The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

It was a close-run thing. Under only slightly different circumstances – with a less persuasive Chancellor, or one who commanded less authority among MPs – the decision might have gone the other way. As it was, five out of the twelve Labour MPs on the Committee, including the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, were in favour of substantially lower annuities for the royal couple, backing figures of £35,000 for Elizabeth and £5,000 for Philip. In the final vote, Labour MPs, split evenly, and the higher figures proposed by the Chancellor required Tory and Liberal support to carry them.

THE DEBATE over annuities for the Heiress and her husband had many echoes over the next half century, as inflation bit into the Civil List, while rising asset values simultaneously added to royal wealth. The question of what Parliament should provide, and what it was fair to ask the Monarch to pay out of private or accumulated resources, remained one of the central issues surrounding the institution.

In 1947, however, few matters were of smaller interest to the public. Despite the Government’s misgivings, ‘Royal Wedding Week’ in mid-November provided the national carnival of the decade: a spectacular display of conspicuous consumption, for royalty and subjects alike, which revealed – to those who cared to note it – the public longing for a relaxation of controls after eight years of tight regulation. If there was popular criticism or resentment, little of it ever became public. Mass Observation discovered discontent, here and there, about the extravagance. People questioned about the 300 clothing coupons and £1,200 spent on the wedding dress split evenly on whether it was reasonable or not. The journalist Jill Craigie described the decision to design a calf-length trousseau for the Princess as ‘a major victory for the vested interests of the fashion houses.’

However, opinion polls showed a mellowing of opinion as the day approached, with a rise between July and November from 40 to 60 per cent of people actively approving of the arrangements.

During the autumn, pre-nuptial excitement focused fetishistically on the physical details of the preparations, including the wedding presents which arrived by the crate-load from all over the world. A souvenir book was published listing all 2,428 of them, and the gifts themselves were put on show, tickets a shilling each, at St James’s Palace. ‘After the scarcity, the make-do of the war years,’ wrote Crawfie, who beat Princess Elizabeth to the altar by getting married, more modestly, in September, ‘this sudden lavishness was unnerving.’

Presents ranged from a gold tiara from the Emperor of Ethiopia to a large number of nylon stockings, home-knitted jumpers and hand-made tea cosies.

There were political gifts, like a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife; well-chosen ones, like a chestnut filly (Astrakhan) from the Aga Khan; and puzzling ones, like the item given by the Mahatma Gandhi, which the catalogue described as a ‘fringed lacework cloth made out of yarn spun by the donor on his own spinning wheel.’

Queen Mary thought it was the Indian leader’s famous loincloth, and took a dim view. ‘Such an indelicate gift,’ she told Lady Airlie.

Not included in the exhibition were hundreds of tons of tinned food from British communities abroad, which were distributed to needy widows and pensioners, with a message from the bride.

All exhibited gifts were carefully and democratically itemised in the catalogue, regardless of splendour. The pot pourri of the exhibition, appropriate for the times, was reflected in a preview party for donors, attended by rich and poor, ‘peers and factory workers, statesmen and schoolgirls, old age pensioners and housewives, visitors from the provinces, the Continent and the United States.’

Such social mixing, however, was not to everybody’s taste; nor were many of the gifts. Chips Channon, caught in the crush, noted with admiration a wreath of diamond roses given by the Nizam of Hyderabad, but ‘was struck by how ghastly some of the presents were, though the crowd made it difficult to see.’

He owed his own invitation to gift No. 797, listed as a ‘silver cigarette case, sunray pattern set with a cabochon sapphire in a gold thumb piece.’

The Princess herself spent much of her time before the Wedding thanking the more important corporate donors in person. For such occasions, she had a set speech, which was like a cutdown version of her Cape Town broadcast and a wedding rehearsal combined. ‘As long as we live’, she recited in her thank-you to the City of London, ‘it will be the constant purpose of Lieutenant Mountbatten and myself to serve a people who are so dear to me and to show ourselves deserving of their esteem’.

