A Brief History of the House of Windsor (23 page)

Whatever the public’s view of Philip, they longed for a great royal occasion. There had been no colour in their lives since the coronation a decade before, and the wedding represented the first time that state coaches and scarlet uniforms had been seen on the streets since then. The bride and groom received over a thousand wedding presents, some of which have been in storage ever since.

The first years of their marriage were to represent the only comparatively carefree interlude they would have. Philip remained a serving naval officer, but he was either at the Admiralty in Whitehall – a ten-minute walk from the Palace, in which the couple were living – or at the Naval College in Greenwich, and thus they were together every day. (Elizabeth would look out of the Palace window in early evening to see him return.) Clarence House, an historic royal property beside St James’s Palace, was renovated to be their family home, and a country residence was rented for them. Almost exactly a year after their wedding, on 14 November 1948, their first child, Prince Charles, was born.

Philip was then posted to the Mediterranean Fleet based in Malta. As a career officer he was naturally delighted to undertake sea-duty, and the delightful and historical island was as pleasant a posting as could be found. His uncle Mountbatten was commander of a cruiser squadron there. It was decided that Princess Elizabeth would accompany her husband but that Charles should stay behind, for the climate could be difficult for an infant. Though an affectionate mother, Elizabeth was always guided by an overwhelming sense of duty. If her husband was overseas, it was her place to be with him.

In Malta she lived the life of an officer’s wife – after a fashion. She was not in the least anonymous – she was after all the daughter of the island’s king – and she was accompanied by a detective, as well as a dresser and a footman. She brought with her forty cases of clothes, and she lived in the Mountbattens’
villa. She was often asked to perform official functions, but was frequently able to find time for shopping, sightseeing, visits to the cinema or the hairdresser, as well as for watching numerous polo matches, since this was her husband’s new passion. He soon acquired another when he was given command of a frigate, HMS
Magpie
. The ship was tasked to cruise the Mediterranean on goodwill visits. In August 1950 the young couple’s second child, Anne, was born, though this meant that Elizabeth had to return home for several months.

Their lives on the island were in any case increasingly interrupted by the illness of the king. The princess had to fly home and deputize for him by hosting two state visits, and at the end of 1950 she and Philip went in his stead on a month-long visit to Canada. The vivacious young couple made a good impression there, as they did on President Truman on a side-trip to Washington. The king was pleased enough with them to request that they stand in for him again the following year on a royal tour of several countries. They would go to Australia and New Zealand via Kenya and Ceylon. It would take six months. Once again, their children would be left behind.

They set off by air on 31 January 1952, to return far sooner than anyone had imagined they would. As before, there was an official party waiting to receive them, but this time everyone was dressed in mourning. The king had died while Elizabeth and her husband were staying at a Kenyan game reserve. They had to return at once, by the shortest air route and without their luggage, which had already started for Ceylon. With the sleight of hand at which royal aides are so accomplished, black clothes for them were spirited aboard the aircraft just after it touched down, so that queen and consort could emerge suitably dressed.

Elizabeth’s new role was abruptly assumed, but she was already very well versed in her duties. Having received no training himself, King George VI had seen to it that his daughter was given a thorough grounding in the everyday tasks of a sovereign. She had watched him work through his dispatch
boxes, and was to prove adept at doing so herself. Courtiers were impressed by her quick grasp of essentials. She could deal with business in half the time it had taken George, and she could remember more. She was, as always, surrounded by advisers who kept in motion the smooth flow of routine. All she had to do, until she found her feet, was follow precedent.

