Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

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Made for Television

THE ONE MISSING VOICE IN THE TENSE DAYS OF SUEZ CONFLICT AND leadership change was Prince Philip’s. It was a time when the Queen could have used his moral support. But on October 15 the thirty-five-year-old duke had set out, with his wife’s encouragement, on a four-month solo tour of Commonwealth countries on Britannia covering nearly forty thousand miles.

His primary destination was Melbourne, where he was to open the 1956 Olympic Games and, as Philip later explained, “it would have been much simpler to have flown out and back.” But he and the Queen decided to expand the scope of the trip to include more stops in Australia and visits to New Zealand, Kenya, and Gambia, as well as a number of “remote communities who are loyal members of the Commonwealth” such as Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, Ceylon, and Malaya. He also went to the Falklands in the South Atlantic, and British bases in the Antarctic.

By his own description, Philip is “by profession a sailor” who owes his “allegiance to another of the world’s few really great fraternities, the fraternity of the sea.” So in the autumn of 1956 he relished reliving the camaraderie of the Officers’ Wardroom, but in considerably more luxurious circumstances than his navy days, with formal dinners at a table for twenty set with silver and crystal, accompanied by the best vintages from the royal yacht’s wine cellar.

The trip also allowed him to free himself from the strictures of Palace life and the suspicious gaze of courtiers. Unlike other men of his generation and class, he was dependent on and subordinate to his wife. Only when on his own could he claim the control that his contemporaries took for granted. He pursued his fascination with exploring by bringing along the famous veteran of Antarctic expeditions, Sir Raymond Priestley; grew a trim mustache and beard known in the Royal Navy as a “full set”; and practiced painting with a private tutor, Norfolk artist Edward Seago, who had been instructing him since the beginning of the year. In a nostalgic touch, Philip signed his paintings with the Greek “Phi”—a circle bisected by a vertical line.

Back home, critics began calling his protracted journey “Philip’s Folly,” noting his conspicuous absence during the aborted Middle East invasion, not to mention his ninth wedding anniversary (although he did send the Queen white roses and a photo of two iguanas embracing), and Christmas, when he broadcast a brief radio address from halfway between New Zealand and Cape Horn, referring to men and women in the Commonwealth “willing to serve others rather than themselves.”

By the fifth year of his wife’s reign, Philip had firmly established a range of causes and passions that he would expand in the years to come. “He has one of those minds where you may be sure the door that is closed is the one he wants to look behind,” said one Buckingham Palace adviser. “He wants to know what is going on. That is the nature of the man.”

From his years as a naval officer, he had been absorbed by science and technology, and he spoke frequently on improving education in those fields. But he equally emphasized the development of the “whole man” by building character along with intellect. He was passionate about the links between mental, moral, and physical health, and the need to give young people opportunities for physical fitness to prevent the spread of what he called “sub-health.” He was an early promoter of Outward Bound, the wilderness schools launched by Gordonstoun founder Kurt Hahn to develop leadership skills and self-confidence by meeting rigorous physical challenges. In 1956 Philip began the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a worldwide program to recognize teenagers and young adults for completing courses of community service and physical endurance.

Toward the end of Philip’s trip, his longtime friend and loyal private secretary, Mike Parker, suddenly left for London when his wife, Eileen, filed for divorce, accusing her husband of adultery. The news splashed across the British tabloids, and Fleet Street conflated Parker’s prominent position in the royal household with Philip’s months overseas to raise questions about the stability of the royal marriage. The press focused on the duke’s attendance for several years at a stag luncheon group in Soho called the Thursday Club that included Parker as well as actors David Niven and Peter Ustinov. While nothing untoward was said to have occurred at these gatherings except drinking, smoking, and telling racy tales, one of the participants, celebrity photographer Stirling Henry Nahum, popularly known as “Baron,” was alleged to have provided his apartment for assignations between the duke and an unnamed “party girl,” causing a “rift” in his marriage.

Given Philip’s matinee idol looks and eye for feminine beauty, he had been linked in the rumor mill for some time to various actresses and society beauties such as Pat Kirkwood, Helene Cordet, and Katie Boyle—all of whom denied anything more than friendship or a glancing acquaintance. The story of the “party girl” had no basis in fact, and Philip was “very hurt, terribly hurt, very angry” about the allegation. The Queen took the unusual step of authorizing her usually tight-lipped press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, to issue an explicit denial, saying, “It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke.” There the matter rested, although rumors of Philip’s supposed dalliances would continue to surface whenever he was spotted on the dance floor or in lively conversation with a pretty woman.

Parker resigned his position to quell the publicity while his case wound through the courts. Elizabeth II and Philip were reunited on February 16, 1957, in Portugal, a moment she used in her own sly fashion to dispel questions about the state of her marriage. When her tanned and freshly shaven consort boarded the Queen’s plane, he found her and the members of her household all wearing false beards. The royal couple spent two days alone before they resumed their public roles on a three-day state visit in Portugal. Reporting on his tour at a luncheon in London on the 26th, the duke took pains to note that in his younger days being away for four months would have meant “nothing at all,” while now for the “obvious reasons” of his wife and family, the prolonged absence “meant much more to me.” But he went on to say that “making some personal sacrifice” was worthwhile to advance the well-being of the Commonwealth “even a small degree.”

Just four days earlier, the Queen had rewarded that sacrifice and Philip’s work generally as her consort by officially making him a Prince of the United Kingdom—a more elevated title than the royal duke designation he had held since their marriage. The idea had come from Harold Macmillan, the new prime minister, who shrewdly saw it as a way to further reinforce Philip’s standing with his wife, as well as in the eyes of Britain and the Commonwealth.

Despite a naturally gloomy cast of mind, Macmillan took charge with a burst of optimism, moving smartly away from the Suez shame and reaffirming Britain’s status as a great country filled with industrious citizens. “Most of our people have never had it so good,” he famously said on July 20, 1957. Under his watch, Britain did indeed grow more prosperous. Shortly after moving into 10 Downing Street, Macmillan also worked deftly to mend the special relationship frayed by Suez, quietly orchestrating an invitation from Eisenhower to the Queen for a state visit to the United States in the fall of 1957.

