Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  By April, the royal family completed its move to Buckingham Palace, and the new Queen adapted to an office schedule that has scarcely varied throughout her reign. She awoke at 7:30 A.M. when a housemaid pulled open the curtains in her first-floor bedroom, and Bobo (the only member of the household to call her “Lilibet,” along with “my little lady”) carried in a “calling tray” with Earl Grey tea and Marie biscuits. Right behind Bobo, surging through the doorway, came the Queen’s pack of corgis, which had spent the night down the corridor in their room adjacent to the Page’s Pantry, each of them assigned a wicker dog basket. A footman had already given them their first walk of the day in the garden.

  After bathing (in water kept at around seventy degrees), dressing, and having her hair styled and sprayed, Elizabeth II walked through her sitting room, often listening to the BBC on her portable radio along the way, for breakfast in her private dining room amid eighteenth-century paintings. The morning papers were arranged on a sideboard. Sporting Life was her first read (supplanted in later years by The Racing Post), with a focus on news of the turf, followed by the Daily Telegraph (including its two crossword puzzles that became a daily task, but never with a thesaurus) and The Times, plus a look at the Express, Mail, and Mirror tabloids. In the early days she tended to eat a boiled egg and toast with a pat of butter from the Windsor dairy stamped with her cypher, tossing scraps of bread to her eager dogs. She later replaced her cooked breakfast with tea and toast thinly spread with marmalade.

  At nine o’clock sharp each morning, a Scottish bagpiper would play for fifteen minutes while marching under her window, skirling familiar Highland reels and strathspeys—a tradition at each of her palaces begun by Queen Victoria. By 10 A.M. Elizabeth II was at the desk by a tall window in her sitting room looking out over the Palace gardens. She sat on a mahogany Chippendale chair with a seat embroidered by her father (one of his hobbies had been needlework), surrounded by papers and books, family photos in silver frames, and oil paintings, including a portrait of Susan, her favorite corgi. There was a Hepplewhite mahogany bookcase, a satinwood chest of drawers, comfortable sofas, and vases of roses, narcissi, or other fresh-cut flowers. “I like my rooms to look really lived in,” she said.

  On her desk were two telephones as well as an intercom, with buttons to summon her private secretaries—Tommy Lascelles and his deputies Michael Adeane, Martin Charteris, and Edward Ford—who came one by one, giving a brisk neck bow on arrival, bearing baskets of papers to be signed and discussed. Standing throughout the meeting, each man covered a different area of expertise, and their agendas ranged across schedules for domestic and foreign travel, ecclesiastical and military appointments, legislation before Parliament, and other issues of the day. Edward Ford called her “a bureaucrat’s dream. She was wonderful to work for, always so accessible.… You talked with her as you might talk to a friend who was staying for the weekend … ‘The prime minister is delayed, shall we put it off till tomorrow?’ … The whole conduct of affairs was very informal and relaxed, far more so than it had been with the King.”

  She was also conscientious about dealing with correspondence from the public. She leafed through a stack of envelopes in a basket, reading quickly, and jotting notes for replies to be written either by her ladies-in-waiting or private secretaries. She once explained that she had always regarded letters as “rather personal to oneself, that people write them thinking that I’m going to open them and read them.” She said that the letters “give one an idea of what is worrying people.”

  She was required to meet monthly for ten minutes with four government ministers from her Privy Council. In these meetings—always conducted with everyone standing up to keep the proceedings short—she would say “approved” to various government actions read out to her, mostly concerning regulations and government appointments.

  Every day except Christmas and Easter—whether at home in London or Windsor, on vacation at Sandringham or Balmoral, weekends visiting friends, travels around the United Kingdom, or visits overseas—she attended to the red leather dispatch boxes of official government papers that could be unlocked only by her key plus three others kept by her private secretaries. Each box brimmed with Foreign Office cables, budget documents, cabinet minutes, orders requiring her signature, and classified intelligence reports.

