Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

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  When the family moved into Clarence House, early in the summer of 1949, Elizabeth and Philip had adjacent, connecting bedrooms. “In England the upper class always have had separate bedrooms,” explained their cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten (later Hicks). “You don’t want to be bothered with snoring, or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cozy you share your room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose.”

  That October, Philip resumed active service when he was appointed first lieutenant and second-in-command of the destroyer H.M.S. Chequers, based on the small island nation of Malta, in the Mediterranean, which had been part of the British Empire since 1814 and served as an important shipping center and outpost for the Mediterranean Fleet. According to John Dean, the royal couple “were advised that conditions [in Malta] were not suitable for the infant Prince.” Elizabeth could have stayed in London with her son, but she decided instead to spend as much time as possible with her husband. She had been accustomed to long parental absences while she was growing up, so her decision to leave Charles wouldn’t have raised eyebrows. She had expert nannies in charge, not to mention her own parents, who were eager to keep their grandson company. Elizabeth would visit Malta for long stretches of time, returning at intervals to Clarence House.

  She left six days after Charles’s first birthday, in time to join Philip for their second wedding anniversary. Beyond minimal royal obligations, Elizabeth was given unaccustomed freedom and anonymity. “I think her happiest time was when she was a sailor’s wife in Malta,” said Margaret Rhodes. “It was as nearly an ordinary a life as she got.” She socialized with other officers’ wives, went to the hair salon, chatted over tea, carried and spent her own cash—although shopkeepers “noticed that she was slow in handling money,” according to biographer Elizabeth Longford. The royal couple lived a significant cut above the ordinary, however, in Earl Mountbatten’s Villa Guardamangia, a spacious sandstone house built into a hill at the top of a narrow road, with romantic terraces, orange trees, and gardens. Dickie Mountbatten was commanding the First Cruiser Squadron, and his wife, Edwina, accompanied Elizabeth on her first flight to Malta.

  Philip and Elizabeth spent Christmas of 1949 on the island, while their son stayed with his grandparents at Sandringham. After Chequers sailed out for duty in the Red Sea at the end of December, the princess flew back to England. She stopped first for several days in London, with a detour to Hurst Park to see her steeplechaser, Monaveen, win a race, before she was re-united with Charles in Norfolk after five weeks apart.

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  When Philip returned from naval maneuvers, Elizabeth rejoined him in Malta at the end of March 1950 for an idyllic six weeks. Much to Uncle Dickie’s delight, he and his wife spent a lot of time with the royal couple, exploring the island’s coves by boat, sunbathing, and picnicking. They cheered the Mountbattens’ younger daughter, Pamela, when she won the ladies’ race at the riding club, and in the evenings they went to the Phoenicia Hotel for dinner and dancing.

  During these weeks, Elizabeth grew closer to the uncle who had taken such a prominent role in her husband’s life. He gave her a polo pony and went riding with her, encouraging her to perfect her skills at sidesaddle, which she “loathed,” recalled Pamela, “because she felt out of touch with the horse. She felt marooned up there and much preferred to ride astride.” But in part because of Uncle Dickie’s persistence, “she was a very good sidesaddle rider.”

  Also at Dickie’s urging, Philip took up polo—“a very fast, very dangerous, very exciting game.” Elizabeth shrewdly advised him how to persuade her husband: “Don’t say anything. Don’t push it. Don’t nag. Just leave it alone.”

  On May 9 she flew back to London, six months pregnant and ready to resume some of her royal duties. Jock Colville had left the household the previous autumn to return to the diplomatic corps, and his replacement was 36-year-old Martin Charteris, who was enraptured by the princess on their first meeting.

  Elizabeth gave birth at Clarence House on August 15, 1950, at 11:50 A.M., to her second child, Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise. Philip had returned to London two weeks earlier, which gave him time to get re-acquainted with his 21-month-old son after almost a year away. But his first command, of the frigate H.M.S. Magpie—and a promotion to lieutenant commander—sent him back to Malta in early September. As she had with Charles, Elizabeth breast-fed her daughter for several months. She celebrated Charles’s second birthday and left shortly thereafter for Malta. Yet again the family was split at Christmas, with mother and father celebrating on their own while the children were at Sandringham with their grandparents, who unabashedly doted on them. Queen Elizabeth sent regular letters to her daughter, reporting Charles “giving himself an ecstatic hug,” Anne “so pretty & neat & very feminine,” and “Everybody loves them so, and they cheer us up more than I can say.”

  But the couple’s time in the Mediterranean was coming to an end. King George VI had been in declining health since 1948, increasingly plagued by pain and numbness resulting from arteriosclerosis. In March 1949 he had undergone surgery to improve circulation in his legs. He continued to carry out his duties, but his appearance was gaunt, and by May 1951 he was seriously ill with a chronic cough that did not respond to treatment.

