The Queen, page 3
On August 21, 1930, a playmate of a very different kind entered her life when her sister Margaret Rose was born at Glamis Castle, the haunted ancestral home of the Strathmore family, located north of Dundee in Scotland. Once the formalities were dealt with—the new home secretary, John Robert Clynes, had traveled to the northern redoubt to certify the birth—Elizabeth was introduced to the infant. She was suitably “enchanted,” especially when she realized that it wasn’t a perfectly formed dolly but a living, if sound asleep, sister.
Thousands of well-wishers, some driving from Glasgow and south of the border, joined the celebrations at Glamis Castle, where huge bonfires were lit.22 As with the birth of her elder sister days before the general strike, Margaret’s arrival served as a sunny counterpoint to the dark economic clouds that had blanketed the nation since the stock market crash the previous October.
The temporary feeling of disappointment that the duchess had given birth to a girl rather than a boy served once more to highlight Elizabeth’s constitutional position. It led to earnest discussion about the proposition that the crown could technically be shared between the sisters or that the younger sister could take precedence. It became such a source of debate that the king ordered a formal investigation into the vexing issue. As common sense suggested, it was officially recognized that Elizabeth had seniority. The constitutional niceties of being a member of the royal family were further brought home to the duchess when it came to the naming of her second child. She had to accept that the final decision was that of the girls’ grandparents King George and Queen Mary, not the parents. Initially the Yorks were set on naming their child Ann Margaret, the duchess thinking Ann of York a pretty name. Her in-laws demurred, preferring Margaret Rose, Margaret being a Scottish queen and family ancestor. The king and queen prevailed. It would not be the last time they interfered in the upbringing of the royal princesses. The mother bit her tongue and busied herself with the new arrival. She was eager to describe her personality to friends and family. In a letter to Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, she wrote: “Daughter number 2 really is very nice, I am glad to say that she has got large blue eyes and a will of iron, which is all the equipment that a lady needs! And as long as she can disguise her will, and use her eyes, then all will be well.”23
The arrival of Margaret Rose added a new actor to the royal melodrama. Now a neat quartet—“We four,” as the duke repeated endlessly—they represented home, hearth, and family. In an age of uncertainty, mass unemployment, and poverty, they were the embodiment of an ideal of ordinary, decent, God-fearing folk who lived modestly and sensibly. Even though they resided in a grandly exclusive town house adjacent to Hyde Park, complete with ballroom and electric elevator, it was the fact that they preferred a cozy home life to café society that ensured their popularity.
This compact between the nation and the family was epitomized when the people of Wales, the most depressed kingdom of the realm, presented Princess Elizabeth with a miniature house called Y Bwthyn Bach—The Little House—for her sixth birthday. Designed by Edmund Willmott, the thatched cottage, two-thirds the scale of a normal house, was a magnificent creation that came complete with electricity, running water, and a flushing toilet. There were pots and pans, books by Beatrix Potter, food cans, and even a gas cooker—all reduced to scale. It was installed at the Royal Lodge, the Yorks’ new if dilapidated home in the Windsor Great Park.
The princesses were enthralled with the present, spending hours cleaning, brushing, polishing, and “cooking.” Elizabeth would wrap the silverware in newspaper so that it wouldn’t tarnish while Margaret’s great joy was running up and down the stairs and pulling the plug in the bathroom and listening to the water gurgle through the pipes. Official palace-sanctioned photographs of the girls standing outside the front door of their cottage or playing with their beloved corgi dogs in the house garden gave the watching public a window into their innocent lives, further cementing the generational bond between the royal family and their subjects. Assessing the public’s covetous fascination with the two princesses, Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, the king’s private secretary, described them as “Pets of the World.”24
The sense that the young princesses were somehow daughters of the wider national family was reinforced by the authorized publication in 1936—months before the abdication—of a picture book titled Our Princesses and Their Dogs, which lovingly chronicled the eight dogs, including two corgis, owned by the family and the central place they occupied in their daily lives. The book also stands as a heartwarming allegory of the intimate relationship between royalty and its people, the book symbolizing that immutable compact, one that was strained but not broken before the year was out.