Of almost as great interest as ‘the presents’ was ‘the cake’ – a topic of special fascination because younger members of the population, reared on sugar rationing, found it difficult even to imagine a culinary creation of such opulence. The problem of having the wedding cake made was solved by a neat and characteristic royal exploitation of professional snobbery, vanity and loyalty. Royal-connected cake manufacturers were graciously permitted to present an example of their work, in return for an invitation to the viewing party in the mirror-lined State dining-room, in the presence of the King and Queen, who wandered around, asking polite questions about the ingredients. The winners had the satisfaction of knowing that their cakes had been consumed by royal guests.

There were twelve cakes in all, the biggest of which stood four feet high, and took four months to make.

Finally, there was ‘The Dress’. Of all the totemic artefacts associated with the royal wedding none drove the press and public to greater frenzy than this garment – partly, again, because of the shortages, which had made fine materials hard or impossible even for well-off people to obtain. Accounts of the wedding dress were caressing: according to Norman Hartnell’s own description, it was made of ‘clinging ivory silk’, trailed with jasmine, smilax, seringa and rose-like blossoms, and included a large number of small pearls. Others were even more lyrical. James Laver, fashion expert at the Victoria and Albert, spoke of Hartnell’s creation of Botticelli curves, and of the raised pearls arranged as York roses, entwined with ears of corn. By the device of reversed embroidery, the design had ‘alternated star flowers and orange blossom, now tulle on satin, and now satin on tulle, the whole encrusted with pearls and crystals.’

A mythology surrounded the production. Hartnell himself liked to recount that his manager, returning from America after a component-hunting expedition, had replied to the question at the customs about whether he had anything to declare, ‘Yes, ten thousand pearls, for the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth.’

Like the presents, the dress was put on display, and at times the queue of people waiting to see it stretched the length of the Mall.

After the build-up, the Wedding became, in the words of an American monarchophile, ‘a movie premiere, an election, a World Series and Guy Fawkes Night all rolled into one’.

It was also, at its core, a gathering of the remnants of European royalty – a vast, rivalrous, beleaguered, mutually suspicious and mutually loyal, and frequently impoverished, extended family. In this respect, the Wedding was different from a Coronation, which was a state more than a personal event. Because of the background of the groom, special attention was directed at the least significant members of this inter-related, uniformed, bemedalled and be-jewelled galère, who included the flotsam of two world wars and many revolutions – and for whom Lieutenant Mountbatten was both an object of envy, and a morale-boosting proof that they still had a place in the world.

Since 1918 – if not before – the British Royal Family had been the premier dynasty; and now, with fewer surviving monarchies than ever, its pre-eminence was even more apparent. ‘You are the big potato,’ Smuts was overheard saying to the King’s mother at the wedding-eve party; ‘all the other queens are small potatoes.’

Nobody doubted it or that this was an occasion for big potatoes to show cousinly solicitude to small ones, whatever their circumstances. Lady Airlie cast her mind back to 1939 or even 1914. Old friends were reunited, she wrote, old jealousies swept away.

‘It was a tremendous meeting place,’ recalls Princess Margaret. ‘People who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe, suddenly reappeared.’

Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia likened the atmosphere to that of a boarding school, in which all the royal families belonged to the same house: the Wedding reminded her of a reunion of school friends, all ‘shedding their grown-up facade, and romping together in an abandon of gossip, leg-pulling and long-remembered family jokes’. Many of the visiting royals – especially the mendicant ones, who had their travel expenses discreetly paid by the Windsors – crowded round a communal table in the dining room at Claridges, where they were put up, adding to the illusion of an unruly and cacophonous academy.

However, simple accounts of happy high jinks, and of bygones being bygones, did not give the whole picture. Delicate decisions had to be made. Though Philip’s mother was invited, his three surviving, German-married sisters were not. Nor was the Duke of Windsor, who spent the day morosely in New York in his Waldorf Towers suite. A few who came might have done better to have stayed away. ‘When I am back behind the Iron Curtain,’ Queen Helen of Romania remarked during her brief stay, ‘I shall wonder whether this is all a dream.’

Her words acquired a special poignancy because the Government in Bucharest used the opportunity afforded by King Michael’s absence to declare a republic.

On the eve of the main event there was a dinner for foreign royalty, and a grand party at the Palace, attended by crowned heads, presidents and premiers. Much was made of the down-at-heel condition of royal adornments, of tiaras taken out of storage and dusted down: as though the ostentation was easier to justify if it was seen as a fancy dress parade, rather than the display of real luxury. Crown jewels were worn as if they were paste, almost apologetically – leading some of the kings and queens who still had thrones to feel superior. ‘Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was frightfully scathing about everybody’s jewellery,’ recalls Pamela Hicks, a bridesmaid. ‘“It’s so dirty,” she kept saying.’

