Elizabeth the Queen (16 page)

“If it was a case of teaching her, it was not done in a didactic way,” said Mary Soames. “She was very well versed in her constitutional position. My father knew very well what the position of constitutional monarch is vis à vis prime minister, cabinet and parliament. So it was a great advantage for her first prime minister to be somebody who really did know that. Most of them don’t, and his massive experience in government would surely have been a help. They talked about the present. They must have talked about people. Young though she was, she had experience. She traveled. She probably knew some of the people better than he, so she would have told him about them. What struck my father was her attentiveness. She has always paid attention to what she was doing. He never said she was lacking confidence.”

One small glimpse of Elizabeth II’s growing self-assurance came when Churchill was finishing his memoirs of World War II and asked her permission to publish two letters he had written to her father. She granted his request but observed that his language was “rather rough on the Poles” and asked that “in the interests of international amity” his words “be toned down a bit.” Churchill readily changed the original version of the letter he had written a decade earlier.

In the weeks before the coronation, the seventy-eight-year-old prime minister had assumed a greater workload than usual when Anthony Eden had a botched gall bladder operation, causing him to fly to Boston for extensive repair surgery and a long recovery in the United States. Although Eden was foreign secretary, he functioned as Churchill’s deputy. In the view of Clementine Churchill, “the strain” of the additional burdens “took its toll” on her husband. While Eden was overseas, Churchill suffered a stroke after a dinner in honor of the Italian prime minister on June 23. Amazingly, since his mind remained sharp, Churchill and his aides were able to conceal his paralytic symptoms as “fatigue,” keeping the truth about his illness under wraps.

The Queen kept informed about Churchill’s condition, writing a lighthearted letter to buoy his spirits, and inviting him in September to join her at the Doncaster races to watch the St. Leger, followed by a weekend at Balmoral. He made a surprisingly rapid recovery, although his condition was still frail. When the prime minister lingered in the rear of the royal box at the racetrack, the Queen said to him, “They want you.” He appeared at the front, he later told his doctor, and “got as much cheering as she did.”

After a period of rest in the south of France, Churchill was back at work by October, making speeches and presiding over cabinet meetings. But he tired easily, and his memory had slipped. It was obviously time for his retirement, but the Queen declined to use their weekly audience to apply any pressure. Churchill made a series of pledges to Eden that he would step down on a certain date, only to find one excuse after another to extend his time in office. In the view of Eden’s wife, Clarissa, the prime minister “prevaricated continuously for nearly two years.”

B
ESIDES DEALING WITH
Churchill’s illness and recovery, the young Queen became embroiled that summer in a highly sensitive family matter with constitutional implications. Princess Margaret had fallen in love and was determined to marry one of the royal household’s most trusted employees, thirty-eight-year-old Group Captain Peter Townsend, who had been working for the family since 1944. Not only was he sixteen years her senior, he was the divorced father of two sons.

Handsome and mild-mannered, Townsend had been a highly decorated Royal Air Force pilot in World War II, a dashing hero who had brought down eleven German planes in the Battle of Britain. He had originally been assigned to Buckingham Palace for three months as an equerry, who is an aide-de-camp who assists the monarch at events, organizes logistics, and helps look after guests. Lascelles noted that Townsend was “a devilish bad equerry: one could not depend on him to order the motor-car at the right time of day, but we always made allowances for his having been three times shot down into the drink in our defence.” Yet Townsend’s calm and empathetic temperament endeared him to George VI, who made him a permanent member of the staff, first as equerry and then as Deputy Master of the Household, overseeing all private social engagements.

Although Margaret was just thirteen when Townsend arrived, her sparkling personality made her the center of attention in the royal family. “Lilibet is my pride, Margaret my joy,” their father used to say. Margaret had always been the impish counterpoint to her sister, the witty entertainer who knew how to brighten her father’s moods, with a quicksilver mind that ran in unpredictable directions and didn’t yield easily to discipline. She was willful and competitive, and she would always remain resentful that her older sister received a better education. She had asked to join Lilibet’s tutorials with Henry Marten, but was told by the tutor, “It is not necessary for you.” Perhaps to compensate, her father indulged and spoiled his younger daughter, which only encouraged her mercurial tendencies. “She would not listen ever,” recalled her cousin Mary Clayton. “She would go on doing something terribly naughty just the same. She was so funny she didn’t get scolded, which would have been good for her.”

