Queen Elizabeth II: The Silence That Made Her More Powerful Than Anyone 

 

 

 

On the morning of February the 6th, 1952, a young woman in a treehouse in Kenya climbed down to breakfast as a princess and learned, hours later, that she had become a queen. Her father, King George VI, had died in his sleep at Sandringham. She was 25 years old, wearing khaki, photographing elephants at a water hole, and the news reached her by way of a journalist’s wire, a private secretary’s whisper, and finally her husband, Philip, who walked her into the garden of the Treetops Lodge and told her quietly that the king was dead.

There is no surviving photograph of the moment. There is only the testimony of those present who remembered that she did not weep. She asked for a pen. She began immediately to write the telegrams that protocol required. By the time the aircraft lifted from Nanyuki to carry her home, she had already chosen the name she would reign under, Elizabeth.

 Not Mary, not Victoria, not some grander Roman invention, her own name, the same one she had been called as a child in the nursery at 145 Piccadilly. For the next 70 years, she would say very little in public about what she felt about anything. She would deliver perhaps 4,000 speeches and grant, by the count of her most diligent biographers, not a single substantive interview.

She would meet 15 British prime ministers, 13 American presidents, seven popes. She would outlive her sister, her husband, her mother, three of her four prime ministers from the 1970s, and the British Empire itself. And through all of it, she would maintain a silence so disciplined, so deliberately constructed, that it became the most powerful instrument in 20th century monarchy.

This is the story of how she built it and what it cost her. To understand why the silence mattered, one has to understand what she inherited. The British monarchy of 1952 was not the secure gilded institution it would later appear to have been. It was, in fact, an institution in crisis, held together by personal credit accumulated during the Second World War, and threatened by every modern force that the 20th century could throw at it.

Her uncle, Edward VIII, had abdicated only 16 years earlier in order to marry a twice-divorced American, an event that had nearly broken the constitutional settlement, and that had embarrassed the family so deeply that his name was scarcely spoken in private. Her father, George VI, had taken the throne reluctantly, stammering through wartime broadcasts that exhausted him into an early grave.

The empire over which he had reigned at his coronation in 1937 was, by 1952, in active dissolution. India had become independent in 1947. Burma had left the Commonwealth entirely. Palestine was lost. Egypt was in revolt. The Suez Crisis was 4 years away. The British public, exhausted by rationing that would not end until 1954, was no longer in any mood for deference.

The newspapers had grown teeth during the war and had not lost them. The new medium of television was about to walk uninvited into every drawing room in the country. Mass tourism, mass photography, the long lenses of the paparazzi, the loosening of sexual and social conventions, the rise of celebrity culture, the collapse of religious authority, the disintegration of the class system that had made monarchy seem natural rather than absurd.

All of these forces were either already in motion or visible on the horizon. The Queen who was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 2nd of June, 1953, was inheriting an institution whose previous business model, dignity at a distance, was about to become impossible to maintain. Walter Bagehot, the Victorian essayist whose book The English Constitution remained the Bible of the royal household, had written a famous warning.

The monarchy, he said, derived its power from mystery. Its magic depended on not being seen too clearly. Daylight, Bagehot warned, must not be let in upon magic. By 1953, the daylight was coming whether the palace wanted it or not. The coronation itself was televised against the strong objections of Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury, both of whom saw the ceremony too sacred for cameras.

27 million people in Britain watched it. Tens of millions more watched across the Commonwealth. The new Queen, kneeling at the high altar, anointed with holy oil under a canopy held by four knights was suddenly visible to anyone with a television set or a cinema ticket. The mystery was already cracking. She had been prepared for none of this in any specific sense and for all of it in a general one.

Her education had been peculiar even by the standards of royal children. She had not been to school. She had been taught at home by a governess, Marion Crawford, and by a vice provost of Eton named Henry Marten who had drilled her in constitutional history while she sat in his study with one of his pet ravens perched on a chair.

She had learned French, some German, the genealogy of the European royal houses, the workings of the British constitution, and how to ride. She had not been taught science, mathematics beyond the elementary, or any literature later than the 19th century. Her sister Margaret, who was sharper and more verbal, had often answered the harder questions during lessons.

Elizabeth had been the quieter, more diligent, more obedient child and her father had noticed this from the beginning. When she was 10 and her uncle abdicated, suddenly making her father king and herself the heir presumptive, George VI was said to have remarked that she had the temperament for it. Margaret, he said, would have made a livelier queen but a worse one.

What he meant and what she would spend the next 70 years proving was that the job required a particular form of self-erasure. The sovereign could not have opinions, could not take sides, could not be seen to react. The sovereign existed to embody continuity and continuity required the suppression of the personal.

