Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

FIVE

Affairs of State

AUREOLE, THE SPIRITED THREE-YEAR-OLD CHESTNUT COLT THAT HAD been the Queen’s preoccupation in the hours before her crowning, was one of the favorites in the Coronation Derby Day on Saturday, June 6, 1953, the 174th running of the Derby Stakes at Epsom Downs. His sire was Hyperion and his dam Angelola, but his name derived from his grand-sire, the stallion Donatello, named for the Italian Renaissance artist who carved bold halos around the heads of his angelic sculptures.

The Queen relishes choosing names for her foals. With her aptitude at crossword puzzles and parlor games such as charades, she is imaginative and quick to make combinations—the filly Angelola, for example, by Donatello out of the mare Feola, and Lost Marbles out of Amnesia by Lord Elgin. “She would pull on all sorts of knowledge, including old Scottish names,” recalled Jean, the Countess of Carnarvon, whose husband, Henry Porchester—later the Earl of Carnarvon, but known to the Queen as “Porchey”—was Elizabeth II’s racing manager for more than three decades.

The Queen was driven down the Epsom Downs track with her husband in the open rear seat of a Daimler to the cheers of a half million spectators, a record for the course. From the royal box she peered through binoculars as her racing colors (purple body with gold braid, scarlet sleeves, and gold-fringed black velvet cap) flashed along the mile-and-a-half course with twenty-six other galloping thoroughbreds. Aureole held second place, but couldn’t catch Pinza, the winner by four lengths. In her sunglasses and cloche hat, the Queen smiled and waved despite her disappointment. The victorious jockey, forty-nine-year-old Sir Gordon Richards, had received his knighthood (the first ever for a jockey) from the Queen only days earlier. After being invited to meet the Queen, he said she was a “marvelous sport” and “seemed to be just as delighted as I was with the result of the race.”

Also in the royal box was Winston Churchill, the Queen’s most ardent booster throughout the coronation festivities. In the sixteen months—to the day—since she took the throne, she had developed a close and unique bond with Britain’s most formidable statesman. His fondness for both of her parents, along with the shaping experience of World War II, gave them a reservoir of memories and a common perspective, despite their five-decade age difference. She appreciated his wisdom, experience, and eloquence, and looked to him for guidance on how she should conduct herself as monarch.

Churchill was also great company, not least because he shared his monarch’s love of breeding and racing, a passion that came to him late in life. For his Tuesday evening meetings with the Queen, he always arrived at the Bow Room in a frock coat and top hat. The rules of the prime minister’s audience called for complete discretion, so few details of the discussions emerged. Years later when Elizabeth II was asked whose audiences she most enjoyed, she replied, “Winston of course, because it was always such fun.” Churchill’s reply to a query about their most frequent topic of discussion was “Oh, racing,” and his daughter Mary Soames concurred that “they spent a lot of the audience talking about horses.”

Palace courtiers escorted the prime minister to the audiences, waited in the room next door, and afterward enjoyed whisky and soda with him while chatting for a half hour or so. “I could not hear what they talked about,” Tommy Lascelles recorded in his diary, “but it was, more often than not, punctuated by peals of laughter, and Winston generally came out wiping his eyes. ‘She’s en grande beauté ce soir,’ he said one evening in his schoolboy French.”

The relationship between the Queen and Churchill prompted comparisons with Queen Victoria, who took the throne at age eighteen, and fifty-eight-year-old William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, her first prime minister. Melbourne’s manner, wrote Lytton Strachey, “mingled, with perfect facility, the watchfulness and the respect of a statesman and a courtier with the tender solicitude of a parent. He was at once reverential and affectionate, at once the servant and the guide.” Yet when asked directly by former courtier Richard Molyneux early in her reign whether Churchill treated her as Melbourne treated Victoria, Elizabeth II said, “Not a bit of it. I find him very obstinate.”

Nor was she shy about catching out her prime minister when he hadn’t adequately prepared, as happened when Churchill failed to read an important cable from the British ambassador in Iraq. “What did you think about that most interesting telegram from Baghdad?” the Queen asked him that Tuesday. He sheepishly admitted he hadn’t seen it, and returned to 10 Downing Street “in a frightful fury.” When he read the cable, he realized that it was indeed significant.

“If it was a case of teaching her, it was not done in a didactic way,” said Mary Soames. “She was very well versed in her constitutional position. My father knew very well what the position of constitutional monarch is vis à vis prime minister, cabinet and parliament. So it was a great advantage for her first prime minister to be somebody who really did know that. Most of them don’t, and his massive experience in government would surely have been a help. They talked about the present. They must have talked about people. Young though she was, she had experience. She traveled. She probably knew some of the people better than he, so she would have told him about them. What struck my father was her attentiveness. She has always paid attention to what she was doing. He never said she was lacking confidence.”

One small glimpse of Elizabeth II’s growing self-assurance came when Churchill was finishing his memoirs of World War II and asked her permission to publish two letters he had written to her father. She granted his request but observed that his language was “rather rough on the Poles” and asked that “in the interests of international amity” his words “be toned down a bit.” Churchill readily changed the original version of the letter he had written a decade earlier.

In the weeks before the coronation, the seventy-eight-year-old prime minister had assumed a greater workload than usual when Anthony Eden had a botched gall bladder operation, causing him to fly to Boston for extensive repair surgery and a long recovery in the United States. Although Eden was foreign secretary, he functioned as Churchill’s deputy. In the view of Clementine Churchill, “the strain” of the additional burdens “took its toll” on her husband. While Eden was overseas, Churchill suffered a stroke after a dinner in honor of the Italian prime minister on June 23. Amazingly, since his mind remained sharp, Churchill and his aides were able to conceal his paralytic symptoms as “fatigue,” keeping the truth about his illness under wraps.

