SIX

A few months after their wedding Prince Philip complained that his young wife wanted sex constantly. He said he was astonished to find her insatiable. "I can't get her out of my bed," he said. "She's always there. She's driving me mad."

Philip made these complaints during his 1948 visit to the South of France while his wife remained in England. He was traveling with his cousin David, the Marquess of Milford Haven, who was his best man and closest friend. They were staying in the Monaco apartment of an English friend, who entertained them and other visiting British nobility. Philip's grousing shocked everyone, including his cousin, who criticized him in front of other guests for being indiscreet.

"Real swordsmen don't discuss their fencing partners," said Milford Haven.

"Prince Philip complained that he could not keep Princess Elizabeth out of his bed, that she was at him sexually all the time," recalled the Duchess of Leeds, who was also vacationing in Monaco.

The Duke of Leeds reported Philip's caddish behavior to his brother-in-law, Oliver Lyttleton, a leading Tory Member of Parliament, and strongly recommended an official sanction.

"We all thought that Philip was singularly unpleasant to discuss his wife in such an open manner," said the Duke of Leeds. "He was a disgusting man."

"My in-laws were stunned by Philip's total lack of discretion," said Nigel Dempster, the Daily' Mail gossip columnist, who married the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. "It wasn't that Philip was lying, but that he was telling the truth too bluntly. My aristocratic in-laws couldn't deal with the image of the randy little sex-crazed Princess who would one day be their Queen."

Philip was partly forgiven that summer when the Palace announced that Princess Elizabeth was canceling her schedule for six months. The official bulletin of June 4, 1948, read, "Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, will undertake no public engagements after the end of June." The message indicated that the Princess was pregnant.

"Royal decorum prohibited using the actual word," said biographer Anthony Holden. "You had to read between the lines to understand that she was pregnant. In those days, physicians referred to pregnancy as `confinement,' and the due date of birth was the EDC, or estimated date of confinement. After the birth, she started breastfeeding, but that news wasn't reported either because the word `breast' was taboo in relation to royalty. This antediluvian mentality was prevailing thirty years later when I wrote a biography of the royal baby Prince Charles and mentioned that his mother had breast-fed him. I submitted my manuscript to the Palace for corrections, and John Dauth, press secretary to the Prince, rang me up in near hysteria.

`The sentence about breast-feeding must be deleted. Absolutely and at once.'

"`But why?' I asked.

`One never mentions the royal breasts.'

`Perhaps I could paraphrase and say, "The Princess fed the baby herself"?'

`That still implies the royal breasts, and the royal breasts must never be exposed.

"In the end," said Holden, chuckling over the prudish restraints of royal protocol, "I deleted the sentence."

When the heir became apparent, Prince Philip looked like a hero. Not only had he ensured the line of succession and the continuation of the monarchy, but he had also produced a boy. The future King, Charles Philip Arthur George, was born by cesarean section at Buckingham Palace six days before his parents' first wedding anniversary at 9:14 P.M. on November 14, 1948. He was taken by forceps and weighed seven pounds six ounces.

His mother had insisted he be delivered in her suite at Bucking- ham Palace and not in a makeshift hospital wing. "I want my baby to be born in my own room, amongst the things I know," she said.

When she was a child, Elizabeth had told her governess, "I shall have lots of cows, horses, and children." When the twenty- two-year-old Princess became pregnant, Crawfie could not quite believe that she was going to have a baby.

"Are your frightened at all, Lilibet?" she asked. "What do you feel about it?"

Elizabeth said she was looking forward to the experience. "After all, it is what we're made for."

One morning her governess found her depressed after reading a newspaper account about the divorce of an acquaintance of hers who had small children. "Why do people do it, Crawfie?" Elizabeth asked her governess. "How can they break up a home when there are children to consider?"

Crawfie tried to explain that some personalities were incompatible and some homes unhappy, but the Princess, who had been raised in a royal palace by loving parents and servants, did not seem to understand.

"But why did they get married in the first place?" she asked.

Crawfie eased the subject back to her impending delivery.

"She said she did not mind whether her first child was a boy or a girl," said John Dean, valet to Prince Philip, "but I believe the Duke was looking forward to having a son."

The King was convinced that the baby was going to be a girl because female genes ran strong on both sides of the family: Philip was the only boy following the birth of four girls, and Elizabeth was one of two girls. The genetic probability of a girl worried the King, who wanted his grandchild to be given the royal treatment, which included the bows and/or curtsies that accompany the HRH style. Since the creation of the House of Windsor in 1917, that style~His Royal Highness~had been reserved for the boys of the sovereign and excluded the girls. Not being a gambling man, the cautious King would not take a chance. He issued an official procla~ mation* a week before his daughter gave birth (not wanting his grandchild to be a commoner) and decreed that all children born to Elizabeth and Philip would be considered royal: all must be given the royal appellation of HRH and styled Prince or Princess. That way he ensured himself a royal grandchild, even if she was a girl. When Elizabeth produced a boy, the King was ecstatic, and his enthusiasm affected everyone around the Palace.

"It's a boy. It's a boy," shouted a policeman at the Palace gates. The gathering crowds sang lustily for hours as the country celebrated the birth of a future king. The royal baby was hailed with forty~one~gun salutes from His Majesty's warships around the globe. Winston Churchill said the birth of Prince Charles had made the British monarchy "the most secure in the world." Prime Minister Clement Attlee congratulated the royal family, who by their example in private life as well as in the devotion to public duty, have given strength and comfort to many in these times of stress and uncertainty."

At Windsor Castle, the two-ton curfew bell, which rings only for royals on four occasions~birth, marriage, investiture, and death tolled for hours. For the next week, London's church bells pealed day and night, bonfires blazed, and fountains spouted blue- for-boy water. More than four thousand telegrams arrived at Buckingham Palace the first night, and a dozen temporary typists were hired to handle the letters and packages that poured in from around the empire and beyond.

The day after Prince Charles was born, the King ordered laborers working on Clarence House to "stop taking so damned many tea breaks." He insisted they work overtime to get the residence ready so his daughter, his son-in-law, and his eventual heir could

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*British Information Services, an agency of the British government, issued a six-page advisory on the birth of Princess Elizabeth's baby to resolve the complicated issues of the baby's rank and title.

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move from their cramped quarters in Buckingham Palace. During World War II, the King had lent Clarence House to the British Red Cross. When he decided to give the bombed-out mansion which had no heat, bathrooms, or electricity to his daughter as a wedding present so she could live near him, Parliament allocated £50,000 ($200,000) for renovations. But work stoppages throttled England's postwar economy and stalled the project for eighteen months, and it ended up costing five times more than the war- drained treasury had allotted. Still, the King's subjects did not object. The royal family was so beloved after the war that the public willingly absorbed the cost of $ 1 million for remodeling the royal residence and installing crystal chandeliers, satin draperies, and gold faucets. Only the communist newspaper in London questioned the expenditures for the future sovereign at a time when the average weekly wage was less than $ 100 and scores of homeless families were shivering in abandoned military barracks.

The Queen addressed the misery of "all those who are living in uncongenial surroundings and who are longing for a time when they will have a home of their own." In her radio address on the occasion of Their Majesties' Silver Jubilee in 1948, she said, "I am sure that patience, tolerance, and love will help them to keep their faith undimmed and their courage undaunted when things seem difficult."

The King continued raging at the laborers working on Clarence House, his irascibility now exacerbated by failing health. At the age of fifty-three, his habit of chain-smoking cigarettes had clogged his lungs with cancer, although the word was never used in his presence. The deadly disease had blocked his bronchial tubes, which caused incessant coughing and shortness of breath. He relied on his doctor, Sir John Weir, a genial seventy-two-year-old homeopath, who dispensed more jokes than remedies while His Majesty's health deteriorated. Finally the amiable practitioner called in six other elderly specialists, who recommended surgery to remove the King's left lung. None of the doctors ever told the King of his spreading malignancy, and only one cautioned against cigarettes.

"Before we do this operation, we've got to cut down on the smoking," said James Learmonth, England's top expert on vascular disease. Learmonth did not have the nerve to tell his sovereign that he was killing himself with cigarettes, but by then nicotine had become the Windsor family curse: Queen Mary, the Duke of Windsor, and Princess Margaret were all addicted, and even the Queen smoked eight cigarettes a day, although never in public.

In addition to lung cancer, the King also suffered from arteno sclerosis, which caused him painful leg cramps. In 1949 he underwent lumbar surgery to relieve the pain and prevent gangrene, which would have meant amputating both his legs. Cardiac compli~ cations so weakened him that he had to curtail his schedule and postpone the royal tour of Australia and New Zealand.

The Queen wanted to hide her husband's illness, so she began applying makeup to his face to camouflage his pallor during public appearances. Each time she rouged his sunken, wan cheeks, she cursed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. "None of this would have happened," she said, "if Wallis hadn't blown in from Baltimore!" On her orders, the Palace denied that the King was camouflaging his ill health with cosmetics.

The Queen possessed the most engaging personality of the royal family. She usually demonstrated intelligence and fbrgiveness. But since the abdication in 1936, she remained implacable in her animosity toward the Windsors. Now, filled with bitterness, she blamed them for leaching life away from her husband. "If only Bertie hadn't had to worry so much during the war," she wrote in a letter, bemoaning the abdication that put her husband on the throne. "If only he hadn't had to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders." In her mind, and that of her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, the cause of the King's alarming deterioration was directly attributable to "that damnable Simpson woman."

Distracted by her husband's failing health, the Queen did not pay close attention to a letter she received from Ladies ` Home JournaL, soliciting her comments and corrections on excerpts from a manuscript entitled The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford. She was stunned to learn that her children's governess was publishing a memoir about her seventeen years of royal service. The Scottish schoolmarm, who retired in 1949, said she had postponed marriage until she was forty years old to take care of the Queen's children.

The governess said she waited until Lilibet, twenty-three, and Margaret Rose, nineteen, no longer needed her on a daily basis. Only then did she decide that she could in good conscience accept Retired Major George Buthlay's proposal of marriage. The royal family did not rejoice. In fact, Queen Mary was horrified.

"My dear child, you can't leave them," she told Crawfie. "You simply cannot."

The Queen, too, was appalled by Crawfie's intentions, especially when she said she was going to be married three months before the royal wedding. The Queen, whom Crawfie described in her book as "always sweet," "usually charming," and "unfailingly pleasant," stared at her coldly. After a moment of stony silence, the Queen recovered her composure.

"You must see, Crawfie," she said, "that this would not be at all convenient just now." Her dulcet tone had hardened into the sound of a woman discovering a dog's mess in the middle of her living room floor.

The King, who usually agreed with his mother and his wife, flew into an imperial rage. Only when Crawfie promised to stay through the royal wedding was he pacified. He agreed then to make her a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. This honor, established by Queen Victoria in 1896 for members of the royal household who had rendered extraordinary personal service to the sovereign, was not good enough for Crawfie, or so the Queen maintained. She said the governess had expected to receive the highest household honor Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, which truly separated the upstairs from the downstairs. Because she didn't receive that particular decoration, she retaliated by writing a memoir and two more books.

The Queen denounced Crawfie as a traitor and never spoke to her again. When Marion Crawford died in 1988 at the age of seventy-eight, no member of the royal family attended her funeral, wrote a condolence letter, or even sent flowers. As far as the Queen was concerned, Crawfie was dead* the day her book was published.

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*The governess always nourished the hope that she would be forgiven by the royal family. She saved the letters the Queen wrote to her during the 1936 royal tour of Canada, as well as photographs of Lilibet and Margaret Rose in the royal nursery and the birthday and Christmas cards the little girls sent her. Rather than sell her precious mementos, she bequeathed them to Lilibet in her will. When Crawfie died, her box of treasures disappeared into the vaults of the royal archive at Windsor Castle, which the Queen controls.

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More than anyone else in the royal family, the Queen understood the power of the revealing detail and the humanizing anecdote. She knew the historical impact of a book like Crawfie's, and despite its loving prose and affectionate stories, she never forgave the governess. The Queen did not like Crawfie's rendering of her as a passive, uninvolved mother who cared little about her children's education beyond their ability to sing and dance. The Queen felt betrayed seeing herself using the governess as a psychiatrist to talk to her difficult daughter, Margaret. `I knew that my real work as Royal Governess at the Palace was over," wrote Crawfie, who had trained to be a child psychologist before entering royal service, ``but in the new, busy life which Princess Margaret was leading, her mother thought an hour or two of quiet, unrestrained chat on general subjects might soothe her. . . . I had to go daily to the Palace to sit with Princess Margaret and discuss whatever subjects came up.

Although Crawfie described the Queen as "one of the loveliest people I had ever seen," she wrote that the Duchess of Kent was an "exceptionally beautiful woman" who, unlike the Queen, had married "the best~looking of all the Princes."

The Queen also objected to seeing personal details in print, such as the King's "blue-green draped bed" in his own bedroom separate and away from the Queen." She did not like the reference to Margaret Rose's looking like "a plump navy-blue fish" in her bathing suit, and she was livid to read about "Uncle David" (the Duke of Windsor) being so "devoted to Lilibet." She was miffed that Crawfie had allowed the world to eavesdrop on the transatlantic call that the King and Queen had made to their children in 1939: "We ended the conversation by holding the Queen's corgi, Dookie, up and making him bark down the telephone by pinching his behind."

And the Queen never forgave Crawfie for telling the stories of Lilibet's nursery, which indicated the future Queen's compulsive disorder as a child. "She became almost too methodical and tidy," Crawfie wrote. "She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes arranged so." The image of such an obsessive youngster, "too dutiful for her own good," was painful.

The Queen knew that The Little Princesses would make Marion Crawford the most quoted royal historian of the twentieth century, because no one before had been given such intimate access to the royal family. Afterward, any mention of the author's name caused the Queen to turn away with displeasure. Her slang for treachery: "to do a Crawfie."

The King and Queen ordered their lawyers to institute loyalty oaths* for all future servants. Anyone who dared to "do a Crawfie" was sued by the Palace and stopped by the courts. Because of Crawfie, the subsequent see-and-sell memoirs of the royal servants had to find their markets outside the United Kingdom. No British publisher would dare dishonor the monarchy by venturing into print with unauthorized recollections. To do so would show flagrant disrespect and, not incidentally, prejudice his prospects for a knighthood. Over the years secrets seeped out of the House of Windsor, stripping the monarchy of its mystique and deflating the fantasy. By 1994 the chimera had been so exposed that all deference was gone. Not even the threat of litigation intimidated royal servants. The fairy tale thoroughly dissolved when Prince Charles, the future King of England, went on television and admitted adultery. His valet then revealed the future King's romps outside his marriage bed.

"He was in the bushes with his mistress and there was mud and muck everywhere," said the disgusted servant, who said he had to wash the royal pajamas. "They'd obviously been doing it in the open air." The valet was forced to resign his $18,000-a-year job, but he said he did not care. By then it was no longer an honor to be a member of the royal household. The royal family had tumbled

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*The following notice was given to all members of the royal household: "Communications to the Press: You are not permitted to publish any incident or conversation which may be within your knowledge by reason of your employment in the royal service, nor may you give to any person, either verbally or in writing, any information regarding Her Majesty, or any member of the Royal Family, which might be communicated to the press."

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so far off its pedestal that even royal servants were dismayed. The power of royal displeasure no longer carried the punch it did in 1949.

At that time, King George VI had his hands full. While dealing with the international commotion Over Crawfie's book, and his own precarious health, he was being pestered by his son-in-law for permission to return to active duty. Prince Philip, who aspired to becoming an admiral, wanted to quit his office job at the Admiralty, where he said all he did was "shuffle ships around all day," and resume his career in the navy. The King was resisting because he knew Elizabeth would want to accompany her husband during his two-year tour, and the King did not want her to go. Weeks of family negotiations ensured what Elizabeth should do; when she agreed to commute to London every few months, the King agreed to release Philip from his desk. The Duke of Edinburgh left in October 1949 for Malta, where his uncle Dickie Mountbatten, second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, eventually gave him command of his own frigate, HMS Mag£ie. Respected, not loved, he was called "Dukey" by his crew.

As she promised, Elizabeth remained in England for a few weeks with her baby. Soon, though, she left the eleven-month~old infant with his nannies and grandparents. She skipped her baby's first birthday to join her husband in Malta for their second wedding anniversary.

"[The]Princess had no very clear understanding of the way people lived outside Palace walls," said her governess, Marion Crawford. "But . . when she flew to visit Prince Philip in Malta, she saw and experienced for the first time the life of an ordinary girl not living in a palace."

Lady Mountbatten agreed. In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, she wrote: "It's lovely seeing her so radiant, and leading a more or less human and normal existence for once."

The Mountbattens turned over their hilltop quarters in Villa Guardamangia to Elizabeth and Philip during her visits, and the Princess so enjoyed herself that she extended her stay to spend Christmas with her husband. So little Prince Charles spent the holidays with his nanny, his grandparents, and his great-grandmother Queen Mary, whom he called "Gan Gan."

"He is too sweet stomping around the room & we shall love having him a

Sandringham," the King wrote of his two-year-old grandson. "He is the fifth generation to live there & I hope will get to love the place."

Elizabeth returned home only when her husband went to sea, and Lady Mountbatten accompanied her to the airport.

"Lilibet had left with a tear in her eyes and a lump in her throat," Edwina Mountbatten wrote to a friend. "Putting her into the Viking when she left was I thought rather like putting a bird back into a very small cage and I felt sad and nearly tearful myself."

Back home, Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant. So she returned to Malta in March 1950 to tell her husband the news and stayed with him for another month. She returned to London in May and did not see Philip again until he came home for the birth of their daughter, Anne, on August 15,1950. He stayed for four weeks before returning to Malta.

Elizabeth rejoined him there in November for three months, again leaving her children with their nannies and grandparents. Accompanied by her maid, her footman, and her detective, she arrived on the island with her sports car, forty wardrobe trunks, and a new polo pony for her husband. She spent her days relaxing in the sun, shopping, lunching with officers' wives, and getting her hair done in a beauty salon. Occasionally she toured military installations, cut ceremonial ribbons, and visited nursery schools. She filled her evenings with dinner parties, dances, and movies. On later trips she traveled with Philip to Italy and Greece. The Maltese press reported the personal cruise as professional business: "Like the wife of any naval officer, she is joining her husband on his station." While she said she considered herself "just another naval wife," she never discouraged curtsies or formal introductions as "Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh."

The Maltese were enchanted with her, and the Times of Ma lta ran several stories reporting her visits to the Under-Five Club, for children whose fathers were stationed in Malta. But the paper did not raise the question of why she, unlike other military mothers, had left her own children, under the age of five, in England. Often, photographs appeared of her smiling and waving, attending Chatn~ pagne parties, visiting churches, warships, and horse stables. She was hailed as "the best-loved, the most notable naval wife ever to visit these islands."

Back home, her press coverage was not quite so gushy. One newspaper story wondered how she could abandon her children for weeks on end, especially when her son came down with tonsillitis. Other newspapers took her to task for looking like "an Edwardian vaudeville queen. Carpings about her weight and wardrobe disturbed her more than criticism about her children, especially coming from her husband.

"You're not going to wear that thing," he said when Elizabeth walked into his room to show him a new dress. "Take it off at once."

"It was all very upsetting," wrote Geoffrey Bocca in an early biography. "The Empire had on its hands a Princess it adored passionately, but a Princess that was both overstuffed and over- dressed. . . . As a non-smoker she did not have the assistance of nicotine to hold down the poundage . . . [so] she went off starchy food and she took appetite~reducing pills~a blue pill for breakfast, a green pill at lunch, and a chocolate pill at dinner." The amphetamines, like all other medications for the Princess, were bought by a servant to preserve her privacy. "When sleeping tablets were prescribed to help her get a good night's rest, I got them in my own name," said John Dean. "To avoid drawing attention to the purchase and to the fact that they were for Princess Elizabeth."

During Elizabeth's longest stay in Malta, her sister came to visit, and the prospect of the glamorous, pouty-lipped Princess with her long, ornate cigarette holder and strapless gowns excited the bachelor contingent stationed on the small island.

"Malta is only ninety square miles in size, and Princess Margaret's arrival was big, big news for the men, who just about went crazy," recalled Roland Flamini, a diplomatic correspondent for Time magazine. "I was a teenager then, and because my father was writing Malta's constitution, I later got to meet Princess Elizabeth.

I didn't have the slightest idea what to say to her, so I blurted out 5omething about Princess Margaret's visit, and said I hoped that she had had a good time.

`I haven't the faintest idea,' said Princess Elizabeth in her

high~pitched voice. `The little bitch hasn't written to me yet, or thanked me.'*

"I knew then that there was more to the proper, prissy-looking princess Elizabeth than met the eye.

Because of her father's failing health, Elizabeth returned to London, and Philip had to follow a few months later after resigning from the navy. On July 16, 1951, he bade farewell to his crew. "The past eleven months have been the happiest of my sailor life," he said. Five days later he flew to England, where he was greeted at the airport by his young son, Prince Charles, and one of his son's nannies. But Elizabeth was not there. She was at the Ascot races.

Three months later, in October 1951, she and Philip were called upon to represent the royal family on a tour of Canada, which, after a diplomatic prod from the British to the Americans,** included a short visit to the United States. Once again Elizabeth and Philip left their children in the care of nannies and grandparents. They missed Princess Anne's first steps and the third birthday of Prince Charles, but before leaving England, they selected gifts for him, which they left with the King and Queen to present. They embarked on their five-week journey with an entourage of four servants and 189 wardrobe trunks. One suitcase contained a sealed parchment envelope with the Accession Declaration in case the King died during the tour. They spent almost a month in the

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*Forty years later, when Flamini wrote Sovereign.' ElitaAeth JJ and rAe Windsor Dynasty (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1991), he recorded his introduction to Princess Elizabeth but was forced to alter the dialogue slightly. "The publishing lawyers refused to let me quote the future Queen of England calling her sister a `bitch,' " he said. "Although I was there and heard what she said, the lawyers maintained that no one would ever believe Elizabeth referred to her sister that way.

