The Queen on Her Platinum Jubilee: Her Reign, Part 1
When the Princess was born, in April 1926, such a prospect was unthinkable. Her uncle, then Prince of Wales, was the golden boy of Britain and the Empire, and despite his affairs with married women, his family expected him eventually to settle down with a suitable bride and father an heir.
It was only after the death of George V that his latest liaison, with the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, accelerated into a constitutional crisis, and pitched his younger brother, the Duke of York, and his Duchess (now the Queen Mother), into reluctant Sovereignty, as George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Shielded
Princess Elizabeth and her younger sister, Princess Margaret Rose, had been shielded from the traumatic events engulfing their parents, but were not unaware, with the portentous flurry of comings and goings, the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the crowds outside their London home, 145 Piccadilly, that something was afoot which was about to change their lives.
According to the royal governess Marion Crawford (‘Crawfie’), the anxiety-wracked parents never mentioned the crisis in front of their daughters, although, she said: ‘It was plain to everyone that there was a sudden shadow over the house.’
Then one afternoon she was summoned to the Duchess’s bedroom, and as she stood on the landing outside ‘something happened that told me that the abdication had taken place. The bedroom door opened and Queen Mary came out. She, who was always so upright, so alert, looked suddenly old and tired. The Duchess was lying in bed (she was recovering from influ-enza), propped up among pillows. She held her hand out to me. ‘I’m afraid there are going to be great changes in our lives, Crawfie,’ she said. We talked a little while as to how we were going to break this news to the children, and what differences it would make. The break was bound to be a painful one.”
“We must take what is coming to us, and make the best of it,’ the Duchess said. When I broke the news to Lilibet (the family name for Princess Elizabeth) and Margaret that they were going to live in Buckingham Palace, they looked at me in horror, “What,” Lilibet said, “you mean for ever?”
Britain and the Empire had to be reassured about the stability of the House of Windsor, and the new King and Queen purposefully set out to restore the monarchy’s tarnished image. Together they successfully combined a popular image of majesty with an equally popular picture of a happy united family, a mirror reflection to which millions of other happy united families could relate.
The spotlight was inevitable, focused on the princesses who played a photogenic role in the coronation of their parents, in May 1937. Princess Elizabeth’s account of the day, pencil-written in an exercise book, and tied round with a piece of pink ribbon, is preserved in the Royal Archives at Windsor. Dedicated to ‘Mummy and Papa, in Memory of their Coronation, from Lilibet by herself’, its ingenuous freshness has lost nothing for the passing of more than six decades and sets the scene even more effectively than the prose of official historians.
