But for the Queen, it was important to get it right for another reason. ‘The Queen is a person of very deep faith,’ said Michael Mann, former Dean of Windsor. ‘She looked on the Coronation in the way in which the Coronation is intended.’
‘The Coronation was a deeply moving spiritual experience for her,’ her cousin Margaret Rhodes said, ‘especially the part which wasn’t filmed – when she stood bareheaded wearing only a white linen shift as the Archbishop of Canterbury marked the sign of the cross on her with the words, “As Solomon was anointed by Zadok the priest, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated as Queen over the people thy God hath given thee to govern.” ’
‘And this feeling of being set aside to a particular task for the whole of her life was something that the Coronation set upon her like a seal,’ Michael Mann confirmed.
Cecil Beaton, who had been commissioned to take the official photographs, gave one of the best and most vivid descriptions of the day as he entered the abbey:
Gold sticks [gentleman at arms of the Queen’s bodyguard] stationed around the cloisters showed us on our way. They were already frozen blue. One of them asked me if I had heard the good news that Hunt had climbed Everest. The iced wind blew in circles round the winding staircase that took me to the rafters and I felt much sympathy for Hunt.
The guests, the peeresses en bloc – in their dark red velvet and foam white, dew spangled with diamonds. The minor royalties and the foreign royalties and representatives of states. The mother of the Duke of Edinburgh, a contrast to the grandeur, in the ash grey draperies of a nun . . . That great old relic, Winston Churchill, lurches forward on unsteady feet, a fluttering mass of white ribbons at his shoulder and white feathers in the hat in his hand. Then the most dramatic and spectacular, at the head of her retinue of white, lily-like ladies, the Queen.
Beaton described her ‘sugar pink cheeks and tightly curled hair and her demeanour of simplicity and humility’, adding, ‘as she walks she allows her heavy skirt to swing backwards and forwards in a beautiful rhythmic effect’.
Rain had fallen solidly throughout most of the ceremony, soaking everyone outside, especially those in uniform who were unable to take any shelter. The Golden Coach was waiting in Dean’s Yard to take the Queen back to Buckingham Palace. But there was profound relief when the great ceremony was over and had gone without a noticeable hitch.
Then as now, both the Queen and Philip enjoy it when things go slightly wrong as their lives are so regimented. They were treated to one such moment in the procession back from the abbey when one of the attendants walking beside the Gold Coach started to head off in the wrong direction towards Hyde Park. John Taylor, the footman walking next to him, noticed straight away and signalled to the Queen, who told the Duke, who yelled out of the window at Taylor, ‘Where does that man think he is going? Get him back!’ Nothing had been left to chance, so the Duke had a walkie-talkie next to him on the upholstered seat of the coach so he could coordinate their arrival down to the second, but even he couldn’t get to the footman, so a lot of discreet signalling went on.
Back at the palace, the newly crowned Queen and her consort’s first concern was with their children. Four-year-old Prince Charles had watched part of the ceremony with his grandmother, while Princess Anne had been left behind. Lady Jane Rayne remembered how at one stage Charles picked up the crown, which was just lying on a nearby table, and put it on his head. ‘I don’t think, as he picked it up, that he could see how heavy it was and he sort of staggered to put it on his head and he couldn’t even walk with it, it was so heavy. But he did look rather sweet and everybody laughed and it broke the tension.’
Then there were long sessions with Cecil Beaton, who had to get the official pictures done as soon as possible for the thousands of publications waiting for them. Prince Philip became at his most officious and tried to take control, which was very much unappreciated. ‘He told me to smile at one point,’ Anne Glenconner recalled. ‘I could see that Cecil Beaton was getting very, very irritated because he is a professional photographer and the Duke of Edinburgh was telling him what to do.’
It may have been a high point of Beaton’s career, but despite the tensions he still had time to make some pithy observations: ‘The Queen looked extremely minute under her robes and crown, her nose and hands chilled and her eyes tired. The Duke of Edinburgh stood by making wry jokes, his lips pursed in a smile that put the fear of God into me. I believe he doesn’t like or approve of me . . . Perhaps he was disappointed that his friend Baron was not doing the job today: whatever the reason he was adopting a rather ragging attitude to the proceedings.’
