Читать книгу The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy - Peter Hennessy, Ben Pimlott - Страница 13

Chapter 3

SIXTY YEARS LATER, it is still hard to assess the impact of the Abdication of Edward VIII. Arguably it had very little. In the short run, politics was barely affected; there was no last minute appeal by the resigning Monarch for public support, as some had feared there might be; no ‘King’s party’ was put together to back him. Indeed, the smooth management of the transition was a cause for congratulation, and was taken to show the resilience of the Monarchy, and the adaptability of the constitution. Even social critics regarded it as evidence of English establishment solidarity. ‘To engineer the abdication of one King and the enthronement of another in six days,’ wrote Beatrice Webb, ‘without a ripple of mutual abuse within the Royal Family or between it and the Government, or between the Government and the Opposition, or between the governing classes and the workers, was a splendid achievement, accepted by the Dominions and watched by the entire world of foreign states with amazed admiration.’¹ Nevertheless, it has always been treated as a turning point, and in an important sense it was one. It broke a spell.

In the past, public treatment of the private behaviour of members of the Royal Family had contained a double standard. Since the days of Victoria and Albert, the personal life of royalty had been regarded as, by definition, irreproachable; while at the same time occasionally giving cause for disapproval or hilarity – as in the case of Edward VII when Prince of Wales, and his elder son, the Duke of Clarence. Not since the early nineteenth century, however, had it been a serious constitutional issue. The Abdication made it one – giving to divorce, and to sexual misconduct and marital breakdown, a resonance in the context of royalty, which by the 1930s it was beginning to lose among the upper classes at large. At the same time the dismissal of a King provided a sharp reminder that British monarchs reigned on sufferance, and that the pomp and sycophancy counted for nothing if the rules were disobeyed. During the crisis, there was talk of the greater suitability for the throne of the Duke of Kent – as if the Monarchy was by appointment. It came to nothing, but the mooting of such a notion indicated what the great reigns of the past hundred years had tended to obscure – that Parliament had absolute rights, and that the domestic affections of the Royal Family were as much a part of the tacit contract between Crown and people as everything else.

In theory, the British Monarchy was already, and had long been, little more than a constitutional convenience. How could it be otherwise, with a Royal Family whose position had so frequently depended on parliamentary buttressing, or on a parliamentary decision to pass over a natural claimant in favour of a more appropriate minor branch? ‘If there was a mystic right in any one,’ as Walter Bagehot put it dryly in 1867, ‘that right was plainly in James II.’² Yet, in practice, there had been accretions of sentiment and loyalty which had allowed the obscure origins of the reigning dynasty to be forgotten. As a result, a traditional right or legitimacy had replaced a ‘divine’ one, and a great sanctity had attached to laws of succession unbroken for more than two centuries. The Abdication cut through all this like a knife – taking the Monarchy back as far as 1688, when Parliament had deprived a King of his throne on the grounds of his unfitness for it.

On that occasion, the official explanation was that James II had run away – though in reality there were other reasons for wishing to dispose of a monarch who caused political and sectarian division. In 1936, the ostensible cause of the King’s departure was his refusal to accept the advice of his ministers that he could not marry a divorced woman. Yet the Government’s position was also regarded as a moral, and not just a technical or legalistic one. The King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson was seen as symptomatic. The nation, as one commentator put it, took a dim view of tales of frivolity, luxury and ‘an un-English set of nonceurs’, associated with the new King and minded seeing its throne ‘provide a music-hall turn for low foreign newspapers’.³ Although the decision to force Edward VIII to choose between marriage and his crown was reluctant, it was accompanied by a hope and belief that his successor – well-married, and with a family life that commanded wide approval – would set a better example.

But the Monarchy would never be the same again. ‘All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,’ Jimmy Maxton, leader of the left-wing Independent Labour Party, reminded the House of Commons, ‘could not put Humpty-Dumpty back again.’⁴ Not only was the experience regarded, by all concerned, as chastening: there was also a feeling that, though the Monarchy would survive, it had been irrevocably scrambled. Even if George VI had possessed a more forceful character, the circumstances of his accession would have taken from the institution much of its former authority. As it was, the Monarchy could never again be (in the words of a contemporary writer) ‘so socially aggressive, so pushy’ as under George V;⁵ nor could it be so brash as under Edward VIII, whose arrival ‘hatless from the air,’ in John Betjeman’s words, had signalled a desire to innovate. After the Abdication, George VI felt a need to provide reassurance, and to behave with a maximum of caution, as if the vulgar lifting of skirts in the autumn of 1936 had never happened. Yet there could be no simple return to the old position of the Monarch as morally powerful arbitrator, a role played by George V as recently as 1931. Under George VI, royal interventions, even minor ones, diminished. The acceptance of a cypher-monarchy, almost devoid of political independence, began in 1936.

