Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

ONE

A Royal Education

IT WAS A FOOTMAN WHO BROUGHT THE NEWS TO TEN-YEAR-OLD Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor on December 10, 1936. Her father had become an accidental king just four days before his forty-first birthday when his older brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, a twice-divorced American. Edward VIII had been sovereign only ten months after taking the throne following the death of his father, King George V, making him, according to one mordant joke, “the only monarch in history to abandon the ship of state to sign on as third mate on a Baltimore tramp.”

“Does that mean that you will have to be the next queen?” asked Elizabeth’s younger sister, Margaret Rose (as she was called in her childhood). “Yes, someday,” Elizabeth replied. “Poor you,” said Margaret Rose.

Although the two princesses had been the focus of fascination by the press and the public, they had led a carefree and insulated life surrounded by governesses, nannies, maids, dogs, and ponies. They spent idyllic months in the English and Scottish countryside playing games like “catching the days”—running around plucking autumn leaves from the air as they were falling. Their spirited Scottish nanny, Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, had managed to give them a taste of ordinary life by occasionally taking them around London by tube and bus, but mostly they remained inside the royal bubble.

Before the arrival of Margaret, Elizabeth spent four years as an only—and somewhat precocious—child, born on the rainy night of April 21, 1926. Winston Churchill, on first meeting the two-year-old princess, extravagantly detected “an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” Crawfie noted that she was “neat and methodical … like her father,” obliging, eager to do her best, and happiest when she was busy. She also showed an early ability to compartmentalize—a trait that would later help her cope with the demands of her position. Recalled Lady Mary Clayton, a cousin eight years her senior: “She liked to imagine herself as a pony or a horse. When she was doing that and someone called her and she didn’t answer right away, she would then say, ‘I couldn’t answer you as a pony.’ ”

The abdication crisis threw the family into turmoil, not only because it was a scandal but because it was antithetical to all the rules of succession. While Elizabeth’s father had been known as “Bertie” (for Albert), he chose to be called George VI to send a message of stability and continuity with his father. (His wife, who was crowned by his side, would be known as Queen Elizabeth.) But Bertie had not been groomed for the role. He was in tears when he talked to his mother about his new responsibilities. “I never wanted this to happen,” he told his cousin Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten. “I’ve never even seen a State Paper. I’m only a Naval Officer, it’s the only thing I know about.” The new King was reserved by nature, somewhat frail physically, and plagued by anxiety. He suffered from a severe stammer that led to frequent frustration, culminating in explosions of temper known as “gnashes.”

Yet he was profoundly dutiful, and he doggedly set about his kingly tasks while ensuring that his little Lilibet—her name within the family—would be ready to succeed him in ways he had not been. On his accession she became “heiress presumptive,” rather than “heiress apparent,” on the off chance that her parents could produce a son. But Elizabeth and Margaret Rose had been born by cesarean section, and in those days a third operation would have been considered too risky for their mother. According to custom, Lilibet would publicly refer to her mother and father as “the King and Queen,” but privately they were still Mummy and Papa.

When Helen Mirren was studying for her role in 2006’s The Queen, she watched a twenty-second piece of film repeatedly because she found it so revealing. “It was when the Queen was eleven or twelve,” Mirren recalled, “and she got out of one of those huge black cars. There were big men waiting for her, and she extended her hand with a look of gravity and duty. She was doing what she thought she had to do, and she was doing it beautifully.”

“I have a feeling that in the end probably that training is the answer to a great many things,” the Queen said on the eve of her fortieth year as monarch. “You can do a lot if you are properly trained, and I hope I have been.” Her formal education was spotty by today’s standards. Women of her class and generation were typically schooled at home, with greater emphasis on the practical than the academic. “It was unheard of for girls to go to university unless they were very intellectual,” said Lilibet’s cousin Patricia Mountbatten. While Crawfie capably taught history, geography, grammar, literature, poetry, and composition, she was “hopeless at math,” said Mary Clayton, who had also been taught by Crawfie. Additional governesses were brought in for instruction in music, dancing, and French.

Elizabeth was not expected to excel, much less to be intellectual. She had no classmates against whom to measure her progress, nor batteries of challenging examinations. Her father’s only injunction to Crawfie when she joined the household in 1932 had been to teach his daughters, then six and two, “to write a decent hand.” Elizabeth developed flowing and clear handwriting similar to that of her mother and sister, although with a bolder flourish. But Crawfie felt a larger need to fill her charge with knowledge “as fast as I can pour it in.” She introduced Lilibet to the Children’s Newspaper, a current events chronicle that laid the groundwork for following political news in The Times and on BBC radio, prompting one Palace adviser to observe that at seventeen the princess had “a first-rate knowledge of state and current affairs.”