Her coronation took place more than a year after her accession, in June 1953. The climate of austerity that had cast such gloom over the post-war years was still evident, and once again the chance for a national celebration was welcome. After a good deal of discussion, it was decided that the service could be televised – thus bringing to fulfilment the concept introduced with her father’s wedding thirty years earlier, that the wider public could participate in the occasion. People responded in their hundreds of thousands by buying or renting television sets. This was not the first time it had been possible to experience a state event without leaving home – the previous coronation had been relayed by wireless – but it was certainly the first opportunity to share in the visual splendour of the ceremony. Sitting-rooms across the country were crowded with families, friends and droppers-in who watched – often in respectful silence – the long hours of ceremonial. Many gatherings stood to attention on hearing the National Anthem.

The queen herself endured the long service with equanimity. Such was her veneration of her father and her determination to do things in the same manner that she refused to have the crown made smaller to suit her woman’s head. She bore the same seven-pound burden that he had.

She was queen of a realm that expected her reign to be a golden age. The fact that she shared a name with – and was the same age at her accession as – one of England’s greatest monarchs was seen as a good omen, an indication that there would be a return to greatness for a country that was physically and financially exhausted by the war. The phrase ‘new Elizabethan’ was everywhere in use. It was mere hyperbole,
and in time would mean that the coming era could only be viewed as a disappointment by those whose expectations had been raised too high.

The first crisis she faced was within the queen’s own family. Princess Margaret had fallen in love with one of her father’s equerries. Group Captain Peter Townsend was a hero straight out of
The Boy
’
s Own Paper
. A former Battle of Britain fighter pilot, he was handsome, urbane and charming. He was also divorced, though he had been the injured party. Margaret had developed a girlish infatuation with him that became mutual when they discovered they shared the same interests and sense of humour. They wished to marry, though they knew there would be disapproval. As the sister of the Head of the Anglican Church, Margaret could not marry a divorced man. The queen had in any case, under the Royal Marriages Act, the power to veto any union involving a member of her family. Whatever the queen privately thought of Townsend (she and her mother would probably both have disapproved of him for forming this friendship), Philip did not like him, and was able to influence his wife. If Margaret married Townsend she would lose her royal status and the privileges that went with it. For a while the relationship was kept secret. At the coronation, however, Margaret made a serious mistake. Outside the Abbey after the service she was seen by a reporter to reach up and brush something from the uniform of an RAF officer. It was a gesture that is only made between intimates and the journalist in question, Audrey Whiting, at once guessed the situation. The man was soon named, and the story was out.

The public was fascinated. After decades of dull and worthy royals, here was a scandal that allowed people to take sides, to pry into the personal lives of the family and to criticize the attitudes or behaviour – depending on whom they supported – of their rulers. The reaction to the last royal scandal – the abdication – had in general been muted because the press had published so little information. Now there were to be no such constraints.

Townsend, who was severely criticized by courtiers for having allowed such a relationship to develop, was appointed Air Attaché at an overseas embassy to take him off the scene, but this was only in Brussels, well within telephoning distance of London, and he and the princess remained in contact. His posting ended after two years and he returned home, where the question of their future was reopened. Matters had now reached such a pitch that it seemed they must finally decide between marriage or duty.

They chose the latter course. Margaret made a statement in which she told the public that she had decided not to marry him, and that was that. It was like the abdication all over again, but with the opposite outcome. It was a noble gesture on Margaret’s part, for she was a woman perfectly capable of selfishness, but the simple fact was that she could never have been happy without the status, the trappings and the wealth that went with royalty. It was these things she had opted to keep. A few years later she would find at least initial happiness in marriage to a less suitable but more acceptable man. As for the public, a number of them would never again be quite so deferential in their attitude to the monarchy.

If the Townsend business represented any sort of milestone it was this: until that time, the modern monarchy had been revered as a matter of course. Since the House of Windsor had begun, there had been no overt mockery of its members. George V had been left alone by newspaper cartoonists because he was considered too dull and too dutiful to caricature. Edward VIII had been a popular idol to some, while those who knew his faults did not talk about them in public. George VI represented such a return to ‘dull worthiness’ that, again, there was no scope for satire. Elizabeth II had, all her life, been a model of rectitude, and she too was seen as being above reproach. The only discomfort she had experienced with the popular media had been speculation about her engagement to Philip, and a certain amount of criticism when she left her children behind while abroad on official
business. Within recent memory, the royal family had known nothing but respect, and with the coronation this had reached new heights. Those of a more cynical bent felt stifled by the atmosphere of what they considered to be fawning reverence around the family. But they were about to have their day.

