The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  Elizabeth was christened in Buckingham Palace with water from the River Jordan and cried during the service. She was soon put under the wing of Clara Cooper, or ‘Alah’ Knight, the brisk, lanky daughter of a Hertfordshire farmer who had looked after her mother from one month old. That summer the baby was taken to Glamis Castle, her mother’s family’s home, then back to London. But by January 1927, when she was nine months old, her parents left her for a 30,000-mile, six-month sea voyage to Australia and New Zealand. Her mother was upset to leave the baby; but the Empire called. Elizabeth would stay behind with her nurse and grandparents. Before she could have been conscious of it, the competing demands of royal work and family life were tugging in opposite directions. Is this proof of the brutal assessment of one royal librarian, who said that ‘the House of Hanover, like ducks, produce bad parents; they trample on their young . . .’2 Not really.

  In the 1920s the upper classes saw far less of their children than would be considered normal now. Nurses, nannies and boarding schools left parents freer to pursue their adult lives. Today, we might think it heartless. Then it was ordinary. Beyond that, however, the weight of Crown and Empire rested on the Windsors with a gravity outsiders cannot properly understand. For seventy years, five monarchs – Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI – carried the ‘I’ of Imperator, or Emperor, after the ‘R’ of kingship, and RI meant a global role. These people felt they themselves were a part of world history and had the job of carrying the story through to the next generation. If there were doubts about the longer-term loyalty of Australia and New Zealand to the Empire, then it was absolutely the job of the family to do their best to mend things. The yearning of a mother for a baby was a lesser matter. Hard choices; tougher people.

  In fact, Elizabeth had a warmer upbringing than many of the children of the great aristocratic dynasties of inter-war Britain. Hers was a close, physically affectionate family. We know a lot about that upbringing because of the indiscretion of the Princess’s governess, Marion Crawford, who lived with the family for sixteen years, from 1933 to 1949, and who then wrote a book, The Little Princesses, in 1950 about her experiences. Crawford, a Scottish teacher who had wanted to work with deprived children, had been recommended to the Yorks by titled relatives and became by all accounts a dedicated and energetic tutor to the girls. Since her book was published more than sixty years ago, former royal servants have gone public with much ruder and wilder accounts of life at Buckingham Palace. Crawford’s book contains not a single damning fact or serious embarrassment of any kind. Elizabeth emerges as very serious and orderly but sweet-natured, kind and loving. Yet when ‘Crawfie’s’ book was published, the retired governess was brutally cut off from all contact with the royal family. After a short and ignominious career as a magazine journalist she went into effective exile, having long delayed her marriage – not a happy one, in the end. When she died, no member of the royal family came to her funeral. Her name is never mentioned.

  This is a story worth dwelling on. It is a strange one. ‘Crawfie’, after all – the nickname was given to her by Elizabeth herself – was someone who knew the Queen intimately and for a long time, during her formative years. Perhaps it was the fact that ‘Crawfie’ felt almost like family that made her behaviour seem so hurtful. Her crime was by today’s standards a comparatively venial one: her affection, even adoration, for her charges shines through her writing. So why the intense anger, the guillotine blade of silence? The answer is that she was the first. Before her no intimate of the Windsors had ‘blabbed’. Royal life is not private in the way most of us understand privacy. Even when not on public view the royal family is almost constantly surrounded by valets, maids, butlers, police protection officers, drivers and the like. Royal family members barely draw an unobserved breath. They know there is an insatiable interest in the smallest aspects of their lives and the briefest comment they make. Few of us could a bear a life under constant surveillance and commentary – imagine being watched while eating breakfast, brushing your hair, dressing, exercising, finishing a last night-time drink. So the discreet silence of those around them is not merely convenient. It is basic to living a tolerable life, to having some at least semi-private space. Inside Buckingham Palace, even senior aides take great care to avoid bumping into the Queen or Duke by accident; this is to give them a little space of their own.