Throughout her girlhood, Elizabeth had time blocked out each day for “silent reading” of books by Stevenson, Austen, Kipling, the Brontës, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, and others in the standard canon. Her preference, then and as an adult, was for historical fiction, particularly about “the corners of the Commonwealth and the people who live there,” said Mark Collins, director of the Commonwealth Foundation. Decades later, when she conferred an honor on J. K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series, the Queen told the author that her extensive reading in childhood “stood me in good stead because I read quite quickly now. I have to read a lot.”

Once she became first in line to the throne, Elizabeth’s curriculum intensified and broadened. Her most significant tutor was Sir Henry Marten, the vice provost of Eton College, the venerable boys’ boarding school down the hill from Windsor Castle whose graduates were known as Old Etonians. Marten had coauthored The Groundwork of British History, a standard school textbook, but he was hardly a dry academic. A sixty-six-year-old bachelor with a moon face and gleaming pate, he habitually chewed a corner of his handkerchief and kept a pet raven in a study so heaped with books that Crawfie likened them to stalagmites. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who would serve as Queen Elizabeth II’s fourth prime minister, remembered Marten as “a dramatic, racy, enthusiastic teacher” who humanized figures of history.

Beginning in 1939, when Elizabeth was thirteen, she and Crawfie went by carriage to Marten’s study twice a week so she could be instructed in history and the intricacies of the British constitution. The princess was exceedingly shy at first, often glancing imploringly at Crawfie for reassurance. Marten could scarcely look Elizabeth in the eye, and he lapsed into calling her “Gentlemen,” thinking he was with his Eton boys. But before long she felt “entirely at home with him,” recalled Crawfie, and they developed “a rather charming friendship.”

Marten imposed a rigorous curriculum built around the daunting three-volume The Law and Custom of the Constitution by Sir William Anson. Also on her reading list were English Social History by G. M. Trevelyan, Imperial Commonwealth by Lord Elton, and The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot, the gold standard for constitutional interpretation that both her father and grandfather had studied. Marten even included a course on American history. “Hide nothing,” Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, private secretary to King George VI, had told Marten when asked about instructing the princess on the crown’s role in the constitution.

Unlike the written American Constitution, which spells everything out, the British version is an accumulation of laws and unwritten traditions and precedents. It is inherently malleable and dependent on people making judgments, and even revising the rules, as events occur. Anson called it a “somewhat rambling structure … like a house which many successive owners have altered.” The constitutional monarch’s duties and prerogatives are vague. Authority rests more in what the king doesn’t do than what he does. The sovereign is compelled by the constitution to sign all laws passed by Parliament; the concept of a veto is unthinkable, but the possibility remains.

Elizabeth studied Anson for six years, painstakingly underlining and annotating the dense text in pencil. According to biographer Robert Lacey, who examined the faded volumes in the Eton library, she took note of Anson’s assertion that a more complex constitution offers greater guarantees of liberty. In the description of Anglo-Saxon monarchy as “a consultative and tentative absolutism” she underlined “consultative” and “tentative.” Marten schooled her in the process of legislation, and the sweeping nature of Parliament’s power. Elizabeth’s immersion in the “procedural minutiae” was such that, in Lacey’s view, “it was as if she were studying to be Speaker [of the House of Commons], not queen.” Prime ministers would later be impressed by the mastery of constitutional fine points in her unexpectedly probing questions.

When Elizabeth turned sixteen, her parents hired Marie-Antoinette de Bellaigue, a sophisticated Belgian vicomtesse educated in Paris, to teach French literature and history. Called “Toni” by the two princesses, she set a high standard and compelled them to speak French with her during meals. Elizabeth developed a fluency that impressed even Parisians, who praised her for speaking with “cool clear precision” on her visit to their city in 1948, at age twenty-two.

De Bellaigue worked in tandem with Marten, who suggested essay topics for Elizabeth to write in French. The governess later recounted that Marten had taught the future Queen “to appraise both sides of a question, thus using [her] judgment.” In de Bellaigue’s view, Lilibet “had from the beginning a positive good judgment. She had an instinct for the right thing. She was her simple self, ‘très naturelle.’ And there was always a strong sense of duty mixed with joie de vivre in the pattern of her character.”