The Queen kept informed about Churchill’s condition, writing a lighthearted letter to buoy his spirits, and inviting him in September to join her at the Doncaster races to watch the St. Leger, followed by a weekend at Balmoral. He made a surprisingly rapid recovery, although his condition was still frail. When the prime minister lingered in the rear of the royal box at the racetrack, the Queen said to him, “They want you.” He appeared at the front, he later told his doctor, and “got as much cheering as she did.”

After a period of rest in the south of France, Churchill was back at work by October, making speeches and presiding over cabinet meetings. But he tired easily, and his memory had slipped. It was obviously time for his retirement, but the Queen declined to use their weekly audience to apply any pressure. Churchill made a series of pledges to Eden that he would step down on a certain date, only to find one excuse after another to extend his time in office. In the view of Eden’s wife, Clarissa, the prime minister “prevaricated continuously for nearly two years.”

BESIDES DEALING WITH Churchill’s illness and recovery, the young Queen became embroiled that summer in a highly sensitive family matter with constitutional implications. Princess Margaret had fallen in love and was determined to marry one of the royal household’s most trusted employees, thirty-eight-year-old Group Captain Peter Townsend, who had been working for the family since 1944. Not only was he sixteen years her senior, he was the divorced father of two sons.

Handsome and mild-mannered, Townsend had been a highly decorated Royal Air Force pilot in World War II, a dashing hero who had brought down eleven German planes in the Battle of Britain. He had originally been assigned to Buckingham Palace for three months as an equerry, who is an aide-de-camp who assists the monarch at events, organizes logistics, and helps look after guests. Lascelles noted that Townsend was “a devilish bad equerry: one could not depend on him to order the motor-car at the right time of day, but we always made allowances for his having been three times shot down into the drink in our defence.” Yet Townsend’s calm and empathetic temperament endeared him to George VI, who made him a permanent member of the staff, first as equerry and then as Deputy Master of the Household, overseeing all private social engagements.

Although Margaret was just thirteen when Townsend arrived, her sparkling personality made her the center of attention in the royal family. “Lilibet is my pride, Margaret my joy,” their father used to say. Margaret had always been the impish counterpoint to her sister, the witty entertainer who knew how to brighten her father’s moods, with a quicksilver mind that ran in unpredictable directions and didn’t yield easily to discipline. She was willful and competitive, and she would always remain resentful that her older sister received a better education. She had asked to join Lilibet’s tutorials with Henry Marten, but was told by the tutor, “It is not necessary for you.” Perhaps to compensate, her father indulged and spoiled his younger daughter, which only encouraged her mercurial tendencies. “She would not listen ever,” recalled her cousin Mary Clayton. “She would go on doing something terribly naughty just the same. She was so funny she didn’t get scolded, which would have been good for her.”

Her younger sister was often vexing, but Elizabeth invariably stood up for her. “Margaret was an awful tease,” said Mary Clayton, “which helped her sister in her own way to control difficult situations.” She also kept Elizabeth humble. “The Queen never shows off, unlike Princess Margaret, who was always pirouetting,” said historian Kenneth Rose. Despite their different natures, the two sisters could laugh at the same jokes, although Elizabeth’s wit is gentler and more dry. Both excelled at mimicry and enjoyed singing popular songs together at the piano, which Margaret played with great flair.

As Margaret matured, Townsend was drawn to her “unusual, intense beauty.” At five foot one, she had a voluptuous figure and what Townsend described as “large purple-blue eyes, generous sensitive lips, and a complexion as smooth as a peach.” He was struck by her “astonishing power of expression” that “could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure, to hilarious uncontrollable joy.” And he saw that “behind the dazzling façade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity.”

By the time Margaret turned twenty in August 1950, Townsend’s marriage had come apart after his wife, Rosemary, strayed into several affairs. The princess and the equerry with blue eyes and chiseled features found themselves in long conversations, and by August 1951 on the Balmoral moors the King spotted his daughter gazing lovingly at Townsend dozing in the heather. Yet both he and his wife averted their eyes, engaging in the royal penchant for “ostriching,” an almost congenital ability to ignore unpleasant situations.

Margaret turned to Townsend for consolation in the months following her father’s death when she was “in a black hole.” That June he initiated divorce proceedings against Rosemary, citing her adultery with John de László, son of the portrait artist who had painted Lilibet as a child. After his divorce from Rosemary was granted in November 1952, Townsend told Tommy Lascelles that he and the princess were “deeply in love” and wanted to get married—a plan the couple had shared only with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.

The following day Lascelles had the first in a series of conversations with the Queen describing the “formidable obstacles” posed by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was designed to prevent unsuitable matches from damaging the royal family. The act specifies that no member of the family in the line of succession can marry without the consent of the sovereign, but if the family member is over the age of twenty-five, he or she could marry one year after giving notice to the Privy Council, unless both houses of Parliament specifically disapproved of the proposed marriage. The problem for Margaret was that marriage to a divorced man would not be recognized by the Church of England, of which her sister was the Supreme Governor—a circumstance that would cause the Queen to forbid the union. Princess Margaret was third in line to the throne after the Queen’s two children, but because Charles and Anne were both so young, she could plausibly serve as Regent. The issue remained unresolved, and was swept temporarily out of mind by the all-consuming coronation preparations.

Other than telling the Queen Mother in February, Margaret and Townsend kept their intentions secret until Coronation Day, when a tabloid reporter caught Margaret flicking a piece of “fluff” from the lapel of Townsend’s uniform with a proprietary and flirtatious glance. Several days later, the Palace learned that The People, a Sunday tabloid, would run a story on the affair, prompting Lascelles to notify Churchill on June 13. “This is most important!” Churchill exclaimed. “One motor accident, and this young lady might be our queen.” Not only was the prime minister troubled about the censure of the Anglican Church, he worried that parliaments in the Commonwealth would disapprove of Margaret marrying Townsend on the grounds that their child would be an unsuitable king or queen. Churchill “made it perfectly clear that if Princess Margaret should decide to marry Townsend, she must renounce her rights to the throne.”