If the Abdication was seen as a success, this was partly because of an accurate assessment that the genetic dice had serendipitously provided a man who would perform the functions of his office in the dutifully subdued way required of him. Indeed, not only the disposition of the Duke of York but the familial virtues of both himself and his wife had been a key element in the equation. The point had been made by Edward VIII in his farewell broadcast, to soften the blow of his departure, when he declared that his brother ‘has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children.’⁶ It was also stressed by Queen Mary, when she commended her daughter-in-law as well as her second son to the nation. ‘I know,’ she said with feeling and with meaning, ‘that you have already taken her children to your hearts.’⁷ Everybody appreciated that if the next in line had happened to be a footloose bachelor or wastrel, the outcome might have been very different. As it was, the Duke of York – despite, but perhaps also because of, his personal uncertainties – turned out to be well suited to the difficult task of doing very little conscientiously: a man, in the words of a contemporary eulogizer, ‘ordinary enough, amazing enough, to find it natural and sufficient all his life to know only the sort of people a Symbol King ought to know,’ and, moreover, one who ‘needs no private life different from what it ought to be.’⁸

To restore a faith in the Royal Family’s dedication to duty: that was George VI’s single most important task. There was a sense of treading on eggshells, and banishing the past. As the Coronation approached, the regrettable reason for the King’s accession was glossed over in the souvenir books, and delicately avoided in speeches. The monarchist historian Sir Charles Petrie observed a few years later that there was a tendency to forget all about it, ‘and particularly has this been the case in what may be described as official circles’.⁹ It was partly because the memory of the episode was acutely painful to the King and Queen, as well as to Queen Mary, but it was also because of the embarrassment Edward VIII’s abdication caused to the dynasty, and the difficulty of incorporating an act of selfishness into the seamless royal image. Burying the trauma, however, did not dispose of it, and the physical survival of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – unprotected by a Court, and often teetering on the brink of indiscretion or indecorum – provided a disquieting shadow, reminding the world of an alternative dynastic story.

By contrast, the existence of ‘the little ladies of 145 Piccadilly’ gave the new Royal Family a trump card. If, in the eyes of the public, the Duchess of Windsor was cast as a seductress, the little ladies offered cotton-clad purity, innocence and, in the case of Princess Elizabeth, hope. It greatly helped that her virtues, described by the press since babyhood, were already well-known. What if she had inherited her uncle’s characteristics instead of her father’s? Fortunately the stock of attributes provided by the sketch-writers did not admit of such a possibility. The ten-and-a-half-year-old Heiress Presumptive, it was confidently observed, possessed ‘great charm and a natural unassuming dignity’. The world not only already knew, but already loved her, and hoped that one day she would ‘rule the world’s greatest Empire’ as Queen.¹⁰

The discovery that she had become a likely future Monarch, instead of somebody close to the throne with an outside chance of becoming one, seems to have been absorbed by Princess Elizabeth gradually. Although her father’s accession, and the elimination of doubt about the equal rights of royal daughters, placed her first in line, it was not yet certain that she would ever succeed. When Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent was told of her expectations at almost precisely the same age in March 1830, she was reported by her governess to have replied ‘I will be good’. According to Lady Strathmore, when Princess Elizabeth received the news, she ‘was ardently praying for a brother’.¹¹ It was still imaginable: the Queen was only thirty-six at the time of the Coronation in May 1937, and shortly before it a rumour spread that she was pregnant.¹² Increasingly, however, a view of the future with Princess Elizabeth as Monarch was widely accepted. There was even some speculation that Elizabeth might be given the title of Princess of Wales.¹³ According to her sister, the change of status was something they knew about, but did not discuss. ‘When our father became King,’ recalls Princess Margaret, ‘I said to her, “Does that mean you’re going to be Queen?” She replied, “Yes, I suppose it does.” She didn’t mention it again.’¹⁴

There was also the matter of where they lived. According to Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth reacted with horror when she was told that they were moving to Buckingham Palace. ‘What – you mean for ever?’ According to Princess Margaret, the element of physical disruption was limited. 145 Piccadilly was only a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, and they had often gone over to see their grandparents, and to play in the garden.¹⁵ Perhaps the distrust was more in the mind of the governess, who likened setting up home in the Palace to ‘camping in a museum’.¹⁶ The living quarters were, in any case, soon domesticated after the long era of elderly kings and queens. Elizabeth’s menagerie of toy horses acquired a new setting; and a room overlooking the Palace lawns, which had briefly been her nursery in 1927, was established as a schoolroom.

