The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

Colville formed a similar impression. ‘Princess Elizabeth has the sweetest of characters,’ he recorded, shortly after joining her, ‘but she is not easy to talk to, except when one sits next to her at dinner, and her worth, which I take to be very real, is not on the surface.’

The impression of Princess Elizabeth is of a strangely poised young person used to going her own way, which tended to be the way of her class rather than of her age group, and making few concessions to fashion. Yet the sense of her as highly conventional – in contrast to her sister – depends partly on the vantage-point and the generation of the observer. Simon Phipps, friendly with Margaret when he was a theological student and young clergyman, and who later became Bishop of Lincoln, remembers the stiffness of royal protocol, including having to change twice in the evening (once for tea, and again for dinner), and turning at table when the Monarch turned. But he also recalls happy games of charades, including an anarchic one in which he was cast as a bishop, and the King as his chaplain.

When Lady Airlie, Queen Mary’s friend and lady-in-waiting, visited Sandringham in January 1946, what shocked her was the extent of change since before the war. She found youth in control, with jig-saw puzzles set out on a baize-covered table in the entrance hall. ‘The younger members of the party – the princesses, Lady Mary Cambridge, Mrs Gibbs and several young guardsmen congregated round them from morning to night,’ she noted. ‘The radio, worked by Princess Elizabeth, blared incessantly.’ No orders or medals were worn at dinner, as they had been in the old days, and the girls related to their parents with – to Lady Airlie – startling informality. Modernity was also visible ‘in the way both sisters teased, and were teased by, the young Guardsmen.’

Teasing and teased Guards Officers were, however, only one aspect of their lives. The chasm that divided the King’s daughters from the young men and women they were able to meet socially, widened early in 1947 when they accompanied their parents on a major tour of southern Africa which attracted world attention, and set the stage for Princess Elizabeth’s début as a fully-fledged royal performer.

The end of the war had given a brief, almost paradoxical, boost to the imperial ideal. Partly, it was an effect of sheer survival – defending the Empire had been one of the causes for which the war had been fought. Britain’s near-bankruptcy had made the vision of a shared, transoceanic loyalty all the more necessary to national self-esteem: a necessity which the granting of self-government to India seemed, if anything, to increase. At the same time, the British Government was aware that the bonds that tied together the Commonwealth were in need of repair. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Pretoria, capital of a Union still bitterly divided between English-speakers and Afrikaners.

Officially, the tour – which involved a total of four months’ travel – was supposed to be a chance for the King and Queen to rest after the ordeal of war. In practice, the schedule prepared for the Royal Family was strenuous, and the objectives highly political. Wheeler-Bennett later called it a ‘great imperial mission’

. That was one way of describing it. From the South African point of view, the visit was (in the words of another historian) ‘essentially a mission to save Smuts and the Crown of South Africa’.

English-speakers were enthusiastic about it, Afrikaners on the other hand, were cynical – seeing George VI (according to the High Commissioner, in a telegram to the Palace) ‘as the symbol of the “Empire-bond” which they had pledged themselves to break.’ General Smuts was accused of having arranged the trip in order to rally the English section round him for the coming general election.

But there was also something else, which in one sense made nationalist Boers right to be suspicious: the royal trip had an ‘imperial’ aspect that went beyond the attempt to improve relations with the Union. South Africa was important in a new ‘multi-cultural’ definition of the Commonwealth – in the light of Indian independence – because it was the only ‘white’ dominion that was in reality predominantly black. The royal visit was to be a way of showing Windsor and Westminster interest in what one (pro-British) Natal paper described as ‘the complex problems of race relationships – problems which are certain to assume an increasing importance in the years ahead,’ in the many countries which owed allegiance to the Crown.

These factors, however, were not the ones that got the most publicity. In the eyes of the world, the tour also had a personal and dynastic interest: Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would be apart for four months. Since the invitation was accepted by the King on behalf of the whole Royal Family in the first half of 1946, the trip could hardly be seen as an attempt to break up the friendship. Yet the visit took place as speculation was at its height; and the irony did not escape the gossip-writers that the first major tour on which the King and Queen proposed to take their elder daughter was also one on which she had reason to be reluctant to accompany them.

