The Queen

1

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 grabbed her pen and scribbled and scratched out the offending words.

Doctor Simpson Scratch. Doctor Simpson Scribble. That he was but a character in one of the children’s 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. She was focused on her make-believe world, unconcerned about her sister’s silent rage over a certain Mrs. Simpson who, unbidden, was now changing all their lives. Disinterested, too, in the growing crowds that jostled and shoved in the winter gloom to watch the to-ing and fro-ing from 145 Piccadilly, the London home of their parents, the Duke and Duchess of York.

After all, they had spent a lifetime 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.

This time, though, the crowds were bigger, the atmosphere inside the stone-fronted mansion tense and hurried. The front doorbells, labeled VISITORS and HOUSE, rang more frequently, and as the crowds of the curious and concerned grew, police were drafted in.

The name Simpson was first whispered and then became part of disapproving conversations that were abruptly ended when the girls hove into view. Much as her parents tried to protect Lilibet—the family name for the princess—and her sister, she was sensitive to moods and rhythms. She was adept at catching the conversational drift, especially because, since her tenth birthday, she’d enjoyed the privilege of taking breakfast with her parents and occasionally her grandmother Queen Mary. She was able to gather crumbs of information 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; her grandmother Queen Mary, routinely ramrod-straight and imperious, seemed older and somehow shriveled; her mother’s normally jaunty demeanor had for once deserted her. Nor did it help when, in early December 1936, the duchess 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, her maid 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 to the Bath Club as a necessary distraction. This down-to-earth triumvirate served as the girls’ window on the world, their genteel observations and prim prejudices shaping Lilibet and Margaret’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.

Elizabeth had briefly met Wallis Simpson in the spring of 1936 after she had celebrated her tenth birthday. Not that she made much of an impression. Simpson arrived with Elizabeth’s uncle David, the new King Edward VIII, to see her parents at their weekend home, the Royal Lodge in the manicured acres of Windsor Great Park. Her uncle came to show off the two American interests in his life—a brand-new Buick sports wagon and his other fascination, the twice-married lady from Baltimore, Wallis Simpson. When they 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, after tea joining the girls for card games of snap, happy families, and racing demon. He was always fun, Elizabeth recalling the time he took the duchess and the girls into the garden at Balmoral and taught 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 noncommittal, 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 Not so her employers. After spending a convivial hour discussing gardening and taking tea with the new king and his 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

At the time it was the presence of the York daughters that 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 grown practiced at being used in this way, impeccably mannered children introduced to the visiting grown-ups to help break the conversational ice.

It was the same when they traveled to Scotland that fateful summer to stay at the modest Stuart house called Birkhall Lodge near Balmoral, the estate first purchased by Queen Victoria and even today rather like going back in time. The principal guest of the Yorks was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, who had accepted their invitation when the king, who traditionally invited England’s senior Protestant prelate to Balmoral, left him swinging in the wind. Instead, up the road at Balmoral, he and Wallis hosted 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 enamored. 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 centered on the king’s wish to marry Wallis once she had divorced her husband, 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 had no business marrying a divorcée, let alone a twice-divorced American of no standing or status. For his part the king threatened to renounce the throne unless he was allowed to marry the woman who had stolen his heart.

Though the British media had kept a lid on the blossoming romance—pictures of the king and Wallis during a summer cruise aboard the steam yacht Nahlin appeared everywhere except England—the potential constitutional crisis was finally made public early in December. It set in train 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. Despite a dire warning from his principal 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 November 16 he informed the prime minister that he intended to marry Mrs. Simpson as soon as he was legally free. If the government opposed he would simply abdicate. He later conveyed his decision to his mother and siblings, who were shocked to the core, Queen Mary seeking the advice of a therapist to verify her conclusion that her eldest son had been bewitched by a skillful sorceress. The prime minister was more sanguine, informing his cabinet colleagues that the elevation of the Yorks might prove to be the best solution as the Duke of York was rather like his much-loved father, King 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 the Duke of Kent, the youngest of the brothers, could take over the throne as he already had a son, the fickle finger of fate pointed to the second-born, the hapless Bertie. For his part he had always assumed that his elder brother would marry one day and go on to have an heir who would become sovereign.

