Elizabeth the Queen (5 page)

With her 150 dolls and lineup of thirty foot-high toy horses saddled and bridled for play, her every creature comfort cared for, and her meals served by footmen in scarlet livery, how did Elizabeth avoid being spoiled and arrogant? “She was brought up by strict nannies,” explained a friend from the age of five. “I remember once when Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret came to tea, and Princess Elizabeth put her elbows on the table. Mrs. Knight said, ‘Take them off.’ I didn’t expect a princess would have to be told, but she was brought up properly, as a nanny would bring you up, and the Queen has never broken the rules.”

Clara “Allah” Knight was the family’s Hertfordshire-born nursery nanny, who along with Lilibet’s Scottish nursemaid, Margaret “Bobo” MacDonald, regulated the quotidian details of life outside the classroom, and spent far more time with the two princesses than did their parents. Bobo—described by valet John Dean as “small, very smart, and rather peremptory”—would remain in the Queen’s service until her death in 1993. “The Queen just enjoyed talking to a sensible Scottish countrywoman,” said Mary Clayton.

To encourage tidiness and frugality, Allah and Bobo taught Lilibet to keep her belongings in neat rows, to save wrapping paper and ribbon in fastidiously folded parcels and carefully wound rolls, and to turn off unneeded lights. The princess received a weekly allowance of 5 shillings, a useful if artificial discipline, since her annual income was £6,000 a year. When she undressed, she obediently folded her clothes and placed them under a lace and net “clothes tidy,” never leaving anything on the floor or thrown over a chair. Allah and Bobo also helped stop her nail biting, although they didn’t entirely extinguish what Helen Mirren called Elizabeth’s “internal fast beat” behind her tranquil demeanor: a tendency in adulthood to fidget with her engagement and wedding rings.

The other crucial enforcer in Elizabeth’s life was her paternal grandmother, Queen Mary, the consort of King George V. She was a stiff and formal figure who wore a tiara every night at dinner, even when she and the King were dining alone. She was unable to “look anyone straight in the face,” noted photographer Cecil Beaton. “Queen Mary wore tiaras like she wore her toques,” observed Deborah Mitford, the Duchess of Devonshire, “as if they were part of her being.” Her manner was thoroughly proper, her dedication to duty absolute. Not long before she died at age eighty-five, Queen Mary touchingly said she wished that just once she had climbed over a fence.

A stickler for protocol, Queen Mary insisted Lilibet and Margaret Rose curtsy to her whenever they met. She rigorously suppressed her emotions—exhibiting, at most, a slight shift of her lips to indicate amusement—and impressed on Lilibet that it was inappropriate for a monarch to smile in public. When Lilibet spoke of “all the people who’ll be waiting to see us outside” a concert, her grandmother punished her self-important remark by taking her home immediately. Lilibet absorbed even the difficult lessons readily, in part because she and her grandmother were similarly self-contained, focused, and industrious. In the years to come she would frequently quote her stern grandmother.

Churchill observed that despite Queen Mary’s rigidity and apparent intolerance of change, “new ideas held no terrors for her.” Her paradoxical open-mindedness injected rigor into Lilibet’s education when Queen Elizabeth was inclined to relax her daughters’ routine, on the theory that they should have “a happy childhood which they can always look back on.” Through a back channel to Crawfie, Queen Mary suggested revisions to the curriculum and schedules, raised the caliber of the literature selections, and encouraged learning poetry by heart as “wonderful memory training.” She took Lilibet and Margaret on cultural excursions to museums and galleries, the British Mint, the Bank of England, Greenwich Palace, and the Tower of London.

Queen Mary’s passion was history—specifically the genealogical heritage of the royal family—and for Lilibet she was a living link to the past. Her grandfather, Prince Adolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, was one of the sons of King George III; Queen Victoria had been her godmother; and she knew two of Britain’s most noteworthy prime ministers, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. She could tell tales of the magnificent Delhi Durbar of 1911, when she and King George V were celebrated as Emperor and Empress of India, and she could describe the origins and particulars of the royal jewelry that she unabashedly flaunted, sometimes wearing the spectacular Cullinan I and II diamonds (530.2 and 317.4 carats respectively) as a brooch between her ample bosom.

