Lilibet, p.1
Lilibet, page 1
Contents
Preface
1: The Night Before
2: Birth in Bruton Street, Mayfair
3: 145 Piccadilly
4: Childhood Scenes
5: Abdication
6: Coronation
7: Buckingham Palace
8: Dartmouth
9: Jane
10: Windsor at War
11: VE Day
12: Married
13: A Woman Alone
14: Treetops
Author’s Note
Copyright
Preface
All over the world, and especially in the countries of the Commonwealth of which Queen Elizabeth II is the head, people are reflecting, not on a doctrine or a regime, but on a person, and what she is, and has been, what she stands for and what she has done.
For seventy years, Her Majesty has been the Queen. No other world leader has been in office for such a time span. In her many speeches and public appearances, she has made clear what it is she stands for, and what she hopes we stand for: decency; the cultivation of simple, personal goodness; a love of all peoples, but with, perhaps, an especial love of the peoples of Scotland and of Africa; a spirit of tolerance, not hatred or rivalry, underpinned by a core belief in equality for all.
She has spoken about the importance of the peoples of the world living together in amity. Visibly pious, she has drawn on her own personal faith to strengthen her, but she has clearly been open to, and friends with, those of other faiths. She has been ‘above politics’, not merely because she has been a skilled constitutional monarch, watching political party leaders come and go. She is above politics in a much larger sense: what she stands for is so much better and so much stronger than the posturings of politicians.
She is the embodiment of an idea: monarchy. She is also the demonstration of what that idea is. Other political systems are based on ideology. Monarchies focus on persons. This is subtly different from the hero worship demanded by tyrants. The Queen is a self-effacing, even a mysterious person, which is one of the ingredients of her huge success as a Head of State. Hers is no ‘cult of personality’. Yet a personality is, however mysterious, visibly there. Her voice and her facial expressions are familiar to millions and millions of us.
In her Jubilee Year, this book tries to imagine her as a person. It takes us from her birth, in a tumultuously divided and unhappy Britain in 1926, to the post-war country of 1952. It takes us to Africa, where, as a young married woman, sitting in the treetops of Kenya, she learned that she had become a monarch. The book makes the imaginative journey, to discover how Lilibet, the shy, orderly, obedient young Princess of the 1940s, became Queen Elizabeth II of the modern world.
1: The Night Before
I
T WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE the Jubilee.
Seventy years!
The Queen had spent the evening quietly. Everyone fussed so. The children. The ladies. The doctor. Tomorrow will be so tiring. Tomorrow will wear Your Majesty out. She had obediently taken to her bed early, and asked the footman to leave Fergus and Muick in the dressing room next door, only with the door open. She liked it when they came into her bedroom to snuffle their hellos. They’d had a good dinner, bless them, some braised chicken – done the way Willow and Candy had always liked it. Poor Willow, poor Candy! What a loss to her their going had been.
And now, she lay alone. People mocked her for saying ‘one’ rather than ‘I’, but she was ‘one’. There can only be one monarch. It’s not really a lonely business. She’d never been lonely, not in the way her poor sister was lonely in latter years. There was always someone around the place. Sometimes, she thought she would only be completely alone when walking the dogs! But One was One. And in the end, however much the others in the family rallied round and undertook duties on her behalf . . . well, One was One.
It was the night before the Jubilee. Seventy years! The Queen had spent the evening quietly. Everyone fussed so.
Perhaps she had been more tired than she had at first believed, because it was during her recitation of the evening prayer that she knew she was no longer quite awake.
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O LORD, and by thy great mercy . . .
It was dark. It was very dark, dark as black velvet. And it was also light, light as the blinding light of the sun. Was she awake? Or was all this a dream? She was aware of a lightness. She had been carrying a heavy burden for years, perhaps forever, and now, as she lay there, she felt it lifting. The new sensation . . . it was freedom?
Philip was there. Not the old man who had been with her so long. Beneath the golden hair which he flopped back from his brow with a casual hand was a teenager’s face. She thought it was the most beautiful face she had ever seen. He was making a joke, of course – as always – but quite what the joke was . . . And Mummie was there. Well, Mummie was always there. Lilibet knew her scent, her wrap, and could hear that voice. That voice of so long ago. No one spoke like that now . . . whenever ‘now’ was . . . Even the ladies – the ladies-in-waiting – now sounded ‘modern’ by comparison. Not middle-class, quite, but certainly not like Mummie. Gawn. The days were gawn.
What had the man said, at the beginning of the reign – that man who had infuriated them all? Tweedy. They were tweedy. And her voice was like a confirmation candidate . . . A ‘pain in the neck’. Philip said he’d have knocked the man’s block orf, if some member of the public hadn’t done it for them. But he’d been right, hadn’t he, the chap who’d mocked them? Lord Altrincham, that was the name. ‘A priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team.’
Trouble was, they did all sound like figures from a vanished time. Margaret was the last whose voice had been like that. Poor Margaret. It was the voice of house parties before the First World War, of meets and balls and dinners where everyone knew everyone and everyone was related. It wasn’t royal, it was class. The voice of the . . . You had to say ‘class’, the ‘class’ that Mummie belonged to.