Her younger sister was often vexing, but Elizabeth invariably stood up for her. “Margaret was an awful tease,” said Mary Clayton, “which helped her sister in her own way to control difficult situations.” She also kept Elizabeth humble. “The Queen never shows off, unlike Princess Margaret, who was always pirouetting,” said historian Kenneth Rose. Despite their different natures, the two sisters could laugh at the same jokes, although Elizabeth’s wit is gentler and more dry. Both excelled at mimicry and enjoyed singing popular songs together at the piano, which Margaret played with great flair.

As Margaret matured, Townsend was drawn to her “unusual, intense beauty.” At five foot one, she had a voluptuous figure and what Townsend described as “large purple-blue eyes, generous sensitive lips, and a complexion as smooth as a peach.” He was struck by her “astonishing power of expression” that “could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure, to hilarious uncontrollable joy.” And he saw that “behind the dazzling façade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity.”

By the time Margaret turned twenty in August 1950, Townsend’s marriage had come apart after his wife, Rosemary, strayed into several affairs. The princess and the equerry with blue eyes and chiseled features found themselves in long conversations, and by August 1951 on the Balmoral moors the King spotted his daughter gazing lovingly at Townsend dozing in the heather. Yet both he and his wife averted their eyes, engaging in the royal penchant for “ostriching,” an almost congenital ability to ignore unpleasant situations.

Margaret turned to Townsend for consolation in the months following her father’s death when she was “in a black hole.” That June he initiated divorce proceedings against Rosemary, citing her adultery with John de László, son of the portrait artist who had painted Lilibet as a child. After his divorce from Rosemary was granted in November 1952, Townsend told Tommy Lascelles that he and the princess were “deeply in love” and wanted to get married—a plan the couple had shared only with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.

The following day Lascelles had the first in a series of conversations with the Queen describing the “formidable obstacles” posed by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was designed to prevent unsuitable matches from damaging the royal family. The act specifies that no member of the family in the line of succession can marry without the consent of the sovereign, but if the family member is over the age of twenty-five, he or she could marry one year after giving notice to the Privy Council, unless both houses of Parliament specifically disapproved of the proposed marriage. The problem for Margaret was that marriage to a divorced man would not be recognized by the Church of England, of which her sister was the Supreme Governor—a circumstance that would cause the Queen to forbid the union. Princess Margaret was third in line to the throne after the Queen’s two children, but because Charles and Anne were both so young, she could plausibly serve as Regent. The issue remained unresolved, and was swept temporarily out of mind by the all-consuming coronation preparations.

Other than telling the Queen Mother in February, Margaret and Townsend kept their intentions secret until Coronation Day, when a tabloid reporter caught Margaret flicking a piece of “fluff” from the lapel of Townsend’s uniform with a proprietary and flirtatious glance. Several days later, the Palace learned that
The People
, a Sunday tabloid, would run a story on the affair, prompting Lascelles to notify Churchill on June 13. “This is most important!” Churchill exclaimed. “One motor accident, and this young lady might be our queen.” Not only was the prime minister troubled about the censure of the Anglican Church, he worried that parliaments in the Commonwealth would disapprove of Margaret marrying Townsend on the grounds that their child would be an unsuitable king or queen. Churchill “made it perfectly clear that if Princess Margaret should decide to marry Townsend, she must renounce her rights to the throne.”