In Lilibet’s pantheon of mentors and tutors, her father had a singular place. George VI alone could tell her what it was like to be monarch, what the challenges were, and how best to meet them. She was brighter than her father, who labored to commit facts and figures to memory, and more even-tempered, but she shared his shyness and his sense of dedication. She watched with admiration his struggle to overcome his stammer for his annual Christmas broadcast, and she noted his diligence in jotting down ideas on a pad he kept nearby during meals. His “steadfastness,” she later said, had been her model.

S
HE LEARNED TIMELESS
lessons about perseverance, courage, and duty from her father’s conduct during World War II. Lilibet was only thirteen when Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Six weeks later, she was in Scotland with Margaret Rose and Crawfie, reading “At a Solemn Musick” by Milton as word came over the radio that the Nazis had sunk the battleship
Royal Oak
, one of the first major blows to Britain’s morale. The King opened a spacious house on his Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands to children and their mothers who had been evacuated from the port city of Glasgow ahead of Nazi bombing. Crawfie directed the princesses to serve them tea, and to talk to the women about their sons and husbands serving in the armed forces.

On May 10, 1940, German troops surged into Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, and Neville Chamberlain resigned as Britain’s prime minister, to be succeeded by Winston Churchill. Lilibet wept while listening to Chamberlain’s resignation speech on the radio; it was clear that after nearly nine months of tense anticipation, the real war was beginning. Two days later, the princesses were sent to the safety of the medieval fortress of Windsor Castle twenty-one miles from the center of London, where they would live within its thirteen acres surrounded by thick walls until the defeat of Germany in May 1945. For security reasons, their location was kept secret, although they were able to venture beyond the castle.

Throughout the war the King and Queen spent their days either at Buckingham Palace or traveling around the country on the ten-car Royal Train, visiting troops, factories, hospitals, and bombed-out neighborhoods. Many nights they would join their daughters at Windsor and sleep in a cavernous shelter built under the castle’s Brunswick Tower or in a fortified ground-floor apartment in the Victoria Tower. Their resolve to continue working in London exposed them to considerable danger and endeared them to the British populace. After Germany launched its Luftwaffe bombing campaign against British cities and military targets in the summer of 1940, Buckingham Palace was hit nine times. The second bomb, which fell in mid-September, destroyed the Palace chapel and nearly killed both the King and Queen.

Like the rest of her generation, Elizabeth was thrown by the war into an extraordinary situation that deeply affected her adolescence. But contrary to what some observers have said, she wasn’t consigned to “purdah” or kept in a state of suspended animation. If anything, her life in the castle gave her an early introduction to the male world she would inhabit as Queen, since she mixed frequently with the young officers in the Grenadier Guards assigned to protect the royal family. (The Grenadiers, founded in 1656, are one of the seven prestigious regiments of the Household Division under the aegis of the monarch. The four other regiments of foot guards are the Coldstream, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, along with two Household Cavalry regiments, the Life Guards and what became known as the Blues and Royals after the merger of the Royal Horse Guards and the Royal Dragoons.) “I was brought up amongst men,” her sister, Margaret, would later say.

At age sixteen, Elizabeth was named an honorary colonel of the Grenadiers and applied her gimlet eye to the first of many regimental inspections. Her rigorous critique prompted one of the majors to advise Crawfie to tactfully remind the princess that “the first requisite of a really good officer is to be able to temper justice with mercy.”

The officers came to tea as well as more formal luncheons where Elizabeth arranged the seating and developed her skills as a hostess. The group included Lord Rupert Nevill and Hugh Euston (later the Duke of Grafton), who would become lifelong friends. Other guests included officers who were convalescing or on leave, among them airmen from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. From having been “a rather shy little girl,” Elizabeth “became a very charming young person able to cope with any situation without awkwardness,” Crawfie observed. “She was an excellent conversationalist.”

Elizabeth and her sister “never forgot there was a war on,” said Antoinette de Bellaigue, “but there was no feeling of doom and gloom.” Windsor’s windows were blacked out, the castle was reinforced with barbed wire and protected by batteries of antiaircraft guns, the vast rooms were illuminated by bare low-wattage bulbs, and hot water was so limited that lines were drawn at five inches in all bathtubs—although the family ate well, with supplies of meat and game from various royal estates. The princesses became accustomed to what their mother described as “the whistle & scream of bombs,” yet she fretted that they were “looking different” because “the noise of guns is so heavy” and so much ordnance landed in the vicinity—nearly three hundred high-explosive bombs by the war’s end. “Though they are so good & composed,” she wrote to Queen Mary, “there is always the listening, & occasionally a leap behind the door, and it does become a strain.”

