Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

FOUR

“Ready, Girls?”

“WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO CALL YOURSELF?” ASKED MARTIN CHARTERIS, as Elizabeth came to grips with the loss of her father. “My own name, of course. What else?” she replied. But some clarification was necessary, since her mother had been called Queen Elizabeth. The new monarch would be Queen Elizabeth II (following her sixteenth-century predecessor, Elizabeth I) but she would be known as the Queen. Her mother would become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, rather than the more fusty Dowager Queen. Elizabeth II would be Queen Regnant, and her royal cypher E II R.

“It was all very sudden,” she recalled four decades later. Her task, she said, was “kind of taking it on, and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate, because I think continuity is important.”

Elizabeth II returned to England on the Argonaut that had flown her to Kenya only a week earlier. When the erstwhile princess walked by his seat several times, Philip’s valet John Dean noted that “she looked as if she might have been crying.” Mike Parker said Philip “was like the Rock of Gibraltar, comforting her as best he could.”

Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at London Airport near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a nineteen-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation of men in dark overcoats, top hats, and homburgs led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and his fellow government ministers stood bareheaded as she slowly shook hands with each of them, and they gave her deep bows. A Daimler bearing the sovereign’s coat of arms on its roof drove her to Clarence House, where eighty-four-year-old Queen Mary honored her by reversing roles, curtsying and kissing her hand, although she couldn’t help adding, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.”

The next day, the new Queen went to St. James’s Palace, the sovereign’s official residence. Built by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, the turreted red-brick complex in the heart of London was the home of the monarch until Queen Victoria moved to much larger Buckingham Palace. At St. James’s, Elizabeth II appeared for twenty minutes before several hundred members of the Accession Council, a ceremonial body including the Privy Council—the principal advisory group to the monarch drawn from senior ranks of politicians, the clergy, and the judiciary—along with other prominent officials from Britain and the Commonwealth. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701, she had been monarch since the moment of her father’s death, but the council was convened to hear her proclamation and religious oath. She would not be crowned until her coronation in sixteen months, but she was fully empowered to carry out her duties as sovereign.

The men of the council bowed simultaneously to the fortieth monarch since William the Conqueror took the English throne after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Elizabeth II declared in a clear voice that “by the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are the world over.… I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.”

As her husband escorted her out, by several accounts she was in tears. They drove to Sandringham to join the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in paying respects privately at the late King’s coffin before it was transported by train to London for the official lying in state at Westminster Hall, followed by the funeral and burial in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor on February 15. The most enduring image was of the three queens—Mary the grandmother, the Queen Mother, and Elizabeth II—standing by the catafalque with Princess Margaret, shrouded in opaque black veils to their waists.

In an unprecedented message to her countrymen, the Queen Mother asked that “protection and love” be given to her daughter “in the great and lonely station to which she has been called.” Privately, she wrote to Queen Mary, “I cannot bear to think of Lilibet, so young to bear such a burden.”

Churchill, who had first met Elizabeth II as a toddler, grieved over George VI and seemed nonplussed by the new sovereign. Jock Colville, who by then had returned to Churchill as private secretary, recalled that “I tried to cheer him up by saying how well he would get on with the new queen, but all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child.”

According to Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary Soames, “my father realized very quickly she was much more than that.” As Martin Charteris observed, “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.” The Queen recognized the change in herself, confiding to a friend, “Extraordinary thing, I no longer feel anxious or worried. I don’t know what it is—but I have lost all my timidity.”

With his gift for eloquence and keen sense of occasion, Churchill set the stage for what the press would optimistically herald as “a new Elizabethan age.” Britain was still gripped by shortages, with rationing of foodstuffs such as tea, sugar, and butter, while rubble from World War II bombing blighted the London landscape. The imperial decline was inexorable, and the fears of communist expansion around the world had ushered in the Cold War.

In a speech to the House of Commons five days after Elizabeth took the throne, Churchill described her as “a fair and youthful figure … the heir to all our traditions and glories,” assuming her position “at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.” He expressed hope that the new Queen would be “a signal for … a brightening salvation of the human scene.” A promising young Conservative politician named Margaret Thatcher had her own sanguine view, writing in a newspaper column that “if, as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.”

ON FEBRUARY 27 at 11 A.M., Elizabeth II presided over her first investiture in the vast ballroom at Buckingham Palace, honoring private citizens and members of the military with awards for exemplary service to their country. While the Queen hands out these honors known as the orders of chivalry, the government chooses the 2,500 individuals to be recognized each year. With Britain’s world role vastly diminished, investitures have helped sustain national pride, and the Queen has presided over these ceremonies with care and precision. By her sixtieth year on the throne, she had conferred more than 404,500 honors and awards, bestowing them in person over 610 times. “People need pats on the back sometimes,” she once said. “It’s a very dingy world otherwise.”

At each investiture she greets more than a hundred recipients individually and presents their medals or brooches (and in the case of knights, taps the kneeling men on the shoulders with a sword), offering personal comments to all. The impressive hour-long ceremonies are attended by Yeomen of the Guard in red and gold uniforms and her Gurkha Orderly Officers.