Macmillan had an easier relationship with Elizabeth II than his jittery predecessor, not as cozy as Churchill’s but sympathetic, notably on her part, although she sometimes became irritated by his antique affectations and tendency to pontificate. Like Churchill, Macmillan had an American mother (invariably described as pushy or dominating) and what his biographer Alistair Horne characterized as an “instinctive reverence towards the monarchy.” The prime minister was astute, witty, and urbane, capable of the sort of penetrating character assessments that intrigued the Queen, who savored political gossip.

Macmillan was a complicated character, a combination of cunning and vulnerability, deeply religious as well as ruthless. The grandson of an impoverished Scottish farmer who built a fortune as a book publisher, Harold had received all the advantages of an education at Eton and Oxford. In World War I, he was wounded five times, an experience that gave him unusual affinity with the working-class men who had served with him in the trenches, along with a measure of survivor’s guilt.

He vaulted into the aristocracy when he married the third daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, Lady Dorothy Cavendish, who tormented him by conducting a decades-long affair with Robert Boothby, a flamboyant and amusing bisexual politician. The relationship was an open secret (“We all knew about it,” the Queen Mother years later told her friend Woodrow Wyatt, a conservative columnist for The Times and News of the World) that made Macmillan’s humiliation even more agonizing. At the beginning, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and over time he coped by developing “a mask of impenetrable calm.” Yet behind what U.S. ambassador David Bruce called a “Victorian languor,” Macmillan was capable of “force” and “determination,” as well as “swift action.”

More at ease in the like-minded company around the bar at White’s, the men’s club on St. James’s Street, he nevertheless quickly warmed to the Queen, a different sort of woman from his social acquaintances, with an intelligence and detailed mastery of domestic and foreign policy issues that astonished him from the outset. He readily took advantage of her total discretion and maternal kindness, describing her as “a great support, because she is the one person you can talk to.”

Butler, the veteran lieutenant who made the Tuesday evening trip to Buckingham Palace when Macmillan was traveling abroad, held a similar view of her gifts as an interlocutor. “She never reacted excessively,” he later said. “She never used a phrase carelessly. She would never give away an opinion early on in the conversation.” Rather, she would solicit an opinion and “listen to it right through.”

In his nearly seven years in office, Macmillan and Elizabeth II had a genuine working partnership. He frequently sent her long letters filled with appraisals of world leaders and confessions about his setbacks, as well as droll vignettes and grim prognostications. The Queen dispatched handwritten replies that were unfailingly encouraging and appreciative. Macmillan was taken with her informality and her sense of fun. Like many others, he wished she could “be made to smile more” in public. On learning of his reaction, she remarked that she “had always assumed people wanted her to look solemn most of the time.”

AFTER A HIATUS of six years, the thirty-one-year-old sovereign was now keen to have more children, as was her husband. Dickie Mountbatten blamed the delay on Philip’s anger over the Queen’s rejection of his family name after the accession. But by her own account, she had postponed her dream of having a large family primarily because she wanted to concentrate on establishing herself as an effective monarch.

During a visit to Buckingham Palace in May 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt met with Elizabeth II for nearly an hour the day after Prince Charles had undergone a tonsillectomy. The former first lady found her to be “just as calm and composed as if she did not have a very unhappy little boy on her mind.” The Queen reported that Charles had already been fed ice cream to soothe his painful throat, yet it was 6:30 in the evening, and she was compelled to entertain the widow of a former U.S. president rather than sit at the bedside of her eight-year-old son.

While the Queen certainly loved her children, she had fallen into professional habits that kept her apart from them much of the time. They benefited from nurturing nannies—for Charles in particular, Mabel Anderson was a “haven of security”—and a doting grandmother. But because of her dogged devotion to duty, amplified by her natural inhibitions and aversion to confrontation, Elizabeth II had missed out on many maternal challenges as well as satisfactions. “She let things go,” said Gay Charteris. “She did have work every day. It was easier to go back to that than children having tantrums. She always had the excuse of the red boxes.” An iconic 1957 photograph taken by Princess Margaret’s future husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, inadvertently crystallized the distance between the royal parents and their children. It shows Elizabeth II and Philip leaning on a stone bridge in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, gazing with admiration at Anne and Charles sitting on a rock below, reading a book.

The downside of the Queen’s approach to motherhood had been clear to Clarissa Eden during a stay at Windsor Castle in April 1955 when she and her husband joined the royal family for a picnic. Six-year-old Charles flopped onto Anthony Eden’s chair, prompting the Queen to tell the boy to move. When he refused, she asked him again, “because it is the prime minister’s cushion and he is tired.” But the young prince wouldn’t budge. Then when Charles wouldn’t eat his food because he hadn’t washed his hands, the Queen Mother indulged him by saying, “Oh I do understand the feeling. Put some water in a saucer for him.” Clarissa Eden was mildly amused by the prince’s spoiled behavior, but surprised that the Queen “didn’t say, ‘Come on Charles, get up,’ but I suppose she doesn’t like scenes at all cost.”

On that particular spring afternoon Philip, the resident disciplinarian, was enjoying himself on the nearby lake in a flat-bottomed punt. If the Queen erred toward leniency, her husband was often too tough. In his role as head of the family—“the natural state of things,” in the view of Elizabeth II—he enforced the rules, insisting, for example, that Charles make his bed each morning and arrive punctually for breakfast. Philip called all the shots for the heir apparent, who was in many ways markedly different from his father: diffident, insecure, introspective, and athletically awkward. From an early age he was, in the words of the Queen Mother, “a very gentle boy, with a very kind heart.” Although two years her brother’s junior, Princess Anne was a much sturdier character: self-confident, rigorous, and assertive like Philip.

The most important decision for Charles concerned his education. (As was traditional among the upper classes, Anne would continue to be taught by a governess until she was ready for boarding school at age thirteen.) In an effort to create a semblance of normal life, the duke and Queen decided to send their son to a private primary school—the first ever for an heir apparent. Philip selected Hill House School in London, a five-year-old academy founded on Plutarch’s credo that a child’s mind was “not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” After Charles’s years in the nursery, being in a classroom with other boys was a novelty, and he was exposed to such leveling experiences as sweeping the floors and riding a bus to the athletic fields. But Charles had only one year in which the embers barely began to glow before his parents packed him off in the autumn of 1957, two months before his ninth birthday—the year when upper-class boys customarily went to boarding school—to his father’s alma mater, Cheam School in Hampshire.

