It is entirely possible that nobody, not even perhaps Queen Elizabeth herself, has ever known what she was really like, so great the charm, the smiling gaze, the gloved arm, the almost wistful voice, the lilting politeness, yet so strong the nerve, so dogged the spirit, so determined the trajectory. And so many were the gossamer veils that enwrapped her aura that these two extremes invariably melded into a rose-centered sweetness. For nearly 70 years Queen Elizabeth, like most royalty, nurtured the cultivation of a façade. To an adoring mass, she was Titania; few glimpsed the dagger beneath her flower-strewn couch.
In William Shawcross’s majestic and elegantly written biography, we come closer than any other to the kernel of Queen Elizabeth’s being. His diligent research brings her alive. Her early letters, for decades lain in stout towers and distant castles, reveal an amorous playfulness; they become ever more sober and poignant as destiny hurls some dastardly thunderbolts. Now and then the author shows that a heart of steel could beat under Norman Hartnell’s flounces.
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born with the good sense and sensibilities characteristic of her class and clan. In youth she did the typical duties of wartime, and in the world- shattered aftermath, attended the typical parties and pleasures needed for forgetting it. There were many flirtations, but her eventual and almost rueful acceptance of Prince Albert (the future George VI)’s repeated proposal brought her into a circle and a court that was largely a male preserve. In it she was the epitome of young womanhood, a weapon she was to use, not unlike her Tudor namesake, with consummate skill.
At a time when her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, was replacing Edwardian plush and fringe with neo-Georgian rep and braid, and George V had just lifted the ban on actors and actresses attending court — he had a bit of a thing about the stage (though it took another 40 years for them to be allowed into the Ritz Hotel in General Franco’s Madrid) — young couples were seeing their first blue-period Picasso, and taking tentative turns to ‘Tea for Two’ on the ‘grammy’.
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