Churchill, Lascelles, and Michael Adeane all agreed that the only remedy was to offer Townsend “employment abroad as soon as possible,” Lascelles recalled. “And with this the Queen agreed.” Until the publication in 2006 of a memorandum written by Lascelles in 1955 detailing the sequence of events, the common assumption was that the Queen had “stood on the sidelines” while others banished Townsend, and that Princess Margaret was misled by Lascelles into thinking she could freely marry on reaching the age of twenty-five. In fact, by Lascelles’s account, “the Queen, after consulting Princess Margaret—and presumably Townsend himself—told me a few days later that she considered Brussels to be the most suitable post.” Elizabeth II also asked for a statement clarifying the “implications” if she were to forbid the marriage. The government’s attorney general produced a memo, and Lascelles wrote a letter outlining the possibility of a split within the Commonwealth if “several parliaments … might take a diametrically opposite view of that held by others.” He was scheduled to retire at the end of the year, but before his departure, the private secretary sent this information to the Queen as well as Margaret, who thanked him for it in February 1954.

Once Townsend left for his Belgian exile in July 1953, the Queen and her advisers hoped the separation would cool the couple’s ardor. But the princess and her lover continued to correspond daily, and Margaret deluded herself into thinking that after her twenty-fifth birthday she could prevail, even if her sister was compelled to withhold her approval. By postponing a decision, everyone involved only prolonged the agony and kept the Queen’s younger sister in limbo for two years.

In retrospect, it’s clear why Elizabeth II did not want to force the issue. Divorced people were excluded from royal garden parties and other gatherings in the sovereign’s palaces and on the royal yacht. Her grandfather had first admitted “innocent parties” in divorce to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and the Queen had relented to include “guilty parties” as well. Still, she had an almost visceral reaction to divorce, which she had inveighed against in her only major speech as a princess. “She strongly believed that divorce was catching,” said Lady Elizabeth Anson, a cousin of the Queen through the Queen Mother’s Bowes Lyon family. “If one got divorced, it made it easier for another unhappy couple to get divorced.”

W
ITH THE RESOLUTION
of Margaret’s dilemma delayed, the Queen turned her full attention to the culmination of the continuing coronation celebration: an ambitious five-and-a-half-month tour of Commonwealth countries, covering 43,000 miles from Bermuda to the Cocos Islands, by plane and ship. It was her first extended trip as sovereign, and the first time a British monarch had circled the globe. By one accounting, she heard 276 speeches and 508 renditions of “God Save the Queen,” made 102 speeches, shook 13,213 hands, and witnessed 6,770 curtsies.

Elizabeth II’s role as the symbolic head of the Commonwealth of Nations not only enhanced her place in the world and extended her reach, it became a source of pride and pleasure and an essential part of her identity. “She sees herself fused into that instrument that was originally an empire,” said former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney after she had been leader of the organization for nearly sixty years. Sir Philip Moore, her private secretary from 1977 to 1986, once estimated that she devoted half of her time to the Commonwealth. Over the course of her reign she would visit most member nations multiple times.

In 1949 the London Declaration created the modern Commonwealth with the removal of “British” from its name, while recognizing King George VI as “Head of the Commonwealth.” That year, newly independent India pledged to keep its membership when it became a republic, setting the stage for British colonies to join as they sought independence. The Irish Free State had become a republic the previous year, ending the British monarch’s role as head of state. In a further demonstration of antipathy for Britain rooted in centuries of domination as well as bitterness over the island’s partition, the new Republic of Ireland left the Commonwealth. Other newly independent nations eagerly joined in the years to come, however. “The transformation of the Crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association … has no precedent,” Elizabeth II observed after twenty-five years on the throne.

What began as a cozy group of eight members—Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, Ceylon, and India—would grow to fifty-four by the early twenty-first century, representing almost one third of the world’s population. Most of the member nations became republics, but some (Brunei and Tonga among them) had monarchs of their own, and all twenty-nine realms and territories where Elizabeth II reigned as Queen belonged as well.

Embracing First and Third World countries, large and small, from all regions except the Middle East, the Commonwealth dedicated itself to giving its members equal voice and a sense of kinship. With English as the shared language, it served as a forum for the promotion of good government, education, economic development, and human rights—although its main weakness was a tendency to dither over the egregious abuses of tyrants.