**U.S. diplomatic memos suggest that the official invitation to Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh had to be coaxed out of the State Department. The cable to the Secretary of State, dated July 5, 1951, states: "Were no official United States invitation forthcoming, it might be misunderstood in England. A press report of today from London quoted a Buckingham Palace official as saying that the Princess would decide whether to visit the United States if and when she gets an American invitation. It is recommended that an official invitation to visit . . . in the fall be extended at an early date. . .

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Chief of Protocol Henry Catto. "I say, Catto. Do you employ professional door slammers in this house?" Duly chastised, Catto immediately ordered all the doorjambs to be lined in felt.

The President's elderly mother, who was bedridden on the top floor of Blair House, was looking forward to meeting the royal couple. "She'll kill me if she doesn't get to say hello to you," Truman told the Princess. So Elizabeth and Philip followed the President up six flights of stairs. Infirm and almost deaf at the age of ninety~eight, Martha Truman had learned that Winston Churchill had been returned as Prime Minister on October 25, 1951. So she was primed for the royal introduction.

"Mother," bellowed Truman, "I've brought Princess Elizabeth to see you!" The little old woman beamed. "I'm so glad your father's been reelected," she said.

Elizabeth smiled and Philip chuckled as Harry Truman threw back his head and roared.

The folksy President had won the affection of the royal couple, and Elizabeth wrote him a three-page letter of thanks: "The memory of our visit to Washington will long remain with us, and we are so grateful to you for having invited us. Our only sadness was that our stay with you was so short, but what we saw has only made us wish all the more that it may be possible for us to return again one day. .

British Paramount News filmed one thousand feet of newsreel on the royal visit to Washington, because after the GI presence in England during the war, Britons were intrigued with America. They packed the movie houses to see the footage. The Foreign Office complimented the British Ambassador to the United States for a job well done, and the Ambassador wrote to the President: "I am so delighted with the success of the visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh that I feel I must express my own deep gratitude to you. I know from what they said to us how much Princess Elizabeth and her husband enjoyed their stay at Blair House."

On their return home, Elizabeth and Philip were buoyed by the praise they received for improving Anglo-American relations.

The King and Queen met them at Victoria Station with Prince Charles, who timidly approached his parents as if they were strangers. The photograph of Princess Elizabeth greeting her three-year01d son with a pat on the back would haunt her years later when the young boy grew up and, citing the picture, criticized her for being a cold and distant mother.

The King, who had undergone three operations in three years, said he felt so much better that he wanted to reinstate his visit to Australia and New Zealand. "An operation is not an illness," he said, "and a sea voyage would be beneficial." His doctors adamantly refused, so once again Elizabeth and Philip were pressed into service. The King received tentative permission from his doctors to plan a therapeutic cruise to South Africa in the spring, and the departure date was set for the next March. The country rejoiced over the King's recovery. "By then he was esteemed to the point of tenderness," recalled writer Rebecca West. A national day of thanksgiving was declared for December 9, 1951. Church bells pealed, the Commonwealth thanked God, and the King knighted his doctors. Five days later he celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday at Buckingham Palace.

Preparing for the rigorous five-month trip ahead, Elizabeth asked that a rest stop be added to the itinerary so she could see the wild animal reserves of what was then called "Kenya Colony." She and Philip wanted to see the Sagana Royal Lodge at Nyeri, which had been their wedding present from the people of East Africa.

The royal couple left London by plane on January 31,1952, with a small traveling party. The King and Queen and Princess Margaret went to the airport to say good-bye. Aboard the blue- and-silver royal aircraft, the King turned to BoBo MacDonald, his daughter's personal dresser.

"Look after the Princess for me, BoBo," he said. "I hope the tour is not going to be too tiring for you."

He disembarked and stood at the bottom of the steps, hatless and haggard. Newsreel cameras captured him in an overcoat, standing in the bitingly cold wind. He waved to his daughter and watched the plane until it became a speck in the sky. He never saw her again.

Five days later at Sandringham, in the early hours of February 6, 1952, he suffered a coronary thrombosis and died in his sleep. That morning, as the Queen was drinking her tea, Sir Harold Campbell came to her room to tell her that the King was gone. She hurried to her husband's chamber, walked to his bed, and kissed his forehead for the last time. She issued instructions for a vigil to be kept at his open door. "The King must not be left alone," she said. "And Lilibet must be informed." Quickly she amended her sentence. "The Queen must be informed."

The equerry backed out of the room to relay the awful news to the young woman, who had departed England a Princess and would be returning as Queen. Campbell did not reach the royal party because a tropical storm had knocked out the telephone lines in Kenya. So he contacted Reuters, which he deemed the most responsible news service, and asked that the message be conveyed to the royal party. Elizabeth and Philip had spent the night at Treetops, the remote observation post in the African jungle, where they watched animals gather at a salt lick in the shadow of Mount Kenya. At dawn the exhausted couple returned to the Sagana Royal Lodge to sleep for a few hours. A Reuters reporter received the news flash from London and located the Queen's private secretary, Martin Charteris.

"I remember he reached for a cigarette with trembling hands before he could tell me the King was dead," said Charteris, who relayed the news to Michael Parker, aide~de~camp to Prince Philip. "Mike," he said, "our employer's father is dead. I suggest you do not tell the lady at least until the news is confirmed."

The British Broadcasting Company made a formal announcement at 10:45 AM., February 6, 1952, and, in a gesture of respect, went silent for the rest of the day. Stunned crowds filled the rain- drenched streets of London, and motorists stood in the middle of the street by their cars, weeping. Church bells tolled fifty-six times, one for each year of the King's short life. England's sorrow echoed around the world. In Australia a member of Parliament said, "We have lost a great bloke." In America the House of Representatives passed a resolution of sympathy and adjourned. President Truman wrote in his diary: "He was a grand man. Worth a pair of his brother Ed."

That brother, the Duke of Windsor, received the news in New York City, where he and the Duchess were staying at the WaldorfAstoria. Winston Churchill advised him to return to England at once but cautioned against bringing the Duchess, who would not be received with propriety. The Duke sailed for England by himself, looking like a forlorn little man who had fallen off a charm bracelet. He stayed with his mother at Marlborough House, although he resented Queen Mary's hostility to his wife.

In Kenya Michael Parker hurried to Prince Philip's room to wake him. "It was his job to tell the Queen," said Parker. "Probably the worst moment of his life. All he could say was, `This will be a terrible blow.' He took her out into the garden and they walked slowly up and down the lawn while he talked and talked and talked to her ve never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life. He's not the sort of person to show his emotions, but you can tell from a man's face how he sets his features. I'll never forget it. He looked as if you'd dropped half the world on him. . . . The rest of us flew into action and were out of that place in an hour."

Elizabeth received the news without cracking. She walked slowly back to the lodge, where BoBo MacDonald was shining her shoes. Her personal dresser dropped to her knees in a deep curtsy. "Oh, no, BoBo," she said. "You don't have to do that." Her lady- in-waiting, Pamela Mountbatten, rushed to give her a comforting hug.

"Oh, thank you," said the new Queen. "But I am so sorry that it means we've got to go back to England and it's upsetting everybody's plans."

Martin Charteris entered with the dreaded envelope containing the accession documents, which required the new sovereign's name.

"I did what I had to do," he recalled. "I addressed her: `The only question I have to ask you at this stage is, what do you wish to be called when you're on the throne?'

`Oh, my own name, of course. Elizabeth. What else?' `Right. Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Second.'

Many years later Charteris characterized the new Queen's reaction to her accession: "I remember seeing her moments after she became Queen--moments, not hours--and she seemed almost to reach out for it. There were no tears. She was just there, back braced, her color a little heightened. Just waiting for her destiny.

"It was quite different for Philip. He sat slumped behind a copy of the Times. He didn't want it at all. It was going to change his whole life: take away the emotional stability he'd finally found."

Charteris summoned the press to make the announcement about "the lady we must now call the Queen." He asked photogra~ phers to respect her privacy by not taking her picture as she prepared to leave. The photographers complied and stood by the side of the road as she passed, holding their cameras limp in their left hands and their right hands held over their hearts. The people of Kenya lined the dirt road to the airport for a solid forty-mile line. Black Africans, brown Indians, and white Europeans, subjects all, bowed their heads in silent tribute.

"There was very little conversation on the flight back to London," recalled John Dean. "BoBo and I sat together, with the royal couple immediately behind. . . . The Queen got up once or twice during the journey, and when she returned to her seat she looked as if she might have been crying."

She was wearing the beige-and~white sundress she had on in Kenya and refused to put on mourning clothes until the very last minute. Upon landing, the Queen looked out the window and saw Prime Minister Churchill waiting with a clutch of elderly men in somber ration-book black suits and black armbands. She gasped when she saw the long line of black Daimler sedans.

"Oh, God," she whispered to her lady~in~waiting. "They've brought the hearses."

Composed, but unsure of what to do next, she turned to her husband.

"Shall I go down alone?"

"Yes," he said, acknowledging her sudden preeminence. As his wife's subject, he now was required to call her "ma'am" in public and walk four paces behind her.

Tears trickled down Churchill's cheeks and he struggled for composure as he offered his condolences.

"A tragic homecoming," said the Queen, "but a smooth flight."

After shaking hands with the plane's crew, and thanking each one, she stepped into the family Daimler and was driven to Clarence House, where Queen Mary, dressed in black, was waiting to pay her respects.

"Her old grannie and subject must be the first to kiss her hand," said Queen Mary.

The eighty-five-year-old woman, who would die thirteen months later, set the royal standard for mourning. After burying her husband, King George V, and two of her five sons, she declared black to be the color of death and to be worn only for doing death's duty. So the women of the House of Windsor never wore black except when grieving. "On royal trips, we always packed something black in the luggage in case news of any death reached us," said John Dean. "That is how it happened that the new Queen returned from tropical Africa dressed appropriately in a plain black dress, coat, and hat."

The Queen greeted her grandmother as always: by kissing her on both cheeks and curtsying. Queen Mary frowned and shook her head, insisting that she be the one to pay homage. Despite crippling arthritis, she dropped to the ground in a deep curtsy to her twenty- five-year-old granddaughter, who was now her sovereign. Then, standing upright, the elderly Queen chided the new Queen.

"Lilibet," she said, "your skirts are much too short for mourning!"

After seeing her grandmother, the Queen was led to St. James's Palace, where she made a poignant accession proclamation. "My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than that I shall always work as my father did," she said.

At Sandringham her mother and sister waited for her, mired in their own grief. Princess Margaret had locked herself in her room, almost inconsolable. "It seems that life has stopped forever," she told her mother. "I wonder how it can go on." The fifty-one-yearold Queen, not yet in black, resisted wearing widow's weeds. She returned to her room and began writing letters. She knew that she was now consigned to the role of Queen Dowager, a title that made her shudder. Ignoring protocol, she insisted on being called Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Her biographer, Penelope Mortimer, suggested that she had devised the title because she could not cope with the sudden demotion she suffered from her husband's death. "In this way," wrote Mortimer, "she managed to be called `Queen' twice over."*

Almost forgotten inside the big, hushed house at Sandringham was the King's three~year~old grandson, Charles, who was playing by himself, sliding a green toy crocodile up and down the great mahogany staircase.

"What happened, nanny? What happened?" he asked his nurse, Helen Lightbody.

"Grandpa's gone to sleep forever," she said, bowing to the bewildered little boy, who was now Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Great Steward of Scotland. As the Crown Prince and heir apparent, he now outranked his father. Nanny took her royal charge by the hand and led him to bed for his nap.

Upstairs, the King's body was moved from his bedroom to the small family church of St. Mary Magdalene, where it was guarded around the clock by his estate workers, who wore the same green tweed knickerbocker suits they wore when hunting with their King. They laid his royal purple standard over the coffin they had built that morning from Sandringham oak. Next to it they placed a white wreath from Winston Churchill. In his own hand, the Prime Minister had written: "For Valour." The Queen's flowers for her father arrived soon after and were placed on top of the coffin with her card: "To darling Papa from your sorrowing Lilibet." When she curtsied to her father's body at the funeral, it was the last curtsy she ever made.

Historians assessed the King as an important symbolic leader for the British during World War II, but they noted that his reign

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*In response to this aurhor's query about the title of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the Buckiogham Palace Press Office offered a different interpretation: "No other widowed Queen Consort in English history has held a title such as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, as no widowed Queen Consort has either had a reigning Queen as a daughter or lived to see her daughter crowned."

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marked the end of the British empire. No longer King and Emperor, George VI was reduced to head of the Commonwealth of Nations and sadly watched Great Britain evolve into a welfare state. But France's Ambassador said the King had left his daughter "a throne more stable than England has known almost her entire history." To his countrymen the King remained a hero worthy of homage, a sovereign deserving respect. Soldiers wore black arm- bands after his death, and people contributed money for a memorial fund. Parliament voted $168,000 to pay for an elaborate state funeral on February 16, 1952, which included spreading purple cloth on the pavements so the white nylon ropes binding the King's coffin to the catafalque would not touch the ground.

On that day, two minutes of absolute silence were observed in memory of the monarch. A man, who defiantly slapped his feet on the street, was arrested for insulting behavior. Crowds of angry Britons mobbed him as he fled to safety in a policeman's arms. In court that afternoon, he was fined $2.80 for breaking the King's silence.

From the moment she stepped off the plane in London, the new Queen was engulfed by courtiers and advisers and equerries, all urgently directing her on her father's formal lying-in-state at Westminster Hall, his state funeral in London, his burial in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, and the long period of national mourning. She was briefed on the protocol for entertaining prime ministers and high commissioners of Commonwealth countries attending the funeral and greeting the seven sovereigns from other countries, including her uncle David, the Duke of Windsor, who posed a ticklish problem. He wanted to discuss continuing the $7O,000-a-year allowance he had been receiving from her father since 1936. Because those personal funds were now hers, she had to decide whether to keep paying him.

The Duke's lawyer argued that the money was a lifetime pension and his brother's compensation to the Duke for renouncing his inheritance. The Duke knew the new Queen would discuss the allowance with her mother and Queen Mary. "It's hell to be even that much dependent on these ice-veined bitches," he wrote to the

Duchess from London. "I'm afraid they've got the fine excuse of national economy if they want to use it."

They didn't need it. The Queen Mother said the Duke already had millions of his own, which the Duchess simply squandered on fripperies like satin pillows for her dogs and Diorissimo perfume, which she sprayed on her flowers to give them added fragrance. Queen Mary, who collected antiques~frequently while visiting friends' homes and then sending her servant to inquire" (that is, collect) the pieces she admired~said the spendthrift Duchess would only waste the money on her addiction to shoes, pointing out that she had once bought fifty-six pairs during one shopping spree. The new Queen deferred to her mother and grandmother and decided not to pay the Duke.

Upon the King's death, all royal possessions passed directly to the new sovereign, including the King's palaces, his twenty mares, his courtiers, and his private secretary, Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles. So, technically, Elizabeth's mother and sister no longer had homes or horses or courtiers. Worse, their eviction from Buckingham Palace would mean that Elizabeth and Philip would have to leave Clarence House, something neither wanted, and move into Buck House, as they called Buckingham Palace.

"Oh, God, now we've got to live behind railings," she said.

"Bloody hell," said her husband. He dreaded exchanging the modern comforts of Clarence House for the drafty caverns of Buckingham Palace, with its 10,000 windows, three miles of red-carpeted corridors, 1,000 clocks, 10,000 pieces of furniture, 690 rooms, 230 servants, and 45-acre backyard. King Edward VII had referred to it disparagingly as "the Sepulchre." King Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, complained of the "dank, musty smell," and the Queen's father, King George VI, called it "an icebox." So Prince Philip, who said he "felt like a lodger," proposed using the Palace as an office and place of official entertainment while maintaining Clarence House as their home. The Queen put the idea to Winston Churchill, who sputtered indignantly. He insisted that Buckingham Palace was the sovereign's home as well as the sovereign's workplace~a focal point for the nation, the locus of the monarchy.

Hesitant to argue with the venerable Prime Minister, the Queen

acceded and dutifully scheduled the move. Her husband was so incensed that he had the white maple paneling stripped from his study at Clarence House and moved to his bedroom in Buckingham Palace. Churchill then recommended that the Queen consider exchanging residences with her mother and sister. The Prime Minister confided his concern over her mother's mental state. He said he had heard that in her grief the distraught widow had turned to spiritualism and even participated in a seance to speak to her dead husband. Churchill was so disturbed by the notion of the Queen Mother spirit rapping with ghosts that he traveled to Sandringham to persuade her to come out of retirement. He said that the government needed her more now than when her husband was alive. He offered to ease her return to public life by making Clarence House her London home.

"The Queen Mother had always thought highly of the bright comfort in which her daughter and son-in-law lived at the modernized Clarence House," said John Dean, "and even envied it. But when it was suggested that she should take over Clarence House, she seemed reluctant to leave the Palace. This was very understandable, for her large suite there was rich with memories of a beloved husband."

The Queen Mother told Churchill that she did not like the color scheme at Clarence House. He offered to change it. Then she said she could not bear to leave her bedroom in Buckingham Palace because the marble fireplace there had been a personal gift from the King. Churchill offered to move the fireplace to Clarence House. Still, she resisted, saying she couldn't afford to live in such luxury anymore. Churchill said that her presence was so vital to the monarchy that the government planned to allocate $220,000 to refurbish the mansion for her and to provide a yearly allowance of $360,000, plus a staff of fifteen. She also was given two other palaces: Royal Lodge, an elegant Gothic house in Windsor Great Park near Windsor Castle, and Birkall in Scotland. In addition she purchased the Castle of Mey, surrounded by twenty-five thousand acres of heather in Scotland. Still, she hesitated accepting Churchill's offer. "I was going to throw in Big Ben," he said later, "but she yielded in time."

And the new Queen agreed to everything. She sympathized with her mother's sixteen years of royal prerogatives suddenly yanked the crown jewels, the palaces, the servants, the title. What the Queen did not realize was how much her mother missed sharing the power of the throne. The Queen understood better as soon as she saw the letter the Queen Mother wrote to her friend Lady Airlie:

Oh, Mabel, if only you knew how hard it has been; how I have struggled with myself. All through the years the King always told me everything first. I do so miss that

The Queen quickly ordered a new red leather dispatch box to be emblazoned in gold with the words "HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother."

But the Queen did not extend this extraordinary privilege to her husband. In fact, she denied Philip the honor of sharing the red dispatch boxes that contained the confidential documents of government sent for royal approval. In this she broke all precedents: Queen Victoria had shared her boxes with Prince Albert. And her son and heir, King Edward VII, even shared his boxes with his daughter-in-law because he was so impressed by her devotion to the monarchy that he wanted her to be prepared to play her part behind the scenes when her husband became King. When he did become King, George V continued "doing" his boxes with his wife, Queen Mary, and his successor, George VI, did the same with his wife. But Queen Elizabeth II declined to carry on the royal responsibility with her spouse. Her advisers were so startled by her refusal that they posed the question again of permitting Philip to have access. Her reply: "No to the boxes." To her husband she blamed her advisers.

A few weeks later her friend Lord Kinross, third Baron of Glasclune, wrote a profile of Philip in The New York Times Maga;`ine and quoted the Queen on how to manage husbands:

"What do you do when your husband wants something very badly and you don't want him to have it?" Elizabeth asked a friend.

"Well, ma'am," the friend replied, "I try to reason with him and dissuade him, and we sometimes reach a compromise."

"Oh," Elizabeth said reflectively, "that's not my method. I tell philip he shall have it and then make sure that he doesn't get it."

The Queen held so tightly to her royal prerogatives that she would not even let her husband enter the Wedgwood blue room in Buckingham Palace during her weekly audiences with the Prime Minister.

"Before . . . whatever we did, it was together," Philip said of his marriage before the accession. "I suppose I naturally filled the principal position."

No longer. The strong, dominant, take-charge husband was suddenly unmanned. He was no longer on an equal footing with his wife. Constitutionally he had no status, except what he received from the Queen.

"I remember attending a dinner for only ten people," said Evelyn Prebensen, the daughter of the dean of the Diplomatic Corps. "And even then poor Philip could not sit down if the Queen was still standing. She was very much the monarch in the early years and insisted on her royal prerogatives. If Philip came into the room after she did, he had to bow to her and say, `I'm sorry, Your Majesty.'

His friends watched helplessly as Philip sank into depression after Elizabeth's accession.

"You could feel it all underneath," ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia told his wife after the King's funeral. "I don't know how long he can last . . . bottled up like that."

"He used to say, `I'm neither one thing nor the other. I'm nothing,' " recalled Michael Parker's wife, Eileen.

Philip, who had aspired to be an admiral, recognized that his career in the navy was sunk. He locked himself in his room and spent hours shut away by himself, confiding only in his eldest sister, Margarita.

"You can imagine what's going to happen now," he said with foreboding.

The day after the King's funeral, the Mountbattens entertained their German relatives at Broadlands, where Uncle Dickie boasted that the House of Windsor no longer reigned. With a Champagne flute in hand, he proposed a toast to the new House of Mountbatten.

He boasted that the blood of Battenberg had risen from obscurity on the banks of the Rhine to the highest throne on earth. His cousin Prince Ernst August of Hannover reported the conversation to Queen Mary, who was outraged. As someone who studied geneal~ ogy like a miner assaying gold, she knew that Philip's family descended from the House of Schleswig~Holstein~Sonderburg~ Glucksburg~Beck. She ticked off his royal antecedents like a child reciting the alphabet.