The very first honor she bestowed on February 27 was the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration for valor in battle, to Private William Speakman of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He had shown “gallantry and utter contempt of personal danger” during “fierce hand-to-hand fighting” in Korea the previous November, when he led more than ten charges, sustaining serious wounds while inflicting “enormous losses to the enemy.” Speakman was one of only fifteen British subjects who received the award in the six decades after World War II.

Conferring that honor had special meaning for the new Queen, who had also become the head of the armed forces. Members of the military pledge their loyalty to the sovereign, not to the government, keeping their allegiance above politicians who come and go. In the years to come, Elizabeth II would personally approve the appointments to the highest ranks, sign all officers’ commissions, and serve as honorary colonel-in-chief of all seven regiments in the Household Division, the guardsmen designated as her personal troops.

By April, the royal family completed its move to Buckingham Palace, and the new Queen adapted to an office schedule that has scarcely varied throughout her reign. She awoke at 7:30 A.M. when a housemaid pulled open the curtains in her first-floor bedroom, and Bobo (the only member of the household to call her “Lilibet,” along with “my little lady”) carried in a “calling tray” with Earl Grey tea and Marie biscuits. Right behind Bobo, surging through the doorway, came the Queen’s pack of corgis, which had spent the night down the corridor in their room adjacent to the Page’s Pantry, each of them assigned a wicker dog basket. A footman had already given them their first walk of the day in the garden.

After bathing (in water kept at around seventy degrees), dressing, and having her hair styled and sprayed, Elizabeth II walked through her sitting room, often listening to the BBC on her portable radio along the way, for breakfast in her private dining room amid eighteenth-century paintings. The morning papers were arranged on a sideboard. Sporting Life was her first read (supplanted in later years by The Racing Post), with a focus on news of the turf, followed by the Daily Telegraph (including its two crossword puzzles that became a daily task, but never with a thesaurus) and The Times, plus a look at the Express, Mail, and Mirror tabloids. In the early days she tended to eat a boiled egg and toast with a pat of butter from the Windsor dairy stamped with her cypher, tossing scraps of bread to her eager dogs. She later replaced her cooked breakfast with tea and toast thinly spread with marmalade.

At nine o’clock sharp each morning, a Scottish bagpiper would play for fifteen minutes while marching under her window, skirling familiar Highland reels and strathspeys—a tradition at each of her palaces begun by Queen Victoria. By 10 A.M. Elizabeth II was at the desk by a tall window in her sitting room looking out over the Palace gardens. She sat on a mahogany Chippendale chair with a seat embroidered by her father (one of his hobbies had been needlework), surrounded by papers and books, family photos in silver frames, and oil paintings, including a portrait of Susan, her favorite corgi. There was a Hepplewhite mahogany bookcase, a satinwood chest of drawers, comfortable sofas, and vases of roses, narcissi, or other fresh-cut flowers. “I like my rooms to look really lived in,” she said.

On her desk were two telephones as well as an intercom, with buttons to summon her private secretaries—Tommy Lascelles and his deputies Michael Adeane, Martin Charteris, and Edward Ford—who came one by one, giving a brisk neck bow on arrival, bearing baskets of papers to be signed and discussed. Standing throughout the meeting, each man covered a different area of expertise, and their agendas ranged across schedules for domestic and foreign travel, ecclesiastical and military appointments, legislation before Parliament, and other issues of the day. Edward Ford called her “a bureaucrat’s dream. She was wonderful to work for, always so accessible.… You talked with her as you might talk to a friend who was staying for the weekend … ‘The prime minister is delayed, shall we put it off till tomorrow?’ … The whole conduct of affairs was very informal and relaxed, far more so than it had been with the King.”

She was also conscientious about dealing with correspondence from the public. She leafed through a stack of envelopes in a basket, reading quickly, and jotting notes for replies to be written either by her ladies-in-waiting or private secretaries. She once explained that she had always regarded letters as “rather personal to oneself, that people write them thinking that I’m going to open them and read them.” She said that the letters “give one an idea of what is worrying people.”

She was required to meet monthly for ten minutes with four government ministers from her Privy Council. In these meetings—always conducted with everyone standing up to keep the proceedings short—she would say “approved” to various government actions read out to her, mostly concerning regulations and government appointments.

Every day except Christmas and Easter—whether at home in London or Windsor, on vacation at Sandringham or Balmoral, weekends visiting friends, travels around the United Kingdom, or visits overseas—she attended to the red leather dispatch boxes of official government papers that could be unlocked only by her key plus three others kept by her private secretaries. Each box brimmed with Foreign Office cables, budget documents, cabinet minutes, orders requiring her signature, and classified intelligence reports.

A smaller evening box, delivered before dinner, contained a summary by the chief whip of the day’s activities in Parliament. Her stated preference: “a piece of 300 to 900 words … a ‘light’ approach is welcomed.” The parliamentary scribes complied with references to “low wattage” debates and descriptions of “shouts and jeers” as well as accolades for speeches of “wit, passion and stinging phrases.” If she were entertaining any politicians for dinner, according to one observer, she could be “as well informed as any of her guests that evening.”

The Queen customarily received a copy of the daily Court Circular, the official list of royal activities prepared by a Palace information officer that she would scrutinize for mistakes before its publication the next day in The Times and the Daily Telegraph. She made similar corrections and comments on government documents, all of which she signed and delivered to her private secretary’s office by 8 A.M. the next day. Michael Adeane estimated that she spent three hours daily doing her paperwork, and it was not unusual for her to be at her desk late into the evening.

