by Kitty Kelley
The Queen’s dresser had a full-time job just laying out the Queen’s various outfits for the day and coordinating the morning and evening jewels she wanted to wear with each ensemble. The royal dresser felt insulted when she was interrupted by a White House usher to relay a message from the Queen to a lady-in-waiting.
“I am Her Majesty’s maid,” snapped the woman, “not a messenger girl.” The White House usher did not understand the difference. Britain’s rigid class system extended from the top of society to the bottom, or “the lower orders,” as they were commonly called. In the hierarchy of royal service, household servants came first. They even had their own sitting room and dining room in the Palace. From their lofty perch, they looked down upon the stewards, clerks, and stenographers and refused to perform duties they deemed beneath them.
The King and Queen seemed unruffled by the fuss among their underlings. They felt at home in the country atmosphere of Hyde Park, especially when they found a tray of cocktails awaiting their arrival.
“My mother thinks you should have a cup of tea,” said the President. “She doesn’t approve of cocktails.”
“Neither does my mother,” said the King, gratefully reaching for a drink.
When the King and Queen returned to London, they dined with the U.S. Ambassador, and the Queen related this and other homey details of the Roosevelts’ picnic for them at Hyde Park. She mentioned the emotional farewell she and the King received when hundreds of people gathered at the train station and spontaneously started singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
Ambassador Kennedy had read the glowing press accounts of the royal visit to America in 1939. “The British sovereigns have conquered Washington, where they have not put a foot wrong,” wrote Arthur Krock in The New York Times, “and where they have left a better impression than even their most optimistic advisers could have expected.”
“They have a way of making friends, these young people,” said Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even Kennedy, an isolationist, was impressed. But over dinner, as the Queen inched the conversation toward American foreign policy, he flared.
“What the American people fear more than anything else is being involved in a war,” he told her. “They say to themselves, ‘Never again!’ and I can’t say I blame them. I feel the same way.”
“I feel that way, too, Mr. Kennedy,” said the Queen. “But if we had the United States actively on our side, working with us, think how that would strengthen our position with the dictators.”
The President agreed with the Queen. Within months Roosevelt asked for Kennedy’s resignation. When the President heard that the Ambassador had told his private secretary, “Roosevelt and the kikes are taking us into war,” FDR told his wife, “I never want to see that son of a bitch again.” By that time the Ambassador—he relinquished the position but never the title—was despised in England for his appeasement policies. “He left London during the Blitz,” said Conor O’Clery, Washington correspondent for the Irish Times, “and the British never forgave him.”
The Queen did not have to resort to a hard sell with her American show business friends. The feeling among artists and entertainers was that if Britain were involved in a war, the United States was bound to come in sooner or later, because living in a totalitarian world was unthinkable.
The Queen was naturally drawn to show business people. The American theatrical producer Jack Wilson enjoyed special access to the Palace because he was the close friend and business partner of Noel Coward, who was the Queen’s favorite playwright and part of her high camp coterie. After the abdication, Coward had endeared himself by suggesting that statues of Wallis Simpson be erected throughout England for the blessing she had bestowed on the British. “She gave us you,” he said, “and saved us all from the reign of King Edward VIII.” So when Wilson telephoned the Queen to say hello in 1939, he was immediately invited for tea.
Jack Wilson arrived at Windsor Castle and was escorted through the grand dining room, where the King and Queen had hired an artist to paint the backs of the Constable, Reynolds, and Gainsborough canvases with the cartoon faces of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to liven up the gloomy atmosphere for their children. Wilson was amused when the King’s footman confided this small detail of royal family life. The servant then tiptoed across the Aubusson carpet, reached up, and slyly turned over a gilded portrait of Charles II to reveal the goofy grin of Walt Disney’s floppy-eared dog Pluto.
Wilson followed the footman into the Queen’s sitting room, where her thirteen-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was playing on the floor. Wilson smiled at the youngster and greeted her pleasantly.
