Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Other than telling the Queen Mother in February, Margaret and Townsend kept their intentions secret until Coronation Day, when a tabloid reporter caught Margaret flicking a piece of “fluff” from the lapel of Townsend’s uniform with a proprietary and flirtatious glance. Several days later, the Palace learned that The People, a Sunday tabloid, would run a story on the affair, prompting Lascelles to notify Churchill on June 13. “This is most important!” Churchill exclaimed. “One motor accident, and this young lady might be our queen.” Not only was the prime minister troubled about the censure of the Anglican Church, he worried that parliaments in the Commonwealth would disapprove of Margaret marrying Townsend on the grounds that their child would be an unsuitable king or queen. Churchill “made it perfectly clear that if Princess Margaret should decide to marry Townsend, she must renounce her rights to the throne.”

  Churchill, Lascelles, and Michael Adeane all agreed that the only remedy was to offer Townsend “employment abroad as soon as possible,” Lascelles recalled. “And with this the Queen agreed.” Until the publication in 2006 of a memorandum written by Lascelles in 1955 detailing the sequence of events, the common assumption was that the Queen had “stood on the sidelines” while others banished Townsend, and that Princess Margaret was misled by Lascelles into thinking she could freely marry on reaching the age of twenty-five. In fact, by Lascelles’s account, “the Queen, after consulting Princess Margaret—and presumably Townsend himself—told me a few days later that she considered Brussels to be the most suitable post.” Elizabeth II also asked for a statement clarifying the “implications” if she were to forbid the marriage. The government’s attorney general produced a memo, and Lascelles wrote a letter outlining the possibility of a split within the Commonwealth if “several parliaments … might take a diametrically opposite view of that held by others.” He was scheduled to retire at the end of the year, but before his departure, the private secretary sent this information to the Queen as well as Margaret, who thanked him for it in February 1954.

  Once Townsend left for his Belgian exile in July 1953, the Queen and her advisers hoped the separation would cool the couple’s ardor. But the princess and her lover continued to correspond daily, and Margaret deluded herself into thinking that after her twenty-fifth birthday she could prevail, even if her sister was compelled to withhold her approval. By postponing a decision, everyone involved only prolonged the agony and kept the Queen’s younger sister in limbo for two years.

  In retrospect, it’s clear why Elizabeth II did not want to force the issue. Divorced people were excluded from royal garden parties and other gatherings in the sovereign’s palaces and on the royal yacht. Her grandfather had first admitted “innocent parties” in divorce to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and the Queen had relented to include “guilty parties” as well. Still, she had an almost visceral reaction to divorce, which she had inveighed against in her only major speech as a princess. “She strongly believed that divorce was catching,” said Lady Elizabeth Anson, a cousin of the Queen through the Queen Mother’s Bowes Lyon family. “If one got divorced, it made it easier for another unhappy couple to get divorced.”

  WITH THE RESOLUTION of Margaret’s dilemma delayed, the Queen turned her full attention to the culmination of the continuing coronation celebration: an ambitious five-and-a-half-month tour of Commonwealth countries, covering 43,000 miles from Bermuda to the Cocos Islands, by plane and ship. It was her first extended trip as sovereign, and the first time a British monarch had circled the globe. By one accounting, she heard 276 speeches and 508 renditions of “God Save the Queen,” made 102 speeches, shook 13,213 hands, and witnessed 6,770 curtsies.

  Elizabeth II’s role as the symbolic head of the Commonwealth of Nations not only enhanced her place in the world and extended her reach, it became a source of pride and pleasure and an essential part of her identity. “She sees herself fused into that instrument that was originally an empire,” said former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney after she had been leader of the organization for nearly sixty years. Sir Philip Moore, her private secretary from 1977 to 1986, once estimated that she devoted half of her time to the Commonwealth. Over the course of her reign she would visit most member nations multiple times.

