Elizabeth the Queen (13 page)

For ninety minutes or so on most mornings she would receive the credentials of newly appointed ambassadors in morning dress or native costume, and bid other envoys goodbye, meet with clergy, government officials, military officers, and distinguished citizens, sometimes using the time to confer honors privately rather than at the larger investiture ceremonies. All these encounters were guided by time-honored rules: waiting in the spacious and gilded Bow Room, the Queen pressing a buzzer, the doors thrown open, the announcement of the guest, one pace into the room followed by a bow or curtsy, three more paces and another bow or curtsy, the handshake and a conversation while standing or an invitation to sit and chat. All visitors were instructed in the protocol by ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and private secretaries, and the Queen read briefing papers about everyone she would meet. As if governed by a well-calibrated internal clock, she invariably knew the precise moment to end the conversation, which she would signal by extending her hand. She would then press a buzzer, summoning one of her senior staff to escort her guest from the room.

Even if she were dining either alone or with Prince Philip, the table in the dining room in her private apartment was set impeccably by footmen responsible for three separate pantries: glass, silver, and china. Yet another footman rolled the ancient wooden trolley with platters of food down long corridors from the basement kitchen on the other side of the Palace. To unwind before luncheon, Elizabeth II would have a gin and Dubonnet (half portions of each, with ice and lemon) and before dinner a strong gin martini, prepared neat, unlike Philip’s, which was an expertly mixed concoction in its own pitcher. The page, a senior footman, served the meal, which tended to be simple—grilled meat, chicken, or fish (always boned), vegetables from the Windsor farm, and cheese. Strong spices were forbidden, along with garlic, pasta with sauce, and raw shellfish such as oysters and mussels. She tended to avoid rich desserts as well, although when served strawberries and cream, she reverted to her nursery ways and crushed them into a puree.

“She is not particular about food,” said a former royal household official. “To her, food is fuel. If she were being served steak, we would make sure the Queen got the smallest piece and that it was well done.” One staple was a constant supply of Malvern water, which was also used for her ice, particularly on trips overseas when tap water might cause illness.

The Queen’s midday meal seldom ran more than an hour, and her afternoons were more variable than her mornings. She might have an outside engagement, more work at her desk, another audience, a long walk with her corgis around the Palace gardens, a wash and set by her hairdresser, or wardrobe fittings in her dressing room furnished with mirrors and a skirted dressing table adorned with gold hairbrushes and framed photographs.

Teatime was sacrosanct, served by her page each day at five from a lace-draped cart with plates of sandwiches made of thin bread cut into rounds and filled with cucumber, egg, and watercress, along with freshly baked scones, gingerbread, and muffins. The Queen would brew the Earl Grey or Darjeeling in a silver teapot, allocating one spoonful for each cup. She preferred her tea lukewarm and usually limited herself to the sandwiches, feeding bits of scones to the corgis.

Charles was only three when his mother took the throne, and Anne was eighteen months old, so their life was spent mainly in the six-room nursery complex on the second floor of Buckingham Palace or out in the extensive gardens, overseen by their two nannies. In her first gesture of modernity, Elizabeth II dropped the tradition of requiring formal bows and curtsies from her children when they were very young. On weekdays Charles and Anne came downstairs after breakfast at 9:30 for some brief playtime with their parents. They didn’t see the Queen and duke until tea, when the nannies brought them down for “a final romp” that sometimes included a splash in the swimming pool for Charles with his father.

Preparations for their bedtime began at 6
P.M.
, which caused the Queen to make one adjustment in the official routine. Her father had held his audience with the prime minister at 5:30
P.M.
on Tuesdays, but when she initially kept to the same schedule, Charles and Anne complained, “Why isn’t Mummy going to play with us tonight?” So she moved the audience to 6:30, which allowed her to go to the nursery to join in their nightly bath and tuck them into bed before discussing matters of state with Winston Churchill.

A
DJUSTING TO HIS
new position as the Queen’s consort proved troublesome for Philip. “For a real action man, that was very hard to begin with,” said Patricia Brabourne. While everything was mapped out for Elizabeth II, he had to invent his job under the scrutiny of her courtiers, and he had no role model to follow.