  So, there is a shield wall around the senior Royals. Inside it, utter loyalty is expected. Crawford did not simply tell a few bland stories about the colour of wallpapers, or sweet things little Princess Margaret said. She yanked open the curtain on a sensitive part of Princess Elizabeth’s life, her childhood and adolescent years, when the Queen’s personality was forming. Having done that, Crawford continued writing about her, from presumed knowledge, in the press. Imagine how Elizabeth must have felt, eyeing up old and trusted staff in front of whom she needed to be occasionally off guard and relaxed, and wondering always – will your book be the next one? Back in the 1950s Elizabeth had no way of knowing how intrusively her family’s lives would be prodded, not least by renegade members of the family itself. Marion Crawford may have been silly, even greedy, but she was not wicked nor, by her lights, disloyal. With royalty there are harsher rules. Cross a line and you are exiled.

  And yet, having said all this, anyone truly interested in the Queen has had their imagination fed for years on the anecdotes and descriptions Crawford gave. The historian A. N. Wilson has gone as far as to say that because she lived so long with the princesses, and because childhood is the most interesting part of life, ‘Crawfie will remain the most important Royal historian of the twentieth century and her book will deserve to be read when all the constitutional experts and all the spies at Royal keyholes of the present generation have been forgotten.’3 By royal standards, if not by Crawfie’s, it makes sense to call this disloyalty.

  So what does this unconventional historian tell us? That the Queen had a very happy, very secure childhood, underpinned by her mother’s gusto, her father’s attentiveness and her sister’s companionship. There is enough detail of bath-time romps, dressing up, horseplay and laughter to be wholly convincing. George VI, both as Duke of York and King, was a physically active parent, keen on riding lessons and games with his daughters. It has been well said that he had a sense of fun, rather than a sense of humour; but for small children, the former is much more important. He liked cards and charades and mimicry and play-acting, and so did his daughters. The Duchess had written a note for him in case of her death, reminding him ‘not to ridicule your children or laugh at them. When they say funny things it is usually quite innocent . . . always try & talk very quietly to children . . . Remember how your father, by shouting at you, & making you feel uncomfortable, lost all your real affection. None of his sons are his friends . . .’4

  Whether or not George needed this excellent advice, his daughters were his friends. They lived for much of the time in a rather oddly extended Victorian house called Royal Lodge, now lived in by Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. It stands in the grounds of Windsor Great Park and had been rebuilt in the 1840s but was in poor shape and was renovated and extended by George. It is surrounded by huge trees and a chapel and beautiful gardens, and, once there, one could be a hundred miles from London. It also contains the miniature thatched and plastered Welsh cottage, a gift to Princess Elizabeth from ‘the people of Wales’ in 1932. It is much larger than a doll’s house, with fully fitted rooms, including a 1930s bathroom and kitchen. Recently renovated by the Queen’s granddaughter Princess Beatrice, it is very much the place where she and Princess Margaret played as girls, and the Queen still likes to visit it.

  Later, after the family had left their last private house, a tall building facing Green Park across Piccadilly, which was bombed during the war and has now disappeared, the King would begin to educate Elizabeth in her constitutional role, ensuring that she read newspapers, understood public affairs and had a good grounding in politics. But from her early year
s, the tight ‘we four’ of the family gave her a sense of security and belonging she has never lost. If this was an abnormal family in its wealth, role and history, it was also a version of the ‘Janet and John’ foursome-family emerging in the suburbs of 1930s Britain.

