Elizabeth- the Queen and the Crown

by Sarah Gristwood

  Of course, the day was also marked by the live broadcast she made from Cape Town, and by a speech that has gone down in history. ‘There is a motto, which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, “I serve.” . . .

  ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong. I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.’

  Perhaps it is ironic that a speech written for her, and polished by Lascelles, should become in effect Elizabeth’s personal credo. But it is one she was able to deliver with all conviction. It was an affirmation of the emerging ideal of the Commonwealth of Nations, and of the monarchy, the sovereign, as the glue that would cement disparate nations into a harmonious whole.

  Elizabeth’s youthful voice – high, rather cool – described also how Britain had in the past saved herself by her exertions ‘and would save Europe by her example’. It was a reinforcement of that idea – set up under Victoria, reinforced under George and Mary – of the moral weight not only of the country but of the monarchy which represented it. In the years ahead this idea would prove to be something of a poisoned chalice . . . but for the immediate future, Elizabeth’s thoughts were fixed on the journey home. She had, of course, been in touch with Philip throughout the trip.

  On 10 July 1947, the announcement was posted from Buckingham Palace that ‘with the greatest pleasure’ King and Queen announced the betrothal of their dearly beloved daughter to ‘Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN’. To this the king ‘has gladly given his consent’.

  In fact George VI was still far from glad to let go of his daughter, while behind the scenes Philip and his future mother-in-law, representing very different ideas about the best path for a modern monarchy, would often clash in the decades ahead. But the wedding was set for 20 November, some four months away.

  It was only since the end of the First World War that, after centuries of small private ceremonies, the Royal Family had begun to hold their weddings in public, as celebrations not only they but their people could enjoy. Since the wedding of Princess Elizabeth’s parents, back in 1923, newspaper readers around the world had learned to relish every detail of a royal bride’s dress, and huge crowds gathered to watch her arrival at Westminster Abbey.

  In 1947, so soon after the Second World War, and with rationing growing ever more stringent, there were in fact qualms about whether a large public ceremony was really appropriate, or whether this wedding should again be held quietly, at Windsor. Some Members of Parliament did complain about the cost. But the majority opinion proved to be that of Winston Churchill, who declared it would be ‘a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel’ – and it was clear the public felt the same way. The great Victorian Walter Bagehot wrote that a royal marriage was ‘the brilliant edition of a universal fact’, and so it seemed to an enthralled audience that stretched far beyond the UK.

  When the wedding presents were put on display at St James’s Palace, they included not only a sapphire and diamond set from the King, and a dinner service from President and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, but a rabbit tea cosy made by one Nurse Kirkpatrick. (The crowds who flocked to St James’s presumably didn’t see the Siamese kitten from two other district nurses in Wiltshire . . . any more than they saw the Aga Khan’s thoroughbred filly, or the hunting lodge from the people of Kenya.)

  A portrait to celebrate the engagement of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, announced on 10 July 1947.

  Many girls around the country sent nylon stockings – a generous gift, since they were a rationed item – and these took their place alongside the five hundred cases of tinned pineapple sent by the Government of Queensland, and the rhododendrons from the Rothschilds’ garden. A lady in Brooklyn sent a turkey ‘because they have nothing to eat in England’, and Mahatma Gandhi sent a tray cloth spun on his own spinning wheel – though old Queen Mary took it for one of his famous loincloths, and exclaimed at the indelicacy.

  The wedding dress came from designer Norman Hartnell, and was presented as a triumph of British industry. The newspapers queried even the nationality of the worms who were producing the silk, wanting to check that they had not come from Italy or Japan, which had so recently been enemy territories. (Feeling still ran so high that Prince Philip’s three surviving sisters, because of their German husbands, were not invited to the wedding ceremony.)

  Hartnell’s inspiration came from the Renaissance paintings of Sandro Botticelli, and the embroidery of blooms, picked out in crystal and some ten thousand pearls, represented the promise of rebirth and growth after the long winter of war. Press speculation about the dress became so hysterical Hartnell’s manager had to sleep in the workroom, for fear of spies, and the Palace had to issue a statement that it was Princess Elizabeth’s own wish to keep the dress a secret until her wedding day.

  At the dance in Buckingham Palace two nights before the wedding, King George led a conga of royal relations through the State Apartments. The bridegroom’s stag night, attended by his fellow naval officers, took place at the Dorchester Hotel. The King had arranged that Philip should be created a Royal Highness ‘& that the titles of his peerage will be: Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth & Duke of Edinburgh . . . It is a great deal to give a man all at once, but I know Philip understands his new responsibilities on his marriage to Lilibet.’

  The wedding day, 20 November, dawned cold and wet, but the crowds in the street were swelling until they stood fifty thick. Princess Elizabeth was peering at them out of Buckingham Palace windows, telling Crawfie that she had to keep pinching herself to believe this was really happening. Prince Philip ordered tea and coffee to be taken to the photographers waiting outside his windows at Kensington Palace.

