Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  President Harry S. Truman, his wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret, greeted them at the airport with a twenty-one-gun salute. Truman expressed relief that the King had “recovered so promptly” and observed that Margaret, who had met the princess during a visit to England, “tells me when everyone becomes acquainted with you, they immediately fall in love with you.” The sixty-seven-year-old president counted himself among them, calling Elizabeth a “fairy princess.” Elizabeth enunciated every word of her reply, her high voice a model of cut-glass precision, proclaiming that “free men everywhere look towards the United States with affection and with hope.” She later told Martin Charteris that she was taken by Truman’s natural manner.

  They drove into the capital in a procession of convertibles as 600,000 people shouted and cheered along the route. Philip and Elizabeth stayed with the Trumans at Blair House, the official guest quarters, and the president took the princess across Pennsylvania Avenue for a tour of the White House, which was undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation.

  The royal couple’s whirlwind itinerary started with a reception at the Statler Hotel (later the Capital Hilton) on 16th Street for nine hundred representatives of “press, radio, television and newsreels.” Elizabeth made some brief remarks, the royal couple met a small number of journalists, and Philip diverted himself by sneaking a look at the notebooks of two women reporters, a gambit he would enjoy repeating in future encounters with the news media.

  The following day they visited the Capitol, inspected the Declaration of Independence and Constitution at the Library of Congress, paid tribute at the grave of George Washington in Mount Vernon and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, and spent two hours shaking hands with 1,500 guests at a British embassy party. At a Rose Garden ceremony, they presented the Trumans with an overmantel mirror adorned with a painting of flowers, to be hung in the refurbished Blue Room as a “welcome ornament … a mark of our friendship.” (It was eventually moved to the pink bedroom suite in the private quarters.) Their visit ended with a white-tie dinner in honor of the Trumans at the Canadian embassy.

  They had a rough return trip across the North Atlantic aboard the Empress of Scotland. Only Elizabeth managed to avoid seasickness and show up regularly at mealtimes, and veteran sailor Philip was furious about his own weakness. On arrival at the Liverpool Dockyards three days after Prince Charles’s third birthday, they boarded the Royal Train for London’s Euston Station. Waiting on the platform were Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and Prince Charles, who had not seen his parents in over a month. He was in a mischievous mood, asking a guardsman, “Where is your sword?” but he obediently walked along a line of dignitaries shaking hands.

  When the princess and duke stepped off the train, Elizabeth rushed to hug her mother and kiss her on both cheeks. For tiny Charles, she simply leaned down and gave him a peck on the top of his head before turning to kiss Margaret. “Britain’s heiress presumptive puts her duty first,” explained a newsreel announcer. “Motherly love must await the privacy of Clarence House.” Prince Philip was even less demonstrative, touching his son on the shoulder to indicate they should move along to the waiting limousines. As they passed through the station, Prince Charles was again with his grandmother, while his parents walked ahead.

  * * *

  IN THE ROYAL couple’s absence, a general election had taken place. On October 25, 1951, the Conservatives had narrowly won a parliamentary majority, sending Attlee off and returning seventy-six-year-old Winston Churchill to 10 Downing Street six years after his crushing loss. When the City of London welcomed Elizabeth and Philip back with a luncheon in their honor at the Guildhall, Churchill raised a glass to toast their health.

  The King and Queen celebrated Christmas at Sandringham with their daughters, son-in-law, two grandchildren, Queen Mary, and an assortment of relatives—the first time the entire clan had enjoyed the holiday together. Like their autumnal escape to Balmoral, the royal family’s six-week sojourn in Norfolk each winter was an ingrained tradition dating back to King Edward VII and his mother, Queen Victoria, who bought the Sandringham estate for him when he was Prince of Wales.

  In 1870 the future Edward VII built a new and considerably larger house at Sandringham, in Jacobean Revival style with more than three hundred rooms. The red-brick facade is trimmed with stone, ornamented with balconies and bay windows, and extravagantly topped with gables, chimneys, and onion domes. The spacious rooms are decorated with paneling, intricate plasterwork, arches, columns, and coffered ceilings. The centerpiece of the house—only steps from the front entrance—is the grand two-story Saloon, a Jacobean-style great hall overlooked by a minstrel’s gallery and dominated by two massive stone fireplaces. The bedroom suites are huge as well, with furniture described by the writer David Cecil as “sturdily philistine.” Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, was astounded to discover three marble sinks in her bathroom, the first engraved “HEAD & FACE ONLY,” the second “HANDS,” and “good heavens the last was blank, so what can it have been for?” she wrote in a letter to a friend.