  Yet Crawford also shows that the princesses were almost entirely cut off from ordinary life. They had no friends outside a tight circle of relatives and a few high-born families. If the world was gawping through railings at the young girls playing Red Indians in a private London park, the princesses were staring back from upstairs windows at the traffic and crowds outside. Crawford’s account emphasizes an isolation, which the deliveries of Punch magazines and visits of solemn-faced politicians hardly mitigated. There were attempts to take the girls into the real world of London, a trip on the Underground and to a YWCA, museum visits, a ride on a bus and excursions to swimming baths. Yet as soon as the princesses were spotted, unless people had been cleared away in advance, the fast-forming crowds and shouting made it difficult to continue. Soon a campaign by the IRA created ‘security issues’, which would dog Elizabeth all her life, another reason to build high that wall. When she moved to Buckingham Palace, a Girl Guide group was formed to help the princesses enjoy some relationships with girls their own age. It was a successful experiment but not a radical one: the other Guides and Brownies were all the daughters of relatives, noble families and courtiers. The Queen’s curiosity about the lives of her subjects is real.

  The likely future course of her life unrolled ahead of her by the time she was just ten. But her emotionally secure start allowed her to march down that claret-coloured carpet uncomplainingly. The Queen’s character in her eighties is strikingly similar to the character described when she was a toddler and child. There was angst, rebellion, psychological damage and transformation in her family’s story. There has been almost none of it in her formative years. Around her, uncles, sisters, sons and in-laws have misbehaved, raged against fate, or simply made bad personal choices. With only one significant exception, her marriage to Prince Philip, she has done nothing against the grain of what was expected. She has uttered not a single shocking phrase in public. There are no reliable recorded incidents of her losing her temper, using bad language or refusing to carry out a duty expected of her. People close to her speak of her wry wit, her talent for mimicry and her very shrewd intelligence, helped by an extraordinary memory for people and events. Outside a tiny circle, none of this is seen. She has a lovely, lightbulb-on smile. But, as if to save electricity, it quickly snaps off. (It is more often merely that she is concentrating.) Her most often used and most effective tactic is silence. Politicians say she is a mistress of the icy silence, the ‘you may go now’ silence, the ‘I disagree’ silence and the plain ‘you make the running’ silence. Otherwise, she understates by instinct.

  Or, rather, by upbringing: the Queen grew up in a Lost World of Understatement, where people knew their place and protocol so well that these things were unspoken. Many have rebelled against that world; others find in it a strange freedom. In the inter-war years, details of title, degree, dress and address still mattered very much. She was born when the hierarchies of aristocracy, honour or chivalry were taken seriously by the middle classes, looking upwards – professional and business people who were themselves graded like the lines of sediment on a cliff face. It was a time when newspaper-reading working-class people could generally tell the difference between an earl and a duke and when ‘respectable’ was an accolade that mattered.

  As scores of novels and plays remind us, this was changing. Beyond the Palace gates and the Bruton Street doors the great handbook of ‘Society’ had begun to lose its pages and then fall apart, after the ‘Great War’. The aristocratic families had lost disproportionate numbers of the sons who were meant to inherit, and to keep the bloodlines going. Democratic politics, which was only fully established in Britain in the Queen’s lifetime – women got the vote on equal terms to men only when she was two – would push meritocratic ideas ahead. No longer was birth, destiny. Money replaced breeding. This cultural revolution would eventually take the British to a point where the only person in the country who seemed to know her place in the old way sat at its lonely apex – the Queen herself.

  The dominant event in her young life was of course the moment her father became king, after which she was next in line (the Heiress Presumptive, not the Heir Apparent, because being female she was only ‘presumed’ to succeed). Though the Yorks’ home at 145 Piccadilly had been a place of strain and nervous tension as the drama unfolded outside, the princesses had been protected from much of what was happening. It seems that it was Crawford who told them. Her account is worth quoting: ‘When I broke the news to Margaret and Lilibet that they were going to live in Buckingham Palace they looked at me in horror. “What!” Lilibet said. “You mean for ever?” ’ On the day of the proclamation, when Bertie left ‘looking very grave’ and dressed as an Admiral of the Fleet, ‘I had to explain to them that when Papa came home to lunch at one o’clock he would be King of England and they would have to curtsey to him. The royal children from their earliest years had always curtseyed to their grandparents. “And now you mean we must do it to Papa and Mummie?” Lilibet asked. “Margaret too?” “Margaret also,” I told her, “and try not to topple over.” ’ When the King returned they curtseyed: ‘I think perhaps nothing that had occurred had brought the change in his condition to him as clearly as this did. He stood for a moment touched and taken aback. Then he stooped and kissed them both warmly.’