  A smaller evening box, delivered before dinner, contained a summary by the chief whip of the day’s activities in Parliament. Her stated preference: “a piece of 300 to 900 words … a ‘light’ approach is welcomed.” The parliamentary scribes complied with references to “low wattage” debates and descriptions of “shouts and jeers” as well as accolades for speeches of “wit, passion and stinging phrases.” If she were entertaining any politicians for dinner, according to one observer, she could be “as well informed as any of her guests that evening.”

  The Queen customarily received a copy of the daily Court Circular, the official list of royal activities prepared by a Palace information officer that she would scrutinize for mistakes before its publication the next day in The Times and the Daily Telegraph. She made similar corrections and comments on government documents, all of which she signed and delivered to her private secretary’s office by 8 A.M. the next day. Michael Adeane estimated that she spent three hours daily doing her paperwork, and it was not unusual for her to be at her desk late into the evening.

  For the weekends she received a larger box with enough material to keep her deskbound in the mornings, reading rapidly but thoroughly. Once while staying with some good friends, the Queen said, “I must go do my boxes.” “Oh must you ma’am?” said the friend. “If I missed one once, I would never get it straight again,” the Queen replied.

  An essential part of her schedule was her series of private audiences in a sitting room on the ground floor of the Palace—“my way of meeting people, without anybody else listening,” she once explained. These sessions would give her “a very broad picture of what is actually going on, either in government or in the civil service.… The fact that there’s nobody else there gives them a feeling that they can say what they like.” She said that the confidentiality and resulting outspokenness helped form the “basis of where I get my information from.”

  For ninety minutes or so on most mornings she would receive the credentials of newly appointed ambassadors in morning dress or native costume, and bid other envoys goodbye, meet with clergy, government officials, military officers, and distinguished citizens, sometimes using the time to confer honors privately rather than at the larger investiture ceremonies. All these encounters were guided by time-honored rules: waiting in the spacious and gilded Bow Room, the Queen pressing a buzzer, the doors thrown open, the announcement of the guest, one pace into the room followed by a bow or curtsy, three more paces and another bow or curtsy, the handshake and a conversation while standing or an invitation to sit and chat. All visitors were instructed in the protocol by ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and private secretaries, and the Queen read briefing papers about everyone she would meet. As if governed by a well-calibrated internal clock, she invariably knew the precise moment to end the conversation, which she would signal by extending her hand. She would then press a buzzer, summoning one of her senior staff to escort her guest from the room.

  Even if she were dining either alone or with Prince Philip, the table in the dining room in her private apartment was set impeccably by footmen responsible for three separate pantries: glass, silver, and china. Yet another footman rolled the ancient wooden trolley with platters of food down long corridors from the basement kitchen on the other side of the Palace. To unwind before luncheon, Elizabeth II would have a gin and Dubonnet (half portions of each, with ice and lemon) and before dinner a strong gin martini, prepared neat, unlike Philip’s, which was an expertly mixed concoction in its own pitcher. The page, a senior footman, served the meal, which tended to be simple—grilled meat, chicken, or fish (always boned), vegetables from the Windsor farm, and cheese. Strong spices were forbidden
, along with garlic, pasta with sauce, and raw shellfish such as oysters and mussels. She tended to avoid rich desserts as well, although when served strawberries and cream, she reverted to her nursery ways and crushed them into a puree.

  “She is not particular about food,” said a former royal household official. “To her, food is fuel. If she were being served steak, we would make sure the Queen got the smallest piece and that it was well done.” One staple was a constant supply of Malvern water, which was also used for her ice, particularly on trips overseas when tap water might cause illness.

  The Queen’s midday meal seldom ran more than an hour, and her afternoons were more variable than her mornings. She might have an outside engagement, more work at her desk, another audience, a long walk with her corgis around the Palace gardens, a wash and set by her hairdresser, or wardrobe fittings in her dressing room furnished with mirrors and a skirted dressing table adorned with gold hairbrushes and framed photographs.