Elizabeth’s mother had an enormous influence on the development of her character and personality. Born Elizabeth Bowes Lyon to the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, she had grown up in an aristocratic Scottish-English family of nine children. In 1929, Time magazine had pronounced her a “fresh, buxom altogether ‘jolly’ little duchess.” She read widely and avidly, with a particular fondness for P. G. Wodehouse. Somewhat improbably, she was also a fan of Damon Runyon’s stories about New York gangsters and molls, once writing to a friend in the author’s vernacular: “The way that Dame Pearl gets a ripple on, there was a baby for you—Oh boy.”

Queen Elizabeth taught her daughter to read at age five and devoted considerable time to reading aloud the children’s classics. As soon as Lilibet could write, her mother encouraged her to begin the lifelong habit of recording her impressions in a diary each night. During her father’s coronation in 1937, the eleven-year-old princess kept a lively journal, “From Lilibet by Herself.” “The arches and beams at the top [of Westminster Abbey] were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned,” she wrote. When her mother was crowned and the white-gloved peeresses put on their coronets simultaneously, “it looked wonderful to see arms and coronets hovering in the air and then the arms disappear as if by magic.”

AT AN EARLY AGE, Elizabeth’s parents began arranging for her to sit for portraits. She would repeat this ritual more than 140 times throughout her life, making her the most painted monarch in history. For the royal family, portraits have long been an essential part of image making, helping to shape the way the public sees its regal icons. When asked if she kept her portraits, the Queen replied, “No, none. They’re all painted for other people.”

Hungarian Alexius de László, a widely admired society portrait artist, was hired to capture Lilibet in oils for the first time. She was just seven. László found her to be “intelligent and full of character,” although he conceded she was “very sleepy and restless.” Aristocratic matrons enjoyed the company of the smooth-talking sixty-four-year-old artist, but Elizabeth thought he was “horrid,” as she recalled years later with a grimace. “He was one of those people who wanted you to sit permanently looking at you.” The resulting ethereal image—a favorite of her mother’s—shows the young princess in ruffled silk, with blond curls and wide blue eyes, holding a basket of flowers. Yet her unsmiling expression betrays a whiff of exasperation.

The second artist to capture Elizabeth’s image was another Hungarian, sculptor Zsigmond Strobl, who had eighteen sessions with her from 1936 to 1938. She was older, by then the heiress presumptive, and eager to chat with the Hungarian journalist who joined the sittings to help her pass the time in conversation. Being painted or sculpted from life reinforced the virtue of patience. As Queen she would also find her sittings to be an oasis of uncluttered time when she could unwind, connect with a stranger in a private and unthreatening way, speak expansively—sometimes quite personally—and even crack jokes. “It’s quite nice,” she said during a sitting before her eightieth birthday as she flashed an impish smile. “Usually one just sits, and people can’t get at you because one’s busy doing nothing.”

A favorite topic during the Strobl sculpting sessions was the world of horses, which had become Elizabeth’s full-blown passion as well as another opportunity for learning. Her father bred and raced thoroughbreds, continuing a royal tradition, and he introduced her to all aspects of the equine world, starting with her first riding lesson at age three. By 1938 she began learning how to ride sidesaddle, a necessary skill for the yearly Trooping the Colour ceremony celebrating the sovereign’s birthday when she would be required to ride in a red military tunic, long navy blue riding skirt, and black tricorn cap at the head of a parade of more than 1,400 soldiers.

Her twice weekly riding lessons helped her develop athleticism and strength and taught her how to keep a cool head in moments of danger. She experienced the uninhibited joy of vaulting fences and cantering across fields and through woodlands—sensations that would temporarily liberate her from the restrictions of her official life. Although she tried fox hunting while in her teens—first with the Garth Foxhounds in Berkshire, then with the Beaufort Hunt in Gloucestershire—she was already captivated by breeding and racing.

During girlhood visits with her father to his stables at Hampton Court and Sandringham, she took in the rudiments of a breeding operation, and she began to master the genealogical permutations of temperament and physical conformation vital to producing successful horses. She saw the formidable stallions as well as mares and their foals, and she watched young horses training on the Wiltshire “gallops,” great swaths of springy turf on the crests of rolling hills that mimic the straightaways and curves of a racetrack. She came to know the grooms and stable boys, the trainers and jockeys—an unaffected community that views life differently because of the primacy of their animals. As she told artist Frolic Weymouth years later, “horses are the greatest levelers in the world.”