Philip chose a school that conformed to his vision of educating the “whole” child. But he also saw his mission to toughen up his son’s apparent softness. Describing his rationale years later, the duke wrote, “Children may be indulged at home, but school is expected to be a Spartan and disciplined experience in the process of developing into self-controlled, considerate and independent adults.”

From the moment he entered his dormitory, Charles was miserable. Although over the following five years he would adjust to the strict regimen and coexist with more than eighty boys in the classroom and on the playing fields, he always remained slightly apart, pining for the distant solace of home. Explaining his inability to make many friends, he later said, “I always preferred my own company, or just a one to one.”

He became even more self-conscious about his singular position when at the end of his first year his mother gave him the title Prince of Wales—the most vivid symbol of his place in the royal succession. He had no idea what was coming as he and several other boys met in the headmaster’s study during the summer of 1958 to watch the telecast of the Queen’s message closing the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff—the quadrennial sporting competition sponsored by member nations. When she made the momentous announcement, Charles cringed with embarrassment as the crowds on the small screen cheered, “God Bless the Prince of Wales.”

His parents were well aware of his unhappiness at school; the Queen even wrote of her son’s “dread” on returning to Cheam after a holiday. But they believed in the need for a stiff upper lip, and the Queen deflected her son’s complaints to her husband. With his brusque manner and tendency to criticize rather than encourage, Philip was notably unsympathetic, which drove an ever-widening wedge between father and son.

As a practical matter, boarding school made sense for Charles given the busy schedules of the Queen and Prince Philip. It also kept him away from the prying eyes of the press. Until then, coverage of the monarch in newspapers and magazines—and in the hushed and impeccable voices of the British Broadcasting Corporation—had been reliably deferential to the Queen, according her praise verging on adoration while directing episodes of sensationalism at others such as her husband and her sister. The press was now for the first time publishing articles critical of Elizabeth II and her closest advisers.

IN THE USUALLY slow month of August 1957, when the Queen and her court had decamped for their annual holiday in the Scottish Highlands, an obscure publication called National and English Review ran a piece called “The Monarch Today” by the magazine’s editor, thirty-three-year-old John Grigg, the 2nd Baron Altrincham. He was a contrarian Tory who had already attracted attention for campaigning against his fellow hereditary peers who sat in Parliament’s House of Lords, many of whom he said were “not necessarily fitted to serve.” He had also advocated the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, and fiercely criticized Anthony Eden’s Suez invasion.

Now he was taking aim at those who served—or rather in his view failed to serve—the monarchy, which he said he supported. His title gave him instant credibility, as did his education at Eton and Oxford and his service as an officer in the Grenadier Guards—all spawning grounds for the Buckingham Palace courtier class. Altrincham denounced those advisers as a “tight little enclave” of “tweedy” aristocrats who filled the Queen’s official speeches with platitudes. “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth,” he wrote, “is that of a priggish schoolgirl,” preventing her from coming into her own “as an independent and distinctive character.” Altrincham urged the royal family to surround itself with a more racially and socially diverse group, creating a “truly classless and Commonwealth court” that could more imaginatively help the Queen achieve the “seemingly impossible task of being at once ordinary and extraordinary.”

This line of criticism echoed a little-noticed essay by journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge in the New Statesman two years earlier. Prompted by the media circus created by Princess Margaret’s drama with Peter Townsend, Muggeridge had warned in October 1955 of the dangers of overexposure in the press. He presciently advised the royal family to install an “efficient public relations set-up” to replace “rather ludicrous courtiers” in an effort to control the press and “check some of the worst abuses.” Better advisers, he wrote, would help the royal family “prevent themselves and their lives from becoming a sort of royal soap opera.” Muggeridge, a clever polemicist, offered this sound advice in a restrained and respectful way. His most provocative observation was that the monarchy had “become a kind of ersatz religion,” and he suggested that the British royal family might consider the Scandinavian approach of living “simply and unaffectedly among their subjects.”

Altrincham’s like-minded analysis might have attracted little more than raised eyebrows among the 4,500 readers of his journal had he not had the temerity to attack the Queen personally for her “debutante stamp” and her “woefully inadequate training” for the job of sovereign. “ ‘Crawfie,’ Sir Henry Marten, the London season, the race-course, the grouse-moor, canasta and the occasional royal tour,” he wrote, “would not have been good enough for Elizabeth I!”

What’s more, he singled out Elizabeth II’s “style of speaking, which is frankly ‘a pain in the neck.’ Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text.… Even if the Queen feels compelled to read all her speeches, great and small, she must at least improve her method of reading them. With practice, even a prepared speech can be given an air of spontaneity.” In the spirit of what he described as “loyal and constructive criticism,” Altrincham observed that once she had “lost the bloom of youth,” her reputation would depend primarily on her personality. “She will have to say things which people can remember,” he wrote, “and do things which will make people sit up and take notice.”

His words drew a torrent of indignant criticism in the press and within the Establishment. The tabloids ran banner headlines about the “attack” on the Queen. The Sunday Times called Altrincham a cad and a coward, and Henry Fairlie wrote in the Mail that the Queen’s critic dared “to pit his infinitely tiny and temporary mind against the accumulated experience of centuries.” Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, dismissed Altrincham as “a very silly man.” B. K. Burbidge of the League of Empire Loyalists slapped Altrincham in the face during an encounter on a London street. The magistrate who fined Burbidge one pound for the assault couldn’t help sympathizing with the man’s anger, saying that “95 per cent of the population of this country are disgusted and offended by what was written.”