The rain continued to pour down, but still the crowds roared and the Queen and Prince Philip reappeared on the balcony half a dozen times. After their final appearance at midnight, the crowd, which was by then a solid mass all the way to Trafalgar Square, started singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘The Queen led us out and we gazed at this extraordinary throng of people stretching for miles down the Mall,’ Lady Glenconner recalled. ‘You couldn’t put a pin between the people and it was just a sort of roar of love for her.’
Eight days later it was Prince Philip’s birthday, and Mike Parker threw a cocktail party at his home in Launceston Place in his honour. Prince Philip’s sisters were still in London and were also invited. Margarita and Theodora (Dolla) were heavily built while Sophie, the youngest, was tall and slender. She had been married twice and her second husband was Prince George of Hanover. They all loved being with their younger brother in informal surroundings and chatted all evening, sharing private jokes in German.
Prince Philip adored his sisters, but spent much of the evening explaining to Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg how the glass blower had managed to trap a bubble of air in the stem of his champagne glass. Philip felt completely at ease with the international set of glamorous rich playboys and Alfonso, who later married the fifteen-year-old Fiat heiress Ira von Fürstenberg, was one of those whose company he enjoyed.
Rather as with the Thursday Club, it made a change from the stuffy post-war British establishment who so mistrusted him. It upset him that he was treated as an outsider by them, but he knew that with the Queen he would be able to share challenges together. And with two children to raise on top of their public duties, they had plenty to keep them fully occupied as they moved into the next stage of their lives together.
Chapter 6
PARENTHOOD
Almost exactly a year after their wedding, the 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth gave birth to a boy. The Westminster Abbey bells rang out and a 41-gun salute was fired in his honour by the King’s Troop Royal Artillery. The fountains in Trafalgar Square were floodlit blue and almost 4000 people flocked to Buckingham Palace to watch the comings and goings of the medical team.
The birth, at 9.14pm on a foggy night on 14 November 1948, had not been an easy one. The official bulletin, pinned to the gates of Buckingham Palace, announced that ‘Her Royal Highness and her son are doing well’. It was later revealed he was born by Caesarean section, but such was the prudery of the age that this was never officially disclosed. Even her friends were not informed. Breast feeding was not spoken of and pregnancy, especially a royal pregnancy, was a condition that polite society feigned to ignore.
In another indication of the contemporary attitudes, Philip did not attend his wife during her confinement. When her labour started, Mike Parker remembers the royal family gathered in the equerry’s room to await news of the birth. The King was stretched out by the fire and the prince was pacing the floor. Eventually Parker took him off for a game of squash. ‘Well, time stretched a bit and he was getting restless,’ Parker recalled. When the King’s private secretary Tommy Lascelles bought the good news, Philip bounded upstairs into the Buhl Room, which had been converted into an operating theatre. He then held his first born, still wearing his sporting flannels and open-necked shirt.
His wife was drugged after the operation and did not come to for some minutes more
. But as soon as she did, Philip presented her with a bouquet of red roses and carnations, thoughtfully provided for the occasion by Parker. Elizabeth would later say that her husband’s face was the last she saw before she slipped under the anaesthetic and the first she saw when she came around again.
Prince Philip’s mother Alice had recently moved to the island of Tinos in Greece in a house without a telephone, so he was obliged to send her a telegram with the news. She was thrilled and wrote to him at once: ‘I think of you so much with a sweet baby of your own, of your joy and the interest you will take in all his little doings. How fascinating nature is, but how one has to pay for it in the anxious trying hours of the confinement.’
The princess had taken a far more pragmatic approach to her pregnancy (‘After all, that’s what we are made for,’ she said), but she was beguiled by what she had produced. ‘I still find it difficult to believe I have a baby of my own,’ she remarked. In the long human tradition, she set about searching for family resemblances in his features. His hands attracted her attention. They were, she said, rather large ‘but fine with long fingers’. Philip, always matter-of-fact to the point of seeming indifference, declared that he looked like a plum pudding.