This was a doctrine she absorbed early and held to with an almost religious discipline. The silence was not natural to her. It was learned. It was practiced and it began in earnest on the day her father died. The first test came within weeks of her accession and it concerned her own name. Her grandmother, Queen Mary, the widow of George V, was a formidable woman of 75 who still wore Edwardian dress and still expected to be obeyed.

Queen Mary had a view about the dynasty’s name. Her late husband had renamed the family Windsor in 1917, abandoning the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha during the First World War. Windsor it must remain. But Elizabeth had married Philip, born a prince of Greece and Denmark, who had taken the surname Mountbatten on becoming a British citizen.

Philip’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had been overheard at a dinner party boasting that the House of Mountbatten now reigned. Queen Mary heard the report. She summoned Winston Churchill. Churchill, who already disliked the Mountbattens, agreed that the matter must be settled. Elizabeth was instructed, not asked, that her children would bear the name Windsor.

She accepted. Philip was furious and is said to have complained for years afterwards that he was the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children. The Queen did not respond to his complaints. She simply did what she had been told. The revelation in the episode is not that she was weak.

It is that she had already understood that her preferences were not the point. The second test came two years later in 1953 and it concerned her sister. Princess Margaret, then 22, had fallen in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend, a war hero and equerry to the late King. Townsend was 16 years older, charming, and divorced.

The Royal Marriages Act required the sovereign’s consent for any marriage by a member of the royal family under the age of 25. The Church of England, of which Elizabeth was supreme governor, did not recognize the remarriage of divorced persons while a former spouse was living. The cabinet, led by Churchill and then by Anthony Eden, made it clear that any marriage would require Margaret to renounce her royal rights and probably leave the country.

Margaret pleaded with her sister. The Queen, who loved Margaret deeply, said almost nothing. She did not intervene. She did not lobby the cabinet. She allowed the constitutional machinery to grind. In October 1955, Margaret issued a public statement renouncing the marriage, citing her duty to the Commonwealth and the teachings of the church.

The witnesses to the private conversations, principally the courtier Tommy Lascelles, recorded that Elizabeth had wept in private but had not bent in public. Margaret never quite forgave her. The revelation was that the silence had a cost and the cost was paid by other people. The third test came in the autumn of 1956 when Anthony Eden’s government, in secret collusion with France and Israel, invaded Egypt in an attempt to seize the Suez Canal.

The operation was a catastrophe. The Americans, who had not been consulted, threatened to collapse the pound. The United Nations condemned the invasion. Eden lied to Parliament about the collusion. The question of what the Queen had known and when she had known it has occupied historians for decades. Her private secretary at the time, Sir Michael Adeane, kept careful notes that were later sealed.

What is known is that Eden briefed her in person, that she expressed reservations, and that she did not publicly dissent. Her former press secretary later told the biographer Ben Pimlott that she had been, in his words, “not enthusiastic about Suez.” But she signed the orders. She received Eden when he resigned, ill and broken, in January 1957.

The witnesses inside the palace remembered that she treated him with exquisite courtesy and asked no questions about the collusion. The revelation was that the silence applied even when she knew she had been lied to. The fourth test was domestic and concerned her marriage. By the late 1950s, Philip’s restlessness had become a problem.

He chafed at his ceremonial role, complained of being a bloody amoeba whose only function was to provide genetic material, and spent long periods away on naval-themed tours and in the company of a private luncheon club called the Thursday Club, whose membership included photographers and actors of varying reputation.

Rumors of his infidelities reached the press in the United States before they reached the British papers, which still observed a code of deference. In February 1957, while Philip was on a four-month tour of the South Pacific, the American magazine Time ran a story suggesting marital strain. The palace took the extraordinary step of issuing a denial, which only confirmed to most readers that there was something to deny.

The Queen herself said nothing. When Philip returned to Lisbon to meet her, she had arranged for the entire welcoming party of household staff to grow beards in mock tribute to the one he had grown at sea. The witnesses laughed. Philip laughed. The press was disarmed. The revelation was that silence could be performed not only with stillness, but with theater.

The fifth test came in October 1957 with the publication in the National and English Review of an essay by Lord Altrincham, a young peer of conservative inclinations, who argued that the Queen’s court was tweedy, complacent, and out of touch. And that her speaking style, which he described as a pain in the neck, made her sound like a priggish schoolgirl.

The essay caused a national uproar. Altrincham was slapped in the street by an outraged monarchist. The Archbishop of Canterbury denounced him. The press was divided. The palace characteristically said nothing in public. But within months, the Queen had quietly accepted nearly every one of Altrincham’s specific recommendations.