  The move to Buckingham Palace was more of a shock. Her mother described it as the worst move of her life, and Crawford found it uncomfortable in the extreme, painting a picture of a gloomy dilapidated grandeur, with awkwardly placed electrical fittings, endless corridors and chilly rooms infested with mice. It was not the courtiers or footmen which impressed Crawford but the sinister-sounding figure of the Palace Vermin Man who patrolled with various weapons including the ‘sticky trap’ – a piece of cardboard with a lump of aniseed in the middle, surrounded by a sea of treacle. Eventually the new royal family made Buckingham Palace, that grand hotel and staff headquarters of British monarchy, rather more comfortable, but Marion Crawford remembered her first night there ‘with a shudder . . . The wind moaned in the chimneys like a thousand ghosts, I was homesick as I had not been for a long time . . .’

  Another child might have been traumatized not just by the move from a familiar house into a walled institution, but at the huge change in her likely future fate. One account claims that Elizabeth prayed furiously hard for a brother to be born. Perhaps. It smacks of a novel. Princess Margaret said later that she had asked Elizabeth whether it all meant she herself would one day be Queen: ‘She replied, “Yes, I suppose it does.” ’5 But she did not mention the matter again and seems to have been, in her tidy, quiet way, relatively calm about it all. After the great event of her father’s Coronation on 12 May 1937 she wrote her own account of it for her parents. It is the product of a cheerful, literal and eleven-year-old sensibility, finding the end of the service ‘rather boring as it was all prayers’, enthusiastic about the ‘sandwiches, stuffed rolls, orangeade and lemonade’ that followed, and exhausted by the day’s end. But Elizabeth was clearly excited rather than intimidated by her initiation into the family business: ‘I thought it all very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did, too. The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so.’ These are not the words of a girl horrified at the prospect of one day being Queen herself. In 1937, with a father still young, that day would have seemed unimaginably distant. But from now on, the Princess was treated with even greater enthusiasm and interest by the press, and learned – not least from her grandmother Mary – the solemn public demeanour expected of royalty.

  Demeanour aside, how much was she learning? She never went to school. It has been often said that the Queen is therefore badly educated, lacking the formal cu
rriculum and structure of a normal classroom. Crawford included examples of the timetable she had drawn up, and Queen Mary’s advice on extra lessons; she also complained about the habit of the Duchess, later Queen Elizabeth, of interfering and taking her daughters away from study for more enjoyable and frivolous times. Neither Crawford nor Queen Mary were much impressed by Queen Elizabeth’s response to a request for more books. They arrived, but they were all by P. G. Wodehouse. Yet Elizabeth had a good French governess and learned fluent French early on. She did not face a long school day, and there was emphasis on dancing, drawing and riding alongside the French, maths and history; but overall it was a perfectly respectable curriculum.

  By the time Elizabeth was thirteen, she was being taught some history by the Royal Archivist and was sent to Eton for lessons in constitutional history by the school’s eccentric Vice-Provost Henry Marten, notorious for chewing his hankies and eating lumps of sugar kept in his pockets. Her sister Margaret always regretted not being similarly tutored. Meanwhile the King began to show Elizabeth state papers, and gently talk her through the duties she would one day have to take on. So it is not true to say the Queen was badly educated. She was just differently educated. She was, and is, very fast at absorbing information and always had remarkable powers of concentration. From early on, she became shrewd at sizing up people, and good at recalling names and faces. Going to school might have helped her understand non-royal life but the lack of a boarding-school education certainly did not cripple her intellectually.