  Christmas in 1951 followed the pattern set by Queen Victoria, with the family opening gifts on Christmas Eve in the German style. They gathered in the ballroom, where trestle tables covered with cloths were arranged with gifts in piles marked for each family member. After tearing off the wrappings and ribbons, the adults changed into black tie and long dresses for a dinner complete with champagne toasts and popping open Christmas crackers, gaily wrapped party favors containing paper hats and trinkets. The next morning they all walked to St. Mary Magdalene, the nearby parish church, then returned for Christmas luncheon. After a big breakfast on Boxing Day—the extra holiday observed in Britain on December 26 when in earlier times landowners would give their employees gifts or reward their service—the men went out for the traditional pheasant shoot. The King felt well enough to join them, carrying a light gun.

  But failing health prevented him from keeping his commitment to travel with the Queen on a long-planned state visit to the Commonwealth nations of Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon in the new year, so he deputed Elizabeth and Philip to take the nearly six-month journey instead. They decided to add several days in the beginning of the trip to visit the British colony of Kenya, which had given them a retreat at the foot of Mount Kenya called Sagana Lodge as a wedding gift.

  The King and Queen accompanied the royal party to the airport on January 31, 1952, to say farewell. Standing on the tarmac, George VI looked haggard as he stoically waved to his daughter and son-in-law when they took off on their BOAC Argonaut. Five days later, after settling into the secluded Sagana Lodge, Elizabeth and Philip spent a night at Treetops Hotel, a three-bedroom cabin built among the branches of a large fig tree above an illuminated salt lick in a game preserve. Dressed in khaki trousers and a bush scarf, Elizabeth excitedly filmed the elephants, rhinos, monkeys, and other animals with her movie camera. At sunset, she and Philip spotted a herd of thirty elephants. “Look, Philip, they’re pink!” she said, not realizing that the gray pachyderms had been rolling in pink dust. After staying up much of the night, Elizabeth stood at dawn with Michael Parker, now her husband’s private secretary, to watch a white eagle swoop above their heads.

  Back at Sagana, Parker took a phone call in the mid-afternoon from Martin Charteris at the nearby Outspan Hotel. The private secretary bore the grim news that the fifty-six-year-old King was dead, and Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was now Queen at age twenty-five. After a pleasant day shooting hares on the Sandringham Estate, George VI had dined with his wife and Princess Margaret before retiring to his ground-floor bedroom at 10:30 P.M. Early in the morning of February 6, he had died in his sleep from a blood clot in his heart. Parker immediately informed Prince Philip, who muttered that it would be “the most appalling shock” for his wife, then walked into her bedroom where she had been resting and broke the news to her. She shed no tears, but looked “pale and worried.” Philip led her down a path through the garden to
the Sagana River, where they took a long walk along the bank.

  When Elizabeth’s cousin Pamela Mountbatten, who was serving as her lady-in-waiting, expressed her condolences, the new Queen could only say, “Oh, thank you. But I am so sorry that it means we’ve got to go back to England and it’s upsetting everybody’s plans.”

  There has been much speculation, not least because of historical parallels, about when precisely Elizabeth became Queen. It undoubtedly happened when she was atop the African fig tree, which draws a romantic line to the moment in 1558 when Elizabeth I, seated next to an oak tree at Hatfield House, heard that the death of her sister, Queen Mary, meant she was the monarch, also at age twenty-five.

  With preternatural composure, her mid-twentieth-century successor set about her business, writing letters, telegrams, and memoranda—vivid proof, as Charteris recalled, that she had “seized her destiny with both hands.”

  “It was the most poignant moment.

  She looked so young, with nothing

  on her head, wearing only the

  white shift over her dress.”

  Queen Elizabeth II, age twenty-six, before the anointing at her coronation in Westminster Abbey, June 1953. Getty Images

  FOUR

  “Ready, Girls?”

  “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO CALL YOURSELF?” ASKED MARTIN CHARTERIS, as Elizabeth came to grips with the loss of her father. “My own name, of course. What else?” she replied. But some clarification was necessary, since her mother had been called Queen Elizabeth. The new monarch would be Queen Elizabeth II (following her sixteenth-century predecessor, Elizabeth I) but she would be known as the Queen. Her mother would become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, rather than the more fusty Dowager Queen. Elizabeth II would be Queen Regnant, and her royal cypher E II R.

  “It was all very sudden,” she recalled four decades later. Her task, she said, was “kind of taking it on, and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate, because I think continuity is important.”

  Elizabeth II returned to England on the Argonaut that had flown her to Kenya only a week earlier. When the erstwhile princess walked by his seat several times, Philip’s valet John Dean noted that “she looked as if she might have been crying.” Mike Parker said Philip “was like the Rock of Gibraltar, comforting her as best he could.”

  Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at London Airport near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a nineteen-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation of men in dark overcoats, top hats, and homburgs led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and his fellow government ministers stood bareheaded as she slowly shook hands with each of them, and they gave her deep bows. A Daimler bearing the sovereign’s coat of arms on its roof drove her to Clarence House, where eighty-four-year-old Queen Mary honored her by reversing roles, curtsying and kissing her hand, although she couldn’t help adding, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.”