While the girls’ corgis, Dookie and Lady Jane, were constant companions, the animals that ruled Elizabeth’s nursery kingdom were her horses, real, inanimate, and imagined. Though her corgis became synonymous with her life and reign, her first passion was for the equestrian world, and Anna Sewell’s well-thumbed equine classic, Black Beauty, was her bedside testament to that love. “If I am ever queen I shall make a law that there must be no riding on Sunday. Horses should have a rest too,” she once pronounced, gravely.25 Equine creatures were all-consuming in her young life, from leading the king around the room by his beard, to turning a string of Woolworths pearls into a rein to perform the same maneuver on the duchess’s biographer Lady Cynthia Asquith, to playing circus horses at Birkhall in Scotland with her cousin Margaret Rhodes where it was “obligatory to neigh.”26 Later injuries she sustained, notably when she was thrown against a tree and, on another occasion, kicked in the jaw, did nothing to dim her enthusiasm. When she was five she rode out with the Pytchley Hounds, her father hoping that she would be “blooded,” if there was a kill. There wasn’t.
When her new governess, Scottish-born Marion Crawford, walked into her bedroom at Royal Lodge in October 1933, their first conversation concerned the two abiding interests in Elizabeth’s life, namely her horses and her baby sister Margaret Rose. She had been allowed to stay up late to meet the woman she would later call Crawfie and was sitting on her wooden bed driving imaginary horses around the park. For reins, she used cords from her dressing gown, which were tied to her bedhead. “Have you seen Margaret,” said the princess. “I expect she is asleep. She is adorable but very naughty sometimes. Will you teach her too and will you play with us both? Will you let me drive you round the garden?”27
For several years Crawfie, as the girls’ companion and teacher, played the role of a docile working horse, making deliveries of groceries and other goods to folk in the neighborhood. During these playtime diversions Crawfie gained an insight into Elizabeth’s vivid imagination, especially when the princess delivered the goods herself. As Crawfie recalled: “Then the most wonderful conversation took place—about the weather, the householders’ horses, their dogs, chickens, children, and menfolk.”28
Crawfie quickly realized that Elizabeth’s interest in all matters equine was more than a passion; it verged on an obsession, a first and lasting love. The princess often remarked that if she had not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs.29 A variation was to be a farmer with cows, horses, and children.30
When she moved to Buckingham Palace the highlight of her week was her riding lesson with instructor Horace Smith. She spoke knowledgeably about galling, girths, and currying, an indication that her interest in horses was not just on their care but also their management.
The princess was so protective of the thirty or so wooden horses that crowded the fifth-floor nursery that when the family was about to move to Buckingham Palace, she gave her favorite horse Ben to her friend Sonia for safekeeping. It was delivered two weeks later, after her other horses had been unpacked and lined up in the corridor outside her room.31
For Elizabeth horse riding was a chance to be herself, to enjoy control in a socially acceptable setting. So much of her daily routine was out of her hands: Bobo chose her clothes, Alah picked her menu, Crawfie organized her lessons, her parents, grandparents, and the men in suits at Buckingham Palace defined her future. She went through a phase where she would wake several times in the night and ensure that her shoes and clothes were folded and arranged just so. It was control but in another guise.
Her education was a classic example of the continual battle for the heart and mind of the heir presumptive. While her grandfather King George V barked at Crawfie, “For goodness sake, teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask of you,”32 Queen Mary was much more involved. She vetted Crawfie’s academic timetable, the royal matriarch suggesting more Bible reading and dynastic history. Most Mondays she took the girls on educational excursions incognito to the Royal Mint, the Tower of London, the Bank of England, as well as art galleries. These visits didn’t always go to plan. On one occasion the party was looking around the Harrods department store when a craning crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of the princesses. Elizabeth became so excited at the prospect of so many people wanting to see her that her grandmother, not wanting her moment of stardom to go to her head, gently ushered her out by a back door.
