, Elizabeth nevertheless remained curious about other people. She iced a cake sent by her mother to unemployed young men in the Welsh town of Blaina, and dictated a letter to a lady-in-waiting, in which she asked to be told “how many people have slices of the cake at teaˮ.
In the summer of 1937, she contributed a piece about looking out of the window at Buckingham Palace to a magazine called The Snapdragon, written by her friends. She did not protest against her gilded incarceration. Watching evening court functions in her rosebud-patterned dressing gown, she told Margaret, “One day you and I will be down there sharing all the fun. And I shall have a perfectly enormous train, yards long.ˮ
As part of her training, her parents involved her in their reception of foreign dignitaries. Aged 12, she delivered a carefully rehearsed speech of welcome in French to France’s President Lebrun, and met the new American ambassador, Joe Kennedy. Her parents shared their thoughts on many aspects of royal life.
“One feels how important it is that the people should see their King, and not have him only as a symbol,ˮ her mother wrote to her from Canada in May 1939, a lesson the Princess remembered when she in turn became Head of the Commonwealth.
At the time of her 13th birthday in 1939, Princess Elizabeth began lessons in constitutional history with the vice-provost of Eton, Henry Marten: together they devoted six years to reading and annotating William Anson’s three-volume Law and Custom of the Constitution. “Mark how he brings the human element into all his history,ˮ her mother told Elizabeth: Marten used examples from recent royal history, including the reign of Queen Victoria, to illustrate constitutional theory.
He commended developments in the relationship between sovereign and subjects, celebrating George V’s use of broadcasting technology in his Christmas message to forge a link between the King and his farflung people. Elizabeth also studied European history, with an émigré Belgian aristocrat, the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, known as “Toniˮ.
Despite Elizabeth’s conscientiousness, her introduction to Marten lacked the excitement of another meeting that year that shaped her future. On 22 July 1939, at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, Elizabeth met the man she was to marry.
She was 13, five years younger than her handsome, blond-haired third cousin, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, and she fell in love at once, never to recover. Their wedding took place months after her 21st birthday, in November 1947. With her parents’ agreement, Elizabeth would have married Philip earlier. She had told a friend that “Philip was her boyˮ when she was 15.
But in September 1939 the outbreak of the Second World War, in which Philip served in the British Navy, while Elizabeth remained in the schoolroom, curtailed any possible meetings.
From May 1940, Elizabeth and Margaret lived quietly in the five-room royal nursery in the Augusta Tower of Windsor Castle. Described as a “country evacuation homeˮ, their whereabouts were kept secret from the public; their parents joined them from Buckingham Palace at weekends.
Crawfie referred to “monotonous daysˮ and “long slow monthsˮ, but Elizabeth appears not to have minded the changes in her life, including greater privacy than she had ever previously experienced. She took carriage-driving lessons with royal riding instructor Horace Smith. To Smith she made her much-quoted confidence that “had she not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of dogs and horsesˮ, an ambition she later achieved on a strictly part-time basis during her annual summer break at Balmoral.
The war prompted Elizabeth’s first radio broadcast, on Children’s Hour, in October 1940. Listening to her speak, novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin prophesied, “If there are still queens in the world a generation hence, this child will be a good queen.ˮ On 30 January 1945, the Princess made a second radio broadcast, this time in French, thanking Belgian children for Christmas toys sent to Britain.
Yet Elizabeth, whose whole life had been lived in a glare of respectful publicity, found her first solo in-person royal engagement, reviewing the Grenadier Guards as their colonel on her 16th birthday, in her own words “a bit frighteningˮ. She would have preferred to do the sort of war work her friends had taken on, but George VI chose to deploy his pretty and shyly charming daughter more conventionally: aged 18, she took on the presidencies of the NSPCC and the Royal College of Music.
Public interest in the Princess was considerable. The Sunday Post claimed that copies of the hat Elizabeth wore in a sitting for Cecil Beaton in 1942 sold in “tens of thousandsˮ. As Queen, Elizabeth would claim that she had been helped in her first engagements by the practice in public speaking she had received in a series of charity pantomimes staged at Windsor, beginning in 1941, in which she and Margaret took the lead roles.
The Princess’s 18th birthday was marked with presents, including her first diamond tiara and the first of a long line of corgis, a puppy called Susan. She was also appointed a counsellor of state and given her first lady-in-waiting, Lady Mary Palmer. Encountering her then, novelist Rebecca West concluded that the Princess was “sweetly dutiful, possibly with her father’s obstinacyˮ.
Once he was sure that the end of the war was in sight, the King authorised his elder daughter joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service, at No 1 Mechanical Training Centre, Camberley. Later, Elizabeth remembered her ATS training in vehicle maintenance as the only instance in her life of testing herself against others of her own age.
She “learned a little about driving and the workings of the combustion engine,ˮ she recalled, “and much about the strength and happiness of companionshipˮ.
In short supply was anything resembling the freedom other 19-year-olds took for granted. On the evenings of VE Day and VJ Day, she escaped the Palace to join the crowds in central London, in a tightly chaperoned group that included Margaret, Toni de Bellaigue, selected Guards officers and a royal equerry. A cousin who was also in the party described it as “a unique burst of freedomˮ for the future queen, “a Cinderella moment in reverseˮ.
At her parents’ request, Elizabeth’s engagement to Philip – first mooted by Philip’s uncle, George II of the Hellenes, in the spring of 1944 – remained a secret until the Royal family’s return from a visit to South Africa in the spring of 1947.
The Princess’s first overseas tour, the South African visit provided the setting for the 21st birthday speech in which, famously, she dedicated her life – “whether it be long or shortˮ – to the nation and empire’s service. The tour marked her emergence on to a bigger stage. Following the family’s return to Britain in April, Princess Elizabeth took up full-time royal duties.
Buckingham Palace announced her engagement to Philip on 8 July. By then Philip had been naturalised as a British citizen: Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. In post-war Britain, anti-German feeling remained strong: both the Greek royal family’s name of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and Philip’s close relationship to the unpopular authoritarian Greek king, George II, were soft-pedalled.
Philip gave Elizabeth an engagement ring made from diamonds from a tiara belonging to his mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Public reaction was overwhelmingly positive, a tribute to the Princess herself, the immense post-war popularity of the Royal family and Philip’s film-star good looks.
With rationing still in place, ahead of their wedding on 20 November, the couple received food parcels from across the globe amounting to more than two million pounds in weight, including 500 cases of tinned pineapple from the government of Queensland. Most were distributed among the needy, each parcel accompanied by a letter from Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s memories of her wedding day were of being “so happy and enjoying myself so muchˮ: to her mother, she confided her worry that she had been selfish in her happiness. That happiness proved long-lasting and sustained her for the next 73 years.
With an income of £50,000 – agreed with some parliamentary resistance – the couple set up home at Clarence House, where their first two children, Charles and Anne, were born in 1948 and 1950.
It was a mostly idyllic period, including intervals in Malta, where Philip continued to serve in the Royal Navy. “It’s lovely to see her so radiant and leading a more or less human existence for once,ˮ Edwina Mountbatten commented of the newly married Princess in Malta.
Only criticism that Princess Elizabeth was spending too much time away from her babies, who remained in Britain, and her father’s deteriorating health in his 50s, darkened her cloudless horizon.
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