by Kitty Kelley
Without an advocate within the establishment, the couple were defeated. In anguish they bowed to the pressure and decided to part, knowing they could never see each other again. Townsend drafted a statement that the Princess approved, and her news was announced a week later when the BBC broke into its programming to read the text that was signed simply “Margaret”:
I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend…. Mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others. I have reached this decision entirely alone.
The Duke of Windsor felt outrage toward the establishment that had forced his niece to make her announcement. “The unctuous hypocritical cant and corn which has been provoked in the Times and Telegraph by Margaret’s renunciation of Townsend has been hard to take,” the Duke wrote to his wife. “The Church of England has won again but this time they caught their fly whereas I was wily enough to escape the web of an outmoded institution that has become no more than a government department….”
Many others felt profound sympathy for the Princess, and a few letters of protest were published, but the vast majority of the public accepted the sad fact that she had done the right thing in putting duty first. The church was omnipotent. “A picture has been built up in some quarters that the church started bullying a lonely girl into doing something she did not want to do,” said the Reverend Peter Gillingham, one of the Queen’s chaplains. “That is false. All the church did was to make plain what the church’s rules are.”
Embittered, Peter Townsend returned to Brussels, resigned from the Royal Air Force, and remarried a few years later. He lived in self-imposed exile in Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, and vowed never to return to England. In his autobiography he wrote that he would like his ashes scattered in France. “And if,” he concluded, “the wind, the south wind on which the swallows ride, blows them on towards England, then let it be. I shall neither know nor care.” Thirty-seven years later when he was dying of cancer, he slipped into London to have a quiet lunch with the Princess at Kensington Palace.
“It was a kind of good-bye,” said one friend who was present. Townsend, then silver haired but still handsome at seventy-seven, was suffering from stomach cancer, which he gallantly dismissed as “a little gastric disorder.” He died three years later with no regrets.
“Once a thing is behind you, you don’t look back,” he said. “Life might have been otherwise—but it wasn’t.”
The inflexibility toward divorce in royal circles had softened by then, but not the courtiers’ attitude toward that particular romance. “Quite simple, really: Duty before diddling. Country before courting,” said a former courtier. “We did what we had to do to protect the Crown, and, after that, we had to launch the first royal tour.”
After her coronation, the Queen had agreed to spend six months traveling forty thousand miles around the world to greet 750 million of her subjects who inhabited one-quarter of the earth’s surface and conducted one-third of the world’s trade. She planned to visit twelve countries, six colonies, four territories, and two dominions. She would hear 276 speeches, receive 6,770 curtsies, and shake 13,213 hands.
Eventually she would become the most traveled monarch in British history. But in 1953 her first royal tour was a stupendous undertaking that had never been attempted by any head of state. The Queen wanted to be the first, because she was determined to present herself to her subjects as something more than a figurehead.
“I want to show that the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity,” she said in her Christmas Day message from New Zealand, “but a personal and living bond between you and me.”
“That tour was a grueling, merciless trip for everyone,” recalled reporter Gwen Robyns, part of the small press contingent accompanying the Queen. “I was working for Evening News, the biggest circulation newspaper in the world at the time, and I watched the Queen every single day, every night, hourly sometimes. I can tell you that she could not have possibly survived that trip without the help of the Duke of Edinburgh.”
Highly disciplined, Elizabeth could stand for hours in the sun and ride a horse sidesaddle for miles. But interacting with people and having to make small talk with strangers for any extended period of time was a burden. She had grown up alone at Windsor Castle, spending her time with her sister, their servants, and their governess. She was not accustomed to accommodating others and did not know how to be socially ingratiating. Her gregarious husband, though, enjoyed bantering with others, exchanging quips, and being flirtatious.
“Philip was perfect for her, and she was blindingly in love with him,” said Gwen Robyns. “She was so young and unsure of herself as Queen. Very, very self-conscious as monarch. Painfully insecure. She did not know how to act or behave among so many people. But he was smooth and easy, more sophisticated. He’d jolly her into good humor, and warm her up for the crowds. She’d put on a grumpy face most of the time because she was overwhelmed, but he’d coax a smile out of her. He was disgusting to the press. ‘Here come the vultures,’ he’d say when he saw us. He threw peanuts at us in Malta, so we despised him, but we could see that he was truly marvelous for her. She brightened up around him. All he had to do was whisper in her ear and she glowed. Every time she was cross and sour, he charmed a laugh out of her. He made her look good. He really carried her on that trip.
“I remember in Australia when she was numbed into boredom by having to shake hundreds of sweaty hands in blistering 110-degree heat. She scowled and looked ugly until Philip turned and said, ‘Cheer up, sausage. It is not so bad as all that.’
“In New Zealand, the little Maori children were fairly jitterbugging with excitement to do their ‘party piece’ for her by jumping off the riverbank. But the Queen didn’t even look their way, and instead walked to her car. Philip saw what happened. ‘Look, Bet [diminutive for Lilibet],’ he said. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ The Queen turned and went back to look at the children.
