The Queen

1926–2022

Andrew Morton

• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781789295313
• eBook ISBN: 9781789294491
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Biographies historiques

In this entertaining and insightful biography, award-winning writer Andrew Morton, author of Diana, Her True Story and Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters, takes you behind the scenes to uncover the woman and her world. For years she prayed for her mother to give birth to a son. She longed to be spared her destiny as Britain's future Queen. Her dream was to live in the country surrounded by children, dogs and horses.But Elizabeth did her duty, the young princess pledging before her people that she would dedicate her whole life to the service of Britain and the Commonwealth. She hoped that that day would be a long way off. It was not to be. Only twenty-five when she became Queen after the premature death of her father, King George Vl, Elizabeth became the stuff of superlatives: the longest reigning, most travelled and, for a shy woman, the Queen who shook more hands and made more small talk than any other monarch in history. She was seen and believed by millions, either in person, on television or film.Elizabeth was set firmly on the road to becoming sovereign because of the D word – divorce. In 1936, her uncle David, King Edward VIII, wanted to marry a twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson. When he couldn't, he abdicated. After that national trauma, divorce and the fall-out from divorce shaped her reign. She witnessed her sister Margaret, three of her children and several grandchildren divorce. And she lived long enough to see the wheel turn full circle, watching as another American divorcee, Meghan Markle, walked down the aisle with her grandson Prince Harry.While her reign was defined by divorce, her private life was moulded by an irascible husband, an extravagant mother and a querulous eldest son. In the winter of her reign she refereed a war between two of her grandsons, brothers William and Harry who were once inseparable friends. As the first monarch to reign for seventy years, she became, following a once in a lifetime pandemic, the reassuring face of hope and optimism, the grandmother to the nation.

CHAPTER ONE

SHIRLEY TEMPLE 2.0

THE YOUNG GIRL WITH the furrowed brow and intent expression bent furiously over her book. She carefully turned the pages and then when she spotted her target, she would grab her pen and scribble and scratch out the offending words: ‘Dr Simpson.’ Scribble. ‘Dr Simpson.’ Scratch. That he was but a name in one of the books in her nursery was irrelevant as far as the angry ten-year-old girl was concerned.

As Princess Elizabeth went about her solemn, destructive task, her younger sister Margaret played with the snaffles, bridles and saddles of the wooden horses that crowded their nursery. Margaret was focused on her make-believe world, unconcerned about her sister’s silent rage concerning a certain Mrs Simpson who, unbidden, had begun to change all their lives. She was also less than interested in the growing crowds that jostled and shoved in the winter gloom to catch a glimpse of the comings and goings to and from 145 Piccadilly, the London home of their parents, the Duke and Duchess of York.

After all, the sisters were used to peering out from their top-floor bedroom, watching people looking at them, both sides wondering what the other was doing. It was a game that would last a lifetime. On this occasion, though, the number of onlookers was greater than normal and the atmosphere inside the stone-fronted townhouse was tense and hurried. The two front doorbells, labelled ‘Visitors’ and ‘House’, rang more frequently and as the crowds of the curious and concerned grew, police were drafted in.

The name ‘Simpson’ had initially been whispered and then became part of disapproving discussions that ended abruptly whenever the girls came within earshot. Much as her parents tried to protect Lilibet – the family’s nickname for the princess – and her sister, the older daughter was sensitive to moods and rhythms. She was adept at catching the conversational drift, especially as, since her tenth birthday, she enjoyed the privilege of taking breakfast with her parents – and occasionally her grandmother, Queen Mary. She was able to gather crumbs of information that were denied her younger sister. Not that Elizabeth was old enough to appreciate what was really going on.

She just knew that at the heart of the puzzle was that woman Simpson. The evidence was all around. Her father looked visibly ill, Queen Mary, who was routinely ramrod-straight and imperious, seemed older and somehow shrivelled, while her mother’s normally jaunty demeanour had for once deserted her. Nor did it help when, in early December 1936, the Duchess of York came down with a nasty case of flu and was confined to bed.