"Philip's name is not Mountbatten," she said. "If he has any name at all, it is Glucksburg."*

She summoned Churchill and reminded him that her husband, King George V, had decreed in 1917 that the House of Windsor was to be the royal family's name forever, and she said no amount of posturing by that "ambitious upstart" Dickie Mountbatten could change the royal edict. The Prime Minister listened respectfully and marveled at how effectively the elderly Queen had buried her German roots to become an icon of Great Britain. She told him she had always despised Hitler because his German accent was so horrible. "He never could speak the language properly," she said.

Churchill called a cabinet meeting to discuss Mountbatten's claim. The cabinet ministers, mindful of the two world wars England fought against the hated Huns, insisted that the new Queen make a public announcement: she must affirm herself a Windsor and proclaim that all her descendants would bear the Windsor surname. Churchill and his ministers felt that anything less would cause political insurrection, so suspicious were they of Mountbatten's dynastic ambitions and liberal politics.** The Queen was duly informed. Churchill told her that "the feeling of the government reinforced by public opinion was that Her Majesty should drop the Mountbatten name and reign under your father's name of Windsor." Philip argued strenuously for the House of Mountbatten and

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*Prince Philip's family through the marriage of King George I of Hellenes to Grand Duchess Olga, granddaughter of Tsar Niabolas I includes sixteen kings of the House of Oldenburg, seven tsars of Russia, six kings of Sweden, and three kings from the House of Schleswig~Holstein Sonderburg~Glucksburg~Beck

**The liberal politics of the Mounthattens shocked their conservative household staff. When a vote canvasser for the Labor Party called on them, Mounthatten said: "Don't worry about us. It's the servants you want to work on."

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Windsor and, failing that, pleaded for the House of Windsor and £dinburgh. But she relied on her Prime Minister and his advisers, which thoroughly humiliated her husband.

"I'm just a bloody amoeba," he was heard to cry. "That's all."

Many years later Martin Charteris said, "I've always taken that to mean Philip [figured he] was just there to deposit semen."

The Queen even deprived her husband of that function. Having let it be known the year before that she had wanted to have another child, she now changed her mind. But she was angry when she read newspaper reports hinting at her pregnancy. During a meeting with Churchill and members of his cabinet to discuss the name change, she said sharply, "I expect these rumors to stop!" The next day the Prime Minister was quoted as saying, "She may not be pregnant, but she is certainly regnant."

After the row about renaming the House of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II, the fourth sovereign of that dynasty, dutifully announced on April 9,1952, that unlike every other wife in the realm, she would not carry her husband's name.

"It was very hurting to Prince Philip that the one thing he felt he brought to his marriage, which was his name, was no longer possible," said Countess Patricia Mountbatten. "But Churchill was an old, very experienced man, and [Elizabeth] was a very young and new Queen, and, understandably, she felt . . . it wasn't her place to stand up to him and say, `I don't want to do this.'

Philip's position was uncomfortable. When a man ascends to the throne and becomes King, his wife automatically becomes his Queen Consort and is crowned with him. Not so when a woman ascends and becomes Queen. Her husband, who will never be King, remains a prince.

Elizabeth tried to mollify her husband by elevating his position within the realm. She declared that "His Royal Highness, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, henceforth and on all occasions.. . shall have, hold and enjoy Place, Pre-Eminence and Precedence next to Her Majesty." This declaration of rank put Philip ahead of everyone in the kingdom, including someone who had once been King (the Duke of Windsor) and someone who would become King one day~Prince Charles.

The Queen then promoted her husband from lieutenant to Admiral, which entitled him to wear the uniform and receive full honors as Admiral of the Royal Navy.* She also elevated him to the highest rank in each of the other military services, making him Field Marshall of the Army, Marshall of the Royal Air Force, and Captain General of the Royal Marines. Despite these honorssudden and unearned-Philip had no authority: he was only background music for the melody. During the painful adjustment to his wife's accession, he learned what his father-in-law, King George VI, had meant when he said: "Being a consort is much more difficult than being a sovereign. It's perhaps the most difficult job in the world."

Days after moving from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, Philip had an attack of jaundice, a liver disease his friends attributed to stress and depression. Engorged with bile, he was confined to bed for three weeks. His valet, John Dean, served him his meals-"all boiled and bland" and the Queen visited him three times a day.

"The Duke's complexion went a sickly yellow, and he was very disgusted and depressed when told what he had got," said his valet. "I paid great attention to him all the time he was ill, doing my utmost to meet his every wish, because I felt so sorry for him in that gloomy room."

Prince Philip recovered his health gradually but continued to feel diminished in his marriage. A few months later he rallied for the coronation because his wife had put him in charge of the ceremony, but the bleakness of being the Queen's Consort nearly capsized him.

"People forget what it was like when the Queen was twenty- six and I was thirty, when she succeeded [to the throne]," he told writer Fiammetta Rocco. "Well . . . that's when things started..."

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*When Mounthatten was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, he arrived at Buckingham Palace to be greeted by Prince Philip, also wearing the same uniform. Someone asked, "Who salutes whom when you two meer as Admirals of the Fleet?" Philip said, "We salute each other, but only one of us means it."

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SEVEN

The black armbands disappeared three months after the King's

death, and for the next year the coronation of the Queen seemed to dominate the country's newsrooms, barrooms, boardrooms, and drawing rooms. The event was set for Tuesday, June 2, 1953, at 10:30 A.M., and until that moment, everything revolved around regalia.

The coronation, which was to be England's reward for prevailing in the war, resonated with the memory of sacrifice and the hope of rebirth. The hyperbolic British press wrote reams about the advent of "the New Elizabethan era" and compared the country's advances under Elizabeth I with the wonders that would occur under Elizabeth II. Then she herself spoke up to dampen the extravagant effusions.

"Frankly," she said, "I do not myself feel at all like my Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her shores."

In distancing herself from her predecessor, Elizabeth II wrapped herself softly in marriage and motherhood. Forty-five years later she would be respected as a dutiful monarch and the most traveled in British history, but lacking as a wife and mother. Elizabeth I, though, would still be admired for the skill, intelligence, and fortitude with which she guided her country.

Coronation fever rose in 1953, and the holiday mood swept Coronation fever rose in 1953, and the holiday mood swept

over London and into the farthest reaches of the British Isles and dominions. British housewives carried brown ration books that controlled their butter, cheese, margarine, meat, and sugar. But now sugar restrictions were lifted, and people who had been deprived of cake, candy, and cookies for fourteen years indulged in sweets. Tea was derationed, and so were eggs. Wanime preoccupa~ tion with rifles, gas masks, and helmets stopped as everyone discussed jeweled swords, tiaras, and coronets. In honor of what was trumpeted as the New Elizabethan era, London turned itself into a gigantic merry-go-round of triumphal arches and twinkling lights. Purple flags and gold pennants with elaborate designs of crowns and scepters decorated the main streets. Shields and medallions adorned office buildings, and lampposts on major thoroughfares were painted a giddy combination of yellow, lavender, black, white, and red. Festive streamers and bunting festooned the seven-mile coronation route the Queen would take after her crowning. Exotic flowers flown in from Australia filled the gigantic boxes in front of Parliament, and two thousand square feet of new carpeting was laid in Westminster Abbey to accommodate the 7,700 guests the Queen had invited to witness her enthronement.

Recognizing the global interest in this event, the British Broadcasting Company suggested televising the coronation, but the Queen's courtiers said no. They said they did not want television cameras recording an event that they felt should be seen only by the aristocracy. They argued that it would be a commercial intrusion on a sacred ritual.

"I don't see why the BBC should have a better view of my monarch being crowned than me," said Prime Minister Churchill.

"Quite right," said the Queen's private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles.

The Queen was consulted and was expected to concur. Instead she started asking technical questions about transmitting the ceremony to the far corners of the earth, how many microphones would be required, how the sound system would work, and where the cameras would be placed in the Abbey.

"But . . . but . . . the great and blinding light," protested Lascelles.

And the Archbishop of Canterbury chimed in, "It would be unfair to expose you . . . to this searching method of photography, without the chance of correcting an error, for perhaps two hours on end."

The Queen listened but disagreed. "I have to be seen to be believed," she said.

Days later she sent her husband to the Prime Minister's office with her decision: The BBC would be allowed to televise the coronation, but with one restriction: no close-ups. The Queen's democratic gesture astonished the conservative Prime Minister, but he recovered and presented her views to his cabinet.

"Her Majesty believes all her subjects should have the opportunity of seeing the coronation," he said.

His ministers argued and tried to reverse her decision, but Churchill said there were no options.

"After all, it was the Queen who was being crowned," he said later, "and not the cabinet."

The Queen's decision enabled the world to watch seven and a half hours of continuous live reporting. The television audience was the largest ever at the time three hundred million. Later, when she visited the BBC to view her coronation coverage, she was delighted by what she saw. "She enjoyed it so much," said Peter Dimmock, the BBC coronation producer, "that she knighted George Barnes, who was director of television at the time. She knighted [him] on the spot in Limegrove, where she watched the recording."

"Allowing television cameras into the sacred precincts of Westminster Abbey was a key decision of her reign," said writer John pearson. "It meant that the coronation . . . would be unique in the annals of the monarchy, the first time in history a sovereign had been crowned with millions of close and fascinated witnesses to the strange and powerful event. . .

No other country has a coronation so steeped in mystique and majesty, laden with history, and imbued with religion. The occasion is celebrated with a festive holiday that includes songs, fireworks, and street fairs. Vendors hawk royally embossed gewgaws such as tea strainers, egg timers, pocket combs, and napkin rings.

The commercial hoopla precedes a high church ceremony that combines the solemnity of a Papal installation with the impact of a presidential inauguration. All that plus the romance of a crown, orb, scepter, and gilded coach.

Nothing in the world is as elaborate as the pageantry surrounding a coronation, and nothing better defines the British monarchy. So the Queen was determined to stage the most magnificent crowning in British history. And it cost her government over $6.5 million about $50 million in 1996 dollars. She felt it was a necessary investment for her impoverished country because the monarchy was, in her view, its most precious possession and the symbol of its historic continuity. Most other monarchies had crumbled under the weight of the two world wars, but the monarchy of Great Britain still dominated the life of the country. As Queen, Elizabeth II would reign over a shrinking kingdom known as the Commonwealth, a group of nations that included Australia, New Zealand, Canada, a few ports in the Caribbean, and some parts of Africa. But even without an empire, her crown still tied the Hong Kong coolie to the Australian Aborigine and the Rhodesian farmer and the Welsh miner. As Winston Churchill said, "The Crown has become the mysterious link-indeed, I may say, the magic link

which unites our loosely bound but strongly interwoven Commonwealth of nations, states and races." He did not need Lo add that the Crown also represented the biggest draw for tourist dollars. With at least two hundred thousand overseas visitors expected for a week in London, spending an average of $8 a day, the total amount estimated was $1.6 million every twenty-one hours.

"More money will change hands during coronation week than most English banks handle in an average year," predicted the Times of London. The newspaper estimated $300 million would be spent at the time, including $28 million for coronation decorations, $280,000 for fireworks on coronation night, and $10 million for the coronation parade.* "The British after 14 years of war, reconstruction and austerity-just don't care.

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*The coronation became the most expensive celebration in British history. The U.K. government spent more than twenty-five times as much as the U.S. Treasury spent on President Eisenhower's inauguration in January 1953. British subjects withdrew $25 million from private savings accounts in less than two weeks to spend on the festivities. The spending spree prompted a sober editorial in the London Times that chided the British for taking "a holiday from reality."

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The left-wing Tribune criticized the expenditure: "It really should be possible to crown a constitutional monarch in a democratic country without giving the impression that Britain has been transformed into Ruritania." The editorial page of the Chicago Tribune shouted, "Wake up, Fairyland!" And the communist Dady W6rker said, predictably, the coronation represented the worst excesses of "luxury and flunkyism."

Unperturbed, the Queen summoned her personal couturier, Norman Hartnell. She requested ten designs for the lavish white satin gown she wanted to wear. She wanted to emphasize her small waist, so Hartnell designed an underskirt with nine layers of stiffened net to give her the fullness she desired. Then she decided she wanted the emblems of the eleven Commonwealth countries embroidered on the gown and encrusted with semiprecious jewels. So Hartnell refashioned his design to include England's Tudor rose, Scotland's thistle, Ireland's shamrock, the leek of Wales, Canada's maple leaf, South Africa's protea, the lotus of India and Ceylon, Pakistan's wheat, Australia's wattle, and New Zealand's fern. Then he hired six young women, who spent two months embroidering the Queen's gown. Money was no object to Elizabeth in her role as sovereign, but as the mistress of her own home, she was cheeseparing. Even as she dickered over the details of a gown that would cost her government $ 1 million, she scrimped on curtains.

"I was at her side while she leafed through a sample book of Bon Marche' fabric with pretty designs for draperies," said William Ellis, former superintendent of Windsor Castle. "The Queen saw the prices and lifted her eyes toward me, lowered her head, and said with regret, `They are truly pretty, Mr. Ellis, but I believe they are too expensive for me. It will be necessary to find something better priced.'

"The same thing happened with the lighting," Ellis recalled.

"She refused a great number of excellent lampshades. Reason: too expensive. All of the lampshades that I finally bought for her had to be purchased locally in town and could only cost a few shillings. The Queen is very prudent about money."

At her other country homes, she regularly inventoried supplies and foodstuffs. "I remember her checking the liquor levels on the whiskey bottles every time she came," said Norman Barson, her former footman. "And she counted all the hams in the larder, too. Everything was logged. She was very businesslike and could spot if something was missing. She'd want to know why the cigarette box she remembered as full was half-empty, even though she didn't smoke. Or she'd ask why the gin was empty and where had the angostura bitters gone."

Absorbed with the mind-numbing details of the coronation, the Queen rehearsed by walking up and down the halls of Buckingham Palace with sheets trailing from her shoulders so she could learn how to walk regally with a sixty-foot train. She sat at her desk and worked on her dispatch boxes wearing the crown of St. Edward to get used to balancing the seven-pound weight on her head. In choosing her coronation stamp, she examined sixty-three designs. And to select her most flattering picture for her official souvenir, * she examined 1,500 photos.

The Palace issued strict orders about what to wear during the ceremony in the cathedral. Gentlemen were required to wear dress uniforms, full decorations, and knee breeches. The Foreign Office cabled a series of instructions to embassies around the world: "If black knee breeches are worn, they should be of the same material as the evening dress coat, and should have black buttons and black buckles at the knee. Black silk stockings should be worn and plain black court shoes with bows not buckles." Women were told to wear head coverings preferably a diamond tiara or a shoulder- length veil that dropped no lower than the waist. The diplomatic cables specified: "Any colour excepting black can be used for this headdress and it should be made in a suitably light material such as

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*The Queen chose the photograph of herself and her husband in the state coach being driven to the opening of Parliament on November 4, 1952. She had been agitated that day because the procession was late. And she became upset when photographers crowded around. Then Prince Philip said, "Darling, give d~em one of your best." That made her laugh, which produced a smiling photograph one of the few that did not make her look like a vinegary schoolmarm.

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tulle, chiffon, organza or lace. It can be attached by a comb, jewelled pins, flowers or ribbon bows but not with feathers."

Within Buckingham Palace, the livery room worked to outfit the men of the royal household in black velvet knee breeches with white silk stockings, black waistcoats, gold-braided tailcoats, lace neck ruffles, and patent-leather pumps with silver buckles. Fifteen thousand policemen were brought to London to handle the coronation crowds, and twenty thousand soldiers were assigned to line the coronation route. In accordance with ancient custom, the troops were ordered to abstain from sexual intercourse for forty-eight hours before the sacred crowning. The six young women who wore white satin gowns and carried the train of the Queen's gown were required to be virgin daughters of earls "unmarried and untarnished." They were described by the London Sunday Times as the Queen's maids of honor "the girls the whole world envied."

No movie star ever had a greater hold on her fans than this beloved twenty-six-year-old sovereign had on her subjects. They remembered her as a young girl "digging for victory" in her vegetable garden at Windsor during the war and recalled her as a fourteen-year-old, reassuring them sweetly over the radio "that in the end all will be well." They believed her then, and now, as she became the sixth Queen of England in her own right in four centuries, they gave her their hearts. One besotted poet, who stood in line all night to wave to her on coronation day, wrote:

I did but see her passing by

Yet I will love her `till die.

Even the elderly Prime Minister fell in love with the young Queen. " `Gracious' and `noble' are words familiar to us all in courtly phrasing," said Churchill on the eve of the coronation, "but tonight they have a new ring in them because we know they are true about the gleaming figure which Providence has brought to us in a time when the present is hard and the future veiled." He was so enraptured with the photograph of the Queen smiling from her carriage window with her left arm raised in a wave that he ordered a large print, which he had framed. He hung the picture over his bed at his country estate, Chartwell.

The Archbishop of Canterbury also succumbed to the monarch's considerable charm. "On Coronation Day," he recalled, "this country and the Commonwealth were not far from the Kingdom of Heaven."

The London Times wrote: "The Queen represents the life of her people.. . as men and women, and not in their limited capacity as Lords and Commons and electors."

To her subjects, the Queen was an exemplar of respectability and the epitome of rectitude. She and her handsome husband and their two young children personified the ideal English family with simple values and ordinary virtues. In 1953 Britons revered their sovereign as someone ordained by God. Someone entitled to devotion. Someone they would lay down their lives for without hesitation. Allegiance to the monarchy filled a basic human need to believe in a cause beyond self-interest something grand and momentous that excited the fervor of religion and patriotism. During the darkest days of the war, the royal family had made people feel good about themselves and the sacrifices they were making. When the King and Queen drove from Windsor to London every day during the Blitz to share with their subjects the risk of being bombed, they inspired fortitude. They fulfilled the fantasy of royalty, which was to always behave splendidly. To be above mere mortals. To be as noble as the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. By meeting these grandiose expectations, the King and Queen brought reverence and respect to the House of Windsor and bestowed a magic on the monarchy that made it unassailable.

The magic of the throne, heightened by the glamour of palaces and heart-stopping pageants, was so enchanting in 1953 that hordes of foreigners swarmed into London for the coronation, hoping for a glimpse of history. Americans, especially, were drawn by the allure of shining armour, prancing horses, and gilded coaches. They flocked to London in droves, captivated by the prospect of dancing at Hampton Court or attending a tea party at Buckingham Palace. The young Queen was so well liked in America that in a U.S. popularity poll she topped President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most revered man in the country. In 1952 Time magazine

named her "Woman of the Year," an honor previously bestowed on only one other woman Wallis Warfield Simpson in 1936.

Major American newspapers, news services, and networks sent reporters to cover the coronation. The Washington Times-Herald sent a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, whose fascination with royalty eventually revolutionized fashion in the United States.* To cover the coronation, she crossed the ocean on the SS United States and reported back to her newspaper, "The passenger list aboard this ship reads like the Mayflower in reverse." She cited names like Freylinghusen, McLean, Reventlow, Arpels of Van Cleef & Arpels, CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite, Whitelaw Reid (publisher of the New York Herald Tribune), and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Windsors were traveling with five pugs, two valets, and the Duchess's homosexual lover, Jimmy Donahue, the thirty-seven-year-old Woolworth heir. He was accompanied by his maid, his valet, his chauffeur, and his mother.

"Passengers stare at the Duke," reported Jacqueline Bouvier, "aware that if he had not abdicated, they would not be sailing to the coronation of his niece. Sometimes children ask him for autographs, which he gives cheerfully."

The Duke and Duchess were among the few passengers on board not going to England for the Queen's coronation.

"Why should he?" asked the Duchess. "He didn't go to his own.

The Windsors disembarked at Le Havre, France, took the train to Paris, and watched the ceremony on television at a party in the home of an American, Margaret Thompson Biddle. The Duke had received $100,000 for writing a ten-thousand-word article on the coronation for a U.S. magazine.** He also sold exclusive rights to

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*Upon her return from England, Jacqueline Bouvier became engaged to John F. Kennedy. They married on September 12, 1953. Seven years later he was elected President of the United States. His First Lady decided to wear hats "just like the Queen of England." She appointed her own couturier like the Queen and issued orders that she wanted her dresses, like the Queen's, to be originals. "Just make sure no one has exactly the same dress I do," she wrote to her designer, "or the same color or material." For her husband's inauguration, she imitated the Queen by wearing a white gown with a scaled-down version of the Queen's coronation cloak.

**While Britons were shamed by the abdication of King Edward VIII, Americans were enthralled, and so, naturally, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor spent a great deal of time in the United States. They became part of New York's cafe society and what passes for high society in Palm Beach.

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United Press to photograph him watching the ceremony on television. At the party, he explained the long, complex ritual to the Duchess, providing historical details on the six phases of the ceremony the recognition, the oath, the anointing, the investiture, the enthronement, and the homage. He sang all the hymns and identified the dignitaries as they moved across the screen, pointing to his friends and cursing his enemies. Seeing a close-up of the Queen, whom he affectionately called Lilibet, he complimented her regal carriage and pointed to her necklace of diamonds, which were as big as quail eggs.

"A Queen enjoys a marked advantage over a King on such an occasion," the Duke wrote, "when a combination of humility and resplendent jewelry play so important a role. A woman can go through the motions far more naturally and gracefully than can any man.

On the eve of the coronation, the Queen received the news that after several attempts the British had scaled Mount Everest. * She later bestowed a knighthood on Edmund Hillary of New Zealand for placing the Union Jack atop the world's highest mountain. In 1953 this summit of 29,002 feet was the last outpost on earth unknown to man. For a kingdom reduced from empire to commonwealth, and one suffering awful deprivation, the conquest of Everest triggered a national celebration. Months before the coronation, a census disclosed that 4.5 million people in England had no bathroom plumbing, and more than 900,000 Britons had no running water. Relatively few families had a car, a refrigerator, or a television set.