It was Queen Mary—leader of the palace faction, augmented by Owen Morshead, the royal librarian, and the formidable Lady Cynthia Colville, the queen’s senior lady-in-waiting—who felt that Elizabeth’s education was too ladylike and easygoing. There was little cognizance in her syllabus, such as it was, of her possible future role and responsibilities. According to Lady Cynthia, “no Bowes-Lyon ever cared anything for things of the mind.” It was a judgment trusted royal chronicler Dermot Morrah considered a tad harsh given the fact that the family had produced three female poets.33
The princesses’ mother felt very differently. She and the duke were not overly concerned about their daughters’ academic education. The last thing they wanted was a pair of bluestockings, girls too smart for their own good. As Crawfie observed: “They wanted most for them a really happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories stored up against the days that might come and, later, happy marriages.”34 For her part the Duchess of York had been brought up on fresh air, a little French, and a smattering of German. Her own parents, the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and his wife, Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, had educated their youngest daughter at home with a governess, only sending her to a private day school in London when she was eight. More emphasis was laid on arranging a vase of flowers, sewing, dancing a reel, and reciting poetry than learning Greek or Latin. Young Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was taught to be polite, to look after visitors, where to cast for salmon, when to pick up dead birds during a shoot, and how to handle a shotgun. She was, however, no intellectual slouch. When she finally attended school, she passed the Oxford Local Examination with distinction when she was just thirteen.
Literature and Scripture were her scholastic strengths, and so it was no surprise that the duchess insisted on teaching the girls Bible stories in her bedroom every morning. Kindness, courtesy, and Christian values mattered, the duchess believing that a decent character, a moral compass, and a sensitive awareness of the needs of others were as important as, if not more important than, intellectual endeavors. In a letter to her husband she laid out her own strictures. She reminded Bertie that his own father lost the affection of his children because he shouted at him and his brothers.
Stuck in the middle was the hired hand Marion Crawford, only twenty-two. Though a graduate of Moray House college of education in Edinburgh—the future alma mater to Harry Potter novelist J. K. Rowling and Olympic cycling gold medalist Chris Hoy—she was out of her depth in the subtle back-and-forth of palace politics. Indeed the Yorks had chosen Crawfie precisely because she was young enough to enthusiastically join in with the children’s games.
Lessons, which included math, geography, poetry—anything about horses captured Elizabeth’s interest—and English grammar, took place only in the morning between nine thirty and twelve thirty, with a thirty-minute break for drinks and snacks. There were also frequent interruptions for visits to the dentist, hairdresser, and dressmaker, Crawfie sensing that education did not come high on the list of the duchess’s priorities.
Any attempt to extend the school day by Crawfie was resisted as the duchess was keen for the girls to enjoy outside play. Often the duke joined in games of hopscotch, hide-and-seek, and sardines in Hamilton Gardens at the rear of their home. As she grew in confidence Crawfie took the children farther afield, organizing trips on the subway, boat rides on the river Thames, and even, at Elizabeth’s insistence, an excursion on the top deck of a double-decker bus. It quickly became clear to her that the girls were eager to experience what other children enjoyed as a matter of course.
The girls as well as Elizabeth’s friend Sonia Graham-Hodgson had weekly dancing lessons with Marguerite Vacani where Elizabeth proved a skillful Scottish dancer. It was, however, those Hollywood hoofers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who were all the rage. For a time Elizabeth’s favorite was the 1935 hit “Cheek to Cheek.”