The boy was christened Charles Philip Arthur George in the Music Room of Buckingham Palace. His godparents were George VI; his great-grandmother, Queen Mary; his aunt, Princess Margaret; his paternal great-grandmother, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven; his great-uncle, David Bowes-Lyon; Earl Mountbatten’s daughter, Lady Brabourne; and his great-uncles, Prince George of Greece and King Haakon of Norway. Alice did not attend, but received all the news of her new grandson’s progress from her younger sister Louise. She said the baby was like Philip, but Marina thought he was more like Lilibet. ‘I am so happy for Philip,’ she wrote, ‘for he adores children and also small babies. He carries it [the baby] about himself quite professionally to the nurse’s amusement.’
Elizabeth breast-fed her young son and Charles spent the first month of his life in a round wicker basket in the dressing room adjoining his mother’s bedroom. She then contracted measles and the doctors advised she and the baby stay apart. He was taken away from his mother and handed into the care of Nanny Helen Lightbody and the nursery maid, Mabel Anderson. Charles spent much of his first months in the country estate, Windlesham Manor, his parents had rented. Two world wars had delivered a hammer blow to the cosy, upper-class world of servants and nurseries. The royal family, however, had weathered this development largely unchanged and Charles soon fell into the routine that had been so much part of Elizabeth’s own childhood. He was taken to see his mother every morning at nine, just as she had been taken to see her parents. And in the evenings, engagements permitting, she would join him in the nursery. But that was just about the extent of it. They lived largely separate lives. ‘To my knowledge, she never bathed the children,’ Mrs Parker said. ‘Nanny did all that.’
Once she had ascended the throne, her children’s upbringing, as her own had been, was left in the care of the nursery staff. It was therefore to his nannies that Charles, who soon revealed himself to be a shy and sensitive child, turned for the affection he needed. It was Nanny Lightbody – Charles called her Nana – who got him up in the morning and dressed him, just as Allah had dressed Elizabeth. She also slept in the same room as him and comforted him when he woke during the night.
Much of his early life was lived ‘behind the green baize door . . . Mummy a remote and glamorous figure who came to kiss you goodnight, smelling of lavender and dressed for dinner.’ Prince Charles worshipped his mother, but from afar. The habits the princess had acquired in her own childhood were proving hard to break and, undemonstrative by nature, she always found it difficult to hug or kiss her son, preferring to leave such important tactile displays of emotion to the nannies.
Charles wasn’t an only child for long, however, and by the time he was twenty-one months old, he had a baby sister for company. Princess Anne was born ten minutes before noon on Wednesday 15 August 1950 in her parents’ newly refurbished marital home, Clarence House. Two years earlier, King George VI had decided that any children born to his eldest daughter would be known as ‘Prince’ or ‘Princess’. A special decree published in the London Gazette in November 1948 stated: ‘The children of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh are to enjoy the style and titular dignity of Prince or Princess before their Christian names.’ Had this decree not been issued, the infant would have been known simply as Lady Anne Mountbatten and would not have become a princess until her mother acceded to the throne.
Philip adored his baby daughter. ‘It’s the sweetest girl,’ he told everyone who would listen after her birth. ‘With quite a definite nose for one so young,’ photographer Cecil Beaton added.
Philip’s elder sister Princess Margarita of Hohenlohe-Langenburg was chosen as a godparent, as was his mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, and Lord Mountbatten; from Princess Elizabeth’s side, her mother and the Rev Andrew Elphinstone were chosen. For the first and last time, Philip’s side outnumbered Elizabeth’s, by three to two, indicating his status as head of the family. The ceremony took place in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace on 21 October 1950 – by coincidence, and appropriately for Philip’s career, it was the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, one of the greatest naval battles in history.
