by Andrew Marr
For Uncle Dickie also provided an unsettling link with Uncle David. After their expedition to India, when Mountbatten married his heiress Edwina Ashley at a glittering society wedding, the future Edward VIII was his best man. The Mountbattens were key members of the Prince’s ‘set’ and remained close friends during his brief reign. Though he disapproved of the abdication, fighting vigorously as a member of the ‘King’s party’ alongside Churchill, Mountbatten kept in close touch with the exiled former monarch, offered to be his best man when he married Mrs Simpson and later passed messages between him and the court. He was on hand to rescue the pair from France in 1940 as the Germans closed in. He was the middle man in negotiations about titles and money after the war, and he did his best to repair relations. Unsuccessfully: Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother did not forgive the Duke of Windsor for his dereliction of duty.
Mountbatten had a greater sense of duty and was much more energetic than Edward, and always deplored the abdication. But he and Edwina had the same relaxed attitude to infidelity, and like the former king, Mountbatten was thought a bit ‘too much’. He certainly lived in high style and had an almost endearing streak of vanity. He and Montgomery once counted each other’s medals and when Mountbatten found he had one decoration fewer, he got himself awarded two more. He was inclined to woo the media rather than shunning them. For the Windsor dynasty, who had come to believe that success was about being comparatively quiet and subdued, it may have seemed a dangerously flamboyant style which had been tested and found wanting back in the 1930s. After the Duke of Windsor died Mountbatten claimed, perhaps more kindly than accurately, that he had been ‘my best friend all my life’.27
The Queen Mother had spread a strong antipathy to that best friend throughout her family, and it is possible that a certain suspicion of Mountbatten passed to her daughter. It would not be surprising if there was a certain ambiguity about him in the Duke’s mind too. So Mountbatten’s strong influence on Prince Charles is a little more complicated than it might first seem. He was, as Charles said of himself while laying the wreath at Mountbatten’s funeral, an ‘honorary grandson’ who had been emotionally supported by the older man for many years. This, however, is a story that must wait. If George V, her grandfather, Uncle David, Mountbatten and, of course, her father, George VI, were all shaping influences on the Queen, so too – of course – was her mother.
Queen Elizabeth
Queen Elizabeth as she was properly known, or the Queen Mother, as she was mostly known for the second half of her life, ended up as much loved granny figure. ‘Mummy’ to the Queen, to millions of her subjects she was an idealized doughty old duck, with a twinkle in her eye and a decent-sized drink near at hand. She seemed to have been always there. For almost everyone alive by the year 2000 that was literally true. Born in 1900, she lived for slightly more than the twentieth century. She was alive during the reigns of six monarchs: Queen Victoria, Edward VII, her father-in-law George V, Edward VIII, her husband George VI and her daughter Elizabeth II. To Britons old enough to remember, she was above all a living link to the Second World War and the Blitz in particular. Her comment after Buckingham Palace was bombed, that at last she could ‘now look the East End in the face’, was the most famous thing she ever said.
She seemed to some to overshadow her daughter when the two were present together. The Queen’s family say she depended heavily on her mother as a sounding-board and source of fun. She was a flirt with men and well into her nineties enjoyed the company of a male with a raffish twinkle in his eye. She liked stories about ‘naughty’ friends and relatives and recommended the stories of Maupassant about love and romance. She possessed natural charisma, shrewd intelligence and could be very funny. The ballet choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton was a favourite dancing partner of the Queen Mother’s at Sandringham when balls were held there. She would gesture to him when she wanted to dance. Once, as he went over to take her hand, the Queen herself interposed and suggested he dance with her. You cannot refuse your monarch. As they twirled round, passing the Queen Mother’s table, she hissed at Ashton: ‘Social climber!’
