Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Several times the family escaped for brief holidays at Balmoral, where Queen Elizabeth was delighted to see her daughters revive with “pink cheeks and good appetites” after walks in the crisp air on the heather-covered hills rising above Royal Deeside, the valley along the River Dee that had been the sentimental heart of the family since the time of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The heiress presumptive’s great-great-grandparents had bought the Balmoral estate in 1852 after falling in love with the Scottish Highlands. “All seemed to breathe freedom and peace,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.”

  Victoria and Albert tore down the existing residence and built a larger Balmoral castle of gleaming off-white granite that would weather into a gray hue, with a hundred-foot-high tower, turrets and gables, all according to Albert’s own exacting adaptation of the baronial style. They decked out the interior with a riot of different-colored tartan plaid rugs, curtains, carpets, and linoleum, thistle-patterned wallpaper, landscape paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer, and stags’ heads lining the hallways. Large windows captured vistas of lawns, gardens, pine forests, and hills up the valley of the Dee—the outdoor paradise that shaped their family expeditions.

  In the four decades since Victoria’s death in 1901, remarkably little had changed at Balmoral, and her descendants felt the magic of the place intensely. It was the sanctuary where the family had spent two months each autumn, a sacrosanct interlude they would resume at war’s end. During their quick wartime Highland respites Lilibet shot her first stag and caught her first salmon—a modest eight pounds. The King, his wife, daughters, and courtiers amused themselves after dinner with games of charades lasting until midnight, highlighted by Tommy Lascelles imitating a St. Bernard so noisily that he lost his voice.

  In the early part of the war, the King and Queen kept up their social life with periodic balls at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. One dance in December 1943 for “young men and maidens” at Windsor lasted until 4 A.M. The King was famous for being “the best waltzer in the world,” and he let loose on the dance floor, even leading a conga line through the glittering state rooms. Later in the war, Elizabeth slipped into London from time to time—for the occasional dinner party, and to attend her first opera, La Bohème, performed by the Sadler’s Wells Company at the New Theatre.

  Crawfie worked to keep the atmosphere light at the castle by organizing games of hide and seek and sardines as well as treasure hunts with the officers, and she set up a Madrigal Society so the girls could sing with guardsmen and boys from Eton. At Christmas the princesses appeared with local schoolchildren in the annual pantomime, a full-scale production staged in the Waterloo Chamber. Elizabeth was called on to sing and tap-dance before audiences of more than five hundred, including townspeople and soldiers. Crawfie remarked on her poise, and her riding instructor, Horace Smith, was struck by her “confidence and vigour,” as well as her droll delivery of comic lines.

  Periodically word came that officers she knew had died in battle—including, in 1942, her uncle Prince George, the Duke of Kent, in a plane crash while serving in the Royal Air Force, leaving three children, the youngest only seven weeks old. “What a beastly time it is for people growing up,” Queen Elizabeth wrote to her brother David in 1943. “Lilibet meets young Grenadiers at Windsor and then they get killed, & it is horrid for someone so young.” While later in life friends would remark that the Queen found it nearly impossible to write condolence notes about the deaths of those close to her, during the war she readily would take up her pen to write to an officer’s mother, “and give her a little picture of how much she had appreciated him at Windsor and what they had talked about,” Crawfie recalled.

  Antoinette de Bellaigue, Marion Crawford, and Henry Marten continued their instruction during the war years. Marten traveled up the hill to the castle in a dog cart, his Gladstone bag bulging with the princess’s textbooks. Sir Owen Morshead, the royal librarian, augmented the curriculum with regular tours of Windsor’s collections, including artifacts such as the shirt worn by King Charles I when he was beheaded, and the lead shot that killed Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. (The priceless paintings had been removed from their frames and sent away for safekeeping.) The future Queen would later say that she considered Windsor to be her home because it represented “all the happiest memories of childhood.”

  The Girl Guides kept up their activities as well, giving Elizabeth an unexpectedly democratic experience when refugees from London’s bomb-ravaged East End were taken in by families on the Windsor estate and joined the troop. The girls earned their cooking badges, with instruction from a castle housekeeper, by baking cakes and scones (a talent Elizabeth would later display for a U.S. president) and making stew and soup. With their Cockney accents and rough ways, the refugees gave the future Queen no deference, calling her Lilibet, the nickname even daughters of aristocrats were forbidden to use, and compelling her to wash dishes in an oily tub of water and clean up the charred remains of campfires.

  The most unusual—and memorable—training received by Elizabeth was a three-week stint she did in 1945 when she was eighteen, at the Mechanical Transport Training Centre run by the Auxiliary Territorial Service. The skills she acquired there figure in a pivotal scene in The Queen when Helen Mirren confidently drives a Land Rover across the hills of Balmoral, only to run aground on a rock while fording the River Dee. In a phone call to Thomas, her head ghillie, she says briskly, “I think I’ve broken the prop-shaft.” “Are you sure, Ma’am?” he replies. “Yes perfectly,” says the Queen. “The front one, not the rear. I’ve lost the four-wheel drive. You forget, I used to be a mechanic during the war.”