  Teatime was sacrosanct, served by her page each day at five from a lace-draped cart with plates of sandwiches made of thin bread cut into rounds and filled with cucumber, egg, and watercress, along with freshly baked scones, gingerbread, and muffins. The Queen would brew the Earl Grey or Darjeeling in a silver teapot, allocating one spoonful for each cup. She preferred her tea lukewarm and usually limited herself to the sandwiches, feeding bits of scones to the corgis.

  Charles was only three when his mother took the throne, and Anne was eighteen months old, so their life was spent mainly in the six-room nursery complex on the second floor of Buckingham Palace or out in the extensive gardens, overseen by their two nannies. In her first gesture of modernity, Elizabeth II dropped the tradition of requiring formal bows and curtsies from her children when they were very young. On weekdays Charles and Anne came downstairs after breakfast at 9:30 for some brief playtime with their parents. They didn’t see the Queen and duke until tea, when the nannies brought them down for “a final romp” that sometimes included a splash in the swimming pool for Charles with his father.

  Preparations for their bedtime began at 6 P.M., which caused the Queen to make one adjustment in the official routine. Her father had held his audience with the prime minister at 5:30 P.M. on Tuesdays, but when she initially kept to the same schedule, Charles and Anne complained, “Why isn’t Mummy going to play with us tonight?” So she moved the audience to 6:30, which allowed her to go to the nursery to join in their nightly bath and tuck them into bed before discussing matters of state with Winston Churchill.

  ADJUSTING TO HIS new position as the Queen’s consort proved troublesome for Philip. “For a real action man, that was very hard to begin with,” said Patricia Brabourne. While everything was mapped out for Elizabeth II, he had to invent his job under the scrutiny of her courtiers, and he had no role model to follow.

  Prince Albert had “wielded over the Sovereign an undefined and unbounded influence,” wrote Lytton Strachey in his biography of Queen Victoria, “the natural head of her family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole CONFIDENTIAL adviser in politics, and only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government … tutor of the royal children, the private secretary of the Sovereign, and her permanent minister.” In 1857, Victoria officially rewarded her husband by naming him Prince Consort, recognizing his unique status during the seventeen years since she married him as a new Queen.

  Not only was Philip excluded from the substance of his wife’s official life, with no access to the state papers in her daily boxes, neither he nor his wife considered an official designation of Prince Consort desirable or appropriate in the twentieth century. “The monarchy changed,” Philip later explained to biographer Gyles Brandreth. “It became an institution. I had to fit into the institution.… There were plenty of people telling me what not to do. ‘You mustn’t interfere with this.’ ‘Keep out.’ I had to try to support the Queen as best I could without getting in the way. The difficulty was to find things that might be useful.”

  Like Prince Albert, Prince Philip was considered an outsider by senior officials of the court. “Refugee husband,” he mockingly referred to himself. He was wounded by the slights he experienced. “Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,” said John Brabourne. Much of the wariness stemmed from Philip’s closeness to Dickie Mountbatten. “My father was considered pink—very progressive,” Patricia Brabourne recalled. “The worry was that Prince Philip would bring into court modern ideas and make people uncomfortable.”

  The most hurtful rebuff had occurred in the days following the King’s death, after Queen Mary heard that Dickie Mountbatten had triumphantly announced that “the House of Mountbatten now reigned.” She and her daughter-in-law, the Queen Mother, were angered by his presumption, and the Queen shared their view that she should honor the allegiance of her grandfather and her father to the House of Windsor by keeping the Windsor name rather than taking that of her husband. Churchill and his cabinet agreed. Philip responded with a memo to Churchill vigorously objecting to the prime minister’s advice and pressing instead for the House of Mountbatten, which was ironic. It was his mother’s family name since his father had given him no surname.

