being amusing and entertaining novelties.” He was the first member of the royal family to host his own television program, a documentary about his Commonwealth tour featuring film he had shot.
From the time of the coronation, Elizabeth II had been wary of the intrusiveness of TV cameras. In her letter to Eden before her North American trip, she confessed her trepidation, saying, “Television is the worst of all, but I suppose when one gets used to it, it is not so terrible as at first sight.” She had decided the previous summer to shift from radio and to televise her annual Christmas broadcast for the first time, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the inaugural radio broadcast by her grandfather, King George V. Days before her departure to Canada, she had even practiced with a TelePrompTer in a makeshift studio in Buckingham Palace. Philip, who had urged her to use the device, acted as her “producer” as she read an old speech. When she sounded flat, he spent a few moments with her, and on the second run-through she was reported to be “more vivacious,” nodding and smiling at appropriate moments.
The Canadian broadcast had been the Queen’s dry run for her live telecast at 3 P.M. on December 25, but she was no less apprehensive. It was her sixth Christmas message, which from the beginning had been prepared without benefit of “advice” from the government—the one predictable occasion during the year when she can talk directly to the people. She always takes great trouble over this personal homily, which reaffirms her religious beliefs and sense of duty as she seeks to inspire others to adhere to high standards and do good works. The message typically incorporates ideas from her private secretaries, but it is mainly written in close collaboration with Philip over a period of months, often building on a specific theme that can be linked to events in the preceding year.
Philip took a particularly active role in the 1957 telecast, bringing in his friend at the BBC, Antony Craxton. They chose the Long Library at Sandringham for its excellent acoustics and set up a small desk in front of a cabinet filled with Christmas cards and family pictures. An arrangement of holly on the desk concealed a microphone, and two cameras were set up, each with a TelePrompTer.
In addition to getting the knack of reading large type scrolling on a machine, the Queen studied an instructional film made by BBC announcer Sylvia Peters. Even after three rehearsals, Elizabeth II told a guest at the staff holiday party at Windsor Castle, “My husband seems to have found the secret of how to relax on television. I am still worried because I have not found the secret yet.” A few days before the broadcast, Craxton spent forty-five minutes with her, going over the script sentence by sentence.
The Queen spoke for seven minutes, interrupting her eye contact with the audience by occasionally looking at her sheaf of papers and turning over the pages periodically for effect. She smiled tentatively from time to time, and clasped her hands for emphasis. Television could help her be less of a “remote figure,” she said, and make her annual message to Britain and the Commonwealth “more personal and direct.” Yet she warned of the new medium’s dangers in the “speed at which things are changing all around us,” causing people to “feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard, how to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.”
The “inventions” themselves weren’t the problem, she added. Rather, “the trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery.” To uphold endangered “fundamental principles,” she called for a “special kind of courage … which makes us stand up for everything we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.”
“I cannot lead you into battle,” Elizabeth II said. “But I can do something else. I can give you my heart, and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.” As she signed off with her Christmas wishes, she glanced quickly toward her husband standing behind one of the cameras and flashed a luminous smile at her viewers.
An estimated thirty million people tuned in, and the press, especially in the United States, hailed her performance as an effective reply to her critics, a “post-Altrincham royal speech.” Her manner, said
No Christmas message in the five decades since has had such an impact, or conveyed such surprisingly dark undertones. “The final draft was, in fact, Prince Philip’s,” Craxton wrote afterward. But it was also a product of ideas exchanged between the Queen and her husband. She has always taken care to avoid saying anything she does not believe, declining even to use the word “very” unless she means “very.” Her pledge of fealty to her people and plea to “stand up for what we believe to be right” were undeniably authentic, as were the deep spiritual threads running through the message.
A YEAR LATER the government permitted the State Opening of Parliament to be televised for the first time. (It had declined to do so in 1957 when the Queen announced a genuine reform originated by Macmillan and his ministers to create life peers, thereby admitting women to the House of Lords for the first time in their own right.) One of the great British spectacles, the opening of Parliament, is as much a made-for-television phenomenon as any event in the royal calendar. It also serves as a reminder of the Queen’s place as the “Crown in Parliament” by gathering the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the sovereign in one place, as the Queen reads out the government’s legislative program.
The ceremony itself draws on centuries of tradition and ageless rituals. The setting is always the House of Lords chamber, with its richly ornamented high ceilings, stained glass windows, and elaborately carved wood.
The day before the ceremony, the Imperial State Crown and seventeenth-century Sword of State are brought from the Tower of London to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen has a chance to get reaccustomed to having nearly three pounds sitting on her head. In the evening she often works at her desk wearing the purple velvet crown glittering with three thousand diamonds; one year her butler noted that she was wearing pink mule slippers as well.
On the morning of the opening, a horse-drawn carriage carries the crown and Sword of State, along with the Cap of Maintenance, a crimson velvet hat trimmed with white ermine, down the Mall to the Houses of Parliament. A second coach transports the gold maces. The Queen calls these symbols of royal power “the working pieces of kit,” and she makes certain that the front of the crown, with its huge Black Prince’s Ruby and Cullinan II diamond, faces forward in the carriage. “There is one thing to remember,” she said with a twinkle to Crown Jeweler David Thomas before he made his first trip to the Palace of Westminster with the priceless cargo. “The horses are always in the front of the carriage.”
Wearing a long white gown, jeweled Garter collar, elbow-length gloves, and diamond tiara, she and Prince Philip, as always in the uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, travel in the horse-drawn Irish State Coach to the Palace of Westminster with her Household Cavalry escort. In the Robing Room, adorned with frescoes depicting the Arthurian legend, she puts on her eighteen-foot-long scarlet velvet robe of state and her crown.
The House of Lords chamber is invariably packed, a tableau vivant of peers in their red robes with white fur collars (including, for the first time in 1958, fifteen recently appointed life peers, four of them women), bewigged justices draped in black and clustered on the large red hassock called the Woolsack, military officers, ecclesiastics, and ambassadors in white tie.
The processional is led by men with quaint medieval titles such as Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, Clarenceaux King of Arms, and Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, all decked out in gold-encrusted scarlet tabards, knee breeches, and silk stockings. Lining the route are the Queen’s bodyguards, the Gentlemen at Arms in helmets waving swan plumes, and the Yeomen of the Guard (also known as Beefeaters), wearing crimson and gold knee- length tunics, crimson knee breeches, white neck ruffs, and black Tudor bonnets.
Elizabeth II, attended by four page boys and two of her ladies-in-waiting, with Prince Philip clasping her raised left hand, makes a stately progress along the Royal Gallery into the chamber. She is preceded by two dignitaries holding the sword and the cap, which dangles from a long stick, as well as two Great Officers of State, the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain, walking backward. On the dot of 11:30 A.M., she arranges herself on her ornately gilded throne beneath a golden canopy, with Philip seated to her left, several inches lower.
Black Rod, an official representing the Queen, strides to the House of Commons, where the door is vigorously slammed in his face to show the independence of the lower house. (No monarch has been permitted in the House of Commons since 1642, when King Charles I barged in and tried to arrest five members.) After three loud knocks with his ebony staff, Black Rod is admitted to the chamber, where he commands the members to “attend Her Majesty immediately in the House of Peers.” Led by the prime minister, his cabinet, and the leader of the opposition, the