More important than the change of location was the ending of a way of life. In the months before the Coronation, public attention became unrelenting. Outside the railings at Buckingham Palace, a permanent crowd formed. Inside them, it was impossible to keep up the illusion of being an ordinary family. At 145 Piccadilly, there had been few visitors, most of whom were personal friends. At the Palace, the King had to see visitors or take part in functions for much of the day, and the Queen was busy every afternoon. Before, the little girls had been able to take walks in the park and play with the children of neighbours. At the Palace, royal headquarters of an Empire, there were no neighbours and different standards applied. A famous anecdote illustrated the change. Princess Elizabeth discovered that merely by walking in front of a sentry on ceremonial duty, she could make him present arms; and having made the discovery, she could not resist walking backwards and forwards to see it repeated.¹⁷

There was a sense of constraint, as well as of power. According to Lajos Lederer, the accession brought an immediate change to Princess Elizabeth’s previously relaxed sittings for Strobl. A detective now accompanied her everywhere, a policeman was always outside, and she ‘no longer referred to Mummy and Papa, but spoke of the King and Queen’.¹⁸ The Queen seems to have been responsible for taking customary formalities seriously, and seeing that her children did so too. According to Dermot Morrah (a trusted royal chronicler), she insisted ‘that even in the nursery some touches of majesty were not out of place, an argument that had the full approval of Queen Mary’.¹⁹ One ‘touch of majesty’ involved the serving of nursery meals by two scarlet-liveried footmen. In addition, though nursery food was mainly ‘plain English cooking,’ the menu, for some reason, was in French.²⁰

The biggest strain for the Royal Family, however, was the almost intolerable pressure placed upon the new King as he came to terms with his unsought and unwelcome role. ‘It totally altered their lives,’ according to Lady Mountbatten. ‘To begin with, the King would come home very worried and upset.’²¹ George VI’s speech impediment, always a handicap, became a nightmare, and every public appearance a cause of suffering. Although British journalists tactfully avoided mentioning it, foreign ones were less reticent. To the American press, suspicious that the real reason for the Abdication was Mrs Simpson’s American nationality, he remained ‘the stuttering Duke of York’.²² The Queen had always taken pleasure from public occasions, and continued to display a much-admired serenity: but the King at first seemed so gauche and unhappy that doubts were raised about whether he could get through his Coronation.²³

HE MANAGED it none the less. In the early spring of 1937, British newspapers which had loyally kept silent about Mrs Simpson, now loyally built up George VI as a ‘George V second edition’.²⁴ Yet there was a sense of him not just as the substitute but also as a reluctant Monarch. Kingsley Martin summed up the mood thus, apostrophizing the thoughts of a supposedly typical member of the public: ‘We would still prefer to cheer Edward, but we know that we’ve got to cheer George. After all, it’s Edward’s fault that he’s not on the throne, and George didn’t ask to get there. He’s only doing his duty, and it’s up to us to show that we appreciate it.’²⁵ Martin noted a feeling of relief and sympathy, as much as of rejoicing, and of healing a personal wound.

The Coronation itself had a wider function than the consecration of a new King. It was also Britain putting its best face to the world – the more urgently so because of the international crisis which overshadowed the royal one. Many commentators, viewing the celebration with its hotch-potch of religion, nostalgia, mumbo-jumbo and military display, saw it simultaneously as a reminder to potential aggressors of British imperial might and a reaffirmation of British freedom. For such purposes, the Empire was unblinkingly described as if it were a democratic, almost a voluntary, association.²⁶

