passion that came to him late in life. For his Tuesday evening meetings with the Queen, he always arrived at the Bow Room in a frock coat and top hat. The rules of the prime minister’s audience called for complete discretion, so few details of the discussions emerged. Years later when Elizabeth II was asked whose audiences she most enjoyed, she replied, “Winston of course, because it was always such fun.” Churchill’s reply to a query about their most frequent topic of discussion was “Oh, racing,” and his daughter Mary Soames concurred that “they spent a lot of the audience talking about horses.”
Palace courtiers escorted the prime minister to the audiences, waited in the room next door, and afterward enjoyed whisky and soda with him while chatting for a half hour or so. “I could not hear what they talked about,” Tommy Lascelles recorded in his diary, “but it was, more often than not, punctuated by peals of laughter, and Winston generally came out wiping his eyes. ‘She’s
The relationship between the Queen and Churchill prompted comparisons with Queen Victoria, who took the throne at age eighteen, and fifty-eight-year-old William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, her first prime minister. Melbourne’s manner, wrote Lytton Strachey, “mingled, with perfect facility, the watchfulness and the respect of a statesman and a courtier with the tender solicitude of a parent. He was at once reverential and affectionate, at once the servant and the guide.” Yet when asked directly by former courtier Richard Molyneux early in her reign whether Churchill treated her as Melbourne treated Victoria, Elizabeth II said, “Not a bit of it. I find him very obstinate.”
Nor was she shy about catching out her prime minister when he hadn’t adequately prepared, as happened when Churchill failed to read an important cable from the British ambassador in Iraq. “What did you think about that most interesting telegram from Baghdad?” the Queen asked him that Tuesday. He sheepishly admitted he hadn’t seen it, and returned to 10 Downing Street “in a frightful fury.” When he read the cable, he realized that it was indeed significant.
“If it was a case of teaching her, it was not done in a didactic way,” said Mary Soames. “She was very well versed in her constitutional position. My father knew very well what the position of constitutional monarch is vis a vis prime minister, cabinet and parliament. So it was a great advantage for her first prime minister to be somebody who really did know that. Most of them don’t, and his massive experience in government would surely have been a help. They talked about the present. They must have talked about people. Young though she was, she had experience. She traveled. She probably knew some of the people better than he, so she would have told him about them. What struck my father was her attentiveness. She has always paid attention to what she was doing. He never said she was lacking confidence.”
One small glimpse of Elizabeth II’s growing self-assurance came when Churchill was finishing his memoirs of World War II and asked her permission to publish two letters he had written to her father. She granted his request but observed that his language was “rather rough on the Poles” and asked that “in the interests of international amity” his words “be toned down a bit.” Churchill readily changed the original version of the letter he had written a decade earlier.
In the weeks before the coronation, the seventy-eight-year-old prime minister had assumed a greater workload than usual when Anthony Eden had a botched gall bladder operation, causing him to fly to Boston for extensive repair surgery and a long recovery in the United States. Although Eden was foreign secretary, he functioned as Churchill’s deputy. In the view of Clementine Churchill, “the strain” of the additional burdens “took its toll” on her husband. While Eden was overseas, Churchill suffered a stroke after a dinner in honor of the Italian prime minister on June 23. Amazingly, since his mind remained sharp, Churchill and his aides were able to conceal his paralytic symptoms as “fatigue,” keeping the truth about his illness under wraps.
The Queen kept informed about Churchill’s condition, writing a lighthearted letter to buoy his spirits, and inviting him in September to join her at the Doncaster races to watch the St. Leger, followed by a weekend at Balmoral. He made a surprisingly rapid recovery, although his condition was still frail. When the prime minister lingered in the rear of the royal box at the racetrack, the Queen said to him, “They want you.” He appeared at the front, he later told his doctor, and “got as much cheering as she did.”