  The most immediate precedent was actually on Philip’s side, when Queen Victoria dropped her own House of Hanover and adopted her husband’s family name. Her son Edward VII ruled as the first King of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which George V then changed to Windsor for political reasons. Elizabeth II had every right to make her own change. Her reluctance to do so reflected not only her unwillingness to stand up to Churchill, but also to her mother and her grandmother. The Queen failed to foresee that her actions would have a profound impact on Philip, leading to strains in their marriage. “She was very young,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Churchill was elderly and experienced, and she accepted his constitutional advice. I felt that if it had been later she would have been able to say, ‘I don’t agree.’ ”

  “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip fumed to friends. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.” Dickie Mountbatten was even more outspoken, blaming “that old drunk Churchill” who “forced” the Queen’s position. The prime minister mistrusted and resented Earl Mountbatten, largely because as India’s last viceroy, appointed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he had presided over that country’s move to independence. “Churchill never forgave my father for ‘giving away India,’ ” said Patricia Brabourne.

  Behind the scenes, Dickie continued a campaign to reverse the decision, with his nephew’s acquiescence. Meanwhile, Philip resolved to support his wife while finding his own niche, which would lead in the following decades to the active patronage of more than eight hundred different charities embracing sports, youth, wildlife conservation, education, and environmental causes. Within the family Philip also took over management of all the royal estates, to “save her a lot of time,” he said. But even more significantly, as Prince Charles’s official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, wrote in 1994, the Queen “would submit entirely to the father’s will” in decisions concerning their children.

  She made Philip the ultimate domestic arbiter, Dimbleby wrote, because “she was not indifferent so much as detached.” Newspaper editor and Conservative politician William Deedes, himself a remote father, saw in Elizabeth II’s detachment “her struggle to be a worthy head of state, which was a heavy burden for her. The Queen in her own quiet way is immensely kind, but she had too little time to fulfill her family care. I find it totally understandable, but it led to problems.”

  PARTICULARLY AT THE outset, Elizabeth II’s focus was on showing gravitas as monarch. “In the first five years she was more formal,” recalled one of her longtime ladies-in-waiting. The freedom she enjoyed as a young princess—she once attended a ball at the American ambassador’s residence dressed as an Edwardian parlor maid, with Philip costumed as a waiter—had to be subdued, at least in public. Keeping h
er dignity was paramount, and in doing so she frequently obeyed Queen Mary’s injunction against smiling, even as her youth and beauty gave her an automatic advantage. “How much nicer to have a young queen than that very dull man,” wrote the novelist Nancy Mitford. Elizabeth II was also fortunate in having said little of consequence in public, which let her maintain an enigmatic aura.

  She had to walk her most delicate line with her mother, a widow at age fifty-one. Elizabeth II was well aware, as she wrote at the time, that her own life was more full than ever, while the future of both her mother and her sister, Margaret, “must seem very blank.” The Queen Mother was too well trained to show her emotions in public, but she shared her grief with friends, telling Edith Sitwell she was “engulfed by great black clouds of unhappiness and misery.” Along with losing her husband, she no longer had her homes or her position at center stage. She agreed to move to Clarence House, but she would stay in Buckingham Palace for more than a year before making the shift.

  In the interim, during a visit to friends in Caithness on the bleak northern coast of Scotland, she impulsively bought a small run-down castle tucked behind a grove of trees stunted and twisted from the persistent winds, with a panoramic view of the Orkney Islands. “How sad it looks,” she said. “Just like me.” She called it the Castle of Mey, and planned to “escape there occasionally when life became hideous.” Although the purchase price was a token £100, the Queen funded an extensive renovation, including the installation of bathrooms and electricity, a project that would take three years.

  It wouldn’t do for the Queen Mother to retreat in mourning as Queen Victoria had done after the death of Prince Albert, so Churchill met with her in the autumn of 1952 to urge her to continue the public service that had earned worldwide admiration and to help her daughter carry out her duties. She agreed, in effect, to assume the role of national grandmother, always smiling and twinkling, a patron of charities and goodwill ambassador for her country and the monarchy, carrying out her essential credo: “The point of human life and living [is] to give and to create new goodness all the time.”