Comparisons were proudly drawn between the symbols of liberty parading through the streets of London, and the choreographed vulgarities of European fascism. One fervent royalist saw George VI’s Coronation as ‘a pageant more splendid than any dictators can put on: beating Rome and Nuremberg hollow at their own bewildering best, and with no obverse side of compulsion or horror’.²⁷ The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski reckoned it a sound investment, as ‘a ceremonial display of the greatness, power and wealth of Britain,’ generating ‘an increased feeling of security, of stability, and the permanence of the British Empire’.²⁸ Even the Left was impressed. Kingsley Martin agreed with the view that the British Establishment had upstaged Goebbels – and suggested that the propaganda purpose of the procession and festivities was to show that the Empire was still as strong and united as in 1914, and that Britain suffered from less class conflict than any other nation.²⁹

Much depended on the central actor, who made little secret of his deep anxiety about the whole proceeding. Afterwards the King told the former Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, that he had been so dazed by fear for much of the ceremony that he was unaware of what was happening.³⁰ However, the Westminster Abbey service went without a hitch, and the Monarch performed his part in it with appropriate gravitas. ‘He carried himself well,’ judged Chips Channon, who witnessed the ceremony as one of several thousand MPs, peers and other dignitaries in the congregation.³¹

A more privileged position among the spectators was given to the two princesses, who sat in the royal box with Queen Mary. For Elizabeth, particularly, the day was an important part of her education. Her governess prepared her for it by reading her Queen Victoria’s account of her own Coronation, written exactly a century before, which began, ‘I was awoke by the guns in the Park and could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the people, bands etc.’ According to Crawfie, the elder princess took such a deep interest that she became ‘one of the greatest living experts on Coronations’.³² The girls rode to the Abbey in a glass coach. Chips Channon looked on as they ‘whipped their robes on to their left arms as they had been shown, pushing up their frocks with the same movement and showing bare legs above socks’.³³ During the three-hour ceremony, Elizabeth watched intently as the Archbishop of Canterbury performed the complex rites, and her father, with the utmost difficulty, repeated the words ‘All this – I promise to do’.³⁴

For any child to view the Coronation at close quarters was a memorable experience: only a handful had the opportunity. For the Heiress Presumptive to see her own parents crowned, and to take part in the procession, must have been awesome. What did she think and feel? The Royal Library contains her own answer – an essay, both vivid and prosaic, written in pencil on lined paper just after the event, and carefully tied with pink ribbon. On the cover is inscribed, in neat red crayon, the words:

The Coronation

12th May; 1937

To Mummy and Papa

In Memory of Their Coronation

From Lilibet

By Herself

An Account of the Coronation

It describes how she was woken at five in the morning by the band of the Royal Marines outside her window (much as her great-great grandmother had been woken by the guns in the Park), and how, draped in an eiderdown and accompanied by her nurse-maid Bobo MacDonald, ‘we crouched in the window looking onto a cold, misty morning’. After breakfast (‘we did not eat very much as we were too excited’) they got dressed and

showed ourselves to the visitors and housemaids. Now I shall try and give you a description of our dresses. They were white silk with old cream lace and had 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.

We went along to Mummy’s bedroom and we found her putting on her dress. Papa was dressed in a white shirt, breeches and stockings, and over this he wore a crimson satin coat. Then a page came and said it was time to go down, so we kissed Mummy, and wished her good luck and went down. There we said Goodmorning to Aunt Alice, Aunt Marina and Aunt Mary with whom we were to drive to the Abbey. We were then told to get into the carriage . . . At first it was very jolty but we soon got used to it.

Princess Elizabeth describes the procession down the Mall, along Whitehall, to Westminster Abbey, and the walk up the aisle with her family, before she went up into the royal box with Queen Mary:

Then the service began.

I thought it all very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did, too. The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so.

When Mummy was crowned and all the peeresses put on their coronets it looked wonderful to see arms and coronets hovering in the air and then the arms disappear as if by magic. Also the music was lovely and the band, the orchestra and the new organ all played beautifully.

What struck me as being rather odd was that Grannie did not remember much of her own Coronation. I should have thought that it would have stayed in her mind for ever.

At the end the service got rather boring as it was all prayers. Grannie and I were looking to see how many more pages to the end, and we turned one more and then I pointed to the word at the bottom of the page and it said “Finis”. We both smiled at each other and turned back to the service.

. . . When we got back to our dressing-room we had some sandwiches, stuffed rolls, orangeade and lemonade. Then we left for our long drive.

