Elizabeth the Queen (12 page)

“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.”

Elizabeth II returned to England on the Argonaut that had flown her to Kenya only a week earlier. When the erstwhile princess walked by his seat several times, Philip’s valet John Dean noted that “she looked as if she might have been crying.” Mike Parker said Philip “was like the Rock of Gibraltar, comforting her as best he could.”

Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at London Airport near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a nineteen-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation of men in dark overcoats, top hats, and homburgs led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and his fellow government ministers stood bareheaded as 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 eighty-four-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.”

The next day, the new Queen went to St. James’s Palace, the sovereign’s official residence. Built by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, the turreted red-brick complex in the heart of London was the home of the monarch until Queen Victoria moved to much larger Buckingham Palace. At St. James’s, Elizabeth II appeared for twenty 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. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701, 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 sixteen months, but she was fully empowered to carry out her duties as sovereign.

The men of the council bowed simultaneously to the fortieth 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, by several accounts she was in tears. They drove to Sandringham to join the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in paying respects privately at the late King’s coffin before it was transported by train to London for the official lying in state at Westminster Hall, followed by the funeral and burial in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor on February 15. The most enduring image was of the three queens—Mary the grandmother, the Queen Mother, and Elizabeth II—standing by the catafalque with Princess Margaret, shrouded in opaque black veils to their waists.

In an unprecedented message to her countrymen, the Queen Mother asked that “protection and love” be given to her daughter “in the great and lonely station to which she has been called.” Privately, she wrote to Queen Mary, “I cannot bear to think of Lilibet, so young to bear such a burden.”

Churchill, who had first met Elizabeth II as a toddler, grieved over George VI and seemed nonplussed by the new sovereign. Jock Colville, who by then had returned to Churchill as private secretary, recalled that “I tried to cheer him up by saying how well he would get on with the new queen, but all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child.”

According to Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary Soames, “my father realized very quickly she was much more than that.” As Martin Charteris observed, “He was impressed by her. She was conscientious, she was well-informed, she was serious-minded. Within days of her Accession she was receiving prime ministers and presidents, ambassadors and High Commissioners … and doing so faultlessly.” The Queen recognized the change in herself, confiding to a friend, “Extraordinary thing, I no longer feel anxious or worried. I don’t know what it is—but I have lost all my timidity.”

With his gift for eloquence and keen sense of occasion, Churchill set the stage for what the press would optimistically herald as “a new Elizabethan age.” Britain was still gripped by shortages, with rationing of foodstuffs such as tea, sugar, and butter, while rubble from World War II bombing blighted the London landscape. The imperial decline was inexorable, and the fears of communist expansion around the world had ushered in the Cold War.

In a speech to the House of Commons five days after Elizabeth took the throne, Churchill described her as “a fair and youthful figure … the heir to all our traditions and glories,” assuming her position “at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.” He expressed hope that the new Queen would be “a signal for … a brightening salvation of the human scene.” A promising young Conservative politician named Margaret Thatcher had her own sanguine view, writing in a newspaper column that “if, as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.”

O
N
F
EBRUARY
27 at 11
A.M.
, Elizabeth II presided over her first investiture in the vast ballroom at Buckingham Palace, honoring private citizens and members of the military with awards for exemplary service to their country. While the Queen hands out these honors known as the orders of chivalry, the government chooses the 2,500 individuals to be recognized each year. With Britain’s world role vastly diminished, investitures have helped sustain national pride, and the Queen has presided over these ceremonies with care and precision. By her sixtieth year on the throne, she had conferred more than 404,500 honors and awards, bestowing them in person over 610 times. “People need pats on the back sometimes,” she once said. “It’s a very dingy world otherwise.”

At each investiture she greets more than a hundred recipients individually and presents their medals or brooches (and in the case of knights, taps the kneeling men on the shoulders with a sword), offering personal comments to all. The impressive hour-long ceremonies are attended by Yeomen of the Guard in red and gold uniforms and her Gurkha Orderly Officers.

The very first honor she bestowed on February 27 was the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration for valor in battle, to Private William Speakman of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He had shown “gallantry and utter contempt of personal danger” during “fierce hand-to-hand fighting” in Korea the previous November, when he led more than ten charges, sustaining serious wounds while inflicting “enormous losses to the enemy.” Speakman was one of only fifteen British subjects who received the award in the six decades after World War II.

Conferring that honor had special meaning for the new Queen, who had also become the head of the armed forces. Members of the military pledge their loyalty to the sovereign, not to the government, keeping their allegiance above politicians who come and go. In the years to come, Elizabeth II would personally approve the appointments to the highest ranks, sign all officers’ commissions, and serve as honorary colonel-in-chief of all seven regiments in the Household Division, the guardsmen designated as her personal troops.

By April, the royal family completed its move to Buckingham Palace, and the new Queen adapted to an office schedule that has scarcely varied throughout her reign. She awoke at 7:30
A.M.
when a housemaid pulled open the curtains in her first-floor bedroom, and Bobo (the only member of the household to call her “Lilibet,” along with “my little lady”) carried in a “calling tray” with Earl Grey tea and Marie biscuits. Right behind Bobo, surging through the doorway, came the Queen’s pack of corgis, which had spent the night down the corridor in their room adjacent to the Page’s Pantry, each of them assigned a wicker dog basket. A footman had already given them their first walk of the day in the garden.

