The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

They had a mixed reception. A few days after their arrival, the Canadian Governor-General wrote soothingly to the King that the Quebecois had been impressed by the Princess’s French, and that the crowds in Ottawa were bigger than those during the state visits of either President Truman or President Auriol of France.16 However the press – unaware of the seriousness of the King’s illness and looking for an angle – quickly decided that the Princess looked distracted, and even bored. ‘At the end of some of the long trying days,’ declared one Canadian broadcaster, ‘you’d hear people worrying about how tired the Princess is.’17 The royal party had an uncomfortable feeling of the trip having got off to a poor start. ‘There was a lot of comment about Princess Elizabeth not smiling,’ according to Lord Charteris. It was to become a common complaint. ‘My face is aching with smiling,’ he recalled her saying in exasperation.18 Yet there was no lack of interest. Such was the crush of photographers wanting to get a picture of her face, smiling or blank, that splinters of glass from exploding flash bulbs were found on her coat.19

As in South Africa in 1947, much of the tour was spent cooped up in a special train. The mood in the royal car varied. To relieve the monotony as they travelled into every province of the dominion, Philip developed a line in practical jokes. On one occasion he left a booby-trapped tin of nuts for his wife to open, on another he chased her down the corridor wearing a set of joke false teeth.20 At other times, tempers frayed. One member of the party remembers the Duke loudly denouncing the Heiress Presumptive as a ‘bloody fool’ in the breakfast room.21 Meanwhile, as they chugged across the vast open spaces, from the industrial lowlands of St Lawrence to the west coast, the nation’s enthusiasm – dormant at first – grew into an extraordinary excitement, focusing on the Governor-General’s train. People travelled colossal distances to gather at each stop. There were vivid incidents. Dean particularly remembered the arrival of the royal train at a small settlement deep in the Rockies, late at night in falling snow. As the couple dismounted, they were greeted by the town band and the entire population singing ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’.22

The high point was the hastily-added pop-over. On October 31st, they flew to Washington, where – to ensure a fitting welcome – President Truman had ordered that all Federal employees should be given time off.23 What guaranteed the success of the visit was partly the Canadian preamble, which gave the American press time to get used to the idea; partly the brevity of the trip, which gave no time for boredom; and partly that Truman decided to make it the climactic celebration of his own presidency. ‘He fell in love with her’, according to Charteris.24 The British ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, wrote to the King that when the President appeared with Princess Elizabeth in public he conveyed ‘the impression of a very proud uncle presenting his favourite niece to his friends’.25 As Federal workers lined the streets to cheer, the President behaved as if the Princess and her husband had been responsible for some magnificent achievement. ‘We have many distinguished visitors here in this city,’ he declared in a speech in the Rose Garden, ‘but never before have we had such a wonderful couple, that so completely captured the hearts of all of us.’26 The Washington papers wrote of ‘little Lilibet’ – recently made familiar to the American public through the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal – who had ‘suddenly matured into the lovely young mother who one day is to be the ruling Queen of England’.27 At a big British embassy reception, the Princess and the Duke had to shake the hands of 1,500 guests.

There were matters of protocol. One, which caused a flurry of diplomatic telegrams, was the question of where the Princess should return the President’s hospitality. As the pop-over took place during a tour of Canada, she came to the United States not as future Queen of England but as future Queen of Canada, and consequently was required to entertain President Truman at the Canadian, not the British, embassy.28

Afterwards, there was the question of thank-you letters. When the royal couple had returned to Canada, Philip wrote to Mrs Truman – as one consort to another – thanking her for her kindness, and describing his ‘rather blurred memory of our rush round Washington’. It was the job of the Princess to write to the President. She did so after talking to her father on the telephone. ‘He sounded much better,’ she wrote, hopefully.29 Across the Atlantic, the King was shown glowing extracts from the Washington Evening Star, and read the famous remark of Harry Truman: ‘When I was little boy, I read about a fairy princess, and there she is.’30

IN MID-NOVEMBER, the Princess and Duke returned to England, and to a new political landscape. A few years earlier, Labour had seemed so firmly entrenched that many people believed it would retain office for a generation. The 1950 election, however, had cut its majority to a handful. In the general election of October 1951, a tired Labour Government – depleted by retirements and resignations – faced a re-invigorated Conservative Party campaigning for a bigger conflagration of controls. The result was tight. Labour polled more votes, but the Tories obtained a small working majority. At seventy-seven, Winston Churchill was called to the Palace and asked by the convalescing King to form the first purely Conservative Government since Baldwin left office in 1929. The Monarch was not sorry. Although Attlee had treated him with civility and respect, the King and Queen made little secret – in private – of their High Tory opinions.31 During the war the King had come to depend personally on Churchill, whose exaggerated shows of deference he found reassuring and flattering, and he welcomed the return of a Prime Minister who took an almost child-like pleasure in the pageantry and show of Monarchy.