  In 1949 the London Declaration created the modern Commonwealth with the removal of “British” from its name, while recognizing King George VI as “Head of the Commonwealth.” That year, newly independent India pledged to keep its membership when it became a republic, setting the stage for British colonies to join as they sought independence. The Irish Free State had become a republic the previous year, ending the British monarch’s role as head of state. In a further demonstration of antipathy for Britain rooted in centuries of domination as well as bitterness over the island’s partition, the new Republic of Ireland left the Commonwealth. Other newly independent nations eagerly joined in the years to come, however. “The transformation of the Crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association … has no precedent,” Elizabeth II observed after twenty-five years on the throne.

  What began as a cozy group of eight members—Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, Ceylon, and India—would grow to fifty-four by the early twenty-first century, representing almost one third of the world’s population. Most of the member nations became republics, but some (Brunei and Tonga among them) had monarchs of their own, and all twenty-nine realms and territories where Elizabeth II reigned as Queen belonged as well.

  Embracing First and Third World countries, large and small, from all regions except the Middle East, the Commonwealth dedicated itself to giving its members equal voice and a sense of kinship. With English as the shared language, it served as a forum for the promotion of good government, education, economic development, and human rights—although its main weakness was a tendency to dither over the egregious abuses of tyrants.

  In preparation for her first Commonwealth tour, the Queen supervised the creation of one hundred new outfits by her couturier Norman Hartnell. Her priorities were comfort for her daytime clothes, which were usually sewn with weights in the hems as a safeguard against windy conditions, bright colors so she could be easily visible at outdoor events, and sumptuous fabrics for her evening gowns, which often incorporated motifs to pay homage to her host countries. Her coronation dress was part of her wardrobe as well, to be worn opening parliaments in a number of countries.

  Watching the televised departure ceremony on the evening of November 23, 1953, Noel Coward thought the Queen “looked so young and vulnerable and valiant,” and the royal couple had “star quality in excelsis.” They traveled on a BOAC Stratocruiser for nearly ten hours to a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland, followed by another five and a half hours to Bermuda, tracked along the way by naval vessels from Britain and Canada that stayed in continuous radio contact.

  After a day of official rounds on Britain’s oldest colony, the royal party visited Jamaica, where they boarded the SS Gothic for their three-week voyage through the Panama Canal to the South Pacific archipelago of Fiji. On the way the Queen worked in her sitting room and wrote letters (posted from each port of call, where airplanes transported them in diplomatic bags). One message to Churchill commended his efforts for “the good of the world” at his summit in Bermuda with President Eisenhower and French premier Joseph Laniel to plan a strategy for dealing with the threat of a nuclear confrontation in the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. Otherwise, Elizabeth II watched members of the royal household play shuffle-board, quoits, and deck tennis, and she filmed the customary “Crossing the Line” initiation. Lady-in-waiting Pamela Mountbatten was tipped into a tank of water by Prince Philip, dressed as the Demon Barber of King Neptune’s Court, who was then unceremoniously pushed into the pool as well.

  Their visit to Fiji challenged the Queen’s ability to cope smoothly with exotic customs. A group of native chieftains came aboard the Gothic and welcomed her with a lengthy dance featuring cla
pping and sequences of grunts while sitting cross-legged, followed by a solemn presentation of whale’s teeth. On shore, the chiefs painstakingly prepared quantities of kava, a strong sedating beverage made by pulverizing roots of the kava plant, liberally lubricated with spit. The Queen, who had been warned of the potency of the drink, watched the long preparation, and when she was somberly offered a draft in a seashell, warily took just half a mouthful. Back on the Gothic that night after their black-tie dinner, Elizabeth II marveled at the experience. “Didn’t you LOVE this?” she exclaimed, and then sat cross-legged in her evening gown on the floor of the dining room. “As she was in the middle of the grunts and claps, the steward came in and was transfixed,” said Pamela Mountbatten.