She also had a natural rapport with dogs. In 1933 her father became fascinated with Welsh corgis—a breed with pointed snout, outsize ears, and stumpy legs—and gave her Dookie, the first in a long line of corgis that became her trademark. She has had as many as a dozen at a time, and they often precede her like a “moving carpet,” as Diana, Princess of Wales, put it. The dogs served as icebreakers, although they could sometimes intimidate guests or employees with their snappish personalities. “They’re heelers,” Elizabeth II once explained. “They’re cattle dogs so they bite,” adding with a sly smile, “They chase people.”

Even before the family moved to Buckingham Palace in 1937 when Lilibet’s father took the throne, making friends was complicated for the young princess. When she became heiress presumptive, the little girls who visited had to curtsy and call her “Ma’am.” “It was a very inhibiting experience,” recalled Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, who was invited to play and take tea at Buckingham Palace. During one visit by the royal family to the 12th Earl and Countess of Airlie’s Cortachy Castle in Scotland, the Airlies’ son, Jamie Ogilvy, took Princess Elizabeth and tossed her onto a sofa. Moments later, his father came up, punched him in the stomach, and said, “Never do that to royalty.” “The Princess didn’t mind,” recalled Ogilvy, “but that was the structure in which she was brought up.”

As Crawfie observed, life in the Palace brought down “a glass curtain between you and the outer world.” Buckingham Palace is an overwhelming place, with 775 rooms, more the head office of the monarchy than a home. Lilibet spent many hours gazing out the windows watching the world pass below her, wondering about the lives of the “real people.”

To expand her horizons beyond the family, and to diminish the sense of isolation, Crawfie organized a troop of Girl Guides (the equivalent of American Girl Scouts) at the Palace. The original group of twenty included relatives such as Patricia Mountbatten, the “quite fierce” (in Lilibet’s view) leader of the Kingfisher patrol to whom the heiress presumptive actually had to defer, and aristocratic friends such as Lady Camilla “Micky” Wallop (daughter of the 9th Earl of Portsmouth), as well as daughters of chauffeurs and other Palace employees.

Using either a designated room in the Palace or the summerhouse in the forty-acre garden as the headquarters, the girls built campfires, watched birds, and played team games. The future Queen was rough-and-ready. She “was brought up knowing she mustn’t cry in public, which becomes a way of life,” Patricia Mountbatten recalled. “As a child she was told, ‘If you fall down, you don’t make a face.’ ”

DIGNITARIES WHO VISITED the King and Queen were introduced to the princesses, who were expected to make intelligent conversation with them during dinner. Elizabeth was as interested in people as her mother, but she lacked Queen Elizabeth’s spontaneous enjoyment of others. Queen Elizabeth helped Lilibet overcome her diffidence by role-playing exercises in which she would pretend to be the Archbishop of Canterbury or another distinguished guest. The Queen drilled in her own mother’s maxim that “if you find something or somebody a bore, the fault lies in you.” She also taught her daughters how to withstand the stares of three thousand people during garden parties at Buckingham Palace, and how to walk at a measured pace. As Lilibet lectured her sister, “You must not be in too much of a hurry to get through the crowds to the tea table. That’s not polite.”

Through her chatty and descriptive letters while she and the King were on tour overseas, Queen Elizabeth introduced her daughter to the wider world and the exacting demands of royal service. When their parents traveled to Canada and the United States in June 1939, Lilibet and Margaret Rose kept track of their progress on maps displayed in their schoolroom. Their mother wrote that Americans were “particularly easy and pleasant … and delighted to find that we were ordinary & fairly polite people with a big job of work.” She revealed that “sometimes I have tears in my eyes when one sees the emotion in their faces” but also confessed to the strain of being “almost continually ‘on show’ … there comes a moment when one’s resistance nearly goes.”

With her mother’s guidance, Lilibet also developed a deeply held Christian faith. Queen Elizabeth read Bible stories and instructed her daughter in the collects and psalms from the Book of Common Prayer. “The Queen knows the prayer book backwards,” said George Carey, the 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury and later Lord Carey of Clifton. Queen Elizabeth showed her devotion by kneeling to pray each night, a practice her daughter was said to continue. “She comes from a generation in which kneeling by the side of the bed is quite natural,” said Carey. “Attitude helps you to pray, and if you are on your knees it creates a mood of submission before the Almighty.”

Queen Elizabeth also instructed her daughter in practical matters. Clarissa Eden, the widow of Sir Anthony Eden (the 1st Earl of Avon), Elizabeth II’s second prime minister, marveled that the Queen would “sit up at a slight distance from the chair back. She can sit like that for hours.” This habit she learned early from her mother, who firmly believed “a lady’s back should never touch the back of her chair.”