Several times the family escaped for brief holidays at Balmoral, where Queen Elizabeth was delighted to see her daughters revive with “pink cheeks and good appetites” after walks in the crisp air on the heather-covered hills rising above Royal Deeside, the valley along the River Dee that had been the sentimental heart of the family since the time of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The heiress presumptive’s great-great-grandparents had bought the Balmoral estate in 1852 after falling in love with the Scottish Highlands. “All seemed to breathe freedom and peace,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.”

Victoria and Albert tore down the existing residence and built a larger Balmoral castle of gleaming off-white granite that would weather into a gray hue, with a hundred-foot-high tower, turrets and gables, all according to Albert’s own exacting adaptation of the baronial style. They decked out the interior with a riot of different-colored tartan plaid rugs, curtains, carpets, and linoleum, thistle-patterned wallpaper, landscape paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer, and stags’ heads lining the hallways. Large windows captured vistas of lawns, gardens, pine forests, and hills up the valley of the Dee—the outdoor paradise that shaped their family expeditions.

In the four decades since Victoria’s death in 1901, remarkably little had changed at Balmoral, and her descendants felt the magic of the place intensely. It was the sanctuary where the family had spent two months each autumn, a sacrosanct interlude they would resume at war’s end. During their quick wartime Highland respites Lilibet shot her first stag and caught her first salmon—a modest eight pounds. The King, his wife, daughters, and courtiers amused themselves after dinner with games of charades lasting until midnight, highlighted by Tommy Lascelles imitating a St. Bernard so noisily that he lost his voice.

In the early part of the war, the King and Queen kept up their social life with periodic balls at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. One dance in December 1943 for “young men and maidens” at Windsor lasted until 4
A.M.
The King was famous for being “the best waltzer in the world,” and he let loose on the dance floor, even leading a conga line through the glittering state rooms. Later in the war, Elizabeth slipped into London from time to time—for the occasional dinner party, and to attend her first opera,
La Bohème
, performed by the Sadler’s Wells Company at the New Theatre.

Crawfie worked to keep the atmosphere light at the castle by organizing games of hide and seek and sardines as well as treasure hunts with the officers, and she set up a Madrigal Society so the girls could sing with guardsmen and boys from Eton. At Christmas the princesses appeared with local schoolchildren in the annual pantomime, a full-scale production staged in the Waterloo Chamber. Elizabeth was called on to sing and tap-dance before audiences of more than five hundred, including townspeople and soldiers. Crawfie remarked on her poise, and her riding instructor, Horace Smith, was struck by her “confidence and vigour,” as well as her droll delivery of comic lines.

Periodically word came that officers she knew had died in battle—including, in 1942, her uncle Prince George, the Duke of Kent, in a plane crash while serving in the Royal Air Force, leaving three children, the youngest only seven weeks old. “What a beastly time it is for people growing up,” Queen Elizabeth wrote to her brother David in 1943. “Lilibet meets young Grenadiers at Windsor and then they get killed, & it is horrid for someone so young.” While later in life friends would remark that the Queen found it nearly impossible to write condolence notes about the deaths of those close to her, during the war she readily would take up her pen to write to an officer’s mother, “and give her a little picture of how much she had appreciated him at Windsor and what they had talked about,” Crawfie recalled.

Antoinette de Bellaigue, Marion Crawford, and Henry Marten continued their instruction during the war years. Marten traveled up the hill to the castle in a dog cart, his Gladstone bag bulging with the princess’s textbooks. Sir Owen Morshead, the royal librarian, augmented the curriculum with regular tours of Windsor’s collections, including artifacts such as the shirt worn by King Charles I when he was beheaded, and the lead shot that killed Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. (The priceless paintings had been removed from their frames and sent away for safekeeping.) The future Queen would later say that she considered Windsor to be her home because it represented “all the happiest memories of childhood.”