Why was there no engagement announcement before they set out? A belief that all was not going smoothly added to the press excitement. One former courtier suggests that – whatever the original intention – the King and Queen saw the visit as an opportunity for reflection. ‘Undoubtedly there was hesitation on the part of her parents,’ he says. ‘They weren’t saying “You must or mustn’t marry Prince Philip,” but rather, “Do you think you should marry him?” It wasn’t forced. The King and Queen basically said: “Come with us to South Africa and then decide”.’

With Philip’s naturalization due to be gazetted in a few weeks, however, any pretence that the relationship did not exist was abandoned. A couple of nights before the departure of the Royal Family, Elizabeth accompanied both her parents to dinner with the Mountbattens, including the about-to-be Philip Mountbatten, at 16 Chester Street – serenaded by Noël Coward. ‘The royal engagement was clearly in the air that night,’ recalled John Dean, Mountbatten’s butler and later valet to Philip.

It was a farewell meal in two senses. While the King prepared to inspect one of his domains, Uncle Dickie was about to negotiate the transfer of power, as George VI’s Viceroy of India, in another.

MUCH OF THE journey to Cape Town, aboard the battleship HMS Vanguard, was uncomfortably rough, confining the Royal Family to their cabins. When she returned to South Africa as Queen several decades later, Elizabeth recounted how sea-sick they had been. However, as they travelled south they left Europe’s worst winter weather of the century behind them. ‘Our party seems to be enjoying themselves, especially the princesses,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, describing ‘crossing the line’ festivities, and a treasure hunt involving the King’s daughters and the midshipmen. ‘Peter T[ownsend],’ he added, referring to an equerry who was a member of the party, ‘tries hard and is doing well.’

For the two young women, the experience was breathtaking – not least because it was the first time either of them had been abroad. In the 1930s, they had been considered too young to accompany their parents on foreign visits, and during the war it had been too dangerous, or impracticable, to do so. Thus, Princess Elizabeth had reached the age of twenty before setting foot outside the United Kingdom. The impact of the voyage and then of the journey around a very different kind of country was therefore all the greater. South Africa – with its varieties of terrain, race, wealth and culture – was a powerful reminder to Elizabeth of the Commonwealth duties that lay ahead. Both girls were struck by the open spaces: Princess Margaret recalls her sense of the vastness of the country and the contrasts with austerity Britain. ‘There was an amazing opulence, and a great deal to eat,’ she says. She remembers the change from a country still restricted by food rationing, and her delight at the endless series of meals with their abundance of delicacies, including an enticing array of complicated Dutch pastries. Huge fir cones seemed to symbolize the outsize scale of everything they encountered. The South Africans lent them horses, and they rode on the beaches, wearing double felt hats.

The royal party arrived in Cape Town on 17 February to a tumultuous welcome that banished fears of republican hostility. There was a glittering state banquet the same night. Next day, Lascelles wrote home that while he had never attended a more dreary and miserable dinner in thirty years of attending public functions, the Royal Family seemed to enjoy it, especially the princesses. ‘Princess E[lizabeth] is delightfully enthusiastic and interested,’ he noted; ‘she has her grandmother’s passion for punctuality, and, to my delight, goes bounding furiously up the stairs to bolt her parents, when they are more than usually late.’

The plan was to bring the British Monarchy into direct contact with every part of the Union – in the words of the tour’s official souvenir – from the seaboard of the Cape and Natal ‘to areas where African tribes live in peace and security under conditions which still suggest the Africa of history.’

The royal party slept in a special ‘White Train’ for a total of thirty-five nights, travelling to the Orange Free State, Basutoland, Natal and the Transvaal, and then to Northern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland. South Africa was a society rigidly divided on racial grounds: but it did not yet have strict apartheid laws, and the royal party met people from different communities, even attending a ‘Coloured Ball’. The King’s daughter attracted particular attention. Africans shouted from the crowds ‘Stay with us!’ and ‘Leave the Princess behind!’