Elizabeth and Philip did not have long, however, to adjust to the change. Following the cancellation of the tour of the King and Queen, arrangements had been put in train for the Princess and her husband to undertake it instead – including, in their itinerary, a few days in East Africa en route. There were two reasons for such an excursion. The Kenyan colonial government, which had given the Princess and Duke a farm, Sagana Lodge, as a wedding present, had been keenly asking for a royal visit. Furthermore, such a pause in the journey gave an excuse for not stopping in Egypt, currently in the throes of a political crisis. ‘Going to Kenya is a good way of skipping the Mediterranean,’ the King pencilled in a tremulous note to his private secretary.32 The intention was to make the Kenya leg of the journey largely a holiday, before they went on from Mombasa, aboard HMS Gothic, to Ceylon.

The Kenyan settler community was delighted at the news. The East African Standard spoke for the colony when it welcomed the visit of two young people whose charm, devotion to duty and ‘personal example of homemaking family life’ had endeared them to the Commonwealth: it hoped that they would enjoy what Kenya had to offer in terms of fishing, riding, shooting and travelling on safari. As with the South African tour, the fiction was preserved that the royal visit – intended to provide symbolic reassurance to the white settlers in increasingly uncertain times – was purely recreational.33 The couple’s example of homemaking did not include bringing their children with them. Though they expected to be away for six months, longer even than the Yorks’ 1927 trip, the question did not arise. ‘It was absolutely taken for granted that they would be left behind,’ says an ex-courtier. ‘It was simply what one did in those days.’34

As soon as he knew they were coming, the Governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell, made an imaginative suggestion. ‘. . . [P]lease try to get them here so that their visit includes the period of three days on either side of the full moon,’ he wrote to the Colonial Office on October 13th. ‘In that case I would reserve Treetops for them for a night, that is the hotel in the branches of a giant fig tree overlooking a salt lick about ten miles from their Lodge in the Aberdares . . . I am sure that H.R.H. would enjoy it enormously; it really is something not to be missed and it does require, for its full enjoyment, as much moonlight as possible.’ The moonlight was for viewing the big game that came to the water-hole under the tree.35

In his Christmas broadcast, the King expressed his pleasure that ‘our daughter, Princess Elizabeth’ and her husband would be taking his and the Queen’s place on the tour. It was the first and last time that he ever referred to his heir on such an occasion by name.36 After recording the programme – piece by piece, as his strength allowed – the King spent Christmas with his family in Norfolk. ‘I am progressing well since my operation, I am glad to say’, he wrote to General Eisenhower from Sandringham on January 7th.37 On January 30th, he returned to London for a visit to the American musical South Pacific in Drury Lane. The following day he accompanied his elder daughter and his son-in-law to London airport and said good-bye to them on the tarmac as they boarded their plane for Nairobi.

The royal couple were greeted on arrival next morning by Sir Philip Mitchell, in plumed hat, and whisked off for a series of engagements. Then the royal party set out for Sagana Lodge in Nyeri, a hundred miles north of the capital, where they spent a couple of days elephant-watching, fishing and filming – before driving to Treetops. The hotel, as Mitchell had indicated, was an outpost only for the sturdiest of tourists. Getting to it was regarded as hazardous, because of wild animals at the foot of the tree. There may also have been another hazard, because it was in the heart of Mau Mau territory – during the rebellion which erupted shortly afterwards, it was burnt down. At the time, however, the Princess and the Duke were able to spend a safe and peaceful evening watching Kenya’s most imposing fauna from the hotel’s observation balcony.

On February 4th, Lascelles wrote to Mitchell from England thanking him, on behalf of the King and Queen, for helping to make the visit a success.38 Next day, in Downing Street, the Cabinet discussed a Labour motion complaining about a planned royal visit to South Africa, in the course of which the King was due to stay in Dr Malan’s official residence as his guest. Ministers agreed that the matter was one for the Union Government to decide, and that it would be ‘constitutionally inappropriate’ to offer advice.39 In Sandringham, the King went out shooting, and returned for dinner with his wife and younger daughter. ‘There were jolly jokes,’ Princess Margaret recalls, ‘and he went to bed early because he was convalescing. Then he wasn’t there any more.’40 That night, he died in his sleep.