A good joke; and a characteristic one. For half her life she was a widow, but in general a merry one, whose role in the inner sanctum of ‘the Firm’ was enormously important. Strongly opinionated and occasionally steely to the point of cruelty, she was more interesting than her later public image of a little old lady who liked horses and gin-and-tonics and big pink hats. For one thing her drink of choice was gin and Dubonnet, a dreadful concoction, a taste for which she passed to her daughter. With those she felt relaxed around, she liked an argument and liked to win it, just as she liked to win at ‘Racing Demon’ – enough, it has to be said, to indulge in some outrageous cheating. Her husband’s official biographer said of her that Queen Elizabeth had ‘a small drop of arsenic at the centre of that marshmallow’.28 She was famously vague about money and totted up large overdrafts. Yet her charisma, which in her day certainly rivalled that of Diana in hers, and her tough sense of Christian duty (the two were not alike in every way) kept her out of trouble.
Her strongly conservative views stayed mostly private and she became adept at blocking dangerous questions, or simply ignoring ‘unwise’ subjects, strategies passed down to her daughter. Nor was her conservatism simply partisan Tory beliefs. Queen Elizabeth was, for instance, passionately hostile to the Social Democratic Party, formed in the 1980s – but not because it was left of centre. She disliked the SDP because it had broken away from, and damaged, ‘the good old Labour Party’. For her, loyalty was all. If Lord Stamfordham was the commoner who, with George V, created the House of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth was the aristocratic commoner who gave it much of its style and many of its codes.
‘Commoner’ might seem an odd word to use of the youngest daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, whose castle at Glamis in Angus could have been a setting for Disneyworld. Yet Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon, a vivacious, zest-filled and apparently sexy little dumpling of a girl, eventually became the first non-Royal to benefit from George V’s rewriting of the family rules in 1917. She may have been brought up in a privileged family, with its fair share of bloodthirsty history, cads and romantic martyrs, and in a home with many ancient royal connections, but when she finally joined the royal family in 1923 she was looked on as an outsider and felt intimidated herself. The lack of precedent meant there was a rather pompous official debate about how exactly she would be described as the Duke of York’s wife, and whether she would be a Royal Highness (she would). She herself replied to one of her oldest friends who had written asking how to address her: ‘I really don’t know! It might be anything – you might try “All Hail Duchess”, that is an Alice in Wonderland sort of Duchess, or just “Greetings” or “What Ho, Duchess” or “Say, Dutch” – in fact you can please yourself . . .’29
Elizabeth had spent most of her girlhood in her family’s southern house, St Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire, with no fewer than nine older brothers and sisters. The girl called ‘Buffy’ by her family lived the golden Edwardian idyll as it still existed for a few, surrounded by servants and immaculate lawns, completely isolated from the Britain of Suffragette protests, trade union strikes and bitter political argument. It was a childhood of woodland rambles and hideouts, horses and shooting parties, candlelit balls, in-jokes and family sing-alongs. Elizabeth attended school only sporadically and most of her education came from governesses, in particular a young German woman who wrote in amazement about the grandness and extravagance of life at Glamis Castle just before the First World War. This lost world would leave some mark on ‘Buffy’s’ daughter, because it put a very secure and self-certain woman at the heart of the Windsor dynasty. She would pass on much more than a love of horses and a fierce belief in family loyalty to the current Queen.
The war brought out the old spirit of noblesse oblige as Glamis and St Paul’s Walden Bury were used for convalescent soldiers, Lady Strathmore presiding over her hospitals. The tee
nage Elizabeth knitted endlessly, packaged presents for troops at the Front and stuffed sleeping bags. At Glamis, she grew used to mingling with injured, plain-speaking working-class men, an experience that would later help with her ‘common touch’. During the war one brother, in the Black Watch, was killed; another was taken prisoner (another had already died after a cricket injury a few years earlier). Alongside the privilege there was loss, grief and much dependence on Christian prayer and church attendance, a quality inherited in due course by her daughter.
