Elizabeth the Queen

by Sally Bedell Smith

  At Tobruk in Libya, the Queen and Prince Philip transferred to Britannia, the new 412-foot royal yacht with a gleaming deep blue hull, which they had designed together with architect Sir Hugh Casson. The duke supervised technical features as well as overall decor, and the Queen selected the understated chintz fabrics, and even doorknobs and lamp shades. With its grand staircase, spacious drawing rooms, and state dining room, Britannia was suitable for entertaining world leaders and hosting large receptions of dignitaries. A less formal sun lounge furnished with bamboo and wicker chairs was used for afternoon tea, and the Queen and Prince Philip each had cozy bedrooms fitted with single beds and connected by a door, as well as his and hers sitting rooms with built-in desks. Britannia was not only the monarch’s floating embassy—a unique bubble of British distinctiveness—to be deployed in future tours around the world, but a secluded “country house at sea” where the Queen said she could “truly relax.”

  For its maiden voyage, Britannia brought Prince Charles and Princess Anne to be reunited with their parents in early May 1954 for the first time in nearly half a year. The Queen was pleased that she would be seeing her children earlier than she had anticipated, but she worried that they wouldn’t know their parents. The Queen Mother wrote to allay her daughter’s concerns, saying, “You may find Charles much older in a very endearing way.”

  Still, when the moment came and the Queen was piped aboard, her strict control and conformity to protocol prevailed as it had when she met her son after her Canada trip. “No, not you dear,” she said as she greeted dignitaries first, then shook the five-year-old’s extended hand. The private reunion was warm and affectionate, as Prince Charles showed his mother all around the yacht where he had been living for more than a week. The Queen told her mother how happy she was to be with her “enchanting” children again. They had both “gravely offered us their hands,” she wrote, “partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!” But the repercussions of that chilly first encounter were evident four decades later in a biography of Prince Charles by Anthony Holden, who titled a chapter about the prince’s childhood “No, Not You Dear.”

  The Queen and her family arrived at the Isle of Wight, where Churchill joined them on board Britannia for a sail into London up the Thames. “One saw this dirty commercial river as one came up,” the Queen recalled. Yet Churchill “was describing it as the silver thread which runs through the history of Britain.” Her prime minister, she observed, saw things “in a very romantic and glittering way; perhaps one was looking at it in a rather too mundane way.” Stilted though she sounded, her oft-mocked use of “one” was her unassuming way to avoid the more self-referential word “I.”

  CHURCHILL HAD SET his retirement date for her return from the tour, but once again he wavered. The Queen remained hopeful he would keep his commitment, telling Anthony Eden during an audience after a Buckingham Palace garden party in July that Churchill “seemed less truculent about going now.” The prime minister would cling to power for eight more months, and during this time, according to Jock Colville, his half-hour audiences with the Queen “dragged out longer and longer … and very often took an hour and a half, at which I may say racing was not the only topic discussed.”

  Finally the eighty-year-old leader agreed to yield his premiership on April 5, 1955. Even at the eleventh hour, he nearly backed off when he thought he might act as a peacemaker by convening a four-power summit with the Soviet Union. The Queen remained patient during their audience on March 29, telling him she didn’t mind a delay. Two days later, he gave formal notification that he would go as planned. Private secretary Michael Adeane replied that the Queen “felt the greatest personal regrets” and had said “she would especially miss the weekly audiences which she has found so instructive and, if one can say so of state matters, so entertaining.”

  Churchill gave a farewell dinner on April 4 in which he toasted the Queen as a “young, gleaming champion” of “the sacred causes and wise and kindly way of life.” He had advised his cabinet that afternoon to “never be separated from the Americans.” At his last audience on April 5, Elizabeth II offered him a dukedom to honor his special place in British history, even though that title was now reserved only for “royal personages.” Jock Colville had assured her that Churchill would decline the offer because he “wished to die in the House of Commons.” But when the prime minister set out for Buckingham Palace in his frock coat and top hat, Colville became apprehensive that in a burst of sentimentality Churchill might change his mind. “I very nearly accepted,” he tearfully told his private secretary back at Number 10. “I was so moved by her beauty and her charm and the kindness with which she made this offer, that for a moment I thought of accepting. But finally I remembered that I must die as I have always been—Winston Churchill. And so I asked her to forgive my not accepting it. And do you know, it’s an odd thing, but she seemed almost relieved.”

  Writing to Churchill afterward, Elizabeth II told him none of his successors “will ever, for me, be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister.” She thanked him for his “wise guidance” and for his leadership during the Cold War, “with its threats and dangers which are more awe-inspiring than any which you have had to contend with before, in war or peace.” Churchill replied that he had tried “to keep Your Majesty squarely confronted with the grave and complex problems of our time.” He revealed that at the beginning of her reign he had recognized her grasp of “the august duties of a modern Sovereign and the store of knowledge which had already been gathered by an upbringing both wise and lively,” including her “Royal resolve to serve as well as rule, and indeed to rule by serving.”

