The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

The going-away involved an additional ritual. As Philip in naval uniform and the Princess in a coat of ‘love-in-a-mist blue’

left the Palace forecourt for Waterloo Station, they were chased by bridesmaids and relations, including the King and Queen, pelting them with rose petals. Queen Alexandra recalled that the Monarch and his wife were hand in hand,

Crawfie that the Queen lifted her skirts to join the farewell party by the railings, as the couple disappeared into the crowds that lined the route.

According to The Times, ‘Roll upon roll of cheers followed the carriage’, on its journey.

Press coverage was even greater than for the Coronation – the start of an inflation in the news value of the Monarchy which eventually took its toll. In 1947, it helped to inflame a public interest in the display of royalty which had lain dormant since before the war. Radio was the dominant medium – used by the BBC to create images in the minds of listeners that were reverential, awe-inspiring and atmospheric. ‘Into London’s gathering dusk this afternoon’, the six o’clock newsreader intoned, ‘Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh – man and wife – drove away in an open landau from Buckingham Palace for their honeymoon . . . It’s been a day which London will long remember.’ The written script was broken up, with strokes between words and phrases, to indicate pauses for solemn effect.

Afterwards, radio and its world-wide audience became part of wedding lore, with tales of huddles of avid listeners in unlikely places – for example, it was reported that the skipper of the New Zealand ship Pamir hove to in the middle of the South Atlantic so that all his crew could listen properly to the broadcast.

Mass Observation noted that in a typical provincial office, the radio was switched on all day. ‘We couldn’t get into the room’, reported an informant, ‘and just joined the crowd clustered outside.’

As well as listening to the radio, a small number of people in Britain were able to watch some of the day’s events on an apparatus described by the press as ‘television’s magic crystal’ which had recently resumed broadcasting. A TV camera placed over the Palace forecourt was able to follow Princess Elizabeth’s coach as it came out of the gates, and another took over outside the Abbey. The service itself was filmed, and shown on television the same evening, while the film and other press and broadcasting materials were flown for distribution next day in the United States. So great was the international interest that the Wedding film was even screened in Allied-occupied Berlin. The 4,000 seat cinema in which it was shown in the still devastated city was fully booked, seven days a week.

For British children, the most potent symbol of the Wedding was probably ‘the cake’. Many schools celebrated with feasts of ices and buns, often (so it was reported) ‘without recourse to special supplementary permits from the Ministry of Food’, and in spite of a request from the Ministry of Education to head teachers to be as modest as possible in their spending. Universities treated it as an unofficial rag. Oxford had ‘its gayest celebration since the war,’ with community singing and fireworks in the streets, and undergraduates dancing eightsome reels.

What was it really about? People were as puzzled then as they are now. Apart from the chance to escape austerity, if only for a day, there was what a woman in Leatherhead described to a Mass Observer as ‘a delighted sort of family feeling. I always get it when watching any sort of royal do.’

The Archbishop of York had alluded to such a feeling in his marriage service address, and John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, displayed it in a mawkish but revealing Prayer for the Royal Marriage. ‘To those dear lands, still calling Britain “Home”,’ he versified, ‘The Crown is still the link with Britain’s past, The consecrated thing that must outlast / Folly and hate and other human foam.’ A less embarrassing version of the same sentiment was provided by the historian G. M. Trevelyan who wrote in the official souvenir of a King above politics, and a symbol of national unity, yet one ‘who appeals below the surface of politics to the simple, dutiful, human instincts which he and his own family circle represent,’ and ‘who holds the Commonwealth together by the common bond of his royal authority’.

In short, the Wedding was to be regarded – in the Establishment, but also in the Labour Government version – as a reminder of the direct link that supposedly existed between royal familial virtue and the constitutional and political functions of the Monarchy; and the public rejoicing as a celebration of a democratic system which worked. The whole occasion could be seen as a kind of victory parade for liberty, for a constitution, ‘still the most sea-worthy of all political craft,’ which had ‘weathered the storms of two world wars’, and for a family which provided a vital human ingredient. Trevelyan’s argument was pragmatic, yet also romantic. ‘In Great Britain the Crown is the least criticised of our domestic institutions’, he claimed; ‘throughout the Dominions and Colonies it is the point on which the eyes of loyalty are turned from across every ocean. Affection for a King’s person and family adds warmth and drama to every man’s rational awareness of his country’s political unity and historic tradition. It is a kind of popular poetry in these prosaic times.’