As the duke, shy, diffident, and cursed with a congenital stammer, reluctantly reviewed the hand he was now being dealt, his immediate thoughts went out to his eldest daughter whose position would change from second in line to the throne to heir 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 eldest daughter. She had character, 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 new king, 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

His daughter was rather more matter-of-fact and practical. When it became inevitable that the Duke of York was going to accede to the throne and that her beloved uncle Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, was leaving for exile abroad, Princess Margaret asked: “Does this mean you’re going to become Queen?” Her elder sister replied: “Yes I suppose it does.”⁶ She didn’t mention it again except when her father casually mentioned that she would have to learn to ride sidesaddle for that time, hopefully in the far distant future, when she would have to appear on horseback at the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony at Horse Guards Parade.

While she was reluctantly 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” when he, Queen Mary, and the king’s lawyer, Walter Monckton, were presented with the draft Instrument of Abdication.⁸ On Friday, December 11, 1936—the year of three kings—the king’s abdication was announced, the now ex-king driving to Windsor Castle where he gave his historic 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 many sterling qualities of civic leadership, he pointed out that “he has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me—a happy home with his wife and children.”⁹

Not so happy for the family in question. The former Duke of York, now the new king described the momentous event as “that dreadful day”; his wife, the new queen, lay prostrate in bed with a nasty bout of flu; while the next day the hitherto ignored but now central characters in this unfolding drama greeted their new station in life with a mixture of excitement and irritated acceptance. When Princess Elizabeth saw an envelope addressed to the queen even her calm demeanor was punctured. “That’s Mummy now, isn’t it?” she commented, while her younger sister lamented the fact that they had to move into Buckingham Palace. “You mean forever?” she asked. “But I have only just learned to write ‘York.’”¹⁰

On the day of the proclamation—December 12, 1936—both girls gave their father a hug before the new king, dressed in the uniform of admiral of the fleet, left for the ceremony. 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, the new king and queen. They had always curtsied to their grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary, so it was not a huge change.

When he returned at one o’clock both girls swept him beautiful curtsies, the behavior of his daughters bringing home to him his changed station.

Crawfie recalled: “He stood for a moment touched and taken aback. Then he stooped and kissed them both warmly. After this we had an hilarious lunch.”¹¹

Like her father, Elizabeth had now transitioned to become 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. She became, along with the Hollywood child star Shirley Temple, the most famous face in the world, a subject of wonder and adoration.

Her life as a fairy-tale princess was, in reality, less Disney 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 rat catcher and his deadly paraphernalia symbolized the gruesome reality behind the perceived regal glamour. Though Elizabeth was thrown into the circumscribed circle of her sister, governess, maid, and nanny with her parents a distant harassed presence, she became an object of fascination for millions.

In some ways nothing really had changed for the heir presumptive. Elizabeth, with her glowing ringlets of blond hair, had been a national symbol all her life. Born on Wednesday, April 21, 1926, at two forty 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 postwar Britain racked 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 the birth lest an imposter be smuggled into the bedchamber. In keeping with tradition the current occupant of that office, William Joynson-Hicks, whose agitated mind was occupied with thoughts about how to defeat the trade unions in the coming conflict, sat in a nearby room at 17 Bruton Street, the duchess’s family’s London home, during the royal birth.

Once the baby was delivered, royal gynecologist Sir Henry Simson gave Joynson-Hicks an official document outlining the bare details of the birth of a “strong healthy female.” The certificate was then handed to a special messenger who hurried to the president of the Privy Council to make the official announcement. At the same time the home secretary informed the lord mayor of London, who posted the news on the gates of his official residence, Mansion House.

In the official bulletin, signed by Simson and the duchess’s personal doctor Walter Jagger, they stated that before the confinement a “certain line of treatment was successfully adopted,” decorously suggesting that the princess had been delivered by cesarean section.¹²

Though the sleeping infant was, by virtue of the 1701 Act of Settlement, third in line to the throne behind her father and the Prince of Wales, and not expected to reign, her lineage was a rich stew of the royal, the exotic, and the common.

While her great-great-grandmother was Queen Victoria, she was also linked, through her grandmother Queen Mary, to dentist Paul Julius von Hügel, who practiced in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires. On her father’s side the blood of European royalty, notably the German Houses of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Hanover, predominated, though it was her mother’s British heritage that intrigued.