When Elizabeth asked the three women in her life – her governess Marion Crawford (known as Crawfie), her maid Margaret ‘Bobo’ MacDonald and nanny Clara Knight (known as Alah) – about what was going on, their responses were evasive and dismissive. Indeed, Crawfie often took the girls for swimming lessons at the Bath Club as a necessary distraction. This down-to-earth triumvirate were the girls’ window on the world, their genteel observations and prim prejudices shaping the children’s own responses. As far as the princesses were concerned the name ‘Wallis Simpson’ was taboo in the House of York. So, Elizabeth went through her books, scratching and scribbling in a futile attempt to delete from her world the name of the woman who would change her life, and that of her parents, forever.

A short while after celebrating her tenth birthday, Elizabeth had briefly met Wallis Simpson in the spring of 1936. Not that the American woman made much of an impression. Mrs Simpson had arrived with the princess’s Uncle David, the new King Edward VIII, to see her parents at their weekend home, Royal Lodge, in the manicured acres of Windsor Great Park. Her uncle had come to show off the two American interests in his life – a brand-new Buick station wagon and his other fascination, the twice-married lady from Baltimore. After the couple had left, Elizabeth asked her governess Crawfie who that woman was. Was she responsible for the fact that Uncle David rarely came to see them these days? Of all her father’s brothers and sisters, he had been the most frequent visitor to 145 Piccadilly, joining the girls for card games of Snap, Happy Families and Racing Demon after tea. He was always fun and took time to play outdoors with his nieces. On one occasion, captured on a home movie from the early 1930s, the then Prince of Wales is seen ushering the Duchess of York and her daughters onto the lawns at Balmoral and teaching them how to perform the Nazi salute – to much hilarity.

While Crawfie’s response to Elizabeth’s questions about the chic American may well have been non-committal, the Scottish governess found herself rather liking Mrs Simpson, later describing her as a ‘smart attractive woman, with that immediate friendliness common to American women’.¹ Her employers did not share this opinion. After spending a convivial hour discussing gardening and taking tea with the Yorks and her paramour, Wallis was left with the distinct impression that ‘while the Duke of York was sold on the American station wagon, the Duchess was not sold on [the King’s] other American interest’.²

On the day, it was the two young princesses who provided the chief talking point, not the American contingent. ‘They were both so blonde, so beautifully mannered, so brightly scrubbed, that they might have stepped straight from the pages of a picture book,’ recalled Wallis in her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons.³ Elizabeth and Margaret were, as children often are, used as the human equivalent of coffee-table books, their presence a neutral conversational diversion, a way of avoiding tricky grown-up issues. By the time they first met with Wallis Simpson, the girls had become practised at being used in this way, impeccably mannered children introduced to the visiting adults to help break the conversational ice.

It was the same in the summer of that fateful year, when they travelled to Scotland to stay at the modest eighteenth-century house called Birkhall Lodge, part of the Balmoral estate that was first purchased by Queen Victoria. The Yorks’ principal guest was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang, who had accepted their invitation after the King, who traditionally would have invited England’s senior Protestant prelate to Balmoral Castle, had seemingly snubbed him in favour of a livelier list of guests. Instead, up the road at the castle, he and Wallis were hosting a jaunty party of aristocrats, Americans and royal relatives, including his second cousin Louis Mountbatten and his younger brother Prince George with his wife Princess Marina.

After tea on the second day of the prelate’s visit, Elizabeth, Margaret and their cousin Margaret Rhodes sang songs ‘most charmingly’. The Archbishop noted: ‘It was strange to think of the destiny which may be awaiting the little Elizabeth, at present second from the throne. She and her lively little sister are certainly most entrancing children.’⁴

The King was not so enamoured. When he heard that the ecumenical head of the Church of England was staying with the Yorks, he suspected his brother of attempting to set up a rival court. Their emerging conflict centred on the Sovereign’s wish to marry Wallis once she had divorced her husband, the shipping agent Ernest Simpson. In those days, divorce wasn’t just frowned on; it was deemed anathema in the eyes of the Church. As the secular head of the Church of England, the King should have been the last person to marry a divorcee, let alone a soon-to-be twice-divorced American of no standing or status. For his part, Edward VIII threatened to renounce the throne unless he was allowed to wed the woman who had stolen his heart.