When did Elizabeth succeed? ‘She became Queen,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink.’41 This became the legend, and it was not far from the truth. When the King’s fatal heart attack occurred in the early hours of the morning, the Princess was either asleep or eating breakfast (watching, not rhinoceros, but baboons) or taking pictures of the sunrise. Mike Parker, a member of the royal party, believes he was with her at the precise moment when her reign began. He had invited her to climb up to a look-out point at the top of the tree to watch the dawn coming up over the jungle. While they looked at the iridescent light that preceded the sunrise, they saw an eagle hovering just above their heads. For a moment, he was frightened that it would dive onto them. ‘I never thought about it until later’, he recalled, ‘but that was roughly the time when the King died.’42

Although for several months his death had been a medical inevitability, the news of it came as a surprise both to the public and to the Royal Family. ‘He died as he was getting better,’ says Princess Margaret.43 Remarkably, the ground had not been prepared and the arrangements for telling key people had rapidly to be improvised. The Queen had been the first to know, after the King’s valet had discovered his body, at 7.30 a.m. An hour or more elapsed before Edward Ford, the assistant private secretary, was sent by Sir Alan Lascelles to tell the Prime Minister and the King’s mother. Ford drove to Downing Street, and was shown up to Churchill’s bedroom. The premier was propped up in bed writing, surrounded by paperwork and a candle for his cigar. ‘I’ve got bad news,’ Ford recalls saying, ‘– the King died this morning.’ Churchill seemed shaken. ‘Bad news?’ he exclaimed. ‘The worst!’ He flung aside the papers. ‘How unimportant these matters seem. Get me Anthony Eden.’ Then, according to Ford, ‘he got onto the phone and said, in an absurd attempt at security, “Anthony, can we scramble?” But they couldn’t scramble. He went on in a kind of code, “Our big chief has gone – we must have a Cabinet.”’44 The Prime Minister’s distress was more than momentary. Jock Colville – who, with the change of Government, had been brought back into No 10 as Churchill’s joint private secretary – found him in tears. When he tried to cheer the premier by saying how well he would get on with the new Queen, ‘all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child’.45

Getting hold of the Prime Minister was a great deal easier than finding the new Monarch, who had returned from Treetops to Sagana Lodge. It was more than four hours before the Queen knew that she had succeeded. ‘Because of where we were,’ says Pamela Hicks, who was in the party as a lady-in-waiting, ‘we were almost the last people in the world to know.’ Another lady-in-waiting – aboard the Gothic at Mombasa in anticipation of the royal party – only learnt of the King’s death when she asked why people were taking down the decorations.46 Eventually the story was picked up from the radio by Martin Charteris, a few miles away at the Outspan Hotel. He telephoned Sagana Lodge and spoke to Parker. There was no way to check officially. It was confirmed, however, when Mike Parker switched on his own radio, and heard the announcement on the overseas wavelength of the BBC.47 Parker told Philip who – at about 2.45 p.m., 11.45 a.m. London time – told his wife.48 ‘He took her up to the garden,’ according to Parker, ‘and they walked slowly up and down the lawn while he talked and talked and talked to her.’49

THE DEATH of a British monarch changes little in practical terms. It does not shift a Prime Minister, alter the party of Government, reverse its policies, or influence the economy. Yet – in a way that is hard to define – it affects the mood. This is because the British public relates to its kings and queens, who it regards with a variety of emotions, but always with interest. It even imagines that the relationship works both ways: the question in A. A. Milne’s rhyme about changing the guard at Buckingham Palace – ‘Do you think the King knows about me?’ – is an adult fancy, as well as a childhood one. Hence such an event is often experienced with genuine grief, as a family loss. But there is also a wider, social relationship, which makes a change of reign more than a nominal transition. It is not just for convenience that the culture, mores, architecture, style of dress of a period have often been identified by the name of the monarch – ‘Victorian’, ‘Edwardian’ and so on. A link is made between the supposed character of the titular ruler, and some facet of the age. Even in the mid-twentieth century, after the abandonment of this kind of epochal labelling, monarchs still give a flavour to the attitudes and outlook of the episode over which they formally preside.