Anthony Wagner, Garter king of arms, noted that among Elizabeth’s many aristocratic ancestors were two dukes, the daughter of a duke, the daughter of a marquess, three earls, the daughter of an earl, one viscount, one baron, and some half a dozen country gentlemen. It was not only the aristocracy represented in her bloodline but also the world of commerce and religion.

According to Wagner, her hereditary pedigree included a director of the East India Company, a provincial banker, two daughters of bishops, three clergymen—one related to America’s first president, George Washington—an Irish officer and his French mistress, a London toyman, and a metropolitan plumber as well as a certain Bryan Hodgson, the landlord of The George, a coaching inn in Stamford, Lincolnshire.

Though her heritage demonstrated a wide social range, the names chosen by her doting parents—Elizabeth Alexandra Mary—suggested her future destiny as queen. Others agreed, the Daily Graphic newspaper observing presciently: “The possibility that in the little stranger to Bruton Street there may be a future Queen of Great Britain (perhaps even a second and resplendent Queen Elizabeth) is sufficiently intriguing.”¹³

With Uncle David only thirty-two and expected to marry and produce an heir, that likelihood seemed remote. Yet there was no doubting the fact that the royal infant had been taken into the nation’s bosom. Judging by the excited crowds gathered outside her Bruton Street home, there was something singularly special about Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, perhaps a reflection of the fondness felt toward her mother who, just three years after her marriage to Bertie, was held in high esteem and affection. In an authorized account of the duchess’s life, biographer Lady Cynthia Asquith admitted that she struggled to find anything other than sweet perfection in the character of the new mother.

Early photographs revealed Princess Elizabeth as the quintessential bonny baby, with her clear blue eyes, perfect pink and white skin, and a mop of blond hair. Or as Queen Mary, one of the first visitors, put it, she was “a little darling with lovely complexion and pretty fair hair.”¹⁴

Without uttering a word, she propelled her parents from the quiet backwaters of royal life to the front pages of newspapers and magazines. She was the Princess Diana of her day, every morsel of information turned into a banquet of gossip and speculation. Newspapers were merely supplying popular demand—weeks after her birth the pavement outside her London home was thronged with so many onlookers that often she had to be smuggled out of the back entrance in her pram for her daily airing.

On the day of her christening at Buckingham Palace on May 29, such was the crush to see the infant that well-wishers broke through the police cordon outside the palace. Until order was restored, a lucky few who surrounded the Yorks’ car were able to catch a glimpse of the infant who had, it was later reported, cried throughout the ceremony, which was conducted by the archbishop of York.

After a few months the Yorks moved to 145 Piccadilly near Hyde Park, the five-story establishment coming complete with a ballroom, electric elevator, library, dining room for thirty, and around seventeen staff including a steward, two footmen, a valet, and three nurses to attend the new arrival. Yet in a collective case of myopia, media correspondents lovingly described how the Yorks had rejected the showy and ornate, opting for a life of simplicity, especially in the royal nursery. In this miniature kingdom, neatness, order, and a sensible routine reigned. There was much approving clucking when it was revealed that the princess was only allowed to play with one toy at a time. Ironically when her parents returned from a six-month tour of Australia in 1927, they brought with them three tonnes of toys for the little girl the media now dubbed Betty.

Thus the eternal paradox of royalty, or our perception of royalty, evolved, that they were and are different but the same as ourselves. Without even knowing it, the baby princess slept soundly beneath an imagined layette of magic and myth, a gossamer blanket where new threads were constantly interwoven into the patchwork of legend and reality. It was a blanket that would accompany her throughout her life.

By the time she could walk and talk the child dubbed the “world’s best known baby” had appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the tagline PINCESS LILYBET—a reference to how she spoke her name. She featured, too, on postage stamps, boxes of chocolates, tea caddies, tea towels, commemorative mugs, and other goods. Songs were sung in her honor, Madame Tussauds installed a waxwork of her on a pony, while the Australians named a piece of Antarctica after her. Her only rival in this sea of adulation was her uncle David, the Prince of Wales, who was a bona-fide international pinup matched only, during his lifetime, by the Hollywood heartthrob Rudolph Valentino.