For the weekends she received a larger box with enough material to keep her deskbound in the mornings, reading rapidly but thoroughly. Once while staying with some good friends, the Queen said, “I must go do my boxes.” “Oh must you ma’am?” said the friend. “If I missed one once, I would never get it straight again,” the Queen replied.

An essential part of her schedule was her series of private audiences in a sitting room on the ground floor of the Palace—“my way of meeting people, without anybody else listening,” she once explained. These sessions would give her “a very broad picture of what is actually going on, either in government or in the civil service.… The fact that there’s nobody else there gives them a feeling that they can say what they like.” She said that the confidentiality and resulting outspokenness helped form the “basis of where I get my information from.”

For ninety minutes or so on most mornings she would receive the credentials of newly appointed ambassadors in morning dress or native costume, and bid other envoys goodbye, meet with clergy, government officials, military officers, and distinguished citizens, sometimes using the time to confer honors privately rather than at the larger investiture ceremonies. All these encounters were guided by time-honored rules: waiting in the spacious and gilded Bow Room, the Queen pressing a buzzer, the doors thrown open, the announcement of the guest, one pace into the room followed by a bow or curtsy, three more paces and another bow or curtsy, the handshake and a conversation while standing or an invitation to sit and chat. All visitors were instructed in the protocol by ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and private secretaries, and the Queen read briefing papers about everyone she would meet. As if governed by a well-calibrated internal clock, she invariably knew the precise moment to end the conversation, which she would signal by extending her hand. She would then press a buzzer, summoning one of her senior staff to escort her guest from the room.

Even if she were dining either alone or with Prince Philip, the table in the dining room in her private apartment was set impeccably by footmen responsible for three separate pantries: glass, silver, and china. Yet another footman rolled the ancient wooden trolley with platters of food down long corridors from the basement kitchen on the other side of the Palace. To unwind before luncheon, Elizabeth II would have a gin and Dubonnet (half portions of each, with ice and lemon) and before dinner a strong gin martini, prepared neat, unlike Philip’s, which was an expertly mixed concoction in its own pitcher. The page, a senior footman, served the meal, which tended to be simple—grilled meat, chicken, or fish (always boned), vegetables from the Windsor farm, and cheese. Strong spices were forbidden, along with garlic, pasta with sauce, and raw shellfish such as oysters and mussels. She tended to avoid rich desserts as well, although when served strawberries and cream, she reverted to her nursery ways and crushed them into a puree.

“She is not particular about food,” said a former royal household official. “To her, food is fuel. If she were being served steak, we would make sure the Queen got the smallest piece and that it was well done.” One staple was a constant supply of Malvern water, which was also used for her ice, particularly on trips overseas when tap water might cause illness.

The Queen’s midday meal seldom ran more than an hour, and her afternoons were more variable than her mornings. She might have an outside engagement, more work at her desk, another audience, a long walk with her corgis around the Palace gardens, a wash and set by her hairdresser, or wardrobe fittings in her dressing room furnished with mirrors and a skirted dressing table adorned with gold hairbrushes and framed photographs.

Teatime was sacrosanct, served by her page each day at five from a lace-draped cart with plates of sandwiches made of thin bread cut into rounds and filled with cucumber, egg, and watercress, along with freshly baked scones, gingerbread, and muffins. The Queen would brew the Earl Grey or Darjeeling in a silver teapot, allocating one spoonful for each cup. She preferred her tea lukewarm and usually limited herself to the sandwiches, feeding bits of scones to the corgis.

Charles was only three when his mother took the throne, and Anne was eighteen months old, so their life was spent mainly in the six-room nursery complex on the second floor of Buckingham Palace or out in the extensive gardens, overseen by their two nannies. In her first gesture of modernity, Elizabeth II dropped the tradition of requiring formal bows and curtsies from her children when they were very young. On weekdays Charles and Anne came downstairs after breakfast at 9:30 for some brief playtime with their parents. They didn’t see the Queen and duke until tea, when the nannies brought them down for “a final romp” that sometimes included a splash in the swimming pool for Charles with his father.

Preparations for their bedtime began at 6 P.M., which caused the Queen to make one adjustment in the official routine. Her father had held his audience with the prime minister at 5:30 P.M. on Tuesdays, but when she initially kept to the same schedule, Charles and Anne complained, “Why isn’t Mummy going to play with us tonight?” So she moved the audience to 6:30, which allowed her to go to the nursery to join in their nightly bath and tuck them into bed before discussing matters of state with Winston Churchill.

ADJUSTING TO HIS new position as the Queen’s consort proved troublesome for Philip. “For a real action man, that was very hard to begin with,” said Patricia Brabourne. While everything was mapped out for Elizabeth II, he had to invent his job under the scrutiny of her courtiers, and he had no role model to follow.

Prince Albert had “wielded over the Sovereign an undefined and unbounded influence,” wrote Lytton Strachey in his biography of Queen Victoria, “the natural head of her family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole CONFIDENTIAL adviser in politics, and only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government … tutor of the royal children, the private secretary of the Sovereign, and her permanent minister.” In 1857, Victoria officially rewarded her husband by naming him Prince Consort, recognizing his unique status during the seventeen years since she married him as a new Queen.

