With preternatural composure, her mid-twentieth-century successor set about her business, writing letters, telegrams, and memoranda—vivid proof, as Charteris recalled, that she had “seized her destiny with both hands.”
Queen Elizabeth II, age twenty-six, before the anointing at her coronation in Westminster Abbey, June 1953.
FOUR
“Ready, Girls?”
“WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO CALL YOURSELF?” ASKED MARTIN CHARTERIS, as Elizabeth came to grips with the loss of her father. “My own name, of course. What else?” she replied. But some clarification was necessary, since her mother had been called Queen Elizabeth. The new monarch would be Queen Elizabeth II (following her sixteenth-century predecessor, Elizabeth I) but she would be known as the Queen. Her mother would become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, rather than the more fusty Dowager Queen. Elizabeth II would be Queen Regnant, and her royal cypher E II R.
“It was all very sudden,” she recalled four decades later. Her task, she said, was “kind of taking it on, and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate, because I think continuity is important.”
Elizabeth II returned to England on the Argonaut that had flown her to Kenya only a week earlier. When the erstwhile princess walked by his seat several times, Philip’s valet John Dean noted that “she looked as if she might have been crying.” Mike Parker said Philip “was like the Rock of Gibraltar, comforting her as best he could.”
Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at London Airport near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a nineteen-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation of men in dark overcoats, top hats, and homburgs led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and his fellow government ministers stood bareheaded as she slowly shook hands with each of them, and they gave her deep bows. A Daimler bearing the sovereign’s coat of arms on its roof drove her to Clarence House, where eighty-four-year-old Queen Mary honored her by reversing roles, curtsying and kissing her hand, although she couldn’t help adding, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.”
The next day, the new Queen went to St. James’s Palace, the sovereign’s official residence. Built by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, the turreted red-brick complex in the heart of London was the home of the monarch until Queen Victoria moved to much larger Buckingham Palace. At St. James’s, Elizabeth II appeared for twenty minutes before several hundred members of the Accession Council, a ceremonial body including the Privy Council— the principal advisory group to the monarch drawn from senior ranks of politicians, the clergy, and the judiciary— along with other prominent officials from Britain and the Commonwealth. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701, she had been monarch since the moment of her father’s death, but the council was convened to hear her proclamation and religious oath. She would not be crowned until her coronation in sixteen months, but she was fully empowered to carry out her duties as sovereign.
The men of the council bowed simultaneously to the fortieth monarch since William the Conqueror took the English throne after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Elizabeth II declared in a clear voice that “by the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are the world over.… I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.”
As her husband escorted her out, by several accounts she was in tears. They drove to Sandringham to join the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in paying respects privately at the late King’s coffin before it was transported by train to London for the official lying in state at Westminster Hall, followed by the funeral and burial in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor on February 15. The most enduring image was of the three queens—Mary the grandmother, the Queen Mother, and Elizabeth II—standing by the catafalque with Princess Margaret, shrouded in opaque black veils to their waists.
In an unprecedented message to her countrymen, the Queen Mother asked that “protection and love” be given to her daughter “in the great and lonely station to which she has been called.” Privately, she wrote to Queen Mary, “I cannot bear to think of Lilibet, so young to bear such a burden.”
Churchill, who had first met Elizabeth II as a toddler, grieved over George VI and seemed nonplussed by the new sovereign. Jock Colville, who by then had returned to Churchill as private secretary, recalled that “I tried to cheer him up by saying how well he would get on with the new queen, but all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child.”
According to Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary Soames, “my father realized very quickly she was much more than that.” As Martin Charteris observed, “He was impressed by her. She was conscientious, she was well- informed, she was serious-minded. Within days of her Accession she was receiving prime ministers and presidents, ambassadors and High Commissioners … and doing so faultlessly.” The Queen recognized the change in herself, confiding to a friend, “Extraordinary thing, I no longer feel anxious or worried. I don’t know what it is—but I have lost all my timidity.”
With his gift for eloquence and keen sense of occasion, Churchill set the stage for what the press would optimistically herald as “a new Elizabethan age.” Britain was still gripped by shortages, with rationing of foodstuffs such as tea, sugar, and butter, while rubble from World War II bombing blighted the London landscape. The imperial decline was inexorable, and the fears of communist expansion around the world had ushered in the Cold War.
In a speech to the House of Commons five days after Elizabeth took the throne, Churchill described her as “a fair and youthful figure … the heir to all our traditions and glories,” assuming her position “at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.” He expressed hope that the new Queen would be “a signal for … a brightening salvation of the human scene.” A promising young Conservative politician named Margaret Thatcher had her own sanguine view, writing in a newspaper column that “if, as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.”
ON FEBRUARY 27 at 11 A.M., Elizabeth II presided over her first investiture in the vast ballroom at Buckingham Palace, honoring private citizens and members of the military with awards for exemplary service to their country. While the Queen hands out these honors known as the orders of chivalry, the government chooses the 2,500 individuals to be recognized each year. With Britain’s world role vastly diminished, investitures have helped sustain national pride, and the Queen has presided over these ceremonies with care and precision. By her sixtieth year on the throne, she had conferred more than 404,500 honors and awards, bestowing them in person over 610 times. “People need pats on the back sometimes,” she once said. “It’s a very dingy world otherwise.”
At each investiture she greets more than a hundred recipients individually and presents their medals or brooches (and in the case of knights, taps the kneeling men on the shoulders with a sword), offering personal
