It was a footman who brought the news to ten-year-old Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor
on December 10, 1936. Her father had become an accidental king just four days before his
forty-first birthday when his older brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated to marry Wallis
Warfi eld Simpson, a twice-divorced American. Edward VIII had been sovereign only ten
months after taking the throne following the death of his father, King George V, making
him, according to one mordant joke, “the only monarch in history to abandon the ship of
state to sign on as third mate on a Baltimore tramp.”
“Does that mean that you will have to be the next queen?” asked Elizabeth’s younger
sister, Margaret Rose (as she was called in her childhood). “Yes, someday,” Elizabeth
replied. “Poor you,” said Margaret Rose.
Although the two princesses had been the focus of fascination by the press and the
public, they had led a carefree and insulated life surrounded by governesses, nannies,
maids, dogs, and ponies. They spent idyllic months in the En glish and Scottish
countryside playing games like “catching the days”—running around plucking autumn leaves
from the air as they were falling. Their spirited Scottish nanny, Marion “Crawfie”
Crawford, had managed to give them a taste of ordinary life by occasionally taking them
around London by tube and bus, but mostly they remained inside the royal bubble.
Before the arrival of Margaret, Elizabeth spent four years as an only — and somewhat
precocious — child, born on the rainy night of April 21, 1926. Winston Churchill, on first
meeting the two-year-old princess, extravagantly detected “an air of authority and refl
ectiveness astonishing in an infant.” Crawfi e noted that she was “neat and methodical . .
. like her father,” obliging, eager to do her best, and happiest when she was busy. She
also showed an early ability to compartmentalize — a trait that would later help her cope
with the demands of her position. Recalled Lady Mary Clayton, a cousin eight years her
senior: “She liked to imagine herself as a pony or a horse. When she was doing that and
someone called her and she didn’t answer right away, she would then say, ‘I couldn’t
answer you as a pony.’ ”
The abdication crisis threw the family into turmoil, not only because it was a scandal
but because it was antithetical to all the rules of succession. While Elizabeth’s father
had been known as “Bertie” (for Albert), he chose to be called George VI to send a message
of stability and continuity with his father. (His wife, who was crowned by his side, would
be known as Queen Elizabeth.) But Bertie had not been groomed for the role. He was in
tears when he talked to his mother about his new responsibilities. “I never wanted this to
happen,” he told his cousin Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten. “I’ve never even seen a State
Paper. I’m only a Naval Offi cer, it’s the only thing I know about.” The new King was
reserved by nature, somewhat frail physically, and plagued by anxiety. He suffered from a
severe stammer that led to frequent frustration, culminating in explosions of temper known
as “gnashes.”
Yet he was profoundly dutiful, and he doggedly set about his kingly tasks while
ensuring that his little Lilibet — her name within the family — would be ready to
succeed him in ways he had not been. On his accession she became “heiress presumptive,”
rather than “heiress apparent,” on the off chance that her parents could produce a son.
But Elizabeth and Margaret Rose had been born by cesarean section, and in those days a
third operation would have been considered too risky for their mother. According to
custom, Lilibet would publicly refer to her mother and father as “the King and Queen,” but
privately they were still Mummy and Papa.
When Helen Mirren was studying for her role in 2006’s The Queen, she watched a
twenty-second piece of film repeatedly because she found it so revealing. “It was when the
Queen was eleven or twelve,” Mirren recalled, “and she got out of one of those huge black
cars. There were big men waiting for her, and she extended her hand with a look of gravity
and duty. She was doing what she thought she had to do, and she was doing it
beautifully.”
“I have a feeling that in the end probably that training is the answer to a great many
things,” the Queen said on the eve of her fortieth year as monarch. “You can do a lot if
you are properly trained, and I hope I have been.” Her formal education was spotty by
today’s standards. Women of her class and generation were typically schooled at home, with
greater emphasis on the practical than the academic. “It was unheard of for girls to go to
university unless they were very intellectual,” said Lilibet’s cousin Patricia
Mountbatten. While Crawfie capably taught history, geography, grammar, literature, poetry,
and composition, she was “hopeless at math,” said Mary Clayton, who had also been taught
by Crawfie. Additional governesses were brought in for instruction in music, dancing, and
French.
Elizabeth was not expected to excel, much less to be intellectual. She had no
classmates against whom to measure her progress, nor batteries of challenging
examinations. Her father’s only injunction to Crawfie when she joined the household in
1932 had been to teach his daughters, then six and two, “to write a decent hand.”
Elizabeth developed flowing and clear handwriting similar to that of her mother and
sister, although with a bolder fl ourish. But Crawfie felt a larger need to fi ll her charge
with knowledge “as fast as I can pour it in.” She introduced Lilibet to the Children’s
Newspaper, a current events chronicle that laid the groundwork for following political
news in The Times and on BBC radio, prompting one Palace adviser to observe that at
seventeen the princess had “a first-rate knowledge of state and current affairs.”
Throughout her girlhood, Elizabeth had time blocked out each day for “silent reading”
of books by Stevenson, Austen, Kipling, the Brontës, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Trollope,
and others in the standard canon. Her preference, then and as an adult, was for historical
fiction, particularly about “the corners of the Commonwealth and the people who live
there,” said Mark Collins, director of the Commonwealth Foundation. Decades later, when
she conferred an honor on J. K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series, the Queen told the
author that her extensive reading in childhood “stood me in good stead because I read
quite quickly now. I have to read a lot.”