  The next day, the new Queen went to St. James’s Palace, the sovereign’s official residence. Built by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, the turreted red-brick complex in the heart of London was the home of the monarch until Queen Victoria moved to much larger Buckingham Palace. At St. James’s, Elizabeth II appeared for twenty minutes before several hundred members of the Accession Council, a ceremonial body including the Privy Council—the principal advisory group to the monarch drawn from senior ranks of politicians, the clergy, and the judiciary—along with other prominent officials from Britain and the Commonwealth. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701, she had been monarch since the moment of her father’s death, but the council was convened to hear her proclamation and religious oath. She would not be crowned until her coronation in sixteen months, but she was fully empowered to carry out her duties as sovereign.

  The men of the council bowed simultaneously to the fortieth monarch since William the Conqueror took the English throne after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Elizabeth II declared in a clear voice that “by the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are the world over.… I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.”

  As her husband escorted her out, by several accounts she was in tears. They drove to Sandringham to join the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in paying respects privately at the late King’s coffin before it was transported by train to London for the official lying in state at Westminster Hall, followed by the funeral and burial in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor on February 15. The most enduring image was of the three queens—Mary the grandmother, the Queen Mother, and Elizabeth II—standing by the catafalque with Princess Margaret, shrouded in opaque black veils to their waists.

  In an unprecedented message to her countrymen, the Queen Mother asked that “protection and love” be given to her daughter “in the great and lonely station to which she has been called.” Privately, she wrote to Queen Mary, “I cannot bear to think of Lilibet, so young to bear such a burden.”

  Churchill, who had first met Elizabeth II as a toddler, grieved over George VI and seemed nonplussed by the new sovereign. Jock Colville, who by then had returned to Churchill as private secretary, recalled that “I tried to cheer him up by saying how well he would get on with the new queen, but all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child.”

  According to Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary Soames, “my father realized very quickly she was much more than that.” As Martin Charteris observed, “He was impressed by her. She was conscientious, she was well-informed, she was serious-minded. Within days of her Accession she was receiving prime ministers and presidents, ambassadors and High Commissioners … and doing so faultlessly.” The Queen recognized the change in herself, confiding to a friend, “Extraordinary thing, I no longer feel anxious or worried. I don’t know what it is—but I have lost all my timidity.”

  With his gift for eloquence and keen sense of occasion, Churchill set the stage for what the press would optimistically herald as “a new Elizabethan age.” Britain was still gripped by shortages, with rationing of foodstuffs such as tea, sugar, and butter, while rubble from World War II bombing blighted the London landscape. The imperial decline was inexorable, and the fears of communist expansion around the world had ushered in the Cold War.

  In a speech to the House of Commons five days after Elizabeth took the throne, Churchill described her as “a fair and youthful figure … the heir to all our traditions and glories,” assuming her position “at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.” He expressed hope that the new Queen would be “a signal for … a brightening salvation of the human scene.” A promising young Conservative politician named Margaret Thatcher had her own sanguine view, writing in a newspaper column that “if, as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.”

  ON FEBRUARY 27 at 11 A.M., Elizabeth II presided over her first investiture in the vast ballroom at Buckingham Palace, honoring private citizens and members of the military with awards for exemplary service to their country. While the Queen hands out these honors known as the orders of chivalry, the government chooses the 2,500 individuals to be recognized each year. With Britain’s world role vastly diminished, investitures have helped sustain national pride, and the Queen has presided over these ceremonies with care and precision. By her sixtieth year on the throne, she had conferred more than 404,500 honors and
awards, bestowing them in person over 610 times. “People need pats on the back sometimes,” she once said. “It’s a very dingy world otherwise.”

  At each investiture she greets more than a hundred recipients individually and presents their medals or brooches (and in the case of knights, taps the kneeling men on the shoulders with a sword), offering personal comments to all. The impressive hour-long ceremonies are attended by Yeomen of the Guard in red and gold uniforms and her Gurkha Orderly Officers.

  The very first honor she bestowed on February 27 was the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration for valor in battle, to Private William Speakman of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He had shown “gallantry and utter contempt of personal danger” during “fierce hand-to-hand fighting” in Korea the previous November, when he led more than ten charges, sustaining serious wounds while inflicting “enormous losses to the enemy.” Speakman was one of only fifteen British subjects who received the award in the six decades after World War II.

  Conferring that honor had special meaning for the new Queen, who had also become the head of the armed forces. Members of the military pledge their loyalty to the sovereign, not to the government, keeping their allegiance above politicians who come and go. In the years to come, Elizabeth II would personally approve the appointments to the highest ranks, sign all officers’ commissions, and serve as honorary colonel-in-chief of all seven regiments in the Household Division, the guardsmen designated as her personal troops.