For the woman who became the longest-serving monarch in British history, the circumstances in which Queen Elizabeth II discovered her new destiny were hardly propitious. As Harold Nicolson quipped, ‘She became Queen while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink.’1 This was an exaggeration, but it was true that when the king died in the early hours of 6 February 1952, the heir to the throne was one of the last members of the immediate circle to know, because of the intrinsic difficulties of contacting her in Kenya. Not only were she, Philip and their entourage staying at the isolated Treetops Hotel in Aberdare National Park, but the mixture of grief and panic that had greeted the news of the king’s death in Britain was only exacerbated by the knowledge that telling his daughter – the new monarch – was a far harder undertaking than it ever should have been.
The news reached Philip’s equerry, Mike Parker, from Martin Charteris, who had heard the tidings from a journalist as a news flash. At quarter to three in the afternoon, Parker informed the prince, who looked ‘absolutely flattened’ at his father-in-law’s death and the realisation of the responsibilities that would now overwhelm both his wife and him; Parker later recalled that ‘I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life.’2 Philip then broke the news to Elizabeth, and they walked up and down the garden for a few moments. When they returned, the new queen was composed and calm, and said to the assembled ladies-in-waiting and other staff, ‘I’m so sorry. It means we’re all going to have to go back home.’3
Leaving aside the shock and grief that any young woman would inevitably feel at the sudden death of a parent, the queen now returned to a country she had only left a matter of a few days before, but that had altered existentially. Although she managed to remain businesslike, she summoned Charteris on the return flight and asked simply, ‘What’s going to happen when we get home?’ Had her private secretary been honest, he might have replied, ‘Your life will change beyond recognition, Your Majesty.’ Instead, he simply offered her what comfort he could, as the plane came in to land and she was greeted by the solemn phalanx of Churchill, Attlee, Eden and other political worthies. Philip followed behind her once she was on the ground, as was now expected of him. While her father had lived, these people had meant little more to her personally than they did to most of the country. Now they would become men – exclusively men – she would have to deal with on a daily basis.
The queen’s first official task was to attend the Accession Council, which took place on 8 February. Lascelles had written a speech for her back in September 1951, and it was with the assurance that had typified her previous public utterances that she now spoke. She alluded to her grief, and declared that ‘at this time of deep sorrow, it is a very great consolation to me to have an assurance of the sympathy which you and all my peoples feel towards me, to my mother, and my sister, and to the other members of my family. He was its revered and beloved head, as he was of the wider family of his subjects; the grief which his loss brings is shared among us all.’
Yet it was her concentration on the idea of duty that would be of greater relevance to her reign. She stated, in an abbreviated version of the prepared text, that ‘My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than that I shall always work as my father did throughout his reign.’ In the original version, she would have gone on to promise ‘to uphold constitutional government and to further the happiness and prosperity of my peoples everywhere … I know that in my determination to follow his shining example of selfless service and tireless devotion, I shall be given strength by the loyalty and affection of those whose Queen I have been called to be, and by the wisdom of their elected Parliaments … I pray that God will guide me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been laid upon me thus early in my life.’4 Yet it was not the time to do so.
Her speech, which she delivered with considerably more confidence than her father had at the same point in his reign, was a success, and reassured anyone who might have doubted the young woman’s ability to handle the public responsibilities that were concomitant with her new title, even if she did later weep in the car that took her back to St James’s Palace. Yet as her biographer, Ben Pimlott, later wrote, ‘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’.5
Queen Victoria had been just eighteen when she had inherited the throne in 1836, avoiding the need for a regency by a month, but she had been beset by counsellors both welcome and unwelcome from the beginning of her reign, jostling for position and influence. The next queen had no ambitious John Conroy* to fear – the Duke of Windsor’s musings on a quasi-regency would have been given short shrift indeed by Philip if they had ever been known – but nor did she have a Lord Melbourne on hand to guide her. Instead, she had the now seventy-seven-year-old Churchill, whom she barely knew and now had to rely on as a guide through the Byzantine paths of political skulduggery. He was not, perhaps, the man she would have chosen in this situation.
For his part, the prime minister was open about his distaste for her husband. Colville recorded Churchill saying that while he did not actively wish Philip ill, he neither liked nor trusted him and only hoped he would not do the country any harm. When he discovered that Mountbatten had proposed a toast to the newly royal house that – in theory – bore his name at his country home of Broadlands on 7 February, he ‘went through the roof’, according to Colville, and regarded Dickie’s nephew with even greater distrust. The comments were relayed to Queen Mary by one guest, and the ailing queen, who had been the first to kiss the new monarch’s hand the same day, was ‘greatly disturbed’ by the implication that the House of Mountbatten would supplant the House of Windsor as the country’s ruling family. Something would have to be done.
