Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

“formidable obstacles” posed by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was designed to prevent unsuitable matches from damaging the royal family. The act specifies that no member of the family in the line of succession can marry without the consent of the sovereign, but if the family member is over the age of twenty-five, he or she could marry one year after giving notice to the Privy Council, unless both houses of Parliament specifically disapproved of the proposed marriage. The problem for Margaret was that marriage to a divorced man would not be recognized by the Church of England, of which her sister was the Supreme Governor—a circumstance that would cause the Queen to forbid the union. Princess Margaret was third in line to the throne after the Queen’s two children, but because Charles and Anne were both so young, she could plausibly serve as Regent. The issue remained unresolved, and was swept temporarily out of mind by the all-consuming coronation preparations.

Other than telling the Queen Mother in February, Margaret and Townsend kept their intentions secret until Coronation Day, when a tabloid reporter caught Margaret flicking a piece of “fluff” from the lapel of Townsend’s uniform with a proprietary and flirtatious glance. Several days later, the Palace learned that The People, a Sunday tabloid, would run a story on the affair, prompting Lascelles to notify Churchill on June 13. “This is most important!” Churchill exclaimed. “One motor accident, and this young lady might be our queen.” Not only was the prime minister troubled about the censure of the Anglican Church, he worried that parliaments in the Commonwealth would disapprove of Margaret marrying Townsend on the grounds that their child would be an unsuitable king or queen. Churchill “made it perfectly clear that if Princess Margaret should decide to marry Townsend, she must renounce her rights to the throne.”

Churchill, Lascelles, and Michael Adeane all agreed that the only remedy was to offer Townsend “employment abroad as soon as possible,” Lascelles recalled. “And with this the Queen agreed.” Until the publication in 2006 of a memorandum written by Lascelles in 1955 detailing the sequence of events, the common assumption was that the Queen had “stood on the sidelines” while others banished Townsend, and that Princess Margaret was misled by Lascelles into thinking she could freely marry on reaching the age of twenty-five. In fact, by Lascelles’s account, “the Queen, after consulting Princess Margaret—and presumably Townsend himself—told me a few days later that she considered Brussels to be the most suitable post.” Elizabeth II also asked for a statement clarifying the “implications” if she were to forbid the marriage. The government’s attorney general produced a memo, and Lascelles wrote a letter outlining the possibility of a split within the Commonwealth if “several parliaments … might take a diametrically opposite view of that held by others.” He was scheduled to retire at the end of the year, but before his departure, the private secretary sent this information to the Queen as well as Margaret, who thanked him for it in February 1954.

Once Townsend left for his Belgian exile in July 1953, the Queen and her advisers hoped the separation would cool the couple’s ardor. But the princess and her lover continued to correspond daily, and Margaret deluded herself into thinking that after her twenty-fifth birthday she could prevail, even if her sister was compelled to withhold her approval. By postponing a decision, everyone involved only prolonged the agony and kept the Queen’s younger sister in limbo for two years.

In retrospect, it’s clear why Elizabeth II did not want to force the issue. Divorced people were excluded from royal garden parties and other gatherings in the sovereign’s palaces and on the royal yacht. Her grandfather had first admitted “innocent parties” in divorce to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and the Queen had relented to include “guilty parties” as well. Still, she had an almost visceral reaction to divorce, which she had inveighed against in her only major speech as a princess. “She strongly believed that divorce was catching,” said Lady Elizabeth Anson, a cousin of the Queen through the Queen Mother’s Bowes Lyon family. “If one got divorced, it made it easier for another unhappy couple to get divorced.”

WITH THE RESOLUTION of Margaret’s dilemma delayed, the Queen turned her full attention to the culmination of the continuing coronation celebration: an ambitious five-and-a-half-month tour of Commonwealth countries, covering 43,000 miles from Bermuda to the Cocos Islands, by plane and ship. It was her first extended trip as sovereign, and the first time a British monarch had circled the globe. By one accounting, she heard 276 speeches and 508 renditions of “God Save the Queen,” made 102 speeches, shook 13,213 hands, and witnessed 6,770 curtsies.