As a little girl, Lilibet had a hot temper—a family trait shared not only by her father, but George V and Edward VII—that her mother’s soothing personality tamed through example and exhortation. Queen Elizabeth’s mother, the Countess of Strathmore, “brought up her children and they brought up their children to be in control of their temper and moods, and to never allow their moods to dominate,” said Mary Clayton. Queen Elizabeth’s enlightened tenets for parenting were grounded in encouragement and understanding: avoid ridicule, discourage showing off, speak quietly, and “never shout or frighten” or “you lose their delightful trust in you.” As she wrote in one letter to Lilibet, “remember to keep your temper & your word & be loving.”

With her 150 dolls and lineup of thirty foot-high toy horses saddled and bridled for play, her every creature comfort cared for, and her meals served by footmen in scarlet livery, how did Elizabeth avoid being spoiled and arrogant? “She was brought up by strict nannies,” explained a friend from the age of five. “I remember once when Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret came to tea, and Princess Elizabeth put her elbows on the table. Mrs. Knight said, ‘Take them off.’ I didn’t expect a princess would have to be told, but she was brought up properly, as a nanny would bring you up, and the Queen has never broken the rules.”

Clara “Allah” Knight was the family’s Hertfordshire-born nursery nanny, who along with Lilibet’s Scottish nursemaid, Margaret “Bobo” MacDonald, regulated the quotidian details of life outside the classroom, and spent far more time with the two princesses than did their parents. Bobo—described by valet John Dean as “small, very smart, and rather peremptory”—would remain in the Queen’s service until her death in 1993. “The Queen just enjoyed talking to a sensible Scottish countrywoman,” said Mary Clayton.

To encourage tidiness and frugality, Allah and Bobo taught Lilibet to keep her belongings in neat rows, to save wrapping paper and ribbon in fastidiously folded parcels and carefully wound rolls, and to turn off unneeded lights. The princess received a weekly allowance of 5 shillings, a useful if artificial discipline, since her annual income was £6,000 a year. When she undressed, she obediently folded her clothes and placed them under a lace and net “clothes tidy,” never leaving anything on the floor or thrown over a chair. Allah and Bobo also helped stop her nail biting, although they didn’t entirely extinguish what Helen Mirren called Elizabeth’s “internal fast beat” behind her tranquil demeanor: a tendency in adulthood to fidget with her engagement and wedding rings.

The other crucial enforcer in Elizabeth’s life was her paternal grandmother, Queen Mary, the consort of King George V. She was a stiff and formal figure who wore a tiara every night at dinner, even when she and the King were dining alone. She was unable to “look anyone straight in the face,” noted photographer Cecil Beaton. “Queen Mary wore tiaras like she wore her toques,” observed Deborah Mitford, the Duchess of Devonshire, “as if they were part of her being.” Her manner was thoroughly proper, her dedication to duty absolute. Not long before she died at age eighty-five, Queen Mary touchingly said she wished that just once she had climbed over a fence.

A stickler for protocol, Queen Mary insisted Lilibet and Margaret Rose curtsy to her whenever they met. She rigorously suppressed her emotions—exhibiting, at most, a slight shift of her lips to indicate amusement—and impressed on Lilibet that it was inappropriate for a monarch to smile in public. When Lilibet spoke of “all the people who’ll be waiting to see us outside” a concert, her grandmother punished her self-important remark by taking her home immediately. Lilibet absorbed even the difficult lessons readily, in part because she and her grandmother were similarly self-contained, focused, and industrious. In the years to come she would frequently quote her stern grandmother.

Churchill observed that despite Queen Mary’s rigidity and apparent intolerance of change, “new ideas held no terrors for her.” Her paradoxical open-mindedness injected rigor into Lilibet’s education when Queen Elizabeth was inclined to relax her daughters’ routine, on the theory that they should have “a happy childhood which they can always look back on.” Through a back channel to Crawfie, Queen Mary suggested revisions to the curriculum and schedules, raised the caliber of the literature selections, and encouraged learning poetry by heart as “wonderful memory training.” She took Lilibet and Margaret on cultural excursions to museums and galleries, the British Mint, the Bank of England, Greenwich Palace, and the Tower of London.