Churchill, Lascelles, and Michael Adeane all agreed that the only remedy was to offer Townsend “employment abroad as soon as possible,” Lascelles recalled. “And with this the Queen agreed.” Until the publication in 2006 of a memorandum written by Lascelles in 1955 detailing the sequence of events, the common assumption was that the Queen had “stood on the sidelines” while others banished Townsend, and that Princess Margaret was misled by Lascelles into thinking she could freely marry on reaching the age of twenty-five. In fact, by Lascelles’s account, “the Queen, after consulting Princess Margaret—and presumably Townsend himself—told me a few days later that she considered Brussels to be the most suitable post.” Elizabeth II also asked for a statement clarifying the “implications” if she were to forbid the marriage. The government’s attorney general produced a memo, and Lascelles wrote a letter outlining the possibility of a split within the Commonwealth if “several parliaments … might take a diametrically opposite view of that held by others.” He was scheduled to retire at the end of the year, but before his departure, the private secretary sent this information to the Queen as well as Margaret, who thanked him for it in February 1954.

Once Townsend left for his Belgian exile in July 1953, the Queen and her advisers hoped the separation would cool the couple’s ardor. But the princess and her lover continued to correspond daily, and Margaret deluded herself into thinking that after her twenty-fifth birthday she could prevail, even if her sister was compelled to withhold her approval. By postponing a decision, everyone involved only prolonged the agony and kept the Queen’s younger sister in limbo for two years.

In retrospect, it’s clear why Elizabeth II did not want to force the issue. Divorced people were excluded from royal garden parties and other gatherings in the sovereign’s palaces and on the royal yacht. Her grandfather had first admitted “innocent parties” in divorce to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and the Queen had relented to include “guilty parties” as well. Still, she had an almost visceral reaction to divorce, which she had inveighed against in her only major speech as a princess. “She strongly believed that divorce was catching,” said Lady Elizabeth Anson, a cousin of the Queen through the Queen Mother’s Bowes Lyon family. “If one got divorced, it made it easier for another unhappy couple to get divorced.”

WITH THE RESOLUTION of Margaret’s dilemma delayed, the Queen turned her full attention to the culmination of the continuing coronation celebration: an ambitious five-and-a-half-month tour of Commonwealth countries, covering 43,000 miles from Bermuda to the Cocos Islands, by plane and ship. It was her first extended trip as sovereign, and the first time a British monarch had circled the globe. By one accounting, she heard 276 speeches and 508 renditions of “God Save the Queen,” made 102 speeches, shook 13,213 hands, and witnessed 6,770 curtsies.

Elizabeth II’s role as the symbolic head of the Commonwealth of Nations not only enhanced her place in the world and extended her reach, it became a source of pride and pleasure and an essential part of her identity. “She sees herself fused into that instrument that was originally an empire,” said former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney after she had been leader of the organization for nearly sixty years. Sir Philip Moore, her private secretary from 1977 to 1986, once estimated that she devoted half of her time to the Commonwealth. Over the course of her reign she would visit most member nations multiple times.

In 1949 the London Declaration created the modern Commonwealth with the removal of “British” from its name, while recognizing King George VI as “Head of the Commonwealth.” That year, newly independent India pledged to keep its membership when it became a republic, setting the stage for British colonies to join as they sought independence. The Irish Free State had become a republic the previous year, ending the British monarch’s role as head of state. In a further demonstration of antipathy for Britain rooted in centuries of domination as well as bitterness over the island’s partition, the new Republic of Ireland left the Commonwealth. Other newly independent nations eagerly joined in the years to come, however. “The transformation of the Crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association … has no precedent,” Elizabeth II observed after twenty-five years on the throne.

What began as a cozy group of eight members—Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, Ceylon, and India—would grow to fifty-four by the early twenty-first century, representing almost one third of the world’s population. Most of the member nations became republics, but some (Brunei and Tonga among them) had monarchs of their own, and all twenty-nine realms and territories where Elizabeth II reigned as Queen belonged as well.

Embracing First and Third World countries, large and small, from all regions except the Middle East, the Commonwealth dedicated itself to giving its members equal voice and a sense of kinship. With English as the shared language, it served as a forum for the promotion of good government, education, economic development, and human rights—although its main weakness was a tendency to dither over the egregious abuses of tyrants.

In preparation for her first Commonwealth tour, the Queen supervised the creation of one hundred new outfits by her couturier Norman Hartnell. Her priorities were comfort for her daytime clothes, which were usually sewn with weights in the hems as a safeguard against windy conditions, bright colors so she could be easily visible at outdoor events, and sumptuous fabrics for her evening gowns, which often incorporated motifs to pay homage to her host countries. Her coronation dress was part of her wardrobe as well, to be worn opening parliaments in a number of countries.

Watching the televised departure ceremony on the evening of November 23, 1953, Noel Coward thought the Queen “looked so young and vulnerable and valiant,” and the royal couple had “star quality in excelsis.” They traveled on a BOAC Stratocruiser for nearly ten hours to a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland, followed by another five and a half hours to Bermuda, tracked along the way by naval vessels from Britain and Canada that stayed in continuous radio contact.

After a day of official rounds on Britain’s oldest colony, the royal party visited Jamaica, where they boarded the SS Gothic for their three-week voyage through the Panama Canal to the South Pacific archipelago of Fiji. On the way the Queen worked in her sitting room and wrote letters (posted from each port of call, where airplanes transported them in diplomatic bags). One message to Churchill commended his efforts for “the good of the world” at his summit in Bermuda with President Eisenhower and French premier Joseph Laniel to plan a strategy for dealing with the threat of a nuclear confrontation in the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. Otherwise, Elizabeth II watched members of the royal household play shuffle-board, quoits, and deck tennis, and she filmed the customary “Crossing the Line” initiation. Lady-in-waiting Pamela Mountbatten was tipped into a tank of water by Prince Philip, dressed as the Demon Barber of King Neptune’s Court, who was then unceremoniously pushed into the pool as well.

