She made Philip the ultimate domestic arbiter, Dimbleby wrote, because “she was not indifferent so much as detached.” Newspaper editor and Conservative politician William Deedes saw in Elizabeth’s detachment “her struggle to be a worthy head of state, which was a heavy burden for her. The Queen in her own quiet way is immensely kind, but she had too little time to fulfill her family care. I find it totally understandable, but it led to problems.”
Following her coronation, on June 2, 1953, the Queen turned her full attention to an ambitious five-and-a-half-month world tour covering 43,000 miles, from Bermuda to the Cocos Islands, by plane and ship. It was her first extended trip as sovereign, and the first time a British monarch had circled the globe.
Five-year-old Prince Charles and three-year-old Princess Anne spoke to the Queen and Prince Philip by radiotelephone, but otherwise news of their progress came in regular letters from the Queen Mother, who had them for weekends at Royal Lodge, her house in Windsor Great Park. Just as Elizabeth and Margaret had followed their parents’ travels on maps, Prince Charles traced his parents’ route on a globe in his nursery.
The crowds everywhere were enormous and enthusiastic. Masses of welcoming boats jammed Sydney Harbor, and by one count, three-quarters of Australia’s population came out to see the Queen. At age 27 she was hailed as the “world’s sweetheart.” But the royal couple refused to let their celebrity go to their heads. “The level of adulation, you wouldn’t believe it,” Philip recalled. “It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.”
The Duke of Edinburgh also helped his wife stay on an even keel when she became frustrated after endless hours of making polite conversation. Meeting and greeting thousands of people at receptions and garden parties actually gave her a temporary facial tic. But when she was watching a performance or a parade, and her face was in repose, she looked grumpy, even formidable. As the Queen herself once ruefully acknowledged, “The trouble is that, unlike my mother, I don’t have a naturally smiley face.” From time to time, Philip would jolly his wife. “Don’t look so sad, Sausage,” he said during an event in Sydney. Or he might provoke a grin by reciting Scripture at odd moments, once inquiring sotto voce, “What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep?”
At Tobruk, in Libya, the Queen and Prince Philip transferred to Britannia, the new, 412-foot royal yacht with a gleaming deep-blue hull, which they had designed together with architect Sir Hugh Casson. For its maiden voyage, Britannia took Prince Charles and Princess Anne to be re-united with their parents in early May 1954 for the first time in nearly half a year. The Queen was pleased that she would be seeing her children earlier than she had anticipated, but she worried that they wouldn’t know their parents.
Still, when the moment came and the Queen was piped aboard, her strict control and conformity to protocol prevailed as it had when she met her son after her Canada trip. “No, not you, dear,” she said as she greeted dignitaries first, then shook the five-year-old’s extended hand. The private reunion was warm and affectionate as Charles showed his mother all around the yacht, where he had been living for more than a week. The Queen told her mother how happy she was to be with her “enchanting” children again. They had both “gravely offered us their hands,” she wrote, “partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!”
In the autumn of 1957, the royal couple set off for their second trip to the United States, a state visit hosted by the 67-year-old president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, with whom the Queen had an affectionate relationship that dated back to World War II, when he was in London as supreme allied commander. Unlike the Queen’s lightning visit in 1951, this would be a full-dress affair: six days in Washington, New York, and Jamestown, Virginia, where she would celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first British colony in America.
After a day-long visit to Williamsburg and Jamestown on October 16, the royal couple flew to Washington on Eisenhower’s aircraft, the Columbine III, a swift and sleek propeller plane with four powerful engines. As they waited to take off, Philip immersed himself in a newspaper while Elizabeth unlocked her monogrammed leather writing case and began writing postcards to her children. “Philip?” she suddenly said. Her husband kept reading. “Philip!” she repeated. He glanced up, startled. “Which engines do they start first on a big plane like this?” Her husband looked momentarily perplexed. “Come on now,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t wait until they actually start them, Philip!” He offered a guess, which turned out to be correct. (They went in sequence, first on one wing from the inner engine to the outer, then the inner followed by the outer on the other wing.) “He was flustered,” recalled Ruth Buchanan, wife of Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., Eisenhower’s chief of protocol, who sat nearby. “It was so like what an ordinary wife would do when her husband wasn’t paying attention.”
Riding into the capital with the president and his wife, Mamie, in a bubbletop limousine, accompanied by 16 bands, they were cheered along the route into Washington by more than a million people, who were undaunted by intermittent rain showers. The royal couple spent their four nights in the most elegant guest quarters in the recently renovated White House—the Rose Suite, furnished in Federal style, for the Queen, and the Lincoln Bedroom for the Duke of Edinburgh.
Much of the visit was given over to the usual receptions, formal dinners at the White House and British Embassy (complete with gold plates flown over from Buckingham Palace), and tours of local sights. It was evident to Ruth Buchanan that the Queen was “very certain, and very comfortable in her role. She was very much in control of what she did, although she did laugh at my husband’s jokes.” Once, when Buchanan was waiting for her husband to escort the royal couple to their limousine, “I could hear her guffawing. You didn’t realize she had that hearty laugh. But the minute she rounded the corner and saw us, she just straightened up.”