  Although the scene was invented, her automobile expertise was a genuine source of pride for Elizabeth II. She told Labour politician Barbara Castle more than two decades after the war that her ATS training was the only time she had ever been able to measure herself against her contemporaries. The other eleven young women at the training center were actually several years older, but Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor wore the same drab uniform and was given the same instruction: learning to drive a three-ton truck in heavy London traffic, changing wheels and spark plugs, understanding the workings of ignition systems, bleeding brakes, and stripping down engines. Her face and hands got grimy from the grease, and she had to salute her senior officers. But the experience gave her confidence and expert driving skills. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” she told a friend. “Everything I learnt was brand new to me—all the oddities of the insides of a car.”

  With the exception of her first tightly scripted radio broadcast in 1940 to children displaced by the war—a sentimental speech delivered in a little-girl voice after numerous rehearsals to master her breathing and phrasing—Elizabeth carried out few official duties until the last years of the war. In 1944 she traveled to Wales with the King and Queen to visit miners, gave her first public speeches in London at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, launched her first battleship, and attended her first official dinner at Buckingham Palace in honor of the prime ministers of the British Dominions.

  When England celebrated Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945, Elizabeth joined her family and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to greet the cheering throngs. That night, she and Margaret Rose escaped the confines of the Palace with Crawfie, Toni de Bellaigue, and the King’s equerry as their chaperones. Among the group of sixteen were their cousin Margaret Rhodes and several guards officers, including Henry Porchester, who would become her lifelong friend and closest adviser on horse breeding and racing. Proudly wearing her ATS uniform, the future Queen linked arms with her friends and surged through the crowds, tearing along St. James’s Street, and joyfully dancing the conga, the Lambeth Walk, and the hokey-cokey. When they returned to the Palace railings, the princesses joined the crowds shouting, “We want the Ki
ng; we want the Queen,” and cheered when their parents appeared on the balcony. Elizabeth and Margaret Rose slipped back into the Palace through a garden gate, and Queen Elizabeth “provided us with sandwiches she made herself,” recalled Toni de Bellaigue.

  The following night, the revels continued. “Out in crowd again,” Elizabeth recorded in her diary. “Embankment, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, walked simply miles. Saw parents on balcony at 12:30 am—ate, partied, bed 3am!” “It was a unique burst of personal freedom,” wrote Margaret Rhodes, “a Cinderella moment in reverse, in which they could pretend that they were ordinary and unknown.”

  Three months later, the group ventured out again to mark the victory over Japan. Once more they “walked miles,” Elizabeth wrote. “Ran through Ritz … drank in Dorchester, saw parents twice, miles away, so many people.” This time Elizabeth was recognized and cheered, although police cautioned the revelers that “the princesses wished to be treated as private individuals, and they were allowed to go on their way.”

  Elizabeth was barely nineteen years old at the war’s end. Despite her years behind the walls of Windsor, she had experienced life in ways she certainly would not have if she had passed through adolescence in the conventional style of a young member of the royal family. She had seen her parents in a heroic new light as the embodiments of duty and brave service, she had felt the losses of wartime deaths, and she had been exposed to people outside the royal orbit. She had taken on new responsibilities and had caught a glimpse of what the next stage of her life would likely be, not only her role as heiress presumptive, but even more profoundly her personal life—a secret she held tight with the discretion that would characterize her conduct in the decades ahead. She had entered the war as a little girl, and now she was a young woman.

  “People thought ‘Aha!’

  at that point.”

  Princess Elizabeth and Philip exchange a telltale glance at the wedding of their cousin Lady Patricia Mountbatten, October 1946. © TopFoto/The Image Works

  TWO

  Love Match

  “THERE WAS A WHOLE BATTALION OF LIVELY YOUNG MEN,” RECALLED Lady Anne Glenconner, whose parents, the Earl and Countess of Leicester, were friends and neighbors of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Sandringham in Norfolk. But Lilibet “realized her destiny and luckily set her heart on Prince Philip at an early age. He was ideal—good looking and a foreign prince.”

  Her choice was in some respects traditional, because the princess and Philip were relatives, but not too close to raise eyebrows. They were third cousins, sharing the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Philip was in fact more royal than Elizabeth, whose mother was mere British nobility (with distant links to English and Scottish kings), while his parents were Princess Alice of Battenberg (a great-grandchild of Queen Victoria) and Prince Andrew of Greece, the descendant of a Danish prince recruited for the Greek throne in the mid-nineteenth century. Lilibet and Philip were both connected to most of Europe’s reigning families, where consanguinity had been common for centuries. Queen Victoria and her husband had been even closer: first cousins who shared the same grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg. Victoria’s mother (also Victoria) and Albert’s father, Ernest, were sister and brother.

  In other ways, Philip was an outlier with a decidedly unconventional background. Queen Elizabeth had made no secret of her preference for one of her daughter’s aristocratic English friends from a family similar to the Strathmores—the future Dukes of Grafton, Rutland, and Buccleuch, or Henry Porchester, the future Earl of Carnarvon. Philip could boast none of their extensive landholdings, and in fact had very little money.