  There were some last-minute mishaps. No one could find the bride’s bouquet – of white orchids, with a sprig of myrtle from the bush at Osborne House planted in Queen Victoria’s day – and it was suddenly discovered that the double strand of pearls Elizabeth had planned to wear, a gift from her parents, was still at St James’s Palace with the rest of the presents, on public display.

  The bouquet was traced to a cool room, where it had been placed to keep fresh, and the Princess’s private secretary leapt into a hastily commandeered car to retrieve the necklace in the nick of time. The bride and her father drove to Westminster Abbey in the Irish State Coach, escorted by the Household Cavalry. It was the first time their full ceremonial uniform and plumed helmets had been seen since the War.

  Despite the splendour, the Archbishop of York, officiating alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, said that this wedding in Westminster Abbey was ‘in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church’.

  Elizabeth and Philip beaming as they returned from their wedding in Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947.

  When Cecil Beaton photographed Princess Elizabeth in 1945, the lush romanticism of the image belies the fact she was wearing a pre-war Hartnell dress of her mother’s – even royalty was not exempt from the clothes rationing of the War!

  The wedding breakfast was an ‘austerity’ event for a mere 150 guests, with the main course a casserole of unrationed partridges. Each place at table carried a small bunch of white heather from Balmoral. King George VI in his speech said: ‘Our daughter is marrying the man she loves.’ Prince Philip, newly naturalized as a British subject, said that he was proud. ‘Proud of my country and my wife.’ Princess Elizabeth said that: ‘I ask nothing more than that Philip and I shall be as happy as my father and mother have been, and Queen Mary and King George before them.’

  London police constables guard the wedding cake. Because food rationing was still in force, the ca
kes were made from ingredients that were sent to the Princess from overseas.

  The couple set off to spend the first days of their honeymoon at Broadlands, Lord Mountbatten’s Hampshire home, driving to Waterloo in an open landau. They were accompanied by Susan, the Princess’s favourite corgi, hidden (along with a handful of hot water bottles) under the rug which shielded them from the winter weather. Accompanied by Bobo MacDonald and by the Princess’s personal footman, at Broadlands they found themselves attended also by a number of unwelcome spectators, both press and public, who even climbed up on ladders to try to snatch a glimpse of the lovers. It must have been a relief when, for the second part of the honeymoon, they moved on to the Scottish fastness of Birkhall.

  From Broadlands, Princess Elizabeth wrote to her mother of how hugely she had enjoyed the day. (Philip, she added, was ‘an angel’.) In newspaper columns around the world, writer after writer described this as a fairy story. But, more importantly, it would prove also to be the start of the Royal Family’s most enduring love story.

  The royal couple were pictured at Buckingham Palace after the wedding ceremony. Designer Norman Hartnell took inspiration from Botticelli’s paintings for the bride’s dress, and the embroidery of flowers was picked out in crystal and some 10,000 pearls.

  The King wrote later to his daughter that he had been proud and thrilled as he led her down the long aisle of the Abbey, but that when he gave her hand to the Archbishop, ‘I felt I had lost something very precious.’ He added, ‘You were so calm and composed during the Service & said your words with such conviction, that I knew everything was all right.’ The bride promised to obey her new husband, and the couple left the Abbey to the strains of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’.

  This was the first time newsreel cameras had been allowed to follow a wedding party into the Abbey itself – an omen, perhaps, of the modernizing role Prince Philip would come to play within the Royal Family. Crowds around the world rushed to the cinemas to watch the film. In occupied Berlin, a four-thousand-seater cinema was packed day after day.

  New Elizabethans

  The early years of the marriage were eased by the fact that Elizabeth had not yet acceded to the throne. Philip, she wrote to her mother from honeymoon, ‘is terribly independent and I quite understand the poor darling wanting to start off properly, without everything being done for us.’ Philip for his part wrote to his new mother-in-law: ‘Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me?’ He had earlier told his future mother-in-law that he had fallen in love ‘completely and unreservedly’.

  Theirs was at this point a two-career marriage. Philip set off each morning to walk to his job at the Admiralty. Elizabeth was asked to perform an increasing number of public engagements – the royal wedding had made her even more interesting in the public’s eyes – but her most immediate ambition now lay elsewhere.

  On 4 June 1948, the Palace announced that the twenty-two-year-old Princess was expecting a child, and the public became obsessed with the impending arrival. Meanwhile, the young couple were (to Philip’s relief) planning to move out of Buckingham Palace, and the shadow of Elizabeth’s parents, and into a home of their own the King had offered them. Clarence House was in a poor state of repair but Philip delightedly took charge of the renovations, while the cumbersome machinery surrounding the birth of the next heir to the throne swung into place.

  The King issued Letters Patent to ensure that the baby would bear the title prince or princess, not normally accorded to the offspring of a king’s female descendant. And it was decided, for the first time, to dispense with the archaic tradition that the Home Secretary should be present at such an important birth. Objections, predictably, came from that arch-conservative the Queen, but gave way when it was pointed out that all the countries of which the baby might one day be sovereign could ask to send their own representatives, and the corridor outside the birthing room might get a little crowded . . .