Prince Albert had “wielded over the Sovereign an undefined and unbounded influence,” wrote Lytton Strachey in his biography of Queen Victoria, “the natural head of her family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole CONFIDENTIAL adviser in politics, and only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government … tutor of the royal children, the private secretary of the Sovereign, and her permanent minister.” In 1857, Victoria officially rewarded her husband by naming him Prince Consort, recognizing his unique status during the seventeen years since she married him as a new Queen.

Not only was Philip excluded from the substance of his wife’s official life, with no access to the state papers in her daily boxes, neither he nor his wife considered an official designation of Prince Consort desirable or appropriate in the twentieth century. “The monarchy changed,” Philip later explained to biographer Gyles Brandreth. “It became an institution. I had to fit into the institution.… There were plenty of people telling me what
not
to do. ‘You mustn’t interfere with this.’ ‘Keep out.’ I had to try to support the Queen as best I could without getting in the way. The difficulty was to find things that might be useful.”

Like Prince Albert, Prince Philip was considered an outsider by senior officials of the court. “Refugee husband,” he mockingly referred to himself. He was wounded by the slights he experienced. “Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,” said John Brabourne. Much of the wariness stemmed from Philip’s closeness to Dickie Mountbatten. “My father was considered pink—very progressive,” Patricia Brabourne recalled. “The worry was that Prince Philip would bring into court modern ideas and make people uncomfortable.”

The most hurtful rebuff had occurred in the days following the King’s death, after Queen Mary heard that Dickie Mountbatten had triumphantly announced that “the House of Mountbatten now reigned.” She and her daughter-in-law, the Queen Mother, were angered by his presumption, and the Queen shared their view that she should honor the allegiance of her grandfather and her father to the House of Windsor by keeping the Windsor name rather than taking that of her husband. Churchill and his cabinet agreed. Philip responded with a memo to Churchill vigorously objecting to the prime minister’s advice and pressing instead for the House of Mountbatten, which was ironic. It was his mother’s family name since his father had given him no surname.

The most immediate precedent was actually on Philip’s side, when Queen Victoria dropped her own House of Hanover and adopted her husband’s family name. Her son Edward VII ruled as the first King of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which George V then changed to Windsor for political reasons. Elizabeth II had every right to make her own change. Her reluctance to do so reflected not only her unwillingness to stand up to Churchill, but also to her mother and her grandmother. The Queen failed to foresee that her actions would have a profound impact on Philip, leading to strains in their marriage. “She was very young,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Churchill was elderly and experienced, and she accepted his constitutional advice. I felt that if it had been later she would have been able to say, ‘I don’t agree.’ ”

“I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip fumed to friends. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.” Dickie Mountbatten was even more outspoken, blaming “that old drunk Churchill” who “forced” the Queen’s position. The prime minister mistrusted and resented Earl Mountbatten, largely because as India’s last viceroy, appointed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he had presided over that country’s move to independence. “Churchill never forgave my father for ‘giving away India,’ ” said Patricia Brabourne.

Behind the scenes, Dickie continued a campaign to reverse the decision, with his nephew’s acquiescence. Meanwhile, Philip resolved to support his wife while finding his own niche, which would lead in the following decades to the active patronage of more than eight hundred different charities embracing sports, youth, wildlife conservation, education, and environmental causes. Within the family Philip also took over management of all the royal estates, to “save her a lot of time,” he said. But even more significantly, as Prince Charles’s official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, wrote in 1994, the Queen “would submit entirely to the father’s will” in decisions concerning their children.

She made Philip the ultimate domestic arbiter, Dimbleby wrote, because “she was not indifferent so much as detached.” Newspaper editor and Conservative politician William Deedes, himself a remote father, saw in Elizabeth II’s detachment “her struggle to be a worthy head of state, which was a heavy burden for her. The Queen in her own quiet way is immensely kind, but she had too little time to fulfill her family care. I find it totally understandable, but it led to problems.”