Philip was the most attentive of fathers. He had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy on the day Anne was born and given command of his own ship, the frigate HMS Magpie, so it was an even more special day for him. He helped choose her names – Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise – and had registered her with the Westminster Food Office. He was presented with the ration book, number MAPM/36, which the little princess, like the rest of the population in the austere post-war years, still required to obtain her allowance of meat, eggs, butter, bread, sugar, milk and, for a growing child, a weekly bottle each of orange juice and cod liver oil.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, Elizabeth and Philip’s royal commitments and his naval career were their main priorities, so that when they toured Canada in 1951, the two young children remained at home. Princess Elizabeth became even more distant as a mother when King George VI died and she became monarch. Godfrey Talbot, the BBC’s court correspondent at the time, recalled: ‘She had been trained since the cradle by her father that duty came before everything, including her family. She reluctantly had to abandon her family and they virtually didn’t see their parents for months on end. It was very upsetting and bewildering for [them].’
In 1953, the new Queen and her consort left on a long-delayed tour of the Commonwealth. They were away for six months. Like her mother before her, Elizabeth cried at the parting. And as her mother had discovered after her six-month trip to Australia in 1927, the long absence had exacted its inevitable toll. When they were eventually reunited, the Queen recalled, her children ‘were terribly polite. I don’t think they really knew who we were.’
In Philip’s case that was even more understandable. He had managed to spend Charles’s first Christmas with his wife and son, but that would prove to be the last time for a few years that they managed to be together for what are usually considered times for family celebration. In 1949, Charles’s mother chose to leave her son at Sandringham with their grandparents and went to join her husband in Malta where he was serving in the Royal Navy.
Philip not only had his career to consider but, as we have seen, he tried to maintain something of a bachelor lifestyle as well, yet he could not escape his royal duties either. Naturally irascible, the demands of fatherhood served only to heighten his irritation and he had little time to devote to his son as he struggled to find a role for himself in these frustrating circumstances. Nor did he show any inclination to be a hands-on, nappy-changing kind of father. Charles, as everyone noted, was an ‘exceptionally sweet-natured little boy’ who was always thoughtful of others and the world around him. George VI, in his dying days, remarked: ‘Ch
arles is too sweet, stumping around the room.’
He was neither aggressive nor sporting, however. His little sister soon came to dominate him physically. Nor was he mechanically minded like his father. He suffered from knock knees like both his grandfather, George VI, and great-grandfather, George V. He had flat feet and had to wear a special pair of orthopaedic shoes. He was prone to chest complaints and suffered from a constant succession of coughs and throat ailments.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these things did not overly impress his father. ‘A resilient character such as Philip, toughened by the slings and arrows of life, who sees being tough as a necessity for survival, wants to toughen up his son – and his son is very sensitive,’ Countess Mountbatten observed. ‘It hasn’t been easy for either of them.’
Philip believed in corporal punishment and Charles was summarily spanked if he was rude or obstreperous, a discipline that was quite normal at the time. Philip usually left the administration of such discipline to the nannies. His remarks, however, could be more wounding.
‘He could be incredibly cutting, not only to his children, but to other people,’ Mrs Parker recalled. ‘He always had to fight for himself from the very beginning. The Queen adored him but she didn’t rough it. He did rough it and I’ve heard him say some awful remarks.’ According to her, Nanny Lightbody also had her reservations: ‘She never said she didn’t like him but I don’t think she saw eye to eye with him one bit.’
‘He just can’t resist coming out with these personal remarks,’ said Lady Kennard, a childhood friend of both the Queen and Prince Philip. ‘He’s at his worst with Charles, but he could be quite sarcastic with Anne, too.’
Philip’s way of teaching his son to swim was to jump into the Buckingham Palace pool and loudly order the often-terrified Charles in after him. One Saturday morning, Charles was ‘slightly chesty’, so Nanny Lightbody did not want to let him into the water, but Philip insisted. The little boy ended up with a bad cold. Nana was furious. ‘I was very cross with his father,’ she said later, ‘but the trouble is I can only say so much.’ Philip, still the naval officer at heart, did not tolerate his decisions being questioned.
My Husband and I Page 10