Lady Airlie wrote that ‘anyone fortunate enough to have a new dress drew all eyes’. However, all the famous diamonds were visible, ‘even though most of them had not been cleaned since 1939’.

ONE TICKLISH question, which exercised the finest and most antiquarian minds at Buckingham Palace almost until the Wedding itself, was what Philip Mountbatten should be called and how he should be styled. Since he was no longer Greek, his royal title was meaningless, and anyway he had abandoned it; yet it was taken for granted that the Heiress’s consort could not remain a commoner. The problem was finding a suitable English title, and an appropriate rank. In choosing one, future children – including the future Heir or Heiress – had to be taken into account. Would they be named after their father or their mother? Consulted on this point, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowett, replied that the 1917 Proclamation which changed the Royal Family’s name to Windsor, did not include under the general rubric George V’s married female descendants. Elizabeth, and her issue, were excluded, and would take their names from her husband.

At the end of July, Dermot Morrah – who had covered the tour of South Africa for The Times and felt a passionate concern about the minutiae of royal etiquette – sent a memorandum to his editor, who passed it on to the Palace, listing some twenty alternative labels for Lieutenant Mountbatten, with comments on each. He gave ‘Edinburgh’ a high ranking. Though it had the drawback of lacking antiquity, ‘having been first conferred only in 1726,’ the adoption of it, he suggested, would be seen as a compliment to Scotland. Lascelles added his own notes, and passed on the list to the King.

In view of Philip’s naval background, either the Earl or Duke of Greenwich was considered a possibility.

Finally, Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, Duke of Edinburgh was agreed. However, the question of a ‘Royal’ Dukedom – whether Philip should be called ‘His Royal Highness’, following his marriage – still had to be sorted out. The King became greatly exercised on this issue. ‘Can you find out how Prince Henry of Battenberg who was Serene Highness was created Royal Highness by Q. Victoria on his marriage to Princess Beatrice?’, the King pencilled to Lascelles in August. ‘This will give me a Precedent in this case.’ In September, after consultations with the Home Secretary, it was decided to bestow the ‘HRH’ title which Philip had turned down before the engagement, but which his marriage to the Princess would justify. The King’s attention now turned to the complex question of his future son-in-law’s coat-of-arms. Rough sketches were commissioned, and the Monarch spent many productive hours poring over them, noting down his comments.

At the end of September, Philip’s transmogrification into an Englishman was completed with his formal reception into the Anglican Church by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the chapel at Lambeth Palace – at roughly the same time as his mother, Princess Alice, was making arrangements for the founding of her own Greek Orthodox order of working nuns. There was one more detail: in November, the King bestowed the Garter on both the Princess and Philip – though too late for the wedding service sheets, which described him as ‘Philip Mountbatten, RN’. Popularly, however, he had always been known as ‘Prince Philip’ – a title to which his wife, as Queen, finally gave regal sanction ten years later.

Courtiers continued to weigh him up. In late October, Philip accompanied Elizabeth on her last pre-marriage engagement, to launch the Cunard liner the Caronia from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown and Co. On the way back, the royal train was delayed in a siding, and Jock Colville walked down the line with his employer’s fiancé, climbing with him into the signal box. ‘I watched P. narrowly,’ he recorded. ‘He is a strong believer in the hail-fellow-well-met as opposed to the semi-divine interpretation of Monarchy.’ However, during a conversation with some of the railwaymen, there was one ‘appalling gaffe’. When the signalman said jokingly that he was waiting for promotion until somebody died, noted Colville, ‘Philip replied, “Like me!” No doubt he meant in the Navy, but another interpretation was obvious.’ Colville wrote that he expected the future consort to be popular with the crowd, but that he could also be vulgar, and that his manner towards Princess Elizabeth at times was quite off-hand.

However, even the Princess’s acidic private secretary was not immune from the rising tide of sentiment towards the young couple, and the sense of a storybook romance. Close contact with both of them also caused him to revise his opinions. ‘As the day drew nearer’, Colville acknowledged immediately after the Wedding, ‘I began to think, as I now sincerely do, that the Princess and Philip really are in love.’

