Elizabeth the Queen (11 page)

The scope and pace of the trip were punishing. They made more than seventy stops, and on a single day in Ontario they visited eight towns. Through it all, Elizabeth worried about the health of her father 3,400 miles away. Prepared for the worst, Martin Charteris carried the documents required for Elizabeth’s accession, and she had black mourning clothes as part of her traveling wardrobe. The princess was buoyed periodically by encouraging phone calls from her mother that made her feel “much refreshed and strengthened.”

In private on the train 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 favored discreetly tailored suits and close-fitting hats, sometimes trimmed with veils, as well as fur coats and capes. During their visit to Niagara Falls, everyone donned oilskin suits on the spray-lashed observation deck. Pulling her hood tight, Elizabeth exclaimed, “This will ruin my hair!”

While most of their time was devoted to sightseeing (which she filmed on her movie camera), they also visited steel and paper mills, and Elizabeth got a first glimpse of the United States from Windsor, Ontario, when she saw the skyline of the Motor City across the Detroit River. Several weeks later, the royal couple boarded a plane for Washington and set foot on American soil for the first time on October 31—the beginning of an important connection with the United States that would grow deeper in the years to come.

President Harry S. Truman, his wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret, greeted them at the airport with a twenty-one-gun salute. Truman expressed relief that the King had “recovered so promptly” and observed that 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 sixty-seven-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.” She later told Martin Charteris that she was taken by Truman’s natural manner.

They drove into the capital in a procession of convertibles as 600,000 people shouted and cheered along the route. Philip and Elizabeth stayed with the Trumans at Blair House, the official guest quarters, and the president took the princess across Pennsylvania Avenue for a tour of the White House, which was undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation.

The royal couple’s whirlwind itinerary started with a reception at the Statler Hotel (later the Capital Hilton) on 16th Street for nine hundred representatives of “press, radio, television and newsreels.” Elizabeth made some brief remarks, the royal couple met a small number of journalists, and Philip diverted himself by sneaking a look at the notebooks of two women reporters, a gambit he would enjoy repeating in future encounters with the news media.

The following day they visited the Capitol, inspected the Declaration of Independence and Constitution at the Library of Congress, paid tribute at the grave of George Washington in Mount Vernon and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, and spent two hours shaking hands with 1,500 guests at a British embassy party. At a Rose Garden ceremony, they presented the Trumans with an overmantel mirror adorned with a painting of flowers, to be hung in the refurbished Blue Room as a “welcome ornament … a mark of our friendship.” (It was eventually moved to the pink bedroom suite in the private quarters.) 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 over a month. He was in a mischievous mood, asking a guardsman, “Where is your sword?” but he obediently walked along a line of dignitaries shaking hands.

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.

* * *

I
N THE ROYAL
couple’s absence, a general election had taken place. On October 25, 1951, the Conservatives had narrowly won a parliamentary majority, sending Attlee off and returning seventy-six-year-old Winston Churchill to 10 Downing Street six years after his crushing loss. When the City of London welcomed Elizabeth and Philip back with a luncheon in their honor at the Guildhall, Churchill raised a glass to toast their health.

The King and Queen celebrated Christmas at Sandringham with their daughters, son-in-law, two grandchildren, Queen Mary, and an assortment of relatives—the first time the entire clan had enjoyed the holiday together. Like their autumnal escape to Balmoral, the royal family’s six-week sojourn in Norfolk each winter was an ingrained tradition dating back to King Edward VII and his mother, Queen Victoria, who bought the Sandringham estate for him when he was Prince of Wales.

In 1870 the future Edward VII built a new and considerably larger house at Sandringham, in Jacobean Revival style with more than three hundred rooms. The red-brick facade is trimmed with stone, ornamented with balconies and bay windows, and extravagantly topped with gables, chimneys, and onion domes. The spacious rooms are decorated with paneling, intricate plasterwork, arches, columns, and coffered ceilings. The centerpiece of the house—only steps from the front entrance—is the grand two-story Saloon, a Jacobean-style great hall overlooked by a minstrel’s gallery and dominated by two massive stone fireplaces. The bedroom suites are huge as well, with furniture described by the writer David Cecil as “sturdily philistine.” Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, was astounded to discover three marble sinks in her bathroom, the first engraved “HEAD & FACE ONLY,” the second “HANDS,” and “good heavens the last was blank, so what can it have been for?” she wrote in a letter to a friend.