On leaving the Abbey we went along the Embankment, Northumberland Avenue, through Trafalgar Square, St. James’s St. Piccadilly, Regent St. Oxford St. with Selfridge’s lovely figures, through Marble Arch, through Hyde Park, Hyde Park Corner, Constitution Hill, round the Memorial and into the courtyard.

Then we went up to the corridor to see the Coach coming in. Then Mummy and Papa came up and said “Goodmorning” and were congratulated. Then we all went on to the Balcony where millions of people were waiting below. After that we all went to be photographed in front of those awful lights.

When we sat down to tea it was nearly six o’clock! When I got into bed my legs ached terribly. As my head touched the pillow I was asleep and I did not wake up till nearly eight o’clock the next morning.³⁵

PRINCESS ELIZABETH was eleven at the time of the Coronation, and it was an initiation for her, as well as for her parents. The day was not far off, as one writer put it in the royalty idiom of the time, when she would move out of childhood ‘into a swifter current of life.’³⁶ Pretty and pubescent, she attracted nearly as much attention as the King and Queen during the two months of state drives, official tours and youth displays that followed. Although she continued to be dressed as a little girl, there was an increase in the number of grand occasions in which she was involved. There was also a sudden seriousness about equipping her for future duties.

One new initiative was the establishment of a Girl Guide company at the Palace, to which a Brownie pack was attached, with the specific purpose of providing the two princesses with a training ground. Based on a romantic myth of imperial kinship, the Scouts and Guides were at their zenith, and several members of the Royal Family had honorific titles within the movement. The Buckingham Palace Company met on Wednesday afternoons and gathered together about twenty children of friends and vetted acquaintances – some, like the royal princesses, taught at home by governesses, others attending London day schools. The Guides were grouped in three patrols. Princess Elizabeth was second-in-command to Patricia Mountbatten, who was a few years older, in the Kingfisher patrol. In winter they met in one of the vast rooms in Buckingham Palace, in the summer in the gardens. There were also trips to Windsor, involving the normal activities of Girl Guides everywhere, though in an abnormal setting: tracking, bird watching, trekking with a hand-cart, cooking sausages and ‘dampers’ (flour balls on sticks) over a campfire. At the Palace, the long corridors were used for signalling practice.

Princess Elizabeth received no special treatment, and mixed in well with the other girls. According to Lady Mountbatten, she was ‘a very efficient and capable deputy,’ already with an air of authority, and popular in the Company, ‘nice, easy to deal with, you’d want her as your best friend’.³⁷ Another member of the Company, Elizabeth Cavendish, confirms the impression of the Heiress Presumptive as a highly competent Girl Guide, who took the various activities and rituals seriously, and did well at them.³⁸ When a Scottish dancer came to give them special instruction, Princess Elizabeth showed a particular proficiency at dancing Highland reels.

The picture is of a conventional, unquestioning child, making the most of what was presented to her. Yet if Princess Elizabeth was not singled out, there was something different about her. ‘She was very aware that how she behaved in public was very important,’ says Lady Mountbatten. ‘For instance, she couldn’t burst into tears. If she hurt her knee she knew she must try not to cry.’³⁹ The Company Captain was a Miss Synge, held in awe by the girls, with Miss Crawford assisting. Some of the Guides, Patricia Mountbatten and Camilla Wallop (later Lady Rupert Nevill), for instance, became lifelong friends.

Punch, 28th April 1937

It was not just cut knees. Incidents in the Kingfisher patrol were not, in general, leaked or reported. However, other events in Princess Elizabeth’s life now were – as the press, less intrusive than later but no less curious, sought to cater for a huge public appetite for details about the royal children’s lives. The princesses might not be able to cry over a minor mishap, but grazes and slight colds often got into the papers just the same. Even before their teens, public appearances had become performances. If the royal children were taken to the theatre, the newspapers automatically treated them as the main attraction – reporting every movement or gesture next day. Sometimes the theatre management, delighted by the privilege of entertaining royalty, would shower honours on them, and the spotlight would be turned in their direction. When the Heiress Presumptive attended the 1937 Christmas production of ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’ at the Holborn Empire, along with fifteen hundred other children, everybody was asked to stand and sing a specially composed children’s verse of the National Anthem.⁴⁰ ‘Normal’ expeditions and natural behaviour were difficult.