Queen Mary’s passion was history—specifically the genealogical heritage of the royal family—and for Lilibet she was a living link to the past. Her grandfather, Prince Adolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, was one of the sons of King George III; Queen Victoria had been her godmother; and she knew two of Britain’s most noteworthy prime ministers, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. She could tell tales of the magnificent Delhi Durbar of 1911, when she and King George V were celebrated as Emperor and Empress of India, and she could describe the origins and particulars of the royal jewelry that she unabashedly flaunted, sometimes wearing the spectacular Cullinan I and II diamonds (530.2 and 317.4 carats respectively) as a brooch between her ample bosom.

In Lilibet’s pantheon of mentors and tutors, her father had a singular place. George VI alone could tell her what it was like to be monarch, what the challenges were, and how best to meet them. She was brighter than her father, who labored to commit facts and figures to memory, and more even-tempered, but she shared his shyness and his sense of dedication. She watched with admiration his struggle to overcome his stammer for his annual Christmas broadcast, and she noted his diligence in jotting down ideas on a pad he kept nearby during meals. His “steadfastness,” she later said, had been her model.

SHE LEARNED TIMELESS lessons about perseverance, courage, and duty from her father’s conduct during World War II. Lilibet was only thirteen when Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Six weeks later, she was in Scotland with Margaret Rose and Crawfie, reading “At a Solemn Musick” by Milton as word came over the radio that the Nazis had sunk the battleship Royal Oak, one of the first major blows to Britain’s morale. The King opened a spacious house on his Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands to children and their mothers who had been evacuated from the port city of Glasgow ahead of Nazi bombing. Crawfie directed the princesses to serve them tea, and to talk to the women about their sons and husbands serving in the armed forces.

On May 10, 1940, German troops surged into Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, and Neville Chamberlain resigned as Britain’s prime minister, to be succeeded by Winston Churchill. Lilibet wept while listening to Chamberlain’s resignation speech on the radio; it was clear that after nearly nine months of tense anticipation, the real war was beginning. Two days later, the princesses were sent to the safety of the medieval fortress of Windsor Castle twenty-one miles from the center of London, where they would live within its thirteen acres surrounded by thick walls until the defeat of Germany in May 1945. For security reasons, their location was kept secret, although they were able to venture beyond the castle.

Throughout the war the King and Queen spent their days either at Buckingham Palace or traveling around the country on the ten-car Royal Train, visiting troops, factories, hospitals, and bombed-out neighborhoods. Many nights they would join their daughters at Windsor and sleep in a cavernous shelter built under the castle’s Brunswick Tower or in a fortified ground-floor apartment in the Victoria Tower. Their resolve to continue working in London exposed them to considerable danger and endeared them to the British populace. After Germany launched its Luftwaffe bombing campaign against British cities and military targets in the summer of 1940, Buckingham Palace was hit nine times. The second bomb, which fell in mid-September, destroyed the Palace chapel and nearly killed both the King and Queen.

Like the rest of her generation, Elizabeth was thrown by the war into an extraordinary situation that deeply affected her adolescence. But contrary to what some observers have said, she wasn’t consigned to “purdah” or kept in a state of suspended animation. If anything, her life in the castle gave her an early introduction to the male world she would inhabit as Queen, since she mixed frequently with the young officers in the Grenadier Guards assigned to protect the royal family. (The Grenadiers, founded in 1656, are one of the seven prestigious regiments of the Household Division under the aegis of the monarch. The four other regiments of foot guards are the Coldstream, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, along with two Household Cavalry regiments, the Life Guards and what became known as the Blues and Royals after the merger of the Royal Horse Guards and the Royal Dragoons.) “I was brought up amongst men,” her sister, Margaret, would later say.

At age sixteen, Elizabeth was named an honorary colonel of the Grenadiers and applied her gimlet eye to the first of many regimental inspections. Her rigorous critique prompted one of the majors to advise Crawfie to tactfully remind the princess that “the first requisite of a really good officer is to be able to temper justice with mercy.”

The officers came to tea as well as more formal luncheons where Elizabeth arranged the seating and developed her skills as a hostess. The group included Lord Rupert Nevill and Hugh Euston (later the Duke of Grafton), who would become lifelong friends. Other guests included officers who were convalescing or on leave, among them airmen from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. From having been “a rather shy little girl,” Elizabeth “became a very charming young person able to cope with any situation without awkwardness,” Crawfie observed. “She was an excellent conversationalist.”