He also wrote that Elizabeth ‘bore the pre-wedding strain with great good nature and cheerfulness’.

Sometimes, it must have been hard. To the worries of any young bride were added an uncertainty about what to expect as the first married Heiress to the Throne of modern times, and the almost suffocating attentions of the world. Crawfie, seeing her former pupil’s nervousness, tried to help – by offering some advice. This took the form of a homily on the condition of matrimony, which reveals much about British attitudes (or at any rate Scottish lower-middle-class ones) in the 1940s. It was unwise, the governess explained, even in a royal union, to be too jealous or possessive a wife. ‘When you marry, you must not expect the honeymoon to last for ever,’ she told the young woman she had helped to bring up. ‘Sooner or later you will meet the stresses and strains of everyday life. You must not expect your husband to be constantly at your side or always to receive from him the extravagant affection of the first few months. A man has his own men friends, hobbies and interests in which you cannot and will not want to share.’

Princess Elizabeth started her wedding day much as she had begun the morning of her father’s Coronation ten years before – looking out of the window of Buckingham Palace in her dressing-gown.

Despite the cold November weather, crowds had gathered in the Mall the night before, in preparation for an all-night vigil. ‘There was a tremendous crowd reaction’, says Pamela Hicks. ‘Suddenly to see the state coach was marvellous, with Princess Elizabeth with her wonderful complexion and Prince Philip so devastatingly handsome – they were a dream couple.’

The theme was popular monarchy. The day’s events, including the service, were broadcast to forty-two countries. The address by the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, stressed the universality of the occasion. Never, he said, had a wedding been followed with such interest by so many people, yet the ceremony was ‘in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales’.

One of the essentials – despite a few protests from ‘extreme advocates for sexual equality’ – was the promise by the Heiress Presumptive ‘to love, cherish and obey’ her husband.

Non-essentials included the attendants, the list of whom made no concessions to social equality. All were either royal or aristocratic. Philip’s cousin, the Marquess of Milford Haven, was best man.

The congregation of two thousand included, as Wheeler-Bennett put it, ‘one of the largest gatherings of royalty, regnant and exiled, of the century’.

There were so many kings and queens and their off-spring, together with foreign heads of state, that other categories were squeezed – British MPs, for instance, had to ballot for places, much to their irritation. Many of the guests were unknown to either the bride or the groom. Others were known to the entire Abbey. When the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, arrived a little late, ‘everyone stood up’, as Channon observed, ‘all the Kings and Queens’.

There were also eccentrics. Lady Munnings, wife of Sir Alfred, President of the Royal Academy, sat through the whole service with her Pekinese dog, Black Knight, concealed in her muff.

To be invited was bliss: to be left off the list, when you thought you should be on it, was torture. ‘Miserable royal wedding day’, wrote Lord Reith, former Director-General of the BBC, in his diary. ‘Didn’t get up till 10.30. Completely out of phase with everything and everybody through not being asked to the Abbey.’

The lucky ones felt the kind of excitement people feel when they attend events everybody else wishes they were at: they found beauty and wonder everywhere, in the building, the words, the music, the congregation, the Royal Family, the royal couple and especially the bride. There were many accounts from people eager to display their privileged access, and inside knowledge. Faces were studied for expressions, clothes critically examined for the minutest detail. Mrs Fisher, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, thought the Princess looked ‘very calm, absolutely lovely’ coming up the aisle. The effect of her outfit, she wrote, ‘was a diaphanous one with her lovely train of silk tulle and her veil’.

Channon ‘thought Princess Elizabeth looked well, shy and attractive, and Prince Philip as if he was thoroughly enjoying himself’.

Others were impressed by the theatricality of the event. ‘The King looked unbelievably beautiful’, Sir Michael Duff wrote to Cecil Beaton, ‘like an early French King and HRH the Bride a dream.’

After the signing of the register in the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor, the couple returned, the Prince bowing to the King and Queen, the Princess dropping a low curtsey, her train billowing out behind her. Then they returned together in the Glass Coach to Buckingham Palace, for an ‘austerity’ wedding breakfast for 150 guests. At the end of it, the King made no speech. He simply raised his glass to ‘the bride’.