Scottish-British patriotism and a passionate dislike of Germans were rooted in Elizabeth’s character long before the rise of Hitler. So, it has to be said, was her gusto for life – food, music, dancing, parties, uncorked as soon as the war ended. She was better educated than her own daughter, but conspicuously failed at an open exam, writing afterwards, ‘DAMN THE EXAM!! . . . What was the use of toiling down to that – er – place Hackney? None, I tell you none. It makes me boil with rage to think of that vile stuff, tapioca, eating for – nothing? Oh hell . . . Yes, I am very disappointed . . .’30 Given the later criticism of her for failing to give Princess Elizabeth a better and wider education, the tapioca may have a lot to answer for. When she kept refusing Bertie, apart from being uncertain about him, Elizabeth may have been properly nervous about the implications of becoming a ‘Royal’. This was an intensely formal, frock-coated and traditionalist court, presided over by a somewhat forbidding monarch. In a highly revealing letter to Bertie, she wrote of Frogmore, the house by Windsor Castle where Victoria’s mausoleum was built: ‘Having never seen Frogmore, I imagine it as a large white Tomb full of frogs! I can’t think why, but that is the impression it gives me – isn’t it silly?’31 She liked jazz and nightclubs, and ran into trouble with George V when she and Bertie stayed out until 3 a.m. at a nightclub, the Follies, at London’s Metropole Hotel.
William Shawcross, Elizabeth’s official biographer, wrote that upon her marriage she was entering ‘a sort of golden incarceration. The young Duchess could no longer go shopping alone; she could not travel on trains alone, or on buses at all. She was no longer able to see her friends as spontaneously as she loved to do . . . All in all, the Duchess was isolated and restricted in a way she had never been before.’32 Her situation was, in short, strikingly similar to that of another young aristocratic woman who entered the family in 1981. Like Diana, she proved an early hit with the public. Like Diana, she made a particular success of an early tour of Australia, overshadowing – as Diana did – her husband. Her smile was endlessly discussed. Like her daughter, today’s Queen, she would grit her teeth and head off on extended royal tours leaving her own children behind. If the Queen Mother and Princess Diana fell out perhaps it was because of echoes in their stories, as well as their differences of character and temperament. But did they? It is most unlikely that we will ever know what they really felt about one another. As we shall see, Queen Elizabeth’s daughter Princess Margaret burned the evidence in an inferno almost as tantalizing for the historian as the immolation of Lord Byron’s diaries in his publisher’s grate. Did the older Queen pass on tips and advice about the rare trick of becoming royal?
By the time the present Queen was born, her mother had already shown herself to be far wilier and shrewder than Diana would be. Elizabeth won over her growling father-in-law with apologetic letters, tact and charm. Formidable Queen Mary, pleased with her effect on her son, thawed too. And Elizabeth was quick to do her new duty as a cadet Windsor, picking up patronage duty, visiting duty, opening-things duty as if born to it. Above all though, despite those repeated refusals and perhaps against expectations, and certainly unlike Diana, she was sustained by a very happy marriage. Her influence on her daughter was perhaps less than her husband’s.
She did not pass on her flirtatiousness or enthusiasm for racy gossip. The current Queen is more careful of money and more reserved than her mother was, and takes life more seriously. Yet when she died at the ripe age of 101 the Queen lost an extraordinarily close lifelong companion as well as a mother. Queen Elizabeth perhaps did her daughter her best service by passing on a passion for horse-racing, a world within a world where the Queen has been able to lighten up and forget human bloodlines for the even chancier business of equine ones.
Part Two
LILIBET
By now the reader might be feeling that in a book about the Queen we have spent long enough on her older relatives. But without knowing about them, it is quite impossible to understand her. Everyone is the product of family; but in the Royals’ case the fusion of the personal and public makes the family history particularly significant. Almost everything about the Queen’s public behaviour, from the time she spends with official boxes of paperwork and her attitude to public engagements and church services, to her annual pilgrimages from Windsor to Sandringham and Balmoral, or her solemnity in public and her suspicion of journalists, thrums and whirrs with the conscious DNA of Windsor traditions. The two last Georges, their Queens, and lesser royals of the twentieth century loom large today in the palaces. They hang in paintings, stare back from photographs and leave traces everywhere, in the furnishings and knick-knacks they once chose.