What Trevelyan did not say – something which provided an important element in the Empire-wide celebration of an essentially personal event – was that ‘family’ had come in the dozen years since George V’s death to encroach still further on the other aspects of Monarchy. As the author of an internal Cabinet Office paper on the functions of the Prime Minister put it in June 1947, not only was it absolute doctrine that the King did nothing political except on ministerial advice, ‘the tendency has been to regard more and more matters as having political significance’.

The Second World War, the election of a highly political Labour Government, and the personality of George VI, had all contributed to this tendency, which had rendered the areas of royal activity that were controversial, or open to normal criticism, nugatory, and narrowed the range of public interest in royal figures and royal lives, without removing its intensity.

Thus, the reduction of the Royal Family to picture book iconography did not diminish public enthusiasm: indeed, by removing all remaining partisan elements, it enhanced it. Appreciation of the virtues of the British system turned into an appreciation of personages from whom all hint of blame had been removed for anything that went wrong – yet who could be thanked for the things that had gone right. The biggest of these was survival. In the late 1940s, apart from the United States, British democracy had no major-state rival, and this was a point, not just for patriotic pride, but also for sober contemplation on the constitutional reasons why it should be so. The point was contemporary and urgent: amongst other things, the Wedding – the ‘splash of colour’ as Churchill called it – was a propaganda blast against totalitarianism at the start of the Cold War. ‘To every foreigner present,’ Wheeler-Bennett was able to write a few years later, the ceremonies, processions and public enthusiasm were ‘an object lesson, doubly expressive in the existing distressed state of Europe, of the stability of Britain’s political institutions, and of the unity of the nation in its respect for tradition and its loyalty to the throne’.

Chapter 8

ANY HOPE THAT, by leaving London for a supposedly private honeymoon in the country, Elizabeth and Philip could escape national attention or at any rate pretend it did not exist, was quickly disappointed. The public hunger, raised to such a level, could not simply be switched off at the moment when it became convenient to do so. The couple were due to spend the first part of their honeymoon at Uncle Dickie’s house Broadlands, near Romsey in the New Forest. When they got off the train at Winchester, the Princess was observed to have a corgi with her – symbol of the domesticity she longed for. But the crowds would not allow it. Having learnt of the whereabouts of the Princess and the Duke, sightseers lay in wait. On the first Sunday after the Wedding, in a foretaste of what was to come, a mass of them surged into Romsey Abbey, where the couple were due to attend Matins. Some – unable to get seats in the church – carried ladders, chairs, and even a sideboard into the churchyard to stand on, in order to get a better look. After the service, less voracious royal enthusiasts queued (it was an age of queuing) outside the Abbey, in order to take their turn at sitting in the seats that royalty had sat in.

After a week under siege at Broadlands the royal couple at last evaded their pursuers by travelling north to Birkhall.

They returned to the Palace in time for the King’s fifty-second birthday on December 14th. ‘The Edinburghs are back from Scotland,’ Colville wrote the following day. ‘She was looking very happy, and, as a result of three weeks of matrimony, suddenly a woman instead of a girl. He also seemed happy, but a shade querulous, which is, I think, in his character.’

One reason for querulousness was that, among all the prewedding preparations, one aspect of their future had been neglected: where they planned to live. Following their engagement they had chosen Sunninghill Park, near Ascot, as their future country home. In August, however, Sunninghill was gutted by fire. Chips Channon recorded that he had been asked if he would let or lend his house to the couple for several months while they found somewhere else, but had turned down the request on the grounds that it would mean too much upheaval.

Instead, they obtained a lease on Windlesham Moor, near Sunningdale in Surrey. This was not immediately available, and in any case was only for weekend use. Their London residence was to be Clarence House in Stable Yard, at the south angle of St James’s Palace. This imposing four-storey mansion had been built for William IV when Duke of Clarence in 1824. Its most recent occupant had been the Duke of Connaught, who had died in 1942, since when it had been unoccupied. In addition to the neglect of an elderly royal duke, there had been serious damage from bombing. Renovations took more than eighteen months, and the couple were unable to move in until July 1949.

In the meantime, they lived in Buckingham Palace. Crawfie believed that this was a mistake, that the Princess needed to get away from her parents.

Philip – beginning to experience the brutal consequences to his own life of such a marriage – may have felt the same. However, as the popular papers eagerly pointed out, the Palace was convenient for the office: Philip had been given a desk job working for the Director of Operations at the Admiralty, and was able to walk there every morning along the Mall, despite the stares of passers-by.