Not only was Philip excluded from the substance of his wife’s official life, with no access to the state papers in her daily boxes, neither he nor his wife considered an official designation of Prince Consort desirable or appropriate in the twentieth century. “The monarchy changed,” Philip later explained to biographer Gyles Brandreth. “It became an institution. I had to fit into the institution.… There were plenty of people telling me what not to do. ‘You mustn’t interfere with this.’ ‘Keep out.’ I had to try to support the Queen as best I could without getting in the way. The difficulty was to find things that might be useful.”

Like Prince Albert, Prince Philip was considered an outsider by senior officials of the court. “Refugee husband,” he mockingly referred to himself. He was wounded by the slights he experienced. “Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,” said John Brabourne. Much of the wariness stemmed from Philip’s closeness to Dickie Mountbatten. “My father was considered pink—very progressive,” Patricia Brabourne recalled. “The worry was that Prince Philip would bring into court modern ideas and make people uncomfortable.”

The most hurtful rebuff had occurred in the days following the King’s death, after Queen Mary heard that Dickie Mountbatten had triumphantly announced that “the House of Mountbatten now reigned.” She and her daughter-in-law, the Queen Mother, were angered by his presumption, and the Queen shared their view that she should honor the allegiance of her grandfather and her father to the House of Windsor by keeping the Windsor name rather than taking that of her husband. Churchill and his cabinet agreed. Philip responded with a memo to Churchill vigorously objecting to the prime minister’s advice and pressing instead for the House of Mountbatten, which was ironic. It was his mother’s family name since his father had given him no surname.

The most immediate precedent was actually on Philip’s side, when Queen Victoria dropped her own House of Hanover and adopted her husband’s family name. Her son Edward VII ruled as the first King of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which George V then changed to Windsor for political reasons. Elizabeth II had every right to make her own change. Her reluctance to do so reflected not only her unwillingness to stand up to Churchill, but also to her mother and her grandmother. The Queen failed to foresee that her actions would have a profound impact on Philip, leading to strains in their marriage. “She was very young,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Churchill was elderly and experienced, and she accepted his constitutional advice. I felt that if it had been later she would have been able to say, ‘I don’t agree.’ ”

“I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip fumed to friends. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.” Dickie Mountbatten was even more outspoken, blaming “that old drunk Churchill” who “forced” the Queen’s position. The prime minister mistrusted and resented Earl Mountbatten, largely because as India’s last viceroy, appointed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he had presided over that country’s move to independence. “Churchill never forgave my father for ‘giving away India,’ ” said Patricia Brabourne.

Behind the scenes, Dickie continued a campaign to reverse the decision, with his nephew’s acquiescence. Meanwhile, Philip resolved to support his wife while finding his own niche, which would lead in the following decades to the active patronage of more than eight hundred different charities embracing sports, youth, wildlife conservation, education, and environmental causes. Within the family Philip also took over management of all the royal estates, to “save her a lot of time,” he said. But even more significantly, as Prince Charles’s official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, wrote in 1994, the Queen “would submit entirely to the father’s will” in decisions concerning their children.

She made Philip the ultimate domestic arbiter, Dimbleby wrote, because “she was not indifferent so much as detached.” Newspaper editor and Conservative politician William Deedes, himself a remote father, saw in Elizabeth II’s detachment “her struggle to be a worthy head of state, which was a heavy burden for her. The Queen in her own quiet way is immensely kind, but she had too little time to fulfill her family care. I find it totally understandable, but it led to problems.”

PARTICULARLY AT THE outset, Elizabeth II’s focus was on showing gravitas as monarch. “In the first five years she was more formal,” recalled one of her longtime ladies-in-waiting. The freedom she enjoyed as a young princess—she once attended a ball at the American ambassador’s residence dressed as an Edwardian parlor maid, with Philip costumed as a waiter—had to be subdued, at least in public. Keeping her dignity was paramount, and in doing so she frequently obeyed Queen Mary’s injunction against smiling, even as her youth and beauty gave her an automatic advantage. “How much nicer to have a young queen than that very dull man,” wrote the novelist Nancy Mitford. Elizabeth II was also fortunate in having said little of consequence in public, which let her maintain an enigmatic aura.

She had to walk her most delicate line with her mother, a widow at age fifty-one. Elizabeth II was well aware, as she wrote at the time, that her own life was more full than ever, while the future of both her mother and her sister, Margaret, “must seem very blank.” The Queen Mother was too well trained to show her emotions in public, but she shared her grief with friends, telling Edith Sitwell she was “engulfed by great black clouds of unhappiness and misery.” Along with losing her husband, she no longer had her homes or her position at center stage. She agreed to move to Clarence House, but she would stay in Buckingham Palace for more than a year before making the shift.

In the interim, during a visit to friends in Caithness on the bleak northern coast of Scotland, she impulsively bought a small run-down castle tucked behind a grove of trees stunted and twisted from the persistent winds, with a panoramic view of the Orkney Islands. “How sad it looks,” she said. “Just like me.” She called it the Castle of Mey, and planned to “escape there occasionally when life became hideous.” Although the purchase price was a token £100, the Queen funded an extensive renovation, including the installation of bathrooms and electricity, a project that would take three years.

