As the Queen marks 70 years on the throne, historian Robert Lacey asks how prepared she was for her destiny.
But was the young princess really so unprepared?
It was George V who shrewdly jettisoned the royal family's Germanic surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1917. So it is hardly surprising that, more than a century later, the world should be in such admiration of the skills that Queen has deployed through her uniquely long and distinguished reign. She learned them first-hand from the House of Windsor's founder.
'You'll see,' he told Lilibet's father, who was visiting him during his convalescence, "your brother will never become King." The old monarch apparently worried that the stuttering Duke of York could collapse under the strain of royal responsibility, so little Lilibet might be thrust upon the throne as a child. In that event, the logical Regent was likely to be George V's stolid third son Henry, Duke of Gloucester .
What effect does it have on a three-year-old mind to discover that you only have to wave your hand and nod your head for the band to strike up and the entire platoon to march off at your behest - especially as further signals of your grandeur multiply?Soon after her fourth birthday, in the summer of 1930, a waxen effigy of Princess Elizabeth made its debut at Madame Tussauds, seated on a pony.
The likely source of these North American revelations - which were studiously ignored by Britain's still-deferential press - was the princess's recently recruited young governess Marion Crawford, who was described as "very pretty", "very dour" and "very Scotch". Grandpa England, meanwhile, set more simple targets. "For goodness' sake," he boomed at the governess, "teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand - that's all I ask you! None of my children could write properly. They all do it exactly the same way. I like a hand with some character in it."
"Oh no, Granny," came the reply, "we can't leave before the end. Think of all the people who'll be waiting to see us outside" - whereupon Granny immediately instructed a lady-in-waiting to escort the child out by the back way and take her home in a taxi. Like Charles, his father, William has voiced mixed feelings at being saddled with knowing his regal destiny from his earliest awareness. He wanted George to enjoy just a few years of relative normality - and maybe that instinct for the normal is what the Queen's early succession-free years granted her. She might have been elevated to the role of captain, but she never forgot she had started as a player in the team.
"Oh dear," she enquired when an embarrassed Labour minister Clare Short had to stop her mobile phone from ringing during a Privy Council meeting. "I hope it wasn't anyone important?"
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