Elizabeth and her sister “never forgot there was a war on,” said Antoinette de Bellaigue, “but there was no feeling of doom and gloom.” Windsor’s windows were blacked out, the castle was reinforced with barbed wire and protected by batteries of antiaircraft guns, the vast rooms were illuminated by bare low-wattage bulbs, and hot water was so limited that lines were drawn at five inches in all bathtubs—although the family ate well, with supplies of meat and game from various royal estates. The princesses became accustomed to what their mother described as “the whistle & scream of bombs,” yet she fretted that they were “looking different” because “the noise of guns is so heavy” and so much ordnance landed in the vicinity—nearly three hundred high-explosive bombs by the war’s end. “Though they are so good & composed,” she wrote to Queen Mary, “there is always the listening, & occasionally a leap behind the door, and it does become a strain.”

Several times the family escaped for brief holidays at Balmoral, where Queen Elizabeth was delighted to see her daughters revive with “pink cheeks and good appetites” after walks in the crisp air on the heather-covered hills rising above Royal Deeside, the valley along the River Dee that had been the sentimental heart of the family since the time of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The heiress presumptive’s great-great-grandparents had bought the Balmoral estate in 1852 after falling in love with the Scottish Highlands. “All seemed to breathe freedom and peace,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.”

Victoria and Albert tore down the existing residence and built a larger Balmoral castle of gleaming off-white granite that would weather into a gray hue, with a hundred-foot-high tower, turrets and gables, all according to Albert’s own exacting adaptation of the baronial style. They decked out the interior with a riot of different-colored tartan plaid rugs, curtains, carpets, and linoleum, thistle-patterned wallpaper, landscape paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer, and stags’ heads lining the hallways. Large windows captured vistas of lawns, gardens, pine forests, and hills up the valley of the Dee—the outdoor paradise that shaped their family expeditions.

In the four decades since Victoria’s death in 1901, remarkably little had changed at Balmoral, and her descendants felt the magic of the place intensely. It was the sanctuary where the family had spent two months each autumn, a sacrosanct interlude they would resume at war’s end. During their quick wartime Highland respites Lilibet shot her first stag and caught her first salmon—a modest eight pounds. The King, his wife, daughters, and courtiers amused themselves after dinner with games of charades lasting until midnight, highlighted by Tommy Lascelles imitating a St. Bernard so noisily that he lost his voice.

In the early part of the war, the King and Queen kept up their social life with periodic balls at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. One dance in December 1943 for “young men and maidens” at Windsor lasted until 4 A.M. The King was famous for being “the best waltzer in the world,” and he let loose on the dance floor, even leading a conga line through the glittering state rooms. Later in the war, Elizabeth slipped into London from time to time—for the occasional dinner party, and to attend her first opera, La Bohème, performed by the Sadler’s Wells Company at the New Theatre.

Crawfie worked to keep the atmosphere light at the castle by organizing games of hide and seek and sardines as well as treasure hunts with the officers, and she set up a Madrigal Society so the girls could sing with guardsmen and boys from Eton. At Christmas the princesses appeared with local schoolchildren in the annual pantomime, a full-scale production staged in the Waterloo Chamber. Elizabeth was called on to sing and tap-dance before audiences of more than five hundred, including townspeople and soldiers. Crawfie remarked on her poise, and her riding instructor, Horace Smith, was struck by her “confidence and vigour,” as well as her droll delivery of comic lines.

Periodically word came that officers she knew had died in battle—including, in 1942, her uncle Prince George, the Duke of Kent, in a plane crash while serving in the Royal Air Force, leaving three children, the youngest only seven weeks old. “What a beastly time it is for people growing up,” Queen Elizabeth wrote to her brother David in 1943. “Lilibet meets young Grenadiers at Windsor and then they get killed, & it is horrid for someone so young.” While later in life friends would remark that the Queen found it nearly impossible to write condolence notes about the deaths of those close to her, during the war she readily would take up her pen to write to an officer’s mother, “and give her a little picture of how much she had appreciated him at Windsor and what they had talked about,” Crawfie recalled.

Antoinette de Bellaigue, Marion Crawford, and Henry Marten continued their instruction during the war years. Marten traveled up the hill to the castle in a dog cart, his Gladstone bag bulging with the princess’s textbooks. Sir Owen Morshead, the royal librarian, augmented the curriculum with regular tours of Windsor’s collections, including artifacts such as the shirt worn by King Charles I when he was beheaded, and the lead shot that killed Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. (The priceless paintings had been removed from their frames and sent away for safekeeping.) The future Queen would later say that she considered Windsor to be her home because it represented “all the happiest memories of childhood.”