The presentation of debutantes at court, an antiquated ritual by which upper-class girls curtsied to the sovereign before entering society, was abolished. Her speechwriters were changed. The composition of her household was broadened, slowly, to include people who had not been to Eton. The witnesses inside the palace later said that she had read the essay carefully and had marked passages in pencil.

The revelation was that she could be moved, but only on her own timetable and only without acknowledgement. The sixth test came in the form of a documentary. In 1969, persuaded by Philip and by her new press secretary William Heseltine that the monarchy needed to be seen as modern and human, the Queen agreed to allow a BBC film crew unprecedented access to her family for a year.

The resulting film, titled Royal Family, showed the Windsors at a barbecue, at breakfast, decorating a Christmas tree, and discussing the price of an ice cream the Queen was buying for Prince Edward. 40 million people in Britain watched it. The first broadcast was followed by a second within a week. Foreign rights were sold to 140 countries.

The film was, by any commercial measure, a triumph. But within a few years, the Queen had quietly withdrawn it from circulation. It has not been broadcast in full since the mid-1970s. She is said to have concluded that the experiment had been a mistake, that she had let too much daylight in, and that the mystery on which Bagshot had insisted could not be recovered once spent.

The witnesses to her decision were few and the reasoning was never publicly explained. The revelation was that she had read Bagshot, too, and that she trusted him more than she trusted her advisers. The seventh test came in 1981 during the Trooping the Colour ceremony marking her official birthday. As she rode down the Mall on her horse Burmese, a 17-year-old named Marcus Sergeant stepped from the crowd and fired six blank shots at her from a starting pistol.

The horse shied. The Queen, who had ridden since childhood, leaned forward, patted the animal’s neck, and brought it under control within seconds. She continued the ceremony without interruption. The footage, watched by hundreds of millions around the world, became iconic. Sergeant was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 5 years under the Treason Act of 1842.

The Queen made no public statement about the incident beyond a brief expression of thanks to her household cavalry. Privately, according to her racing manager Lord Porchester, she remarked only that it was poor Burmese she felt sorry for. The witnesses on the parade ground remembered her as having shown no fear at any moment.

The revelation was that the silence was now so total that it extended to her own near assassination. The eighth test came in July 1982 when an unemployed man named Michael Fagan climbed a drainpipe at Buckingham Palace, evaded the security system, walked through the state apartments, and entered the Queen’s bedroom while she was asleep.

He sat on her bed. She woke. According to the account she later gave to her police protection officer, she engaged him in conversation for approximately 10 minutes, kept him talking, and eventually summoned a footman who had been walking the corgis. Fagan was removed. The palace tried at first to suppress the story.

When it leaked, the political damage was severe. The Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, offered his resignation, which she declined. She made no public statement about the intrusion. The witnesses, including Fagan himself, who gave interviews decades later, agreed on one detail. She had remained calm throughout.

She had asked him about his life. She had not raised her voice. The revelation was that the discipline she had spent 30 years cultivating now operated even at the moment of waking from sleep. The ninth test of this period was perhaps the most revealing because it concerned her relations with her own prime minister.

In 1986, The Sunday Times published a front-page story claiming that the Queen was dismayed by Margaret Thatcher’s social policies, her handling of the miners’ strike, and her resistance to Commonwealth sanctions against apartheid South Africa. The story was attributed to sources close to the palace. It was, by the standards of constitutional propriety, an earthquake.

The sovereign was supposed to have no political opinions. If she had them, she was supposed to keep them entirely private. The palace issued a denial. The journalist responsible, Michael Shea, who was her own press secretary, resigned shortly afterwards, insisting he had been misinterpreted. The Queen herself said nothing in public then or ever.

Thatcher, in her memoirs, was diplomatically vague. The witnesses inside Whitehall remained divided about how much had been authorized and how much had escaped. >> The revelation was that the silence could be broken, even by accident, and that when it was, the damage was almost impossible to repair. The decade that followed broke the silence more thoroughly than any prime minister could have done.

It broke from within the family. By the early 1990s, the marriages of three of her four children were in visible collapse. Princess Anne divorced Captain Mark Phillips in April 1992. Prince Andrew separated from Sarah Ferguson in March of the same year after photographs appeared of the Duchess of York having her toes sucked by a Texan financial advisor beside a swimming pool in the South of France.

 And in June 1992, the journalist Andrew Morton published Diana, Her True Story, a book that revealed, with the secret cooperation of the Princess of Wales herself, the depth of misery inside the marriage of the heir to the throne. The Queen, addressing a Guildhall lunch in November to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession, broke character in the only way she ever publicly did.

 “1992,” she said, in a voice hoarse with a cold and with something else, “is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. It has turned out to be an anus horribilis. The witnesses in the hall, mostly bankers and civic dignitaries, recognized that something had cracked. The revelation was that even her vocabulary for distress was Latin, and even her admission of pain was filtered through a dead language.