Christmas in 1951 followed the pattern set by Queen Victoria, with the family opening gifts on Christmas Eve in the German style. They gathered in the ballroom, where trestle tables covered with cloths were arranged with gifts in piles marked for each family member. After tearing off the wrappings and ribbons, the adults changed into black tie and long dresses for a dinner complete with champagne toasts and popping open Christmas crackers, gaily wrapped party favors containing paper hats and trinkets. The next morning they all walked to St. Mary Magdalene, the nearby parish church, then returned for Christmas luncheon. After a big breakfast on Boxing Day—the extra holiday observed in Britain on December 26 when in earlier times landowners would give their employees gifts or reward their service—the men went out for the traditional pheasant shoot. The King felt well enough to join them, carrying a light gun.

But failing health prevented him from keeping his commitment to travel with the Queen on a long-planned state visit to the Commonwealth nations of Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon in the new year, so he deputed Elizabeth and Philip to take the nearly six-month journey instead. They 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.

The King and Queen accompanied the royal party to the airport on January 31, 1952, to say farewell. Standing on the tarmac, George VI looked haggard as he stoically waved to his daughter and son-in-law when they took off on their BOAC Argonaut. Five days later, after settling into the secluded Sagana 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 elephants, rhinos, monkeys, and other animals with her movie camera. At sunset, she and Philip spotted a herd of thirty elephants. “Look, Philip, they’re pink!” she said, not realizing that the gray pachyderms had been rolling in pink dust. After staying up much of the night, Elizabeth stood at dawn with Michael Parker, now her husband’s private secretary, to watch a white eagle swoop above their heads.

Back at Sagana, Parker took a phone call in the mid-afternoon from Martin Charteris at the nearby Outspan Hotel. The private secretary bore the grim news that the fifty-six-year-old King was dead, and Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was now Queen at age twenty-five. After a pleasant day shooting hares on the Sandringham Estate, George VI had dined with his wife and Princess Margaret before retiring to his ground-floor bedroom at 10:30
P.M.
Early in the morning of February 6, he had died in his sleep from a blood clot in his heart. Parker immediately informed Prince Philip, who muttered that it would be “the most appalling shock” for his wife, then walked into her bedroom where she had been resting and broke the news to her. She shed no tears, but looked “pale and worried.” Philip led her down a path through the garden to the Sagana River, where they took a long walk along the bank.

When Elizabeth’s cousin Pamela Mountbatten, who was serving as her lady-in-waiting, expressed her condolences, the new Queen could only say, “Oh, thank you. But I am so sorry that it means we’ve got to go back to England and it’s upsetting everybody’s plans.”

There has been much speculation, not least because of historical parallels, about when precisely Elizabeth became Queen. It undoubtedly happened when she was atop the African fig tree, which draws a romantic line to the moment in 1558 when Elizabeth I, seated next to an oak tree at Hatfield House, heard that the death of her sister, Queen Mary, meant she was the monarch, also at age twenty-five.

With preternatural composure, her mid-twentieth-century successor set about her business, writing letters, telegrams, and memoranda—vivid proof, as Charteris recalled, that she had “seized her destiny with both hands.”

“It was the most poignant moment.
She looked so young, with nothing
on her head, wearing only the
white shift over her dress.”

Queen Elizabeth II, age twenty-six, before the anointing at her coronation in Westminster Abbey, June 1953.
Getty Images

FOUR

“Ready, Girls?”

“W
HAT ARE YOU GOING TO CALL YOURSELF?” ASKED
M
ARTIN
C
HARTERIS
, 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 sixteenth-century predecessor, Elizabeth I) but she would be known as the Queen. Her mother would become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, rather than the more fusty Dowager Queen. Elizabeth II would be Queen Regnant, and her royal cypher E II R.