After bathing (in water kept at around seventy degrees), dressing, and having her hair styled and sprayed, Elizabeth II walked through her sitting room, often listening to the BBC on her portable radio along the way, for breakfast in her private dining room amid eighteenth-century paintings. The morning papers were arranged on a sideboard.
Sporting Life
was her first read (supplanted in later years by
The Racing Post
), with a focus on news of the turf, followed by the
Daily Telegraph
(including its two crossword puzzles that became a daily task, but never with a thesaurus) and
The Times
, plus a look at the
Express, Mail
, and
Mirror
tabloids. In the early days she tended to eat a boiled egg and toast with a pat of butter from the Windsor dairy stamped with her cypher, tossing scraps of bread to her eager dogs. She later replaced her cooked breakfast with tea and toast thinly spread with marmalade.

At nine o’clock sharp each morning, a Scottish bagpiper would play for fifteen minutes while marching under her window, skirling familiar Highland reels and strathspeys—a tradition at each of her palaces begun by Queen Victoria. By 10
A.M.
Elizabeth II was at the desk by a tall window in her sitting room looking out over the Palace gardens. She sat on a mahogany Chippendale chair with a seat embroidered by her father (one of his hobbies had been needlework), surrounded by papers and books, family photos in silver frames, and oil paintings, including a portrait of Susan, her favorite corgi. There was a Hepplewhite mahogany bookcase, a satinwood chest of drawers, comfortable sofas, and vases of roses, narcissi, or other fresh-cut flowers. “I like my rooms to look really lived in,” she said.

On her desk were two telephones as well as an intercom, with buttons to summon her private secretaries—Tommy Lascelles and his deputies Michael Adeane, Martin Charteris, and Edward Ford—who came one by one, giving a brisk neck bow on arrival, bearing baskets of papers to be signed and discussed. Standing throughout the meeting, each man covered a different area of expertise, and their agendas ranged across schedules for domestic and foreign travel, ecclesiastical and military appointments, legislation before Parliament, and other issues of the day. Edward Ford called her “a bureaucrat’s dream. She was wonderful to work for, always so accessible.… You talked with her as you might talk to a friend who was staying for the weekend … ‘The prime minister is delayed, shall we put it off till tomorrow?’ … The whole conduct of affairs was very informal and relaxed, far more so than it had been with the King.”

She was also conscientious about dealing with correspondence from the public. She leafed through a stack of envelopes in a basket, reading quickly, and jotting notes for replies to be written either by her ladies-in-waiting or private secretaries. She once explained that she had always regarded letters as “rather personal to oneself, that people write them thinking that I’m going to open them and read them.” She said that the letters “give one an idea of what is worrying people.”

She was required to meet monthly for ten minutes with four government ministers from her Privy Council. In these meetings—always conducted with everyone standing up to keep the proceedings short—she would say “approved” to various government actions read out to her, mostly concerning regulations and government appointments.

Every day except Christmas and Easter—whether at home in London or Windsor, on vacation at Sandringham or Balmoral, weekends visiting friends, travels around the United Kingdom, or visits overseas—she attended to the red leather dispatch boxes of official government papers that could be unlocked only by her key plus three others kept by her private secretaries. Each box brimmed with Foreign Office cables, budget documents, cabinet minutes, orders requiring her signature, and classified intelligence reports.

A smaller evening box, delivered before dinner, contained a summary by the chief whip of the day’s activities in Parliament. Her stated preference: “a piece of 300 to 900 words … a ‘light’ approach is welcomed.” The parliamentary scribes complied with references to “low wattage” debates and descriptions of “shouts and jeers” as well as accolades for speeches of “wit, passion and stinging phrases.” If she were entertaining any politicians for dinner, according to one observer, she could be “as well informed as any of her guests that evening.”

The Queen customarily received a copy of the daily Court Circular, the official list of royal activities prepared by a Palace information officer that she would scrutinize for mistakes before its publication the next day in
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
. She made similar corrections and comments on government documents, all of which she signed and delivered to her private secretary’s office by 8
A.M.
the next day. Michael Adeane estimated that she spent three hours daily doing her paperwork, and it was not unusual for her to be at her desk late into the evening.

For the weekends she received a larger box with enough material to keep her deskbound in the mornings, reading rapidly but thoroughly. Once while staying with some good friends, the Queen said, “I must go do my boxes.” “Oh must you ma’am?” said the friend. “If I missed one once, I would never get it straight again,” the Queen replied.

An essential part of her schedule was her series of private audiences in a sitting room on the ground floor of the Palace—“my way of meeting people, without anybody else listening,” she once explained. These sessions would give her “a very broad picture of what is actually going on, either in government or in the civil service.… The fact that there’s nobody else there gives them a feeling that they can say what they like.” She said that the confidentiality and resulting outspokenness helped form the “basis of where I get my information from.”