Peers of the realm attend the coronation as their traditional right to recognize, acclaim, and do homage to the new ruler. This was one of the few times when they wore their coronets and robes of rank and, for a few hours, relived times past when the power and privilege of the peerage predominated. In 1953 Great Britain was so impoverished that most of its 860 peers and peeresses could not afford to spend $600 for new coronation robes of red velvet

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*The conquest of Mount Everest so captured the four-year~old imagination of Prince Charles that he climbed over the largest pieces of furniture in the Palace, announcing that he was "mountaineering." He snatched the towels from most of the Palace bathrooms to make "base tents."

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trimmed with ermine. Some patched up old robes that had been used in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI, but most of the lords and ladies resorted to renting cotton velveteen capes stitched with shaved rabbit. The white fur trim was officially called miniver* to make it sound richer and more imposing. For the coronation parade, the country's cavalry, which had to sell most of its horses during the war, borrowed 350 dray horses from breweries and rented 100 horses from Alexander Korda's film company.

Coronation Day arrived under gray skies, but when the Queen left Buckingham Palace and stepped into her gold state coach,** the rain stopped briefly. The huge carriage, weighing four tons, swayed back and forth as the eight gray horses, led by one named Eisenbower,*** cantered down the Mall. The Queen, who had rehearsed every detail of this day for the past year, sat next to the Duke of Edinburgh. When she saw the columns of people lining the street to honor her, she smiled. Some had camped out all night, enduring steady rain and freezing winds just to see her pass by. The Queen tilted her head from side to side, and as she had practiced, she recited the phrase devised by her courtiers to carry her through the two-hour procession to and from the Abbey so that she would look as though she were talking to her subjects.

As her coach glided past her subjects, she said, "So kind, so nice, so very, very loyal," and she raised her arm in an elegant wave. "So very, very loyal."

She repeated the refrain over and over as the Duke of Edinburgh, sitting by her side, smiled easily and returned the salute of soldiers standing at attention under the Admiralty Arch.

Inside the Abbey, the peers of the realm began their stately procession down the long aisle. The measured line was broken when the Prime Minister, stooped from the weight of his seventy- eight years, saw his old friend, George C. Marshall, former Chief

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*Miniver was a plain white fur esteemed in the Middle Ages as part of a costume.

**The gold state coach was built for George III in 1762 from a design by a Florentine artist, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, who was living in London. The coach, twelve feet high, twenty-four feet long, and eight feet wide, is gilded on the exterior and lined with crimson satin and has been used for every coronation since 1831.

***As Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower enjoyed a special relationship with the British royal family, fostered during the Second World War.

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of the U.S. General Staff in World War II and now chief of the U.S. delegation to the coronation. Marshall had been assigned the most prestigious seat in the Abbey out of respect for the rebuilding plan for Europe that bore his name and later won him the Nobel Peace prize. Churchill was so moved to see the seventy~two~year~ old General that he impulsively broke ranks to clasp his hand. Flushed and happy, the Prime Minister looked like a big red tomato.

The lords and ladies took their places on their little gold chairs with tufted velvet cushions. Outside, the populace camped on the curb or sat in one of the $14 stadium seats erected to watch the Queen pass in her golden carriage, wearing her heavy crown and holding her orb, a jeweled globe, in one hand and her scepter, a jeweled rod, in the other.

Heralded by trumpets and the voices of four hundred young Westminster choirboys, the Queen made her way down the aisle of the Abbey to begin the ancient ritual of her coronation. Through~ out the ceremony, the Duke of Edinburgh, sitting with the Princes of the Blood Royal, the Duke of Gloucester and the young Duke of Kent, never for one moment took his eyes off her. At times he leaned forward tensely as she went through the elaborate ceremony.

The supreme moment of the day was timed for 12:30 P.M., when the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed Her Majesty with sacred holy oil and placed the crown on her head, proclaiming her Queen Elizabeth II of England "by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, Sovereign of the British Orders of Knighthood, Captain General of the Royal Regiment of Artillery."

Those words enthroned the monarch, whose blood flows from the Saxon King Egbert through Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scots, linking Elizabeth II to every English sovereign since William the Conqueror. As Queen, she became Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith. Her royal prerogative gave her ten powers: dismiss the government; declare war; disband the army; sell all the ships in the navy; dismiss the civil service; give territory away to a foreign power; make everyone a

peer; declare a state of emergency; pardon all offenders; establish a ~niversity in any parish.

As a constitutional monarch, she reigns but does not rule. Her only rights are to be consulted, to be informed, to encourage, and to warn, and even those are more limited than they were in the days of her ancestors. Her role is mostly ceremonial, and her activities~opening Parliament, signing legislation, appointing officials, bestowing medals and titles are ritual. In practice, her official actions are no more than mandatory approvals of her government's wishes. Still, her symbolic power is considerable, for as "the Queen" she personifies Great Britain. The government is "Her Majesty's Government," not Britain's government. British passports are issued "in the Name of Her Majesty," not in the name of the state. Her face appears on stamps and coins. Her royal arms dominate the judiciary. Her royal insignia governs the church. Cabinet ministers are her ministers, state departments are her agencies, and those living within her realm are her subjects. There are no citizens, only subjects, in Great Britain, and the country's armed forces and the police serve "the Queen," not the people.

Her greatest power as Queen is the emotional hold she exerts on her people, who toast her health at every formal banquet and dinner and whose National Anthem beseeches God to protect her. As the fountainhead of such honor, she is a sacred symbol that elevates her above criticism. From this pinnacle she commands absolute fealty.

"Because of her exalted position," wrote the Duke of Windsor in his coronation article for an American magazine, "it is possible for the monarch by the influence of example and personality to impart a character and coloring to an era in a manner that lies quite outside the day-to-day functions of government."

After the Archbishop set the crown on her head, Prince Philip rose to be the first to pay her homage. In the full dress uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, he walked to the foot of the throne, took off his coronet, and bowed. He walked up the five steps and knelt at his wife's feet. She took his hands in her own as he said:

I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and

truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.

He touched her crown and kissed her left cheek before returning to his chair.

"It was a gesture which had all the humility of a subject and the tenderness of a husband," wrote a British journalist, "and for a brief moment the Queen pressed her cheek close and firm to her husband."

That night the young Queen paid public tribute to the man she had married. In a radio address to her loyal subjects, she pledged "with all my heart" to devote her life to the service of her people. ``In this resolve,'' she said, ``I have my husband to support me.

As the Queen departed Westminster Abbey to the shouts of "Vivat Regina!" trumpets sounded and church bells pealed. Enraptured crowds cheered as the stately coaches of seventy-four foreign powers made their way along the coronation route. Despite the downpour, Queen Salote of Tonga rode in an open carriage, the only head of state to do so. An enormous woman, she waved her huge, fleshy arms to greet bystanders and completely overshadowed the frail little man sharing her carriage.

"What's sitting across from her?" someone asked.

"Her lunch," said Noel Coward.

The Sultans of Brunei, Johore, Perak, Lahej, Kelantan, Selangor, and Zanzibar passed in colorful turbans, silk saris, and extravagant plumage. The native dress of the Zulus, Arabs, Indians, Chinese, and Nepalese dazzled bystanders. To heighten the drama of the parade, BBC technicians laid microphones on the ground to magnify the thundering beat of the horses' hooves and tape- recorded nightingales to sing continuously in Berkeley Square.

The emotion reduced some men to tears. "When her carriage went past, I felt as if my heart were bursting," said Richard Smith, a soldier on duty. "We were virtually crying as we presented arms to the Queen. We were no more than ten yards away, and I don't think I've seen anything as beautiful in all my life."

Similar feelings swept through the cathedral. "Although our

preparation was intense, the one thing the rehearsals hadn't prepared us for was the emotion of the ceremony, especially the entry of the Qu~~een and her procession," said a radio announcer, John Snagge. I was overwhelmed: Handel's `Music for Royal Fireworks' on the organ, everyone standing, then Parry's anthem

Oh, it was the most moving moment."

The BBC engineer, who was supposed to black out close-ups of the Queen during the coronation, was so transfixed that he could not censor her image.

"Gorgeous, she was," recalled the engineer, Ben Shaw. "I thought the close-up picture of her was so beautiful that I couldn't press the button."

As Queen, Elizabeth became the head of two separate churches-the Church of England, which is Episcopalian, and the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian. For her assumption of authority, she took the sacraments and worshiped in both churches. In England she prayed as an Episcopalian, and in Scotland as a Presbyterian. Having sworn to govern all her peoples according to their respective laws and customs, she traveled north soon after her coronation in London for a second coronation in Edinburgh to receive the ancient crown of Scotland.

"This was her first visit to Scotland as Queen, and, naturally, everyone expected her to come in her coronation robes," recalled Margaret McCormick, who attended the event. "I was in my Sunday best and was shocked when she appeared in a simple gray blue coat, because she looked so . . . SO,; SO . . . ordinary. She should've honored the occasion more.

In St. Giles Cathedral, the Queen, who was surrounded by the Scottish peerage in their velvet cloaks and coronets, looked strangely out of place in black leather shoes, a gray blue felt hat, and a street-length coat, especially next to the Duke of Edinburgh, who was dressed magnificently in a plumed helmet and gold-braided uniform. The most jarring part of the Queen's attire was the big black purse she was carrying in the crook of her arm. To the Scots she looked like a middle-class housewife on her way to the grocery.

At the altar she stepped forward while the Duke of Hamilton

and Brandon knelt before her in his coronation robes to proffer the crown of Scotland on a velvet cushion with gold tassels. As she reached toward him, her leather handbag, which was as large as a breadbox, almost hit him in the face. He quickly moved his head to avoid getting smacked by the royal purse.

In the official painting commemorating the ceremony, the Queen is shown receiving the ancient crown of the Highlands but without her handbag. The Scottish portrait artist deliberately left out the purse because he could not bear to render his sovereign looking like a commoner.

The atmosphere around the Queen was so reverential that no one dared utter a word of criticism about her attire, which was viewed by some in Scotland as insulting. She would falter a few more times in her new role, but each misstep would be carefully papered over by her courtiers, whose mission in life was to burnish the myth that the monarch was perfect.

These courtiers, whose families had been in royal service for hundreds of years, were either military men or from the landed gentry. "The circle around the throne is aristocratic," editorialized the Daily Mirror, "as insular and-there is no other word for it-as toffee-nosed as it has ever been." The courtiers felt that their positions were ordained in the Book of Proverbs: "A scribe skillful in his office, he shall find himself worthy of being a courtier. .

Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings." With a heightened sense of superiority, these courtiers did for the Queen what they had always done for her father: they determined what she would do and say publicly and whom she would see, from debutantes to diplomats. The courtiers also protected the Crown from stain, blemish, and disgrace. They did this by controlling the flow of information to the public.

In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, the courtiers expected reporters to be deferential, and for the most part the press obliged. This fandango between press and palace enabled the courtiers to fabricate news, withhold information, and impose restrictions without question. The courtiers manipulated the press to mold public opinion, and some of their efforts to make the monarch appear worthy of respect seem ridiculous in retrospect, but their dedication was unquestionable and their loyalty unswerving. In the beginning 0f Elizabeth's reign, her courtiers sought to present her as grand yet genteel. They refused to admit that she enjoyed playing canasta

or that for her first royal portrait sitting, she arrived carrying her tiara in an egg box. They reluctantly admitted that she loved horse races, a fact not worth denying because she was constantly at the track, but they claimed she never gambled.

"Her Majesty never bets, but she shows great delight when a royal horse wins," the Queen's press secretary told US News & World Report.

In fact, the Queen always bet on her horses and twice topped the list of money-winning owners on British tracks in 1954 and 1957. She even advised the Palace stewards when not to bet on her horses. Yet because gambling was illegal and something that the courtiers felt a revered monarch should not indulge in, they promoted the fairy tale that the Queen never wagered.

Within four years a critic denounced these courtiers as fusty, old-fashioned, and hidebound. The critic, Lord Altrincham, derided them as "a second-rate lot." Altrincham later renounced his hereditary title and became known simply as John Grigg. A historian, he achieved recognition as the man who publicly criticized the Queen as "priggish" and "poorly educated" and lambasted all the Queen's men as blinkered and inept.

At the time of the coronation, such criticism was so outrageous as to be blasphemous. The monarchy was still revered enough that even those who served it were considered untouchable. The only voice of dissent being heard came from within the Palace walls, and that was the irascible growl of the Queen's husband, who was appalled by the inefficiency he found all around him.

Pronouncing his wife's courtiers "creaky" and their administration of Buckingham Palace "medieval," Prince Philip scorched most of the 230 servants as "goddamned idiots who wait on each other not on us." Insisting on naval efficiency, he regarded the 690-room Palace as a leaky old rust-bucket that he had to make seaworthy. Beginning with the footmen, he said the practice of "powdering" their hair with a messy mixture of soap, water, flour, and starch was "old-fashioned and unmanly." He stopped it. He

pronounced the Palace communications system "hopelessly antiquated" and instituted a system to get rid of the "bloody pages running all over the place." He ordered a modern intercom installed so that with a flick of a switch the Queen could contact him, her secretaries, the children's nannies, even her chef. Next, the gadget-minded Duke ordered intercoms put in every office and two-way radios put in all royal cars. He introduced Dictaphones, tape recorders, and automated filing systems. He had washing machines installed in the Palace basement to replace the platoon of laundresses scrubbing overtime on washboards. He ended the Palace system of running several dining rooms at full steam all day long just so the servants could eat. He commissioned small pantries with hot plates and refrigerators to be installed in the royal suites so servants would not have to walk three miles of corridors just to take the Queen her coffee every morning. He did away with placing a fresh bottle of Scotch by the monarch's bed, a quaint practice that had been going on since 1910 when Edward VII asked for a whiskey to counteract a cold. No one had ever canceled the order.

He did allow the Queen to keep her bagpiper. In a tradition started by Queen Victoria, the Pipe Major of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders marches across the terrace of the Palace at nine o'clock every morning, playing the bagpipes.

For the hidebound courtiers, who preferred having young pages in silk breeches run messages by foot, as they had done in the days of Queen Victoria, Philip was radically disruptive. They protested his time-motion studies of the staff and objected to his heliport behind the Palace to save commuting time. They opposed his plan for marketing surplus peas from the farmlands at Sandringham and sneered when he installed bread slicers and carrot-washing machines. They objected when he ordered that Queen Victoria's orangerie at Windsor Castle be converted into a heated swimming pool. They especially disapproved of his mingling with the masses and said he didn't distinguish between commoners and aristocrats. They cringed when he entertained labor leaders and shuddered when he invited movie stars to lunch with the Queen. Allowing film stars into Buckingham Palace was worse than permitting untouchables into a shrine.

"Why, that German princeling," snapped the Queen's private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, who did not understand or appreciate philip's efforts to keep his wife attuned to the real world.

"That man is no gentleman," said Commander Sir Richard Colville, the Queen's press secretary, fuming. "And he has no friends who are gentlemen." For a courtier whose honor was invested in being considered a gentleman,* this was a debasing insult, but the swipe was passed privately. As so-called gentlemen, the courtiers were careful to be correct in public because they could not afford to be openly hostile to the Queen's husband. On the surface they acted civilized, and in his presence they addressed him respectfully. Behind his back they savaged him. Philip, who cared little about being defined as a gentleman, barged ahead with his sweeping innovations.

"It's our job to make this monarchy business work," he said. He functioned for the Queen in much the same way Eleanor Roosevelt had done for the President. She had been his eyes and ears, his emissary to the masses. Philip was determined to revitalize the Crown and make it relevant to people's lives. He accepted honorary positions with groups like the National Playing Fields Association and fought hard to establish the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme, which rewards young people for outstanding achievements in sports, cultural activities, and voluntary service.

The Ministry of Education was highly suspicious of a scheme bearing the obvious imprint of Dr. Kurt Hahn, the German founder of Gordonstoun, which was Philip's alma mater. The Minister of Education was more than a little dubious about the Duke of Edinburgh. "I had a rather difficult interview," admitted Philip many years later. "As with all our organization, it worked on the `not invented here' syndrome. Anything you haven't thought of yourself is bound to be wrong. . . . But gradually, as they came to realize what the scheme was about, and that it wasn't a new Hitler

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*In 1995 anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote a book, Exploring English Character, in which he questioned the beliefs, prejudices, and habits of mind of large numbers of the English middle class. He found that the English people as a whole are deeply obsessed with restraining any element of violence and rate gentleness very high as a virtue. They regard impatience and loss of temper as major sins. Being considered a gentleman means everything.

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Youth movement, people began to realize that there was some merit in it."*

With frenetic energy Philip toured plants and factories and schools, constantly asking questions: "How do you make that work? Can't you find a better way? Faster? More efficient?" He fought the courtiers at every turn, refusing to let them write his speeches and, worse, refusing to follow their advice to say nothing. He insisted on being heard, and to their dismay, he was.

As President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he hectored the members for being complacent.

"It's no good shutting your eyes and saying, `British is best' three times a day after meals and expecting it to be so," he said. "I'm afraid our no-men are a thousand times more harmful than the American yes-men. If we are to recover prosperity, we shall have to find ways of emancipating energy and enterprise from the frustrating control of the constitutionally timid."

The courtiers worried about negative press reaction to Philip's outspokenness. Already overworked, they had been trying for months to squelch a potential scandal involving the Queen's twenty-three~year~old sister, Princess Margaret, and Group Captain Peter Townsend, the thifty~eight~year~old equerry who had served her father since 1944 and was now working for her mother as Deputy Master of the Household. For months the courtiers had been denying rumors of a romance, but a newspaper photograph taken during the coronation showed the Princess flicking a piece of fluff from Townsend's shoulder. The intimacy of that small passing gesture revealed the truth and threw the Palace into confusion.

A fighter pilot in World War II's Battle of Britain, Peter Townsend had received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Order for valor. He then became the King's favorite equerry. With the same gentle appeal of Leslie Howard playing Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wi'nJ, Townsend was a

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*The Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme is operated in more than fifty-five countries but under a variety of names: the Benelux Award in Belgium; the Crown Prince Award in Jordan; the Gold Shield Award in South Africa. In Australia, Jamaica, and New Zealand, it is called the "Dee of Ee." Prince Philip says, "I don't give a damn what they call it as long as it is compatible with the one that runs here."

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charming man with humor. He was not robust and swaggering like Prince Philip, but slightly fragile and emotional. He stammered, which was one reason the King, who also stammered, loved him. Townsend had suffered a nervous breakdown in the RAF and had been grounded occasionally because of his incurable nervous eczema. To everyone who met him, he appeared graceful and considerate, the paradigm of an officer and a gentleman. "We were all in love with him," said British novelist Angela Lambert. "He was handsome, brave, romantic and discreet," wrote Francois Nourissier in Le Figaro upon his death in 1995. "He was one of those men without whose heroism and sacrifice our lives would have been no doubt less free, less honourable. An England, which I hope still exists, invented a kind of complete man that was one of the successes of Europe. Peter Townsend was the last of this species, now threatened with extinction."

Townsend had known Margaret since she was fourteen years old and, as a favor to her parents, had escorted her to dances and horse shows. He had served as her riding companion and flown her plane in the King's Cup air races. By the time she was twenty-one she had fallen in love with him. She pursued him openly, and each time he resisted her advances, she resorted to her royal prerogatives.

Coming home from a dance one evening, she demanded that he carry her up the stairs. He demurred. She insisted. He still resisted.

"Peter, this is a royal order," she said, stamping her foot.

The handsome equerry laughed and scooped her into his arms. "Ever your obedient servant, ma'am," he said, sweeping her up the staircase of Clarence House.

"Margaret was quite blatant," said her friend Evelyn Prebensen, whose father, the Norwegian Ambassador, was dean of the Diplomatic Corps in London. "I spent a lot of time with her in those days and remember one Christmas when the King had promised Peter time off to be with his family. Margaret got it into her head that she wanted to play cards, and she insisted Peter play with her. So he was forced to forgo the holiday with his family and dance attendance on Margaret. No wonder his wife wandered."

In 1952 Townsend was granted a divorce on the grounds of his

wife's adultery and received custody of their two sons. Although he was the aggrieved party, his divorce traumatized the Queen's courtiers, who still felt haunted by the 1936 divorce that had led to the only abdication in British history and resulted in exile for the disgraced King. Divorce was considered such an abomination that the Lord Chamberlain,* Head of the Queen's Household in England, had to insure that no divorced person was ever allowed into the Queen's presence.t He even excluded from the royal enclosure at Ascot such a distinguished figure as Laurence Olivier, considered England's greatest actor, because of his divorce. In Scotland, Lyon King of Arms was the moral arbiter, and he, too, struck the names of all divorced persons from royal guest lists. One Scottish nobleman protested his exclusion from a royal visit to Edinburgh because he had been divorced.

"My marriage was annulled," said the nobleman, "and I've been remarried in the church."

"That may well allow you into the Kingdom of Heaven," said the Lyon King of Arms, "but it will not get you into the Palace of Holyroodhouse."

In 1953 Princess Margaret's love affair with Townsend, a divorced man, shook the British establishment, and the government, the church, and the royal family became intensely embroiled in the romance. As a royal princess, Margaret Rose, who was third in line to the throne, was excused for falling in love, while Townsend, a commoner, was condemned for crossing class lines.

"What cheek!" said the Duke of Edinburgh. "Equerries should look after the horses!"

The Queen's courtiers were equally outraged. They believed in the supremacy of the class system as defined by the doggerel they had learned as children:

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*In later years the Lord Chamberlain's duties were modified so the Queen could visit her divorced cousins, her divorced sister, her divorced daughter, and her two divorced sons, including the heir to the throne.

**The restrictions on divorced persons being allowed to share the same air as royalty were relaxed slightly after Peter Townsend's divorce. Only those divorced persons who were legally blameless for their divorce were admitted into the company of royalty. This policy allowed Townsend, who was wronged by an adulterous wife, to continue in royal service. From 1950 to 1953 he acted as head of the Queen Mother's household. For the rest of his life, even in exile, his name was listed in Whitaker's Almanac as an extra equerry to Her Majesty the Queen.