  It was the Queen’s constitutional prerogative to choose, after consulting with members of the Conservative Party, the next leader of the party capable of commanding the necessary majority in the House of Commons. After Churchill resigned, she asked him during their final audience if he would recommend a successor. Since he was no longer prime minister, he could not technically offer such advice, so he demurred, saying he would leave it to her. She told him, according to Colville, “the case was not a difficult one and that she would summon Anthony Eden.”

  She had presumably taken soundings with Tory officials, but she didn’t disclose the nature or extent of those consultations. Her emphasis then, as it would be throughout her reign, was strict adherence to constitutionally correct procedures and an unwillingness to impose her personal preference.

  In her first audience with Eden, the Queen was almost offhand in discharging her duties. After they had chatted for a while, he finally said, “Well, Ma’am?” to which the Queen replied, “I suppose I ought to be asking you to form a government.”

  An Old Etonian son of a baronet, the fifty-seven-year-old prime minister was “the best looking politician of his time,” a cultivated man with an Oxford First in Oriental Languages, including Persian and Arabic. He brought extensive experience to his role, having served in Parliament since 1923, with leadership positions in prewar, wartime, and postwar governments. He had considerable charm, but he could be tense and sometimes unpredictable, with an “odd and violent temper,” observed Cynthia Gladwyn, the wife of diplomat Sir Gladwyn Jebb, along with a need for praise and flattery. A shy streak made him seem remote, which put more of a burden on the Queen to establish rapport.

  Her success in doing so was evident that summer when Eden and his wife, Clarissa, a niece of Winston Churchill, were attending a military event in Winchester with the Queen. Afterward the prime minister had his weekly audience, which Clarissa overheard when she was resting in a room next door. “Anthony was telling her the menu he had had at Ike’s—there was a lot of merriment,” she wrote in her diary. Recalling the moment years later, she said, “They were chatting away and
laughing like anything. It was very noisy, and it surprised me. I would have thought it would be more structured questions and answers.”

  Eden had married Clarissa after his first wife, Beatrice, bolted with another man, making him the first divorced prime minister. That circumstance put him in a delicate position when Princess Margaret turned twenty-five on August 21, 1955, and her romance with Peter Townsend—like Eden, the innocent party in a divorce—again moved to center stage. Six days before her birthday, Margaret wrote Eden a letter explaining that she would remain at Balmoral until October when Townsend was expected in London for his annual leave. “It is only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not,” she wrote. “I hope to be in a position to tell you and the other Commonwealth Prime Ministers what I intend to do.”

  While the press whipped up popular sentiment for a royal love match (“COME ON MARGARET! PLEASE MAKE UP YOUR MIND!” pleaded the Daily Mirror), the Queen, the prime minister, and Michael Adeane debated how to proceed once she was compelled to deny permission as head of the Church of England, requiring Margaret to ask for approval from the parliaments in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms. In early October the Edens visited Balmoral for the annual prime minister’s weekend, which featured long consultations, some of them including Prince Philip. The Queen wanted her sister to be happy, but was equally committed to the royal family’s role as a model for her subjects. She took pains to remain neutral and let Margaret make up her own mind.

  Back in London, after determining that Parliament would not approve a union opposed by the Church, Eden informed Margaret that if she wished to wed Townsend in a civil ceremony, she needed to renounce her right to the throne. This would mean giving up her Civil List income and the rights of any of her heirs in the line of succession.

  On October 20, 1955, the cabinet prepared the points to be covered by a Bill of Renunciation in Parliament, and four days later an editorial in The Times laid out in moralistic terms the princess’s stark choice: either she could keep her “high place” in the estimation of the Commonwealth and give up Townsend, or she could contract a civil marriage and relinquish her royal status.

  On October 31 Princess Margaret announced that she and Townsend were parting company. Although her sorrowful statement, written in collaboration with Townsend, emphasized her religious beliefs and sense of obligation to the Commonwealth, the true deciding factor was that she had been raised in luxury as a princess, and she couldn’t face the prospect of living, as Kenneth Rose put it, “in a cottage on a group captain’s salary”—outside the royal family that was the very essence of her identity.

  The controversy over Margaret’s dashed marital plans prompted some mild criticism, but mainly she drew praise for her willingness to sacrifice her happiness on the altar of royal duty. Margaret continued to live in Clarence House with her mother, making public appearances and cutting a glamorous figure, although some could see, as Tommy Lascelles described it, that she had become “selfish and hard and wild.” Like her father before her, the Queen coddled her sister rather than confronting her when she misbehaved.

  THE IMAGE OF the Queen in the public imagination in the mid-1950s was set by two of her most celebrated portraits, each romanticized in a particular way. To commemorate her Commonwealth tour, the bespectacled Australian artist William Dargie captured her in seven sessions at the end of 1954 in the Yellow Drawing Room on the first floor of Buckingham Palace. Dargie found her to be chatty and marveled that her “straight back … never slumped once,” but noted that “she had a difficult mouth to paint.” His image combines dignity with accessibility: “a nice friendly portrait,” in the Queen’s words. It was commissioned to hang in Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra, but she liked it so much that she asked Dargie to make a copy for her private apartment at the Palace. The only other portrait of herself that she has kept in her personal collection is the official state portrait in her coronation dress by Sir James Gunn, hanging at Windsor Castle.