It wouldn’t do for the Queen Mother to retreat in mourning as Queen Victoria had done after the death of Prince Albert, so Churchill met with her in the autumn of 1952 to urge her to continue the public service that had earned worldwide admiration and to help her daughter carry out her duties. She agreed, in effect, to assume the role of national grandmother, always smiling and twinkling, a patron of charities and goodwill ambassador for her country and the monarchy, carrying out her essential credo: “The point of human life and living [is] to give and to create new goodness all the time.”

Cecil Beaton called her “the great mother figure and nannie to us all.… The warmth of her sympathy bathes us and wraps us in a counterpane by the fireside.” She combined an ability to connect instantly with virtually anyone and a flair for high drama, “like a great musical comedy actress in the 1930s descending the stairs,” said Sir Roy Strong, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. No one looked askance when she wore pearls while fishing in Scottish rivers or arrived late for engagements in what Beaton once described as a “pink cushiony cloud.”

Her destiny was to remain single, and to deny herself the love of another man, although few could have predicted that she would be a widow for fully half of her life. She needed to find compensations beyond her public duties, so the Queen permitted—in fact indulged with generous financial support—her mother to live a carefree and extravagant private life marked by nonstop entertaining and the stimulation of a lively group of friends.

Mother and daughter spoke nearly every day on the telephone. When the Queen placed the call, the Palace operator said to her mother, “Good morning, Your Majesty, Her Majesty is on the line for Your Majesty,” which became a standing joke among friends and courtiers. They usually exchanged news about horses and racing, as well as gossip and family matters. “They were great confidantes,” recalled the Queen Mother’s long-serving lady-in-waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. “The Queen could talk to her about her troubles. Queen Elizabeth was aware of the tremendous responsibility the Queen had. She and the King had had it, so she knew the pressures.”

The Queen Mother was in many ways “an Edwardian lady with rigid views,” recalled Campbell-Preston. “A lot of the importance the Queen attached to tradition and doing things the right way came from her mother,” said a former household official. As a consequence, the Queen Mother was a brake on changes to the status quo proposed by Prince Philip and senior advisers. “The Queen Mother was always in the equation,” said another former member of the household. “The Queen would ask, ‘Does Queen Elizabeth know about this?’ ”

There were inevitable comparisons—not always flattering—between the staid young Queen, trapped within the restraints of neutrality and propriety, and the spirited dowager who had the freedom to display her enjoyment and the gaiety to light up a room. The two women deferred to each other in private, although only the Queen Mother was required to curtsy. Still, by June 1952, Richard Molyneux, a former equerry to Queen Mary, reported that during a visit to Windsor Castle, the Queen was “very much the Sovereign. She enters the room at least ten yards ahead of her husband or mother.”

MUCH OF THE Queen’s first year on the throne was devoted to preparing for her coronation on Tuesday, June 2, 1953. The biggest question was whether to let the ceremony be televised, and her initial decision, supported by Churchill, was to keep the lights and cameras away, fearing an intrusion on the sanctity of the rituals. But after the ban on televising was announced in October, the Palace faced an outcry from broadcasters as well as the public over being excluded from such a significant ceremony.

The Queen yielded after recognizing that her subjects wanted to see her crowned, so she agreed to a compromise permitting live coverage of everything except the most sacred moments, including her anointing and taking Communion, and excluding any close-ups as well. In her first Christmas radio broadcast she declared with evident satisfaction that during the coronation “millions outside Westminster Abbey will hear the promises and prayers being offered up within its walls, and see much of the ancient ceremony.… I want to ask you all, whatever your religion may be, to pray for me on that day—to pray that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making, and that I may faithfully serve Him and you, all the days of my life.”

That autumn, Elizabeth II also made a conciliatory gesture toward her husband by announcing that during the State Opening of Parliament he should “henceforth have, hold and enjoy the Place, Pre-eminence and Precedence next to Her Majesty.” When she opened Parliament for the first time in November, the Duke of Edinburgh sat in the Chair of State to the left and several inches below her throne in the House of Lords, just as Prince Albert had done. Unlike her father’s hesitant delivery, Elizabeth II made a flawless seven-minute address, which was written by Churchill. Ever observant, Cecil Beaton noted that her eyes were “not those of a busy, harassed person.”

The honor given Prince Philip in Parliament would not be repeated in Westminster Abbey the following June. At the Queen’s suggestion he was made chairman of the committee to oversee the coronation ceremony, but he would not walk by her side. “We took it for granted that she would be alone,” recalled Gay Charteris. “That must have been hard for him. It was how it was done. She is the monarch. Yet if she had been a man, the wife would have been there.” Such was the case in 1937 when Queen Elizabeth was first anointed on her uncovered head, and then crowned with her husband. But by tradition, the Queen’s consort is neither crowned nor anointed.

Two months before the big celebration, on March 24, 1953, Queen Mary died in her sleep at age eighty-five. She received all the suitable honors at Westminster Hall followed by a funeral at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. Her son the Duke of Windsor attended, but the Queen did not include him in a dinner that evening, nor did she invite him to the coronation. She agreed with Churchill’s advice that it would be “quite inappropriate for a King who had abdicated.” The embittered duke wrote to his wife, “What a smug stinking lot my relations are.”