Their visit to Fiji challenged the Queen’s ability to cope smoothly with exotic customs. A group of native chieftains came aboard the Gothic and welcomed her with a lengthy dance featuring clapping and sequences of grunts while sitting cross-legged, followed by a solemn presentation of whale’s teeth. On shore, the chiefs painstakingly prepared quantities of kava, a strong sedating beverage made by pulverizing roots of the kava plant, liberally lubricated with spit. The Queen, who had been warned of the potency of the drink, watched the long preparation, and when she was somberly offered a draft in a seashell, warily took just half a mouthful. Back on the Gothic that night after their black-tie dinner, Elizabeth II marveled at the experience. “Didn’t you LOVE this?” she exclaimed, and then sat cross-legged in her evening gown on the floor of the dining room. “As she was in the middle of the grunts and claps, the steward came in and was transfixed,” said Pamela Mountbatten.

The next stop was the island kingdom of Tonga, and a joyful reunion with the exuberant Queen Salote, who drove her British counterpart around in the London taxicab she had acquired during the coronation and laid on a feast for seven hundred people, all seated on the ground, eating with their fingers. “The Queen suffered through that,” recalled Pamela Mountbatten. “She has a very small appetite, but she knows if she stops, everyone stops. So out of consideration she had to play with her food and extend the time eating.”

The royal party arrived in New Zealand before Christmas. They celebrated the holiday at the Auckland home of Governor General Sir Willoughby Norrie, where the Queen broadcast her Christmas speech, declaring her intention to show the people of the Commonwealth that “the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity but a personal and living bond between you and me.” She also touched on the expectation of a new Elizabethan Age and admitted, “frankly I do not myself feel at all like my great Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores.” She emphasized that the Commonwealth “bears no resemblance to the Empires of the past,” but rather was built on “friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace.” And she echoed her twenty-first birthday pledge by declaring her intention to give her “heart and soul every day of my life” to this “equal partnership of nations and races.”

Two keen listeners to the broadcast were five-year-old Prince Charles and three-year-old Princess Anne, who were spending Christmas at Sandringham with their grandmother. They spoke to the Queen and Prince Philip by radio telephone, but otherwise news of their progress came in regular letters from the Queen Mother, who had them for weekends at Royal Lodge, her pale pink house tucked among the trees in Windsor Great Park. Just as Elizabeth and Margaret had followed their parents’ travels on maps, Prince Charles traced his parents’ route on a globe in his nursery. “He is intensely affectionate & loves you & Philip most tenderly,” reassured the Queen Mother in a letter to her daughter.

The crowds everywhere were enormous and enthusiastic. Masses of welcoming boats jammed Sydney’s harbor, and by one count, three quarters of Australia’s population came out to see the Queen. At age twenty-seven she was hailed as the “world’s sweetheart.” But the royal couple refused to let their celebrity go to their heads. “The level of adulation, you wouldn’t believe it,” Prince Philip recalled. “It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.” The Queen Mother reinforced this instinct to separate their public and private personae. “How moving & humble making,” she wrote her daughter in early March 1954, “that one can be the vehicle through which this love for country can be expressed. Don’t you feel that?”

The Duke of Edinburgh also helped his wife stay on an even keel when she became frustrated after endless hours of making polite conversation. “I remember her complaining in Australia, ‘All these mayors are so boring. Why are they so boring?’ ” recalled Pamela Mountbatten. “Prince Philip explained to her, ‘You don’t have to sit next to them every day in England. We are two months in Australia so you have to sit next to them a lot more.’ This was easy for Prince Philip, who charges in and makes things happen. The Queen early on was not a natural conversationalist or mixer. So for her it was much harder work. Also, they were intimidated by her. The protocol was they shouldn’t speak first, which made for stilted conversation.”

The Queen’s style was sparing—“never … a superfluous gesture,” the photographer Cecil Beaton once observed—smiling only when delighted or amused, rather than incessantly as a politician would do. Meeting and greeting thousands of people at receptions and garden parties actually gave her a temporary facial tic. But when she was watching a performance or a parade, and her face was in repose, she looked grumpy, even formidable. The portrait painter Michael Noakes observed that “she has no intermediate expression,” just a “great smile or dour.” As the Queen herself once ruefully acknowledged, “The trouble is that unlike my mother, I don’t have a naturally smiley face.” From time to time, Philip would jolly his wife. “Don’t look so sad, sausage,” he said during an event in Sydney. Or he might provoke a grin by reciting scripture at odd moments, once inquiring sotto voce, “What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep?”

During the long and repetitive days, the Queen developed coping techniques, including her preternatural ability to stand for hours without tiring. Years later she described her technique to Susan Crosland, the wife of Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland: “One plants one’s feet apart like this,” said the Queen as she lifted her evening gown above her ankles. “Always keep them parallel. Make sure your weight is evenly distributed. That’s all there is to it.” Her handshaking was similarly designed with self-preservation in mind: she extends her hand, allowing her to grasp the fingers and do the squeezing, usually protected by a size seven white glove, which guards against picking up illness and being cut by women’s diamond rings.

Elizabeth II has always carried a handbag on her left arm. Its ubiquity has prompted fascination about its significance and speculation about its contents. Phil Brown, the manager of the Hull City football team, got a good look inside when he sat next to the Queen at a luncheon in 2009. “It was almost like a lady’s prop with essential items,” he said. “It had things that you would expect—makeup, [coin] purse, sweeteners she put in her coffee, the normal stuff. You expect that a lady-in-waiting would carry her handbag, but for the Queen, it was almost like a comfort blanket.”

