Her duties left her little time for a normal family life, although in the early days of her reign she asked Winston Churchill to change the time of his weekly prime ministerial audience to allow her to bath Prince Charles. Nine Prime Ministers later it is still fixed at 6.30pm on Tuesday, while Parliament is sitting.
The second 25 years of the Queen’s life also saw the completion of her family. The new burden of sovereignty diverted her attention in the early years of her two elder children, and she is said to have remarked to a close friend: ‘The Crown separated them from me. It is something that I have regretted all my life… I was never allowed to be a mother.’
But the Queen became pregnant for the third time in 1959. Six years after being crowned, she was confident in her role and looked forward to having a second family. Prince Andrew was born in February 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964. Thereafter the Queen achieved a satisfactory balance between the time she devoted to her work and to her children.
The 1970s saw two significant anniversaries. In November 1972 the Queen and Philip celebrated their Silver Wedding, and in a speech at Guildhall, Her Majesty gave her own straightforward view of marriage and family life. ‘I am for it,’ she declared.
This simply expressed conviction remains at the core of her own domestic life. Her own successful marriage cannot be separated from any analysis of her reign, because without Philip’s support she would not have been such a popular and effective Queen.
Jubilee
Then in the summer of 1977 Britain partied amid a sea of red, white and blue. The Silver Jubilee, the celebration of 25 years of her reign, got off to a slow start, but finally burst into a spontaneous explosion of excitement, affection, and displays of loyalty which overwhelmed the principal participant.
The Queen was ‘floored’ by what the newspapers call ‘jubilee fever’, and echoing her grandfather George V’s response to the outpouring of affection at the time of his Silver Jubilee (‘I am beginning to think they must really like me for myself’), the Queen, when faced with the evidence of her own popularity, repeatedly remarked: ‘I am simply amazed. I had no idea.’
At a City luncheon in her honour, she reaffirmed the lifetime pledge of service she made on her 21st birthday in South Africa 30 years before. ‘Although that vow was made in my salad days, when I was green in judgement, I do not regret, nor retract, one word of it,’ she said.
She meant it in 1947, in 1977, and still does. Retirement is not an option and abdication (a dirty word in the House of Windsor) is not to be contemplated.