  Although he was born on June 10, 1921, on the isle of Corfu, Philip spent scarcely a year in Greece before the entire royal family was expelled in a coup. His parents took him, along with his four older sisters, to Paris where they lived rent-free in a house owned by wealthy relatives. A proud professional soldier with an extroverted personality and quick wit, Prince Andrew found himself at loose ends, while Alice (properly known as Princess Andrew of Greece after her wedding) had difficulty managing a large family, not least because she was congenitally deaf. Still, during these early years Philip flourished in an overwhelmingly female household that showered attention on him. He attended the American school in St. Cloud, learned to speak fluent French, and developed an assertive personality.

  But his childhood took a dysfunctional turn after his parents sent him at the age of eight to Cheam, a boarding school in England. A year later his mother had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanatorium for several years, which precipitated his parents’ permanent separation. She eventually moved to Athens and established a Greek Orthodox order of nuns, dedicating herself with religious fervor to carrying out good works.

  Prince Andrew was mostly absent from his son’s life as well, living as a “boulevardier” in Monte Carlo with a mistress, and subsisting on a small annuity, while beneficent relatives and friends paid Philip’s school fees. Philip’s four sisters married prosperous German princes—several with connections to the Nazi Party—and welcomed their little brother on school holidays until Hitler’s intensifying belligerence made the visits impossible. Philip was also touched twice by tragedy while in his teens when his sister Cecile and her family were killed in a plane crash, and a year later his favorite uncle and guardian, George Mountbatten, the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, died of cancer.

  Philip was consigned to an itinerant life as an exile, with neither home nor parents to sustain him. Asked years later about the rootlessness of his upbringing, he said, “The family broke up.… I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.” He left Cheam in 1933 to spend one year at Salem, a boarding school in Germany run by a progressive Jewish educator named Kurt Hahn. After the Nazis briefly detained Hahn, he fled in 1934 to the North Sea coast of Scotland and founded Gordonstoun School, where Philip soon enrolled.

  Gordonstoun’s educational philosophy was rooted in leadership and service, and meeting tests of physical endurance (harsh drills, cold showers) in addition to academic work. Philip embraced the challenges and became the school’s head boy (known as the “Guardian”). “He was one of those boys who very early rendered disinterested service and who never asked for any privilege on account of his birth,” Hahn recalled. In his final report, Hahn wrote that Philip was a “born leader” who would “need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself.” The headmaster saw “intelligence and spirit” as well as “recklessness,” and noted that Philip’s leadership qualities were “marred at times by impatience and intolerance.”

  Once in the United Kingdom, Philip came under the wing of his relatives there, chiefly his Battenberg grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, who lived in a grace-and-favor apartment in Kensington Palace, and his mother’s younger brother, Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, later the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who assiduously cultivated his royal relatives.

  Six feet tall, with intense blue eyes, chiseled features, and blond hair, Philip was an Adonis as well as athletic and engaging, exuding confidence and a touch of impudence. He was a resourceful and energetic self-starter, yet he was also something of a loner, with a scratchy defensiveness that sprang from emotional deprivation. “Prince Philip is a more sensitive person than you would appreciate,” said his first cousin Patricia Mountbatten, Dickie’s older daughter. “He had a tough childhood, and his life constrained him into a hard exterior in order to survive.”

  As cousins, Philip and young Elizabeth had crossed paths twice, first at a family wedding in 1934 and then at the coronation of King George VI in 1937. But it wasn’t until July 22, 1939, when the King and Queen took their daughters to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, that the thirteen-year-old princess spent any time with Philip, who was a cadet in training at the school.

  At the behest of Dickie Mountbatten, an officer in the British navy, Philip was invited to have lunch and tea with the royal family. Cra
wfie observed the sparks, later writing that Lilibet “never took her eyes off him,” although he “did not pay her any special attention”—no surprise since he was already a man of the world, and she only on the cusp of adolescence. More revealing was the depth and durability of Elizabeth’s attraction, and her single-minded determination to marry him.

  During the war years, Philip came to visit his cousins occasionally at Windsor Castle, and he and the princess corresponded when he was at sea. He served with the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific, and was cited for gallantry after the Battle of Matapan against Italian forces in 1942. Friends and relatives detected a flutter of romance between Philip and Elizabeth by December 1943, when he was on leave at Windsor for Christmas and watched Elizabeth, then seventeen, perform in the “Aladdin” pantomime. Queen Mary wrote to her friend Mabell, the Countess of Airlie, shortly afterward that the cousins had “been in love for the past eighteen months. In fact longer, I think.” The King was quite taken by Philip, telling his mother the young man was “intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.” But both the King and Queen thought that Lilibet was too young to consider a serious suitor.

  Philip visited Balmoral in the summer of 1944, and he wrote Queen Elizabeth about how he savored “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them.” That December, while Philip was away on active duty, his father died of cardiac arrest at age sixty-two in the room where he lived at the Hotel Metropole in Monte Carlo. All he left his twenty-three-year-old son were some trunks containing clothing, an ivory shaving brush, cuff links, and a signet ring that Philip would wear for the rest of his life.