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Vice President Richard Nixon treated the royal couple to a luncheon with 96 guests in the orchid-bedecked Old Supreme Court Chamber, in the Capitol. Elizabeth had specifically asked to see an American football “match,” so the White House arranged for her to sit in a “royal box” at the 50-yard line at the University of Maryland’s Byrd Stadium for a game against the University of North Carolina. On the way she spotted a Giant supermarket and asked if a visit might be arranged so she “could see how American housewives shop for food.”
To the cheers of 43,000 spectators, the Queen walked onto the field to chat with two opposing players. Dressed in a $15,000 mink coat given to her by the Mutation Mink Breeders Association, a group of American fur farmers, she watched the game intently but seemed “perturbed” whenever the players threw blocks. While the royal pair was being entertained at halftime, security men raced back to the supermarket to arrange for a royal visit on the fly. After Maryland’s 21–7 victory, the motorcade arrived at the Queenstown Shopping Center at five P.M., to the amazement of hundreds of shoppers. Elizabeth and Philip had never before seen a supermarket, a phenomenon then unknown in Britain.
With the curiosity of anthropologists and an informality they had not displayed publicly in Britain, they spent 15 minutes shaking hands, quizzing customers, and inspecting the contents of shopping carts. “How nice that you can bring your children along,” said Elizabeth, nodding toward the little seat in one housewife’s cart. She took a particular interest in frozen chicken pot pies, while Philip nibbled on sample crackers with cheese and joked, “Good for mice!”
An exuberant welcome awaited them in New York City. The Queen had asked specifically to see Manhattan “as it should be approached,” fro
m the water, a vista she had been dreaming about since childhood. “Wheeeee!” she exclaimed as she caught her first glimpse of the Lower Manhattan skyline from the deck of a U.S. Army ferryboat. A crowd of 1.25 million lined the streets from Battery Park to City Hall and northward to the Waldorf-Astoria for their ticker-tape parade.
She had only 15 hours in the city to fulfill her wish list and shake some 3,000 hands. Wearing a dark-blue satin cocktail dress and close-fitting pink velvet hat, she addressed the representatives of 82 countries at the United Nations General Assembly. At the conclusion of her six-minute speech, the audience of 2,000 responded with “a thunderous standing ovation.” During a reception with delegates, Philip talked to Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko about the recently launched Sputnik satellite.
The royal couple were fêted at two meals at the Waldorf: a luncheon for 1,700 hosted by Mayor Robert Wagner and a dinner for 4,500 given by the English-Speaking Union and the Pilgrims of the United States. In between, the Queen took in the “tremendous” view from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building at twilight—another specific request. As the white-tie banquet began, in the Grand Ballroom, the punishing schedule was beginning to take its toll, even on an energetic 31-year-old Queen. The New York Times noted that her speech was the “one time during the program . . . when the fatigue showed through . . . She made no effort to force a smile . . . and although she stumbled over her text only once, her voice plainly showed it.”
Her final stop that night was a Royal Commonwealth ball for another 4,500 guests at the Seventh Regiment Armory, on Park Avenue. One aviator blinded in World War I tried to get up from his wheelchair to greet her. “She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and told him that he should not rise,” recalled Wiley Buchanan. “She spoke to him for several moments, then moved on.”
“You both have captivated the people of our country by your charm and graciousness,” Eisenhower wrote in his farewell letter to the royal couple.
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After a hiatus of six years, the 31-year-old monarch was keen to have more children, as was her husband. Dickie Mountbatten blamed the delay on Philip’s anger over the Queen’s rejection of his family name after the accession. But by her own account, she had postponed her dream of having a large family primarily because she wanted to concentrate on establishing herself as an effective monarch.
During a visit to Buckingham Palace in 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt met with Elizabeth for nearly an hour the day after Prince Charles had undergone a tonsillectomy. The former First Lady found her to be “just as calm and composed as if she did not have a very unhappy little boy on her mind.” Elizabeth reported that Charles had already been fed ice cream to soothe his painful throat, yet it was 6:30 in the evening, and she was compelled to entertain the widow of a former U.S. president rather than sit at the bedside of her eight-year-old son.
While the Queen certainly loved her children, she had fallen into professional habits that kept her apart from them much of the time. They benefited from nurturing nannies and a doting grandmother. But because of her dogged devotion to duty, amplified by her natural inhibitions and aversion to confrontation, Elizabeth had missed out on many maternal challenges as well as satisfactions.
In May 1959, after Philip’s return from a four-month goodwill tour aboard Britannia, Elizabeth got pregnant at last. Once she hit the six-month mark, she withdrew from her official duties. But one bit of unfinished business needed to be resolved. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited her at Sandringham in early January 1960, she told him that she needed to revisit the issue of her family name, which had been irritating her husband since she decided in 1952 to use Windsor rather than Mountbatten. “The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband—with whom she is desperately in love,” the prime minister wrote in his diary. “What upsets me . . . is the Prince’s almost brutal attitude to the Queen over all this.” Somewhat cryptically he added, “I shall never forget what she said to me that Sunday night at Sandringham.”
