Elizabeth the Queen (9 page)

After the hour-long service, the bride and groom led a procession down the nave that included five kings, five queens, and eight princes and princesses, among them the crowned heads of Norway, Denmark, Romania, Greece, and Holland. Philip’s mother was present, but his three sisters and their German husbands were pointedly not invited. Also noticeably absent was the king’s brother, former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, and his wife the Duchess, for whom he had abdicated the throne. The estranged Windsors were living in Paris, unwelcome in London except for periodic visits. Although their exile may have seemed harsh, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and their advisers had seen no alternative. A king and former king living in the same country would have resulted in two rival courts.

While the bells of the Abbey pealed, Elizabeth and Philip were driven to Buckingham Palace in the Glass Coach, preceded and followed by the two regiments of the Household Cavalry on horseback, wearing full ceremonial dress: the Royal Horse Guards in their blue tunics, the Life Guards in red, all with white leather breeches, black thigh-high boots, shiny steel cuirasses, and gleaming helmets with either red or white plumes. It was the most elaborate public display since the war, and the crowds responded with cheers and thunderous applause. More than 100,000 people broke through police lines to surge toward the Palace railings, shouting, “We want Elizabeth! We want Philip.” When the royal family stepped out on the balcony to smile and wave, they received a “tumultuous expression of good will.”

As a concession to Britain’s hard times, only 150 guests attended the “wedding breakfast,” which was actually luncheon in the Ball Supper Room. The “austerity” menu featured
Filet de Sole Mountbatten, Perdreau en Casserole
, and
Bombe Glacée Princess Elizabeth
, served on plates of silver gilt (solid silver covered with gold) by footmen in scarlet livery. The tables were decorated with pink and white carnations, as well as small keepsake bouquets of myrtle and white Balmoral heather at each place setting. The bride and groom cut the wedding cake—four tiers standing nine feet high—with Philip’s Mountbatten sword.

The King didn’t subject himself to the strain of making a speech, celebrating the moment instead with a raised glass of champagne to “the bride.” After being showered with rose petals in the Palace forecourt, the newlyweds were transported in an open carriage drawn by four horses—“the bride snugly ensconced in a nest of hot-water bottles”—to Waterloo Station, crossing the Thames on Westminster Bridge, illuminated by streetlights in the gloaming. As they alighted on the red carpet at the station, Elizabeth’s beloved corgi, Susan, hopped out as her owner handed the leash to Cyril Dickman, the footman, who would accompany the couple on their honeymoon, along with John Dean, Bobo, and a detective.

They spent the first week at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, and more than two more weeks in snowbound seclusion at Birkhall, an early-eighteenth-century white stone lodge on the Balmoral estate, set in the woods on the banks of the River Muick. With its Victorian decor—pine furniture, tartan carpets, walls covered with Landseer paintings and Spy caricatures—and memories of childhood summers before her parents became King and Queen, Elizabeth could relax in a place she considered home. Dressed in army boots and a sleeveless leather jacket lined with wool, Elizabeth went deer stalking with her husband, feeling “like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles,” she wrote to her cousin Margaret Rhodes.

She also sent her parents tender letters thanking them for all they had given her, and the example they had set. “I only hope that I can bring up my children in the happy atmosphere of love and fairness which Margaret and I have grown up in,” she wrote, adding that she and her new husband “behave as though we had belonged to each other for years! Philip is an angel—he is so kind and thoughtful.” Philip revealed his carefully cloaked emotions when he wrote to his mother-in-law, “Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me.” He declared that his new wife was “the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me, and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.”

“The Queen in her own way
is immensely kind, but she
had too little time to fulfill
her family care.”

Princess Elizabeth with her first child and heir apparent, Prince Charles, November 1948.
Photograph by Cecil Beaton, Camera Press London

THREE

Destiny Calls

T
HE HONEYMOONERS WERE BACK IN
L
ONDON IN TIME FOR THE
fifty-second birthday of King George VI on December 14, ready to begin their new life. Elizabeth and Philip chose to live in Clarence House, the nineteenth-century residence adjacent to St. James’s Palace, just down the Mall from her parents. But the house needed extensive renovations, so they moved temporarily into an apartment in Buckingham Palace. For weekend getaways, they rented Windlesham Moor in Surrey, not far from Windsor. Philip had a paper-pushing job at the Admiralty on the other end of the Mall, where he would walk on the weekdays. Elizabeth was kept busy by Jock Colville, whose tutorial seemed to be yielding results. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had first spotted Elizabeth’s ability to ask “serious questions” during a visit to England in 1942, was delighted six years later when she came to Windsor Castle and found that the princess showed a keen interest in “social problems and how they were being handled.”

Colville’s biggest project was organizing Elizabeth and Philip’s first official visit to Paris in May 1948. During their four days in the city, the glamorous young couple proved effective at generating goodwill for Britain among the wary French. The crowds along the Champs-Élysées were so passionate in their cheering that Elizabeth’s eyes were “brimming with tears.” The British ambassador, Sir Oliver Harvey, noted that even the usually contemptuous communist newspapers “published good photographs and sympathetic accounts of the visit.”