The buildup to the coronation pulled the British together in a burst of patriotism and great expectations, as the country began to emerge from postwar rationing and economic stagnation. Princess Margaret said it was “like a phoenix-time. Everything was being raised from the ashes. There was this gorgeous-looking lovely young lady, and nothing to stop anything getting better and better.” Churchill’s notion of a new Elizabethan Age may have been an illusion, but for a time it caught the imagination of the British public and emphasized the importance of the monarch, in the words of Rebecca West, as “the emblem of the state, the symbol of our national life, the guardian of our self-respect.”

For weeks, the Queen applied herself to learning every nuance of the three-hour service. She met several times with Geoffrey Fisher, the ninety-ninth Archbishop of Canterbury, who instructed her in the spiritual significance of the various rites and gave her prayers to say. She practiced her lines and her steps every day in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace. Tied to her shoulders were sheets stitched together and augmented with weights to simulate her heavy robe and train. She sat at her desk wearing the five-pound St. Edward’s Crown dating from the coronation of Charles II, and listening to recordings of her father’s coronation.

The 16th Duke of Norfolk, a small, ruddy, and highly efficient peer who carried the additional title of Earl Marshal, was responsible for choreographing the ceremony (an ironic coincidence, since he was a Roman Catholic supervising a deeply Protestant service). His wife, Lavinia, the Duchess of Norfolk, stood in for the Queen at numerous rehearsals in Westminster Abbey, several of which were watched intently by Elizabeth II. The Queen’s six maids of honor, unmarried daughters of the highest-ranking hereditary peers (dukes, earls, and marquesses) who were responsible for carrying the train, also rehearsed frequently in the Abbey and had one trial run at the Palace. When asked whether she would like to take a break midway through the service the Queen replied, “I’ll be all right. I’m as strong as a horse.”

An estimated one million people streamed into London to witness the pageantry, including forty thousand Americans. The official delegation from the United States was led by General George Marshall and included Earl Warren, governor of California, and General Omar Bradley. Also in the crowd was twenty-four-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier—the future wife of President John F. Kennedy—then a reporter for the Washington Times Herald, who filed whimsical reports on the London scene. “All the deposed monarchs are staying at Claridge’s,” she wrote, and ladies had to have their hair done at 3:30 A.M. on Coronation Day so they could be in their seats at 6:30 A.M. wearing their tiaras, “and that takes a bit of arranging.”

The night before the coronation, hundreds of thousands of spectators endured unseasonably cold temperatures, lashing wind, and downpours to stake out positions along the route of the procession, which began at 9 A.M. The parade included twenty-nine bands and twenty-seven carriages, as well as thirteen thousand soldiers representing some fifty countries, among them Indians, Pakistanis, Malayans, Fijians, Australians, and Canadians. Queen Salote of Tonga, a British territory in the South Pacific, was the runaway crowd pleaser, oblivious to the weather in her open landau, “a great big, warm personality” who was “swathed in purple silk and with a magnificent plume waving in the wind from the crown.”

Elizabeth II traveled to Westminster Abbey in the twenty-four-foot-long Gold State Coach, with gilded sculptures and door panels featuring classical scenes painted in the eighteenth century. Eight gray horses, one of which was named Eisenhower, pulled the fairytale carriage. The Queen wore her great-great-grandmother’s diadem and a coronation gown of white satin with short sleeves and a heart neckline, its bodice and bell-shaped skirt adorned with the symbols of Great Britain and its Commonwealth realms (among them a rose, thistle, shamrock, maple leaf, and fern), all extravagantly embroidered in pale colored silk, gold and silver threads, semiprecious stones, seed pearls, and shimmering crystals. She could be seen smiling at the thunderous cheering as she waved her white-gloved arm up and down. Prince Philip wore the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, which he covered during the ceremony with his peer’s robes of scarlet topped by an ermine cape.

Awaiting the Queen’s arrival at the Abbey door promptly at 11 A.M. were the maids of honor, dressed identically in white satin with pearl embroidery. “She was relaxed, and she looked so beautiful,” recalled Anne Glenconner (then Lady Anne Coke, daughter of the Earl of Leicester). “She had a wonderful little figure, with a tiny waist and wonderful complexion with great big eyes. Prince Philip looked after her, saying to us, ‘Do this and do that.’ ” One of the Queen’s attendants said, “You must be feeling nervous, Ma’am.” “Of course I am,” replied Elizabeth II, “but I really do think Aureole will win,” a reference to her horse running in the Derby four days later.

The maids of honor, assisted by the Mistress of the Robes, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, arranged the monarch’s crimson velvet Robe of State edged with ermine and gold lace. As the maids grabbed the satin handles on the eighteen-foot train, the Queen looked over her shoulder and said, “Ready, girls?” They lifted the heavy velvet, and proceeded down the long aisle toward the gold-carpeted coronation “theater” in the center of the Abbey before the high altar gleaming with regalia of scepters, swords, and crowns and draped with gold, crimson, and blue tapestry, all illuminated by bright arc lights for television.

The procession included heads of state, diplomats, an African chieftain in leopard skin and feather headdress, a Muslim in plain black robe, crown princes, and members of the royal family, including Philip’s mother wearing a dove gray nun’s habit and wimple, and the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret trailing twelve-foot trains. All the women wore ball gowns, and those men not in flowing robes or traditional costumes (“plucked indiscriminately out of the dead pages of British history,” wrote Russell Baker in the Baltimore Sun) wore white tie and tails, although Labour politician Aneurin Bevan defiantly appeared in a black business suit.