The birthday of Princess Elizabeth, meanwhile, became a national event. Birthday presents were listed even in the serious newspapers, together with details of the guests and of how the anniversary was being celebrated. Stimulated by these public announcements, well-wishers would gather wherever the Princess happened to be, to cheer her and convey greetings, and she would be required to appear, and politely acknowledge them.⁴¹ She also became the recipient of a flow of unsolicited mail, often from children in disaster areas, like Chinese orphans fleeing from the Japanese.

Some aspects of the princesses’ lives did not greatly alter. The family continued to come together for weekends at Royal Lodge, where their existence remained much as it had been before. The press made much of the ‘simplicity’ of life at the Lodge, although actually the Royal Family enjoyed every luxury, opportunity for recreation, and service that anybody could wish for. Still, it was possible to enjoy a degree of informality. Here they could enjoy, if not simple living, then the kind of rustic domesticity which had been the greatest pleasure of the Duke and Duchess of York before the upheaval, in the company of horses and dogs unconscious of rank, with grooms, stable boys and kennel hands to look after, handle and talk about them. Princess Elizabeth’s ponies had names like Peggy and Comet; the dogs included corgis, labradors and a Tibetan lion dog, and had names like Dookie, Spark, Flash, Scruffy, Mimsey and Stiffy. The public took a keen interest in these animals. ‘Dookie is unquestionably the “character” of the princesses’ delightful canine family,’ declared one authority in 1942.⁴² On Sundays, the girls and their parents attended services at St George’s Chapel or the Chapel Royal in the grounds of Royal Lodge; on Saturdays, and other days during holidays, the princesses went riding in the morning. Sometimes they walked in Windsor Forest, cycled in the royal gardens at Frogmore or swam in an outdoor pool at the Lodge. All that was lacking was the company of other children of whom they saw as little, or less, than at Buckingham Palace.⁴³

Juvenile guests were rare. However, the King and Queen had to entertain official, and especially foreign, visitors who were invited to stay with increasing frequency as fears about the international crisis grew. According to Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth began to take an interest in politics at about this time, ‘and knew quite a bit of what was going on in the world outside’.⁴⁴ She certainly had a unique vantage point compared with most other children of her age. In one month in 1938, four kings, a regent and a crown prince called on her parents, mainly on trips to London to rally support in defence of their countries. Visitors to Windsor early in the reign included the newly appointed American Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, and his wife Rose, who stayed for a weekend in April 1938. Rose Kennedy was moved by her brief contact with British royalty, especially its younger members. She recorded in her diary that she ‘found it a great conversational convenience’ that her own large brood included two children, Teddy and Jean, who were about the same ages as the princesses. During her stay, she watched out for the royal daughters, much as one might look out for rare and exotic birds when visiting their habitat, and she was not disappointed. While walking in the park surrounding the Castle, she and Joe ‘ran into Princess Elizabeth hiding behind the shrubs. She had on a pink coat and was hatless and she smiled at us’. The Kennedys saw her again over luncheon, when Elizabeth and Margaret appeared together, clad identically in rose dresses with checked blouses, red shoes with silver-coloured buckles, white socks and necklaces of coral and pearl. Elizabeth, not quite twelve, was placed next to the wicked old envoy, to his saturnine delight. After the meal, the princesses were required to accompany their parents and the ambassadorial couple as they walked ‘very informally’ over to Frogmore.⁴⁵

Learning how to handle distinguished guests was one important part of an Heiress’s education, and was soon extended. Shortly after the Kennedy visit, Princess Elizabeth was promoted from white socks to silk stockings, receiving a box from her mother as a birthday present.⁴⁶ She started to attend the huge, thousands-strong, garden parties held annually at Buckingham Palace. She also began occasionally to take a leading role at small-scale semi-public events, presenting rosettes at children’s pony shows, and cups and shields to children at the Bath Club. When she was thirteen, she was allowed to accept the presidency of the Children’s League of the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital, which had been named after her.

