Elizabeth the Queen (3 page)

Her politeness was badly rewarded when Stephen decided to commit two protocol infractions simultaneously: asking the Queen a question and mentioning the possibility that she gambled at the racetrack. “Did you put a wager on Street Sense at Churchill Downs?” he inquired, referring to the winner of the Kentucky Derby, which she had attended for the first time the previous Saturday. With masterful diplomatic deflection, she ignored the question, but lingered. Something about the phrasing must have piqued her interest. Stephen and I had watched the race on television; as a fan of the turf for many years, he knew how to “read a race,” seeing maneuvers on the track that utterly eluded me. He made a quick observation about the race, and Elizabeth II replied that it was startling to see the winning horse covered with so much mud afterward—the result of running on dirt rather than the grass tracks she was accustomed to seeing in England.

Evidently relieved to be discussing horses, one of her favorite topics, she went back and forth with my husband, replaying the race and its thrilling finish, in which Street Sense went from nineteenth place to first. “You could see the yellow cap!” she said excitedly. Stephen told her that the handicapper at his newspaper,
The Washington Examiner
, had picked the top three horses in their order of finish. “That’s really quite extraordinary,” the Queen said. And then she was gone.

I had not anticipated the animated gestures, the expressive blue eyes, the flashing smile. For a minute or so, I had glimpsed the gaiety so often obscured by the dignity of the Queen’s role. While I didn’t realize it at the time, I had also witnessed her control and skill. By ignoring my husband’s inappropriate question about making a bet, she didn’t make him feel ill at ease. She simply let it slide away, and moved the conversation back to comfortable terms.

Throughout her reign, Elizabeth II has managed to float above politics and, for the most part, controversy. If not exactly a Hollywood star, she is a major celebrity. She has long been the most popular member of the royal family on Google, generating considerably more searches, although her grandsons, Prince William and Prince Harry (along with Catherine Middleton after she and William became engaged), have followed her closely and periodically surpassed her in the Google Trends data since 2004. She has even been portrayed on
The Simpsons
by comedian Eddie Izzard.

With her good health and her determination to keep fit, the Queen could continue to carry out her duties effectively for a decade or more, leaving the prospect of a short reign for Prince Charles, the next in line, who will turn sixty-four in 2012 during his mother’s Diamond Jubilee celebrating her sixty years on the throne.

It was probably fitting that the second time I chatted with the Queen was with a group dedicated to Anglo-American fellowship, the Pilgrims, at a reception for some six hundred members and guests that she hosted at St. James’s Palace in London in June 2009. I had been working on this biography for more than a year. My admittance card also contained a slip of paper assigning me to the crimson and gilt Throne Room, specifically to “Group Five,” led by General Sir Richard Dannatt, then chief of the General Staff of the British Army.

Frequently in large receptions, people are selected in advance and clustered in small groups to be presented to Elizabeth II. For the Pilgrims, she would greet about a hundred or so, and General Dannatt would make the introductions for my group. This time, she offered a black-gloved hand, while her ubiquitous Launer handbag dangled from her other arm. I knew she had been briefed several months earlier about this book, and her press secretary, who stood nearby, had been told I would be attending the gathering. But many people had passed before the Queen’s gaze.

I told her that it was good to see her again in an Anglo-American setting, having previously met her in Washington. “Is that what brought you over here?” she asked. “No, my daughter is getting married here in London,” I replied. “When is the wedding?” asked the Queen. “The Fourth of July,” I replied. Yet again I saw those twinkling eyes. “Oh,” she said, “that’s a little dangerous!” “I hope all is forgiven,” I replied. Another smile, and once more, she moved on.

His “steadfastness”
had been her model
.

Princess Elizabeth watching her father reading documents from his government boxes, April 1942.
Lisa Sheridan/Getty Images

ONE

A Royal Education

I
T 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.”