Unknown to either the French or the British, Elizabeth was four months pregnant, and behind closed doors was suffering from nausea. Even so, she and Philip kept up an active social life. They went to the races at Epsom and Ascot and joined friends at restaurants, nightclubs, and dances. For a costume party at Coppins, the home of the Duchess of Kent, Elizabeth dressed “in black lace, with a large comb and mantilla, as an Infanta,” wrote diarist Chips Channon, and “danced every dance until nearly 5 a.m.” Philip “was wildly gay,” Channon observed, in a “policeman’s hat and hand-cuffs. He leapt about and jumped into the air as he greeted everybody.… He and Princess Elizabeth seemed supremely happy and often danced together.” When they were with friends such as Rupert Nevill and his wife, Micky, the former Camilla Wallop (who had been in Elizabeth’s Girl Guides troop), and John and Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple showed an easy affection toward each other. During a visit to the Brabournes in Kent, John said to Philip, “I never realized what lovely skin she has.” “Yes,” Philip replied, “she’s like that all over.”

In the early evening of November 14, 1948, word went out that Princess Elizabeth had gone into labor in her second-floor bedroom at Buckingham Palace, where a hospital suite had been prepared for the baby’s arrival. In attendance were four physicians led by gynecologist Sir William Gilliatt, and a midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Philip passed the time playing squash with three courtiers, beating each of them in turn. Around 9
P.M.
senior members of the household gathered in the Equerry’s Room, a ground-floor drawing room that was equipped with a well-stocked bar, and shortly afterward were told that Elizabeth had given birth to a seven-pound, six-ounce son at 9:14. They set to work writing “Prince” on telegrams and calling the Home Office, Prime Minister Attlee, and Winston Churchill, the leader of the opposition. “I knew she’d do it!” exclaimed Commander Richard Colville, press secretary to the King, exultant over the arrival of a male heir. “She’d never let us down.”

Ainslie, the Palace steward, phoned for “any spare pages to put their flippin’ skates on” as family members converged on the Equerry’s Room. Eighty-one-year-old Queen Mary brought her brother, the Earl of Athlone, and his wife, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone. “Glad it’s all over,” mumbled the earl. “All for the best, I suppose—horrid business.” After the elderly trio had been taken to see the newborn, they returned with the King and Queen as well as the doctors for a round of champagne. Sir John Weir, one of the official physicians to the royal family, confided to Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary, Major Thomas Harvey, that he’d “never been so pleased to see a male organ in all his life.” Queen Elizabeth was “beaming with happiness,” and George VI was “simply delighted by the success of everything.” Queen Mary, sitting in “the straightest-backed chair we could find,” was busy grilling Sir William Gilliatt “from A to Z.” Philip, still dressed in sneakers and sports clothes, joined his wife as her anesthesia wore off, presented her with a bouquet of roses and carnations, and gave her a kiss.

Shortly before midnight, the baby was brought to the ballroom for viewing by the courtiers. Thomas Harvey described him as “just a plasticene head emerging from a cocoon, with Nurse Rowe proudly standing guard: a simple little cot, with white blankets.… Poor little chap, two-and-a-half hours after being born, he was being looked at by outsiders—but with great affection and good-will.” Well-wishers who had been given the news of the heir’s birth by a policeman were still cheering along the Buckingham Palace railing. Finally Richard Colville and Lieutenant Michael Parker, Prince Philip’s equerry, persuaded them to go home.

Elizabeth and Philip named their son Charles Philip Arthur George. “I had no idea that one could be kept so busy in bed—there seems to be something happening all the time!” Elizabeth wrote to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge two weeks after giving birth. “I still find it hard to believe that I really have a baby of my own!” The new mother was particularly taken with her son’s “fine, long fingers—quite unlike mine and certainly unlike his father’s,” as she described them in a letter to her former music teacher, Mabel Lander. For nearly two months, the princess breast-fed her son until she fell ill with measles—one of several childhood diseases she had missed by not attending a school—and Charles had to be sent away temporarily so he wouldn’t catch the illness at such a young age.

I
N ADDITION TO
parenthood, Elizabeth and Philip were collaborating on the refurbishment of Clarence House. He took the lead on matters of design, orchestrating the placement of pictures on the walls, as he would do throughout their marriage, and indulging in his passion for technology by having a speaker system installed in their bedroom. She made practical suggestions, according to biographer Sarah Bradford, who recounted that “when someone complained about the smell of paint in the room, she said, ‘Put a bucket of hay in there and that’ll take it away.’ ” Elizabeth was sensitive about her husband’s need to assert himself in his domain. “Philip is terribly independent,” she had written to her mother during her honeymoon, adding that she wanted him to be “boss in his own home.”

They moved early in the summer of 1949, delighted at last to be in their own home together. They had adjacent bedrooms, connected by a door, his with masculine paneling, hers a feminine pink and blue, with canopy hangings “suspended from a crown” over the double bed. “In England the upper class always have had separate bedrooms,” explained their cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten (later Hicks). “You don’t want to be bothered with snoring, or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cozy you share your room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose.”