Inside the Palace, the essay was taken as constructive criticism. Martin Charteris privately described it as a “real watershed for the post-war monarchy” and said the author had performed a “terrific service.” By some accounts, Prince Philip—no fan of crusty courtiers—felt the same way. With help from her husband and various professionals such as the BBC’s David Attenborough and Antony Craxton, a friend of Philip’s from Gordonstoun days, the Queen improved her delivery of speeches, mainly by lowering her voice and smoothing out her clipped accent. But she continued to read her prepared scripts rather than risk violating her neutral position as monarch with a misspoken word. Contrary to Altrincham’s prediction, even after she had lost her youthful bloom, the public respected her stolid style, along with her self-effacing refusal to “make people sit up and take notice.”

Charteris’s gratitude for Altrincham’s wake-up call reflected other ways the Queen adapted to the times, democratizing some of her activities and eventually diversifying her staff. The following year marked the last of the elitist “presentation parties” for debutantes at Buckingham Palace, an antiquated upper-class ritual dating back to the court of George III, to be replaced by additional royal garden parties open to a wider spectrum of people.

While these changes were beginning to take shape behind the scenes, Malcolm Muggeridge added to the imbroglio in October 1957 by writing an essay titled “Does England Really Need a Queen?” in the American weekly magazine The Saturday Evening Post. He not only expanded his earlier themes of “royal soap opera,” he raised the ante with his sarcastic tone and blunt criticism of the Queen and those who revered her.

He reported that “those who mix socially with the royal family” are the most “contemptuously facetious” about the Queen. “It is the duchesses, not shop assistants,” he wrote, “who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal.” He said the Queen fulfilled her duties with “a certain sleep-walking quality about the gestures, movements and ceremonial.” Worse still, she was “a generator of snobbishness and a focus of sycophancy.”

Muggeridge got an even more vehement pummeling in the press than Altrincham. He was harassed on the street, his house was vandalized, and he received vitriolic hate mail, some of which contained excrement and razor blades. The BBC even temporarily banned him from its airwaves. When he returned, he became one of the network’s preeminent broadcasters.

ONE REASON FOR the intensity of the reaction was the article’s intentional timing to coincide with the Queen’s much anticipated visit to North America. Arriving in Canada on October 12 for a five-day visit, she made her first live television broadcast, speaking alternately in English and French to an audience of fourteen million out of Canada’s 16.5 million population. She used a TelePrompTer for the first time, which enabled her to look straight into the camera. She came across as “shy, a bit bashful and sometimes awkward,” but endearing because her performance “was so human,” according to The New York Times.

Perhaps the criticisms of Altrincham and Muggeridge had already sunk in, because she uncharacteristically began her seven-minute speech by telling her viewers, “I want to talk to you more personally.” She went on to say, in almost confidential fashion, “There are long periods when life seems a small dull round, a petty business with no point, and then suddenly we are caught up in some great event which gives us a glimpse of the solid and durable foundations of our existence.”

The following day she was the first sovereign to open the Canadian parliament. So Canadians could feel they were “taking part in a piece of Canada’s history,” she also agreed to television coverage of her speech from the throne in Ottawa’s Senate chamber.

The Queen was especially looking forward to her second trip to America. Writing to Anthony Eden, she said, “there does seem to be a much closer feeling between the U.S. and ourselves, especially since the Russian satellite [Sputnik] has come to shake everyone about their views on Russian scientific progress!” Unlike her lightning visit in 1951, this would be a full-dress affair: six days in Washington, New York, and Jamestown, Virginia, where she would celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first British colony in America.

She had an affectionate relationship with the sixty-seven-year-old American president that dated back to World War II when Eisenhower was in London as Supreme Allied Commander. He had enjoyed a “devoted friendship” with her parents, and he liked to recount how they had once arranged for him to have a special tour of the private areas of Windsor Castle. To ensure the general’s privacy, they had decided to remain in their apartments. But on the appointed day George VI had forgotten, and he and his family were on a terrace above the rose garden having tea with Margaret Rhodes at a table covered to the ground with a white tablecloth. As Eisenhower and his group approached, the King knew that their presence would stop the tour. “We all dived under the table and hid,” the Queen said years later. “If [Eisenhower] and his party had looked up … they would have seen a table shaking from the effect of the concerted and uncontrollable giggles of those sheltering beneath it,” recalled Margaret Rhodes. When George VI later recounted the story to Eisenhower, the general “was so staggered by the King of England hiding,” said Elizabeth II.

A crowd of ten thousand greeted the Queen and duke on their arrival in Virginia on October 16 for a day-long celebration in Jamestown and Williamsburg. They were accompanied by an entourage of sixty-six, including the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. In Williamsburg the Queen gave a brief speech from a balcony at the College of William and Mary, praising the “enlightened and skilled statesmen” who founded the American republic. “Lord what’s-his-name was way off base,” wrote The Washington Post. “She is no orator, but those who heard her today thought that there was a nice lilt to her voice.”

The following morning they flew to Washington on Eisenhower’s aircraft, the Columbine III, a swift and sleek propeller plane with four powerful engines on its long wings. As they waited to take off, Philip immersed himself in the sports section of the newspaper while Elizabeth II unlocked her monogrammed leather writing case with a small gold key and began writing postcards to her children. “Philip?” she suddenly said. Her husband kept reading. “Philip!” she repeated. He glanced up, startled. “Which engines do they start first on a big plane like this?” Her husband looked momentarily perplexed. “Come on now,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t wait until they actually start them, Philip!” He offered a guess, which turned out to be correct. (They went in sequence, first on one wing from the inner engine to the outer, then the inner followed by the outer on the other wing.) “He was flustered,” recalled Ruth Buchanan, wife of Wiley T. Buchanan, Jr., Eisenhower’s chief of protocol, who sat nearby. “It was so like what an ordinary wife would do when her husband wasn’t paying attention.”

Riding into the capital with the president and his wife, Mamie, in a bubble-top limousine accompanied by sixteen bands, they were cheered along the route by more than a million people who were undaunted by intermittent rain showers. The royal couple spent their four nights in the most elegant guest quarters in the recently renovated White House—the Rose Suite furnished in Federal style for the Queen (later the Queens’ Bedroom and Sitting Room, named in honor of all its royal guests) and the Lincoln Bedroom, with its eight-foot-long carved rosewood bed, for the Duke of Edinburgh.