“Well, hello there, cutie pie,” he said. “How’re you doing today?”
The footman froze, unable to continue into the room. The youngster stared hard at the producer. Then she raised her arm and pointed to the floor.
“Bow, boy, bow,” she told the forty-year-old man.
The teenage heir to the throne had been trained to demand her royal entitlements.
“And you know what I did?” said the producer, laughing as he recalled his introduction to the young woman who would become the sixty-third sovereign of the oldest royal house in Europe. “I bowed my arse off because that little girl scared the living bejabbers out of me.”
The Lord Chamberlain had had a similar experience when he encountered the Princess in a Palace corridor.
“Good morning, little lady,” he said.
“I’m not a little lady,” she snapped. “I’m Princess Elizabeth.”
Hearing the youngster’s uppity tone disturbed Queen Mary, her grandmother. An hour later the elderly Queen had her granddaughter in tow as she knocked on the Lord Chamberlain’s door.
“This is Princess Elizabeth,” announced Queen Mary, “who hopes one day to be a lady.”
Days later the Princess, in a fury, demanded a favor of her governess. The governess said no, but the Princess persisted. Finally she shouted: “This is royalty speaking.” Her mother remonstrated: “Royalty has never been an excuse for bad manners.”
Still, the young Princess never learned to conceal her imperiousness. From the age of ten she had been reared as the next Queen of England.* Platoons of liveried butlers, footmen, and chauffeurs bowed to her whenever she entered a room, and maids, nannies, and dressers fell to the floor in obeisant curtsies. And whenever she entered or departed the royal houses of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, Balmoral, and Birkall, the scarlet-uniformed guards at the gates snapped to attention and performed the stately exercise of “presenting arms”—saluting her with a rifle or saber.
This royal treatment fascinated her. The first time she discovered the attention she commanded, she slipped away from her nurse and paraded back and forth in front of the Palace guard, who clicked his heels, raised his rifle, and stood ramrod straight each time she passed.
Her name was given to bone china, to hospitals, and even to chocolates. Her wax figure, sitting on the white pony she received for her fourth birthday, stood in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Flags were flown on her birthday, and her face appeared on a six-cent stamp in Newfoundland. Her portrait hung in the Royal Academy, and her picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine. This reverence worried her father, who wrote to his mother, Queen Mary: “It almost frightens me that the people should love her so much. I suppose it is a good thing, and I hope she will be worthy of it, poor little darling.”
The young Princess had a few ordinary experiences, such as Christmas shopping at Woolworth’s, riding in the top deck of a bus, and traveling incognito on the underground. But she had never ridden in a taxi or placed her own telephone call. She was so protected that she had never contracted the childhood diseases of measles or chicken pox.* Her usual transportation consisted of a horse-drawn carriage, where she sat with her mother and grandmother, or the royal train with its nine cream leather coaches, gold-plated ventilators, gold electric light fixtures, and gold telephone. She was always accompanied by her gove
rness, Marion (“Crawfie”) Crawford; her guardian and dresser, Margaret (“BoBo”) MacDonald; and her nurse, Clare (“Allah”) Knight.
“We used to say that the first thing Nanny teaches a royal is how to ring for service,” said a Palace employee. The youngster, who called herself Lilibet, certainly had learned that lesson well. By the age of seven she also knew her place in the line of succession.
“I’m three and you’re four,” she told her younger sister.
“No, you’re not,” said Margaret Rose, who thought her sister was talking about their ages. “I’m three and you’re seven.”
Knowing that his oldest daughter, Elizabeth, would follow him to the throne, the new King decided that she should be better prepared for her role than he was for his. He had been traumatized by the prospect of giving up grouse shooting every day to become King.
Minutes before his brother’s abdication, he told his cousin Louis Mountbatten: “This is the most awful thing that has ever happened to me. I’m completely unfitted [sic] to be King. I’ve had no education for it.”