Mummie belonged to a class. They – Lilibet herself, Papa, Grandpa England – they did not belong to a class. They were on their own. One is One and all alone. That was what Philip had seen, that laughing teenage boy who had turned up, with his mischievous enquiring twinkle, when they visited Dartmouth that wonderful summer day when she was . . . what? Thirteen? He did not belong to a class either. Didn’t belong anywhere, he said – homeless, stateless, everything-bloody-else-less.
Papa and Mummie were worried by him. Thought he was an oaf, and worried about the relations being . . . Mummie had that way of simpering and not finishing a sentence. In this case, the sentence would have ended ‘German’.
And now, edging into her consciousness, here was Margaret Rose. The sad old Margaret was not here any more. Lilibet could hear her own voice scolding a little girl – Margaret Rose – who was getting above herself.
‘Crawfie, tell Margaret she mustn’t fidget in the Abbey. It’s Papa’s . . . We must all . . . after Uncle David had let them all down. After he had failed. Failed in his duty.’
Strange the way the faces came and went, like the flickering images on the magic lantern shows which they used to watch at Windsor during the war. For Uncle David had just come into view, so handsome, so funny. His finger had just chucked her under the chin, and he’d said, ‘Little Lil.’ Her chin had been aged no more than five.
But now she was ten, and Uncle David had so let them all down. And Grandpa England had gone to Heaven, and they were all in their ceremonial clothes – Mummie was about to become Queen Empress; Lil and Margaret Rose were in their ceremonial robes. They were all going to be taken to the Abbey in State coaches, and it was so important Margaret Rose wouldn’t show them up by silliness or showing off. Crawfie, do tell her. And Papa, poor Papa, in his robes, waiting in the hall at Buckingham Palace, lighting up yet another Senior Service and losing his rag for the umpteenth time that morning . . . He was dressed like a King in a fairy story, with his white silk stockings and the ermine on his velvet robe, but the cigarette made him a modern person somehow.
‘One day,’ he had said to her – ‘one day . . .’ He could not speak the words. Poor Papa. She used to pray that his wretched stammer could be lifted from him. Heaven imposed such burdens.
One day? What was going to happen one day? It was all going to happen to her. The crown, that burden, that gift from Heaven, was going to be placed . . . not on Papa’s head but on . . . on one.
And now, there was such lightness. In one moment, it was all happening. It was not Papa on the throne, it was her.
One afternoon lately, Sophie – such a nice girl, Sophie Wessex – had come round to watch a film in the Queen’s sitting room, and she’d brought Murder on the Orient Express. Such a clever story – it was not a single murderer. All the suspects had done it! They came into the American tycoon’s cabin one by one during the night, and lifted high the knife.
And while she was watching, she’d thought – it’s like a ritual sacrifice. And then – it had made her think of something quite, quite . . . as yet another person lifted the dagger and in it went.
The Archbishop had lifted it high in the air, like a murder weapon – it was the crown. And now he was lowering it upon her own head. And she felt the weight of it. And the tottering old peers – they still spoke, most of ’em, as Mummie spoke – cried out in their Latin, ‘VIVAT! VIVAT!’ Live! Live! That was her duty. To live. Poor Papa had not been able to do that, but it was her duty to do it. VIVAT.
No, I am not. I am going to bear it. I am strong. All those feelings.
Grandpa England had known that. How had he known it? She stretched out a hand and it met his, his mottled old hand that she had held on the beach at Bognor.
But now, as they returned to her, Uncle David, Papa, Grandpa England, Mummie, poor Margaret, there were new feelings, sensations of release, as if, instead of feeling the Archbishop putting on the crown, she were taking it off; as if in the end there was a beginning; as if, as life drew to its close, it opened up like the petals of a spring flower. Not long now – though whether she meant not long until tomorrow, Jubilee Day, or not long before it was all over . . . Her mind drifted for a while into blackest velvet.
2: Birth in Bruton
Street, Mayfair
T
HE GENTLEMAN IN THE HALL looked like what he was: a refugee from the Victorian Age. The tall silk hat, beautifully brushed and glossy, had been handed to the footman on his arrival. The rest of his attire, the black frock coat, the stiff collar, the pinstriped trousers, were what you would expect a Member of Parliament to have been wearing in the reign of Queen Victoria.
But change was abroad, and Jix, as his friends affectionately called him, did not like change. It was un-English. If anyone could hold the incoming rollers at bay, it was surely Jix. He was, after all, Home Secretary. He had opposed giving women the vote, and he and his friends, to their very great surprise, had lost that argument. At least he was able, for the time being, to limit the number of female voters to those over the age of thirty.
And at least he could do his best to stop them reading filth. He might have failed to prevent women bothering their heads with voting, but he had it in his power to cleanse the rot of modern literature. D.H. Lawrence – save the mark. Jix was assiduous in nosing out, and prosecuting, salacious literature. Why, that woman Radclyffe Hall! She had written of a ‘love’ which makes you shudder.
