How does she keep her balance? Part of the answer is that she started
early in the family business. She was not envisaged as a monarch until
her mercurial uncle, Edward VIII, abdicated to marry twice-divorced
Wallis Simpson, bringing her awkward and dutiful father George VI
to the throne. But she was third in the line of succession from birth
and an international celebrity from the time she could walk. People
pressed their faces against the fence to see her play in the park.
As a small child, "chocolates, china sets, children's hospital wards,
even a territory in Antarctica were named after her," Pimlott observes.
"The people of Newfoundland had her image on their postage stamps.
Songs were written in her honor, and sung by large assemblies of her
contemporaries." Elizabeth's governess recalled the young princess
standing for hours gazing wistfully out the window at Buckingham Palace,
asking questions about "the world outside" — the other side
of her goldfish bowl. The love from her parents was abundant and a
firm foundation. As small children, she and her sister Margaret romped
with them morning and evening, something previously unheard of in
the frosty discipline of the Windsors. But her parents were also content
to leave her, before her first birthday, in the care of nannies for
six months as they journeyed to Australia and New Zealand.
When their father came home after his brother's abdication, his daughters
curtsied to their King — as they did for the rest of his life.
(Once Elizabeth became Queen, the Queen Mother and Margaret curtsied
to her too.) Little "Lilibet" was upbraided for saying something as
racy as "my goodness." She loved pageants, dressing up and horses
— the right predispositions for her career. But in keeping with
her class and era, she was educated at home, receiving two hours of
schooling a day aimed mainly at making her a happy wife and mother.
Rebellion did not occur to her. The whole thrust of her parents' reign
was to restore the monarchy, after Edward's selfish and seamy abdication,
to a paragon of conventional mores and dedicated service. In any event,
during World War II when she was a teenager, the idea of sacrifice
for the nation was commonplace. She arrived at adulthood both well-equipped
and perfectly inclined to climb into her gilded cage, determined not
to put a foot wrong.
Her father's private secretary gave this assessment as she reached
21: "Not a great sense of humor but a healthy sense of fun. When necessary,
she can take on the old bores with much of her mother's skill, and
never spares herself in that exhausting part of royal duty. For a
child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other
people's comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic
of that family." Moreover she was punctual, beautiful, remembered
names and faces, and in Philip Mountbatten found a match made in central
casting: grandson of a king (of Greece), handsome and energetic, with
an English education and a distinguished war record in the Royal Navy.
Their wedding in 1947 was a worldwide sensation. It was Philip who
told her, on a visit to Kenya five years later, that her father had
died at age 56, and she was now Queen. She later told the BBC: "My
father died much too young and so it was all very sudden. It was a
matter of making the best job you can ... and accepting the fact that
it's your fate."
In 50 years she has never exercised her constitutional powers in a
fashion to arouse serious criticism, never interfered in politics
except in the most benign and emollient of ways, especially when her
beloved British Commonwealth had squabbles. Faced with controversy,
her initial instinct is always to retreat, to avoid giving offense
— including, insiders say, with her children. The central task
of her reign has always been managing the monarchy's image, from which
all legitimacy flows. In the 1950s, editors were decorous, convinced
that negative news or gossip would outrage readers.
But the culture of deference was soon displaced by a raucous war for
circulation and TV viewers, where skirmishes were fought with scandal
and tittle-tattle about the Windsors, some of it true. "The main change
of the last 50 years is that the monarchy has become absorbed into,
embroiled with, the culture of celebrity," says John Baxendale, a
lecturer in cultural history at Sheffield Hallam University. The royals
needed popularity to justify themselves and played the P.R. game with
some success. The 1969 BBC film The Royal Family, showing carefully
sanitized but mesmerizing footage of the Windsors at home as well
as the Queen churning through her duties, was a triumph.
But self-publicity was like heroin: hard to gauge the dose, each fix
giving rise to a bigger craving, exacting a high price in the end.
In 1987, a nadir was reached when the children, Anne, Edward, Andrew
and his then-wife Sarah Ferguson, cavorted in a slapstick game show
It's a Royal Knockout, rendering them not down-to-earth but
ridiculous. The royals could not have remained Victorian icons; they
had to find their footing in a media age. But the progress they made
was undermined by scandal, especially through the mutual loathing
of Charles and Diana. In 1993 people could read in the Mirror a transcript
of a semi-erotic phone call between Charles and his lover Camilla
Parker Bowles. The public snapped it up: the chance to ogle the juicy
parts while clucking disapprovingly about the "terrible decline in
standards" was irresistible.
