The Queen leaving the Belgian Embassy in London, 1963.
Copyright © 2012 by Sally Bedell Smith
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
From “The Opening of Parliament,”
MARY WILSON,
wife of Harold Wilson,
Prime Minister, 1964–70 and 1974–76
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in New Brunswick, Canada, during her Golden Jubilee celebrations, October 2002.
PREFACE
AT THE END OF THE WEDDING OF PRINCE WILLIAM AND CATHERINE Middleton on April 29, 2011, the radiant couple turned before walking down the aisle at Westminster Abbey and stood before his grandparents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. The newlyweds were celebrated for their romantic love match, and for the young prince’s determination to marry his soul mate despite her being a “commoner”—having neither royal nor aristocratic origins. The bride and groom gave a low curtsy and neck bow to the Queen, who looked sturdy and stoic at age eighty-five. She signaled her approval with an almost imperceptible nod.
Seventy-two years earlier the Queen had made a similarly independent decision about love. When she was only thirteen, on the first afternoon she spent with eighteen-year-old Prince Philip of Greece, a strikingly handsome but impecunious British naval officer in training, Elizabeth fell in love. Eight years later they married under the same Gothic arches of Westminster Abbey. While everything else in the life of Lilibet, as she was called, was laid out for her, she made the most important decision on her own, against the wishes of her mother, who preferred a titled English aristocrat. “She never looked at anyone else,” said Elizabeth’s cousin Margaret Rhodes.
It was a sign of remarkable certitude on the part of then-Princess Elizabeth, not to mention strength and confidence in a girl so young. But that unwavering decision is just one of many surprising aspects I discovered about the woman who has reigned for sixty years as Queen of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, along with fifteen other realms and fourteen territories around the world. Her role and how she manages to perform it seemed to me to defy rational explanation: a hereditary position consecrated by God, embodying a multicultural and multifaith nation far different from the homogenous land ruled by her predecessors over the thousand-year history of the British monarchy. I understood that much of her life is ceremonial, an unvarying routine of yearly set pieces that date from the time of Queen Victoria. A singular and internationally famous figure, Elizabeth II is the world’s longest-serving leader—seemingly as familiar, predictable, and unchanging as she is dutiful.
In her epic life, the Queen has played her part like a great actress—the only person about whom it can truly be said that all the world is a stage. Billions have watched her evolve from a beautiful ingenue to a businesslike working mother to a wise grandmother. When she was twenty-eight years old and had been on the throne for three years, her first private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, said, “People will not realize for years how intelligent she is.… Eventually it will become an accepted national fact.” Yet while her public persona conveys gravitas, she has concealed much of that intelligence, much of her personality and humor. Behind her enigmatic and dignified facade resides a largely unknown woman.