As well as banning her novel, and those of that Lawrence fella, Jix had successfully instructed the Metropolitan Police to occupy and close down some notorious nightclubs. At one such establishment, the police had been embarrassed to inform him that they had encountered no less a person than the Prince of Wales. Even more shocking than the royal presence in such a ‘low dive’ (as Jix was informed they were known in America) was the fact that the Prince of Wales had been found to be wearing not the starched shirt front and a white tie which any gentleman would have been wearing had he chosen to stay up to a literally ungodly hour, but . . . but . . . a soft silk shirt. In the evening! When the head of the Metropolitan Police told Jix this story, the Home Secretary could scarcely believe his ears. When you hear something like that, the first person you pity is the man’s mother. A soft shirt in the evening! Poor Queen Mary. After all the sacrifices she had made for the Empire.
Not that Jix had ever been to a nightclub himself. They were one of the many innovations gnawing at the heart of civilization as he understood it. For Jix – Sir William Joynson-Hicks – Home Secretary, and half-successful stemmer of unwelcome historical tides, there were too many assaults being attempted on what made Britain British: who but an American would consider starting a ‘nightclub’?
Worse than the sleazy morals of novelists and nightclub proprietors, was the march of the Reds. Less than a decade ago, the Bolsheviks had murdered the Russian Royal Family. And now – in Britain – in Jix’s Britain, the good old Britain of silk hats and frock coats and the Book of Common Prayer – what was happening, at that very moment, as he sat in Lord Strathmore’s marble hall, and heard the reassuring ticking of the long-case clock? A General Strike! The working classes united against the established order.
Jix had been inspired by the way in which so many public-school-educated, sensible young men had volunteered in the last few days as strike breakers. They had driven trains and buses, they had defied picket lines in factories and printing presses. They had volunteered as mounted policemen. No one, however, was going to forget this week in a hurry. It was as if Britain was at war with itself.
Only eight years before, the British had all pulled together, in the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France. Joynson-Hicks had been astonished, during the last week, to hear Bolshevik voices claiming that the gallant struggle, put up by a united front of officers and men, during the Great War had been a fight in vain; astounded at the wicked idea that the working classes had not wanted to fight. And when they came back, the brave Tommies, they had found a land fit for heroes, no?
A figure was leaning over Joynson-Hicks as he sat in the hall chair. Important as his reveries were – about the General Strike, about the mounting waves of anarchy and decadence – there was a matter here, at 17 Bruton Street, which was of even greater significance. It was an event which could, potentially, put an end to the march of time – stop all this madness of soft evening shirts, Communism and women’s rights. That was, after all, the Home Secretary’s reason, in the middle of a General Strike, for sitting in the hall of the Earl of Strathmore’s town house on the very edge of Berkeley Square.
The polite, hovering figure was not the footman who had taken his silk hat. This time, it was His Lordship’s butler, no less.
Jix started.
‘Has it . . . has he . . . Has Her Royal Highness . . .’
‘No, sir, no news as yet to report. But His Lordship was wondering whether you would not feel more comfortable waiting in the library.’
‘I must stay here,’ said Jix. ‘I am, as it were – in earshot.’
‘His Lordship’ – the butler suppressed a lugubrious Caledonian chuckle – ‘assures you there are no warming pans on the landing.’
‘I am sorry, but there you have the advantage of me.’
‘His Lordship wished to assure the Home Secretary that no one was going to smuggle a baby into the Duchess’s room in a . . .’
‘In a what? Smuggle a baby? What on earth are you talking about, man?’
Jix was not known for his sense of irony.
True, ever since the Jacobite times (and, as far as Jix was concerned, the Roman Catholics, capable de tout, were probably as dangerous in their own day as the Communists were in this the year of grace 1926), the Home Secretary had been present at the birth of royal babies. Queen Victoria, of course, God bless Her, had put a stop to the Home Secretary actually being in the room when the birth took place, although he was expected to wait outside. But it was still considered not merely respectful but, ahem . . . appropriate, that the birth into the world of a royal heir should happen within the respectable proximity of a man in a frock coat and pinstriped trousers.
From where he sat in the hall, Joynson-Hicks could look up the stone staircase, the grey walls hung with portraits in gilt frames of Lyonses and Boweses and Bowes-Lyonses, the Earl’s forebears, and the eye could follow the swooping bannisters to the first-floor landing where, in a bedroom easily within earshot, the Duchess of York was confined. It was her first child. It was to be the third grandchild of His Majesty George V, King Emperor, but it would be the heir presumptive. Unless or until the Prince of Wales were to abandon his wild courses and his nightclubs and find a respectable wife, this child could one day inherit the throne. Highly unlikely, of course. The Prince of Wales was a healthy young man, who would surely come to his senses, or have some sense knocked into him by His Majesty. And he would in any case live another forty years at least. Putting jazz bands and silk shirts and nightclubs behind him, he would marry, and become respectable, and do his duty to the Empire. Surely? It was the gravest of historical misfortunes that so many of the eligible Protestant Princesses and Grand Duchesses were, ahem, Germans, but if necessary, Jix and his fellow Tories felt they might find a bride for him among the daughters of the British aristocracy.