Her mother was concerned about the inordinate amount of attention she engendered. During a visit to Edinburgh in May 1929 she wrote to Queen Mary: “It almost frightens me that the people should love her so much. I suppose that it is a good thing, and I hope that she will be worthy of it, poor little darling.”¹⁵

As the months and years passed, the contours of her personality, real and imagined, began to emerge. Frequently described as “cherubic” or “angelic,” she was portrayed as a sunny, well-behaved girl with an innocent wit and engaging and endearing temperament.

When the royal family gathered at Sandringham for Christmas 1927 she was described by the Westminster Gazette as “chattering and laughing and bombarding the guests with crackers handed to her by her mother.”¹⁶ Even Winston Churchill was impressed. On a visit to Balmoral on September 1928, he wrote to his wife, Clemmie: “She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.”¹⁷

Stories soon circulated about how the unafraid girl had tamed her irascible grandfather King George V, who was known to strike terror into the hearts of his children and senior staff. When Princess Elizabeth was in his presence, though, he was putty in her little hands. The Archbishop of Canterbury recounted an occasion when the monarch acted the role of a horse being led around the room by his “groom” and granddaughter, who clung to his gray beard as he shuffled along the floor on his knees.

“He was fond of his two grandsons, Princess Mary’s sons,” recalled the Countess of Airlie, “but Lilibet always came first in his affections. He used to play with her—a thing I never saw him do with his own children—and loved to have her with him.”¹⁸ The fact that she was a cherubic little girl with an unselfconscious and vivid imagination, particularly regarding the world of horses, probably sealed the deal—demonstrated by the fact that when she was just four, the doting monarch gave her a Shetland pony named Peggy.

Indeed, her ability to soothe the troubled brow of the sovereign—echoes here of the medieval notion of the healing royal touch—became a talking point of the nation in February 1929 when the king traveled to the seaside resort of Bognor, on the south coast of England, to recover from a near-fatal illness. The two-year-old princess kept the old man amused with her chatter and was widely appreciated for her role in helping to effect his recovery. He loved that she later called him Grandpa England and was always attentive in his company, listening gravely as he extolled the virtues of duty, decency, and hard work.

The constant company of indulgent adults encouraged a certain guileless precocity. When she was taking a walk with Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang in the gardens at Sandringham, she asked that the conversation not dwell on God. “I know all about him already,” said the nine-year-old, solemnly.¹⁹

Elizabeth made her first friend outside the immediate royal family when she was in Hamilton Gardens and saw a girl of her age playing. It was Sonia Graham-Hodgson, the daughter of the king’s radiographer. “Will you come and have a game with me?” asked the slender creature with the bell-like voice. They played French cricket for an hour under the watchful gaze of their respective nannies. Afterward they met virtually every day—until Elizabeth had to move to Buckingham Palace. Even so for a long time the princess considered Sonia to be her best friend. She even dedicated an unfinished novel, The Happy Farm, written when she was eight, to her friend. Her inscription read: “To Sonia My Dear Little Friend and Lover of Horses.”²⁰

Sonia had happy memories of their long friendship: “She was a sweet child and great fun. She always had a great sense of humor and a vivid imagination.”²¹ Most games involved horses but sometimes they imagined they were invited to a grand ball and the girls would earnestly discuss what they would like to wear. Before the Second World War they took dance lessons together; afterward Elizabeth was guest of honor at Sonia’s twenty-first birthday. Despite Elizabeth’s elevation they stayed in touch and saw each other from time to time at dinner parties or for afternoon tea.

On August 21, 1930, a playmate of a very different kind entered her life when her sister Margaret Rose was born at Glamis Castle, the haunted ancestral home of the Strathmore family, located north of Dundee in Scotland. Once the formalities were dealt with—the new home secretary, John Robert Clynes, had traveled to the northern redoubt to certify the birth—Elizabeth was introduced to the infant. She was suitably “enchanted,” especially when she realized that it wasn’t a perfectly formed dolly but a living, if sound asleep, sister.

Thousands of well-wishers, some driving from Glasgow and south of the border, joined the celebrations at Glamis Castle, where huge bonfires were lit.²²