It was an odd period for both of them: Elizabeth at first living a life which on the surface had altered remarkably little since before her engagement, Philip undergoing the profound change of outlook, circumstance and expectation that accompanied his choice of mate. Both worked, though neither of them very strenuously. They took a keen interest in the Clarence House renovations, often visiting the initially gloomy building. Sometimes they joined in – Elizabeth amusing herself by mixing the paints for the walls of the Adam-style dining-room, which was hung with Hanoverian portraits, and by furnishing the house with wedding presents. When eventually they moved in, the Princess and her husband had separate but communicating bedrooms, with the dressing-tables only a few feet from the joint door, so that they could talk through it when they were getting ready for dinner. According to the Duke’s valet, John Dean, when Bobo MacDonald was helping Elizabeth and he was helping Philip, the couple ‘would joke happily through the left-open door.’

Getting settled into suitable accommodation took some time to sort out. Money was quicker – though by no means automatic. The Select Committee report on the Civil List was delivered promptly on December 11th, and discussed on the floor of the House six days later. The debate – as the Manchester Guardian put it – was of ‘peculiar interest’.

Against the background of the Wedding on the one hand, and the split vote in the Committee on the other, it provided the first opportunity since the Abdication for a proper public exploration of the role and function of the Monarchy. It was also an exercise in temperature taking: for the vote was a free one, and the House, with its large Labour majority, was as far tilted away from automatic monarchism as at any time since 1918.

Conservatives and Liberals supported the report proposals. The difficulty was on the Government side. Sir Stafford Cripps, moving the acceptance of the report, spoke of the importance of the functions the Princess and Duke had to perform, and of the proof of that importance provided by ‘the intense interest and enthusiasm displayed by all sections of the population at the time of their marriage’. For the Conservatives, Anthony Eden reminded the House that the British ambassador in Washington spent £20,000 a year just on entertaining. Labour left-wingers responded with arguments that were to become staple fare on such occasions. There was talk of the excessive cost of the ‘servants and hangers-on of the Court,’ and of ‘spivs and drones and butterflies’ around the royal couple. A Scottish MP compared the Duke’s £10,000 (‘in addition to a cushy job at the Admiralty’) with the forty shillings a week paid to men blinded in the war. Others suggested that the ‘Scandinavian type’ of monarchy was cheaper and better.

In addition, there was a ‘moderate’ opposition to the CrippsLascelles package – not republicanism, but a belief that (in the words of Maurice Webb, a Select Committee member) the country both wished to retain the Monarchy ‘and desired it to be simple, austere and democratic’. From the Palace’s point of view, such an argument was much more dangerous than that of the Monarchy denigrators, because it struck a genuine chord among the loyal but luxury-denied public; and because it sought, in reasonable tones, to reassert parliamentary control of royal expenditure. The decisive group, however, was the powerful body of Labour MPs who both believed in the Monarchy as a useful device, and felt – with Nye Bevan – that if it was to be done at all, it had to be done in style: in the words of Arthur Greenwood in the debate, ‘with proper dignity’.

It was to this group that the Prime Minister appealed when he spoke in support of a ‘ceremonial’ monarchy – whose value, he implied, derived both from its ability to meet a need for public theatre, and from the exemplary behaviour of the principal actors. In what amounted to a Labour theory of Monarchy, Attlee spoke of the need for ‘simple lives and approachable people’ at the heart of a democracy, and of royal ceremonials as an alternative to the sinister rituals of totalitarianism. The financial details before the House, he suggested, were intended to make such ceremonials and necessary symbolism possible, by giving ‘these young people the facilities for doing the kind of work the general public wanted them to do, of visiting and getting into contact with people in the United Kingdom’ and outside, especially in the Dominions.

Attlee’s advocacy worked, but it failed to supply the all-party support for the Select Committee recommendations which the Palace would have liked. Although no more than thirty-three MPs voted for a left-wing amendment to give no increase in the Civil List at all, an amendment proposed by Webb to limit the couple’s total to £40,000 was defeated only by 291 to 165 – indicating a large dissentient vote among Labour backbenchers, and a significant rate of abstention among ministers. A mere 122 Labour MPs opposed Webb’s amendment, while 106, including eleven ministers, were unaccounted for. In short, if Labour had voted on its own, the Webb reduction to the List payments would have been carried. As it was, the Princess and Duke got their increases in spite of, not because of, the votes of the governing party.