“Philip was fiercely protective of her when her energy started flagging,” Gwen Robyns said. “He would leap to her side and wave off photographers, if he thought they were getting too close or might embarrass her. ‘Don’t jostle the Queen,’ he’d say. While he was great for her, he was boorish to others. I remember in South Australia the mayor of some little town was all got up in dreadful homemade robes of bunny rabbit fur to meet the Queen. He was about seventy years old, so sweet, so pathetic. He presented the Queen with a huge box, and in a quivering voice said: ‘Your Royal Highness’—poor thing, he was supposed to say Your Majesty—‘at this very moment, our Ambassador in London is presenting a similar box to your representative at the Palace.’
“ ‘Oh, my God, man,’ roared Philip. ‘Don’t you realize the ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between here and England? Your Ambassador is probably sound asleep right now.’
“The mayor wilted. He looked as if he’d been accosted. It was so sad to see him standing there in his sorry little costume, shaking and stammering apologies. ‘I should have thought of that,’ he said, berating himself. Here it was the day of his life and he’s crushed by the Duke of Edinburgh. Philip acted like a bastard.
“Naturally, I couldn’t report that kind of thing,” said Robyns, “or any other personal details. When I noticed that the Queen always took her shoes off, which seemed endearing and human, I noted in one of my dispatches: ‘The weary Queen slipped out of her shoes.’ I got a rocket from my editors saying, ‘Lay off the Queen. Buckingham Palace is furious with you.’ Another time I wrote that the Queen looked tired. We knew that she was bored stiff with the flags and bunting and all that red, white, and blue every time she turned around, so I wrote that she looked fatigued like the rest of us. Another rocket: Lay off the Queen. So I had to stop reporting the human side of the tour….”
The vigilant Palace tried to protect the Queen from herself. “They wanted to
hide her human side—or what there was of it,” said the Daily Telegraph’s Maurice Weaver. “I remember a royal visit to Papua New Guinea when the Queen was watching the natives perform a dance in their grass skirts. They were wearing circular necklaces made out of bones and twigs and strange coins. She turned to her equerry. ‘I feel these people need my effigy on their coins.’ So he rounded up the British reporters and asked them for their sovereigns.
“I filed a light story about the whip-around for the Queen and how we had to rustle up some coins. When the equerry found out, he banged on my hotel door in the middle of the night and demanded that I spike the story.
“ ‘It makes the Queen look poor,’ he said.
“ ‘Oh, rubbish,’ I said. ‘It’s a frothy little piece, and besides, no one expects the Queen to be carrying money.’ ”
He said he had not written the real story, which was the Queen’s pathetic noblesse oblige mentality about her poor benighted natives. So the froth stood. But he learned how sensitive the Palace was to the Queen’s press coverage. “We were not allowed to write anything other than what the Queen wore and how she looked,” he said. “The Palace press secretary would come out and feed us a description of Her Majesty in her green tulle gown, and we dutifully took it all down and reported it that way….”
As the Queen became more secure in her role, the Palace press office relaxed, but only slightly. “There’s an unwritten agreement,” said journalist Phillip Knightley, who accompanied the Queen on her first royal tour. “It’s as if the Palace said, ‘You need us to bring in your readers, most of whom love royal stories. We need you to tell the Queen’s subjects what she’s up to and what a wonderful person she is. So you can write anything you like about the royals—as long as you don’t question the actual institution of the monarchy.’ ”
Yet a soupçon of deference was expected. In New Zealand only the American press could get away with mentioning the Queen’s grammatical error. She had overheard two little girls arguing whether she was Queen Elizabeth or Princess Margaret. One said, “I tell you, it’s Princess Margaret.” The other said, “Is not. Is not. It’s the Queen.” With what Newsweek described as a “cavalier disregard for the Queen’s English,” the sovereign leaned over to the little girls and said: “No, it’s me.”
After years of travel the Queen eventually learned to carve a way for herself, but with great effort. “She was always proper, but never warm and ingratiating,” said Gwen Robyns. “Still, stilted, and remote, she held herself at a distance so she would never make a mistake, never put a foot wrong. She was so insecure that that was the only way she could handle her role. She’s not a woman who lights up in public like her mother, who on the surface is all bonnets, smiles, and feathers but underneath is steel—cold, hard steel with a marshmallow casing.”
Despite obvious discomfort in the spotlight, the young sovereign starred in no fewer than three films that were spun out of the royal tour. Six months after leaving London, she returned home to a rapturous welcome from her subjects, who lined the riverbanks as she sailed up the Thames on the royal yacht, Britannia. They understood that she would never be the crowd-pleasing actress her mother was, but they still appreciated her solid commitment to duty. They roared their approval as the royal yacht approached, and the Queen acknowledged their cheers with a stiff little wave. She, too, knew how lacking she was compared with her charismatic mother. Like her stolid father, she depended on an appealing spouse. She later acknowledged as much to close friends when she paid tribute to her husband. “Without Philip,” she said, “I could not have carried on.”
EIGHT
The monarchy was a distant train that had been bearing down on Elizabeth since she was ten years old. Growing up, she always heard it approaching. She knew that one day she would have to climb aboard; she never dreamed it would arrive so soon. At age twenty-five she was in a marriage just starting to bloom.