Although the British media had kept a lid on the blossoming romance – pictures of the King and Wallis on board the steam yacht Nahlin during a summer cruise in the Adriatic had appeared everywhere except in Britain – the potential constitutional crisis was finally made public early in December 1936. It set in motion a series of calamitous events that unintentionally placed Princess Elizabeth at the heart of the drama.

By then, Wallis had secured a decree nisi from her husband but had to wait a further six months for the decree absolute, thus allowing her to marry the King and become his Queen. In spite of a dire warning from his private secretary Alec Hardinge – supported by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin – that he would cause irrevocable damage to the monarchy and probably provoke a general election if he continued along this path, the King’s mind was made up. At a tense meeting on 16 November, he informed the Prime Minister that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson as soon as she was legally free. If the government opposed his plan, he would simply abdicate. He later conveyed his decision to his mother and siblings, who were shocked to the core. Queen Mary even sought the advice of a therapist to verify her conclusion that her eldest son had been bewitched by a skilful sorceress. Baldwin was more sanguine, informing his Cabinet colleagues that the elevation of the Yorks to the positions of King and Queen might prove to be the best solution, as the Duke of York was rather like his much-loved father, George V.

Not that Prince Albert, known as Bertie, would have agreed. He was slowly but surely being wound into a constitutional web that gave him no opportunity of escape. It was the stuff of nightmares. While there was some discussion that Prince George, the Duke of Kent, who was the youngest of the four brothers, could take over the throne as he already had a son, the fickle finger of fate pointed to the second-born, the unfortunate Bertie.

Shy, diffident and cursed with a congenital stammer, as the duke considered the hand he was now being dealt, his immediate thoughts went out to his eldest daughter, whose position would change from third in line to the throne to Heiress Presumptive, a future Queen sentenced to a lifetime of duty and public solitude.

Though he had grave doubts about himself and his own capacity to take on such a great office of State, he quietly admired his firstborn. She had extraordinary character and solid qualities that, as he told the poet Osbert Sitwell, reminded him of Queen Victoria. High praise even from a doting father who was, as Dermot Morrah, royal historian and friend of the duke, observed, ‘reluctant to sentence his daughters to the lifetime of unremitting service, without hope of retirement, even in old age, which is inseparable from the highest place of all’.⁵

Princess Elizabeth was rather more matter-of-fact and practical. When it became inevitable that her father was going to succeed his elder brother as King, Princess Margaret asked, ‘Does that mean you’re going to be Queen?’ to which her sister replied, ‘Yes, I suppose it does.’⁶ Elizabeth didn’t refer to it again, except when her father casually mentioned that she would need to learn to ride side-saddle for the occasions when, hopefully in the far-distant future, she would have to appear on horseback at the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony at Horse Guards Parade.

Although she gradually grew resigned to becoming Queen she did, according to her cousin Margaret Rhodes, think that moment would be ‘a long way off’.⁷ As an insurance policy, she added to her evening prayers the fervent hope that she would have a baby brother who, by dint of his sex, would leapfrog over her and become the heir apparent.