Once she became first in line to the throne, Elizabeth’s curriculum intensified and
broadened. Her most significant tutor was Sir Henry Marten, the vice provost of Eton
College, the venerable boys’ boarding school down the hill from Windsor Castle whose
graduates were known as Old Etonians. Marten had coauthored The Groundwork of British
History, a standard school textbook, but he was hardly a dry academic. A sixty-six-
year-old bachelor with a moon face and gleaming pate, he habitually chewed a corner of his
handkerchief and kept a pet raven in a study so heaped with books that Crawfie likened
them to stalagmites. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who would serve as Queen Elizabeth II’s
fourth prime minister, remembered Marten as “a dramatic, racy, enthusiastic teacher” who
humanized figures of history.
Beginning in 1939, when Elizabeth was thirteen, she and Crawfie went by carriage to
Marten’s study twice a week so she could be instructed in history and the intricacies of
the British constitution. The princess was exceedingly shy at first, often glancing
imploringly at Crawfie for reassurance. Marten could scarcely look Elizabeth in the eye,
and he lapsed into calling her “Gentlemen,” thinking he was with his Eton boys. But before
long she felt “entirely at home with him,” recalled Crawfie, and they developed “a rather
charming friendship.”
Marten imposed a rigorous curriculum built around the daunting three- volume The Law
and Custom of the Constitution by Sir William Anson. Also on her reading list were
English Social History by G. M. Trevelyan, Imperial Commonwealth by Lord
Elton, and The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot, the gold standard for
constitutional interpretation that both her father and grandfather had studied. Marten
even included a course on American history. “Hide nothing,” Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles,
private secretary to King George VI, had told Marten when asked about instructing the
princess on the crown’s role in the constitution.
Unlike the written American Constitution, which spells everything out, the British
version is an accumulation of laws and unwritten traditions and precedents. It is
inherently malleable and dependent on people making judgments, and even revising the
rules, as events occur. Anson called it a “somewhat rambling structure . . . like a house
which many successive owners have altered.” The constitutional monarch’s duties and
prerogatives are vague. Authority rests more in what the king doesn’t do than what he
does. The sovereign is compelled by the constitution to sign all laws passed by
Parliament; the concept of a veto is unthinkable, but the possibility remains.
Elizabeth studied Anson for six years, painstakingly underlining and annotating the
dense text in pencil. According to biographer Robert Lacey, who examined the faded volumes
in the Eton library, she took note of Anson’s assertion that a more complex constitution
offers greater guarantees of liberty. In the description of Anglo-Saxon monarchy as “a
consultative and tentative absolutism” she underlined “consultative” and “tentative.”
Marten schooled her in the process of legislation, and the sweeping nature of Parliament’s
power. Elizabeth’s immersion in the “procedural minutiae” was such that, in Lacey’s view,
“it was as if she were studying to be Speaker [of the House of Commons], not queen.” Prime
ministers would later be impressed by the mastery of constitutional fine points in her
unexpectedly probing questions.
When Elizabeth turned sixteen, her parents hired Marie-Antoinette de Bellaigue, a
sophisticated Belgian vicomtesse educated in Paris, to teach French literature and
history. Called “Toni” by the two princesses, she set a high standard and compelled them
to speak French with her during meals. Elizabeth developed a fluency that impressed even
Parisians, who praised her for speaking with “cool clear precision” on her visit to their
city in 1948, at age twenty-two.
De Bellaigue worked in tandem with Marten, who suggested essay topics for Elizabeth to
write in French. The governess later recounted that Marten had taught the future Queen “to
appraise both sides of a question, thus using [her] judgment.” In de Bellaigue’s view,
Lilibet “had from the beginning a positive good judgment. She had an instinct for the
right thing. She was her simple self, ‘très naturelle.’ And there was always a
strong sense of duty mixed with joie de vivre in the pattern of her character.”
Elizabeth’s mother had an enormous influence on the development of her character and
personality. Born Elizabeth Bowes Lyon to the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, she had
grown up in an aristocratic Scottish- En glish family of nine children. In 1929, Time
magazine had pronounced her a “fresh, buxom altogether ‘jolly’ little duchess.” She read
widely and avidly, with a particular fondness for P. G. Wodehouse. Somewhat improbably,
she was also a fan of Damon Runyon’s stories about New York gangsters and molls, once
writing to a friend in the author’s vernacular: “The way that Dame Pearl gets a ripple on,
there was a baby for you — Oh boy.”
Queen Elizabeth taught her daughter to read at age five and devoted considerable time
to reading aloud the children’s classics. As soon as Lilibet could write, her mother
encouraged her to begin the lifelong habit of recording her impressions in a diary each
night. During her father’s coronation in 1937, the eleven-year-old princess kept a lively
journal, “From Lilibet by Herself.” “The arches and beams at the top [of
Westminster Abbey] were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned,” she
wrote. When her mother was crowned and the white-gloved peeresses put on their coronets
simultaneously, “it looked wonderful to see arms and coronets hovering in the air and then
the arms disappear as if by magic.”