He said that would not happen to his daughter, whom he began tutoring at an early age. He instructed her in the ceremonial duties of being a sovereign, and he made her study on her feet so she would become accustomed to long hours of standing in heavy robes to have her portrait painted. He told her she must keep a daily diary and showed her how to review troops and take a salute. He also shared the red boxes containing top-secret state papers that were delivered to him every day. Soon she approached new tasks by asking: “Will I have to do this when Papa dies?”
The first time her younger sister saw the King’s equerry call for Elizabeth and escort her to the King’s study to “do the boxes,” she was curious.
“Does this mean that you will have to be the next Queen?” Margaret asked.
“Yes, someday,” replied Elizabeth.
“Poor you,” said Margaret Rose, who was disgusted when her father became King and the family had to move into Buckingham Palace.
“What?” Margaret had asked. “Do you mean forever? I hate all this. I used to be Margaret Rose of York, and now I’m Margaret Rose of nothing.”
But Elizabeth was wide-eyed when she saw a letter on the hall table addressed to “Her Majesty the Queen.”
“That’s Mummie now, isn’t it,” she said, awestruck.
By 1939 Lilibet was prefacing her sentences with “When I become Queen…”
“She makes it very plain to the Queen [her mother] that whereas she, the Queen, is a commoner, she, Princess Elizabeth, is of royal blood,” said the Duke of Devonshire.
Although four years separated the two Princesses, they were reared as twins, and until they were teenagers, their mother dressed them identically in matching brown oxfords, coats with velvet collars, and little hats fastened on their heads by elastic bands. Featured frequently in the newspapers and newsreels, they became the paradigm for how all little girls should dress, sit, walk, talk, and behave.
The two Princesses played games together and performed plays and pantomimes for their parents on the stage built for them at Windsor Castle. Their mother liked to sing dance hall songs, while the King enjoyed dancing in a conga line. Their world, once described by their father as “us four,” was filled with dogs and horses and servants but very few friends. They listened to Bing Crosby records, took weekly dancing classes, played the piano, and sang constantly. Because their mother stressed music over mathematics, they excelled at the former and neglected the latter.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Britain declared war. Soon women and children were evacuated from London. The two Princesses remained in seclusion at Windsor for the next five years, traveling to London only to see the dentist. The Palace issued a statement that Princess Elizabeth, the heir presumptive,* was discontinuing her German lessons and, in another ploy for American intervention, would start studying U.S. history. Nothing was said about the education of Princess Margaret because she did not count: she was only a spare to the heir. Later, when Margaret wanted to study history with her sister’s Eton tutor, she was told, “It is not necessary for you.” Margaret exploded, “I was born too late!”
The biggest investment of time and attention was made in Elizabeth as the future sovereign, and she became as orderly, dutiful, and responsible as her father. “She is exactly the daughter that plain, conscientious King George and matronly Queen Elizabeth deserve,” said Time magazine. “And that is precisely what her future subjects want her to be.” Elizabeth shared her father’s passion for horses, grouse shooting, and deer stalking. Like him, she did not much enjoy going to church. When a minister in Scotland promised to give her a book, she thanked him and asked that it not be about God. “I know everything about Him,” she said.
She inherited her father’s broad vaudevillian sense of humor, and together they laughed at the exaggerated antics of slapstick clowns wearing droopy drawers and doing pratfalls. Margaret, more like her mother, preferred sophisticated comedy and drawing room repartee. She was so spoiled as a child that her servants found her “terrible” and “absolutely impossible,” but her proud and indulgent parents saw her outrageous behavior as merely “entertaining and engaging.” They didn’t bother holding Margaret accountable because she was never going to be Queen. As she once joked: “I don’t have to be dour and dutiful like Lilibet. I can be as beastly as I want.”
Inside the fortress of Windsor Castle the two Princesses bickered on occasion but became each other’s best friends for life, with the older sister assuming the mentor’s role.