The post-war decades were a time of conspicuous change. The war had undermined moral standards through an increase in casual sex and illegitimate births. Divorce had become widespread as wartime marriages foundered and, because it affected the upper classes as much as the rest of society, a great deal of the stigma that had formerly been attached to it was lost. The years of conflict had created an impetus towards much greater social equality, and this had been furthered by the Labour government that came to power in 1945. In the fifties and sixties levels of prosperity increased, with more money in people’s pockets and more things available on which to spend it. Travel became easier so that foreign holidays became possible for millions. The university population vastly increased as new campuses sprang up across the country. The finer things of life were now within reach of those who had never previously felt entitled to them. ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was paraphrased as saying. With this unprecedented sharing of material well-being, small wonder that the habit of unquestioning deference to supposed superiors went into decline.

Two men publicly criticized the royal family in print. One was Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist who made his reputation by taking up contrarian stances. In 1955 he wrote a satirical article entitled ‘Royal Soap Opera’. Two years later, before a visit by the queen to Washington, an expanded version appeared in the US publication the
Saturday Evening Post
under the title ‘Does England Really Need a Queen?’ and was much more widely read. There was outrage in Britain. Two of his employers, Beaverbrook Newspapers and the BBC, sacked him, and Muggeridge was hounded by hostile,
threatening letters. He went on, incidentally, to be equally rude about another national icon – the Beatles.

John Grigg was not a journalist. As Lord Altrincham, he was a member of the Establishment. When – also in 1957 – he too wrote an article in which he commented on the queen’s public presence, he intended his remarks to be read as constructive criticism, aimed not at Her Majesty but at those who were responsible for her image. Her manner, he complained, was that of ‘a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and recent candidate for Confirmation’. He also took a swipe at her accent, which carried the tones of a girls’ public school even though she had never attended one. It was, he said, ‘a pain in the neck’, while her public speeches, often filled with wholesome moralizing and usually written by others, were ‘prim little sermons’. He too was vilified for his article, and indeed physically attacked as a consequence of it. Nevertheless his shafts hit home. There was, of course, no official riposte but the queen’s voice, which one sympathizer described as ‘cruelly easy to caricature’, became steadily less shrill and girlish. The message was received even if the messenger earned no thanks.

The monarchy, perceived by critics as stuffy and backward-looking, was actually undergoing many changes during this decade. Some were small and to a large extent insignificant, such as the moving of Trooping the Colour from Thursday to Saturday so that it would interfere less with the capital’s traffic, but they showed that a process of continual adjustment was being made to accommodate the mood and outlook of a new generation. All of these changes came voluntarily from within rather than being imposed, or advised, from outside. ‘Presentation at Court’ – the ritual in which upper-class young women processed past the monarch and dropped a curtsey as their names were announced – ended in 1958, to be replaced by a charity ball that was privately organized. To replace it in the Court calendar there was an increase (from two to three, as well as another held in Edinburgh) in the number of royal
garden parties held each summer. These had previously been for members of Society only. Now they were for representatives of the wider public. Invitations were allocated to businesses, school and college staffs, government departments, military units, charity organizations, the law, medicine, the Church, and so on. Anyone belonging to one of these institutions over a period of years was likely to receive an invitation at some point – to have the chance to walk through the Palace gates, stroll in the gardens (which were never normally open) and enjoy the queen’s hospitality in the form of sandwiches provided by Lyons the caterers. Though only a fraction of those attending ever met Her Majesty, they could enjoy the sense of occasion and the knowledge that they and their spouses had ‘been there’.