After a period of rest in the south of France, Churchill was back at work by October, making speeches and presiding over cabinet meetings. But he tired easily, and his memory had slipped. It was obviously time for his retirement, but the Queen declined to use their weekly audience to apply any pressure. Churchill made a series of pledges to Eden that he would step down on a certain date, only to find one excuse after another to extend his time in office. In the view of Eden’s wife, Clarissa, the prime minister “prevaricated continuously for nearly two years.”
BESIDES DEALING WITH Churchill’s illness and recovery, the young Queen became embroiled that summer in a highly sensitive family matter with constitutional implications. Princess Margaret had fallen in love and was determined to marry one of the royal household’s most trusted employees, thirty-eight-year-old Group Captain Peter Townsend, who had been working for the family since 1944. Not only was he sixteen years her senior, he was the divorced father of two sons.
Handsome and mild-mannered, Townsend had been a highly decorated Royal Air Force pilot in World War II, a dashing hero who had brought down eleven German planes in the Battle of Britain. He had originally been assigned to Buckingham Palace for three months as an equerry, who is an aide-de-camp who assists the monarch at events, organizes logistics, and helps look after guests. Lascelles noted that Townsend was “a devilish bad equerry: one could not depend on him to order the motor-car at the right time of day, but we always made allowances for his having been three times shot down into the drink in our defence.” Yet Townsend’s calm and empathetic temperament endeared him to George VI, who made him a permanent member of the staff, first as equerry and then as Deputy Master of the Household, overseeing all private social engagements.
Although Margaret was just thirteen when Townsend arrived, her sparkling personality made her the center of attention in the royal family. “Lilibet is my pride, Margaret my joy,” their father used to say. Margaret had always been the impish counterpoint to her sister, the witty entertainer who knew how to brighten her father’s moods, with a quicksilver mind that ran in unpredictable directions and didn’t yield easily to discipline. She was willful and competitive, and she would always remain resentful that her older sister received a better education. She had asked to join Lilibet’s tutorials with Henry Marten, but was told by the tutor, “It is not necessary for you.” Perhaps to compensate, her father indulged and spoiled his younger daughter, which only encouraged her mercurial tendencies. “She would not listen ever,” recalled her cousin Mary Clayton. “She would go on doing something terribly naughty just the same. She was so funny she didn’t get scolded, which would have been good for her.”
Her younger sister was often vexing, but Elizabeth invariably stood up for her. “Margaret was an awful tease,” said Mary Clayton, “which helped her sister in her own way to control difficult situations.” She also kept Elizabeth humble. “The Queen never shows off, unlike Princess Margaret, who was always pirouetting,” said historian Kenneth Rose. Despite their different natures, the two sisters could laugh at the same jokes, although Elizabeth’s wit is gentler and more dry. Both excelled at mimicry and enjoyed singing popular songs together at the piano, which Margaret played with great flair.
As Margaret matured, Townsend was drawn to her “unusual, intense beauty.” At five foot one, she had a voluptuous figure and what Townsend described as “large purple-blue eyes, generous sensitive lips, and a complexion as smooth as a peach.” He was struck by her “astonishing power of expression” that “could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure, to hilarious uncontrollable joy.” And he saw that “behind the dazzling facade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity.”
By the time Margaret turned twenty in August 1950, Townsend’s marriage had come apart after his wife, Rosemary, strayed into several affairs. The princess and the equerry with blue eyes and chiseled features found themselves in long conversations, and by August 1951 on the Balmoral moors the King spotted his daughter gazing lovingly at Townsend dozing in the heather. Yet both he and his wife averted their eyes, engaging in the royal penchant for “ostriching,” an almost congenital ability to ignore unpleasant situations.
Margaret turned to Townsend for consolation in the months following her father’s death when she was “in a black hole.” That June he initiated divorce proceedings against Rosemary, citing her adultery with John de Laszlo, son of the portrait artist who had painted Lilibet as a child. After his divorce from Rosemary was granted in November 1952, Townsend told Tommy Lascelles that he and the princess were “deeply in love” and wanted to get married—a plan the couple had shared only with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.
The following day Lascelles had the first in a series of conversations with the Queen describing the