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God bless the squire and all his relations. And keep us in our proper stations.

When Peter Townsend confided he had fallen in love with Princess Margaret, the Queen's private secretary, Alan Lascelles, snapped, "You must be either mad or bad." Lascelles quickly conferred with the Prime Minister.

"Captain Townsend must go," declared Winston Churchill. "He simply must go."

In desperation the courtiers decided to follow Churchill's advice and banish Townsend from England. They foolishly believed his relationship with the Princess would founder under the separation, not realizing that distance might lend enchantment. They cared only about buying time until Margaret's twenty-fifth birthday. Until then she was not allowed to marry without her sister's permission, and as head of the Church of England, her sister could never allow her to marry a divorced man. By separating the couple, the courtiers also quashed the publicity that threatened to overshadow the Queen's first royal tour of the Commonwealth.

Townsend, who was scheduled to accompany Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother on their 1953 tour of Rhodesia, was suddenly yanked out of royal service and dispatched to the embassy in Brussels as an air attache'. "I came here because the position was impossible for us both," he told a reporter. "I cannot answer questions because I am not the prime mover in the situation. My loyalty to Princess Margaret is unquestionable. I would undergo any difficulties because of that loyalty."

Townsend was banished so quickly that he did not have time to prepare his sons, boarding at a prep school in Kent, for the news. Margaret pleaded frantically with her sister to reverse the decision, but the Princess was refused. The sisters had a terrible row.* Margaret took to her bed for three days and lived on sedatives. When she got up, she sat at her piano and poured her misery into her music. "I composed a lament, words as well as music," she told

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*Years later Princess Margaret said, "I have only twice ever had a row with the Queen. These were probably both about men." She explained to the historian Elizabeth Longford, "in our family we do not have rifts a very occasional row, but never a rift."

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biographer Christopher Warwick. "That was after Peter Townsend and I knew we couldn't get married." Townsend had left the country immediately upon his return from Northern Ireland with the royal couple and was last seen in England on the tarmac, shaking hands with the Queen and Prince Philip.* He returned quietly to visit the Princess twice before her twenty-fifth birthday, meeting her secretly at the homes of friends.

In October of 1955, a few weeks after her twenty-fifth birthday, Margaret went to Windsor Castle to talk to the Queen and Philip. In an emotional meeting they told her that the government of Sir Anthony Eden was implacably opposed to the marriage, as was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"You are third in the line of succession," said Philip.

"I can count," Margaret snapped.

"You've caused a constitutional crisis," continued Philip, pointing to the lead editorial in the Times, which stated that a sister to the Queen, Governor of the Church of England, Defender of the Faith, had to "be irrevocably disqualified from playing her part in the essential royal function" if she married a divorced man.

"If you persist in your plans to marry," said the Queen, "you will not be allowed a church blessing." She went on to say that the wedding could not take place in Britain, that the couple would have to live abroad, that Margaret would lose her title and her annual allowance and be forced to abandon her place within the royal family. The Princess left in tears.

To avoid an unpleasant scene, her mother had withdrawn to her Castle of Mey home in Scotland. As tough as she was, the Queen Mother shrank from direct confrontation. She could never abide personal collisions and avoided them by contracting bronchitis or taking to her bed with flu or a headache.

Without an advocate within the establishment, the couple were defeated. In anguish they bowed to the pressure and decided to

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*In his discreet autobiography Townsend wrote that he had been prepared to like Philip but...When I went into exile in 1953, he did not exactly walk me to the door and say goodbye. He is a German but he does not look very German. He is certainly trenchant and his views are trenchant. I would say he is intelligent without being an intellectual . . . he could be abrupt and he has this staccato way of talking, although he will ofien end things up with a joke or a quip."

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part, knowing they could never see each other again. Townsend drafted a statement that the Princess approved, and her news was announced a week later when the BBC broke into its programming to read the text that was signed simply "Margaret":

I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. . . . Mindful of the Church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others. I have reached this decision entirely alone.

The Duke of Windsor felt outrage toward the establishment that had forced his niece to make her announcement. "The unctuous hypocritical cant and corn which has been provoked in the Times and Telegraph by Margaret's renunciation of Townsend has been hard to take," the Duke wrote to his wife. "The Church of England has won again but this time they caught their fly whereas I was wily enough to escape the web of an outmoded institution that has become no more than a government department

Many others felt profound sympathy for the Princess, and a few letters of protest were published, but the vast majority of the public accepted the sad fact that she had done the right thing in putting duty first. The church was omnipotent. "A picture has been built up in some quarters that the church started bullying a lonely girl into doing something she did not want to do," said the Reverend Peter Gillingham, one of the Queen's chaplains. "That is false. All the church did was to make plain what the church's rules are."

Embittered, Peter Townsend returned to Brussels, resigned from the Royal Air Force, and remarried a few years later. He lived in self-imposed exile in Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, and vowed never to return to England. In his autobiography he wrote that he would like his ashes scattered in France. "And if," he concluded, "the wind, the south wind on which the swallows ride, blows them on towards England, then let it be. I shall neither know nor care." Thirty~seven years later when he was dying of cancer, he slipped into London to have a quiet lunch with the Princess at Kensington Palace.

"It was a kind of good-bye," said one friend who was present. Townsend, then silver haired but still handsome at seventy~seven, was suffering from stomach cancer, which he gallantly dismissed as

a little gastric disorder." He died three years later with no regrets.

"Once a thing is behind you, you don't look back," he said. "Life might have been otherwise but it wasn't."

The inflexibility toward divorce in royal circles had softened by then, but not the courtiers' attitude toward that particular romance. "Quite simple, really: Duty before diddling. Country before courting," said a former courtier. "We did what we had to do to protect the Crown, and, after that, we had to launch the first royal tour."

After her coronation, the Queen had agreed to spend six months traveling forty thousand miles around the world to greet 750 million of her subjects who inhabited one-quarter of the earth's surface and conducted one-third of the world's trade. She planned to visit twelve countries, six colonies, four territories, and two do- minions. She would hear 276 speeches, receive 6,770 curtsies, and shake 13,213 hands.

Eventually she would become the most traveled monarch in British history. But in 1953 her first royal tour was a stupendous undertaking that had never been attempted by any head of state. The Queen wanted to be the first, because she was determined to present herself to her subjects as something more than a figurehead.

"I want to show that the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity," she said in her Christmas Day message from New Zealand, "but a personal and living bond between you and me."

"That tour was a grueling, merciless trip for everyone, recalled reporter Gwen Robyns, part of the small press contingent accompanying the Queen. "I was working for The Evening News, the biggest circulation newspaper in the world at the time,and I watched the Queen every single day, every night, hourly sometimes. I can tell you that she could not have possibly survived that trip without the help of the Duke of Edinburgh."

Highly disciplined, Elizabeth could stand for hours in the sun and ride a horse sidesaddle for miles. But interacting with people and having to make small talk with strangers for any extended

period of time was a burden. She had grown up alone at Windsor Castle, spending her time with her sister, their servants, and their governess. She was not accustomed to accommodating others and did not know how to be socially ingratiating. Her gregarious husband, though, enjoyed bantering with others, exchanging quips, and being flirtatious.

"Philip was perfect for her, and she was blindingly in love with him," said Gwen Robyns. "She was so young and unsure of herself as Queen. Very, very self-conscious as monarch. Painfully insecure. She did not know how to act or behave among so many people. But he was smooth and easy, more sophisticated. He'd jolly her into good humor, and warm her up for the crowds. She'd put on a grumpy face most of the time because she was overwhelmed, but he'd coax a smile out of her. He was disgusting to the press. `Here come the vultures,' he'd say when he saw us. He threw peanuts at us in Malta, so we despised him, but we could see that he was truly marvelous for her. She brightened up around him. All he had to do was whisper in her ear and she glowed. Every time she was cross and sour, he charmed a laugh out of her. He made her look good. He really carried her on that trip.

"I remember in Australia when she was numbed into boredom by having to shake hundreds of sweaty hands in blistering 110- degree heat. She scowled and looked ugly until Philip turned and said, `Cheer up, sausage. It is not so bad as all that.'

"In New Zealand, the little Maori children were fairly jitterbugging with excitement to do their `party piece' for her by jumping off the riverbank. But the Queen didn't even look their way, and instead walked to her car. Philip saw what happened. `Look, Bet [diminutive for Lilibet],' he said. `Aren't they lovely?' The Queen turned and went back to look at the children.

"Philip was fiercely protective of her when her energy started flagging," Gwen Robyns said. "He would leap to her side and wave off photographers, if he thought they were getting too close or might embarrass her. `Don't jostle the Queen,' he'd say. While he was great for her, he was boorish to others. I remember in South Australia the mayor of some little town was all got up in dreadful homemade robes of bunny rabbit fur to meet the Queen. He was

about seventy years old, so sweet, so pathetic. He presented the Queen with a huge box, and in a quivering voice said: `Your Royal Highness' poor thing, he was supposed to say Your Majesty~'at this very moment, our Ambassador in London is presenting a similar box to your representative at the Palace.'

"`Oh, my God, man,' roared Philip. `Don't you realize the ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between here and England? Your Ambassador is probably sound asleep right now.'

"The mayor wilted. He looked as if he'd been accosted. It was so sad to see him standing there in his sorry little costume, shaking and stammering apologies. `I should have thought of that,' he said, berating himself. Here it was the day of his life and he's crushed by the Duke of Edinburgh. Philip acted like a bastard.

"Naturally, I couldn't report that kind of thing," said Robyns, or any other personal details. When I noticed that the Queen always took her shoes off, which seemed endearing and human, I noted in one of my dispatches: `The weary Queen slipped out of her shoes.' I got a rocket from my editors saying, `Lay off the Queen. Buckingham Palace is furious with you.' Another time I wrote that the Queen looked tired. We knew that she was bored stiff with the flags and bunting and all that red, white, and blue every time she turned around, so I wrote that she looked fatigued like the rest of us. Another rocket: Lay off the Queen. So I had to stop reporting the human side of the tour.

The vigilant Palace tried to protect the Queen from herself. "They wanted to hide her human side-or what there was of it," said the Da~~ Telegraph's Maurice Weaver. "I remember a royal visit to Papua New Guinea when the Queen was watching the natives perform a dance in their grass skirts. They were wearing circular necklaces made out of bones and twigs and strange coins. She turned to her equerry. `I feel these people need my effigy on their coins.' So he rounded up the British reporters and asked them for their sovereigns.

"I filed a light story about the whip-around for the Queen and how we had to rustle up some coins. When the equerry found out, he banged on my hotel door in the middle of the night and demanded that I spike the story.

"`It makes the Queen look poor,' he said.

`Oh, rubbish,' I said. `It's a frothy little piece, and besides, no one expects the Queen to be carrying money.'

He said he had not written the real story, which was the Queen's pathetic noblesse oblige mentality about her poor benighted natives. So the froth stood. But he learned how sensitive the Palace was to the Queen's press coverage. "We were not allowed to write anything other than what the Queen wore and how she looked," he said. "The Palace press secretary would come out and feed us a description of Her Majesty in her green tulle gown, and we dutifully took it all down and reported it that way

As the Queen became more secure in her role, the Palace press office relaxed, but only slightly. "There's an unwritten agreement," said journalist Phillip Knightley, who accompanied the Queen on her first royal tour. "It's as if the Palace said, `You need us to bring in your readers, most of whom love royal stories. We need you to tell the Queen's subjects what she's up to and what a wonderful person she is. So you can write anything you like about the royals as long as you don't question the actual institution of the monarchy.'

Yet a soup~on of deference was expected. In New Zealand only the American press could get away with mentioning the Queen's grammatical error. She had overheard two little girls arguing whether she was Queen Elizabeth or Princess Margaret. One said, "I tell you, it's Princess Margaret." The other said, "Is not. Is not. It's the Queen." With what Newsweek described as a "cavalier disregard for the Queen's English," the sovereign leaned over to the little girls and said: "No, it's me.

After years of travel the Queen eventually learned to carve a way for herself, but with great effort. "She was always proper, but never warm and ingratiating," said Gwen Robyns. "Still, stilted, and remote, she held herself at a distance so she would never make a mistake, never put a foot wrong. She was so insecure that that was the only way she could handle her role. She's not a woman who lights up in public like her mother, who on the surface is all bonnets, smiles, and feathers but underneath is steel cold, hard steel with a marshmallow casing."

Despite obvious discomfort in the spotlight, the young sovereign starred in no fewer than three films that were spun out of the royal tour. Six months after leaving London, she returned home to a rapturous welcome from her subjects, who lined the riverbanks as she sailed up the Thames on the royal yacht, Britannia. They understood that she would never be the crowd-pleasing actress her mother was, but they still appreciated her solid commitment to duty. They roared their approval as the royal yacht approached, and the Queen acknowledged their cheers with a stiff little wave. She, too, knew how lacking she was compared with her charismatic mother. Like her stolid father, she depended on an appealing spouse. She later acknowledged as much to close friends when she paid tribute to her husband. "Without Philip," she said, "I could not have carried on."

EIGHT

The monarchy was a distant train that had been bearing down

on Elizabeth since she was ten years old. Growing up, she always heard it approaching. She knew that one day she would have to climb aboard; she never dreamed it would arrive so soon. At age twenty-six she was in a marriage just starting to bloom.

Before her father's death forced her onto the throne, she had looked forward to being a wife and mother. After marrying, she said she wanted to have four children and devote herself to her family.

In the early years of her marriage, when faced with a choice between being a wife or mother, she always chose to be a wife. Her husband was her first priority then. Before her son was born in 1948, she was quoted as saying, "I am going to be the child's mother, not the nurses." Yet when the role of mother conflicted with wife, she turned to the nurses.

She skipped her son's first birthday to be with her husband, who was on naval duty in Malta. Leaving the little boy at home with his grandparents and nannies for several months, she missed his first step and his first tooth. His first word was not "Mama," but "Nana," the person closest to him, his beloved nanny. Elizabeth raised her children the way that she had been raised. As an infant she had been left with nannies for six months while her parents toured Australia and New Zealand, so she did not hesitate to leave

her own children in the care of others. Occasionally she expressed a twinge of guilt.

"I don't want someone else to raise my children," she said before the birth of Princess Anne in 1950. Yet when her daughter was three months old, Elizabeth left her in the Palace nursery so she could travel with her husband. When the little girl had her tonsils and adenoids removed, her nanny took her to the Hospital for Sick Children and spent the night at her bedside. Her mother, not overly concerned, stayed at Windsor Castle.

"Royalty regard their children like cattle," wrote John Gordon in the Daily Express after learning that the Queen stayed in bed the night Prince Charles was rushed to London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for an emergency appendectomy at midnight. "People didn't like the Queen's failure to go to Prince Charles's bedside when he was suffering," wrote Gordon.

In 1952, when Elizabeth became the new Queen, she struggled to make room in her life for her family, but she no longer had time to be a mother. Instead she dedicated herself to the Crown and postponed having more children.

As the new sovereign, she knew she had to reign to travel the world, make state visits, welcome world leaders, consult Parliament, deliver speeches, accept salutes, cut ribbons, bestow knight- hoods and try to smile.

The obsessive-compulsive child, once described by her governess as "too methodical and tidy. . . too dutiful for her own good," took over as she buried herself in the duties of the monarchy. "I didn't have an apprenticeship," she said later. "My father died much too young. It was all a very sudden kind of taking on, and making the best job you can She became zealous about answering her mail, making her speeches, doing her boxes, which held the government documents sent to her every day.

"Oh, those boxes," said a former courtier many years later. "It was all too easy for her to say, `I've got two red boxes upstairs, that's my constitutional duty, and I'd really rather do that than have a row with my son, daughter, or husband.' Red boxes are a marvelous escape from family problems."

Publicly Elizabeth looked like the ideal mother. Pictures of her

with her handsome husband and her two young children appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines. She learned from her clever mother, who, as Queen, had authorized books such as The Family Life of Queen Eli:'abeth. She also arranged newspaper photo spreads called "Our Little Princesses at Home" and "Playtime at Royal Lodge" to foster the image of an idyllic royal family. Naturally Elizabeth grew up considering such orchestrated coverage a vital marketing tool for the monarchy. She felt that posing for photos was part of her job as Queen, and her husband felt the same way. "If you are really going to have a monarchy," he said, "you have got to have a family, and the family has got to be in the public eye.

Reordering her priorities, the Queen now placed the monarchy first, her marriage second, and her children third. "I think any idea of a family in the normal sense was knocked on the head by the Queen's accession at such an early age," said biographer Philip Ziegler. "I don't think it was ever in her nature to be a close parent, but in any case, it became impossible once she was swept up into the merry-go-round of royal activities."

Still, she tried not to give up all her maternal responsibilities. "I must have some time for the children every day," she said. She changed the hour of her weekly visit with the Prime Minister so she could see Charles, four, and Anne, two, before they went to bed, and she allowed them thirty minutes with her and Philip in the morning. Their nannies, Helen Lightbody and Mabel Anderson, took the children into the Queen's sitting room at 9:00 A.M. for this visit every day and promptly whisked them away by 9:30 A.M., when she sat down at her desk to work. Usually Anne did not want to leave, but her brother would pull her away, saying, "Anne, you must not bother Mummy. She's busy. She's queening."

The children spent the rest of the day with their nannies and nurses, the sturdy Scottish women with sensible black shoes and tightly permed hair, who fed them, dressed them, bathed them, and even slept in the same room with them. At 5:00 P.M.* every

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*"That particular hour was chosen more for the corgis than for the children," said the Queen's footman, explaining the Queen's daily ritual of feeding her dogs dinner in her sitting room. "One of us brings a tray of bowls to Her Majesty every evening at that time, and the tray contains the individual diets prepared by the kitchen for the Queen's seven corgis." The silver bowls were placed on a plastic sheet on the floor, and the Queen mixed each portion with a silver knife and fork.

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day, the nannies took the children back for another visit with their mother and father before taking them to the nursery for their baths and bedtime. The children saw their nannies more often than they ever saw their parents.

"A miserable childhood," recalled Prince Charles years later, blaming his parents, especially his father, for his upbringing. One of his saddest recollections was growing up alone. He said that his father was rarely present for his birthdays and missed the first five. Instead his father sent him notes.

"Loneliness is something royal children have always suffered and always will," said Lord Mountbatten, refusing to place blame on either parent. "Not much you can do about it, really."

The romance novelist Barbara Cartland could not bring herself to fault the Queen as a mother. Instead she damned her by implication. "Charles was born when his mother was very young, so she didn't spend an awful lot of time with him," she said. "He was such an unhappy little boy growing up."

The Queen Mother knew where to place the blame. "The papers continually accuse Philip of having been a harsh father," she confided to a dinner partner. "If they only knew the truth. . . . It was always Lilibet who was too strict and Philip who tried to moderate her."

Each time the Queen returned from one of her royal tours, she expressed surprise at how much her young son had grown and how noisy he had become. Unaccustomed to his energy, she felt overwhelmed around him. "He's such a responsibility," she said with a sigh.

Early on, she decided the children should be known in the household simply as "Charles" and "Anne" rather than "sir" and "ma' am." She decreed that maids and footmen no longer had to bow and curtsy to the sovereign's children, reserving that homage for herself and her mother. Like the staff, Charles, too, was required to bow to his mother before he left the room, just as he bowed to his grandmother, the Queen Mother.

"You always have to do as Granny tells you," he told a playmate, "or else she has no sweets in her bag."

"Why do you bow to her?" asked the playmate.

"It's what I have to do."

"Why?"

"Because Papa says so.

When his nanny insisted Charles wear a pair of tartan shorts beneath his kilt at Balmoral, he refused.

"I'm not wearing those," he said. "Papa doesn't."

"Papa" was the sun that shone on his childhood and warmed his days, despite occasional scoldings and spankings. "I think he has had quite a strong influence on me, particularly in my younger days," Charles said in later years. "I had perfect confidence in his judgment." Only when Charles was unable to live up to his father's expectations did he turn on Philip. Then Charles said his father was a bully, who ruled his childhood like a despot. He sniped to friends that there are two types of fathers: the first instills self-confidence in his children by offering praise when merited and withholding criticism when possible. "The second is the Duke of Edinburgh," he said. By then Charles had forgotten how he once idolized his father and imitated everything he did, right down to walking with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back.

"As a child, Charles begged to be with his father," recalled the Queen's footman, "and much preferred sitting on Prince Philip's knee than on the Queen's when we brought them for their morning visit. . . . He was the sort of father any kid would adore. . . . More so than the Queen, he has a natural, easy ability to come down to the simpler level of childhood without seeming either patronizing or condescending."

Members of the royal household recall Philip reading Hiawatha to the children and putting on the Indian feather headdress he had brought from Canada. Whooping and hollering, he performed war dances around the nursery, to the delight of his young son. "That's the game I love best of all," said Charles, clapping his hands.

Others see Philip through more jaundiced eyes. "He tolerated Charles, but I don't think he was a loving father," said Eileen Parker, whose former husband, Michael Parker, was Philip's best

friend and equerry. He would pick up Charles, but his manner Was odd. He had more fun with Anne. I think Charles was frightened of him."

The little boy was certainly afraid of his mother, who appeared aloof, forbidding, and too busy for him. Years later he said he could not remember one incident of maternal love from his childhood, except for an evening when his mother came to the nursery before his evening bath. She sat on a gilt chair with a footman behind her and watched his nanny bathe him. "She didn't put her hands in the bathwater," Charles recalled, "but at least she watched the procedure."

He recounted for one of his biographers how his mother greeted him after her first royal tour. He had not seen her for six months, so he raced on board the Britannia to welcome her home. He ran up to join the group of dignitaries waiting to shake her hand. When the Queen saw her young son squirming in line, she said, "No, not you, dear." She did not hug him or kiss him; she simply patted his shoulder and passed along to the next person. A photographer captured the awkward greeting between mother and son, which the Queen later justified to a friend. "I have been trained since childhood never to show emotion in public," she said.