Before her father’s death forced her onto the throne, she had looked forward to being a wife and mother. After marrying, she said she wanted to have four children and devote herself to her family.
In the early years of her marriage, when faced with a choice between being a wife or mother, she always chose to be a wife. Her husband was her first priority—then. Before her son was born in 1948, she was quoted as saying, “I am going to be the child’s mother, not the nurses.” Yet when the role of mother conflicted with wife, she turned to the nurses.
She skipped her son’s first birthday to be with her husband, who was on naval duty in Malta. Leaving the little boy at home with his grandparents and nannies for several months, she missed his first step and his first tooth. His first word was not “Mama,” but “Nana,” the person closest to him, his beloved nanny. Elizabeth raised her children the way that she had been raised. As an infant she had been left with nannies for six months while her parents toured Australia and New Zealand, so she did not hesitate to leave her own children in the care of others. Occasionally she expressed a twinge of guilt.
“I don’t want someone else to raise my children,” she said before the birth of Princess Anne in 1950. Yet when her daughter was three months old, Elizabeth left her in the Palace nursery so she could travel with her husband. When the little girl had her tonsils and adenoids removed, her nanny took her to the Hospital for Sick Children and spent the night at her bedside. Her mother, not overly concerned, stayed at Windsor Castle.
“Royalty regard their children like cattle,” wrote John Gordon in the Daily Express after learning that the Queen stayed in bed the night Prince Charles was rushed to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for an emergency appendectomy at midnight. “People didn’t like the Queen’s failure to go to Prince Charles’s bedside when he was suffering,” wrote Gordon.
In 1952, when Elizabeth became the new Queen, she struggled to make room in her life for her family, but she no longer had time to be a mother. Instead she dedicated herself to the Crown and postponed having more children.
As the new sovereign, she knew she had to reign—to travel the world, make state visits, welcome world leaders, consult Parliament, deliver speeches, accept salutes, cut ribbons, bestow knight-hoods—and try to smile.
The obsessive-compulsive child, once described by her governess as “too methodical and tidy… too dutiful for her own good,” took over as she buried herself in the duties of the monarchy. “I didn’t have an apprenticeship,” she said later. “My father died much too young. It was all a very sudden kind of taking on, and making the best job you can….” She became zealous about answering her mail, making her speeches, doing her boxes, which held the government documents sent to her every day.
“Oh, those boxes,” said a former courtier many years later. “It was all too easy for her to say, ‘I’ve got two red boxes upstairs, that’s my constitutional duty, and I’d really rather do that than have a row with my son, daughter, or husband.’ Red boxes are a marvelous escape from family problems.”
Publicly Elizabeth looked like the ideal mother. Pictures of her with her handsome husband and her two young children appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines. She learned from her clever mother, who, as Queen, had authorized books such as The Family Life of Queen Elizabeth. She also arranged newspaper photo spreads called “Our Little Princesses at Home” and “Playtime at Royal Lodge” to foster the image of an idyllic royal family. Naturally Elizabeth grew up considering such orchestrated coverage a vital marketing tool for the monarchy. She felt that posing for photos was part of her job as Queen, and her husband felt the same way. “If you are really going to have a monarchy,” he said, “you have got to have a family, and the family has got to be in the public eye.”
Reordering her priorities, the Queen now placed the monarchy first, her marriage second, and her children third. “I think any idea of a family in the normal sense was knocked on the head by the Queen’s accession at such an early age,” said biographer Philip Ziegler. “I don’t think it was ever in her nature to be a close
parent, but in any case, it became impossible once she was swept up into the merry-go-round of royal activities.”
Still, she tried not to give up all her maternal responsibilities. “I must have some time for the children every day,” she said. She changed the hour of her weekly visit with the Prime Minister so she could see Charles, four, and Anne, two, before they went to bed, and she allowed them thirty minutes with her and Philip in the morning. Their nannies, Helen Lightbody and Mabel Anderson, took the children into the Queen’s sitting room at 9:00 A.M. for this visit every day and promptly whisked them away by 9:30 A.M., when she sat down at her desk to work. Usually Anne did not want to leave, but her brother would pull her away, saying, “Anne, you must not bother Mummy. She’s busy. She’s queening.”
The children spent the rest of the day with their nannies and nurses, the sturdy Scottish women with sensible black shoes and tightly permed hair, who fed them, dressed them, bathed them, and even slept in the same room with them. At 5:00 P.M.* every day, the nannies took the children back for another visit with their mother and father before taking them to the nursery for their baths and bedtime. The children saw their nannies more often than they ever saw their parents.
“A miserable childhood,” recalled Prince Charles years later, blaming his parents, especially his father, for his upbringing. One of his saddest recollections was growing up alone. He said that his father was rarely present for his birthdays and missed the first five. Instead his father sent him notes.
“Loneliness is something royal children have always suffered and always will,” said Lord Mountbatten, refusing to place blame on either parent. “Not much you can do about it, really.”
The romance novelist Barbara Cartland could not bring herself to fault the Queen as a mother. Instead she damned her by implication. “Charles was born when his mother was very young, so she didn’t spend an awful lot of time with him,” she said. “He was such an unhappy little boy growing up.”