Her ladies-in-waiting are responsible for necessities such as extra pairs of gloves as well as needles, thread, and safety pins to make emergency repairs. Her private secretary keeps the texts of her speeches, which he hands to her at the appointed time. But the Queen “is a very practical down-to-earth lady,” said one of her long-serving ladies-in-waiting. “She needs a comb or lipstick or Kleenex, and if she hasn’t got it, what does she do?” For the same reason, her handbag usually contains reading glasses, mint lozenges, and a fountain pen, although rarely cash, except for a precisely folded £5 or £10 note on Sundays for the church collection plate.

Elizabeth II has also been known to carry a bag hook, an ingenious item designed for practicality. “I watched the Queen open her handbag and remove a white suction cup and discreetly spit into it,” recalled a dinner guest at the Berkshire home of the Queen’s cousin Jean Wills. “The Queen then attached the cup to the underside of the table. The cup had a hook on it, and she attached her handbag to it.”

Elizabeth II taught herself to keep engaged in the moment by sharpening her powers of observation. Once when she spotted a Franciscan monk in a crowd, she said to an official nearby, “I’m always fascinated by their toes, aren’t you?” She would store up these moments for later and recount them, often with expert dialect, for her husband and advisers. She used her mimicry in part as “a way of relieving the boredom and shattering the formality,” said a former courtier.

On many evenings during the Commonwealth tour the royal party shared reminiscences over private black-tie dinners aboard the Gothic. They relaxed by going to stud farms and the races at Rondwich and Flemington in Australia. During weekend visits to the beach, the Queen’s advisers became accustomed to hearing Philip speak with spousal directness. When she balked at wearing a swim-suit on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, he said, “Do come in, you have nothing to do, at least have a nice swim.” “I need to keep out of the sun,” the Queen replied. “You are a premature grandmother!” he exclaimed in exasperation.

Philip’s principal diversion at public events continued to be wisecracks and lighthearted banter. In motorcades he took to finding the most unlikely people and waving at them. But when he was off on his own, he gave speeches reflecting his growing portfolio of interests. To a gathering of scientists in Wellington, New Zealand, he spoke at length about the applications of science to agriculture, medicine, and the military. While the Queen spoke briefly and carefully hewed to written texts, Philip began to enjoy the luxury of discursive and off-the-cuff remarks.

The last leg of the tour brought the royal couple back to exotic locales, with stops in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, Uganda, and Libya. The Queen wore her coronation dress to open the Ceylonese parliament in an outdoor pavilion. As she sat in the sun on the throne for an hour, her bejeweled dress heated up and she nearly roasted, but she showed no sign of discomfort. Her attendants noticed that even in the hottest temperatures the Queen scarcely perspired—a phenomenon still evident into her eighties. On a visit to Ground Zero in New York City in July 2010, she spent nearly a half hour in record-shattering 103-degree heat greeting families of those who had lost their lives on 9/11. “We were all pouring sweat,” said Debbie Palmer, the widow of a firefighter. “She didn’t have a bead of sweat on her. I thought that is what it must be like to be royal.” But Pamela Mountbatten, who witnessed the Queen’s uncanny cool nearly six decades earlier, said, “There are certain people whose skin runs water, but she doesn’t. That means she can’t get relief, so she suffers twice as much from the heat. She says no perspiration makes it much worse. It is very convenient because it looks wonderful, but at a cost.”

At Tobruk in Libya, the Queen and Prince Philip transferred to Britannia, the new 412-foot royal yacht with a gleaming deep blue hull, which they had designed together with architect Sir Hugh Casson. The duke supervised technical features as well as overall decor, and the Queen selected the understated chintz fabrics, and even doorknobs and lamp shades. With its grand staircase, spacious drawing rooms, and state dining room, Britannia was suitable for entertaining world leaders and hosting large receptions of dignitaries. A less formal sun lounge furnished with bamboo and wicker chairs was used for afternoon tea, and the Queen and Prince Philip each had cozy bedrooms fitted with single beds and connected by a door, as well as his and hers sitting rooms with built-in desks. Britannia was not only the monarch’s floating embassy—a unique bubble of British distinctiveness—to be deployed in future tours around the world, but a secluded “country house at sea” where the Queen said she could “truly relax.”

For its maiden voyage, Britannia brought Prince Charles and Princess Anne to be reunited with their parents in early May 1954 for the first time in nearly half a year. The Queen was pleased that she would be seeing her children earlier than she had anticipated, but she worried that they wouldn’t know their parents. The Queen Mother wrote to allay her daughter’s concerns, saying, “You may find Charles much older in a very endearing way.”

Still, when the moment came and the Queen was piped aboard, her strict control and conformity to protocol prevailed as it had when she met her son after her Canada trip. “No, not you dear,” she said as she greeted dignitaries first, then shook the five-year-old’s extended hand. The private reunion was warm and affectionate, as Prince Charles showed his mother all around the yacht where he had been living for more than a week. The Queen told her mother how happy she was to be with her “enchanting” children again. They had both “gravely offered us their hands,” she wrote, “partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!” But the repercussions of that chilly first encounter were evident four decades later in a biography of Prince Charles by Anthony Holden, who titled a chapter about the prince’s childhood “No, Not You Dear.”

The Queen and her family arrived at the Isle of Wight, where Churchill joined them on board Britannia for a sail into London up the Thames. “One saw this dirty commercial river as one came up,” the Queen recalled. Yet Churchill “was describing it as the silver thread which runs through the history of Britain.” Her prime minister, she observed, saw things “in a very romantic and glittering way; perhaps one was looking at it in a rather too mundane way.” Stilted though she sounded, her oft-mocked use of “one” was her unassuming way to avoid the more self-referential word “I.”

CHURCHILL HAD SET his retirement date for her return from the tour, but once again he wavered. The Queen remained hopeful he would keep his commitment, telling Anthony Eden during an audience after a Buckingham Palace garden party in July that Churchill “seemed less truculent about going now.” The prime minister would cling to power for eight more months, and during this time, according to Jock Colville, his half-hour audiences with the Queen “dragged out longer and longer … and very often took an hour and a half, at which I may say racing was not the only topic discussed.”