‘There was much criticism of the sums proposed but none of the Monarchy as such,’ noted Colville who, with other courtiers, keenly watched the proceedings from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery. ‘There was, however, a large school on the Labour backbenches which said the country wanted a “Scandinavian monarchy” with less pageantry and pomp rather than a “ceremonial monarchy”. Cripps spoke admirably and was most effective in debate and Eden was also telling.’

Chips Channon blamed the Palace for the tactical error, as he saw it, of failing to invite enough ordinary MPs to the Wedding, which had resulted in a lengthy and embarrassing debate. He concluded that ‘the Royal Family had, I think, a deserved jolt.’

THE FIRST DUTY and ambition of an Heir to the Throne was swiftly accomplished: early in the New Year, Princess Elizabeth became pregnant. The announcement was not made until the summer. In the meantime, the publicity created by the Wedding, combined with the Princess’s new status, helped to increase her list of engagements.

With the marriage, as Ziegler has written, ‘the monarchy gained a new and incomparably brighter focus of attention. The King was in no sense forgotten . . . but in a curious way he was written off. Elizabeth was the future.’

The young Princess who signed no documents, made no decisions and uttered few words in public that were her own, continued to have a hypnotic effect wherever she went. As time passed, however, there was a shift in the tone and quality of the adulation. By chance, the marriage had coincided, not just with a crisis, but with the nadir of the nation’s peacetime fortunes. Thereafter, both the economy and living conditions began to improve. It was as if the Wedding had been a good omen; and the Princess – a healthy, composed, pretty, wifely symbol of post-war youth and possibility, with her exquisitely designed couture that made imaginative use of clothing coupons, and her picture-book war-hero husband – stood for a new alternative to drabness.

It was an enjoyable life, and less demanding than the frequency of her newsreel appearances made it appear. Yet it was also – as Colville perceived – a remarkably aimless one, devoid of any content apart from pleasing and being seen. The Princess’s private secretary, an ambitious and high-flying diplomat on secondment, had had a more exciting life than this, and he determined to inject some element of purpose, or at least of understanding, into the repetitive royal round. Once the Wedding was out of the way, he set himself the task of extending his employer’s political education.

He found the Princess easier to instruct than her husband. After going through some paperwork with both of them, he noted that Philip became impatient if his interest was not immediately aroused; and that Elizabeth concentrated better on details.

In order to advance the Princess’s knowledge, though possibly also to increase his own, he hit on the idea of getting her included in the distribution of Foreign Office telegrams. The less technical ones, he wrote to Lascelles, ‘would give HRH an idea of world affairs which she cannot possibly get from the newspapers.’

The Foreign Office consented, as did the King, and the first box of telegrams arrived on January 16th. In addition, rather like Crawfie and Queen Mary before the war, Colville decided to take the Princess on educational trips. Shortly after the arrival of the first FO box, they sat and watched a Foreign Affairs debate in the House of Commons. As the Princess entered, ‘all eyes there turned in her direction,’ according to the press.

The Princess sat demurely, while the Duke, who accompanied them, made lively comments.

Compensating for the deficiencies of a royal education was an uphill struggle. Though she appeared to read the telegrams, Colville was disappointed to find Princess Elizabeth at first uninterested in politics. However, his attempt to widen her experience continued. In February, he took her to a juvenile court for a day, in the not very optimistic hope of persuading her to improve her knowledge of the social services.

In this, he achieved more success than he perhaps realized. At any rate, the Princess picked up enough to assist her in one of the most necessary of royal skills, that of talking brightly to distinguished guests about areas that concerned them. When Eleanor Roosevelt stayed at Windsor Castle the same spring during a visit to England for the unveiling of a statue of her husband, she was greatly flattered that the King’s daughter sought her out with a question about homes for young women offenders. She found the Heiress ‘very serious-minded’ and she was impressed ‘that this young Princess was so interested in social problems and how they were being handled’.

There were also other horizon-expanding excursions in addition to the formal round. In May 1948, Tom Driberg complained to Lord Mountbatten that the Princess and Duke had made the wrong kind of visit to the Commons at the wrong time. Before the war, he pointed out, members of the Royal Family had dined informally in private rooms at the House with MPs of the then ruling party. He suggested taking the Princess to the House at Question Time. ‘To get the ethos, the feel, of Parliament’, he wrote, ‘she really ought to watch Bevan, Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Morrison etc. parrying the everyday cuts, often pretty effectively and wittily.’

If this particular suggestion reached Clarence House, it was ignored. However, Driberg’s belief that the Princess had no contact with leading Labour figures was not quite correct. In fact, a meeting with a couple of the Labour politicians on his list had occurred only the month before.

