?100, the Queen funded an extensive renovation, including the installation of bathrooms and electricity, a project that would take three years.
It wouldn’t do for the Queen Mother to retreat in mourning as Queen Victoria had done after the death of Prince Albert, so Churchill met with her in the autumn of 1952 to urge her to continue the public service that had earned worldwide admiration and to help her daughter carry out her duties. She agreed, in effect, to assume the role of national grandmother, always smiling and twinkling, a patron of charities and goodwill ambassador for her country and the monarchy, carrying out her essential credo: “The point of human life and living [is] to give and to create new goodness all the time.”
Cecil Beaton called her “the great mother figure and nannie to us all.… The warmth of her sympathy bathes us and wraps us in a counterpane by the fireside.” She combined an ability to connect instantly with virtually anyone and a flair for high drama, “like a great musical comedy actress in the 1930s descending the stairs,” said Sir Roy Strong, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. No one looked askance when she wore pearls while fishing in Scottish rivers or arrived late for engagements in what Beaton once described as a “pink cushiony cloud.”
Her destiny was to remain single, and to deny herself the love of another man, although few could have predicted that she would be a widow for fully half of her life. She needed to find compensations beyond her public duties, so the Queen permitted—in fact indulged with generous financial support—her mother to live a carefree and extravagant private life marked by nonstop entertaining and the stimulation of a lively group of friends.
Mother and daughter spoke nearly every day on the telephone. When the Queen placed the call, the Palace operator said to her mother, “Good morning, Your Majesty, Her Majesty is on the line for Your Majesty,” which became a standing joke among friends and courtiers. They usually exchanged news about horses and racing, as well as gossip and family matters. “They were great confidantes,” recalled the Queen Mother’s long-serving lady- in-waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. “The Queen could talk to her about her troubles. Queen Elizabeth was aware of the tremendous responsibility the Queen had. She and the King had had it, so she knew the pressures.”
The Queen Mother was in many ways “an Edwardian lady with rigid views,” recalled Campbell-Preston. “A lot of the importance the Queen attached to tradition and doing things the right way came from her mother,” said a former household official. As a consequence, the Queen Mother was a brake on changes to the status quo proposed by Prince Philip and senior advisers. “The Queen Mother was always in the equation,” said another former member of the household. “The Queen would ask, ‘Does Queen Elizabeth know about this?’ ”
There were inevitable comparisons—not always flattering—between the staid young Queen, trapped within the restraints of neutrality and propriety, and the spirited dowager who had the freedom to display her enjoyment and the gaiety to light up a room. The two women deferred to each other in private, although only the Queen Mother was required to curtsy. Still, by June 1952, Richard Molyneux, a former equerry to Queen Mary, reported that during a visit to Windsor Castle, the Queen was “very much the Sovereign. She enters the room at least ten yards ahead of her husband or mother.”
MUCH OF THE Queen’s first year on the throne was devoted to preparing for her coronation on Tuesday, June 2, 1953. The biggest question was whether to let the ceremony be televised, and her initial decision, supported by Churchill, was to keep the lights and cameras away, fearing an intrusion on the sanctity of the rituals. But after the ban on televising was announced in October, the Palace faced an outcry from broadcasters as well as the public over being excluded from such a significant ceremony.
The Queen yielded after recognizing that her subjects wanted to see her crowned, so she agreed to a compromise permitting live coverage of everything except the most sacred moments, including her anointing and taking Communion, and excluding any close-ups as well. In her first Christmas radio broadcast she declared with evident satisfaction that during the coronation “millions outside Westminster Abbey will hear the promises and prayers being offered up within its walls, and see much of the ancient ceremony.… I want to ask you all, whatever your religion may be, to pray for me on that day—to pray that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making, and that I may faithfully serve Him and you, all the days of my life.”