Finally the eighty-year-old leader agreed to yield his premiership on April 5, 1955. Even at the eleventh hour, he nearly backed off when he thought he might act as a peacemaker by convening a four-power summit with the Soviet Union. The Queen remained patient during their audience on March 29, telling him she didn’t mind a delay. Two days later, he gave formal notification that he would go as planned. Private secretary Michael Adeane replied that the Queen “felt the greatest personal regrets” and had said “she would especially miss the weekly audiences which she has found so instructive and, if one can say so of state matters, so entertaining.”

Churchill gave a farewell dinner on April 4 in which he toasted the Queen as a “young, gleaming champion” of “the sacred causes and wise and kindly way of life.” He had advised his cabinet that afternoon to “never be separated from the Americans.” At his last audience on April 5, Elizabeth II offered him a dukedom to honor his special place in British history, even though that title was now reserved only for “royal personages.” Jock Colville had assured her that Churchill would decline the offer because he “wished to die in the House of Commons.” But when the prime minister set out for Buckingham Palace in his frock coat and top hat, Colville became apprehensive that in a burst of sentimentality Churchill might change his mind. “I very nearly accepted,” he tearfully told his private secretary back at Number 10. “I was so moved by her beauty and her charm and the kindness with which she made this offer, that for a moment I thought of accepting. But finally I remembered that I must die as I have always been—Winston Churchill. And so I asked her to forgive my not accepting it. And do you know, it’s an odd thing, but she seemed almost relieved.”

Writing to Churchill afterward, Elizabeth II told him none of his successors “will ever, for me, be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister.” She thanked him for his “wise guidance” and for his leadership during the Cold War, “with its threats and dangers which are more awe-inspiring than any which you have had to contend with before, in war or peace.” Churchill replied that he had tried “to keep Your Majesty squarely confronted with the grave and complex problems of our time.” He revealed that at the beginning of her reign he had recognized her grasp of “the august duties of a modern Sovereign and the store of knowledge which had already been gathered by an upbringing both wise and lively,” including her “Royal resolve to serve as well as rule, and indeed to rule by serving.”

It was the Queen’s constitutional prerogative to choose, after consulting with members of the Conservative Party, the next leader of the party capable of commanding the necessary majority in the House of Commons. After Churchill resigned, she asked him during their final audience if he would recommend a successor. Since he was no longer prime minister, he could not technically offer such advice, so he demurred, saying he would leave it to her. She told him, according to Colville, “the case was not a difficult one and that she would summon Anthony Eden.”

She had presumably taken soundings with Tory officials, but she didn’t disclose the nature or extent of those consultations. Her emphasis then, as it would be throughout her reign, was strict adherence to constitutionally correct procedures and an unwillingness to impose her personal preference.

In her first audience with Eden, the Queen was almost offhand in discharging her duties. After they had chatted for a while, he finally said, “Well, Ma’am?” to which the Queen replied, “I suppose I ought to be asking you to form a government.”

An Old Etonian son of a baronet, the fifty-seven-year-old prime minister was “the best looking politician of his time,” a cultivated man with an Oxford First in Oriental Languages, including Persian and Arabic. He brought extensive experience to his role, having served in Parliament since 1923, with leadership positions in prewar, wartime, and postwar governments. He had considerable charm, but he could be tense and sometimes unpredictable, with an “odd and violent temper,” observed Cynthia Gladwyn, the wife of diplomat Sir Gladwyn Jebb, along with a need for praise and flattery. A shy streak made him seem remote, which put more of a burden on the Queen to establish rapport.

Her success in doing so was evident that summer when Eden and his wife, Clarissa, a niece of Winston Churchill, were attending a military event in Winchester with the Queen. Afterward the prime minister had his weekly audience, which Clarissa overheard when she was resting in a room next door. “Anthony was telling her the menu he had had at Ike’s—there was a lot of merriment,” she wrote in her diary. Recalling the moment years later, she said, “They were chatting away and laughing like anything. It was very noisy, and it surprised me. I would have thought it would be more structured questions and answers.”

Eden had married Clarissa after his first wife, Beatrice, bolted with another man, making him the first divorced prime minister. That circumstance put him in a delicate position when Princess Margaret turned twenty-five on August 21, 1955, and her romance with Peter Townsend—like Eden, the innocent party in a divorce—again moved to center stage. Six days before her birthday, Margaret wrote Eden a letter explaining that she would remain at Balmoral until October when Townsend was expected in London for his annual leave. “It is only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not,” she wrote. “I hope to be in a position to tell you and the other Commonwealth Prime Ministers what I intend to do.”

While the press whipped up popular sentiment for a royal love match (“COME ON MARGARET! PLEASE MAKE UP YOUR MIND!” pleaded the Daily Mirror), the Queen, the prime minister, and Michael Adeane debated how to proceed once she was compelled to deny permission as head of the Church of England, requiring Margaret to ask for approval from the parliaments in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms. In early October the Edens visited Balmoral for the annual prime minister’s weekend, which featured long consultations, some of them including Prince Philip. The Queen wanted her sister to be happy, but was equally committed to the royal family’s role as a model for her subjects. She took pains to remain neutral and let Margaret make up her own mind.

Back in London, after determining that Parliament would not approve a union opposed by the Church, Eden informed Margaret that if she wished to wed Townsend in a civil ceremony, she needed to renounce her right to the throne. This would mean giving up her Civil List income and the rights of any of her heirs in the line of succession.

On October 20, 1955, the cabinet prepared the points to be covered by a Bill of Renunciation in Parliament, and four days later an editorial in The Times laid out in moralistic terms the princess’s stark choice: either she could keep her “high place” in the estimation of the Commonwealth and give up Townsend, or she could contract a civil marriage and relinquish her royal status.

On October 31 Princess Margaret announced that she and Townsend were parting company. Although her sorrowful statement, written in collaboration with Townsend, emphasized her religious beliefs and sense of obligation to the Commonwealth, the true deciding factor was that she had been raised in luxury as a princess, and she couldn’t face the prospect of living, as Kenneth Rose put it, “in a cottage on a group captain’s salary”—outside the royal family that was the very essence of her identity.

