Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

comments to all. The impressive hour-long ceremonies are attended by Yeomen of the Guard in red and gold uniforms and her Gurkha Orderly Officers.

The very first honor she bestowed on February 27 was the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration for valor in battle, to Private William Speakman of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He had shown “gallantry and utter contempt of personal danger” during “fierce hand-to-hand fighting” in Korea the previous November, when he led more than ten charges, sustaining serious wounds while inflicting “enormous losses to the enemy.” Speakman was one of only fifteen British subjects who received the award in the six decades after World War II.

Conferring that honor had special meaning for the new Queen, who had also become the head of the armed forces. Members of the military pledge their loyalty to the sovereign, not to the government, keeping their allegiance above politicians who come and go. In the years to come, Elizabeth II would personally approve the appointments to the highest ranks, sign all officers’ commissions, and serve as honorary colonel-in-chief of all seven regiments in the Household Division, the guardsmen designated as her personal troops.

By April, the royal family completed its move to Buckingham Palace, and the new Queen adapted to an office schedule that has scarcely varied throughout her reign. She awoke at 7:30 A.M. when a housemaid pulled open the curtains in her first-floor bedroom, and Bobo (the only member of the household to call her “Lilibet,” along with “my little lady”) carried in a “calling tray” with Earl Grey tea and Marie biscuits. Right behind Bobo, surging through the doorway, came the Queen’s pack of corgis, which had spent the night down the corridor in their room adjacent to the Page’s Pantry, each of them assigned a wicker dog basket. A footman had already given them their first walk of the day in the garden.

After bathing (in water kept at around seventy degrees), dressing, and having her hair styled and sprayed, Elizabeth II walked through her sitting room, often listening to the BBC on her portable radio along the way, for breakfast in her private dining room amid eighteenth-century paintings. The morning papers were arranged on a sideboard. Sporting Life was her first read (supplanted in later years by The Racing Post), with a focus on news of the turf, followed by the Daily Telegraph (including its two crossword puzzles that became a daily task, but never with a thesaurus) and The Times, plus a look at the Express, Mail, and Mirror tabloids. In the early days she tended to eat a boiled egg and toast with a pat of butter from the Windsor dairy stamped with her cypher, tossing scraps of bread to her eager dogs. She later replaced her cooked breakfast with tea and toast thinly spread with marmalade.

At nine o’clock sharp each morning, a Scottish bagpiper would play for fifteen minutes while marching under her window, skirling familiar Highland reels and strathspeys—a tradition at each of her palaces begun by Queen Victoria. By 10 A.M. Elizabeth II was at the desk by a tall window in her sitting room looking out over the Palace gardens. She sat on a mahogany Chippendale chair with a seat embroidered by her father (one of his hobbies had been needlework), surrounded by papers and books, family photos in silver frames, and oil paintings, including a portrait of Susan, her favorite corgi. There was a Hepplewhite mahogany bookcase, a satinwood chest of drawers, comfortable sofas, and vases of roses, narcissi, or other fresh-cut flowers. “I like my rooms to look really lived in,” she said.

On her desk were two telephones as well as an intercom, with buttons to summon her private secretaries— Tommy Lascelles and his deputies Michael Adeane, Martin Charteris, and Edward Ford—who came one by one, giving a brisk neck bow on arrival, bearing baskets of papers to be signed and discussed. Standing throughout the meeting, each man covered a different area of expertise, and their agendas ranged across schedules for domestic and foreign travel, ecclesiastical and military appointments, legislation before Parliament, and other issues of the day. Edward Ford called her “a bureaucrat’s dream. She was wonderful to work for, always so accessible.… You talked with her as you might talk to a friend who was staying for the weekend … ‘The prime minister is delayed, shall we put it off till tomorrow?’ … The whole conduct of affairs was very informal and relaxed, far more so than it had been with the King.”

She was also conscientious about dealing with correspondence from the public. She leafed through a stack of envelopes in a basket, reading quickly, and jotting notes for replies to be written either by her ladies-in-waiting or private secretaries. She once explained that she had always regarded letters as “rather personal to oneself, that people write them thinking that I’m going to open them and read them.” She said that the letters “give one an idea of what is worrying people.”