  Elizabeth came home to stand in for her father at a variety of events, and Philip returned to London in July when it became clear that the royal couple would be needed full-time to represent the sovereign. He took an open-ended leave from the navy, but in effect the 30-year-old duke was ending his military career after only 11 months of enjoying the satisfaction of his own command—“the happiest of my sailor life.” Much later Philip would say philosophically, “I thought I was going to have a career in the Navy but it became obvious there was no hope. . . . There was no choice. It just happened. You have to make compromises. That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.”

  In September, George VI had a biopsy that revealed a malignancy, and surgeons removed his left lung in a three-hour operation. The cancer diagnosis was not openly discussed and certainly not given out to the press, but the family understood the severity of the King’s condition.

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  Elizabeth and Philip had been scheduled to leave for a state visit to Canada and the United States, which they postponed by two weeks until they were reassured that her father was in no imminent danger. They departed at midnight on October 8, 1951, and arrived 16 hours later in Montreal—the beginning of a 35-day trek of more than 10,000 miles to the Pacific and back.

  The essential public routine that the royal couple would use over the decades took shape in those long days: Elizabeth was the restrained presence, her smiles tentative and infrequent, which prompted criticism in some press accounts. “My face is aching with smiling,” she complained to Martin Charteris when she heard the reports on her dour demeanor. Philip, always at a discreet distance behind, was already providing comic relief. Once, he went over the line, committing the first of his famous “gaffes” when he jokingly observed that Canada was “a good investment”—a remark that stuck in the Canadians’ craw for its neo-imperial implication.

  The scope and pace of the trip were punishing. They made more than 70 stops, and on a single day in Ontario they visited eight towns. Through it all, Elizabeth worried about the health of her father. Philip tried to keep the atmosphere light, but he clearly found the journey stressful. “He was impatient. He was restless,” recalled Martin Charteris. “He hadn’t yet defined his role. He was certainly very impatient with the old-style courtiers and sometimes, I think, felt that the Princess paid more attention to them than to him. He didn’t like that. If he called her a ‘bloody fool’ now and again, it was just his way. I think others would have found it more shocking than she did.”

  For much of the trip, Philip wore his naval uniform, and Elizabeth fa
vored discreetly tailored suits and close-fitting hats, as well as fur coats and capes. During their visit to Niagara Falls, they had to wear oilskin suits on the spray-lashed observation deck. Pulling her hood tight, Elizabeth exclaimed, “This will ruin my hair!”

  Several weeks later, the royal couple boarded a plane for Washington and set foot on American soil for the first time on October 31. President Harry S. Truman observed that his daughter, Margaret, who had met the princess during a visit to England, “tells me when everyone becomes acquainted with you, they immediately fall in love with you.” The 67-year-old president counted himself among them, calling Elizabeth a “fairy princess.” Elizabeth enunciated every word of her reply, her high voice a model of cut-glass precision, proclaiming that “free men everywhere look towards the United States with affection and with hope.”

  At a Rose Garden ceremony, the royal couple presented the Trumans with a mirror adorned with a painting of flowers, to be hung in the refurbished Blue Room as a “welcome ornament . . . a mark of our friendship.” Their visit ended with a white-tie dinner in honor of the Trumans at the Canadian Embassy.

  They had a rough return trip across the North Atlantic aboard the Empress of Scotland. Only Elizabeth managed to avoid seasickness and show up regularly at mealtimes, and veteran sailor Philip was furious about his own weakness. On arrival at the Liverpool dockyards three days after Prince Charles’s third birthday, they boarded the Royal Train for London’s Euston Station. Waiting on the platform were Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and Prince Charles, who had not seen his parents in more than a month.

  When the princess and duke stepped off the train, Elizabeth rushed to hug her mother and kiss her on both cheeks. For tiny Charles, she simply leaned down and gave him a peck on the top of his head before turning to kiss Margaret. “Britain’s heiress presumptive puts her duty first,” explained a newsreel announcer. “Motherly love must await the privacy of Clarence House.” Prince Philip was even less demonstrative, touching his son on the shoulder to indicate they should move along to the waiting limousines. As they passed through the station, Prince Charles was again with his grandmother, while his parents walked ahead.

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  After Christmas, the ailing King deputed Elizabeth and Philip to represent him on a long-planned six-month tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon. The couple decided to add several days in the beginning of the trip to visit the British colony of Kenya, which had given them a retreat at the foot of Mount Kenya called Sagana Lodge as a wedding gift. After settling into the lodge, Elizabeth and Philip spent a night at Treetops Hotel, a three-bedroom cabin built among the branches of a large fig tree above an illuminated salt lick in a game preserve. Dressed in khaki trousers and a bush scarf, Elizabeth excitedly filmed the animals with her movie camera. At sunset, she and Philip spotted a herd of 30 elephants. “Look, Philip, they’re pink!” she said, not realizing that the gray pachyderms had been rolling in pink dust.