That autumn, Elizabeth II also made a conciliatory gesture toward her husband by announcing that during the State Opening of Parliament he should “henceforth have, hold and enjoy the Place, Pre-eminence and Precedence next to Her Majesty.” When she opened Parliament for the first time in November, the Duke of Edinburgh sat in the Chair of State to the left and several inches below her throne in the House of Lords, just as Prince Albert had done. Unlike her father’s hesitant delivery, Elizabeth II made a flawless seven-minute address, which was written by Churchill. Ever observant, Cecil Beaton noted that her eyes were “not those of a busy, harassed person.”
The honor given Prince Philip in Parliament would not be repeated in Westminster Abbey the following June. At the Queen’s suggestion he was made chairman of the committee to oversee the coronation ceremony, but he would not walk by her side. “We took it for granted that she would be alone,” recalled Gay Charteris. “That must have been hard for him. It was how it was done. She is the monarch. Yet if she had been a man, the wife would have been there.” Such was the case in 1937 when Queen Elizabeth was first anointed on her uncovered head, and then crowned with her husband. But by tradition, the Queen’s consort is neither crowned nor anointed.
Two months before the big celebration, on March 24, 1953, Queen Mary died in her sleep at age eighty-five. She received all the suitable honors at Westminster Hall followed by a funeral at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. Her son the Duke of Windsor attended, but the Queen did not include him in a dinner that evening, nor did she invite him to the coronation. She agreed with Churchill’s advice that it would be “quite inappropriate for a King who had abdicated.” The embittered duke wrote to his wife, “What a smug stinking lot my relations are.”
The buildup to the coronation pulled the British together in a burst of patriotism and great expectations, as the country began to emerge from postwar rationing and economic stagnation. Princess Margaret said it was “like a phoenix-time. Everything was being raised from the ashes. There was this gorgeous-looking lovely young lady, and nothing to stop anything getting better and better.” Churchill’s notion of a new Elizabethan Age may have been an illusion, but for a time it caught the imagination of the British public and emphasized the importance of the monarch, in the words of Rebecca West, as “the emblem of the state, the symbol of our national life, the guardian of our self-respect.”
For weeks, the Queen applied herself to learning every nuance of the three-hour service. She met several times with Geoffrey Fisher, the ninety-ninth Archbishop of Canterbury, who instructed her in the spiritual significance of the various rites and gave her prayers to say. She practiced her lines and her steps every day in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace. Tied to her shoulders were sheets stitched together and augmented with weights to simulate her heavy robe and train. She sat at her desk wearing the five-pound St. Edward’s Crown dating from the coronation of Charles II, and listening to recordings of her father’s coronation.
The 16th Duke of Norfolk, a small, ruddy, and highly efficient peer who carried the additional title of Earl Marshal, was responsible for choreographing the ceremony (an ironic coincidence, since he was a Roman Catholic supervising a deeply Protestant service). His wife, Lavinia, the Duchess of Norfolk, stood in for the Queen at numerous rehearsals in Westminster Abbey, several of which were watched intently by Elizabeth II. The Queen’s six maids of honor, unmarried daughters of the highest-ranking hereditary peers (dukes, earls, and marquesses) who were responsible for carrying the train, also rehearsed frequently in the Abbey and had one trial run at the Palace. When asked whether she would like to take a break midway through the service the Queen replied, “I’ll be all right. I’m as strong as a horse.”
An estimated one million people streamed into London to witness the pageantry, including forty thousand Americans. The official delegation from the United States was led by General George Marshall and included Earl Warren, governor of California, and General Omar Bradley. Also in the crowd was twenty-four-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier—the future wife of President John F. Kennedy—then a reporter for the
The night before the coronation, hundreds of thousands of spectators endured unseasonably cold temperatures, lashing wind, and downpours to stake out positions along the route of the procession, which began at 9 A.M. The parade included twenty-nine bands and twenty-seven carriages, as well as thirteen thousand soldiers representing some fifty countries, among them Indians, Pakistanis, Malayans, Fijians, Australians, and Canadians. Queen Salote of Tonga, a British territory in the South Pacific, was the runaway crowd pleaser, oblivious to the weather in her open landau, “a great big, warm personality” who was “swathed in purple silk and with a
