Elizabeth the Queen (7 page)

During the war years, Philip came to visit his cousins occasionally at Windsor Castle, and he and the princess corresponded when he was at sea. He served with the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific, and was cited for gallantry after the Battle of Matapan against Italian forces in 1942. Friends and relatives detected a flutter of romance between Philip and Elizabeth by December 1943, when he was on leave at Windsor for Christmas and watched Elizabeth, then seventeen, perform in the “Aladdin” pantomime. Queen Mary wrote to her friend Mabell, the Countess of Airlie, shortly afterward that the cousins had “been in love for the past eighteen months. In fact longer, I think.” The King was quite taken by Philip, telling his mother the young man was “intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.” But both the King and Queen thought that Lilibet was too young to consider a serious suitor.

Philip visited Balmoral in the summer of 1944, and he wrote Queen Elizabeth about how he savored “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them.” That December, while Philip was away on active duty, his father died of cardiac arrest at age sixty-two in the room where he lived at the Hotel Metropole in Monte Carlo. All he left his twenty-three-year-old son were some trunks containing clothing, an ivory shaving brush, cuff links, and a signet ring that Philip would wear for the rest of his life.

While Philip was completing his deployment in the Far East, Lilibet enjoyed the freedom of the postwar period. In August 1945 she reveled in the country life at Balmoral, stalking stags and picnicking on the moors, singing “descants and ditties” with her parents. Her one unanticipated sadness came in December 1945 when her nanny, Allah, died after a brief illness during the family’s first Christmas at Sandringham, which had just been reopened after being shuttered for six years.

Back in London that autumn, Lilibet had her own suite in Buckingham Palace with a view of Big Ben and a decor of “pink and fawn” floral fabric, as well as her own small household: two ladies-in-waiting, a footman (also known as a page), a housemaid, and Bobo, now serving as her dresser (the royal term for a lady’s maid who attends to personal matters). She invited Mrs. Vicary Gibbs, who was one of her ladies-in-waiting, her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge, and several guardsmen to a house party at Sandringham, turned up the radio, entertained them at dinner, and joined in games.

At a party given by the Grenfell family at their Belgravia home in February 1946 to celebrate the peace, the princess impressed Laura Grenfell as “absolutely natural.… She opens with a very easy and cosy joke or remark.… She had everyone in fits talking about a sentry who lost his hat while presenting arms.” Elizabeth “danced every dance.” She was “thoroughly enjoying herself” as the “Guardsmen in uniform queued up.”

Philip finally returned to London in March 1946. He took up residence at the Mountbatten home on Chester Street, where he relied on his uncle’s butler to keep his threadbare wardrobe in good order. He was a frequent visitor to Buckingham Palace, roaring into the side entrance in a black MG sports car to join Lilibet in her sitting room for dinner, with Crawfie acting as duenna. Margaret was invariably on hand as well, and Philip included her in their high jinks, playing ball and tearing around the long corridors. Crawfie was taken with Philip’s breezy charm and shirtsleeve informality—a stark contrast to the fusty courtiers surrounding the monarch.

During a month-long stay at Balmoral late in the summer of 1946, Philip proposed to Elizabeth, and she accepted on the spot, without even consulting her parents. Her father consented on the condition that they keep their engagement a secret until it could be announced after her twenty-first birthday the following April. Like the princess, Philip didn’t believe in public displays of affection, which made it easy to mask his feelings. But he revealed them privately in a touching letter to Queen Elizabeth in which he wondered if he deserved “all the good things which have happened to me,” especially “to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly.”

Palace courtiers and aristocratic friends and relatives of the royal family viewed Philip suspiciously as a penniless interloper. They were irked that he seemed to lack proper deference toward his elders. But mostly, they viewed him as a foreigner, specifically a “German,” or in their less gracious moments, a “Hun,” a term of deep disparagement after the bloody conflict so recently ended. Even though his mother had been born in Windsor Castle, and he had been educated in England and served admirably in the British navy, Philip had a distinctly continental flavor, and he lacked the clubby proclivities of the Old Etonians. What’s more, the Danish royal family that had ruled in Greece
was
in fact predominantly German, as was his maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and his sisters’ German husbands continued to be a touchy subject.