  The next stop was the island kingdom of Tonga, and a joyful reunion with the exuberant Queen Salote, who drove her British counterpart around in the London taxicab she had acquired during the coronation and laid on a feast for seven hundred people, all seated on the ground, eating with their fingers. “The Queen suffered through that,” recalled Pamela Mountbatten. “She has a very small appetite, but she knows if she stops, everyone stops. So out of consideration she had to play with her food and extend the time eating.”

  The royal party arrived in New Zealand before Christmas. They celebrated the holiday at the Auckland home of Governor General Sir Willoughby Norrie, where the Queen broadcast her Christmas speech, declaring her intention to show the people of the Commonwealth that “the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity but a personal and living bond between you and me.” She also touched on the expectation of a new Elizabethan Age and admitted, “frankly I do not myself feel at all like my great Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores.” She emphasized that the Commonwealth “bears no resemblance to the Empires of the past,” but rather was built on “friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace.” And she echoed her twenty-first birthday pledge by declaring her intention to give her “heart and soul every day of my life” to this “equal partnership of nations and races.”

  Two keen listeners to the broadcast were five-year-old Prince Charles and three-year-old Princess Anne, who were spending Christmas at Sandringham with their grandmother. They spoke to the Queen and Prince Philip by radio telephone, but otherwise news of their progress came in regular letters from the Queen Mother, who had them for weekends at Royal Lodge, her pale pink house tucked among the trees in Windsor Great Park. Just as Elizabeth and Margaret had followed their parents’ travels on maps, Prince Charles traced his parents’ route on a globe in his nursery. “He is intensely affectionate & loves you & Philip most tenderly,” reassured the Queen Mother in a letter to her daughter.

  The crowds everywhere were enormous and enthusiastic. Masses of welcoming boats jammed Sydney’s harbor, and by one count, three quarters of Australia’s population came out to see the Queen. At age twenty-seven she was hailed as the “world’s sweetheart.” But the royal couple refused to let their celebrity go to their heads. “The level of adulation, you wouldn’t believe it,” Prince Philip recalled. “It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.” The Queen Mother reinforced this instinct to separate their public and private personae. “How moving & humble making,” she wrote her daughter in early March 1954, “that one can be the vehicle through which this love for country can be expressed. Don’t you feel that?”

  The Duke of Edinburgh also helped his wife stay on an even keel when she became frustrated after endless hours of making polite conversation. “I remember her complaining in Australia, ‘All these mayors are so boring. Why are they so boring?’ ” recalled Pamela Mountbatten. “Prince Philip explained to her, ‘You don’t have to sit next to them every day in England. We are two months in Australia so you have to sit next to them a lot more.’ This was easy for Prince Philip, who charges in and makes things happen. The Queen early on was not a natural conversationalist or mixer. So for her it was much harder work. Also, they were intimidated by her. The protocol was they shouldn’t speak first, which made for stilted conversation.”

  The Queen’s style was sparing—“never … a superfluous gesture,” the photographer Cecil Beaton once observed—smiling only when delighted or amused, rather than incessantly as a politician would do. Meeting and greeting thousands of people at receptions and garden parties actually gave her a temporary facial tic. But when she was watching a performance or a parade, and her face was in repose, she looked grumpy, even formidable. The portrait painter Michael Noakes observed that “she has no intermediate expression,” just a “great smile or dour.” As the Queen herself once ruefully acknowledged, “The trouble is that unlike my mother, I don’t have a naturally smiley face.” From time to time, Philip would jolly his wife. “Don’t look so sad, sausage,” he said during an event in Sydney. Or he might provoke a grin by reciting scripture at odd moments, once inquiring sotto voce, “What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep?”

  During the long and repetitive days, the Queen developed coping techniques, including her preternatural ability to stand for hours without tiring. Years later she described her technique to Susan Crosland, the wife of Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland: “One plants one’s feet apart like this,” said the Queen as she lifted her evening gown above her ankles. “Always keep them parallel. Make sure your weight is evenly distributed. That’s all there is to it.” Her handshaking was similarly designed with self-preservation in mind: she extends her hand, allowing her to grasp the fingers and do the squeezing, usually protected by a size seven white glove, which guards against picking up illness and being cut by women’s diamond rings.

