The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

When Pamela Hicks expressed her sympathy, the Queen’s reaction was ‘I’m so sorry, we’ve got to go back. I’ve ruined everybody’s trip’.

Parker felt that ‘her feelings were deep, deep inside her’.

They left Sagana – the Queen still wearing blue jeans – before five. ‘When all the luggage had been packed,’ a servant wrote in Swahili a few days later, ‘Their Royal Highnesses came to us and said, “Goodbye, and thank you, we shall meet again”. They got into their car and went away.’

Charteris asked the press not to take any pictures. ‘As the motor cars left the Lodge, the world’s press lined the road’, he recalled. ‘Yet not a single photograph was taken.’

At seven o’clock, the royal party flew from Nanyuki to Entebbe, where they had to wait for two hours in the airport lounge, because of a thunderstorm. Then they began the twenty-four-hour flight home – monitored stage by stage by the world’s news agencies as the plane made refuelling stops. There was little talk on the journey. Dean recalled that once or twice the Queen left her seat, and when she returned she looked as if she had been crying.

‘She was looking out of the window on her own,’ says Lord Charteris. ‘At one point she called me over. She said: “What’s going to happen when we get home?” I realized that she didn’t know.’

The first thing to happen was a solemn greeting on the tarmac from the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and other prominent political figures. At Clarence House, she was met by Queen Mary, veteran of five reigns, who curtseyed and kissed her granddaughter’s hand. It was Churchill, however, who set the scene for what he called a new Elizabethan Age. ‘Famous have been the reigns of our Queens,’ he declaimed in a broadcast that night. ‘Some of the greatest periods in our history have unfolded under their sceptre.’ He also spoke of the Monarchy, ‘the magic link which unites our loosely bound, but strongly interwoven Commonwealth.’

The Queen’s first public presentation took place at a full meeting of the Accession Council at St James’s Palace on February 8th. It was attended by an assortment of Privy Councillors – ‘people one didn’t remember were still alive,’ Dalton noted, ‘and some looking quite perky and self-important.’ The Queen, he thought, looked ‘very small – high pitched, rather reedy voice. She does her part well, facing hundreds of old men in black clothes with long faces. She will take up this task “which has come to me so early in life”.’

The contrast with her stumbling father on such occasions was stark. Harold Macmillan noted ‘her firm yet charming voice’ as she said her lines.

Harold Wilson found the Council ‘the most moving ceremonial I can recall’.

Deep emotions stirred. There were uncomfortable features. It was one of the ironies – or hypocrisies – of the hereditary system that death and renewal were combined: grief at the loss of one monarch was supposed to be accompanied by joy at the arrival of another. Churchill spoke of the thrill in once more invoking the prayer and the anthem ‘God Save the Queen’.

Yet the thrill at placing a young woman on a pedestal normally reserved for men was a complex one. If there was something grotesque – a distortion of past glories – about the protracted rituals and obeisances associated with the public mourning, there was also a peculiarity about the prostration of old gentlemen before a twenty-five-year-old Queen who had no choice but to accept the part she was asked to play.

Some spoke or wrote about her with barely concealed sexuality. Cecil Beaton described her, after a brief encounter at the theatre in July, as if she were Garbo. ‘The purity of her expression,’ he wrote, ‘the unspoilt childishness of the smile, the pristine quality of her pink and white complexion, are all part of an appearance that is individual and gives the effect of a total entity.’

Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, found ‘something breathtaking’ in her swift changes of costume and role. He recalled how moved he felt watching her out of the window at the Palace, as she knelt on the grass in a yellow shirt and jodhpurs, calling a dog to come to her – and knowing that, within a quarter of an hour, she would have changed and become a sovereign receiving her subjects.

Churchill himself soon became besotted. ‘All the film people in the world,’ the premier rhapsodized to Lord Moran, ‘if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part.’