“Margaret almost forgot to say ‘Thank you,’ Crawfie,” Elizabeth reported to her governess, “but I gave her a nudge, and she said it beautifully.”
Yet when Elizabeth became patrol leader for her own troop of Girl Guides, she spared no one, including her chatterbox sister.
“Here,” she told Margaret, “I am not your sister, and I’ll permit no slackness.”
Margaret stuck out her tongue, not at all intimidated by her future sovereign. “You look after your empire,” she told her at one point, “and I’ll look after myself.”
Nor was Margaret above berating the future Queen of England for overeating, especially when she indulged in sweets.
“Lilibet,” she said, “that’s the fourteenth chocolate biscuit you’ve eaten. You’re as bad as Mother—you don’t know when to stop.”
Mother knew best how to handle her outspoken younger daughter. She simply ignored her, declining to react to any of Margaret’s taunts.
“Mummy, why are you wearing those dreadful hairpins?” Margaret asked her mother one day. “They do not match your hair.”
“Oh, darling,” said the Queen before gliding off with a smile. “Are they really so awful?”
The two little Princesses shared the small, isolated world of royalty, where everyone tried to entertain them because that’s what the King and Queen wanted—especially the King, who felt guilty that the war was depriving his daughters of a normal life. “Poor darlings,” he wrote in his diary, “they have never had any fun yet.” So he seized every opportunity to amuse them.
When Noel Coward began filming In Which We Serve, the movie based on the heroic exploits of Louis Mountbatten and the ship he commanded, HMS Kelly, the King and Queen were invited to visit the set, and they took the two little Princesses, who were entranced by the world of make-believe.
The King enjoyed the company of the glamorous Mountbatten, despite his excessive ambition and blatant self-promotions. The King secretly envied his cousin’s dashing style and easy charm as he sailed along the surface of life without dropping anchor. The King even tolerated Mountbatten’s exaggerated vanity and seemed more amused than offended when he took his medals and decorations on tour, producing them with theatrical flourish from a custom-built box with stacks of trays: “Did I show you my Star of Nepal?” The Queen was not so impressed. She distrusted Mountbatten because of his continuing friendship with the exiled Duke of Windsor, and years
later, when he was Viceroy of India, she blamed him “for giving away the empire.” Nor did she like his sleek, elegant wife, Edwina, who had inherited an immense fortune from her grandfather, Sir Edward Cassel. From her father she inherited Broadlands, the family estate in Hampshire.
“She’s only partly English, you know,” the Queen told one of her ladies-in-waiting. “Her mother was half-Jewish.” The implication was that the “half-Jewish” part accounted for Edwina’s taste in jazz, fast cars, cocktail parties, and moonlight swims in the nude—all unacceptable to the Queen, who now saw herself as the embodiment of English respectability.
“The Queen was far too clever to slam with a sledgehammer,” said John Barratt, Mountbatten’s private secretary. “She despised Edwina, who was named one of the best-dressed women in the world and looked like a gazelle in her Chanel suits, while the Queen made her suits look like slipcovers on fire hydrants. But the Queen never overtly sliced Edwina up. Rather, her cuts were sly and deftly delivered, even in death. When Lady Mountbatten died in her sleep in 1960, the Queen, who by then was the Queen Mother, attended the funeral service in Romsey Abbey but returned to Clarence House to view the burial at sea on television. As Edwina’s coffin was lowered into the water, she smiled and said: ‘Oh, my. Edwina always did want to make a splash.’ ”
During the early days of their reign, the King and Queen felt insecure as they struggled to lift the weight of Edward’s abdication from the throne. They worried that Winston Churchill was stealing their limelight. “K. and Q. feel Winston puts them in the shade,” the Conservative MP Victor Cazalet wrote in his diary of June 1940. After visiting with the King’s courtiers, he wrote, “We talk of K. and how Winston quite unconsciously has put them [King and Queen] in background. Who will tell him?”