Macmillan left shortly afterward for a trip to Africa, leaving the resolution of the Queen’s tricky family problem to Rab Butler, his deputy prime minister, and Lord Kilmuir, who served as the government’s legal arbiter as the lord chancellor. Butler sent a telegram to Macmillan in Johannesburg on January 27, saying that the Queen had “absolutely set her heart” on making a change for Philip’s sake. By one account, Butler confided to a friend that Elizabeth had been “in tears.”
Following discussions among her private secretaries and government ministers, a formula emerged in which the royal family would continue to be called “the House and Family of Windsor,” but the Queen’s “de-royalised” descendants—starting with any grandchildren who lacked the designation of “royal highness”—would adopt the surname “Mountbatten-Windsor.” Those in the immediate line of succession, including all of the Queen’s children, would continue to be called “Windsor.” It seemed clear-cut, but 13 years later Princess Anne, at the urging of Dickie and Prince Charles, would contravene the policy on her wedding day by signing the marriage register as “Mountbatten-Windsor.”
Elizabeth announced the compromise in a statement on February 8, 1960, saying, “The Queen has had this in mind for a long time and it is close to her heart.” On February 19, at 33, she gave birth to her second son. In a gesture of wifely devotion, Elizabeth named the boy Andrew, after the father Philip had lost 15 years earlier.
PRINCESS DIANA
THE MOUSE THAT ROARED
By Tina Brown | October 1985
When the Prince and Princess of Wales arrive in Washington next month, they step into intense curiosity about the state of their marriage. Magazines and newspapers in every capital crackle with backstairs backchat about the princess’s autocratic ways. She has banished all his old friends. She has made him give up shooting. She throws slippers at him when she can’t get his attention. She spends all his money on clothes. She forces him to live on poached eggs and spinach. She keeps sacking his staff. Certainly forty members of their household have resigned, including his private secretary, Edward Adeane, whose family had served the monarchy since Queen Victoria. The debonair Prince of Wales, His Royal Highness, Duke of Cornwall, heir to the throne, is, it seems, pussywhipped from here to eternity.
Can it be true? Is it possible that the girl they picked to be the Royal Mouse of Windsor has turned into Alexis Carrington [of the prime-time soap-opera Dynasty] in the space of four years? In the TV age it is irresistible to see such snippets of royal family life as a long-playing soap opera. Like the Ewings [of Dallas], most of them live in the same square mile of the royal ranch of Kensington Palace—the Wales apartments near Princess Margaret’s and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester’s, and next door to Prince and Princess Michael of Kent’s.
Even in the country they choose to live on top of each other in the “Tallyho Ridge” of huntin’ Gloucestershire. Recent episodes of the royal soap have starred Princess Michael, the Wagnerian blonde married to Prince Charles’s cousin. She’s the one whose father was revealed to be an SS officer and who, in a second burst of bad luck, was caught emerging from an Eaton Square apartment in a red wig followed by Texas millionaire John Ward Hunt. Another episode featured the royal-christening row when Princess Diana did not invite Princess Anne to be a godmother to Prince Harry. Anne snubbed the ceremony and spent the day shooting rabbits instead. (Her ratings recovered during her tour of India, when she was recast as Dame Peggy Ashcroft in The Jewel in the Crown.)
Back at Buck House, the Queen and Prince Philip are not amused by all this. They’re concerned about what is happening to the future King of England since he got married. As it happens, it’s a lot more interesting and complex than a scenario from Aaron Spelling Productions. Only a novelist like George Eliot, who understood that character is destiny, could fully capture the nuances of how the royal couple are acting on each other under a very peculiar se
t of circumstances.
A curious role reversal has taken place in the marriage.
Princess Diana, the shy introvert unable to cope with public life, has emerged as the star of the world’s stage. Prince Charles, the public star unable to enjoy a satisfying private life, has made peace at last with his inner self. While he withdraws into his inner world, his wife withdraws into her outer world. Her panic attacks come when she is left alone and adulation-free on wet days at Balmoral; his come when his father tells him he must stop being such a wimp and behave like a future king. What they share is an increasing loss of reality. Ironically, both are alienated by the change in the other.
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To understand why this has happened, one has to look behind the public images.
Prince Charles has for decades been presented as Action Man, jumping out of helicopters and being kissed by beauty queens in Australia. The truth is, he was always a lonely, eccentric figure haunted by self-doubt. Like the Queen, he had to work hard on his appeal, and he developed a dry sense of humor to cope with it all. He kept sane with the rigors of physical exercise and a battery of ballsy blondes who brought in refreshing gusts from the world outside. Lady Diana Spencer in 1980 was very different from most of the women Prince Charles had been attracted to in the past. Even though he looked so painfully conservative, he’s always had a streak of bohemianism, however crushed by royal life. He liked the flamboyant girls of the seventies who put him in touch with that streak: Sabrina Guinness, who worked in Hollywood as Tatum O’Neal’s nanny; Lady Jane Wellesley, an independent minded BBC journalist; Davina Sheffield, who went off on adventurous volunteer work to Vietnam. All were good, punchy company.
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