Much of the visit was given over to the usual receptions, formal dinners at the White House and British embassy (complete with gold plates flown over from Buckingham Palace), and tours of local sights, several of which offered unguarded glimpses of the Queen, described in news accounts as “the little British sovereign” or “the little monarch.”

It was evident to Ruth Buchanan that the Queen was “very certain, and very comfortable in her role. But she didn’t let the barrier down. She would maintain a stance, and she was very much in control of what she did, although she did laugh at my husband’s jokes.” Once when Buchanan was waiting for her husband to escort the royal couple to their limousine, “I could hear her guffawing. You didn’t realize she had that hearty laugh. But the minute she rounded the corner and saw us, she just straightened up.”

British ambassador Harold Caccia threw a garden party for two thousand under five tents lined with fiberglass that shimmered like silk, preceded by a more exclusive meeting with eighty diplomats and their wives. During a tour of the National Gallery, the Queen confessed to its director, John Walker, that she had recently longed to buy a Monet at a London auction, but couldn’t afford the “staggering amount.”

Vice President Richard Nixon treated the royal couple to a luncheon with ninety-six guests in the orchid-bedecked old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol. It was their first encounter with the incisive but socially awkward vice president. Perhaps taking note of the recent criticism of the Queen, Nixon talked to her about speaking techniques. The next day he even sent her a book with some “rather startling ideas” that he thought could be helpful: The Art of Readable Writing, by noted language expert Dr. Rudolf Flesch, an advocate of “plain talk.”

On the third day the Queen indulged in some unusual departures from the normal run of activities. She had specifically asked to see an American football “match,” as she put it, so the White House arranged for her to sit in a “royal box” at the fifty yard line at the University of Maryland’s Byrd Stadium for a game against the University of North Carolina. On the way she spotted a Giant supermarket and asked if a visit might be arranged so she “could see how American housewives shop for food.”

To the cheers of 43,000 spectators, the Queen walked onto the field to chat with two opposing players, both strapping lads in crew cuts. Dressed in a $15,000 mink coat given to her by Mutation Mink Breeders Association, a group of American fur farmers, she watched the game intently but seemed “perturbed” whenever the players threw blocks. It was a quintessential American display: cheerleaders doing cartwheels, high-stepping drum majorettes, marching bands, and North Carolina girls costumed in large cigarette packs covering their heads and torsos, dancing as an announcer boasted about their state’s “parade of industries.”

While the royal pair was being entertained at halftime, security men raced back to the supermarket to arrange for a visit on the fly. After Maryland’s 21–7 victory, the motorcade arrived at the Queenstown Shopping Center at 5 P.M., to the amazement of hundreds of shoppers. Elizabeth II and Philip had never before seen a supermarket, a phenomenon then unknown in Britain, and their visit was noteworthy for its spontaneity and novelty.

With the curiosity of anthropologists and an informality they had not displayed publicly in Britain, they spent fifteen minutes shaking hands, quizzing customers, and inspecting the contents of shopping carts. “How nice that you can bring your children along,” said Elizabeth II, nodding toward the little seat in one housewife’s cart. Queen and consort were amazed not only at the quantities of food but the range of products—clothing, stationery, toiletries, even Halloween costumes. She took a particular interest in frozen chicken pot pies, while he nibbled on sample crackers with cheese and joked, “Good for mice!” They both heard about refrigeration techniques and were particularly intrigued by the checkout counters, which cashier David Ferris explained as the monarch walked through the lane. “Thank you for the tour,” the Queen said to supermarket manager Donald D’Avanzo. “I enjoyed it very much.” D’Avanzo announced afterward that he had been “amazed and scared.… It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

On their final day in Washington, the Queen and Philip made their only private visit of the entire tour, a sunny drive out to Virginia so she could inspect eighteen yearlings at the Middleburg Training Track. She spent nearly an hour looking at the horses and talking to the owners and their trainers. Elizabeth II’s host was the sportsman and philanthropist Paul Mellon, a friend and fellow thoroughbred breeder, who entertained her at tea that afternoon at his four-thousand-acre estate in nearby Upperville.

A far more exuberant welcome awaited Elizabeth II and Philip in New York City the next morning. The Queen had asked specifically to see Manhattan “as it should be approached” from the water, a vista she had been dreaming about since childhood. “Wheeeee!” she exclaimed as she caught her first glimpse of the glistening lower Manhattan skyline from the deck of a U.S. Army ferryboat. The sight reminded her, she said, of “a row of great jewels.”

A crowd of 1.25 million lined the streets from Battery Park to City Hall and northward to the Waldorf-Astoria, waving British and American flags and cheering her motorcade with shouts of “Hi Liz” and “Hooray for Prince Phil,” along with spontaneous bursts of “God Save the Queen.” Driving along Wall Street in Eisenhower’s bubble-top limousine, she and Philip passed through a blizzard of ticker tape, confetti, and torn-up phone books. As she looked up at the canyon of skyscrapers, she exclaimed, “I never realized they were so close together!”

She had only fifteen hours in the city—“a teaser,” she admitted—to fulfill her wish list and shake some three thousand hands. Wearing a dark blue satin cocktail dress and close-fitting pink velvet hat, she addressed the representatives of eighty-two countries in the United Nations General Assembly. At the conclusion of her six-minute speech praising the organization’s laudable ideals and urging all its member nations to persevere in the pursuit of peace, the audience of two thousand responded with “a thunderous standing ovation.” Afterward, she had an hour-long tour of the five-year-old U.N. headquarters, asking at one point how the thirty-nine-story glass Secretariat building “kept standing up.” During a reception with delegates, Philip talked to Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko about the recently launched Sputnik satellite that his wife had mentioned in her letter to Anthony Eden.

The royal couple used a Louis XV–style suite on the twenty-eighth floor of the Waldorf Towers as their temporary headquarters, and they were feted at two meals in the legendary hotel: a luncheon for 1,700 hosted by Mayor Robert Wagner, and a dinner for 4,500 given by the English-Speaking Union and the Pilgrims of the United States, both groups committed to Anglo-American amity. In between, the Queen took in the “tremendous” view from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building at twilight—another specific request—when “the evening sky was purple and the offices were still blazing, and the whole midtown skyline is composed of vast hanging sheets of exquisite lace,” in the words of British writer Alistair Cooke.