The presence of British royalty also aroused keen interest in the small, enclosed white South African world, dominating popular entertainment. At a huge civic ball held in Cape Town the night following their arrival, five thousand guests danced to a fox-trot composed in honour of Elizabeth, called ‘Princess’. The tune accompanied a song which became the catch of the season. ‘Princess, in our opinion,’ went its loyal refrain, ‘You’ll find in our Dominion/Greetings that surely take your breath,/For you have a corner in every heart,/Princess Elizabeth’.

Elsewhere, there were other musical tributes. At Eshowe, Zulu warriors pounded out the ‘Ngoma Umkosi,’ the Royal Dance before the King. One verse was omitted at the last minute: ‘We hear, O King, your eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, is about to give her heart in marriage, and we would like to hear from you who is the man, and when this will be.’

On 1st April, close to the end of the tour, the not unwelcome or unhelpful news came through of the death of King George of Greece. Lascelles reported home that while there would be a week’s court mourning in London, no notice at all would be taken ‘by anybody out here because we haven’t any becoming mourning with us – a typical Royal Family compromise!’

At East London, the second city of Cape Province, Elizabeth had to open a graving dock – it was a windy day, and she had to struggle to keep her hat on, her dress down, and her speech from blowing away.

For much of the trip, however, the princesses’ most demanding duty was to walk behind their parents at ceremonies or sit beside them at displays. It was a long time to be away, on holiday yet constantly on show – and out of touch with ice-bound Britain, where Philip, at his naval base, lectured his students in his naval greatcoat and by candlelight, because of the fuel crisis. According to below-stairs gossip, spread by Bobo MacDonald, who had graduated from children’s nursemaid to become the Princess’s maid and dresser, ‘Elizabeth was very eager for mail throughout the tour, and so was Philip.’

She also wrote to other friends. Lord Porchester, for instance, received letters from her wherever she went. She wrote vividly, about the tour and meeting Smuts, but also about home. In one letter she asked about her horse, Maple Leaf.

The passivity, however, did not last until the end of the tour. The Royal Family’s departure date was fixed for 24 April. Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday fell three days earlier – a happy coincidence of timing which enabled the South African government to make it the climax of the visit. It could scarcely have been celebrated on a more elaborate, and extravagant, scale. As a token of the importance Smuts attached to the royal tour, 21 April was declared a public holiday throughout the Union. In addition, the royal birthday was marked by a ceremony, attended by the entire Cabinet, at which the Princess reviewed a large contingent of soldiers, sailors, women’s services, cadets and veterans; by a speech given by the Princess to a ‘youth rally of all races’; by a reception at City Hall in Cape Town; and by yet another ball in the Princess’s honour at which General Smuts presented her with a twenty-one-stone gemstone necklace and a gold key to the city.

The Royal Family made its own most dramatic contribution to the day’s events in the form of a broadcast to the Empire and Commonwealth by Princess Elizabeth, which became the most celebrated of her life. The author was not the Princess, but Sir Alan Lascelles, a straight-backed, hard-bitten courtier, not given to emotionalism – though with a sense of occasion and (as his memoranda and diaries reveal) a lucid, if somewhat old-fashioned, literary style. The speech was both a culmination to the tour, and a prologue for the Princess.

When Princess Elizabeth was consulted in the White Train near Bloemfontein during the preparation of a draft, according to one account, she told her father’s private secretary, ‘It has made me cry’. The effect on many listeners and cinema-goers was much the same as they heard or later watched the solemn young woman making her commitment, like a confirmation or a marriage vow. That her message came from a problematic dominion added to the impact of words which already sounded archaic, and a few years later might have seemed kitsch, yet which seemed strangely to capture the moment. The effect was the more surprising because Lascelles had made no concessions to populism, and had not attempted to write the kind of speech a young woman might have delivered, if the thoughts had been her own.

Punch, 23rd April 1947

‘Although there is none of my father’s subjects, from the oldest to the youngest, whom I do not wish to greet,’ the Princess read from her script, ‘I am thinking especially today of all the young men and women who were born about the same time as myself and have grown up like me in the terrible and glorious years of the Second World War. Will you, the youth of the British family of nations, let me speak on my birthday as your representative?’ She quoted Rupert Brooke. She spoke of the British Empire which had saved the world, and ‘has now to save itself,’ and of making the Commonwealth more full, prosperous and happy. Thus far, her speech belonged alongside other truistic utterances forgettably spoken by royalty when required to address the public. It was the next part that took listeners by surprise. Unexpectedly, she changed tack, launching into what amounted to a personal manifesto, that combined two themes of Sir Henry Marten in his tutorials – the Commonwealth, and the importance of broadcasting:

There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, “I serve”. Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did, but through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple.