"Her dislike of physical contact is almost a phobia," wrote British columnist Lynda Lee-Potter. "By her inability to demonstrate love for her children, the Queen has made it difficult for them to give affection in return. She is a stoic and, like her mother, has a ruthless streak."

While the Queen seemed incapable of demonstrating affection, her husband appeared to be similarly aloof and reserved. "He doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve," said Michael Parker. "I always wanted to see him put his arms around the Queen and show her how much he adored her. What you'd do for any wife. But he always sort of stood to attention. I mentioned it to him a couple of times. But he just gave me a hell of a look."

Charles did not grow up seeing much physical affection between his parents; nor does he remember his mother kissing him after the age of eight. He wistfully told a friend that his nanny meant more to him emotionally than his mother ever did. He cited

research done on baby monkeys deprived of a soft, motherly touch right after birth. He said they never recovered emotionally. They became impassive and withdrawn, not unlike the fearful little boy who wandered through the carpeted corridors of Buckingham Palace. When he became aware of scientific research that shows the loving interaction between mother and child charges the youngster's brain to be receptive to learning, Charles said he finally understood why he had been described as "a plodder."

A sickly child, he suffered from knock-knees like his grandfather and great-grandfather. His flat feet forced him into orthopedic shoes and he developed colds, sore throats, bouts of asthma, and chronic chest congestions.

"His Royal Highness was an earnest little boy," said a former courtier. "Correct, well mannered, but timid like his mother. He was uncertain on a horse and queasy on a boat. His sister, Anne, who was twenty-one months younger, was bold and rambunctious like her father, which is why she became his favorite child."

Philip worried about his son's frailties and tried to toughen him up. "I want him to be a man's man," he said. Fit, tough, and handsome, Philip played cricket and polo, crewed in yachting races, drove carriages, piloted planes, and shot grouse with zest. He wanted his son to do the same. Philip gave Charles a cricket bat for his first birthday and later taught him how to play. He gave him his first gun and taught him how to shoot. He taught him to swim, to ride, to sail, and to hunt. He later introduced him to painting and polo and arranged for flying lessons so he could pilot his own plane. Charles then survived strenuous naval training to take command of a coastal minesweeper, but he could not shed the image of a wimp.

A nail-biting child, afraid of the dark, Charles longed for his father's approval and overcame his fear of horses to ride and his seasickness to sail. He was not a natural athlete like his sister, but he pushed himself hard in sports, sometimes to the edge of recklessness.

Hardly an indulgent parent, Philip spanked Charles whenever he hit his sister or pulled her hair. And that was often. "When we were children, Charles and I used to fight like cat and dog," said

Anne. Philip told Charles that he had to take his spankings "like a man.

``Act like a man," was his father's constant refrain. ``Be a man." Once, after a mild scolding from his nanny, Charles ran to his father. "I'm so sick of girls, Papa," he said. "Let's go away and be men by ourselves."

Sometimes Philip's preoccupation with manliness bordered on homophobia. "I remember when the Queen and Prince Philip were shown the newly done up Porchester house," said the British decorator Nicholas Haslam. "They brought Prince Charles with them but left him in the car when they went inside. The hostess asked, `Wouldn't you like to let Prince Charles accompany us?'

"`Good God, no,' said Prince Philip. `We don't want him knowing anything pansy like decoration.'"

Even so, the Queen's footman noticed a feminine effect on the young boy. "At the time he was first sent to school, Charles was already showing signs of succumbing to the cloying, introverted atmosphere that pervades the Palace," he said. "He was the object of considerable petticoat influence."

So many women exercising so much authority over his son annoyed Philip. "Nothing but nannies, nurses, and poofs," he said, referring to the household staff, which was mostly homosexual.* He insisted his son be educated outside the Palace. The Queen objected, but Philip pointed to her sheltered childhood and reminded her that she rarely met a commoner who was not a servant. "Charles must learn to mix with other lads on the same level," he said. The Queen preferred to continue her son's education inside the Palace with the private tutor, Miss Katherine Peebles ("Mispy"), who had been teaching Charles since he was five years old. Philip argued that while the small, spry Scotswoman was a nice person, she had no formal training and no university degree. Consequently he did not think she was qualified to educate a future king. She had proved adequate at taking Charles and Anne on field trips to the zoo, the planetarium, and the museums, but now that

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*Unhappy with so many homosexuals in the royal household, Philip cheered the footman who had been caught in flagrante delicto with a housemaid. "They sacked him," said the Duke of Edinburgh. "He should have been given a medal."

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Charles was eight, he needed to get out of the Palace and begin his formal education. "That means school a real school," said Philip.

The education of Charles became a matter of great debate inside and outside the Palace. Regular newspaper headlines asked "Why Can't the Royal Children Go to School Must It Always Come to Them?" and "Have We the Right to Cut Prince Charles Off from Normal Pleasures So Early in Life?"

The Queen reluctantly agreed to send her son to Hill House, a London day school. He arrived wearing a gray coat with a black velvet collar. The other children wore the school's uniforms. For the next year Philip suggested his own preparatory school, the Cheam School, where Charles would board, share a dormitory with nine other boys, and sleep on wood-slatted beds. Again the Queen resisted, but Philip badgered her. Finally she agreed and allowed her son to become the first heir to the British throne to go away to school like a commoner.

"We want him to go to school with other boys of his generation and to live with other children and absorb from childhood the discipline imposed by education with others," said Philip. The Queen told the headmaster at Cheam to treat the future monarch like any ordinary student but to address him as Prince Charles. He could be plain Charles to the other boys, some of whom made fun of their future monarch's soft pudginess by calling him "Fatty."

The little boy who had been dressed in silk dresses and rib- boned bonnets for the first two years of his life now faced bamboo rod canings from the headmaster. "I was warned," Charles said years later, "that we would be beaten, and I got beaten [for dormitory horseplay]. I didn't do it again. I was one of those people for whom corporal punishment actually worked."

On the first day of school, Charles clutched his initialembossed box of milk chocolates his mother's parting gift. He did not know how to share with the other boys and was too frightened to try. Leaving the loving arms of his nanny, his nurse, and his governess proved painful for Charles, who was shy and unaccustomed to making friends.

"He felt family separation very deeply," said his nanny, Mabel Anderson.

"He would write Mispy every day," said his sister, Anne. "He was heartbroken. He used to cry into his letters and say, `I miss you.'"

He wrote wistfully to his father. "Dearest Papa, I am longing to see you in the ship." He drew a sailboat like the one Prince Philip raced at Cowes, the world's biggest sailing regatta. He excelled in art and enjoyed drawing and painting pictures of his family. When he was six years old he drew a humorous Christmas card for his father, who was shown next to a vat labeled "Hair Restorer." Philip had been fretting about his receding hairline and encroaching baldness.

Soon after he started school, Charles was reprimanded for saying a naughty word. "He may have picked it up from one of the workmen," said Philip, "but I'm afraid he may equally have picked it up from me."

After five and a half years at Cheam, where he failed mathematics and barely passed history,* Charles told his parents that he wanted to go to "Papa's school," which meant Gordonstoun, a Scottish citadel of cold showers and canings.

"I remember Philip discussing public [p21ivate] schools at one of our Thursday Club luncheons~those all-male get-togethers we had at Wheeler's Tavern in Soho," recalled harmonica player Larry Adler. "I told him I saw public schools as factories for manufacturing homosexuals. James Robertson Justice, a fine actor and a gruff Scotsman, joined the conversation.

"`Oh, God, Adler, are you on that dreary hobbyhorse of yours again?' he said. `I was buggered my first week at Eton. Did me no harm whatsoever.'

`Well, James,' I said, `it was different with you, as everyone had to turn out to watch you being buggered because of the school motto: Justice Must Not Only Be Done, He Must Be Seen to Be Done.' Philip howled with laughter."

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*Charles, eleven, stunned his history teacher at Cheam by not knowing that Britain once had a Prince of Wales who became King Edward VIII and then abdicated to become the Duke of Windsor. Years later Charles shocked another history teacher by defending King George III, who suffered attacks of insanity because of the rare and incurable ailment of porphyria. "I happen to admire, appreciate and sympathise with a lot of things he did," said Charles of the British King who lost the American Colonies in 1783. "He was a marvelous eccentric."

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He felt that by sending his son to Gordonstoun in Scotland, he would protect him from the effete influence of the English public school system. He also said that the school in Morayshire was far enough from London so that Charles would escape the daily scrutiny of reporters. "Eton is frequently in the news, and when it is, it's going to reflect on you," he told his son. "If you go to the north of Scotland, you'll be out of sight, and reporters are going to think twice about taking an airplane to get up there, so it's got to be a major crisis before they actually turn up, and you'll be able to get on with things."

Charles finally consented and chose his father's school, which he later regretted. "It was hell," he said. "I failed my math exams three times," he said. He also flunked German and struggled with science. He wrote sad letters every night, complaining about how his classmates treated him. "I don't get any sleep . . . they throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can." Years later he blamed his father for sending him to Gordonstoun. Yet, at the time, Philip was not entirely comfortable about leaving his soft young son in the hands of Gordonstoun's taskmasters. After delivering Charles for his first term, Philip and the Queen returned to Balmoral, where they spent the weekend with their friends David and Myrah Butter. Philip, more than the Queen, seemed shaken by the sinking experience of leaving his firstborn at boarding school.

"Prince Philip came into the drawing room," recalled Myrah Wernher Butter, who has known him since childhood. "He was white as a sheet. I asked him what was the matter, but he just walked across the room and poured himself a drink, which was very unusual for him. Years later Charles was telling me about what he felt when he sent his son off to school. I told him I understood. He said, `Oh, that's because you always cared so much. I bet no one ever cared that much about me.' So I told him the story about his father. He was stunned. He just couldn't believe it."

By the time Charles was ready to start school in 1956, his father was fed up. He was tired of fighting the Palace guard, especially for his wife's time and attention. He disliked the courtiers he called them "old farts" and resented his wife's dependence on

them. She no longer consulted him on court matters, and her passivity to his suggestions infuriated him. "Come on, Lilibet. Come on," he would snap. "Just do it. Do it." Exasperated with Palace bureaucracy, he started spending more time with his pals from the Thursday Club. This only hardened the courtiers' opinion of him as a crude adolescent with a predilection for lavatory humor.

"The Duke of Edinburgh is very lewd, very Germanic," said one of the Queen's private secretaries. The haughty courtier attributed "Philip's vulgar German preoccupation with nudity" to his "Mountbatten origins." He cited the photographs that Lord Mount- batten had posed for with Cary Grant in Las Vegas. In the first picture, the two men faced the camera surrounded by gorgeous showgirls swathed in feather boas. In the second picture, the men turned their backs to the camera and so did the show girls, whose rhinestoned-thonged backsides were without feathers. Mountbatten found the picture of the bare-bottomed showgirls so amusing that he had it blown up and hung in the Queen's passageway on the royal yacht. Philip, who roared with laughter when he saw it, enjoyed showing it off and would not remove it, even for state guests. "That's his Germanic idea of art and entertainment naked buttocks," said the courtier.

Philip started sharing the London apartment of actor Richard Todd with two other married men during afternoons to entertain young actresses. The three men called themselves "the Three Cocketeers."

"No, I can't talk about what went on in that apartment," said British actor Jack Hedley in 1993. "It's too dangerous to talk about those days even forty years later."

Philip also used his equerry s flat on South Street. "Mike, or Parker-from-the-Palace, as we called him that's how he always introduced himself on the phone~-was living another life away from his wife and his family, and the parties at his flat were rousing affairs," recalled one man who attended many of the parties. "Yes, Philip was always there and he always had women, but nothing serious. As the French say, les danseuses, which are a rich man's indulgence. Philip usually came with Parker and Baron Nahum, the court photographer, known by his first name. One night, Aristotle

Onassis brought Maria Call as to dinner, and another night Prince Bernhard, married to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, spent a riotous evening with us."

"I remember the dinner with Prince Bernhard," recalled Larry Adler. "That's when we all realized how much Philip hated his job as Prince Consort. Throughout dinner Philip kept jabbing at Bernhard: `Boy, I really envy you,' he said. `You can go anywhere you like and not be recognized. You can have all the girlfriends you like and no one knows. I can't go anywhere without press vultures and policemen following me.' Bernhard had to leave early that evening to get back to Holland before the airport closed and the field lights were turned off. As he got up to go, Philip bent down and gave him an exaggerated salaam. `Give my regards to Her Imperial Majesty,' he said. He spat out the last three words with withering scorn. You could tell he identified with Bernhard, who, like Philip, was tied to a short royal leash."

By 1956 Philip had had a bellyful of "pomping," as he referred to court protocol. With his son starting school, his daughter too young to notice, and his wife too busy for him, he felt diminished. He decided to go off on his own for a while. He had been invited to visit Melbourne, Australia, for the opening of the 1956 Olympic games, so he laid out a forty-thousand-mile itinerary around this one event to include visits to The Gambia, the Seychelles, Malaya, New Guinea, New Zealand, Antarctica, the Falklands, Galapagos Islands, and the West Coast of the United States. He planned to travel for four months with Michael Parker. The two men had been navy shipmates, crewed on the same yachting team, and played cricket on the same team. Parker recently had separated from his wife, and Philip now wanted to be separated from his geographically, if not matrimonially. So the two grown-up boys planned their trip to the South Pacific with the abandon of Huckleberry Finn and Jim rafting down the Mississippi.

"Philip was born with itchy feet," said the Queen, seemingly unperturbed by his plans. "It's a waste of time trying to change a man's character," she added. "You have to accept your husband as he is."

Her husband presented the cruise as a "diplomatic mission."

"This is my personal contribution to the Commonwealth ideal," he said, announcing that he would leave England by air for Mombassa, Kenya, on the east coast of Africa on October 15, 1956, to meet the royal yacht, Britannia, with its crew of 275. He would be accompa~ nied by his equerry, Michael Parker, and his friend Baron, the photographer.

Several weeks before they left, the forty-nine~year~old court photographer went into the hospital for hip surgery to relieve his arthritis. He wanted to be in good shape for the trip, but a few days after his operation, he died of a heart attack. His fiancee, actress Sally Ann Howes, who had begged him not to undergo the surgery, never forgave Philip.

"Baron was a wonderful guy witty, debonair, and quite brave," said Larry Adler. "He belonged to the Thursday Club, and he gave Philip his bachelor party. He had been the official photographer for the royal wedding in 1947 and for the coronation in 1953. He felt that if he hadn't been Jewish, he could've married Princess Margaret. He took wonderful pictures of the royal family, and for all of that, he naturally expected a knighthood. But Philip wouldn't do a thing about it-he could have, I think, but he didn't-and the reason was the Queen did not approve of Baron. She thought he got Philip into trouble and helped Philip find girlfriends."

The Duke of Edinburgh, extraordinarily handsome at thirty- five, needed no help attracting women. He needed only privacy, which the cruise provided; it also kicked up a swirl of whispers. His trip to Australia became a sensitive issue for biographers who tried to investigate what happened and for friends who tried to defend him against scurrilous allegations. Even a devout monarchist like Barbara Cartland, who reveres the royal family, talks about a secret love affair that she learned of from Philip's uncle Lord Mountbatten.

``I know all about Philip's illegitimate daughter in Melbourne," she told an interviewer, "but I'm not going to talk about it."

"Look into the boathouse in Sydney that is owned by Lady Mary Ellen Barton," advised an Australian lawyer. "That's the place Philip used for his dalliances."

The stories of Philip's women and his trysts were as many and varied as his ports of call. "A couple of lady typists were flown out to join the boat in Singapore," reported the royal author Brian Hoey. "It was said they didn't do too much typing. They weren't the type.

The rumors dogged Philip from Melbourne to Sydney to Singapore, but as the Queen's husband he carried a certain immunity. No one could touch him without harming her, and no one in Great Britain, not even republicans, wanted to harm the Queen, who in 1956 was still considered inviolate. So despite his protestations to Prince Bernhard, Philip enjoyed a freewheeling life away from the Palace.

On the tour he managed to relax enough to joke about his second-class status within his marriage. In Australia a young couple were presented to him as Mr. and Dr. Robinson. Philip looked surprised until Mr. Robinson explained that his wife was a doctor of philosophy and much more important than he. "Ah, yes," said Philip. "We have that trouble in our family, too."

During the cruise, Philip and his equerry had a whisker- growing contest to see who could grow the longest beard; they shot alligators and were photographed tromping around in matching safari suits; they sat on the deck of the Britannia, sunbathing, painting at their easels in the afternoon, and drinking gin and tonics in the evening. Philip felt at home on the yacht, which appealed to his sense of neatness and precision. Navy stewards used a tape measure to set the table so that knives, forks, and spoons were lined up evenly with dishes. They wore felt slippers so they would not make noise while delivering his messages. The British press slammed the trip as "Philip's folly," calling it useless, unnecessary, and a luxury that cost the nation "at least two million pounds."* Estimating the tour's cost at $11,000 a week, they criticized Philip's "commando raft," created to unload the royal Rolls-Royce in places where no docking facilities were available for automobiles, and they carped about his traveling with his own sports car. "Who pays for it all?" asked one newspaper.

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*About $6 million in U.S. dollars.

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While decrying the expense of the cruise, no one dared publish a word about the women who were entertained on board ship. The Queen's husband was not an indiscreet man, and he certainly had no intention of embarrassing his wife. "He told me the first day he offered me my job," said Michael Parker, "that his job, first, last, and always, was never to let Her Majesty down." Still, the rumors persisted as Philip cruised the Indian Ocean, missing such family celebrations as his son's eighth birthday, his own ninth wedding anniversary, and the tenth family Christmas.

"The cruise was a brilliant idea of Prince Philip's and deserved much greater recognition," Parker said years later. "The object was to put Britannia to her greatest use in visiting beleaguered British people deep in the oceans around the world-Ascension, St. Helena, Gough Island, Tristan de Cunha, the Falklands, South Georgia, Chatham Islands, Deception Island, and some bases in Antarctica open only twenty days a year. It was quite a sacrifice for all our first Christmas away from home since the war to boot."

Near Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Philip and his equerry watched the world almost explode. Shortly after leaving England, the Britannia was put on emergency notice to stand by for nine days as the Middle East seemed poised for war over the Suez Canal. Egypt had seized the Canal in July 1956 after the United States withdrew its $56 million commitment to help build the Aswan Dam. The U.S. move enraged Egypt's President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who then closed the canal to all foreigners.

"I look at Americans and say: May you choke to death on your fury!" Nasser roared. "The annual income of the Suez Canal is $100 million. Why not take it ourselves? We shall rely on our own strength, our own muscle, our own funds. And it will be run by Egyptians! Egyptians! Egyptians!"

Of the 1.5 million barrels of oil that passed through the canal each day, 1.2 million went to Western Europe. So, in nationalizing the canal, Nasser had choked off the chief source of petroleum for England and France. Fearful for their survival and spoiling for retaliation, the two countries joined secretly with Israel, also menaced by the Arabs, to seize the canal. On October 29,1956, Israel's armored tanks plowed across the Sinai and attacked Egypt, giving Britain and France the excuse they needed. The next day they declared that fighting in the Middle East threatened international navigation and demanded both sides withdraw from the Suez within twenty-four hours. Egypt refused, and on October 31, 1956, the British and French started bombing. Five days later they dropped fifty thousand paratroops on Port Said, Egypt, at the mouth of the canal.

The Britannia, officially designated as a hospital ship during war, suspended its cruise. Philip was in constant radio contact with the Palace, which relayed hourly news bulletins. He learned that most of the world opposed the Anglo-French alliance with Israel and their use of military force. At the United Nations, America, England's staunchest ally, denounced the invasion, and Britain's currency plummeted. Still, England and France continued to veto the UN's cease-fire proposals. Finally the White House made it clear that if they continued to use force, the United States would not support them. Just as terrifying to England, France, and Israel was the hectoring threat from Russia to "crush the aggressors" and "restore peace . . . through the use of force." With no U.S. support and the rest of the world against them, they yielded and announced a cease-fire.

The Queen was too young and inexperienced to exercise her royal prerogative and advise her new Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. Instead she listened to him and accepted his proposals. She knew that he had been brilliant as Winston Churchill's Foreign Secretary but did not realize he was in over his head as Prime Minister. Struggling on five hours of sleep a night, he became addicted to amphetamines, which distorted his judgment. She was at the racetrack when his messenger reached her with an urgent proclamation requiring her signature, calling out army reserves. In between horse races, she signed. Britain was ready to go to war.

"In a few weeks' time," predicted Laborite John Strachey, "this country is going to wake up to the fact that we have marched into Egypt, marched out of Egypt, caused the canal to be blocked, stopped our oil, made every Arab in the world into an enemy, opened the Middle East to Russian penetration, split the Commonwealth, quarreled with the Americans and ruined ourselves--all for nothing."

Prime Minister Eden collapsed and flew to Jamaica in December to recuperate. Randolph Churchill compared Eden's leadership to Hitler's in marching his troops to Stalingrad and leaving them there to freeze to death. "Except," said Winston Churchill's son, "Hitler, with all his faults, did not winter in Jamaica." Sir Anthony returned three weeks later to find gas lines blocking the roads as a result of emergency rationing brought on by the crisis. The next month he resigned as Prime Minister. As his replacement, the Queen chose Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan.

The country was reeling from international humiliation. The British press lashed out at everyone connected with the debacle. Even Philip, thousands of miles away, was berated for not being at his wife's side. But the Queen said privately that she was relieved not to have her husband around. "I'm glad he wasn't here," she said. "All hell would have broken loose."