As the white-tie banquet began in the grand ballroom, the punishing schedule was beginning to take its toll, even on an energetic thirty-one-year-old Queen. A closed-circuit television set up for the six adjoining banquet rooms gave guests an unusual view of Elizabeth II in her three-inch-high diamond tiara and evening gown glittering with pastel paillettes. She was never supposed to be filmed in the act of eating, but there she was, on the TV screens, fork in left hand, eating striped bass with champagne sauce, filet of beef with truffle sauce, beignet potatoes, string beans almandine, and Waldorf savarin au rhum. Guests could watch her follow strict mealtime protocol, talking for the first two courses to her partner on the left, former U.S. ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas, then turning to the right at the main course to converse with Pilgrims president Hugh Bullock.

The New York Times noted that her speech was the “one time during the program … when the fatigue showed through.… She made no effort to force a smile … and although she stumbled over her text only once, her voice plainly showed it.” Despite her somber demeanor, she warmly praised the dinner’s two sponsors for their emphasis on the “common language and the heritage of history” between Britain and America, as well as their “conscious effort” to ensure that the two nations did not “take each other for granted.”

She had one more stop that night, a Royal Commonwealth ball for another 4,500 guests at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue. Protocol chief Wiley Buchanan marveled that despite her fatigue, she sat on the dais “straight as a ruler, not even touching the back of her chair.” As the Queen and Philip made their way to a waiting limousine well after midnight, she stopped frequently to speak to war veterans. One aviator blinded in World War I tried to get up from his wheelchair to greet her. “She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and told him that he should not rise,” recalled Buchanan. “She spoke to him for several moments, then moved on.”

Buchanan had arranged for a light to be placed on the floor of the royal couple’s car that was switched on for their drive to Idlewild Airport, illuminating the Queen’s dress and tiara for the throngs of spectators lining the streets of Manhattan and Queens. Many of the women wore bathrobes and had curlers in their hair. “Philip,” said Elizabeth II, “look at all those people in their nightclothes. I certainly wouldn’t come out in my nightclothes to see anyone drive by, no matter who it was!”

By 2 A.M. the Queen and Philip were on board the Seven Seas, a BOAC DC-7, for their nearly fourteen-hour flight home. “You both have captivated the people of our country by your charm and graciousness,” Eisenhower wrote in his farewell letter to the royal couple.

American and British papers pronounced the visit “extraordinarily successful” and a “tremendous American triumph.” No one was more pleased than Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who was due to follow his sovereign to Washington the next week for a round of meetings with Eisenhower. The Queen, Macmillan wrote in his diary, “has buried George III for good and all.” But the British people felt left out as they read about her impromptu forays, not to mention the extensive television coverage she had permitted. “Why did she have to cross the Atlantic to become real?” wondered the London Daily Herald.

THE QUEEN’S NEW reliance on television was no accident, and her husband had much to do with the change. Given Philip’s fascination with technology, it was only natural that he would see the potential of broadcasting for the monarchy. As early as November 1952 he had predicted that radio and television had “gone beyond the stage of being amusing and entertaining novelties.” He was the first member of the royal family to host his own television program, a documentary about his Commonwealth tour featuring film he had shot.

From the time of the coronation, Elizabeth II had been wary of the intrusiveness of TV cameras. In her letter to Eden before her North American trip, she confessed her trepidation, saying, “Television is the worst of all, but I suppose when one gets used to it, it is not so terrible as at first sight.” She had decided the previous summer to shift from radio and to televise her annual Christmas broadcast for the first time, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the inaugural radio broadcast by her grandfather, King George V. Days before her departure to Canada, she had even practiced with a TelePrompTer in a makeshift studio in Buckingham Palace. Philip, who had urged her to use the device, acted as her “producer” as she read an old speech. When she sounded flat, he spent a few moments with her, and on the second run-through she was reported to be “more vivacious,” nodding and smiling at appropriate moments.

The Canadian broadcast had been the Queen’s dry run for her live telecast at 3 P.M. on December 25, but she was no less apprehensive. It was her sixth Christmas message, which from the beginning had been prepared without benefit of “advice” from the government—the one predictable occasion during the year when she can talk directly to the people. She always takes great trouble over this personal homily, which reaffirms her religious beliefs and sense of duty as she seeks to inspire others to adhere to high standards and do good works. The message typically incorporates ideas from her private secretaries, but it is mainly written in close collaboration with Philip over a period of months, often building on a specific theme that can be linked to events in the preceding year.

Philip took a particularly active role in the 1957 telecast, bringing in his friend at the BBC, Antony Craxton. They chose the Long Library at Sandringham for its excellent acoustics and set up a small desk in front of a cabinet filled with Christmas cards and family pictures. An arrangement of holly on the desk concealed a microphone, and two cameras were set up, each with a TelePrompTer.

In addition to getting the knack of reading large type scrolling on a machine, the Queen studied an instructional film made by BBC announcer Sylvia Peters. Even after three rehearsals, Elizabeth II told a guest at the staff holiday party at Windsor Castle, “My husband seems to have found the secret of how to relax on television. I am still worried because I have not found the secret yet.” A few days before the broadcast, Craxton spent forty-five minutes with her, going over the script sentence by sentence.

The Queen spoke for seven minutes, interrupting her eye contact with the audience by occasionally looking at her sheaf of papers and turning over the pages periodically for effect. She smiled tentatively from time to time, and clasped her hands for emphasis. Television could help her be less of a “remote figure,” she said, and make her annual message to Britain and the Commonwealth “more personal and direct.” Yet she warned of the new medium’s dangers in the “speed at which things are changing all around us,” causing people to “feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard, how to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.”

The “inventions” themselves weren’t the problem, she added. Rather, “the trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery.” To uphold endangered “fundamental principles,” she called for a “special kind of courage … which makes us stand up for everything we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.”

“I cannot lead you into battle,” Elizabeth II said. “But I can do something else. I can give you my heart, and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.” As she signed off with her Christmas wishes, she glanced quickly toward her husband standing behind one of the cameras and flashed a luminous smile at her viewers.