Before it could be, the queen mother broadcast to the nation on 18 February. After thanking her listeners for their sympathy and affection ‘throughout these dark days’, she emphasised a theme of continuity rather than change. She began by saying that ‘throughout our married life, we have tried, the King and I, to fulfil with all our hearts and all our strength the great task of service that was laid upon us … my only wish now is that I may be allowed to continue the work we sought to do together’, and then looked to the new queen. ‘I commend to you our dear daughter: give her your loyalty and devotion: though blessed in her husband and children she will need your protection and your love in the great and lonely station to which she has been called.’6 Her speech was intended to reassure, but there was another implication, too: the former queen, still only fifty-one, was not going anywhere. For all her public and private proclamations that she was now taking on a supporting role, she remained a powerful figure, and one not ready to shuffle off into her dotage.
The first indication that she was prepared to flash steel came shortly after her broadcast, at the end of the month. Philip was reluctant to move his family from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, having spent a considerable amount of time and money refurbishing the residence to his specifications; he argued that with Buckingham Palace either a five-minute walk or a minute-long car journey away, there was no need for the expense and bother of uprooting the new royal family. He was soon put in his place by both Churchill and the wider infrastructure of courtiers. One member of the household later commented that ‘Prince Philip didn’t want to go to Buckingham Palace, but all the old codgers like Lascelles said “you must go”.’7 The prime minister reminded Philip that every monarch since Queen Victoria had lived at the palace – even, briefly, Edward VIII, who hated it but accurately remarked, ‘I had a feeling that I might not be there very long’8 – and that there was no reason why precedent should be altered to suit the young family. After all, the monarchy was a far greater institution than four people.
This necessitated the queen mother’s departure from the place that had been her home, which she regarded with mixed feelings. Nobody believed more strongly in upholding protocol than her, but a letter she wrote to her daughter in late February suggested that she was still coming to terms with her altered status. ‘I have been feeling very unhappy all today, and I suppose that talking about leaving Buckingham Palace just finished me off … naturally you must move back to B.P. in the Spring … I expect that the best plan would be for you & Philip to move into the Belgian rooms, because you are quite independent there … That would give me time to move my things without any ghastly hurry, and I could be quite self contained upstairs, meals etc.’ Poignantly, she stated, ‘you would hardly know I was there’.9
Yet before any move could happen, the question of the name of the family who would be taking up residence needed to be resolved. After Queen Mary’s alarm at the idea that the House of Mountbatten would reign, Colville stepped in and not only assured her that the Windsor name should be the only one attached to the ruling family, but that it would be supported by the government. He was correct; not only were the Cabinet ‘strongly of the opinion that the family name of Windsor should be retained’, but Churchill was invited ‘to take a suitable opportunity of making their views known to Her Majesty’. The premier, unsurprisingly, concurred – no doubt relishing the opportunity to frustrate the ambitions of both Philip and his uncle, against whom he held a lingering grudge for his apparent sacrifice of India – and on 20 February, he informed the Cabinet that ‘it was the Queen’s pleasure that she and their descendants should continue to bear the family name of Windsor’.10
This went down exceptionally badly with Philip, who shouted, ‘I am nothing but an amoeba – a bloody amoeba’, and stated, ‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.’ He might have walked behind his wife publicly, but he was not prepared to suffer the slight without a fight. Following a huge row, he wrote what Colville described with some understatement as ‘an ably but strongly worded memorandum’, in which he conveyed his feelings of anger at length, concluding with the suggested compromise that the royal family could henceforth be known as the House of Edinburgh. Churchill was vexed by his recalcitrance, and asked Colville to draft a ‘firm, negative answer’, in association with the Lord Chancellor, the Home Secretary, the Leader of the House of Commons and the Lord Privy Seal.
In due course, on 7 April, the Lord Chancellor was able to assert that ‘it cannot be doubted that by His Proclamation of 1917 King George V intended that, so long as there was a member of His House to ascend the Throne, the name of the House should be Windsor’.11 It therefore became inevitable that a new proclamation would be issued on 9 April, stating, ‘The Queen today declared in Council her Will and Pleasure that She and Her Children shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that Her descendants other than female descendants who marry and their descendants shall bear the name of Windsor.’ Had Philip been a more conciliatory – or tactical – man, he might have arranged a compromise, so that his children might have come to be known as the ‘Mountbatten-Windsors’* or something similar. But his energy and focus, which could be so useful in practical and military contexts, now butted up against carefully orchestrated protocol, and could only come off second.