The controversy over Margaret’s dashed marital plans prompted some mild criticism, but mainly she drew praise for her willingness to sacrifice her happiness on the altar of royal duty. Margaret continued to live in Clarence House with her mother, making public appearances and cutting a glamorous figure, although some could see, as Tommy Lascelles described it, that she had become “selfish and hard and wild.” Like her father before her, the Queen coddled her sister rather than confronting her when she misbehaved.

THE IMAGE OF the Queen in the public imagination in the mid-1950s was set by two of her most celebrated portraits, each romanticized in a particular way. To commemorate her Commonwealth tour, the bespectacled Australian artist William Dargie captured her in seven sessions at the end of 1954 in the Yellow Drawing Room on the first floor of Buckingham Palace. Dargie found her to be chatty and marveled that her “straight back … never slumped once,” but noted that “she had a difficult mouth to paint.” His image combines dignity with accessibility: “a nice friendly portrait,” in the Queen’s words. It was commissioned to hang in Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra, but she liked it so much that she asked Dargie to make a copy for her private apartment at the Palace. The only other portrait of herself that she has kept in her personal collection is the official state portrait in her coronation dress by Sir James Gunn, hanging at Windsor Castle.

From October 1954 through February 1955, the Queen also sat sixteen times for Pietro Annigoni. The forty-four-year-old Florentine artist was barely five feet tall, with a burly physique, intense brown eyes, and big peasant hands. He spoke broken English, so they conversed entirely in French. He found her to be “kind, natural and never aloof,” and was taken by the unaffected way she talked, referring to “my husband,” “my mother,” and “my sister.” Her memories of childhood, “watching the people and the cars down there in the Mall,” inspired him to show her “alone and far off” despite being “dear to the hearts of millions of people whom she loved.”

The result is an arresting three-quarter view of the Queen bareheaded, in her capacious dark blue robes of the Order of the Garter against a bleak imaginary landscape. Her demeanor is regal, her expression contemplative, with a hint of determination. The Queen was happy with the portrait, and Margaret praised the artist’s success with her sister’s elusive mouth. The following year Margaret sat thirty-three times for her own Annigoni portrait, which she considered so beautiful it moved her to tears. When American artist Frolic Weymouth asked Margaret her opinion of her sister’s portrait, she sniffed, “Mine was better than hers.”

As Elizabeth II approached her thirtieth birthday in 1956, she was still benefiting from a honeymoon glow, although her prime minister was grappling with an array of domestic crises. Only a month after taking office, he had called an election in May 1955, which the Tories had won easily. But the country was plagued with labor unrest; the Queen’s birthday parade that June even had to be canceled when Eden declared a state of emergency during a railway strike. Churchill had done nothing to slow the growth of the welfare state created by the postwar Labour government, and the costs were hobbling the economy.

The Queen took several noteworthy steps to shrink the traditional distance from her subjects. During a trip to Nigeria in February, she visited the Oji River Leper Settlement at a time when victims of leprosy were considered outcasts. Her “qualities of grace and compassion,” wrote British journalist Barbara Ward, “shine through the spectacle of a young queen shaking hands with cured Nigerian lepers to reassure timid villagers who do not believe in the cure.” The gesture was every bit as groundbreaking as Princess Diana’s handshake in 1987 with an AIDS patient at a time of public fear about catching the disease through touch.

On May 11, 1956, the Queen began hosting informal luncheons at Buckingham Palace for “meritocrats” from fields such as medicine, sports, literature, the arts, religion, education, and business. She holds them to this day. The inspiration came from Prince Philip, who thought gatherings of a half dozen luminaries every month or so could keep the Queen better connected to the outside world. One peculiarity of the get-togethers is that the guests have little or nothing in common with each other, which some participants liken to being shipwrecked. Elizabeth II, invariably preceded by her pack of corgis and her special cross-breed of corgis and dachshunds called “dorgis,” typically mixes with everyone over cocktails and then makes more extensive conversation with her two luncheon partners at the oval table in the 1844 Drawing Room or the Chinese Dining Room.

As with her public events, the Queen enjoys mild mishaps. Once one of her corgis had an accident on the rug, prompting the Queen to signal her Master of the Household, Vice Admiral Sir Peter Ashmore, who retrieved an old-fashioned blotter from a nearby desk and dropped to his hands and knees to remove the stain—while everyone else pretended not to notice.

That spring, Elizabeth II deployed her diplomatic skills on Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin, the newly installed leaders of the Soviet Union. The two tough-minded Cold War foes did not come to Britain on a state visit as the Queen’s guests. But they were eager to spend time with her, so she invited them to Windsor Castle. After meetings with Eden, they left London “looking very smart in new black suits and clean shirts and different ties.”

The Russian leaders were enchanted by the monarch’s casual appearance. “She was dressed in a plain, white dress,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. “She looked like the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon.”

The Queen gave them a guided tour and served each leader a glass of tea, Russian style. Philip quizzed them about Leningrad, while Elizabeth II inquired about their airplane, the TU-104, which she had seen flying over the castle on its descent into London Airport. Khrushchev was impressed that she “had such a gentle, calm voice. She was completely unpretentious, completely without the haughtiness that you’d expect of royalty.… In our eyes she was first and foremost the wife of her husband and the mother of her children.” In the car back to Claridge’s in London, the two Russians excitedly tried to top each other: “The Queen said to me …” “No, she said that to me!”

THE TRANQUILLITY OF the spring and early summer was shattered by the Suez Crisis that escalated from mid-July until the end of the year. It began when Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by Britain and France through the Suez Canal Company. The 120-mile waterway linking the Mediterranean and Red Sea had long been a strategic conduit for the British navy, but was increasingly important for the transport of oil to Europe. Nasser sought to rid the region of British influence, chiefly its close alliance with the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan, and to set himself up as the Arab world’s dominant leader. Eden viewed Nasser, who had overthrown Egypt’s King Farouk four years earlier, as a dangerous dictator who should be stopped.