Politically, there was little to bind the reign of George VI together. Spanning a turbulent fifteen and a half years from the Depression and the rise of fascism, through a world war, to post-war austerity, the building of the welfare state, Indian independence, the Cold War, and the beginnings of consumer affluence, it had no single theme. Yet its very instability gave the King’s nervous courage and mule-like conservatism an historical role. Indeed, his lack of imagination was seen by many as an advantage, placing him below statesmen and closer to the bewildered common man. In private, prime ministers found him almost intolerably slow, yet they respected his honesty and decency, and his desire to do his best, and they felt protective towards him. There was also relief, and gratitude, that he should have provided the most domestically admirable ‘Royal Family’ since the days of Prince Albert.

The press became filled with images of black drapery, coffins, tombs and catafalques. Even the New Statesman – whose editor, Kingsley Martin, was a rare critic of Monarchy – became convulsed by an argument about whether the front page should have a black band around it. However, the mourning was not just a media indulgence. Affection for George VI was felt everywhere. A few days after the death, Richard Crossman, a left-wing MP and iconoclast, recorded his impression of a ‘hard-boiled’ attitude in Parliament, but ‘directly you got outside, you certainly realised that the newspapers were not sentimentalizing when they described the nation’s feeling of personal loss’.50 The feeling was intensified by the King’s relatively young age, and by sympathy for his widow; and by a mixture of concern and excited, expectant curiosity towards his elder daughter, who had been so closely watched since childhood, who had recently become an almost mythic being, but about whom very little was yet known. It was around this small and mysterious person that the national sentiment rapidly became – in the unironic phrase of the Annual Register for 1952 – ‘a religion of royalism’.51

A variety of procedures automatically followed the King’s death, even before Elizabeth – now the Queen – knew of it. An emergency Cabinet met at 11 a.m., and decided to hold an Accession Council the same afternoon. There was a discussion of the wording of the Proclamation, which had important long-term effects. It was also decided to extend the Council’s composition. ‘Representatives of other members of the Commonwealth’ were now to join the ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal, members of the Privy Council, and other Principal Gentlemen of Quality, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London’.52 At the Council later in the day, the Lord President, Lord Woolton, read the draft declaration proclaiming the new Monarch as Queen Elizabeth the Second – the first to have been proclaimed in absentia since the accession of George I.

Proclamations echoed around the world, as never before – and never again, for the phenomenon of one individual as hereditary Head of State in so many different colonies and self-governing states is unlikely to be repeated. There was a plethora of invented traditions. In Australia, for example, the proclamation of George VI in 1936 had been read by a secretary in the Prime Minister’s department to a handful of people assembled in the King’s Hall at Parliament House. His daughter’s proclamation was read by the Governor-General from the steps of Parliament House, and similar ceremonies were conducted before large crowds in state capitals around the country.53 In some places, the implications of what was proclaimed caused local difficulties. A particular complaint was made in Scotland, where the National Committee of the Scottish Covenant Association pointed out that, north of the border, she was Elizabeth I. There was a fierce legal argument. On February 20th the Edinburgh Court of Sessions resolved the matter by announcing that, as far as official documents and declarations were concerned, she would be styled ‘the Second’. The result was a grievance against the British Monarchy that was not forgotten.

In Kenya, it was difficult for ‘the lady we must now call the Queen’ – as Charteris began to refer to her – to come to terms, simultaneously, with the loss of a father and becoming Head of State for the rest of her life. It was also hard for her husband. After they got the news, the royal party rapidly prepared for the return journey to London. ‘I have this picture in my mind,’ according to Lord Charteris, ‘of going into the Lodge on 6th February 1952 and the Queen sitting at her desk, pencil in hand, and Prince Philip lying back on a sofa and holding open The Times over his face. And I felt then that something had changed, and it had.’ He recalls her ‘sitting erect, no tears, colour up a little, fully accepting her destiny’. He asked what she wanted to be called as Queen. ‘My own name, Elizabeth, of course,’ she said.54 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’.55 Parker felt that ‘her feelings were deep, deep inside her’.56

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.’57 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.’58 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.59 ‘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.’60

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.’61

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”.’62 The contrast with her stumbling father on such occasions was stark. Harold Macmillan noted ‘her firm yet charming voice’ as she said her lines.63 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’.64 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.’65 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.66 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.’67