After four months on board the Britannia, Philip headed for a family reunion in Lisbon with his wife before their state visit to Portugal. First he had to stop in Gibraltar to say good-bye to his equerry, who was no longer allowed to be in the Queen's presence. Days before, news of Michael Parker's divorce had leaked and the press was full of stories that his wife, Eileen, was suing him for sexual misconduct and demanding alimony on the grounds of alleged adultery. He was forced to resign. Philip raged about the hypocrisy of a broken marriage being an impediment to royal service when the former Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, had been married twice and divorced. Philip pleaded with his equerry to reconsider because he could not bear to lose the one person who was his friend and ally in the Palace, but both men knew, and Philip later admitted, that Parker "had to go," especially after the Townsend affair. The Queen's courtiers demanded that the equerry be put ashore before Philip's reunion with the Queen. Furious at having to follow their orders, Philip insisted on accompanying his friend to the airport in Gibraltar. "It's the least I can do," he said. He looked unhappy as he emerged from a government limousine with Parker. Philip walked him to his waiting plane, and in front

of reporters,* he clasped his hand in silence. Parker forced a smile, bounded up the steps without a backward glance, and flew to London, where he held a press conference with his lawyer.

Waiting for him at the London airport was the Queen's formidable press secretary, Commander Richard Colville. The equerry brightened when he saw the courtier and approached to thank him for coming to run interference with the reporters. The press secretary cut him off before he could say a word and made it clear that he was not there to help him.

"Hello, Parker," said Colville. "I've just come to let you know that from now on, you're on your own." That said, Colville turned and walked away.

In Lisbon the Queen's plane circled the airfield because the Queen's husband was running late. On board the Viscount airliner, Her Majesty and her twenty-five passengers, including Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, and all her ladies-in-waiting, giggled as they pasted fake beards on their chins in preparation for Philip's arrival. He had sent the Queen a picture of himself after weeks without a shave. "It was the Queen's idea," said one of the women. "She has a wonderful sense of humor."

At the time, few people around the throne were laughing. The press in Germany, France, and Italy had published another round of stories about the Duke of Edinburgh's "bachelor apartment close to London's famous Berkeley Square" and questioned whether the weekly dinner parties of the Thursday Club that met "in the infamous Soho district" had been confined to Philip's male friends. On February 5, 1957, the E~ening Standard of London had implied a less-than-happy marriage by reporting that Philip had ordered a new bed for his room at Windsor Castle. The bed was made to his exact specifications ("It's a single bed," reported the newspaper). Other than mentioning that the Queen "rode alone" in Windsor Great Park and opened Parliament "without her husband by her side," the British press had remained silent about the Queen's rocky marriage and relied on the American press to spread the bad news.

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*Philip's rage over the press coverage given to his marriage and his equerry's divorce surfaced later at a reception. As an official pointed out Gibraltar's famous cave-dwelling monkeys, Philip asked in a loud voice: "Which are the press and which are the apes?"

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On February 8, 1957, the Baltimore Sun delivered. The story ran on the front page under the headline "London Rumors of Rift in Royal Family Growing." Filed by the paper's London correspon~ dent, Joan Graham, the article linked Michael Parker's resignation to whispers that the Duke of Edinburgh had had more than a passing interest in an unmarried woman and had met her regularly in the apartment of the late royal photographer, the Duke's friend Baron Nahum. Asserting that rumors about the splintered royal marriage "are now percolating down to the British masses, who only know about the royal family from what is printed in the British press," the dispatch concluded the real reason for the four-month cruise was that Philip "was being got out of the country to cool down."

The Queen, who according to people close to her had been troubled enough about her marriage to consult a psychiatrist three times during this period, acted stunned. "How can they say such terrible things about us?" she asked her dresser, BoBo MacDonald. The Palace courtiers became concerned, thinking the monarchy was being sullied. Commander Richard Colville, the Queen's press secretary, quickly denounced the story. "It is quite untrue that there is a rift between the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh," he said. "It's a lie." His denial was reported around the world with a recapitulation of the offending story, which insured that the Queen s strained marriage now became international news.

The British press took exception. "We could not drag even a simple denial out of the palace for the British public," said an editorial in the London Daily Herald. "For Americans, a denial. For the British people, no comment. The Queen's subjects were evidently not supposed to know." The Daly Mirror blamed the Queen s courtiers: "They need lessons on how to handle a hot potato."

The next day the Queen put on her public face, and the United Press reported from London that she "was amused" by the rumors of a rift between her and her husband. "The Queen shrugged off the story," UP said, "and gave the impression that her reunion with the Duke in Portugal after the longest separation of their marriage would effectively squelch further gossip. . . . Anyone with eyes to see will know then how wrong the stories are."

A horde of reporters and photographers swarmed into Lisbon to watch the royal reunion at the airport. Philip was already irascible about the press coverage he had received, which compared ~~m~unfavorably with Queen Victoria's husband, Albert. Victoria had included him in her meetings with ministers and allowed him to read her state papers. At first Philip joked about his lack of status. "Constitutionally, I don't exist," he said. But when he arrived in Lisbon and saw the press waiting for him, he stopped chuckling. "Those bloody lies that you people print to make money," he snapped. "These lies about how I'm never with my wife."

Running five minutes late, he bounded up the steps to the Queen's airplane two at a time. He was wearing a suit, a white shirt, a tie, and a bronze tan with a small white shadow around his chin where he had obviously just shaved off his beard.

An hour later he emerged from the plane with a faint smudge of lipstick on his cheek and smilingly assumed his position a few paces behind the Queen. They spent the weekend together on the Britannia, anchored in the choppy waters of the river Sado, which was a big concession on the Queen's part. Never a sailor, she was afraid of water and usually avoided the yacht because she was prone to seasickness, but on this weekend she was determined to accommodate her sea-loving husband. Knowing their schedule was set for the next two years, she decided that after their royal tour of Canada in 1959, she would concentrate on her ambition to have four children. She also would change the rules regarding her family name so that her descendants not in line for the throne would carry her husband's name and be known as Mountbatten-Windsor.

After their four-day state visit to Portugal, the royal couple returned to England, where the Queen made a rare public display of affection. She rewarded her husband for his service to the Commonwealth by issuing a proclamation that granted him the title and titular dignity of a Prince of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. She declared that henceforth he would be known as the Prince Philip* Duke of Edinburgh. She no longer wanted him

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*Although Philip had been born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, he renounced his title in 1947 when he became a British subject and assumed the name of Philip Mountbatten to marry Elizabeth. Upon his marriage, he became the Duke of Edinburgh. But most people continued to call him Prince Philip-ncorrectly. Technically he was not a prince until his wife made him one.

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treated as a mere adjunct or royal accessory. Except for sharing her sacrosanct red boxes and her weekly meetings with the Prime Minister, she made her husband a full partner in her monarchy. She even insisted that when Philip attended royal functions alone, he was to get the complete first verse of the National Anthem, no longer the abbreviated version.

Feeling ennobled, Philip delivered a self-serving speech a few days later, to justify the four months he had spent away from his wife and children. "I believe there are some things for which it is worthwhile making personal sacrifices, and I believe that the British Commonwealth is one of those things, and I, for one, am prepared to sacrifice a good deal if by doing so,I can advance its well~being by even a small degree. . . . I might have got home for Christmas, but I could not have entertained nearly 1,400 people in the Queen's yacht from Australia, New Zealand, and those remote communities at twenty~six lunches, dinners, and receptions, and thereby strengthened, I hope, the close links which exist between the Crown and the people of the Commonwealth."

Those close links were severely strained by the Suez invasion, which had so damaged Britain's reputation for morality in international politics that the Queen was forced to help pick up the pieces. She made four state visits during 1957 to Portugal, France, Denmark, and Canada. In October her new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, urged a visit to the United States to try to repair the damage she had allowed her country to wreak on that alliance. "A visit by the Queen is worth one hundred diplomats," said the Prime Minister, who was eager to mend relations between the two countries. And he wanted to persuade the Americans to share their nuclear weapons technology.

The Queen was not eager to add yet another state visit to her schedule until the Prime Minister shrewdly showed her a cartoon that had appeared in America after it became known that England had duped the United States by conspiring with France and Israel in the Suez invasion. The cartoon showed President Eisenhower sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. The former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II had said he always regarded England as "an old and trusted friend." Now, obviously distraught, he was holding his head in his hands. The cutline read "Great Britain Is No Longer Great."

The Queen did not hesitate. She agreed at once to make the five-day visit to America, with stops in Jamestown, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, where she promised to address the UN General Assembly. She left England, in the words of historian Elizabeth Longford, "like a dove from a battered ark."

Queen Elizabeth and Philip arrived in the United States on Columbus Day, trailed by a press contingent of two thousand reporters and photographers who were not allowed to talk to her. Their instructions from the Palace included a "recommended" dress code. For women: no black dresses, gloves a must, and a curtsy would be nice. For men: a shirt, a tie, and a deferential bow from the neck. The Palace distributed press releases at every stop but ruled out personal interviews.

"How many people," asked Philip, "go to President Eisenhower's press conferences?"

"Up to three hundred," said the Newsweek correspondent.

The Duke of Edinburgh shook his head. "If we did the same thing, we'd get about two."

British reporters disagreed. "No dictator ever muzzled the press quite so tightly as the Queen of England muzzles hers today on every aspect of royalty," wrote Anne Edwards in the Daily Mail.

"We had our orders from Charlie Campbell at the British Embassy," said Warren Rogers of the Associated Press. "No direct questions to the Queen, no talking to the Queen, don't even look the Queen in the eye. So at the embassy's press reception, I talked to Philip, who held forth on a briefing he'd just received from the head of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was so full of himself, he sounded as though he could launch Sputnik J and H with his hands tied behind his back. The U.S. was smarting from getting beat the previous week in the space race by the Russians, who had launched the first earth satellites. So Philip's inanities on the subject

were of timely interest, and I quoted him verbatim. We both got in trouble: he looked like an idiot for saying the things he said, and I caught hell from the [British] embassy for letting him say thern. `You should have protected him from himself,' I was told.

"At first, I was sympathetic to Philip and felt sorry for the guy having to drag along in his wife's wake. Not being a royalist, I certainly didn't expect to be impressed by the Queen of England, but after covering the royal tour for thirteen days and nights in Canada and America, I found him to be a pompous ass-and fell in love with her. She was so pretty and shy, so demure. I remember her walking down a cascade of white granite steps outside the U.S. Capitol-there must've been a thousand steps-and she never looked down once. I couldn't believe it. I thought for sure she'd fall on her face, but I guess they teach you how to walk down steps without looking at your feet in Queen School. Along with that funny little wave.

Americans were entranced by the royal visit. The Chicago Tribune hailed the Queen as "a charming little lady," and the Louisyille Courier-Journal described her as an English rose "with a little of the morning dew still on the petal." Waiters and cabdrivers gathered at street corners to cheer her limousine, and the doorkeeper of the House of Representatives was so excited to see her that he hollered, "Howdee-do, ma'am." Women were captivated when she attended her first football game and appeared bewildered by men's passion for the sport. She didn't understand the concept of downs, or why the two teams huddled. "Why do they gather that way?" she asked. "Why are the goalposts behind the lines at the ends of the field? Why does one man leave the huddle first?" Pointing to the scoreboard, she asked what the numbers meant, and as the game dragged on, she inquired, plaintively but sweetly, "What is the duration of the game?"

Warren Rogers, the Associated Press reporter, who filed several stories a day during the state visit,* encountered further static from the British Embassy press office when he reported that Her

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*The three major U.S. wire services-Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service filed four hundred thousand words on the royal state visit. The preceding week they sent out three hundred thousand on Sputnik.

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Majesty and Gina Lollobrigida shared the same corsetiere. "The brassieres made for Gina were designed to maximize," recalled Bogers, "but those for the Queen, who had the same kind of prominent bosom, were designed to minimize. I wrote that this was the difference between movie stars and royalty. But I was taken to task by the British press officer for even mentioning the Queen's Hanoverian bosom. He said in oh, so lofty terms that I had crossed the line, even for a brash American. I had not demonstrated the proper amount of deference. `After all,' he said, `the Crown nevah, evah, evah shows cleavage.'

NINE

Royal weddings invigorate the monarchy. With all their pageantry, they pump energy into the ancient rituals. They provide an epic pageant that stirs emotions. The romantic procession of a princess bride in a glass coach drawn by prancing horses to an enchanted life of happily ever after has no equal outside fairy tales. The crash of military drums, the blare of trumpets, and the roar of cheering crowds entrance the country like a shower of shooting stars.

Swept up in the excitement, people unite to celebrate. And, not incidentally, businesses prosper as couturiers design hats and gowns; hotels book guests; restaurants cater parties; concessionaires produce gewgaws; and tourists spend freehandedly. Next to a coronation, nothing enchants the British like a royal wedding, and by 1960 the monarchy needed one.

Reverence for the Crown had slipped since the coronation, and traditional deference had been displaced by a new press curiosity. While still submissive to the Palace, British reporters were finally disclosing how much it cost taxpayers to maintain royalty. The 1959 bill for upkeep of the royal yacht, Britannia, the two airplanes in the Queen's Flight, Prince Philip's two Westland helicopters, the royal train, and the Queen's four royal Rolls-Royces exceeded $1 million.

Reporters, far from being aggressive, were at least becoming

more vigorous in covering the royal family. They still considered the sixty-year-old Queen Mother above reproach, so they rarely wrote a negative word about her, but they singed the Queen a few times for her lackluster style, her hidebound courtiers, her shaky marriage, and her absent (translation: philandering) husband.*

"What this family needs next year is a wedding," the Queen Mother told her oldest daughter during the royal family's 1959 Christmas holidays. She had consulted the court calendars to find the right time to announce Princess Margaret's engagement. She had decided to give her younger daughter a full-blown wedding with all the royal flourishes. She knew that such a state occasion would revitalize the monarchy, but the Queen resisted. She feared that an extravagant wedding would only bring more criticism for spending taxpayers' money, and she did not want any more criticism. Still, she would never oppose her mother directly.**

The Queen Mother said Princess Margaret's engagement announcement would not interfere with the national celebration planned for the birth of the Queen's third child, expected in February. Ten years had passed since Princess Anne was born, and for the Queen, her current pregnancy would underscore the stability of her marriage and commitment to her family. Significantly, the birth was timed to coincide with changing the name of the House of Windsor to the House of Mountbatten-Windsor. The Queen had proposed the change the previous year and suggested the announcement to include her husband's name be made shortly before the arrival of their third baby.

Despite his misgivings, the Prime Minister agreed to present the matter to his cabinet. The traditional monarchists objected when he broached the subject, but the Prime Minister, Harold Mac-

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*In 1959 Prince Philip made an extended trip to the Far East for almost four months. The Daily Express ran a series of articles entitled "The woman of the World with an Absent Hushand." Philip had made so many trips out of England that upon his return, one newspaper carried the headline "The Duke Visits Britain."

**The Garter King of Arms, who is in charge of the sovereign's heraldic ceremonies, wrote to the Queen to ask whether the entire College of Arms should attend Princess Margaret's wedding. The Queen shuddered. Her private secretary responded: "While Her Majesty appreciated the loyal feeling of the Officers at Arms, they would understand that for ohvious reasons she did not want the wedding to he made more of an occasion of state than was ahsolutely necessary."

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millan, pushed for the Queen's position, saying how important it was to her that her husband's name be validated. The Bishop of Carlisle cooperated by announcing that he did not like to think of any child born in wedlock being deprived of the father's family name. "Why should Her Majesty be different from any other married woman in the realm?" the Prime Minister asked his cabinet.

"Why indeed," snorted one Tory minister, who suspected the ambitions of "that Battenberg buggerer" (that is, Louis Mountbatten) had more to do with the name change than the Queen's personal wishes.

The Deputy Prime Minister reported back to the Queen that several ministers suspected the strong hand of her unpopular husband. The Deputy then wrote a confidential memo to the Prime Minister about his meeting, saying: "The Queen stressed that Prince Philip did not know of the present decision, on which she had absolutely set her heart."

So the Prime Minister went back to his cabinet and argued strenuously for the name change. The meeting was so acrimonious that papers dealing with the issue were not routinely released in 1990 under the thirty-year rule. The subject referred to within the cabinet as "the Queen's Affair" was so sensitive that the government ordered all pertinent documents be kept sealed for an additional twenty years.

After months of discussion, the Macmillan* cabinet finally acceded to the Queen, and the new name was intricately fashioned by lawyers to accommodate her wishes without sacrificing historical continuity. The hyphenated hybrid was confusing, but at least it gave the Queen and Prince Philip, not to mention "Uncle Dickie," some small measure of satisfaction. On February 8, 1960, eleven days before the birth of Prince Andrew,** Her Majesty announced:

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*Three years later the Queen sadly accepted Macmillan's resignation as Prime Minister. In a letter, she thanked him for being "my guide and supporter" in international matters. "There have also heen, I am afraid, a number of problems affecting my family . . . which must have occupied a great amount of your time. I should like to put on record my appreciation and gratitude for the unstinting care which you have taken in giving me your advice about them and helping me to find a solution."

**The Sunday Express, one of Lord Beaverbrook's three newspapers, acidly congratulated Prince Philip when the Queen was about to give birth: "We are edified that he was able at last to leave his bird shooting at Sandringham and rejoin his wife at this exciting moment of her life."

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While I and my children will continue to be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, my descendants, other than descendants enjoying the style, title or attributes of Royal Highness and the titular dignity of prince or Princess and the female descendants who marry, and their descendants shall bear the name Mountbatten Windsor.

The reaction was immediate and scathing. "Only fifteen years after the second world war against Germany," fumed a columnist for the Mirror, "we are abruptly informed that the name of Mount batten, formerly Battenberg, is to be joined willy-nilly with the name of Windsor."

Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express, the Sunday Express, and the Evening Standar&, blamed Mountbatten for pushing the Queen into a hyphenated name. "Small wonder that Lord Mountbatten, whose devotion to his heritage is little short of fanatical, has for many years nursed a secret ambition that one day, the name of the ruling house of Britain might be Mountbatten," he wrote. "The Queen could never see the name of Windsor, chosen by her grandfather, abandoned by the royal house. On the other hand, she sympathizes with her husband's feelings and more particularly with the overtures of his uncle."

The pompous Mountbatten was unperturbed. He was too busy celebrating. "My greatest happiness," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "is that in the future royal children will be styled by the surname Mountbatten-Windsor."

In January 1960 Lord Mountbatten had staged an elaborate wedding for his younger daughter, Lady Pamela, to interior decorator David Nightengale Hicks. Mountbatten invited all the crowned heads of Europe to make sure his daughter's wedding was as colorful and splendid as a royal wedding, prompting the press to describe him as "almost royal." Future Prime Minister Harold Wilson described him as "the Shop Steward of Royalty," but his future son-in-law said that Mountbatten was insecure about his status. "The trouble with Dickie," said David Hicks, "was that in spite of his brilliant achievements, he never really knew who he was. He wasn't a member of the aristocracy; he had royal blood, but he

wasn't fully accepted in the royal family, so he held a peculi~~ position that somehow left him very insecure."

At first Mountbatten had been dismayed that his daughter wanted to marry a commoner far beneath her rank and station. For his own pride, he wanted her to make a more illustrious marriage like her sister's. In 1946 he had persuaded his older daughter, Patricia, his acknowledged favorite* and the one for whom he had secured his title,** to marry John Knatchbull, a strapping aristocrat who was the seventh Earl of Brabourne. Mountbatten was proud to claim this man as his son-in-law; he was not at all pleased with the prospect of an impecunious interior decorator.

"David's effeminate profession, plus his sexual preferences, bothered Lord Mountbatten," said his former secretary John Barratt. "But he recognized that Pammy was already thirty years old and on the cusp of spinsterhood. She had never been proposed to before, so he tried to accept the situation and make the best of it."

Mountbatten's biographer, Philip Ziegler, agreed that Hicks *** was not Mountbatten's idea of the perfect son-in-law. "An interior decorator," wrote Ziegler, "was not what he would have chosen as a recruit for his family."

"The English aristocracy are so two-faced about sexuality," said the writer Gwen Robyns. "It was absolutely hypocritical for Mountbatten, supposedly an old queen himself, or at least bisexual, to object to David Hicks. David never lied about himself or his

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*Mounthatten made no pretense about favoring his older daughter, Patricia. In 1953 he wrote her a letter saying, "You know how basically fond I am and always have been of Mummy, you know pretty well about my girl friends, but none of them have [sic] had that magic `something' which you have." He said that he was fond of his second child, Pamela, "but the mainspring of my love [for her] is that she is your sister and you love her."

**In 1946 Lord Louis Mounthatten was created Viscount Mounthatten of Burma. The next year he was created Baron Romsey and Earl Mounthatten of Burma, with "special remainder" to his male heirs, and if no males, to his eldest daughter and her male heirs. This special remainder, which allowed the title to pass to a female, was a rare concession by the monarch and granted only to military veterans with a record of distinguished war service. After the death of his wife in 1960, Mounthatten told his beloved daughter, Patricia, that he could not contemplate remarriage because he might have a son and disturb the plans he had made for her succession to his title.

***Mountbatten never developed deep affection for David Hicks and never accepted him as a surrogate son the way he did John Brabourne and Prince Philip. In 1972, twelve years after Hicks had married his younger daughter, Mountbatten wrote a letter to Philip in which he said, "Patricia and Pammy could not be sweeter or more affectionate daughters, but one does miss sons so I am very lucky to have you and John who are both so affectionate and nice to me."

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boyfriends. He's always been quite open, and Pammy's very accepting of the men in his life.

"I came to know Pammy and David quite well when I worked with him on a book about decorating," said the writer. "I dined with them many times, and there was always a beautiful young boy in attendance. I met several of David's boyfriends, and even interviewed them when I was writing his biography.* I do remember asking Pammy once how she could put up with all the men. And she said, `Gwen, if you had parents like mine, you can put up with anything. Besides, David is a very good father and he's very nice to me. He runs the house, he orders the food, and he picks out all my clothes.'

