early October the Edens visited Balmoral for the annual prime minister’s weekend, which featured long consultations, some of them including Prince Philip. The Queen wanted her sister to be happy, but was equally committed to the royal family’s role as a model for her subjects. She took pains to remain neutral and let Margaret make up her own mind.
Back in London, after determining that Parliament would not approve a union opposed by the Church, Eden informed Margaret that if she wished to wed Townsend in a civil ceremony, she needed to renounce her right to the throne. This would mean giving up her Civil List income and the rights of any of her heirs in the line of succession.
On October 20, 1955, the cabinet prepared the points to be covered by a Bill of Renunciation in Parliament, and four days later an editorial in
On October 31 Princess Margaret announced that she and Townsend were parting company. Although her sorrowful statement, written in collaboration with Townsend, emphasized her religious beliefs and sense of obligation to the Commonwealth, the true deciding factor was that she had been raised in luxury as a princess, and she couldn’t face the prospect of living, as Kenneth Rose put it, “in a cottage on a group captain’s salary”—outside the royal family that was the very essence of her identity.
The controversy over Margaret’s dashed marital plans prompted some mild criticism, but mainly she drew praise for her willingness to sacrifice her happiness on the altar of royal duty. Margaret continued to live in Clarence House with her mother, making public appearances and cutting a glamorous figure, although some could see, as Tommy Lascelles described it, that she had become “selfish and hard and wild.” Like her father before her, the Queen coddled her sister rather than confronting her when she misbehaved.
THE IMAGE OF the Queen in the public imagination in the mid-1950s was set by two of her most celebrated portraits, each romanticized in a particular way. To commemorate her Commonwealth tour, the bespectacled Australian artist William Dargie captured her in seven sessions at the end of 1954 in the Yellow Drawing Room on the first floor of Buckingham Palace. Dargie found her to be chatty and marveled that her “straight back … never slumped once,” but noted that “she had a difficult mouth to paint.” His image combines dignity with accessibility: “a nice friendly portrait,” in the Queen’s words. It was commissioned to hang in Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra, but she liked it so much that she asked Dargie to make a copy for her private apartment at the Palace. The only other portrait of herself that she has kept in her personal collection is the official state portrait in her coronation dress by Sir James Gunn, hanging at Windsor Castle.
From October 1954 through February 1955, the Queen also sat sixteen times for Pietro Annigoni. The forty- four-year-old Florentine artist was barely five feet tall, with a burly physique, intense brown eyes, and big peasant hands. He spoke broken English, so they conversed entirely in French. He found her to be “kind, natural and never aloof,” and was taken by the unaffected way she talked, referring to “my husband,” “my mother,” and “my sister.” Her memories of childhood, “watching the people and the cars down there in the Mall,” inspired him to show her “alone and far off” despite being “dear to the hearts of millions of people whom she loved.”
The result is an arresting three-quarter view of the Queen bareheaded, in her capacious dark blue robes of the Order of the Garter against a bleak imaginary landscape. Her demeanor is regal, her expression contemplative, with a hint of determination. The Queen was happy with the portrait, and Margaret praised the artist’s success with her sister’s elusive mouth. The following year Margaret sat thirty-three times for her own Annigoni portrait, which she considered so beautiful it moved her to tears. When American artist Frolic Weymouth asked Margaret her opinion of her sister’s portrait, she sniffed, “Mine was better than hers.”
As Elizabeth II approached her thirtieth birthday in 1956, she was still benefiting from a honeymoon glow, although her prime minister was grappling with an array of domestic crises. Only a month after taking office, he had called an election in May 1955, which the Tories had won easily. But the country was plagued with labor unrest; the Queen’s birthday parade that June even had to be canceled when Eden declared a state of emergency during a railway strike. Churchill had done nothing to slow the growth of the welfare state created by the postwar Labour government, and the costs were hobbling the economy.
The Queen took several noteworthy steps to shrink the traditional distance from her subjects. During a trip to Nigeria in February, she visited the Oji River Leper Settlement at a time when victims of leprosy were considered outcasts. Her “qualities of grace and compassion,” wrote British journalist Barbara Ward, “shine through the spectacle of a young queen shaking hands with cured Nigerian lepers to reassure timid villagers who do not believe in the cure.” The gesture was every bit as groundbreaking as Princess Diana’s handshake in 1987 with an AIDS patient at a time of public fear about catching the disease through touch.
On May 11, 1956, the Queen began hosting informal luncheons at Buckingham Palace for “meritocrats” from fields such as medicine, sports, literature, the arts, religion, education, and business. She holds them to this day. The inspiration came from Prince Philip, who thought gatherings of a half dozen luminaries every month or so could keep the Queen better connected to the outside world. One peculiarity of the get-togethers is that the guests have little or nothing in common with each other, which some participants liken to being shipwrecked. Elizabeth II, invariably preceded by her pack of corgis and her special cross-breed of corgis and dachshunds called “dorgis,” typically mixes with everyone over cocktails and then makes more extensive conversation with her two luncheon partners at the oval table in the 1844 Drawing Room or the Chinese Dining Room.
As with her public events, the Queen enjoys mild mishaps. Once one of her corgis had an accident on the rug, prompting the Queen to signal her Master of the Household, Vice Admiral Sir Peter Ashmore, who retrieved an old- fashioned blotter from a nearby desk and dropped to his hands and knees to remove the stain—while everyone else pretended not to notice.
That spring, Elizabeth II deployed her diplomatic skills on Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin, the newly installed leaders of the Soviet Union. The two tough-minded Cold War foes did not come to Britain on a state visit as the Queen’s guests. But they were eager to spend time with her, so she invited them to Windsor Castle. After meetings with Eden, they left London “looking very smart in new black suits and clean shirts and different ties.”
The Russian leaders were enchanted by the monarch’s casual appearance. “She was dressed in a plain, white dress,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. “She looked like the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon.”
The Queen gave them a guided tour and served each leader a glass of tea, Russian style. Philip quizzed them about Leningrad, while Elizabeth II inquired about their airplane, the TU-104, which she had seen flying over the castle on its descent into London Airport. Khrushchev was impressed that she “had such a gentle, calm voice. She was completely unpretentious, completely without the haughtiness that you’d expect of royalty.… In our eyes she was first and foremost the wife of her husband and the mother of her children.” In the car back to Claridge’s in London, the two Russians excitedly tried to top each other: “The Queen said to me …” “No, she said that to me!”
THE TRANQUILLITY OF the spring and early summer was shattered by the Suez Crisis that escalated from mid-July until the end of the year. It began when Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by Britain and France through the Suez Canal Company. The 120-mile waterway linking the Mediterranean and Red Sea had long been a strategic conduit for the British navy, but was increasingly important for the transport of oil to Europe. Nasser sought to rid the region of British influence, chiefly its close alliance with the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan, and to set himself up as the Arab world’s dominant leader. Eden viewed Nasser, who had overthrown Egypt’s King Farouk four years earlier, as a dangerous dictator who should be stopped.
In the following months, Britain publicly pursued various diplomatic options for international supervision of the canal while secretly plotting military action against Egypt with France and Israel. The plan called for Israel to invade Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956, which would then prompt several thousand British and French troops to intervene in a so-called effort to save the canal from the battling Israeli and Egyptian forces. The entire misbegotten operation was a ruse to ensure that Britain and France could recapture the canal by force.
The invasion succeeded after a week of hostilities. But Eden made a terrible miscalculation by keeping the United States in the dark, infuriating Dwight Eisenhower, who had been working with the British government in the spirit of the “special relationship.” Not only did the newly reelected American president oppose the Suez military adventure for destabilizing the Middle East, he worried that the Soviet Union’s offer to assist Egypt could trigger a