Parker later described how Philip ‘was deeply wounded’, and one confidant of the prince said, ‘it was a terrible blow. It upset him very deeply and left him feeling unsettled and unhappy for a long while.’12 Even as the ailing Queen Mary remarked disapprovingly, ‘what the devil does that damned fool Edinburgh think that the family name has got to do with him’,13 he contracted jaundice, possibly because of the stress he was under, and was miserably bedridden for several weeks.
His wife, meanwhile, was discovering confidence in adversity. She commented to one friend that ‘I no longer feel anxious or worried … I don’t know what it is – but I have lost all my timidity somehow becoming the sovereign and having to receive the Prime Minister.’14 These receptions became increasingly friendly and personal in nature. Had her husband known that he had a rival for his wife’s affections in the unlikely form of a seventy-seven-year-old Old Harrovian with some military and authorial experience, he may have been less than sanguine about their weekly meetings, conducted à deux and without any record of their discussions.
Yet the wholly platonic relationship between Elizabeth and Churchill would be crucial to the early months and years of her reign. He had enjoyed a warm friendship with her father, but it had been tempered by a certain degree of wariness on both men’s parts, with each of them acknowledging the other’s desired primacy during wartime. George VI’s final illness meant that the first few months of Churchill’s second premiership did not register as strongly as either man would have wished. Yet the man whom the Duke of Windsor had so contemptuously dubbed ‘Cry Baby’ was anything but po-faced or humourless.
Although the queen initially described him as ‘very obstinate’,15 there was another issue at hand: was Churchill up to the job? His physical health was fading, and although he was still sharp and witty, it was whispered that he lacked the necessary powers of concentration to cope with the demands of the premiership. He had been re-elected by his country in a symbolic act of contrition for allowing Labour to win in 1945, and the sentimental hope that he would once again lead the country to greatness in its hour of need. But peacetime prime ministers face very different challenges to wartime leaders, and it seemed inevitable that Elizabeth’s first premier would not last long in his post.
However, having coveted a return to 10 Downing Street since the day he was ejected from it, Churchill would not leave willingly. Therefore, it was hinted that the queen should offer him the chance to retire at a time of his own choosing – an honourable departure, with laurels bound around his noble brow, but nonetheless a departure. Lascelles, however, scorned the idea. When it was put to him on 22 February, he remarked, ‘If she said her part, [Churchill] would say charmingly “It’s very good of you, Ma’am, to think of it” – and then he would politely brush it aside.’ There was the possibility that George VI might have been robust about the matter, but as Lascelles remarked, ‘he is gone’.16 Churchill himself let it be known that he wished to remain in office at least until the coronation of the new queen, and even as his personal doctor Lord Moran suggested that his departure would be ‘best for the Monarch, the country and his successor’, to say nothing of being regarded as a ‘noble gesture’, the prime minister responded with typical sangfroid, remarking to Moran, ‘I don’t want you to worry. You really needn’t. One has to die some time.’17
He was at the Trooping the Colour ceremony in the first week of June, watching the queen parade. Channon said of it that ‘the presence of the youthful Queen added excitement … she seemed perfectly self-possessed, and a tiny bit cross but she is a competent horsewoman’.18 Churchill described to the Press Association, at their annual luncheon on 11 June, how the event made him feel. ‘As I watched our young Queen riding at the head of her Guards, I thought of the history of the past and the hopes of the future. Not only of the distant past – it is barely ten years since we upheld on our strong, unyielding shoulders the symbols, the honour and perhaps even the life of the free world. Certainly no one of British race could contemplate such a spectacle without pride. But no thinking man or woman could escape the terrible question: on what does it all stand?’19
Just as Attlee had inherited a country in chaos and turmoil, and had only been partially successful in his efforts to rebuild the war-ravaged state, so Churchill now faced an uncertain and unresolved situation. Britain was no longer Great, it seemed. Its king was dead, and Russia was in the ascendant. Another world war – this time nuclear – was something he had warned about while he was out of power, but now fine words and inspirational speechifying had to contend with fears of impending Armageddon. Less than a week later, Colville wrote in his diary that Churchill no longer saw himself as being up to the job; ‘the Prime Minister is depressed and bewildered … [and] said to me this evening: “the zest is diminished”. I think it is more that he cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. Nor can I.’20
It was fortunate, then, that in the final hour of his political life, Churchill found himself falling in love again. As Charteris told Gyles Brandreth, ‘Churchill was nearly eighty, and the Queen was no more than twenty-five, but it was not simply her youth and beauty that entranced him. He was impressed by her. She was conscientious, she was well-informed, she was serious-minded. Within days of her Accession she was receiving prime ministers and presidents, ambassadors and High Commissioners … and doing so faultlessly. She had authority and dignity as well as grace.’*21 There are those who will find Churchill’s comment to Moran – ‘all the film people in the world, if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part’22 – breathless and syrupy, the distasteful expression of an old man’s panting over a much younger woman. And then there are others who will find it a gesture of the deep affection the prime minister came to feel for his monarch.
A pattern soon developed in their weekly audiences. The ‘rather obstinate’ prime minister would arrive at Buckingham Palace formally attired in frock coat and top hat – as he might have done half a century before – looking as if he was off for a day at the races rather than an appointment with the queen. Onlookers noticed that he had a gleam in his eye, and seemed younger, somehow, as if he was rejuvenated by his meetings. Once the premier and the monarch were ensconced together, they would not be interrupted for the length of their session, which often stretched well beyond the allotted hour. Courtiers were surprised to hear that these usually solemn occasions were punctuated by the sound of hearty laughter from both participants. Colville, after one such audience, figuratively caught the prime minister by his lapel and asked, ‘What do you talk about?’ Churchill smiled and said, ‘Oh, mostly racing.’
Throughout 1952, the relationship between the two deepened and strengthened. It may have helped that, as Channon noted on 26 February, the queen was ‘openly, assuredly, dangerously Tory’23 – in contrast to her more progressive husband – but Churchill began to act around her as if he were both an ami de maison and a watchful guardian. In October, the queen commissioned a bust of the prime minister, to be sculpted by Oscar Nemon, who frequently sculpted both royalty and politicians. Churchill sat for him over a dozen times, but he could be a quixotic subject. Nemon later wrote to the royal librarian, Owen Morshead, to say, ‘the progress of my work depends on this most unpredictable sitter. On Sunday for instance I moved to Chequers where I had a very pleasant contact in a relaxed setting.’ Upon its completion, the bust was placed in the Queen’s Guard Chamber at Windsor Castle: a conspicuous mark of favour, and one never extended to any other living prime minister.
Whether Churchill was praising the queen’s charm in conversation with the US president-elect, Dwight Eisenhower, in January 1953, or cheerfully batting away an intrusive journalist’s question about how Britain could justify the expense of the coronation when the country was in such dire financial straits with the reply ‘Everybody likes to wear a flower when he goes to see his girl’, there was little doubt that he was smitten. Yet it was not simply the doting affection of an older man for a younger woman, but a genuine belief that the queen offered Britain the same hope for the future that he himself had done nearly a decade and a half previously. Then, he had said to an exhausted and frightened country that ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ Now, his country needed a different kind of inspiration. Grandstanding and rhetoric had their place, but the young woman who, seven and a half years earlier, he had stood next to on the Buckingham Palace balcony as they celebrated VE Day represented modernity and progress.
A few months before that occasion, the prime minister had been offered the Order of the Garter by her father, in recognition of his services during the war. Although he described himself as ‘touched and honoured’ by the recognition, he turned it down, as he considered it inappropriate to accept such an award while he continued to serve as premier. Although the king was greatly disappointed by this, saying, ‘I feel that the country will expect me to give you a high honour which it will acclaim as a fitting tribute for all your arduous work in this war, and one which will still enable you to remain in the House of Commons’,24 he did not press the issue, especially as Churchill conceded that, were he to be nominated by a future premier on his retirement, he would be prepared to reconsider accepting the award.
Lascelles now suggested to Colville that in view of the changed circumstances, the queen was keen to offer Churchill the Garter once more, but wanted to discreetly sound out the chances of his acceptance. When Colville dined with the prime minister and his wife, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that Churchill was open to the idea; he wrote in his diary, ‘Mr Churchill said that he always felt that it had been discourteous of him to refuse the Garter … and what is more, as the 1st Duke of Marlborough’s father had been Sir Winston Churchill, he felt that he himself would not mind being Sir Winston … In the end, he said he thought that if he were offered it he might well reconsider his view.’25
Shortly before the coronation, Churchill remarked to Moran, ‘I will tell you a secret. You mustn’t tell anyone. The Queen wants me to accept the Garter.’ He went on to say that he had refused it before, ‘but the Prime Minister had a say in it. Now only the Queen decides.’ And when he finally accepted it, he took great pride in telling his well-wishers why he had changed his mind. He wrote to his friend Pamela Lytton on 3 May 1953 to say, ‘I took it because it was the Queen’s wish. I think she is splendid.’26
Meanwhile, Philip – the de facto rival for Elizabeth’s attentions – was shaking off his frustrations over dynastic nomenclature by throwing himself into energetic pursuits. When he and the rest of his family had moved into Buckingham Palace, he marched from room to room, asking everyone he met who they were and what their purpose was. Ever the naval man, he called this his ‘organisation and methods review’, and his straight-talking, fast-walking manner offended some of the older and stuffier courtiers, who were unable to keep up with him, figuratively or literally. Nor did he have time for sycophancy. One overawed woman was rebuked when she referred to him as ‘Your Highness’; he brusquely responded, ‘I don’t like to be “Highnessed”. Just call me “sir”. This is the 20th century. You’re not at King Arthur’s court, you know!’27
He occupied himself with everything from flying lessons to helping to plan his wife’s coronation, taking the role of chairman of the coronation committee. One courtier described him to Churchill as ‘insupportable when idle’,28 and Channon wrote on 21 May that Philip was ‘desperately bored with his three womenfolk, the two Queens and Princess Margaret’.29 If he felt frustrated, or belittled, or redundant, he made his feelings and opinions plain, but this did little to harm public opinion of him. When the Daily Mirror asked in February 1953 whether Philip should take a virtually equal role by his wife’s side at the coronation, or if it should centre entirely on her, 42,680 readers took the former stance; a mere 432 disagreed. The paper’s editorial was staunchly pro-duke. ‘These figures show overwhelmingly Britain’s affection and high regard for Philip. The people think he is a fine man doing a fine job. The Daily Mirror agrees.’30 Channon remained entranced, saying breathlessly on 10 January 1953, ‘[he was] as always perfect … he is an enchantment’.31
Yet for all the haut ton’s admiration for the royal couple, the combined stress of Queen Mary’s death and preparing for the coronation told on them. Channon wrote of how, on 6 April, Philip was ‘white and ill – “almost dying”’.32 There were lengthy arguments about whether the coronation should be televised; George VI’s in 1937 had not been, but this was partly because broadcast technology was in its infancy, and partly because his nervousness and discomfort with public speaking might have turned the event into a disastrous and embarrassing spectacle.
The queen, perhaps surprisingly, was against it, and so Colville, informed of her opinion via Philip, sent a memo to Churchill in which he stated, ‘the Committee was almost unanimous in considering that television of the actual ceremony should not be allowed’. He justified this by adding, ‘whereas film of the ceremony can be cut appropriately, live television would not only add considerably to the strain on the Queen (who does not herself want TV) but would mean that any mistakes, unintentional incidents or undignified behaviour by spectators would be seen by millions of people’.33 That there might yet be a greater good in televising it did not seem to occur to anyone involved in its organisation.
Initially, it seemed as if the government would simply support the royal wishes. The Cabinet noted that due to ‘the importance of avoiding unnecessary strain for Her Majesty and upholding the sanctity of the ceremony’, they concurred with the committee’s decision. However, this was not the end of the matter. The public desired to see their young, attractive monarch being crowned, and if they could not be present at Westminster Abbey themselves, they wanted the next best thing: to be able to watch the ceremony on television. So overwhelming and consistent was the outcry, ably communicated to their elected representatives, that in October 1952, it was stated that in view of the ‘serious public disappointment’, the sacred event would indeed be broadcast live. According to Colville, the decision was not only accepted by the queen, but almost encouraged, with her agreeing that ‘all her subjects should have an opportunity of seeing [the Coronation]’.34
As the event approached, there were rehearsals of near-unimaginable length and complexity, which the queen claimed to enjoy, and Churchill had to be allowed his moment of grandstanding. On 17 May, in the queen’s presence, he delivered a speech at Westminster Hall on the theme of monarchy, in which he declared that ‘I have served your Majesty’s great-great grandmother, greatgrandfather, grandfather, father and now yourself.’ Ignoring the obvious riposte that it was unclear whether he was her premier or Old Father Time, he went on to remind her that the crown was as much a burden as it was a symbol of majesty, but stated that it was also a unifying symbol; he called it ‘the central link in all our modern changing life, the one which above all others claims our allegiance to death’.35
It was an imposing, even awesome weight that was placed upon her, and the coronation on 2 June threatened to overwhelm the young queen. It is testament, then, to her calm that she was able to maintain a sense of humour. ‘You must be feeling nervous, ma’am’, a lady-in-waiting said to her, with an attempt at woman-to-woman compassion. The monarch replied, deadpan, with an allusion to one of her favourite activities: horse racing. ‘Of course I am, but I really do think Aureole will win.’36 In the event, her horse came second in the 1953 Derby, but he never faltered in the attempt, and would subsequently go on to triumph.