While Princess Elizabeth largely accepted her new station with the phlegmatic unconcern of youth, her father reacted differently. He ‘broke down and sobbed like a child’⁸ when he visited his mother, Queen Mary, to tell her the abdication was imminent. On Friday 11 December 1936 – the year of three kings – Edward VIII’s abdication was announced. It was at Windsor Castle where the now ex-King gave his historic live broadcast containing the memorable passage: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’ After praising his younger brother’s ‘long training in the public affairs’ of the country and his ‘fine qualities’, he also pointed out that he had ‘one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children’.⁹

But no longer so happy for the family in question. While his wife, now Queen Consort, lay confined to her bed with a nasty bout of flu, the new King described the momentous event as ‘that dreadful day’. The next day, the hitherto ignored but now central characters in this unfolding drama greeted their altered circumstances with a mixture of excitement and irritated acceptance. When Princess Elizabeth saw an envelope addressed to the Queen, even her calm demeanour was punctured. ‘That’s Mummy now, isn’t it?’ she asked, while her younger sister lamented the fact that they had to move into Buckingham Palace. ‘You mean forever?’ she remarked, incredulously.¹⁰

On the day of the official proclamation on 12 December 1936, both girls hugged their father, who was dressed in the uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, before he left to attend the Accession Council at St James’s Palace. After he had gone, Crawfie explained that when he returned he would be King George VI, and from then on they would have to curtsy to their parents. They had always curtsied to their grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary, so were already more than familiar with this respectful practice.

When he came back at one o’clock, each princess presented him with a beautiful curtsy, the behaviour of his daughters bringing home to him his new station. Crawfie recalled: ‘He stood for a moment, touched and taken aback. Then he stooped and kissed them both warmly. After this we had a hilarious lunch.’¹¹

By virtue of her father’s changed royal status, Elizabeth began to transition into a living symbol of the monarchy; her name mentioned in prayers, her doings and her dogs now the daily fodder for the breakfast newspapers, her life owned by the nation. Along with the Hollywood child star Shirley Temple, she became the most famous face in the world, a subject of wonder and adoration.

Her life as a fairy-tale princess was, in reality, less Walt Disney and more Brothers Grimm. The sisters’ new life in Buckingham Palace, a sprawling, echoing place of sinister shadows, scurrying mice, gloomy rooms and portraits with eyes that followed as one tiptoed past, was a mixture of excitement, boredom and isolation. It was a place where childhood nightmares came to life, where the daily round of the royal ratcatcher and his deadly paraphernalia symbolized the gruesome reality behind the perceived regal glamour. Thrown into the circumscribed circle of her sister, governess, maid and nanny, with her parents a distant harassed presence, Elizabeth became an object of fascination for millions.

Apart from having to settle into a new home, in some ways not much had changed for the Heiress Presumptive. With her glowing ringlets of blonde hair, Elizabeth had been a national symbol all her life. Born on Wednesday 21 April 1926 at 2.40 in the morning, just days before the General Strike that crippled the British economy, she represented, in the midst of national crisis, values of family, continuity and patriotism. Not only was her arrival a welcome diversion from the daily struggle for subsistence in a post-war Britain wracked by dispute and want, it was also somehow medieval, mysterious and rather comical.

Royal custom dating back to the seventeenth century decreed that the Home Secretary be present at a royal birth, lest an imposter be smuggled into the bedchamber. In keeping with tradition, the person who occupied that Cabinet office in 1926, William Joynson-Hicks, whose agitated mind was occupied with thoughts on how to defeat the trade u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Andrew Morton
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Surfing with her Majesty
• Chapter One: Shirley Temple 2.0
• Chapter Two: Bombs at Bedtime
• Chapter Three: A Walk in the Heather
• Chapter Four: The Barefoot Princess
• Chapter Five: Crowning Glory
• Chapter Six: Hearts and Coronets
• Chapter Seven: Secrets, Scandals and Spies
• Chapter Eight: A Family Affair
• Chapter Nine: Then Along Came Diana
• Chapter Ten: Marriages Under The Microscope
• Chapter Eleven: One’s Annus Horribilis
• Chapter Twelve: Flowers, Flags and Fortitude
• Chapter Thirteen: Two Weddings and Two Funerals
• Chapter Fourteen: Good Evening, Mr Bond
• Epilogue
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Credits
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations