He had to propose three times before she accepted him. Nor were her parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, enthusiastic – not being among those who, as Lady Strathmore put it, have to be fed royalty as sea lions are fed fish. They were themselves a family whose Scottish title went back to the fourteenth century and whose most famous seat was the immense Scottish castle of Glamis. (Indeed, by comparison the couple would find their first married home, the White Lodge in Richmond Park, distinctly poky.)
The wedding – celebrated in Westminster Abbey – was a huge and popular public spectacle. Bertie had been created Duke of York and the heartwarming style of the new Duchess was early displayed when – having lost a brother in the War – she began a fresh tradition for royal brides by placing her bouquet on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. His mother-in-law said that the Duke was a man who would be made or marred by his wife, and the Duchess’s influence would be an immensely positive one.
It was however three years before their first child was born, just weeks before the General Strike brought the country almost to a halt – a comparatively long interval by the standards of the day. After the birth, only the most discreet of announcements revealed that after medical consultation ‘a certain line of treatment was successfully adopted’ – code for the fact that Princess Elizabeth was born by caesarean section. In accordance with tradition the Home Secretary was waiting in the next room to verify the arrival of a new member of the Royal Family.
‘I do hope that you & Papa are as delighted as we are to have a granddaughter, or would you sooner have another grandson?’ Bertie wrote to his mother. Queen Mary declared that the baby was ‘a little darling with a lovely complexion and pretty hair’. She was named Elizabeth for her mother. There was at the time no real thought of Queen Elizabeth I.
Nonetheless, press interest around the globe was such that the Australian papers dubbed her ‘The World’s Best-Known Baby’. (She would feature on the first of many Time covers at the age of three.) Even the fact that her mother and grandmothers had stitched her baby clothes was news.
But Elizabeth’s immediate environs made for a secluded, ordered environment. Her nurse, Clara Knight – nicknamed ‘Alah’, a child’s version of Clara – had been Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon’s own nurse, and she stuck to the old traditions. Strict timetable, airings in the perambulator and an hour with her parents before bed.
The Duke and Duchess of York pictured with baby Elizabeth after the christening ceremony. She quickly became, as one newspaper declared, ‘the World’s Best-Known Baby’.
A Progress Book was kept, describing the baby’s development – ‘very healthy’, ‘vigorous’, ‘contented’. Adored by her grandparents, the nine-month-old Lilibet – as she became known after failing properly to pronounce her name – was left in their care when her parents set off on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand.
Princess Elizabeth with her uncle the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII. He was a favourite of the young Elizabeth but his abdication would place great strain on her family.
Winston Churchill, meeting Princess Elizabeth as a two-year-old, found already ‘an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant’. Others noted that she was unusually ‘neat and methodical’, as her governess put it – even getting out of bed in the night to make sure that her shoes were correctly arranged in pairs. That desire for order – that urge not to shake established patterns – would be both a blessing and a curse to her in later life.
What must surely have been useful was her early ability to separate one part of her life from another, to compartmentalize. She was early obsessed with horses. Her grandfather George V gave her a Shetland pony, Peggy, for her fourth birthday, and her stable of toy horses were each unsaddled and watered every night. But she also liked to play games where she was a horse in her own mind and, in that capacity, unable to answer any human query.
Soon after Elizabeth turned four her sister, Margaret Rose, was born. She had ‘large blue eyes and a will of iron, which is all the equipment a lady needs!’, her mother wrote in an interesting sidelight on how she saw her daughters’ future roles.
Three had now become four – ‘we four’ or ‘us four’, as their father would always put it. The two sisters were even dressed the same; their father being anxious that Margaret should not suffer, as he had done, from feeling herself of secondary importance within the family. There may, even then, have been a sense that no more children were likely – the Yorks had not found procreation easy. But it didn’t matter, since this was not supposed to be where the future of the monarchy lay. George V was only in his sixties, and his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was hugely popular.
For the first years of their lives Elizabeth and Margaret were reared in not only an affectionate but also a cheerfully under-schooled atmosphere – educated to be wives, not world figures. They had, as Randolph Churchill said, no more education than was suitable for the rearing of ‘nicely behaved young ladies’.
The rocking horse on which Princess Elizabeth and her sister were pictured riding in 1932, prefigured a lifelong passion for horses. Their mother had played on the same rocking horse as a child.
A new addition to the household was the nurserymaid, Margaret ‘Bobo’ MacDonald. The family now had the use of not only their London mansion (since destroyed) at 145 Piccadilly, but also Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. There, for for Princess Elizabeth’s sixth birthday, was installed a thatched cottage built entirely in Welsh materials, described as a gift from the people of Wales and intended to showcase the skills of a nation whose people were suffering badly in the depression years. Y Bwthyn Bach, The Little Cottage, had a gas cooker, a fridge and every imaginable furnishing in miniature, right down to the packet of Epsom salts in the bathroom, and the princesses were encouraged themselves to keep it clean.
Princess Elizabeth and her younger sister were dressed alike at the insistence of their father, anxious Margaret should not feel inferior in any way.