Glossed over was the fact that German bloodlines had been tightly woven into the British royal family since the eighteenth century. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when Catholic King James II fled England, the crown passed to his Protestant daughter Mary II and her husband William III, who ruled together. Following their deaths, Mary’s sister Queen Anne took the throne until she died in 1714. But Anne left no successor, which triggered the provisions of the Act of Settlement of 1701, a constitutional law passed by Parliament to ensure a Protestant would occupy the throne. It stipulated that the crown could only pass to the descendants of Sophia, the Electress of Hanover, the granddaughter of James I. At the time of Queen Anne’s death, the successor was Sophia’s son, George Louis, who became King George I of Great Britain, the first sovereign in the House of Hanover. Neither he nor his German-born son, King George II, spoke English. King George III, who took the throne in 1760, was the first in the Hanover line born in Britain.

In the nineteenth century, the German strain in the British line of succession was further strengthened when Edward the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, married the Princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield and produced Princess Victoria, who took the throne on the death of her uncle, King William IV. Queen Victoria raised the German stakes yet again by choosing Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as her husband, taking on his name and dropping the House of Hanover. Their grandson, George V, in turn married Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, who had a German father, Prince Francis, the Duke of Teck. Although born in Kensington Palace, Queen Mary always spoke with a slight German accent.

During World War I, amid strong anti-German feeling in Britain, King George V made a strategic decision to dispel the long Teutonic shadow from the royal family’s image. By royal proclamation in 1917, he transformed the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha into the House of Windsor, after the ancient castle. At the same time, he anglicized the names of collateral members of the family: Battenberg became Mountbatten, and Teck became Cambridge and Athlone.

None of the criticisms of Philip’s German blood or cheeky attitude was of any concern to Princess Elizabeth. A man of ideas and appealing complexity, he was a breath of fresh air to the heiress presumptive. It was clear he would not be easy, nor would he be boring, as might have been the case with one of her mother’s chosen suitors. He shared her commitment to duty and service, but he also had an irreverence that could help lighten her official burdens at the end of a tiring day. His life had been as unfettered as hers had been structured, and he was unencumbered by the properties and competing responsibilities of a landed British aristocrat. According to their mutual cousin, Patricia Mountbatten, the princess also saw that behind his protective shell, “Philip had a capacity for love which was waiting to be unlocked, and Elizabeth unlocked it.”

The princess “would not have been a difficult person to love,” said Patricia Mountbatten. “She was beautiful, amusing and gay. She was fun to take dancing or go to theater.” In the seven years since their first meeting, Lilibet (which is what Philip now called her, along with “darling”) had indeed become a beauty, her appeal enhanced by being petite. She did not have classical features but rather what
Time
magazine described as “pin-up” charm: big bosom (taking after her mother), narrow shoulders, a small waist, and shapely legs. Her curly brown hair framed her porcelain complexion, with cheeks that Cecil Beaton described as “sugar pink,” vivid blue eyes, an ample mouth that widened into a dazzling smile, and an infectious laugh. “She sort of expands when she laughs,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. “She laughs with her whole face.”

There was nothing daring or even particularly stylish about Elizabeth’s appearance. Until she was well into her teens, she and her sister had dressed alike in childish outfits, primarily to assuage Margaret, who “was always tying to catch up,” explained Anne Glenconner, a good friend of Margaret. Only when Lilibet turned nineteen did she begin choosing clothing for herself, and even then she tended toward the conservative styles and pastel colors favored by her mother, avoiding any hint of décolletage. Crawfie had to badger her into choosing a bold red dinner dress with a pleated skirt and figure-hugging jacket piped in white silk—“one of the most becoming frocks she ever had,” the governess concluded. The princess was intrigued by the process of selecting bespoke clothing from the royal couturier, Norman Hartnell—the sketches, the models, and the fittings. But she had little patience for gazing at herself in mirrors. Vain preening was alien to her nature.