There remained the question, both practical and philosophical, of what an Heiress Presumptive and future Queen should be educated to be like – a conundrum that had not faced the Court or Government since the 1830s, when Princess Victoria’s education had been entrusted to the remarkable Baroness Lehzen. Marion Crawford had been employed to help the princesses become lady-like, not monarchical. After George VI’s accession, there was a hesitant appreciation that being lady-like was not enough, but there remained a tension between the training felt suitable for a Head of State, and the needs of an idealized princess. The result was an incongruous mix. If the notion, as an authorized account claimed, that the Princess was subjected to ‘a strenuous tutelage increasing in measure with the passing years’,⁴⁷ was simply a pious invention, there was at least some expansion of the curriculum. Princess Elizabeth began to take twice weekly lessons in constitutional history at Eton College, close to Windsor Castle and Royal Lodge, given by the Vice-Provost, Henry (later Sir Henry) Marten. Later this tuition was supplemented by that of the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, who taught both princesses French, French literature and European history.⁴⁸ Yet there was also a deep concern to avoid the taint of an ‘intellectual’ as opposed to ‘practical’ princess. It was therefore announced that she was taking cooking lessons in the Royal Lodge kitchens, that she sometimes baked cakes in her little Welsh cottage which were sent to children in hospitals or to unemployed areas, that she had learnt to sweep and scrub and to polish furniture, and that Queen Mary, ‘a keen housewife,’ had admired her efforts.⁴⁹

Marten did his best. The theme of his tutelage combined the traditional and the modern, reminding the Princess of where she came from, but also of the changes wrought by modern conditions. Later, he recalled teaching her that the British Monarchy was exceeded in antiquity only by the papacy, that it went back more than a millennium to King Egbert, ‘the first to unite all England,’ and that the secret of its survival was its ability to adapt. He also taught her what he considered the two great events affecting the Monarchy in their own time, the 1931 Statute of Westminster and the advent of broadcasting. The Statute, he explained, had founded the modern British Commonwealth by making a common allegiance to the Crown the sole surviving link between Great Britain and the Dominions; while broadcasting enabled the Royal Family, by talking personally on the air, to sustain that link.⁵⁰ How much his pupil retained is hard to say, though he may have fired her interest in the past a little. When Princess Marie Louise apologized over dinner at Windsor during the Second World War for indulging in an old lady’s reminiscences, the teenage Princess replied: ‘But Cousin Louise, it’s history, and therefore so thrilling.’⁵¹ But perhaps she was just being polite.

Yet if the Princess began to build up an academic knowledge from her tutor, as well as an extraordinary acquaintanceship with some of the major players on the world stage, if she was known to millions of young people all over the world and occasionally seen by a few thousand of them – she nevertheless remained separate from all but a handful of carefully selected contemporaries, with few of whom she could ever be close. There is always a sense of the goldfish bowl, and the lack of any direct contact through the glass.

In some ways, she was very mature for her age. Physically, she developed early, with ‘big bosoms just like her mother’, as a member of a courtier family, who played kick-the-tin with her at Balmoral in the late 1930s, fondly recalls.⁵² In other ways, silk stockings notwithstanding, she was held back in childhood. Marten remembered teaching ‘a somewhat shy girl of thirteen who when asked a question would look for confidence and support to her beloved governess, Miss Crawford.’⁵³ Crawfie herself suggests a lonely, yet self-sufficient, child, and one with her own private world of perplexity. She recalled seeing her stand for hours at the window at Buckingham Palace, looking down the Mall towards Admiralty Arch, and that she would ask her questions ‘about the world outside’.⁵⁴ The picture of a young princess who lacked nothing except social intercourse with people who did not think of her, first and always, as a princess, is confirmed by Elizabeth’s own recollections. When she was having her portrait painted in the Yellow Drawing-Room by Pietro Annigoni shortly after her own Accession, she told the artist that she had spent hours as a child in the same huge, magnificent room, looking out of the windows. ‘I loved watching the people and the cars there in the Mall,’ she said. ‘They all seemed so busy. I used to wonder what they were doing and where they were all going, and what they thought about outside the Palace.’⁵⁵

WAR, AND THE threat of war, ups the value of Monarchy. As the danger from Hitler grew, and the rearmament programme gathered pace, the King and Queen became increasingly busy as hosts, ambassadors and patriotic symbols. Two days before the signing of the Munich agreement in the autumn of 1938, the twelve-year-old Princess Elizabeth travelled with her mother to Clydebank for the launch of the giant Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth, destined to be used both for civilian passengers and as a troop ship. Usually, however, the royal couple did their visiting and travelling unaccompanied by their children who, it was felt, were better off at home. In the case of the foreign trips which the King and Queen were now required to make, there was no sense that, quite apart from the advantages of keeping the family together, seeing other countries would be educational.