Elizabeth II’s role as the symbolic head of the Commonwealth of Nations not only enhanced her place in the world and extended her reach, it became a source of pride and pleasure and an essential part of her identity. “She sees herself fused into that instrument that was originally an empire,” said former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney after she had been leader of the organization for nearly sixty years. Sir Philip Moore, her private secretary from 1977 to 1986, once estimated that she devoted half of her time to the Commonwealth. Over the course of her reign she would visit most member nations multiple times.

In 1949 the London Declaration created the modern Commonwealth with the removal of “British” from its name, while recognizing King George VI as “Head of the Commonwealth.” That year, newly independent India pledged to keep its membership when it became a republic, setting the stage for British colonies to join as they sought independence. The Irish Free State had become a republic the previous year, ending the British monarch’s role as head of state. In a further demonstration of antipathy for Britain rooted in centuries of domination as well as bitterness over the island’s partition, the new Republic of Ireland left the Commonwealth. Other newly independent nations eagerly joined in the years to come, however. “The transformation of the Crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association … has no precedent,” Elizabeth II observed after twenty- five years on the throne.

What began as a cozy group of eight members—Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, Ceylon, and India—would grow to fifty-four by the early twenty-first century, representing almost one third of the world’s population. Most of the member nations became republics, but some (Brunei and Tonga among them) had monarchs of their own, and all twenty-nine realms and territories where Elizabeth II reigned as Queen belonged as well.

Embracing First and Third World countries, large and small, from all regions except the Middle East, the Commonwealth dedicated itself to giving its members equal voice and a sense of kinship. With English as the shared language, it served as a forum for the promotion of good government, education, economic development, and human rights—although its main weakness was a tendency to dither over the egregious abuses of tyrants.

In preparation for her first Commonwealth tour, the Queen supervised the creation of one hundred new outfits by her couturier Norman Hartnell. Her priorities were comfort for her daytime clothes, which were usually sewn with weights in the hems as a safeguard against windy conditions, bright colors so she could be easily visible at outdoor events, and sumptuous fabrics for her evening gowns, which often incorporated motifs to pay homage to her host countries. Her coronation dress was part of her wardrobe as well, to be worn opening parliaments in a number of countries.

Watching the televised departure ceremony on the evening of November 23, 1953, Noel Coward thought the Queen “looked so young and vulnerable and valiant,” and the royal couple had “star quality in excelsis.” They traveled on a BOAC Stratocruiser for nearly ten hours to a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland, followed by another five and a half hours to Bermuda, tracked along the way by naval vessels from Britain and Canada that stayed in continuous radio contact.

After a day of official rounds on Britain’s oldest colony, the royal party visited Jamaica, where they boarded the SS Gothic for their three-week voyage through the Panama Canal to the South Pacific archipelago of Fiji. On the way the Queen worked in her sitting room and wrote letters (posted from each port of call, where airplanes transported them in diplomatic bags). One message to Churchill commended his efforts for “the good of the world” at his summit in Bermuda with President Eisenhower and French premier Joseph Laniel to plan a strategy for dealing with the threat of a nuclear confrontation in the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. Otherwise, Elizabeth II watched members of the royal household play shuffle-board, quoits, and deck tennis, and she filmed the customary “Crossing the Line” initiation. Lady-in-waiting Pamela Mountbatten was tipped into a tank of water by Prince Philip, dressed as the Demon Barber of King Neptune’s Court, who was then unceremoniously pushed into the pool as well.

Their visit to Fiji challenged the Queen’s ability to cope smoothly with exotic customs. A group of native chieftains came aboard the Gothic and welcomed her with a lengthy dance featuring clapping and sequences of grunts while sitting cross-legged, followed by a solemn presentation of whale’s teeth. On shore, the chiefs painstakingly prepared quantities of kava, a strong sedating beverage made by pulverizing roots of the kava plant, liberally lubricated with spit. The Queen, who had been warned of the potency of the drink, watched the long preparation, and when she was somberly offered a draft in a seashell, warily took just half a mouthful.