The press caught wind of the cousins’ romance as early as October 1946 at the wedding of Patricia Mountbatten to Lord Brabourne at Romsey Abbey. Philip was an usher, and when the royal family arrived, he escorted them from their car. The princess turned as she removed her fur coat, and the cameras caught them gazing at each other lovingly. “I think people thought ‘Aha!’ at that point,” recalled Patricia Brabourne. But no official confirmation followed, and the couple kept up an active social life. Elizabeth’s guardsmen friends served as her escorts to restaurants and fashionable clubs like The 400, and Philip would take Elizabeth and Margaret out to a party or the theater. But he was only one among many young men to dance with the heiress presumptive.

L
ILIBET HAD A
growing number of official duties in what her father wryly called the “Royal Firm” (later shortened to the “Firm”). In July 1945, her parents took her to Northern Ireland—her first flight on an airplane. Eight months later she returned for her first solo visit to the six predominantly Protestant counties that were created when Ireland was divided by the British government in 1922. Ireland had been a British colony since England’s King Henry II invaded in the twelfth century. After more than eight centuries of oppressive British rule, Irish nationalists rebelled in 1916, resulting in the violent six-year war for independence that led to partition. While the north (also to be known as Ulster) remained within the United Kingdom, the predominantly Catholic twenty-six counties in the south became the self-governing Irish Free State, a British dominion (similar to Canada and Australia) that grudgingly recognized the British monarch as its head of state.

George VI continued to be his daughter’s most important tutor. During long walks at Sandringham, Balmoral, and Windsor Home Park, he gave her advice and shared his views on government and politics.

The King’s popularity was at its peak, but the postwar years proved difficult for him. In the July 1945 election, the Labour Party won control of Parliament. After heroically leading Britain through the war, Winston Churchill, the King’s confidant and valued partner, was replaced at 10 Downing Street by Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour party. Not only was Attlee taciturn and reserved, his socialist policies—an ambitious Labour platform to create a far-reaching welfare state, nationalize industry, and redistribute wealth—were anathema to both the King and Queen (although Queen Elizabeth shrewdly sized him up as “a practical little man … quite cagey … difficult to get along with, but he soon melted”). The King didn’t hesitate to express his outrage in private, but publicly he remained rigorously neutral. His elder daughter could also see how the strain of his job was wearing her father down. He had begun to suffer from arteriosclerosis, which affected the circulation in his legs and gave him considerable pain. But instead of pacing himself, he kept late hours, chain-smoking as he worked.

On February 1, 1947, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret embarked on their first official overseas trip together—three months in the British colonies of South Africa and Rhodesia, plus a month for the round-trip ocean voyage on the forty-thousand-ton battleship HMS
Vanguard
, where the admiral’s quarters had been transformed into a suite of day and sleeping cabins decorated with prints of London scenes, sofas and chairs in cheerful patterns of ivory, blue, and beige, and satinwood furniture. With a household entourage of ten, they left England from Portsmouth on a gray day at a time when Britain was suffering through a winter of record-breaking cold along with food rationing and fuel shortages.

The journey marked Lilibet’s emergence as a major presence in the royal family and introduced her to the distant reaches of British power. The idea of the British Commonwealth began taking shape in the early twentieth century to describe colonies in the empire making the transition to independence but keeping their connection to the crown. What would become the modern Commonwealth in 1949 was still inchoate, but George VI wanted to transmit to the heiress presumptive his devotion to the countries of the formerly robust British Empire. On a personal level, her time away from Philip would be a final test of her commitment and some time for “we four,” the affectionate name King George VI had given to his family, to spend their last stretch of time together.

The first several days shipboard left the entire royal party seasick and confined to their cabins in heavy swells and gales so fierce that the Royal Standard—the sovereign’s red, gold, and blue flag bearing lions passant and rampant as well as a gold harp—was torn to shreds. When the sun came out as they cruised into the tropics, the princesses leaned hatless against the rails in their flowered dresses, lay on the deck of the rifle range to compete in shooting contests, and dashed around playing tag with the boisterous naval officers. The King, in shirtsleeves and shorts displaying spindly legs, played deck tennis with midshipmen while the women watched. When the ship passed the equator, the crew staged a “Crossing the Line” ceremony featuring sailors dressed in wigs, falsies, and skirts, presided over by Father Neptune with his trident. The “novices” crossing for the first time were dunked and otherwise tormented, although the two princesses only had their faces dabbed with outsized powder puffs.