Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

which are her chief beauty.”

Elizabeth II with Harold Macmillan, her third prime minister, at Oxford University, November 1960. © Popperfoto/Getty Images

SEVEN

New Beginnings

ELIZABETH II WAS TWO MONTHS FROM HER THIRTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY when she gave birth for the third time. Unlike the arrivals of Charles and Anne in the early years of her marriage, she now had the sovereign’s obligations competing for her postpartum time. “Nothing, but nothing deflected her from duty,” recalled assistant private secretary Sir Edward Ford. “She’d go into labor and have a baby, so we knew we weren’t going to see her for a while. But within a very short time, twenty-four or forty-eight hours at most, she’d be asking whether there were any papers and would we care to send them up?”

Andrew Albert Christian Edward, second in the line of succession, was barely a week old when twenty-nine- year-old Princess Margaret seized the limelight by announcing her engagement to the prominent photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, also twenty-nine. Since the bitter disappointment of her dashed romance with Peter Townsend more than four years earlier, the Queen’s sister had cut a showy figure among London’s smart set. Her hairstyles changed with her moods, and she displayed her curvy figure in flamboyant outfits featuring vivid colors and leg-revealing skirts. (Dismayed by her un-aristocratic open-toed shoes, Nancy Mitford called her “Pigmy-Peep- a-toes.”) A heavy smoker, Margaret was known for her ten-inch cigarette holders, and for drinking Famous Grouse whisky, often to excess.

While the Queen would engage people in conversation, Princess Margaret would address them in what museum director Roy Strong described as a “slightly explosive drawl.” She was more insistent on formalities than the sovereign, rebuking friends when they unwittingly violated protocol with a word or a gesture. “If you missed the ‘royal’ in ‘Your Royal Highness,’ she would rip you to shreds,” said one of her friends. “She would say, ‘There are members of Arab states who are highnesses. I am a royal one.” One slyly believable moment in the film The Queen had Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II remarking, “I don’t measure the depth of a curtsy.… I leave that to my sister.”

Since 1953 Princess Margaret had been enjoying a prolonged adolescence while living with her mother at Clarence House, where she often slept late after long evenings at parties—frequently exhausting the other guests, who knew it was impolite to leave before a member of the royal family. To the embarrassment of their friends, Margaret could be cavalier with her mother, walking into the room where she was watching television, for example, and changing the channel, or criticizing her food at a luncheon party. “You mustn’t worry,” the Queen Mother said to her friend Prudence Penn, who expressed concern about Margaret’s rude treatment. “I’m quite used to it.”

The Queen adopted a similarly phlegmatic approach, even when Margaret was an hour and a half late to her tenth anniversary party at Buckingham Palace. “I felt the Queen was not served well by her sister, who was not a good advertisement for the monarchy,” said Patricia Brabourne. “The Queen dealt with it by acting in private as the sister giving support she needed and probably giving the hard advice that probably wasn’t followed.”

Margaret could also be affectionate and warmhearted—the “rare softness” that Peter Townsend had observed—as well as caring and kind, notably to those who were ill. She had a keen interest in theater and the performing arts, principally ballet. She enchanted her loyal friends with her quick wit and vivacity, enhanced by a sharp intelligence.

When Margaret fell in love with Tony Armstrong-Jones, it came as a relief to the Queen, who wanted above all for her sister to be happy. He was not an aristocrat but his background was privileged. His father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a barrister with deep roots in Wales, and his beautiful mother, Anne Messel, came from a family of wealthy bankers who had made their original fortune in Germany before converting from Judaism to Christianity in London, a genealogical fact that the royal family chose to disregard. The Armstrong-Joneses had divorced when Tony was just five, and his mother had acquired aristocratic cachet when she married the Earl of Rosse. An education at Eton and Cambridge gave Tony entree into upper-class circles where he found clients for his growing photography business.

He was several inches taller than tiny Margaret, and good-looking, with a dazzling smile and a hint of vulnerability from a slight limp caused by polio that he contracted at sixteen. Sophisticated and charming, he moved easily from the raffish world of artists and writers to the rarefied atmosphere of the Queen’s court. Equally important, he could match wits with Margaret, and he shared her taste for the high life. He also captivated both the Queen Mother and the Queen, who offered him an earldom before the wedding. He initially declined the title, only to accept it the following year when he became the Earl of Snowdon (after the highest mountain in Wales) before Margaret gave birth to their first child, David, ensuring that the Queen’s nephew would receive his own title— Viscount Linley—rather than being known as Mr. Armstrong-Jones.

Elizabeth II provided generously for the couple. Two days before their marriage, she and Prince Philip hosted a sumptuous court ball at Buckingham Palace, where the “whole atmosphere,” wrote Noel Coward, conveyed “supreme grandeur without pomposity.”

The wedding day on Friday, May 6, 1960, sparkled with sunshine. White banners bearing the initials A and M woven in gold fluttered over the Mall, where an estimated 100,000 people crowded the route to Westminster Abbey, resembling “endless, vivid herbaceous borders,” wrote Coward. “The police were smiling, the Guards beaming, and the air tingled with excitement and the magic of spring.”

Margaret was the image of a fairytale princess, dressed in an artfully simple gown of white silk organza, nominally a Norman Hartnell creation but in fact designed by Tony. The three-inch-high Poltimore diamond tiara encircled her chignon and anchored her long silk tulle veil. Prince Philip walked his sister-in-law to the altar, where Tony waited, looking “pale” and “a bit tremulous.” Eight bridesmaids aged six to twelve, led by nine-year-old Princess Anne, followed in floor-length white silk dresses.

Noel Coward watched the Queen, elegant in a pale blue gown and matching long-sleeved bolero jacket, “scowl a good deal,” and wondered whether this “concealed sadness or bad temper.” Close observers of Elizabeth II understood her expression meant she was straining to contain powerful emotions. “When she is deeply moved and tries to control it she looks like an angry thunder-cloud,” wrote Labour politician Richard Crossman.

As with other royal spectaculars, the Duke of Norfolk organized the day’s pageantry, and the BBC presented the first televised royal wedding ceremony. The Glass Coach—the traditional conveyance for royal brides for the previous five decades—transported the smiling couple back to Buckingham Palace, where they had a wedding breakfast for just 120 of the two thousand Abbey guests. The Queen gave her sister and brother-in-law Britannia for their six-week honeymoon. The ?26,000 cost of the wedding was paid by the Queen Mother, who was in turn heavily subsidized by the Queen, although the Macmillan government picked up the ?60,000 tab for the honeymoon. On their return to London, Margaret and Tony moved into a twenty-room apartment on four floors of Kensington Palace provided by the Queen and refurbished at a cost of ?85,000, ?50,000 of which was allocated by the government’s Ministry of Public Works to repair structural damage caused by bombs during the war.

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ELIZABETH II CURTAILED her foreign travel during her third child’s first year in 1960 but otherwise remained fully engaged in affairs of state as Macmillan sent her a stream of letters and memos, mainly on foreign policy. For their weekly audiences, Macmillan provided clear agendas that gave her “an opportunity to consider the issues involved, and frame her own views (by custom, generally put in the form of questions) on them,” wrote his biographer Alistair Horne. Macmillan’s respect for the Queen deepened with time as he observed the consistent “assiduity with which she absorbed the vast mass of documents passed to her, and—even after so few years on the