When the Queen approached the high altar, her heavy skirt swinging “backwards and forwards in a beautiful rhythmic effect,” the Boys Choir of Westminster School sang out, “Vivat Regina Elizabetha! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!,” the sole remnant of Latin in the entire service. During the ceremony, most of which dates from the first Abbey coronation of William the Conqueror on Christmas Day in 1066, she was seated in three different places. The Chair of Estate faced the center of the theater, in front of the royal gallery, which was behind a long table filled with silver gilt and solid gold pieces including giant platters, chalices, and salt cellars. The carved oak King Edward’s Chair, used for every coronation since 1308, faced the high altar. Behind it on an elevated platform, also facing the altar, was the Queen’s throne where she would sit after being anointed and crowned.

Elizabeth II stood by King Edward’s Chair as the archbishop began the “recognition,” presenting her in turn to the 7,500 distinguished guests seated in the four sides of the Abbey. As the occupants of each quadrant cried “God Save Queen Elizabeth!” followed by a trumpet fanfare, she gave a slight neck bow and slow half curtsy, the only time she would ever make that dual gesture as Queen.

After swearing the coronation oath in which she pledged to honor the laws of Great Britain, its realms, territories, and possessions, and “maintain the Laws of God,” the most spiritual part of the ceremony took place. She stood in front of the Chair of Estate as her maids of honor removed her crimson robe, her gloves, her jewelry and diadem. The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Marquess of Cholmondeley, then helped Elizabeth II put on her Colobium Sindonis, a simple scoop neck white linen dress with a full pleated skirt that fitted over her gown. “Lord Cholmondeley had to do up the shift in the back,” recalled Anne Glenconner. “He couldn’t do hooks and eyes, so they put on press fasteners so he just had to push them shut.”

Four Knights of the Garter held silver poles supporting a canopy of woven silk and gold over King Edward’s Chair, where the Queen sat awaiting her anointing out of television camera range. “It was the most poignant moment,” Anne Glenconner continued. “She looked so young, with nothing on her head, wearing only the white shift over her dress.” The Archbishop of Canterbury poured holy oil from a 22-karat gold ampulla in the form of an eagle into a twelfth-century silver-gilt anointing spoon. He anointed Elizabeth II with oil, making a sign of the cross on the palms of each of her hands, her forehead, and exposed upper chest. “Some small interest was generated,” according to one account, “by the fact that Elizabeth unlike Victoria did not refuse to let the archbishop anoint her breast.”

She was then invested with coronation robes weighing thirty-six pounds. They were made of stiff woven golden cloth—the long-sleeved Supertunica held by a wide belt, the embroidered Stole draped around her neck, and the Imperial Mantle, a large gleaming cloak fastened with a gold eagle clasp. Her garments, from the simple linen dress to the splendid vestments, along with the symbolism of her anointment, were designed to signify her priestlike status. British sovereigns long ago gave up the notion of a divine right, responsible to God alone, which allowed them to rule without necessarily listening to the advice of their merely mortal ministers or Parliament. But as a devout Christian, the Queen believed that the coronation sanctified her before God to serve her people, much as the Pope is blessed in his ordination.

“The real significance of the coronation for her was the anointing, not the crowning,” said Canon John Andrew, a friend of the royal family and senior chaplain to the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury. “She was consecrated, and that makes her Queen. It is the most solemn thing that has ever happened in her life. She cannot abdicate. She is there until death.”

In a further series of rituals, she was presented with her regalia, each “ornament” a symbol of royalty, starting with two armills, thick 22-karat gold bracelets that signified sincerity and wisdom. She received gold spurs, a thick white glove to encourage “gentleness in levying taxes,” and the Jewelled Sword of Offering to help her protect good and punish evil, which she carried to the altar, reverently balancing it between her hands. A ruby and sapphire coronation ring was placed on the fourth finger of her right hand to show her fidelity to her subjects, jeweled scepters represented queenly power, mercy, and leadership, and the orb topped by a cross of precious jewels displayed Christ’s power over mankind.

Still seated in King Edward’s Chair, nearly engulfed by her ponderous golden robes and holding a jeweled scepter upright in each hand, she looked with “intense expectancy” as the archbishop blessed the enormous St. Edward’s Crown of solid gold, set with 444 semiprecious stones. He held it aloft, then placed it firmly on her head, which momentarily dropped before rising again. Simultaneously, the scarlet and ermine robed peers in one section of the Abbey, and the bejeweled peeresses in another, also identically dressed in red velvet and fur-trimmed robes, crowned themselves with their gold, velvet, and ermine coronets. The congregation shouted “God Save the Queen,” and cannons boomed in Hyde Park and at the Tower of London. As the archbishop intoned, “God crown you with a crown of glory and righteousness,” Elizabeth II could literally feel the weight of duty—between her vestments, crown, and scepters, more than forty-five pounds’ worth—on her petite frame.