The Girl Guides kept up their activities as well, giving Elizabeth an unexpectedly democratic experience when refugees from London’s bomb-ravaged East End were taken in by families on the Windsor estate and joined the troop. The girls earned their cooking badges, with instruction from a castle housekeeper, by baking cakes and scones (a talent Elizabeth would later display for a U.S. president) and making stew and soup. With their Cockney accents and rough ways, the refugees gave the future Queen no deference, calling her Lilibet, the nickname even daughters of aristocrats were forbidden to use, and compelling her to wash dishes in an oily tub of water and clean up the charred remains of campfires.

The most unusual—and memorable—training received by Elizabeth was a three-week stint she did in 1945 when she was eighteen, at the Mechanical Transport Training Centre run by the Auxiliary Territorial Service. The skills she acquired there figure in a pivotal scene in The Queen when Helen Mirren confidently drives a Land Rover across the hills of Balmoral, only to run aground on a rock while fording the River Dee. In a phone call to Thomas, her head ghillie, she says briskly, “I think I’ve broken the prop-shaft.” “Are you sure, Ma’am?” he replies. “Yes perfectly,” says the Queen. “The front one, not the rear. I’ve lost the four-wheel drive. You forget, I used to be a mechanic during the war.”

Although the scene was invented, her automobile expertise was a genuine source of pride for Elizabeth II. She told Labour politician Barbara Castle more than two decades after the war that her ATS training was the only time she had ever been able to measure herself against her contemporaries. The other eleven young women at the training center were actually several years older, but Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor wore the same drab uniform and was given the same instruction: learning to drive a three-ton truck in heavy London traffic, changing wheels and spark plugs, understanding the workings of ignition systems, bleeding brakes, and stripping down engines. Her face and hands got grimy from the grease, and she had to salute her senior officers. But the experience gave her confidence and expert driving skills. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” she told a friend. “Everything I learnt was brand new to me—all the oddities of the insides of a car.”

With the exception of her first tightly scripted radio broadcast in 1940 to children displaced by the war—a sentimental speech delivered in a little-girl voice after numerous rehearsals to master her breathing and phrasing—Elizabeth carried out few official duties until the last years of the war. In 1944 she traveled to Wales with the King and Queen to visit miners, gave her first public speeches in London at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, launched her first battleship, and attended her first official dinner at Buckingham Palace in honor of the prime ministers of the British Dominions.

When England celebrated Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945, Elizabeth joined her family and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to greet the cheering throngs. That night, she and Margaret Rose escaped the confines of the Palace with Crawfie, Toni de Bellaigue, and the King’s equerry as their chaperones. Among the group of sixteen were their cousin Margaret Rhodes and several guards officers, including Henry Porchester, who would become her lifelong friend and closest adviser on horse breeding and racing. Proudly wearing her ATS uniform, the future Queen linked arms with her friends and surged through the crowds, tearing along St. James’s Street, and joyfully dancing the conga, the Lambeth Walk, and the hokey-cokey. When they returned to the Palace railings, the princesses joined the crowds shouting, “We want the King; we want the Queen,” and cheered when their parents appeared on the balcony. Elizabeth and Margaret Rose slipped back into the Palace through a garden gate, and Queen Elizabeth “provided us with sandwiches she made herself,” recalled Toni de Bellaigue.

The following night, the revels continued. “Out in crowd again,” Elizabeth recorded in her diary. “Embankment, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, walked simply miles. Saw parents on balcony at 12:30 am—ate, partied, bed 3am!” “It was a unique burst of personal freedom,” wrote Margaret Rhodes, “a Cinderella moment in reverse, in which they could pretend that they were ordinary and unknown.”

Three months later, the group ventured out again to mark the victory over Japan. Once more they “walked miles,” Elizabeth wrote. “Ran through Ritz … drank in Dorchester, saw parents twice, miles away, so many people.” This time Elizabeth was recognized and cheered, although police cautioned the revelers that “the princesses wished to be treated as private individuals, and they were allowed to go on their way.”

Elizabeth was barely nineteen years old at the war’s end. Despite her years behind the walls of Windsor, she had experienced life in ways she certainly would not have if she had passed through adolescence in the conventional style of a young member of the royal family. She had seen her parents in a heroic new light as the embodiments of duty and brave service, she had felt the losses of wartime deaths, and she had been exposed to people outside the royal orbit. She had taken on new responsibilities and had caught a glimpse of what the next stage of her life would likely be, not only her role as heiress presumptive, but even more profoundly her personal life—a secret she held tight with the discretion that would characterize her conduct in the decades ahead. She had entered the war as a little girl, and now she was a young woman.