"David told me that he was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1959," continued the writer. "A friend told him the only solution was to marry an heiress, but David didn't know any heiresses, so his friend invited him to a party to meet a few. That night David was taking his mother to the movies he was living with his mother at the time. He left her in the car for a few minutes while he ran in to his friend's party to scout heiresses. Enter Lady Pamela Mountbatten. David didn't waste a second.

"`I saw an estate of five million pounds walk through the door in white peep-toe shoes and the worst white pocketbook you've ever seen' he told me. `I immediately took her in my arms to dance and whispered, `How many babies do you want?' Naturally, Pammy, who had never been courted before and was in danger of never getting married, was enchanted. She told me she went home and told her mother, who was pleased for her but rather puzzled.

`That's wonderful, darling,' said Edwina, an heiress who inherited generations of heirlooms and never purchased furniture in her life. `But what's an interior designer?'

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*Mounthatten objected to his son-in-law's collaborating on a book. He phoned the writer and invited her for lunch. After a round of drinks he said, "Now, now, Miss Robyns. Be a good girl and give me those tapes." She refused.

"I couldn't," she said. "I had all of David's old gay boyfriends on tape, saying terrible things about 1869]him, and I didn't think it right to release them." Mounthatten threatened to sue her. She gave in. "I couldn't fight a man with his money, so we ended up going to his lawyer's office and hurning the tapes." Hicks waited until after Lord Mounthatten's death to contact another writer, June Ducas, to resume work on his life story. "June can write whatever she likes, warts and all," he said in 1995. "I don't give a damn."

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After conferring with the Queen's courtiers, Lord Mountbatten chose January 13, 1960, for his daughter's wedding because that was the only date that was convenient' for the royal family. "Despite the snow and slush of a winter blizzard, he insisted on a January wedding because he wanted to have the royal family there," said Barratt, "and most of them attended, except for the Queen, who was in confinement at Sandringham for the birth of her third child."

Mountbatten took charge of his daughter's wedding like an impresario staging a theatrical production. He selected her royal bridesmaids Princess Anne, the Queen's ten-year-old daughter; Princess Clarissa of Hesse; and Princess Frederica of Hanover. He summoned Owen Hyde-Clark of the House of Worth to design her wedding dress and promptly put his daughter on a diet so that she would look sleek and slim on her wedding day. He relegated the incidental details to his future son-in-law, the decorator, who was eager to please his future father-in-law. Hicks decreed that everything should be white "all white, all white" from the mink cuffs on the bridal gown to the bridesmaids' coronets of hyacinth petals.

"As mother of the bride, Edwina was delighted to have her future son-in-law flying about attending to everything," said a friend, "because she was already overexhausted planning her charity excursion to the Far East. She left a few days after the wedding, and, sadly, died in her sleep on that trip while touring Borneo."

The press coverage of the Mountbatten wedding conveyed the impression of a glorious union between a nobleman's daughter, and the common but worthy man of her dreams. The bride's entrance into Romsey Abbey was heralded by trumpets playing "0 Perfect Love." And at the reception later, surrounded by members of the British and German royal families, the Duke of Edinburgh toasted the future of the bride and bridegroom.

"As long as they produce children and keep the bloodline going," said Gwen Robyns, "that's all that's required. Whether the bridegroom is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual doesn't matter, as long as the marriage looks good on the outside and is kept up for public appearances. It's worse for gay men within the aristocracy because it's the duty of the oldest male to produce an heir to pass on the family name, the property, and the title. So they've

got to get married, no matter what their sexual orientation is, which accounts for the long established tradition in Britain of homosexual men marrying women simply to breed. Makes no difference what they do later on the side as long as they do it discreetly. That's the hypocrisy of it all."

In his memoir, Palimpsest, writer Gore Vidal reflects on the homoerotic preference of men for each other that is accepted as a fact of life in Great Britain, especially in public schools. "Most young men, particularly attractive ones, have sexual relations with their own kind," Vidal writes. "I suppose this is still news to those who believe in the two teams: straight, which is good and unalterable; queer, which is bad and unalterable unless it proves to be only a Preference, which must then, somehow, be reversed, if necessary by force." Within the British aristocracy, marriage was the force.

"The love that dare not speak its name" was the way Oscar Wilde's young male lover had described men's sexual preference for one another in 1895. At that time, men like Oscar Wilde, who married women but loved men, were considered degenerates whose sexual acts were punishable by imprisonment. Sixty-five years later nothing had altered that concept in England, and in 1960, after the announcement of Princess Margaret's engagement, homosexuality again became an issue.

The whispering started soon after the Queen Mother announced her daughter's engagement and impending marriage in May. Ordinary people were pleased that the twenty-nine-year-old Princess, who had partied aimlessly for five years since renouncing Peter Townsend, seemed to have finally found happiness. For the public, her marriage to a commoner would lower a class barrier between the monarchy and the people and bring them closer to the throne. For those within royal circles, the announcement caused an audible rumble in the tectonic plates that underpin the British establishment. Not only was the bohemian photographer a commoner whose parents were divorced, but he also had a mother who was Jewish. The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy hardly considered him an appropriate suitor for the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen, a royal princess who was fourth in the line of succession to the throne.

``Princess Margaret has announced her engagement to Tony Armstrong4ones,,, wrote Noel Coward in his diary on February 28,1960. "Tony looks quite pretty, but whether or not the marriage is entirely suitable remains to be seen." He recorded further disap~ proval from the Duchess of Kent and Princess Alexandra. "They are ~ pleased over [the] engagement," he wrote. "There was a distinct froideur when I mentioned it."

Ronald Armstrong4ones was shocked that his son was consid ering such a marriage. "I wish in heaven's name this hadn't hap~ pened," he said. "It will never work out. Tony's a far too independent sort of fellow to be subjected to discipline. He won't be prepared to play second fiddle to anyone. He will have to walk two steps behind his wife, and I fear for his future."

Tony's closest friends agreed. "I sent a telegram," said classmate Jocelyn Stevens, a former magazine editor, "and said: `Never has there been a more ill-fated assignment.'

The Times editorial page concurred. "There is no recent precedent for the marriage of one so near to the Throne outside the ranks of international royalty and the British peerage."

Even the W~w Statesman, a liberal publication expected to be enthusiastic, withheld approval. The magazine said that the suitability of this particular commoner to become a member of the royal family must be judged "with a leniency which only a few years before would have been unthinkable."

The Queen was the first sovereign in five hundred years to admit a commoner into her immediate family. She tried to remedy the situation by offering Mr. ArmstrongJones a title, but he refused.* A year later, when his wife became pregnant, he decided he wanted his children to be titled, so he accepted the Queen's offer to become the Earl of Snowdon, also Viscount Linley of Nymans. The Mancliester Guardian expressed a "tinge of disappointment that the plain, honest Mr. Armstrong4ones should have a title thrust upon him." People said the newly minted peer had lost his appeal. "As the husband of the Queen's sister, Tony Armstrong-Jones had

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*When Angus Ogilvy, a commoner, married Margaret's cousin, Princess Alexandra, daughter of Marina, the Duchess of Kent, on April 24, 1963, he refused the Queen's offer of an earldom. "I don't see why I should get a peerage," said Ogilvy, "simply because I have married a princess."

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one very big claim on the sympathy of the British people. He had no handle to his name. He was, in fact, one of us . . . now he has lost even that most precious asset which was his birthright."

Those close to the Princess were concerned that she was marrying on the rebound. They knew that Peter Townsend had written to her on October 9, 1959, to say that he was marrying a beautiful young Belgian tobacco heiress, twenty years old, whom he had met in Brussels soon after he arrived in exile. "She might be rich," said the princess, trying to dismiss the news, "but she's not royal." Within hours of receiving that letter, Margaret had elicited a marriage proposal from Armstrong-Jones.

"It's true," Margaret admitted many years later. "I had received a letter from Peter in the morning, and that evening I decided to marry Tony. It was not a coincidence. I didn't really want to marry at all. Why did I? Because he asked me! Really, though, he was such a nice person in those days. He understood my job and pushed me to do things. In a way he introduced me to a new world." Margaret said she managed to keep Tony's proposal a secret for several months "because no one believed he was interested in women.

Described in the press as "artistic," "campy," and "theatrical," Antony Armstrong-Jones, thirty-two, was the only child of a lawyer. The father had long since divorced Tony's mother and remarried an actress, whom he also divorced. When his son's engagement was announced, Ronald Armstrong-Jones was living with an airline stewardess thirty years his junior. He quickly married her so as not to embarrass his son, who was only one year younger than his new stepmother. Years before, Tony's mother had married an Irish peer and was now the Countess of Rosse, which gave Tony a seat on the edge of the aristocracy. He attended Eton determined to become an architect and went on to Cambridge, but after a year he flunked out.

When he was sixteen he contracted polio. After hospitalization and several months in leg braces, he rehabilitated himself by designing a pair of skis with which he exercised to strengthen his leg muscles. He eventually developed a bouncy walk to hide his limp. Still, he identified with the handicapped and showed compassion

for them. In later years he served on charity committees to raise money for medical research into disability. He also invented a wheelchair on a motorized platform to allow the ~ncapacitate~ to move easily from room to room.

Tony's uncle was the theatrical designer Oliver Messel, who was a close friend to Cecil Beaton and Noel Coward. They encour~ aged the late court photographer Baron, who specialized in royalty and society, to take on Tony as an apprentice. After working for Baron for several months, Tony opened his own photography studio in the Pimlico section of London, and with immense charm and ambition he began pursuing his own royal assignments. He photographed the young Duke of Kent and, after that sitting, photographed the children of the Queen's equerry. The Queen then asked him to come to Buckingham Palace to photograph Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

A few months later the photographer met Princess Margaret at the home of Lady Elizabeth Cavendish. The Princess, normally imperious, allowed herself to be approachable that evening, although she insisted that Tony address her as "ma' am," something she demanded of everyone because, as she said, it was her due as royalty. (A close friend, when asked what the Princess was like, said, CeShe needs to hear the crack of a knee at least three times before breakfast.") Tony cleverly appealed to her vanity by asking her advice about a fashion shoot he was doing for Vogue magazine. He later invited her to his apartment~and she accepted.

Although they came from far different backgrounds, the Princess and the photographer shared similar temperaments. Clever, witty, and sharp-tongued, both were petite rebels who chain- smoked cigarettes and slavered over pornographic movies. The photographer, barely five feet seven, longed to escape his class- enforced position, and the Princess, five feet tall in her platform heels, enjoyed flouting the strictures of society. Together they began a most unconventional love affair under the amused gaze of the Queen Mother. The Princess, disguised in a scarf and sunglasses, frequently sneaked out of Clarence House and was driven to the photographer's apartment in Pimlico, where he entertained her in his bedroom, which he had painted purple. Thriving on the

glamour of show business, they socialized with the trendy celebrities of the day like Mick Jagger, David Frost, Peter Sellers, and the Beatles.

"Tone and Pet their nicknames for each other enjoyed ex-

ploring taboos the strange, the dark, the bizarre fetishes, that sort of thing," said a friend, who related how the couple dressed up in each other's clothes and posed for pictures.

As a little boy, Tony occasionally dressed up in women's clothes. One evening, with the encouragement of his stepmother, an actress, he dressed up as a parlor maid to serve dinner to his father and grandfather. He later attended parties in drag, and two years before his engagement, he entered the field of dress design. During his courtship he shocked Princess Margaret's footman by wearing her makeup and dressing up in her elaborate party dresses and veiled hats. "I gaped with astonishment," recalled the footman, "but Margaret's sides were splitting from laughter at the sight of Tony's bare legs with such spindly calves which showed out from underneath the Princess's maroon pleated skirt. . . . His feet tottered 1n a delicate pair of the Princess's sandals with the laces untied."

The footman, David John Payne, wrote about this incident of cross-dressing in a book that angered the Queen Mother, who sued to prevent publication in England. She did not want the royal family embarrassed by the footman, particularly his allegation of having been the object of a sexual overture from Antony Armstrong-Jones. The British court issued an injunction in the United Kingdom, but the book was published in Paris, where readers of France Dimanche learned what were presented as intimate details of Margaret's courtship.

The footman, who resigned his position before the royal wedding, described an incident that he said left him shaken. He recalled leaving the Princess's Royal Lodge suite at Windsor Castle, where he had been helping her select records to take to London:

I got up and left while she remained seated on the floor. I was halfway through the door when it burst open and Tony Armstrong-Jones came into the room. Seeing me, he exclaimed: "John, I've looked for you everywhere. Have a seat, darling."

My heart stopped. Obviously, Tony hadn't noticed the Princess on the floor behind the sofa, which accounted for his familiar tone with me. He was interrupted by the sudden rustle sounds of her skirt as she hastened to get up.

She looked at him, her face livid with anger. " `John, sit down, darling'? What does tAat mean? To whom are you speaking?"

Tony was totally caught off guard by these questions in a glacial tone. He blushed and began to sway from one foot to the other.

"Oh, madame," said Tony. "I didn't know... I didn't see you. I was looking for John."

"And what do you mean by `darling'?" asked Margaret in a fierce voice.

"It's an expression used all the time in the theater, madame," he stammered.

Margaret said nothing to him, turned towards me, and in her most majestic voice said, "You may retire."

I left her still looking at Tony, who was nonplussed; she continued to look shocked. Then I left, and having closed the door, I realized I was soaked in perspiration.

Obviously unamused by her fiance's familiarity with her footman, the Princess was relaxed about the dress-up games that An- tony Armstrnng~Jone5 liked to play. She joined him and assumed the male role by wearing su1ts and ties. They took turns photographing each other. She took a picture of him dressed as a child; he took a picture of her posing in his tuxedo, holding a cigar. Already they epitomized the swinging new decade of the sixties, in which the lines of sexual identity were blurred.

Because his mother was a countess, Antony Armstrnng~Jones was considered privileged, but to aristocrats he was still a commoner who was now marrying above himself. This bold social leap, coupled with his artistic pursuits, subjected him to a certain amount of sniping in the press. Shortly before his marriage, Newsweek described him suggestively as "the uncommon commoner who once was set upon and de-trousered at a country house party by high-

spirited male guests who saw him strolling with a camera round his neck. He weathered that indignity, chin up, just as he is making no apologies for his Bohemian cool-cat friends and showing no embarrassment in the unprecedented wave of pub and club innuendoes about his private life."

The bizarre sexual implications annoyed some of his friends, who emphasized that all-male dining societies are a tradition at certain English schools. "At some of the Oxford debauches, men regularly dress up as women in strapless gowns and high heels," explained one man. "The most notorious all-male dining society there is is the Peers Gaveston Society, named for King Edward II's catamite, who, by dictionary definition, is a boy kept for unnatural purposes. According to legend, the King's catamite was killed by being sodomized with a hot poker. So, in comparison, the little escapade of Antony Armstrong-Jones getting de-trousered is quite tame.

Without addressing the issue of sexuality head on, the press made snide insinuations about Tony's circle of male friends, who were described as "confirmed bachelors," a journalistic euphemism for homosexuals.

"Tony didn't know if he was Arthur or Martha," said the British novelist Una-Mary Parker. "We're not talking Adam and Eve; we're talking Adam and Steve."

"Not so," said one of Tony's Cambridge classmates. "I'd say he was more bisexual than homosexual. He'd never limit himself."

Another said, "Let's just put that subject under what Sir Osbert S~well called an enormous tolerance for the untoward or eccentric."

A few weeks before the wedding, Tony announced the name of his best man, and the press pounced like cats on a mouse. They reported that the best man, who was married, had been convicted of a homosexual offense eight years earlier.

"Prince Philip went wild. Tony was a little too swish for his taste anyway, what with his scarlet velvet capes and his long-haired friends who wore beards instead of shoes," said a friend. "But when Tony announced that Jeremy Fry was to stand up for him at his

wedding, the Duke of Edinburgh exploded. Fry was flagrantly homosexual."

So, under pressure, Tony withdrew Fry's name, and the Palace quickly announced that the young man had come down with a case of jaundice and would be unable to take part in the wedding. A few days later Tony chose Jeremy Thorpe to be his best man, but Scotland Yard investigators informed the Palace that Thorpe might be the target of homosexual blackmail and, obviously, not an accept~ able choice. The Queen's courtiers informed Tony that his friend could not be allowed to stand up for him in Westminster Abbey in the presence of royalty. Again Tony was forced publicly to retreat.

Because this would be the first royal wedding televised, the Palace insisted that a proper image be presented. The courtiers, whose responsibility was to protect the Crown from scandal, worried that people might think the Queen condoned "degenerate" behavior if she allowed a known homosexual to be part of the royal wedding party.

"Ridiculous, I know," said a friend of Tony's many years later, especially since most of the royal household has always been homosexual, to say nothing of the aristocracy and the clergy; but that's how prickly the Palace was about the issue in 1960."

Tony was summoned to the Palace for a hurried meeting with the Queen's courtiers. Hours later they announced that the third choice for Tony's best man would be Dr. Roger Gilliatt, son of the Queen's surgeon~gynecologist. He was married to the magazine editor Penelope Gilliatt, for whom Tony occasionally had worked. He was hardly a close friend, as Gilliatt acknowledged. "Armstrong~ Jones seems like a nice chap," he said, "but I don't know him very well."

Parchment wedding invitations engraved with the words "The Lord Chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother is commanded by Her Majesty to invite . . ." were sent from Clarence House to two thousand people. The Palace did not release the names for fear of press inquiries regarding the marital status of some of the guests. The bridegroom's father and both his former wives, plus their husbands, were included in the guest list. Meanwhile the bride's disgraced uncle, the Duke of Windsor, and his

twice divorced wife were pointedly excluded. "Ah, well, perhaps there'll be a funeral soon," said the Duchess of Windsor, blithely trying to bat aside the continued royal ostracism. Poking fun at herself, she added, "At least they can't say I haven't kept up with the Joneses."

As the only royal dynasty to stake its claim to the throne on its opposition to divorce, the House of Windsor could no longer preserve the pretense that divorce barred participation in royal events. Few people realized it at the time, but this royal wedding lowered the divorce barrier forever.

"They changed the guard at Buckingham Palace last night," observed the Daily Mail in describing the theatrical wedding guests who sat in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey: playwright Noel Coward, ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, movie star Leslie Caron, and actress Margaret Leighton. The newspaper listed the names of actors, actresses, couturiers, hairdressers, interior decorators, restaurateurs, choreographers, dancers, writers, singers, and songwriters all friends of the bridegroom. "These are the people who will dominate the social landscape," the paper predicted, "not fusty aristocrats."

"This wedding marked a new chapter for royalty," said the Daily TelegrnpA and Morning Post. "Like the seventh son of the seventh son who eventually marries the beautiful Princess, the bridegroom was a new and magical link between Court and people. On pavement level, the marriage of Royalty with Royalty is a spectacle; but the marriage of a Princess with a photographer is a party."

Less enthusiastic were a few Scottish aristocrats north of the border, who watched the wedding on television. They professed astonishment when the young Prince of Wales walked down the aisle dressed as a Highland chieftain. The BBC broadcaster said he thought Prince Charles looked delightful in his green doublet, lace jabot, and Royal Stuart kilt, but several Scots pointed out that the eleven-year-old Prince was improperly dressed in evening attire. They became even more indignant when Antony Armstrong-Jones appeared at the Royal Highland Games at Braemar in Scotland wearing trousers instead of a kilt. The nobility of Scotland had looked down on the House of Windsor ever since the Queen

showed up for her Scottish coronation wearing a street dress instead of her coronation gown.

For everyone else, the wedding was a dazzling spectacle of royalty, from the bride's diamond tiara to the five gold carriages transporting members of the royal family. Inside Westminster Abbey, the setting sparkled with more shades of gold than a Faberge' box. From the Queen's gilt chair to the Archbishop's polished miter to the solid gold altar plate, everything gleamed, reflecting immense wealth. A crowd of more than one hundred thousand people lined the procession route to cheer the Princess, whose wedding was the gayest and grandest ever staged by the royal family. Three million people watched on television, and schoolchildren were given the day off. For the first and only time in her life, Margaret was transported in a glass coach escorted by one hundred horsemen in gold braid. Awaiting her arrival, the crowds screamed: "We want Margaret! We want Margaret!"

Her state allowance was raised by Parliament from $ 18,000 to $45,000 per year. After a fbrty~fbur~day honeymoon in the Caribbean on the Britannia, which cost $30,000 a day, she and her new husband would return to a ten-room apartment in Kensington Palace that cost taxpayers $180,000 to renovate. British servicemen had had a portion of their wages deducted as a contribution toward a wedding present. The wedding itself had cost $78,000, which made the Queen uneasy. The Queen Mother shrugged off the expense telling her daughter that she had to learn to live up to the lavish style people expected of royalty.

"There was nothing like it," wrote Eve Perrick in the Daily Mail. "I have been to highly publicised weddings before. I was outside the Abbey when the Queen married Prince Philip. I saw Prince Rainier marry film star Grace Kelly. The unique quality of yesterday's semi-state occasion was that it combined the best elements of both. It was a right royal affair."

"The Queen alone looked disagreeable," Noel Coward wrote in his diary. "Princess Margaret looked like the ideal of what any fairy-tale princess sliould look like . . . Prince Philip jocular and really very sweet and reassuring as he led the bride to the altar. The music was divine and the fanfare immensely moving. Nowhere

in the world but England could such pomp and circumstance and pageantry be handled with such exquisite dignity . . . it was lusty, charming, romantic, splendid and conducted without a false note. It is still a pretty exciting thing to be English."

Noel Coward would not live long enough to realize that what he had just seen was the beginning of the end. Royalty was unravellng. Within a few years this wedding would push the House of Windsor into what it feared most.