I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong, but I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.

What was it in this nun-like promise – about a crumbling Empire that in a few years would cease to exist – that captured the imagination of those who heard it? It was partly the youth of the speaker, the cadences of the delivery, and the confidence of the performance; partly the knowledge that a royal betrothal was imminent; partly the earnestness of the sentiment in an earnest decade.

In fact, though the Princess may not have known it, the message was highly political – directed at several distinct audiences. One of its aims was to help Smuts and the cause of English-speakers in South Africa. It was designed to help Uncle Dickie, as Viceroy, in his task of seeking to retain Indian friendship within a Commonwealth that would no longer be able to differentiate between self-governing white dominions, and imperially ruled black colonies. At the same time, the speech was for domestic consumption in Britain – it offered a population that was exasperated by restrictions, and worn out after the added hardships of a terrible winter, the bromide of Commonwealth and imperial ideals. Finally, it was a royal speech, written by a courtier for a royal anniversary: it reaffirmed the British Monarchy as the one reliable link in an association of nations and territories whose ties had become tenuous, because of war, British economic weakness, and nascent nationalism.

But it was the Princess herself, and the feeling she conveyed as an individual, which, as it was said, brought ‘a lump into millions of throats’.

For a moment, the Empire seemed as one. In South Africa, the English-speakers could not have felt prouder, and even the Afrikaners acknowledged the effect. ‘I feel . . . a bit exhausted by the tremendous success of the whole thing,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, as he packed his bags in Cape Town, ‘and for Princess Elizabeth’s speech, on which I had lavished much care.’

A few days later, as the Vanguard sailed for home, the King’s private secretary was able to reflect a little more on his handiwork. The tour, he concluded, had amply achieved its most important objective, as far as the Court was concerned, of demonstrating the value to South Africa of the British Monarchy. The biggest revelation had been the blossoming of the King’s elder daughter:

From the inside, the most satisfactory feature of the whole business is the remarkable development of P’cess E. She has got all P’cess Marg’s solid and endearing qualities plus a perfectly natural power of enjoying herself . . . Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun. Moreover, when necessary, she can take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill, and never spares herself in that exhausting part of royal duty. For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.

In addition, he noted with approval, the Princess had become extremely business-like: she had developed the ‘admirable technique,’ if they were running late, ‘of going up behind her mother and prodding her in the Achilles tendon with the point of her umbrella when time is being wasted in unnecessary conversation’. When circumstances required, she also ‘tells her father off . . .’ Both princesses must have found moments in the tour very dull, Lascelles concluded. But, on the whole, both had been ‘as good as gold’.

Lascelles’s optimism about the impact of the tour turned out to be misplaced. Indeed, if the aim had been to save both Smuts and the Crown in South Africa, it was a double failure. The following year, Smuts was ousted by Malan and the isolationists, and a new government adopted a programme of racial laws that weakened still further the Commonwealth links of the Union, and led eventually to South Africa’s withdrawal from the association thirteen years later. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the trip as politically negligible. In a way it was a marker: remembered, with nostalgia and also hope, for the affirmation it had provided of more elevated values than those later imposed. The memory was still there when, nearly half a century later, Nelson Mandela’s democratic republic re-applied for Commonwealth membership. There was also a directly personal effect. Elizabeth’s first tour, which was also one of her longest, profoundly affected her outlook, helping to establish a Commonwealth interest and loyalty that became a consistent theme of her reign.

AT HOME, every paper carried a birthday profile of the Heiress Presumptive, in each case seeking to meet a public desire for as happy and as rosy a picture of the Princess as the meagre details available about her short life permitted. Descriptions highlighted the qualities an idealized princess ought to have, alongside those she actually did. Since it was an egalitarian, democratic era, much ingenuity was exercised in presenting her as a people’s princess.

The Prime Minister set the tone. The simple dignity and wise understanding of the King’s elder daughter, he declared, had endeared her to all classes.

