wonderful, but at a cost.”
At Tobruk in Libya, the Queen and Prince Philip transferred to
For its maiden voyage,
Still, when the moment came and the Queen was piped aboard, her strict control and conformity to protocol prevailed as it had when she met her son after her Canada trip. “No, not you dear,” she said as she greeted dignitaries first, then shook the five-year-old’s extended hand. The private reunion was warm and affectionate, as Prince Charles showed his mother all around the yacht where he had been living for more than a week. The Queen told her mother how happy she was to be with her “enchanting” children again. They had both “gravely offered us their hands,” she wrote, “partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!” But the repercussions of that chilly first encounter were evident four decades later in a biography of Prince Charles by Anthony Holden, who titled a chapter about the prince’s childhood “No, Not You Dear.”
The Queen and her family arrived at the Isle of Wight, where Churchill joined them on board
CHURCHILL HAD SET his retirement date for her return from the tour, but once again he wavered. The Queen remained hopeful he would keep his commitment, telling Anthony Eden during an audience after a Buckingham Palace garden party in July that Churchill “seemed less truculent about going now.” The prime minister would cling to power for eight more months, and during this time, according to Jock Colville, his half-hour audiences with the Queen “dragged out longer and longer … and very often took an hour and a half, at which I may say racing was not the only topic discussed.”
Finally the eighty-year-old leader agreed to yield his premiership on April 5, 1955. Even at the eleventh hour, he nearly backed off when he thought he might act as a peacemaker by convening a four-power summit with the Soviet Union. The Queen remained patient during their audience on March 29, telling him she didn’t mind a delay. Two days later, he gave formal notification that he would go as planned. Private secretary Michael Adeane replied that the Queen “felt the greatest personal regrets” and had said “she would especially miss the weekly audiences which she has found so instructive and, if one can say so of state matters, so entertaining.”
Churchill gave a farewell dinner on April 4 in which he toasted the Queen as a “young, gleaming champion” of “the sacred causes and wise and kindly way of life.” He had advised his cabinet that afternoon to “never be separated from the Americans.” At his last audience on April 5, Elizabeth II offered him a dukedom to honor his special place in British history, even though that title was now reserved only for “royal personages.” Jock Colville had assured her that Churchill would decline the offer because he “wished to die in the House of Commons.” But when the prime minister set out for Buckingham Palace in his frock coat and top hat, Colville became apprehensive that in a burst of sentimentality Churchill might change his mind. “I very nearly accepted,” he tearfully told his private secretary back at Number 10. “I was so moved by her beauty and her charm and the kindness with which she made this offer, that for a moment I thought of accepting. But finally I remembered that I must die as I have always been—Winston Churchill. And so I asked her to forgive my not accepting it. And do you know, it’s an odd thing, but she seemed almost relieved.”
Writing to Churchill afterward, Elizabeth II told him none of his successors “will ever, for me, be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister.” She thanked him for his “wise guidance” and for his leadership during the Cold War, “with its threats and dangers which are more awe-inspiring than any which you have had to contend with before, in war or peace.” Churchill replied that he had tried “to keep Your Majesty squarely confronted with the grave and complex problems of our time.” He revealed that at the beginning of her reign he had recognized her grasp of “the august duties of a modern Sovereign and the store of knowledge which had already been gathered by an upbringing both wise and lively,” including her “Royal resolve to serve as well as rule, and indeed to rule by serving.”
It was the Queen’s constitutional prerogative to choose, after consulting with members of the Conservative Party, the next leader of the party capable of commanding the necessary majority in the House of Commons. After Churchill resigned, she asked him during their final audience if he would recommend a successor. Since he was no longer prime minister, he could not technically offer such advice, so he demurred, saying he would leave it to her. She told him, according to Colville, “the case was not a difficult one and that she would summon Anthony Eden.”
She had presumably taken soundings with Tory officials, but she didn’t disclose the nature or extent of those consultations. Her emphasis then, as it would be throughout her reign, was strict adherence to constitutionally correct procedures and an unwillingness to impose her personal preference.
In her first audience with Eden, the Queen was almost offhand in discharging her duties. After they had chatted for a while, he finally said, “Well, Ma’am?” to which the Queen replied, “I suppose I ought to be asking you to form a government.”
An Old Etonian son of a baronet, the fifty-seven-year-old prime minister was “the best looking politician of his time,” a cultivated man with an Oxford First in Oriental Languages, including Persian and Arabic. He brought extensive experience to his role, having served in Parliament since 1923, with leadership positions in prewar, wartime, and postwar governments. He had considerable charm, but he could be tense and sometimes unpredictable, with an “odd and violent temper,” observed Cynthia Gladwyn, the wife of diplomat Sir Gladwyn Jebb, along with a need for praise and flattery. A shy streak made him seem remote, which put more of a burden on the Queen to establish rapport.
Her success in doing so was evident that summer when Eden and his wife, Clarissa, a niece of Winston Churchill, were attending a military event in Winchester with the Queen. Afterward the prime minister had his weekly audience, which Clarissa overheard when she was resting in a room next door. “Anthony was telling her the menu he had had at Ike’s—there was a lot of merriment,” she wrote in her diary. Recalling the moment years later, she said, “They were chatting away and laughing like anything. It was very noisy, and it surprised me. I would have thought it would be more structured questions and answers.”
Eden had married Clarissa after his first wife, Beatrice, bolted with another man, making him the first divorced prime minister. That circumstance put him in a delicate position when Princess Margaret turned twenty- five on August 21, 1955, and her romance with Peter Townsend—like Eden, the innocent party in a divorce—again moved to center stage. Six days before her birthday, Margaret wrote Eden a letter explaining that she would remain at Balmoral until October when Townsend was expected in London for his annual leave. “It is only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not,” she wrote. “I hope to be in a position to tell you and the other Commonwealth Prime Ministers what I intend to do.”
While the press whipped up popular sentiment for a royal love match (“COME ON MARGARET! PLEASE MAKE UP YOUR MIND!” pleaded the