Of course Queen Victoria also casts a special spell in the rooms and palaces she created. She was the builder, in physical terms and in creating atmosphere. Her famous sense of morality, not overwhelmingly evident in British monarchy before, somehow suffuses the institution still, like background static. Without this history the Queen would not be the Queen. Without it Britain would be a slightly different place. The Hanoverians and Windsors have distinctive faces but a wide range of temperaments, from dutiful to reckless, careful to carefree, pious to naughty. The Queen is clearly on the dutiful, careful and pious end of the register. Even in very early photos, she stares back with a calm, unruffled and distinctly Windsor self-assurance.
So where do we start? At the birth of the first daughter, in the middle of a national crisis, to the second son of the King in a private house in central London? At a writing desk in Sagana Lodge in Kenya twenty-five years later, where a composed young woman is catching up on holiday letters, when her husband walks in to tell her that her father has died of a heart attack? Or at one of the dramatic moments in her long life after that, such as the apparent assassination attempt when she was riding her horse in the Mall? Different biographers have gone for different moments; but the true story of a human life begins with birth and the earliest years: this life is no different. The Queen was born into a world of quiet, calm, order and privilege. But outside the walls of 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, where she was delivered by Caesarean section at 2.40 a.m. on 21 April 1926, Britain was a riven nation.
Days later, on 3 May, a General Strike would begin, which many thought would be the start of a socialist or communist revolution of the kind that had swept away some of the baby’s relatives in Europe nine years before. As it happened, Britain would be spared political upheaval. The conservative, patriotic temperament of the middle classes would be shored up by its monarchy; and Elizabeth, whose birth was greeted by a modest group of well-wishers outside, would become its greatest twentieth-century monarch. One of the shrewdest historians of the period, David Cannadine, says she was a child of two worlds: ‘She is a child of aristocracy, her mother of course was an aristocrat, not a Royal, and she was a child of empire – her father and her grandfather were emperors of India, and that was part of the apparently eternal order of things in 1926.’1
Bruton Street today is a small street of expensive art galleries, restaurants and car showrooms between Berkeley Square, where once the nightingales sang, and New Bond Street, where the fashion victims stalk. The Strathmores’ house has been knocked down. In 1926, the Queen’s parents were staying there after rejecting life in a pretty but unmodernized stuccoed country house in Richmond Park, which had been offered to them by the King – and which is now the Royal Ballet School, featured in the plimsolls-to-fame tale Billy Elliot. They had wanted somewhere more central, more
convenient and cosier.
Four physicians of the utmost fame attended the Duchess and after a difficult labour, Buckingham Palace was told of the birth of a daughter early the following morning. During those tumultuous days leading to the General Strike the Duke of York was anxiously attending Commons debates. The King had made his feelings of private sympathy for the miners clear to one coal-owner: ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them’ he had replied to Lord Durham’s outburst against ‘damned revolutionaries’. (The interests of monarchy are not identical to the interests of big money; monarchy needs stability even more than money does.)
George V’s government felt it was facing social breakdown and anarchy and was mobilizing the middle and upper classes to do their bit against the trade unions’ militant eruption. The home secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a peppery man, was obliged to break off preparations for the political crisis to be present at the princess’s birth. This was a silly old tradition, said to date back to the suspicion that James II’s wife smuggled in a male baby after a fake pregnancy, part of a Catholic plot which provoked the invasion of Britain by the Dutch in 1688. It probably had more to do with the old habit of courtiers crowding round the Royals at important moments, even into the birthing rooms. Either way, even in 1926 it felt a bit odd. Having a sense of tradition also means knowing which traditions to quietly drop.
In all this, one might have expected the Queen’s birth to be little discussed. Though she was third in line to the throne, her uncle and his brother were both still comparatively young men. If her mother produced a son later on he would, under British laws of succession, have immediately leap-frogged Elizabeth. So it did not seem particularly likely that this golden-haired infant would one day reign. It is worth remembering that had George VI, her father, lived to a decent age, he could still have been on the throne well into the 1970s. Yet the birth of the Duke of York’s daughter did capture the attention of newspapers, perhaps scrabbling around in dark days for some good, light news, and did attract an immediate small crowd in the street, which stayed for weeks. One newspaper speculated about her becoming a future Queen Elizabeth; but the overall tone was simply one of welcome for another young member of what was, by modern standards, still a small royal family, rather short on children.