Elizabeth in particular also loved playing with the family pets. One photograph shows her holding a resigned-looking corgi like a baby in her arms. Her father bought his first Pembrokeshire corgi, Dookie, in 1933, and soon added another, Jane. There were also three yellow Labradors, a black Cocker Spaniel, a Golden Retriever and a Tibetan Lion Dog called Choo-Choo. The plethora of dogs, like the family’s annual routine of summer at Balmoral and Christmas at Sandringham, are among the many ways in which the adult Elizabeth would recreate the patterns of her youth – employing, even, some of the same people to educate her own children, like Madame Vacani, who taught the two princesses to dance.
When Elizabeth was six a governess – Marion Crawford, ‘Crawfie’ – was imported to take charge of the girls’ education. She found, however, little interest in learning from the Duchess, who described herself cheerfully as ‘uneducated on the whole’, while the girls’ royal father and grandfather were concerned only that they should learn ‘to write a decent hand’.
Princess Elizabeth riding a tricycle shortly before her sixth birthday.
What the girls’ parents sought for them, Crawfie recalled, was ‘a really happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories, stored up against the days that might come out and, later, happy marriages’. The Duchess’s view of childraising was in many ways an enlightened one. A note she wrote for her husband, in the event of her death, urged him ‘not to ridicule your children or laugh at them . . . Remember how your father, by shouting at you, & making you feel uncomfortable, lost all your real affection.’
A possible downside was that at seven, Elizabeth had only a very modest hour-and-a-half of lessons a day. Nonetheless Crawfie – with the support of their grandmother, the well-educated Queen Mary – tried to inculcate an interest in current affairs, as well as some faint acquaintance with the world outside the palace. She taught the girls history, geography, grammar, literature and composition. She herself was no good at maths. Her work was made easier by Elizabeth’s interes
t in reading . . . even if, inevitably, her favourite book was the autobiography of a horse, Black Beauty. The Archbishop of Canterbury, visiting George V on one occasion, was surprised to find the formidable King on his hands and knees, pretending to be a horse, while his granddaughter led him by the beard. When ‘Grandpa England’, as she called him, was ill, Elizabeth was brought to Bognor on the south coast to help him convalesce. But soon after George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935, it became clear that his health was failing fast. By 20 January 1936, the news bulletins told the nation that ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’
On hearing the news of George V’s death his son and heir – the new king, Edward VIII, Elizabeth’s favourite uncle – broke down in horror at the thought of taking up the mantle of kingship. He was deeply in love with Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee with a questionable reputation, already on her second husband. There had perhaps been insufficient concern in royal circles about the advent of Mrs Simpson. She was after all still married (and with perhaps another current lover to her name). She looked, in other words, like just another royal mistress – certainly not like a potential wife.
But when in the summer of 1936 the new King Edward took Mrs Simpson on a Baltic cruise, the world began to take notice. Mrs Simpson filed for divorce from her husband Ernest. In October an MI5 investigation revealed worrying connections with the Nazis. The British press were still maintaining a loyal silence on the subject of the King’s affair, but the foreign press was full of the story. On 16 November, Edward summoned Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and declared his intention of taking Mrs Simpson as his wife.
Through those weeks there was, wrote Crawfie, ‘a shadow over the house’ at 145 Piccadilly – albeit that the family’s very typical reaction was to distract the girls with swimming lessons at the local Bath Club. Baldwin had told King Edward that the people would not accept Mrs Simpson as queen. The idea of a morganatic marriage was canvassed – a marriage by which Mrs Simpson would not become queen, nor would any children she bore inherit the crown. But everyone knew that if no solution could be found, the kingship would devolve on Edward’s brother, Bertie.
The solemn portrait in the splendour of coronation robes reflects the change that had come to ‘we four’ as George VI called his little family.
In the first week of December the story broke in Britain, and the Cabinet rejected the idea of a morganatic marriage and on 10 December the King’s irrevocable decision to abdicate was read to the House of Commons.
Interestingly, Baldwin’s speech explicitly linked the ideal of monarchy – its role as the glue holding together the Empire – with its moral authority, and this perhaps was one of the lessons Princess Elizabeth would carry away from the event. Her uncle had chosen personal emotion over duty and the result was to place an intolerable burden upon her father, who wept when he learned he was now king. Said the Duchess of York – now Queen Elizabeth – ‘I don’t think we could have imagined a more incredible tragedy.’
On 11 December, the former King-Emperor, who would live the rest of his life as Duke of Windsor, addressed the nation via the BBC. On 12 December Bertie was proclaimed King George VI. That day the princesses hugged their father as he went off to meet the Privy Council. As he returned, they curtseyed to him.
‘Does that mean you will have to be the next queen?’ Princess Margaret asked her elder sister.
‘Yes, some day,’ Elizabeth replied.
‘Poor you.’
Not many lives change at the age of ten, but Elizabeth’s had changed forever.
In preparation for her father’s coronation, Elizabeth’s governess read her Queen Victoria’s account of her own. She wrote her own account of the day as a schoolroom essay that is in the Royal Library today.