They were also enrolled for music lessons with Mabel Lander, a student of the Second Viennese School. Elizabeth, sometimes accompanied by her mother, would sing English ballads, African American spirituals, and Scottish airs—“The Skye Boat Song” was an enduring favorite. When Margaret was old enough to join in, her elder sister was immediately impressed by her ability to pick up a tune by ear. French lessons, which often took place when Crawfie was on holiday, were not so popular. On one occasion, presumably in protest at the dull teaching methods, a bored Elizabeth picked up a silver inkpot and turned it upside down on her blond locks. Their French mistress Mademoiselle Lander had an attack of the vapors and left others to sort out the inky mess.
Music, dance, and drawing classes interspersed with occasional French lessons were all very well, but Crawfie felt that the girls needed the stimulation and companionship of children their own age. “In those days we lived in an ivory tower removed from the real world,” she recalled in her memoir, The Little Princesses.35
One of her most satisfying achievements was in 1937 when she set up a Girl Guide and Brownie troop that met at Buckingham Palace every week. For once the sisters were able to mingle with their contemporaries—the thirty-four-strong troop comprised children of palace employees, friends, and courtiers. Elizabeth was deputy to her older cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten in the Kingfisher patrol while Margaret, who was too young for the Guides, was in the specially created Brownie patrol.
It was just as well they had children of their own age to play with as there was a steep change in their lives once they moved into their rooms at Buckingham Palace in the spring of that year. When Elizabeth went out and about she was now accompanied by a detective who had the ability, to the girls’ amusement, of seemingly making himself invisible. Elizabeth now spoke of the king and queen rather than Mummy and Daddy and spent more time curtsying and being curtsied to than at 145 Piccadilly. Even the nursery menus were in French—just like those put before the king and queen. As for the nightly pillow fights and other high jinks that punctuated their lives at 145 Piccadilly, these were soon a distant memory. Their parents were just too busy.
Besides playing skittles in the long palace corridors, there was one perk to being a princess in a palace. The young princess discovered that the act of walking in front of the sentries guarding her new home meant that they had to present arms. Walking back and forth in front of a sentry was a new game Elizabeth never tired of.
Trumping this delight was the excitement surrounding the coronation scheduled for May 1937. Queen Mary took the event as a didactic opportunity, bringing a panorama of the 1821 coronation of King George IV into the nursery and proceeding to teach the princesses about the symbolism and meaning of the coronation. By the end Elizabeth was, according to Crawfie, an expert. Perhaps as enticing as these rites and rituals was the prospect of wearing their first long dresses and lightweight coronets designed by their father. “They came to me very shyly,” recalled Crawfie, “a little overawed by their own splendour and their first long dresses.”36
In her serious motherly way, what concerned eleven-year-old Elizabeth most about the coronation was whether her little sister, then six, would behave. She remembered that when she had been bridesmaid at the wedding of her uncle the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark at Westminster Abbey in November 1934, Margaret was allowed to sit quietly with her mother. However, when her big sister first appeared, walking down the aisle and holding the bridal train, Margaret had waved at her, possibly in a mischievous attempt to distract her from her solemn duties. Elizabeth would not be swayed. She gave her sister a stern look and shook her head in order to discourage Margaret from further misbehavior. Elizabeth did not want a repeat at the coronation. In the end she was happy to report to Crawfie that her sister had behaved beautifully. It was all the more commendable as both girls had been awake most of the night due to the singing and chatter among the waiting crowds outside the palace.
Princess Elizabeth recorded her memories of that historic day in a lined exercise book neatly tied with a piece of pink ribbon with a touching inscription written in red crayon on the cover. It read: “The Coronation, 12th May 1937. To Mummy and Papa in memory of their Coronation from Lilibet by herself.”37
She described how she was woken by the Royal Marines Band outside her bedroom window. Then, clutching an eiderdown, she and Bobo MacDonald “crouched in the window looking onto a cold, misty morning.”38 After breakfast they dressed and paraded themselves in their finery before visiting their parents who were themselves in the midst of dressing for the big day.