  Back at Sagana on the morning of February 6, the princess’s aides learned that the 56-year-old King had died from a blood clot in his heart. Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was now Queen, at age 25. When Philip was told, he muttered that it would be “the most appalling shock” for his wife, then walked into her bedroom and broke the news to her. She shed no tears, but looked “pale and worried.”

  “What are you going to call yourself?” asked Martin Charteris as Elizabeth came to grips with the loss of her father. “My own name, of course. What else?” she replied. But some clarification was necessary, since her mother had been called Queen Elizabeth. The new monarch would be Queen Elizabeth II (following her 16th-century predecessor, Elizabeth I), but she would be known as the Queen. Her mother would become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, rather than the fustier Dowager Queen. Elizabeth II would be Queen Regnant, and her royal cypher E II R.

  “It was all very sudden,” she recalled four decades later. Her task, she said, was “kind of taking it on, and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate, because I think continuity is important.”

  Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at the airport in London near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a 19-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She slowly shook hands with each of them, and they gave her deep bows. A Daimler bearing the sovereign’s coat of arms on its roof drove her to Clarence House, where 84-year-old Queen Mary honored her by reversing roles, curtsying and kissing her hand, although she couldn’t help adding, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.”

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  The next day, the new Queen went to St. James’s Palace, where she appeared for 20 minutes before several hundred members of the Accession Council, a ceremonial body including the Privy Council—the principal advisory group to the monarch, drawn from senior ranks of politicians, the clergy, and the judiciary—along with other prominent officials from Britain and the Commonwealth. She had been monarch since the moment of her father’s death, but the council was convened to hear her proclamation and religious oath. She would not be crowned until her coronation, in 16 months, but she was fully empowered to carry out her duties as sovereign.

  The men of the council bowed to the 40th monarch since William the Conqueror took the English throne after the Battle of Hastings, in 1066. Elizabeth II declared in a clear voice that “by the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are the world over. . . . I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.” As her husband escorted her out, she was in tears.

  By April, the royal family had moved to Buckingham Palace, and the new Queen adapted to an office schedule that has scarcely varied throughout her reign. Adjusting to his position as the Queen’s consort proved troublesome for Philip. “For a real action man, that was very hard to begin with,” said Patricia Brabourne. While everything was mapped out for Elizabeth II, he had to invent his job under the scrutiny of her courtiers, and he had no role model to follow.

  Prince Philip was still considered an outsider by some senior officials of the court. “Refugee husband,” he mockingly referred to himself. “Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,” said John Brabourne. Much of the wariness stemmed from Philip’s closeness to Dickie Mountbatten. “My father was considered pink—very progressive,” Patricia Brabourne recalled. “The worry was that Prince Philip would bring into court modern ideas and make people uncomfortable.”

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  The most hurtful rebuff had occurred in the days following the King’s death, after Queen Mary heard that Dickie Mountbatten had triumphantly announced that “the House of Mountbatten now reigned.” She and her daughter-in-law the Queen Mother were angered by his presumption, and the Queen shared their view that she should honor the allegiance of her grandfather and her father to the House of Windsor by keeping the Windsor name rather than taking that of her husband. Churchill and his Cabinet agreed. Philip responded with a memo to Churchill vigorously objecting to the prime minister’s advice and pressing instead for the House of Mountbatten, which was ironic. It was his mother’s family name, since his father had given him no surname.

  The Queen failed to foresee that her actions would have a profound impact on Philip, leading to strains in their marriage. “She was very young,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Churchill was elderly and experienced, and she accepted his constitutional advice. I felt that if it had been later she woul
d have been able to say, ‘I don’t agree.’”

  “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip fumed to friends. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.” Dickie Mountbatten was even more outspoken, blaming “that old drunk Churchill” who “forced” the Queen’s position. The prime minister mistrusted and resented Earl Mountbatten, largely because as India’s last Viceroy, appointed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he had presided over that country’s move to independence. “Churchill never forgave my father for ‘giving away India,’” said Patricia Brabourne.

  Behind the scenes, Dickie continued a campaign to reverse the decision, with his nephew’s acquiescence. Meanwhile, Philip resolved to support his wife while finding his own niche, which would lead in the following decades to the active patronage of more than 800 different charities embracing sports, youth, wildlife conservation, education, and environmental causes.

  Within the family, Philip also took over management of all the royal estates, to “save her a lot of time,” he said. But even more significantly, as Prince Charles’s official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby wrote in 1994, the Queen “would submit entirely to the father’s will” in decisions concerning their children.