An estimated thirty million people tuned in, and the press, especially in the United States, hailed her performance as an effective reply to her critics, a “post-Altrincham royal speech.” Her manner, said The New York Times, was “unstrained and natural.” “All her charm, grace and simplicity were there,” wrote a London Daily Express commentator. “I was moved … to the point of tears.” Harry Truman called her reference to the “unthinking people” a “lovely statement. We haven’t lost the ideals, but we’ve certainly been neglecting them.”

No Christmas message in the five decades since has had such an impact, or conveyed such surprisingly dark undertones. “The final draft was, in fact, Prince Philip’s,” Craxton wrote afterward. But it was also a product of ideas exchanged between the Queen and her husband. She has always taken care to avoid saying anything she does not believe, declining even to use the word “very” unless she means “very.” Her pledge of fealty to her people and plea to “stand up for what we believe to be right” were undeniably authentic, as were the deep spiritual threads running through the message.

A YEAR LATER the government permitted the State Opening of Parliament to be televised for the first time. (It had declined to do so in 1957 when the Queen announced a genuine reform originated by Macmillan and his ministers to create life peers, thereby admitting women to the House of Lords for the first time in their own right.) One of the great British spectacles, the opening of Parliament, is as much a made-for-television phenomenon as any event in the royal calendar. It also serves as a reminder of the Queen’s place as the “Crown in Parliament” by gathering the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the sovereign in one place, as the Queen reads out the government’s legislative program.

The ceremony itself draws on centuries of tradition and ageless rituals. The setting is always the House of Lords chamber, with its richly ornamented high ceilings, stained glass windows, and elaborately carved wood.

The day before the ceremony, the Imperial State Crown and seventeenth-century Sword of State are brought from the Tower of London to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen has a chance to get reaccustomed to having nearly three pounds sitting on her head. In the evening she often works at her desk wearing the purple velvet crown glittering with three thousand diamonds; one year her butler noted that she was wearing pink mule slippers as well.

On the morning of the opening, a horse-drawn carriage carries the crown and Sword of State, along with the Cap of Maintenance, a crimson velvet hat trimmed with white ermine, down the Mall to the Houses of Parliament. A second coach transports the gold maces. The Queen calls these symbols of royal power “the working pieces of kit,” and she makes certain that the front of the crown, with its huge Black Prince’s Ruby and Cullinan II diamond, faces forward in the carriage. “There is one thing to remember,” she said with a twinkle to Crown Jeweler David Thomas before he made his first trip to the Palace of Westminster with the priceless cargo. “The horses are always in the front of the carriage.”

Wearing a long white gown, jeweled Garter collar, elbow-length gloves, and diamond tiara, she and Prince Philip, as always in the uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, travel in the horse-drawn Irish State Coach to the Palace of Westminster with her Household Cavalry escort. In the Robing Room, adorned with frescoes depicting the Arthurian legend, she puts on her eighteen-foot-long scarlet velvet robe of state and her crown.

The House of Lords chamber is invariably packed, a tableau vivant of peers in their red robes with white fur collars (including, for the first time in 1958, fifteen recently appointed life peers, four of them women), bewigged justices draped in black and clustered on the large red hassock called the Woolsack, military officers, ecclesiastics, and ambassadors in white tie.

The processional is led by men with quaint medieval titles such as Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, Clarenceaux King of Arms, and Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, all decked out in gold-encrusted scarlet tabards, knee breeches, and silk stockings. Lining the route are the Queen’s bodyguards, the Gentlemen at Arms in helmets waving swan plumes, and the Yeomen of the Guard (also known as Beefeaters), wearing crimson and gold knee-length tunics, crimson knee breeches, white neck ruffs, and black Tudor bonnets.

Elizabeth II, attended by four page boys and two of her ladies-in-waiting, with Prince Philip clasping her raised left hand, makes a stately progress along the Royal Gallery into the chamber. She is preceded by two dignitaries holding the sword and the cap, which dangles from a long stick, as well as two Great Officers of State, the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain, walking backward. On the dot of 11:30 A.M., she arranges herself on her ornately gilded throne beneath a golden canopy, with Philip seated to her left, several inches lower.

Black Rod, an official representing the Queen, strides to the House of Commons, where the door is vigorously slammed in his face to show the independence of the lower house. (No monarch has been permitted in the House of Commons since 1642, when King Charles I barged in and tried to arrest five members.) After three loud knocks with his ebony staff, Black Rod is admitted to the chamber, where he commands the members to “attend Her Majesty immediately in the House of Peers.” Led by the prime minister, his cabinet, and the leader of the opposition, the members of Parliament crowd behind the Bar of the House of Lords, a wooden barrier near the entrance, where they are required to stand. Squeezed into a space roughly eighteen by twelve feet, the politicians bring an earthy and slightly raffish touch to the proceedings, “looking like culprits in a law court,” wrote American ambassador David Bruce.

The Lord Chancellor climbs the dais, reaches into a red silk bag, and hands the Queen the speech that has been prepared by the prime minister and his cabinet. Seldom taking more than fifteen minutes, she dutifully recites the government’s legislative program for the coming year. “I think I have made the dullest and most boring speech of my life,” she confided to Pietro Annigoni while sitting for him after the ceremony in 1969. “But it dealt with such dry material. One tries at least to put a little expression into one’s voice, but it’s not humanly possible to produce something even remotely lively.” Wearing the heavy crown is as tiring as it looks. Hours afterward, “my neck is still feeling the effects,” she once confessed.

At two minutes and ten seconds, her speech on October 28, 1958, was one of the shortest on record, with sentences she could actually read with conviction, mostly generalities about advancing the Commonwealth and supporting the United Nations and the Atlantic Alliance. She spoke of the historic significance of broadcasting the ceremony to enable “many millions of my subjects … to witness this renewal of the life of parliament.” She mentioned as well her planned visit “with my dear husband” to Canada the following summer and later in the year to Ghana, which had declared its independence from Britain in 1957.