  Elizabeth II has always carried a handbag on her left arm. Its ubiquity has prompted fascination about its significance and speculation about its contents. Phil Brown, the manager of the Hull City football team, got a good look inside when he sat next to the Queen at a luncheon in 2009. “It was almost like a lady’s prop with essential items,” he said. “It had things that you would expect—makeup, [coin] purse, sweeteners she put in her coffee, the normal stuff. You expect that a lady-in-waiting would carry her handbag, but for the Queen, it was almost like a comfort blanket.”

  Her ladies-in-waiting are responsible for necessities such as extra pairs of gloves as well as needles, thread, and safety pins to make emergency repairs. Her private secretary keeps the texts of her speeches, which he hands to her at the appointed time. But the Queen “is a very practical down-to-earth lady,” said one of her long-serving ladies-in-waiting. “She needs a comb or lipstick or Kleenex, and if she hasn’t got it, what does she do?” For the same reason, her handbag usually contains reading glasses, mint lozenges, and a fountain pen, although rarely cash, except for a precisely folded £5 or £10 note on Sundays for the church collection plate.

  Elizabeth II has also been known to carry a bag hook, an ingenious item designed for practicality. “I watched the Queen open her handbag and remove a white suction cup and discreetly spit into it,” recalled a dinner guest at the Berkshire home of the Queen’s cousin Jean Wills. “The Queen then attached the cup to the underside of the table. The cup had a hook on it, and she attached her handbag to it.”

  Elizabeth II taught herself to keep engaged in the moment by sharpening her powers of observation. Once when she spotted a Franciscan monk in a crowd, she said to an official nearby, “I’m always fascinated by their toes, aren’t you?” She would store up these moments for later and recount them, often with expert dialect, for her husband and advisers. She used her mimicry in part as “a way of relieving the boredom and shattering the formality,” said a former courtier.

  On many evenings during the Commonwealth tour the royal party shared reminiscences over private black-tie dinners aboard the Gothic. They relaxed by going to stud farms and the races at Rondwich and Flemington
in Australia. During weekend visits to the beach, the Queen’s advisers became accustomed to hearing Philip speak with spousal directness. When she balked at wearing a swim-suit on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, he said, “Do come in, you have nothing to do, at least have a nice swim.” “I need to keep out of the sun,” the Queen replied. “You are a premature grandmother!” he exclaimed in exasperation.

  Philip’s principal diversion at public events continued to be wisecracks and lighthearted banter. In motorcades he took to finding the most unlikely people and waving at them. But when he was off on his own, he gave speeches reflecting his growing portfolio of interests. To a gathering of scientists in Wellington, New Zealand, he spoke at length about the applications of science to agriculture, medicine, and the military. While the Queen spoke briefly and carefully hewed to written texts, Philip began to enjoy the luxury of discursive and off-the-cuff remarks.

  The last leg of the tour brought the royal couple back to exotic locales, with stops in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, Uganda, and Libya. The Queen wore her coronation dress to open the Ceylonese parliament in an outdoor pavilion. As she sat in the sun on the throne for an hour, her bejeweled dress heated up and she nearly roasted, but she showed no sign of discomfort. Her attendants noticed that even in the hottest temperatures the Queen scarcely perspired—a phenomenon still evident into her eighties. On a visit to Ground Zero in New York City in July 2010, she spent nearly a half hour in record-shattering 103-degree heat greeting families of those who had lost their lives on 9/11. “We were all pouring sweat,” said Debbie Palmer, the widow of a firefighter. “She didn’t have a bead of sweat on her. I thought that is what it must be like to be royal.” But Pamela Mountbatten, who witnessed the Queen’s uncanny cool nearly six decades earlier, said, “There are certain people whose skin runs water, but she doesn’t. That means she can’t get relief, so she suffers twice as much from the heat. She says no perspiration makes it much worse. It is very convenient because it looks wonderful, but at a cost.”