To Mummy and Papa
In Memory of Their Coronation
From Lilibet
By Herself
She had been woken at 5 a.m. by the band of the Royal Marines playing in the park and, too excited to eat breakfast, rode with her sister to Westminster Abbey in a glass coach (‘very jolty but we soon got used to it’). She described their dresses: ‘white silk with old cream lace and little gold bows all the way down the middle. They had puffed sleeves with one little bow in the centre. Then there were the robes of purple velvet with gold on the edge.’
An intent Elizabeth listens to the music at a special Coronation concert for London children, held at Westminster Hall.
In the Abbey she stood beside her grandmother in the royal box, a dignified little figure. The widow of the last king would not usually have attended the coronation of the next, but Queen Mary had expressed a special wish to be at this one. At the end, Lilibet wrote, ‘the service got rather boring as it was all prayers.’ Sandwiches and lemonade before the long drive back, an appearance on the balcony ‘where millions of people were waiting below’.
‘I thought it all very, very wonderful, and I expect the Abbey did, too.’
War
Elizabeth was now heir to the throne – but, as a girl, she was ‘Heir Presumptive’, rather than ‘Heir Apparent’. Any late-born brother would supersede her – and her mother was only thirty-six. (She would remain merely Heir Presumptive until the day of her accession, which is why she was never given the title of Princess of Wales.)
But even before the Abdication there had been – given her uncle’s reluctance to marry suitably and breed – a discreet canvassing of the possibility of a Queen Elizabeth II. Indeed, her grandfather George V was reported as saying he hoped his scapegrace eldest son would never marry, so that nothing would keep Bertie and Lilibet from the throne.
The changes for ‘we four’ were instantly apparent. For a start, they had to move from their comfortably relaxed Piccadilly home into Buckingham Palace with its ninety offices, its fifty-odd grand bedrooms, its officers with archaic names like the Yeoman of the Silver Pantry.
‘What, forever?’ asked Lilibet, dismayed.
The girls would eventually find compensations, like the forty acres of gardens where they could row on the lake, and Princess Elizabeth found fun in walking in front of the sentry just to see him present arms. But whenever they went beyond the gates they had now to be accompanied by at least one detective and to refer to their parents always by their formal titles, as the King and Queen.
George VI was determined that his heir should be equipped for the task that lay ahead of her. Princess Elizabeth looks over her father’s shoulder as he studies state papers at Windsor Castle.
Their parents were much busier these days, and their father, at least, deeply perplexed. His family called his sudden rages his ‘gnashes’. He saw himself as trying to steady ‘this rocking throne’, with always over his shoulder the ghost of his brother, the people’s prince, the hero of the working classes. Perhaps Elizabeth would prove to have learned lessons from both her father and her uncle.
The question of a formal education for Elizabeth was now a more pressing one. George VI, he said in dismay, had never so much as seen a state paper before he became king. No one wanted his daughter to be similarly handicapped when her time came. From the age of thirteen, Elizabeth was sent to nearby Eton for twice-weekly lessons in constitutional history from the school’s Vice-Provost, a noted authority, and thoroughly absorbed his teaching that the greatest strength of the British monarchy was its adaptability.
As her father settled into his role he would share his own experiences with her – a telling photograph from 1942 showed Elizabeth looking over her father’s shoulder as he read from his red boxes of official documents. She had obviously accepted her destiny, telling the royal riding instructor that, ‘had she not been who she was’, she would have liked to be a lady living in the country, with lots of horses and dogs.
In some ways, however, Elizabeth was not given anything like the education of the queens regnant before her – certainly not the extraordinary Renaissance education bestowed on Elizabeth I. Crawfie remained the princesses’ governess,
hours of lessons were still lax, and the reports given out for the public concerned the cakes Lilibet was baking for children in hospital, rather than any intellectual attainments.
There was concern that she and her sister should not be too isolated, and so a special Girl Guides pack was set up in Buckingham Palace where she and the other patrol members – all relatives or the daughters of ranking courtiers – went trekking in the grounds and practised signalling in the long corridors.
But these and all other concerns were overshadowed by the international situation. Before the Abdication there had indeed been concern lest Edward VIII could be led into sympathy with the Nazi cause. (Recently discovered family film shows a child Elizabeth, with her mother and uncle, raising their right arms in joking imitation of a Nazi salute.) George VI had not been crowned a year when, in the spring of 1938, Adolf Hitler marched into Austria.
The Princesses (at Windsor for the duration of hostilities) joined the rest of the nation in helping the war effort – knitting, and digging, for victory.
Soon Britain began preparing in case of war, erecting bomb shelters and digging trenches. The princesses, like all children, had already been issued with gas masks when, at the end of September, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler with the agreement he declared would ensure ‘peace for our time’. But the following March, Hitler’s tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.
As Germany continued to build up its armed forces, the Royal Family kept to its usual pattern of a summer holiday in Scotland. As war was announced on 3 September 1939 and the King broadcast to the nation – as the Queen began training with a pistol – their daughters were at Birkhall near Balmoral and it was decided they should stay there, at least for the moment.
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