  From October 1954 through February 1955, the Queen also sat sixteen times for Pietro Annigoni. The forty-four-year-old Florentine artist was barely five feet tall, with a burly physique, intense brown eyes, and big peasant hands. He spoke broken English, so they conversed entirely in French. He found her to be “kind, natural and never aloof,” and was taken by the unaffected way she talked, referring to “my husband,” “my mother,” and “my sister.” Her memories of childhood, “watching the people and the cars down there in the Mall,” inspired him to show her “alone and far off” despite being “dear to the hearts of millions of people whom she loved.”

  The result is an arresting three-quarter view of the Queen bareheaded, in her capacious dark blue robes of the Order of the Garter against a bleak imaginary landscape. Her demeanor is regal, her expression contemplative, with a hint of determination. The Queen was happy with the portrait, and Margaret praised the artist’s success with her sister’s elusive mouth. The following year Margaret sat thirty-three times for her own Annigoni portrait, which she considered so beautiful it moved her to tears. When American artist Frolic Weymouth asked Margaret her opinion of her sister’s portrait, she sniffed, “Mine was better than hers.”

  As Elizabeth II approached her thirtieth birthday in 1956, she was still benefiting from a honeymoon glow, although her prime minister was grappling with an array of domestic crises. Only a month after taking office, he had called an election in May 1955, which the Tories had won easily. But the country was plagued with labor unrest; the Queen’s birthday parade that June even had to be canceled when Eden declared a state of emergency during a railway strike. Churchill had done nothing to slow the growth of the welfare state created by the postwar Labour government, and the costs were hobbling the economy.

  The Queen took several noteworthy steps to shrink the traditional distance from her subjects. During a trip to Nigeria in February, she visited the Oji River Leper Settlement at a time when victims of leprosy were considered outcasts. Her “qualities of grace and compassion,” wrote British journalist Barbara Ward, “shine through the spectacle of a young queen shaking hands with cured Nigerian lepers to reassure timid villagers who do not believe in the cure.” The gesture was every bit as groundbreaking as Princess Diana’s handshake in 1987 with an AIDS patient at a time of public fear about catching the disease through touch.

  On May 11, 1956, the Queen began hosting informal luncheons at Buckingham Palace for “meritocrats” from fields such as medicine, sports, literature, the arts, religion, education, and business. She holds them to this day. The inspiration came from Prince Philip, who thought gatherings of a half dozen luminaries every month or so could keep the Queen better connected to the outside world. One peculiarity of the get-togethers is that the guests have little or nothing in common with each other, which some participants liken to being shipwrecked. Elizabeth II, invariably preceded by her pack of corgis and her special cross-breed of corgis and dachshunds called “dorgis,” typically mixes with everyone over cocktails and then makes more extensive conversation with her two luncheon partners at the oval table in the 1844 Drawing Room or the Chinese Dining Room.

  As with her public events, the Queen enjoys mild mishaps. Once one of her corgis had an accident on the rug, prompting the Queen to signal her Master of the Household, Vice Admiral Sir Peter Ashmore, who retrieved an old-fashioned blotter from a nearby desk and dropped to his hands and knees to remove the stain—while everyone else pretended not to notice.

  That spring, Elizabeth II deployed her diplomatic skills on Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin, the newly installed leaders of the Soviet Union. The two tough-minded Cold War foes did not come to Britain on a state visit as the Queen’s guests. But they were eager to spend time with her, so she invited them to Windsor Castle. After meetings with Eden, they left London “looking very smart in new black suits and clean shirts and different ties.”

  The Russian leaders were enc
hanted by the monarch’s casual appearance. “She was dressed in a plain, white dress,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. “She looked like the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon.”

  The Queen gave them a guided tour and served each leader a glass of tea, Russian style. Philip quizzed them about Leningrad, while Elizabeth II inquired about their airplane, the TU-104, which she had seen flying over the castle on its descent into London Airport. Khrushchev was impressed that she “had such a gentle, calm voice. She was completely unpretentious, completely without the haughtiness that you’d expect of royalty.… In our eyes she was first and foremost the wife of her husband and the mother of her children.” In the car back to Claridge’s in London, the two Russians excitedly tried to top each other: “The Queen said to me …” “No, she said that to me!”

  THE TRANQUILLITY OF the spring and early summer was shattered by the Suez Crisis that escalated from mid-July until the end of the year. It began when Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by Britain and France through the Suez Canal Company. The 120-mile waterway linking the Mediterranean and Red Sea had long been a strategic conduit for the British navy, but was increasingly important for the transport of oil to Europe. Nasser sought to rid the region of British influence, chiefly its close alliance with the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan, and to set himself up as the Arab world’s dominant leader. Eden viewed Nasser, who had overthrown Egypt’s King Farouk four years earlier, as a dangerous dictator who should be stopped.