P
ARTICULARLY AT THE
outset, Elizabeth II’s focus was on showing gravitas as monarch. “In the first five years she was more formal,” recalled one of her longtime ladies-in-waiting. The freedom she enjoyed as a young princess—she once attended a ball at the American ambassador’s residence dressed as an Edwardian parlor maid, with Philip costumed as a waiter—had to be subdued, at least in public. Keeping her dignity was paramount, and in doing so she frequently obeyed Queen Mary’s injunction against smiling, even as her youth and beauty gave her an automatic advantage. “How
much
nicer to have a young queen than that very dull man,” wrote the novelist Nancy Mitford. Elizabeth II was also fortunate in having said little of consequence in public, which let her maintain an enigmatic aura.

She had to walk her most delicate line with her mother, a widow at age fifty-one. Elizabeth II was well aware, as she wrote at the time, that her own life was more full than ever, while the future of both her mother and her sister, Margaret, “must seem very blank.” The Queen Mother was too well trained to show her emotions in public, but she shared her grief with friends, telling Edith Sitwell she was “engulfed by great black clouds of unhappiness and misery.” Along with losing her husband, she no longer had her homes or her position at center stage. She agreed to move to Clarence House, but she would stay in Buckingham Palace for more than a year before making the shift.

In the interim, during a visit to friends in Caithness on the bleak northern coast of Scotland, she impulsively bought a small run-down castle tucked behind a grove of trees stunted and twisted from the persistent winds, with a panoramic view of the Orkney Islands. “How sad it looks,” she said. “Just like me.” She called it the Castle of Mey, and planned to “escape there occasionally when life became hideous.” Although the purchase price was a token £100, the Queen funded an extensive renovation, including the installation of bathrooms and electricity, a project that would take three years.

It wouldn’t do for the Queen Mother to retreat in mourning as Queen Victoria had done after the death of Prince Albert, so Churchill met with her in the autumn of 1952 to urge her to continue the public service that had earned worldwide admiration and to help her daughter carry out her duties. She agreed, in effect, to assume the role of national grandmother, always smiling and twinkling, a patron of charities and goodwill ambassador for her country and the monarchy, carrying out her essential credo: “The point of human life and living [is] to give and to create new goodness all the time.”

Cecil Beaton called her “the great mother figure and nannie to us all.… The warmth of her sympathy bathes us and wraps us in a counterpane by the fireside.” She combined an ability to connect instantly with virtually anyone and a flair for high drama, “like a great musical comedy actress in the 1930s descending the stairs,” said Sir Roy Strong, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. No one looked askance when she wore pearls while fishing in Scottish rivers or arrived late for engagements in what Beaton once described as a “pink cushiony cloud.”

Her destiny was to remain single, and to deny herself the love of another man, although few could have predicted that she would be a widow for fully half of her life. She needed to find compensations beyond her public duties, so the Queen permitted—in fact indulged with generous financial support—her mother to live a carefree and extravagant private life marked by nonstop entertaining and the stimulation of a lively group of friends.

Mother and daughter spoke nearly every day on the telephone. When the Queen placed the call, the Palace operator said to her mother, “Good morning, Your Majesty, Her Majesty is on the line for Your Majesty,” which became a standing joke among friends and courtiers. They usually exchanged news about horses and racing, as well as gossip and family matters. “They were great confidantes,” recalled the Queen Mother’s long-serving lady-in-waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. “The Queen could talk to her about her troubles. Queen Elizabeth was aware of the tremendous responsibility the Queen had. She and the King had had it, so she knew the pressures.”

The Queen Mother was in many ways “an Edwardian lady with rigid views,” recalled Campbell-Preston. “A lot of the importance the Queen attached to tradition and doing things the right way came from her mother,” said a former household official. As a consequence, the Queen Mother was a brake on changes to the status quo proposed by Prince Philip and senior advisers. “The Queen Mother was always in the equation,” said another former member of the household. “The Queen would ask, ‘Does Queen Elizabeth know about this?’ ”