  On 14 November, Prince Charles was born, in Princess Elizabeth’s own bedroom, with four doctors in attendance and all the facilities of a hospital suite installed nearby. Prince Philip was summoned from the Palace squash courts, and the fountains in Trafalgar Square flowed blue for a boy. The baby was placed in a gilt crib and displayed to the waiting courtiers. One remarked, on hearing the baby was a boy, that he’d known Princess Elizabeth wouldn’t let them down.

  On 15 December, the baby was christened in the Buckingham Palace Music Room with the names Charles Philip Arthur George. The Princess at first fed her son herself, but motherhood did not impede what must, in retrospect, have been the most carefree period of her life. She celebrated her twenty-third birthday at the Café de Paris, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in the company.

  A few months later she and Philip finally moved into Clarence House – but only briefly. In October Philip was appointed First Lieutenant of HMS Chequers, of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet based in Malta. He flew out there immediately and Princess Elizabeth soon joined him, leaving baby Charles behind.

  Cecil Beaton, photographing Princess Elizabeth with her four-week-old son, recalled that baby Charles was ‘an obedient sitter’. Elizabeth’s flower basket brooch was given by her parents to celebrate the birth of their first grandchild.

  The first four years of marriage gave the royal couple a taste of normal life. While Prince Philip was stationed in Malta, Elizabeth accompanied him to Rome to watch him playing with the Malta Naval Polo Team in April 1951.

  The pattern of her life over the next year or so would be of lengthy visits to Malta interspersed with periods at home. Her time in Malta as a Navy wife was the closest to a normal (albeit a privileged) life Elizabeth would ever know. The Edinburghs, as they were known, were living in a villa belonging to Philip’s uncle Lord Mountbatten, a commander of the Mediterranean Fleet. From there Elizabeth could drive around the island in her Daimler, swim off the beach, visit the hairdresser, dine at the local hotel.

  On 15 August 1950, at Clarence House, she gave birth to another baby, Princess Anne; and ill health forced her to stay in the UK for some months before once again flying back to Malta to spend Christmas with her husband, who was that year promoted to command of the HMS Magpie. The couple were able also to enjoy a visit to Philip’s native Greece – but their days of pleasure were soon curtailed.

  George VI’s health had been steadily deteriorating, and his haggard appearance when he opened the Festival of Britain in May 1951 marked a visible downturn. That summer exploratory surgery revealed that the King was suffering from lung cancer. It was expected that Princess Elizabeth would have to take on more of his duties – and expected she would do so with her husband at her side. Prince Philip’s promising naval career had come to an early end.

  In October 1951, when the couple set off for a tour of Canada and the United States, the King’s state of health was such that Elizabeth’s private secretary slept with the documents necessary to confirm her accession to the throne under his bed. The visit saw complaints in the Canadian press that Elizabeth seemed never to be smiling. To appear always serious and dignified in public was in fact a lesson her grandmother Queen Mary had taught her, but Philip tried not only to relieve the strain of the tour but to encourage her to show a more approachable face.

  The royal couple were in Kenya in February when Elizabeth learnt of her accession to the throne. Here they are in the gardens of Sagana Lodge, presented to them as a wedding gift from the people of Kenya.

  The new Queen reviews the Grenadier Guards on the occasion of her 26th birthday, less than three months after her father’s death.

  When they moved on to America, however, it marked the start of Elizabeth’s long love affair with that nation. It certainly seemed safe for the Princess to represent her father on an even more ambitious foreign trip. Though King George seemed to rally over Christmas at Sandringham with his family, there could be no question of his undertaking the long-planned six-month tour of the rest of the Common
wealth.

  Elizabeth and Philip would go instead – with the treat, before the tour proper began, of a short stay in Kenya, at the safari lodge that had been given to them as a wedding present. They could also spend a night at Treetops, just 10 miles away – the hotel in the branches of a giant fig tree.

  On 31 January 1952 the King stood on the tarmac at London airport to wave goodbye to his daughter. They would never see each other again.

  Princess Victoria, roused from sleep, had been wearing a dressing gown when she heard the news that she was queen; Elizabeth was in safari kit, fresh down from a night game viewing from the platform at Treetops. She was probably one of the last world figures to hear the news that had already been broadcast all over the globe: that George VI had died suddenly, in his sleep. On 5 February he had been out shooting at Sandringham; on the morning of the 6th, his valet found him dead.

  In remote Kenya, it was a journalist who told Elizabeth’s private secretary, who told Prince Philip’s equerry, Mike Parker. Parker told Prince Philip, who looked ‘as if you’d dropped half the world on him’. It was for Philip to tell Elizabeth – or, as she now was, the Queen. He took her out into the garden and observers saw them walking up and down together, ‘talking, talking, talking’.

  Personal grief must have been her first and overwhelming emotion – not a given for royal heirs in British history. But when she went back into the Kenyan safari lodge and her lady-in-waiting, Pamela Mountbatten, offered sympathy, Elizabeth responded with an apology. ‘I’m so sorry, it means we’re all going to have to go back home.’ There were telegrams and documents even before she returned to Entebbe and began the twenty-four-hour flight to the UK.