The most important royal visit of the decade took place in 1939. Following a brief and apparently successful trip to France in July 1938 to strengthen the Entente Cordiale, it was decided to send the royal couple to North America, to strengthen the special relationship. Before the journey, President Roosevelt invited ‘either or both’ the princesses, genially observing in his letter that ‘I shall try to have one or two Roosevelts of approximately the same age to play with them!’ It was an exciting offer, but the King declined it, on the grounds that they were too young for the rigours of the Canadian part of the tour.⁵⁶

By the time of embarkation in May 1939, Franco had taken Madrid, Hitler had marched into Prague, and a full-scale European conflict seemed imminent. Interest in the tour on both sides of the Atlantic was intense. Perhaps the wild excitement that greeted the King and Queen from the moment they landed in Canada on 17 May would have been even greater if their daughters had been with them. As it was, the visitors had to content themselves with the first-ever royal transatlantic telephone call, taken by the princesses at the Bowes-Lyon house at St. Paul’s Walden Bury.⁵⁷ The King and Queen spoke through hand microphones; the children finished their end of the conversation by holding the Queen’s corgi and making him bark by pinching him.⁵⁸

After three weeks in Canada, the King and Queen were fêted in the United States by the President (‘He is so easy to get to know,’ wrote a grateful Monarch, ‘& never makes one feel shy’), before reembarking from Canada on 15 June. Deeply moved by his reception, and relieved that it was over, the King ‘nearly cried’ – as he later confessed – at the end of his final speech before departing. It was, wrote his biographer, ‘a climacture in the King’s life,’ while at the same time ‘an undeniable wrench to leave homeland and family under such uncertain conditions’.⁵⁹

Presumably it was also a wrench for his children, despite the telephone call. In the press, the six-week parting was widely discussed as an example of the high level of sacrifice the royal couple were prepared to make for the public good. Some interest was also taken in the feelings of their daughters, and the leave-taking at Portsmouth at the beginning of the trip became a moment of sentimental drama.

Keen attention was paid to the princesses as they were taken aboard their parents’ ship before she sailed. Elizabeth at thirteen, it was observed, was nearly as tall as her mother. There was a change in the way she dressed – no longer in ‘babyish, bonnet-shaped hats,’ wearing instead a tilted cap, with the hem-line of her coat and dress lowered to below her knees.⁶⁰ The faces of both girls were scrutinized for signs of emotion. According to one witness, ‘they looked somewhat forlorn when, at length, amid tremendous cheering, the hooting of sirens, and the God-speed of thousands of onlookers, the mighty liner, bearing their Majesties, slowly glided out of the harbour.’⁶¹ According to another, when the princesses returned to the jetty, ‘Margaret’s face puckered up, Elizabeth looked tearful . . . ,’ while the King and Queen could be seen gazing after them, ‘until the two little figures merged into the blue of thronged quays’.⁶²

During the tour, Elizabeth sent her mother photographs, and made a film of Margaret and the pets with a cine-camera. Various diversions of an educational sort were arranged by Queen Mary. One was a visit to the Bank of England to see the gold in the vaults. Naturally, the Governor, Montagu Norman, accompanied them. The old Queen was sincere in her didactic aims. However, in the prevailing mood such excursions almost inevitably became public events as well as private ones, despite strenuous efforts by Buckingham Palace to prevent, or at any rate contain, publicity. ‘I think that the question of the press and press photographers in connection with the outings of T.R.H.s Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret will have to be seriously considered,’ Sir Eric Miéville, the courtier responsible for press relations, wrote to the King’s private secretary following a trip to London Zoo which was widely covered in the picture papers. ‘What happens now is that by some extraordinary means, unknown to me, whenever they are due to visit an institution, news always leaks out ahead to certain members of the press . . . One has to remember that in these days such information given to the newspapers is worth money.’⁶³

The homecoming of the King and Queen was almost as dramatic as the departure. The princesses prepared for it by spring-cleaning the ‘Little House’.⁶⁴ The press did so by sending every available reporter to Southampton, where a destroyer, the Kempenfelt, had been ordered to carry the children to the liner Empress of Britain for a family reunion. ‘Blue eyes sparkling, hair blowing,’ the girls were piped on board the Kempenfelt.⁶⁵ Solemnly, they shook hands with each of the ship’s officers, before sailing out to meet their parents in the Solent. After they had been brought together and returned to shore, the whole royal party proceeded by train to Waterloo, whence they rode in state to Buckingham Palace, the two princesses beside the King and Queen in the leading carriage.