The sentiment was echoed, universally. The News Chronicle helpfully noted that, unlike a male heir, who would have been created Prince of Wales and a member of the House of Lords, she was technically a commoner, and had appropriately simple tastes in personal adornment.

The Times saw the point as more than technical. Elizabeth belonged to a Monarchy that had become ‘social and unpretentious,’ it declared, acting as ‘the mirror in which the people may see their own ideals of life’. From this firm base, the Princess would provide the rising generation with a model that was progressive in the widest sense, ‘standing for the aspirations of the men and women of her own age, for everything that is forward-looking, for all the effort that seeks to build afresh.’

Such a ‘representative’ view of royalty, of course, begged a few questions: did being ‘representative’ mean representing the interests and ideals of ordinary young people in a symbolic sense, or actually being like them? Dermot Morrah, always ready with a loyal argument, claimed that the Princess was as representative in the second sense as in the first – and that her representative status came from the happy chance of her intellectual and cultural limitations. Like her father and grandfather, he pointed out, she was ‘normal’ – that is, average – in capacity, taste and training. The result was an Heiress Presumptive with normal, average values. That she was ‘simple, warm-hearted, hard-working, painstaking, cultivated, humorous and above all friendly’ helped to make her ‘a typical daughter of the Britain of her time’.

Like the trumpeted ‘simplicity’ of the Princess’s pre-war upbringing, however, the reality was somewhat different. Most of the ‘normality’ of her early adulthood was a product of the ambition of observers to present her as somebody with whom genuinely simple and normal people could identify. The only hard, publicly available evidence was that she was untypical – in particular that she was rich and about to become richer, with a Civil List income rising from £6,000 per annum to £15,000 on her majority, a sum over which she would have full control. She was also untypically, even uniquely, famous: one newspaper suggested that the twenty-one-year-old Princess was ‘unquestionably the most publicized young woman in the world,’ easily out-distancing Shirley Temple, her nearest rival.

Privately, the Princess felt no particular need to pretend to be what she was not. Indeed, her reluctance to step outside her own class in her social relations caused her royal grandmother, who continued to watch her progress carefully, some disquiet. At the beginning of July, Jock Colville recorded a conversation with Queen Mary in the garden at Marlborough House, in the course of which the elderly lady, nearing eighty, ‘said many wise things’ about her grand-daughter, ‘including the necessity of travel, of mixing with all the classes (H.R.H. is inclined to associate with young Guards officers to the exclusion of more representative strata of the community) and of learning to know young members of the Labour Party.’

Yet there was also, perhaps, a quality that did not entirely belong to the categories of cliché or necessary myth. Unremarkable in capacity, abnormal in experience, wealth and friends, the Princess nevertheless possessed an attribute which radio listeners and filmgoers believed they could hear and see for themselves. This could best be described as ‘wholesomeness’ and stood in unremarked contrast to the decadence associated with the former Heir Apparent to George V. The Princess’s involvement in the Guides and ATS, her outdoor interests and pursuits, and her supposedly happy upbringing, had already been the stuff of wartime propaganda. After 1945, a belief in the Princess’s decency, straightforwardness, honesty, rather than in any visible talent, did much to elevate the idea of Monarchy during anxious years when – against ideological trends, or pre-war expectations – its psychic power seemed to soar. When Lord Templewood, who as Sir Samuel Hoare had been a Cabinet minister at the time of the Abdication, wrote of the ‘growing influence of the Crown,’ and of its ‘moral power,’ which was now ‘so firmly established that we can look forward with undoubted confidence to the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second,’

he expressed a common feeling, for which the Cape Town broadcast had provided confirmation, that the institution would remain in clean hands.

The future of the Monarchy, however, was also linked to the question of who the Princess would marry. By now, an engagement to Prince Philip was assumed. During the South African tour, the BBC – planning ahead – began to consider a talk on the Princess ‘by someone who had known her since childhood’ to follow a betrothal announcement, and a similar one on the Prince.

But no announcement was made, either on Princess Elizabeth’s birthday, or on the Royal Family’s return. To damp down speculation, the couple tried to be seen less together – thereby sparking rumours that the relationship had been broken off.