She was required to meet monthly for ten minutes with four government ministers from her Privy Council. In these meetings—always conducted with everyone standing up to keep the proceedings short—she would say “approved” to various government actions read out to her, mostly concerning regulations and government appointments.

Every day except Christmas and Easter—whether at home in London or Windsor, on vacation at Sandringham or Balmoral, weekends visiting friends, travels around the United Kingdom, or visits overseas—she attended to the red leather dispatch boxes of official government papers that could be unlocked only by her key plus three others kept by her private secretaries. Each box brimmed with Foreign Office cables, budget documents, cabinet minutes, orders requiring her signature, and classified intelligence reports.

A smaller evening box, delivered before dinner, contained a summary by the chief whip of the day’s activities in Parliament. Her stated preference: “a piece of 300 to 900 words … a ‘light’ approach is welcomed.” The parliamentary scribes complied with references to “low wattage” debates and descriptions of “shouts and jeers” as well as accolades for speeches of “wit, passion and stinging phrases.” If she were entertaining any politicians for dinner, according to one observer, she could be “as well informed as any of her guests that evening.”

The Queen customarily received a copy of the daily Court Circular, the official list of royal activities prepared by a Palace information officer that she would scrutinize for mistakes before its publication the next day in The Times and the Daily Telegraph. She made similar corrections and comments on government documents, all of which she signed and delivered to her private secretary’s office by 8 A.M. the next day. Michael Adeane estimated that she spent three hours daily doing her paperwork, and it was not unusual for her to be at her desk late into the evening.

For the weekends she received a larger box with enough material to keep her deskbound in the mornings, reading rapidly but thoroughly. Once while staying with some good friends, the Queen said, “I must go do my boxes.” “Oh must you ma’am?” said the friend. “If I missed one once, I would never get it straight again,” the Queen replied.

An essential part of her schedule was her series of private audiences in a sitting room on the ground floor of the Palace—“my way of meeting people, without anybody else listening,” she once explained. These sessions would give her “a very broad picture of what is actually going on, either in government or in the civil service.… The fact that there’s nobody else there gives them a feeling that they can say what they like.” She said that the confidentiality and resulting outspokenness helped form the “basis of where I get my information from.”

For ninety minutes or so on most mornings she would receive the credentials of newly appointed ambassadors in morning dress or native costume, and bid other envoys goodbye, meet with clergy, government officials, military officers, and distinguished citizens, sometimes using the time to confer honors privately rather than at the larger investiture ceremonies. All these encounters were guided by time-honored rules: waiting in the spacious and gilded Bow Room, the Queen pressing a buzzer, the doors thrown open, the announcement of the guest, one pace into the room followed by a bow or curtsy, three more paces and another bow or curtsy, the handshake and a conversation while standing or an invitation to sit and chat. All visitors were instructed in the protocol by ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and private secretaries, and the Queen read briefing papers about everyone she would meet. As if governed by a well-calibrated internal clock, she invariably knew the precise moment to end the conversation, which she would signal by extending her hand. She would then press a buzzer, summoning one of her senior staff to escort her guest from the room.

Even if she were dining either alone or with Prince Philip, the table in the dining room in her private apartment was set impeccably by footmen responsible for three separate pantries: glass, silver, and china. Yet another footman rolled the ancient wooden trolley with platters of food down long corridors from the basement kitchen on the other side of the Palace. To unwind before luncheon, Elizabeth II would have a gin and Dubonnet (half portions of each, with ice and lemon) and before dinner a strong gin martini, prepared neat, unlike Philip’s, which was an expertly mixed concoction in its own pitcher. The page, a senior footman, served the meal, which tended to be simple—grilled meat, chicken, or fish (always boned), vegetables from the Windsor farm, and cheese. Strong spices were forbidden, along with garlic, pasta with sauce, and raw shellfish such as oysters and mussels.