In the following months, Britain publicly pursued various diplomatic options for international supervision of the canal while secretly plotting military action against Egypt with France and Israel. The plan called for Israel to invade Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956, which would then prompt several thousand British and French troops to intervene in a so-called effort to save the canal from the battling Israeli and Egyptian forces. The entire misbegotten operation was a ruse to ensure that Britain and France could recapture the canal by force.

The invasion succeeded after a week of hostilities. But Eden made a terrible miscalculation by keeping the United States in the dark, infuriating Dwight Eisenhower, who had been working with the British government in the spirit of the “special relationship.” Not only did the newly reelected American president oppose the Suez military adventure for destabilizing the Middle East, he worried that the Soviet Union’s offer to assist Egypt could trigger a wider war. The United States joined other countries, including many of Britain’s Commonwealth allies, in the United Nations to condemn the Suez action and demand a cease-fire. The crisis caused a run on the pound—the sale of millions from sterling accounts, especially in the United States—which enabled Eisenhower to exert further leverage by refusing to back an international loan to Britain unless the invading forces were withdrawn. The U.N. cease-fire took effect at midnight on November 6, and by the end of December the French and British troops had completed a humiliating retreat.

Through her daily boxes, the Queen had access to the Foreign Office documents about the Suez strategy. “Nothing was kept from her. She knew about the secret deals beforehand,” said one Palace adviser. In Eden’s view, “she understood what we were doing very well.” During the weeks before the invasion, she had two audiences with the prime minister, whose nerves were frayed from the tension. He began taking Benzedrine, which aggravated his insomnia and volatile moods. Martin Charteris later described him as “edgy” and “jumpy,” and unable to sit still when he came to Buckingham Palace. “I think the Queen believed Eden was mad,” recalled Charteris.

Despite misgivings by some members, Eden’s cabinet backed the Suez operation with near unanimity. Michael Adeane supported the prime minister, but the Queen’s assistant private secretaries Martin Charteris and Edward Ford were adamantly opposed. Elizabeth II might have raised her signature question: “Are you sure you are being wise?” The most Eden would reveal two decades later to biographer Robert Lacey was that the Queen did not express her disapproval, “nor would I claim that she was pro-Suez.” She maintained scrupulous neutrality in keeping with her constitutional role. “I don’t think she was really for it,” recalled Gay Charteris. “That is the impression Martin got, and he was frightfully against it.”

Mentally and physically shattered—by one account “in such a bad way that he didn’t make sense”—Eden flew to Jamaica in mid-November for a rest cure at Goldeneye, the home of writer Ian Fleming, leaving R. A. “Rab” Butler in charge during the interim. Churchill, who criticized Eden’s failure to consult Eisenhower, dispatched a letter to his old friend, emphasizing that the two countries needed to stop second-guessing Eden’s decisions and concentrate on having a united front against the Soviet Union. Replying on November 23, Eisenhower agreed that the Soviets were “the real enemy” and that the United States and Britain should focus on “achieving our legitimate objectives in the Middle East.”

Churchill sent Eisenhower’s letter to the Queen, who observed that “it is most interesting to learn his appreciation of the situation, and I hope it means that the present feeling that this country and America are not seeing eye-to-eye will soon be speedily replaced by even stronger ties between us.” Britain would in fact work more harmoniously with America on the international stage in the following decades, even as its prestige as a world power faded and its colonies pushed for independence.

Although the Queen bore no blame personally, the setback of Suez inevitably cast a shadow on her reign. The most immediate casualty was Eden himself. His health still fragile, he decided to resign on January 9, 1957, at age fifty-nine, after only twenty months in office. The Queen praised his “highly valued” leadership “in tempestuous times,” and Eden expressed gratitude for her “wise and impartial reaction to events.” But his reputation as a statesman was in tatters, never to be fully rehabilitated.

Once again it fell to Elizabeth II to select the party leader, but this time she was caught up in political machinations that for the first time reflected badly on her reputation for impartiality. While the Labour Party elected its leaders by democratic vote, the more elitist Conservatives preferred an obscure process of private soundings they called “emergence.” The two leading candidates were sixty-two-year-old Harold Macmillan, the chancellor of the exchequer, and fifty-four-year-old Rab Butler, the leader of the House of Commons, who had been the prime minister’s deputy and expected to get the top job.

It seemed reasonable to reward Butler for his decades of service in leadership roles. He had also objected to Suez, while Macmillan had been one of its architects, even as he managed to distance himself from the fiasco. Eden had no formal say in the selection of a successor, although he did tell the Queen he preferred Butler.

At the retiring prime minister’s suggestion, her point men for the decision were the party’s top mandarins, sixty-three-year-old Lord Salisbury, and fifty-six-year-old David Maxwell Fyfe, Viscount Kilmuir, who served as Lord Chancellor, one of the senior officers of Parliament. Together they polled the cabinet, along with several former ministers and the leader of the backbenchers. Salisbury reported to the Queen that Macmillan came out ahead by a wide margin. Churchill also weighed in, advising the Queen to “choose the older man.”

But when she summoned Macmillan to the Palace on January 10 and asked him to form a government, her choice surprised the Tory rank and file, many of whom supported Butler. Rather than making a well-considered decision, Elizabeth II seemed to have ceded her judgment to a pair of hidebound aristocrats whose soundings were too narrow. In fairness to the Queen, she was only following the improvisational rules of the Conservative Party. If she had made an independent choice—a highly unlikely outcome, given her cautious temperament—she would have been accused of overreaching her role. Even so, the lingering impression was of a young woman out of touch, and too beholden to the wishes of an Establishment coterie. The new Elizabethan Age, so buoyant five years before, was losing altitude in the cool air of criticism.