This took the form of a small dinner party held by the Prime Minister and his wife for the royal couple, to which a few of the younger members of the Government, including the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, and the Minister of Fuel and Power, Hugh Gaitskell, and their wives were invited. The gathering was indeed a strange one. The politicians could not decide whether it was appropriate to admit to the kind of feelings their constituents would have had at such an intimate meeting with royalty, or to put on a show of jacobin disdain. While they waited to greet the royal guests in the drawing room at No 10, they made nervous schoolboy jokes. ‘We had been talking about capital punishment,’ Gaitskell recorded. ‘Harold reminded us that it was still a capital offence to rape a Royal Princess!’ When the Princess and Duke arrived, the ministers and their wives were faced with the problem which often seems to beset prominent socialists in the presence of royalty: whether it was sillier to bow and curtsey, or not to. Dora Gaitskell could hardly bring herself to curtsey, but Mrs Attlee, entering into the spirit of things, ‘suddenly swung round and curtsied low to the Duke.’

After dinner, each minister was summoned to the sofa, to spend a quarter of an hour in conversation with the twenty-two-year-old guest of honour, who must have found the experience as taxing as they did. Gaitskell formed the same opinion as Colville. ‘She had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally’, he concluded. She tried hard, but evidently found it more difficult to think of things to say about the fuel economy than about homes for bad girls. Gamely, she remarked that her grandmother’s house was the coldest she knew. Why? inquired the minister. The Princess replied that ‘it was because of her national duty’.

Colville’s ambitions to extend his employer’s range (and also to extend his own) did not cease. In February, he proposed that the Princess and the Duke should visit Paris to help strengthen ties with an ally that was beginning to recover its economy and self-confidence after the war. The proposal was accepted by the Foreign Secretary and the King, but at first it encountered difficulties with the royal couple. Elizabeth was enthusiastic about the prospect of a trip that would take her to a city and country she had never visited, and which would be a good deal more exciting than speaking to women’s organizations in the provinces, or sitting on sofas with middle-aged politicians. Philip, on the other hand, who had spent most of his childhood in or around Paris, was less thrilled. He also resented the way Colville did things that affected him without getting his opinion first. There was a row, but eventually he agreed.

The notional purpose of the visit was the opening of the Exhibition of Eight Centuries of British Life at the Musée Galliera in Paris, in a ceremony to take place in the presence of President Auriol on May 14th. The real aim, however, was to give the Anglophile section of the French public a chance to show its sympathies, after a decade of confusion. It was the first official visit by British royalty since the King and Queen had been sent on a similar mission of bridge-building in 1939. The precedent was not entirely propitious: though British royalty had been welcomed on that occasion, the visit had failed in its purpose of helping to create an unbreakable bond between the two peoples. Since 1940, French attitudes towards Britain had contained a complex mixture of emotions, including those of comradeship and suspicion in equal measure.

So it was a gamble – but it worked. The French government did everything in its power to build up the diplomatic importance of the visit, and the French public – mystified and fascinated by the royal wedding – seemed delighted at the opportunity to see and cheer a newly married Princess. The royal party was escorted to Versailles and given lunch at the Grand Trianon, where the tablecloths and napkins had been embroidered with ‘E’s and ‘P’s in their honour. A triumphal progress down the Seine was followed by a dinner and reception at the British embassy, where the Princess glistened with the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels; and there were visits, through thick crowds, to Fontainebleau, Barbizon, Vaux-le-Vicomte. It was, said the papers, the Norman Conquest in reverse: Elizabeth had conquered Paris. It helped that the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue had done her work well, and that the Princess spoke almost faultless French. Even the Communist press abandoned its normal silence on such occasions, and paid the Princess the indirect compliment of complaining that the police arrangements for her security made it impossible for ordinary Parisians to get a close enough look.

The British Foreign Office privately expressed its satisfaction. ‘The latent enthusiasm of the French people for the pomp and pageantry of monarchy was clearly revealed,’ the British ambassador, Sir Oliver Harvey, wrote to Ernest Bevin. ‘It was an unusual experience to see the townsfolk of Paris cheer an English Princess from the Place de la Bastille.’ Yet the visit caused offence to some. General de Gaulle – opposed both to the current French government and to the Fourth Republic Constitution – was left off the Embassy invitation list, for fear of offending the President, and they had to do make do with the General’s brother, who was President of the Municipal Council of Paris, instead.