It did not take long for the popular newspapers, mixing the lugubrious and the prurient, to see the opportunities. For if the Queen at her Accession had been, in the press imagery, ‘a girl in unrelieved black whom [the King’s] death had brought back from Kenya’s tropic sunshine to the searching chill of Norfolk in mid-winter,’

she was also a pretty face to brighten the front page. Some of the finest pre-Coronation pictures show her in mourning. There was an erotic splendour to the line of queens and princesses, Elizabeth II at their head, that attended the lying in state in Westminster Hall, ‘like Moslem women,’ as Crossman put it, ‘clothed in dead black, swathed and double swathed with veils so thick that they couldn’t read the Order of Service through them’.

THE QUESTION of how the Queen should be described in the Proclamation – discussed in Cabinet within hours of the King’s death – was of more than ritual significance. The words chosen, and amended, helped to determine the relationship of the Queen to her realms – and those that would cease to be realms – for many years to come. There was agreement that account needed to be taken of changes. Ministers felt that the traditional formula ‘was not wholly in accord with present constitutional conditions in the Commonwealth.’ The old wording contained anomalous references to ‘Ireland’ – no longer a member state – and to the ‘British Dominions’ which some of the countries so described might not like. It was therefore decided to drop ‘Imperial Crown,’ and include a reference to the Sovereign’s position as ‘Head of the Commonwealth’.

The problem reflected the growing diversity of the dominions since the Second World War; and it helped to determine the future nature of their relationship with the United Kingdom. Much was to flow from the designation of the Queen as ‘Head of the Commonwealth’ – a title formally acquired by George VI less than a year earlier, through the Royal Titles Bill, which had recognized the ‘divisibility’ of the Crown. Divisibility (the product of diversity) was officially adopted as a principle at the first Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference of the reign in December 1952, when it was agreed that each state should think up a title to express its own relationship with the Crown.

Apart from the United Kingdom, six self-governing nations – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon – retained the British Monarch as head of state. Three of them felt that ‘Defender of the Faith’ was inappropriate. In all of them ‘Queen of the British Dominions beyond the Seas’ was replaced by ‘Queen of her other Realms and Territories’. Finally, the words ‘Great Britain, Ireland’ in the full title were replaced by ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. The changes accelerated a movement away from the notion of the British Monarch as sovereign over ‘dominions’ and towards a personally-based link, in which the Monarch enjoyed a separate identity in each country.

Advocates of ‘divisibility’ maintained that it was unavoidable and desirable. Not only were the dominions growing apart constitutionally in any case, a sober recognition of political and cultural realities would have the effect of promoting rather than diminishing Commonwealth unity.

Others argued both that the idea of a ‘personal union’ was absurd, and that the idea of a ‘Head of the Commonwealth,’ who would have any area of discretion distinct from the advice given to her by the ministers of her governments, and primarily the British Government, was a dangerous heresy.

The sharpest proponent of this view was Enoch Powell, a young Conservative MP who had spent much of the war in India, and who – from the start of the new reign – established himself as a lynx-eyed guardian of parliamentary rights vis-à-vis the Crown. Three weeks after the Accession, he wrote to the Prime Minister complaining about the attendance of the Duke of Edinburgh in the peers’ gallery of the House of Commons during a debate – something, he pointed out, a royal consort had not done since 1846 – in the course of which the Duke seemed to make his opinions of what was being discussed unconstitutionally obvious.

The Government Chief Whip backed the complaint, remarking that the consort had not been ‘exactly pokerfaced,’ and the Duke was privately ticked off.

Powell returned to the topic of royal interference on many occasions, as the Queen’s titular ‘divisibility’ – which many people in 1952 saw as just an exercise in linguistic tidying – grew in significance as the Commonwealth evolved.

As well as Commonwealth titles, there was also another problem of nomenclature – which touched the Sovereign herself, and more particularly her husband, personally. This was the question of what the Royal Family, and its descendants, should be called.