Accompanied by the archbishop and Earl Marshal, the Queen held the scepters while ascending the platform to sit on her throne and receive the homage of her “princes and peers.” The first was the archbishop, followed by the Duke of Edinburgh, who approached the throne bareheaded in his long red robe, mounted the five steps, and knelt before his wife, placing his hands between hers and saying, “I, Philip, do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.” When he stood up, he touched her crown and kissed her left cheek, prompting her to quickly adjust the crown as he walked backward and gave his wife a neck bow.

In the royal gallery, tiny Prince Charles, wearing a white satin shirt and dark shorts, arrived through a rear entrance and sat between the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret to witness his mother’s anointing, investiture with regalia, crowning, and homage paid by his father. “Look, it’s Mummy!” he said to his grandmother, and the Queen flashed a faint smile. The four-and-a-half-year-old heir to the throne watched wide-eyed, variously excited and puzzled, while the Queen Mother leaned down to whisper explanations.

The woman who only sixteen years earlier was at the center of the same ceremony smiled throughout, but Beaton also caught in the Queen Mother’s expression “sadness combined with pride.” “She used to say it was like a priesthood, being a monarch,” said Frances Campbell-Preston. “I imagine seeing your daughter go into the anointing must be unusual.” Princess Margaret had a slightly glazed look, and by one account, during the Queen’s investiture “never once did she lower her gaze from her sister’s calm face.” But at the end of the service, she wept. “Oh ma’am you look so sad,” Anne Glenconner said to the princess with the red-rimmed eyes. “I’ve lost my father, and I’ve lost my sister,” Margaret replied. “She will be so busy. Our lives will change.”

The lengthy ceremony ended after a parade of noblemen paid homage, and the congregation celebrated Holy Communion, as the Queen knelt to take the wine and bread “as a simple communicant.” Elizabeth II and her maids of honor took a short break by retiring into the Chapel of St. Edward the Confessor, where she shed her golden vestments, put on her jewelry, and was fitted with a new robe of ermine-bordered purple velvet, lined in white silk and embroidered with a gold crown and E.R. She also exchanged the St. Edward’s Crown, which is worn only once for the coronation, for the somewhat lighter—at three pounds—Imperial State Crown that she would use for the State Opening of Parliament and other major state occasions. This celebrated crown contains some of the most extraordinary gems in the world—the Black Prince’s Ruby, which Henry V wore at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the Stuart Sapphire, and the Cullinan II diamond weighing over 317 carats. Before leaving the chapel, the archbishop produced a flask of brandy from beneath his gold and green cope. He passed it around to the Queen and her maids so they could each have a sip as a pick-me-up before the processional.

Carrying the two-and-a-half-pound orb and two-pound scepter, with her maids holding the eighteen-foot train of her robe, the newly crowned Queen walked through the nave of the Abbey to the annex, where she and her attendants had a luncheon of Coronation Chicken—cold chicken pieces in curried mayonnaise with chunks of apricot. Afterward Elizabeth II and Philip settled into the Gold State Coach for two hours in a seven-mile progress through London, this time in the pouring rain.

Back at the Palace, the Queen had a chilled nose and hands from the drafty carriage. But she was ebullient as she relaxed with her maids in the Green Drawing Room. “We were all running down the corridor, and we all sat on a sofa together,” recalled Anne Glenconner. “The Queen said, ‘Oh that was marvelous. Nothing went wrong!’ We were all laughing.” Elizabeth II took off her crown, which Prince Charles put on his head before toppling over, while Princess Anne scampered around giggling underneath her mother’s train. The Queen Mother managed to subdue their wild excitement. She “anchored them in her arms,” Beaton wrote, “put her head down to kiss Prince Charles’s hair.”

It was a day of jubilation not only over the coronation’s success, but because that morning had brought the news that Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and his Tibetan Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, members of a British mountain climbing team, had been the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest. The “Elizabethan explorers” toasted the Queen with brandy and flew her standard atop the highest mountain in the world, five and a half miles above sea level.

As Earl Warren reported to President Dwight Eisenhower, “the Coronation has unified the nation to a remarkable degree.” An astonishing number of people saw the ceremony on television. In Britain an estimated 27 million out of a population of 36 million watched the live broadcast, and the number of people owning television sets doubled. Future prime minister John Major, then ten years old, fondly recalled seeing the ceremony on his first television, as did Paul McCartney. “It was a thrilling time,” McCartney said. “I grew up with the Queen, thinking she was a babe. She was beautiful and glamorous.” About one third of Americans—some 55 million out of a total population of 160 million—also tuned in, either on the day when they saw only photographs accompanied by a radio feed, or the next day for the full broadcast.

One notably alert viewer in Paris was former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated before he was crowned (an important distinction: as one of the Queen’s friends put it, “he was never anointed, so he never really became king”) and had last attended a coronation in 1911 when he was the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales and his father was crowned King George V. Now dressed in a stylish double-breasted gray pinstripe suit, the Duke of Windsor watched at the home of Margaret Biddle, a wealthy American who had a “television lunch” for one hundred friends. She positioned three television sets in one room filled with rows of gilt chairs, and the duke sat in the middle of the front row, where he observed the entire telecast “without a sign of envy or chagrin.” At the conclusion of the coronation, he stretched his arms in the air, lit a cigarette, and said coolly, “It was a very impressive ceremony. It’s a very moving ceremony and perhaps more moving because she is a woman.”