BUT BEFORE THEY were to leave for Ghana, Philip set off again on another goodwill tour aboard Britannia, spending four months visiting India, Pakistan, Singapore, Brunei, Borneo, Hong Kong, the Solomon, Gilbert, and Ellice Islands in the Pacific, Panama, the Bahamas, and Bermuda. He returned at the end of April 1959, and soon afterward Elizabeth II got pregnant at last. Some years later the rumor arose that Prince Andrew, the child from this pregnancy, was fathered during her husband’s long absence by Henry Porchester, her good friend and fellow thoroughbred enthusiast. But given the timing of the baby’s arrival in mid-February 1960, the conception had to have occurred during the preceding May when the Queen and Philip “were scarcely separated,” according to subsequent research by gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, the repentant promoter of the original tale.

As soon as the Queen confirmed her condition, she sent Martin Charteris on a confidential mission. “I am going to have a baby, which I have been trying to do for some time,” she told her assistant private secretary, “and that means I won’t be able to go to Ghana as arranged. I want you to go and explain the situation to [President Kwame] Nkrumah and tell him to keep his mouth shut.”

She and Philip went ahead with their six-week trip across fifteen thousand miles of Canada, which included stops in every province and territory. As part of the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway with the United States, they invited the Eisenhowers to join them for luncheon aboard Britannia on June 26. Ten days later the royal couple touched down in Chicago for fourteen hours, and once again the president provided them with a limousine, this time a convertible. Mayor Richard Daley rolled the red carpet across Lake Shore Drive, introduced Elizabeth II to his seven children, and proclaimed, “Chicago is yours!” Eisenhower wrote the Queen that his chauffeur reported that “he had never witnessed greater enthusiasm among the crowds lining the streets.”

She was suffering from morning sickness that she managed to conceal, although during her journey through the Yukon Territory she took to her bed for several days. Her press office said she had a minor stomach ailment, and once she had rested, she resumed her travels. A week after her return to London on August 1, the Palace announced that she was expecting, and she headed to Balmoral for her annual holiday.

Harold Macmillan, who had delayed calling an election until the Queen’s return, used her as a lure to pressure Eisenhower to visit Britain as part of his planned world tour. The prime minister knew that a visit from the American president could help bolster his party’s prospects in the coming campaign. When Eisenhower wavered, Macmillan sent word that if he bypassed the United Kingdom, “this will be an insult to the Queen.” She had no intention of returning to London, so Eisenhower took up her invitation to spend two days at Balmoral.

Prince Philip met Ike, Mamie, and their son John at Aberdeen airport on August 28 and accompanied them to Balmoral. The presidential party quickly fell into the rhythms of the Highlands, socializing with the Queen’s family as well as friends including the Earl of Westmorland, Lord and Lady Porchester, and Dominic Elliot, son of the 5th Earl of Minto and a friend of Princess Margaret.

“The Queen and Eisenhower got on famously,” Elliot recalled. “The President was quite a character, a marvelous chap, and he fitted in very well.” While Ike didn’t join the men shooting out on the grouse moors, the Queen did treat him to a picnic luncheon near Loch Muick, including drop scones that she prepared on a griddle, drawing on the lessons she had learned from the cook at Windsor Castle during the war. He was so impressed that he asked for the recipe, and several months later she obliged, writing everything out in longhand and apologizing that the quantity was for sixteen people. “When there are fewer I generally put in less flour and milk,” she wrote helpfully, adding that “the mixture needs a great deal of beating.”

The Queen Mother gave the Eisenhowers a jolly cocktail party at Birkhall before they departed. The president declared the trip “perfect in every respect,” and thanked the Queen in particular for her parting gift of grouse from the day’s shoot. He and the prime minister had the birds for dinner the following evening at Chequers.

Macmillan and the Tories won a decisive victory six weeks later in the general election. The prime minister wrote the Queen, who was by then nearly five months pregnant, that there was no reason for her to return to London prematurely. Because of her condition, she missed the State Opening of Parliament, and the Lord Chancellor read the speech instead.

While her own trip to Ghana was necessarily postponed, Philip went as her representative in late November, in part to assuage Nkrumah, who was deeply disappointed by the loss of the sovereign’s visit. Philip gave eight speeches in six days, ranging across promoting academic freedom in universities, encouraging scientific research, and inspiring young people to become doctors and nurses. His praise for the country’s “great national awakening” went down well, and he promised to return with his wife in 1961.

Once the Queen hit the six-month mark in her pregnancy, she withdrew from her official duties. But one bit of unfinished business needed to be resolved. When Macmillan visited her at Sandringham in early January 1960, she told him that she needed to revisit the issue of her family name that had been irritating her husband since she decided in 1952 to use Windsor rather than her husband’s Mountbatten. “The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband—with whom she is desperately in love,” the prime minister wrote in his diary. “What upsets me … is the Prince’s almost brutal attitude to the Queen over all this.” Somewhat cryptically he added, “I shall never forget what she said to me that Sunday night at Sandringham.”

Macmillan left shortly afterward for a trip to Africa, leaving the resolution of the Queen’s tricky family problem to Rab Butler, his deputy prime minister, and Lord Kilmuir, who served as the government’s legal arbiter as the Lord Chancellor. Butler sent a telegram to Macmillan in Johannesburg on January 27 saying that the Queen had “absolutely set her heart” on making a change for Philip’s sake. By one account, Butler confided to a friend that Elizabeth II had been “in tears.”

Following discussions among her private secretaries and government ministers, a formula emerged in which the royal family would continue to be called “The House and Family of Windsor,” but the Queen’s “de-royalised” descendants—starting with any grandchildren who lacked the designation of “royal highness”—would adopt the surname “Mountbatten-Windsor.” Those in the immediate line of succession, including all of the Queen’s children, would continue to be called “Windsor.” It seemed clear-cut, but thirteen years later Princess Anne, at the urging of Dickie and Prince Charles, would contravene the policy on her wedding day by signing the marriage register as “Mountbatten-Windsor.”

Elizabeth II told Macmillan that the compromise was “a great load off her mind.” She announced it in a statement on February 8 saying, “The Queen has had this in mind for a long time and it is close to her heart.” On February 19, 1960, she gave birth to her second son at Buckingham Palace, with the usual crowds along the railings to cheer the news. In a gesture of wifely devotion, Elizabeth II named the boy after the father Philip had lost fifteen years earlier.