The 11th anecdote of the long unraveling concerns the fire at Windsor Castle. On the 20th of November 1992, a spotlight ignited a curtain in the private chapel at Windsor. The fire spread through the state apartments, destroying nine principal rooms and damaging a hundred more. The Queen, alerted by telephone, drove from Buckingham Palace and arrived in a raincoat and headscarf to find smoke pouring from the roof of the castle her family had occupied for 900 years.

Photographs of her standing in the courtyard, small, soaked, and clearly upset, ran in every newspaper. The cost of restoration was estimated at 60 million pounds. The government announced that the taxpayer would meet the bill. The public reaction was hostile. “Why?” asked the tabloids, “Should ordinary people pay for a castle they could not enter, owned by a woman who paid no income tax?” Within months, the Queen had volunteered, through the Prime Minister John Major, to begin paying income tax for the first time, and to open

Buckingham Palace to paying visitors in the summer to help fund the repairs. The witnesses to the negotiation, principally her private secretary Robert Fellowes, remembered that she had grasped the political mood with unsentimental speed. The revelation was that the silence could adapt. It could absorb.

 It could concede, but it could not be heard to concede aloud. The 12th anecdote is the one everyone remembers, and it concerns the week of the 31st of August, 1997. Diana, Princess of Wales, by then divorced from Prince Charles for a year, was killed in a car crash in a Paris tunnel, along with her companion, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul.

 The Queen was at Balmoral with her grandchildren, William and Harry, then 15 and 12. Her instinct, deeply ingrained, was to protect the boys from public view, to keep them in Scotland, to attend the local church on the Sunday morning without mentioning their mother’s name from the pulpit, and to leave the flag at Buckingham Palace as protocol required, which was to say, not at half-mast, because the royal standard never flies at half-mast, because the sovereign never dies.

The public did not understand any of this. The public, in unprecedented numbers, brought flowers to the gates of Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace, and watched the bare flagpole, and read the tabloids that demanded the Queen come south and speak. For 4 days, she did not. The witnesses, including her dresser, Angela Kelly, and her then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, recorded that she eventually understood that protocol would have to bend.

She returned to London. The flag was lowered. She walked among the flowers. She made a live television broadcast in which she spoke as a grandmother of Diana as an exceptional and gifted human being. The revelation was that the silence, when finally broken, could still command. But it had been forced, for the first time, to speak on someone else’s timetable.

What does the evidence tell us? It tells us first that the silence was not a personality trait, but a constitutional doctrine learned and practiced and refined over seven decades. Elizabeth had inherited a job whose chief requirement, in her own understanding of it, was that the holder should be a screen onto which the nation could project itself without interference from the holder’s own personality.

Her uncle Edward had failed at this because he had insisted on having a personality. Her father had succeeded painfully because he had had so little personality to suppress that the suppression was almost natural. She, who had a sharper mind than either of them and a drier wit than she ever showed, had to manufacture the suppression by act of will.

She did it for 70 years. The cost was paid in her marriage, in her relationships with her children, in the loneliness of a position that allowed no real confidants, and in the slow accumulation of resentments inside a family that had to compete with the institution for her attention. The evidence tells us second that the silence worked.

It worked in the sense that the British monarchy, which in 1952 looked like a Victorian relic with at most a generation left in it, survived into the 21st century with its constitutional functions intact and its public approval, by the time of her death in September 2022, at levels that would have astonished her grandfather.

It worked in part because she was lucky. Her reign coincided with a period in which the British people, for all their cultural revolutions, retained a residual affection for ceremonial continuity. It worked in part because the alternatives, an elected presidency, a republic on the French or American model, never developed the political constituency that would have made them inevitable.

But it worked above all because she made it work. The silence created a vacuum into which the public could pour whatever meaning it needed. To monarchists, she was a guardian of tradition. To pragmatists, she was a constitutional safety valve. To the Commonwealth, she was a symbol of post-imperial continuity. To ordinary people, she was the face on the coin, the voice at Christmas, the woman who had always been there.

Each of these meanings was made possible by her refusal to commit publicly to any of them. The evidence tells us third that the doctrine is probably not transferable. It depended on a particular biography. She had been born before television, before mass air travel, before the collapse of deference. She had served as a teenage princess in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war, learning to drive lorries and change tires, an experience that gave her a credibility with her generation that no later monarch could replicate.

She had married young to a man who, for all his difficulties, remained at her side for 73 years. She had been crowned at 27 and had reigned long enough to become, by simple longevity, the constant against which every other British institution was measured. Her successors will not have these advantages. The silence she perfected may turn out to have been a feature not of monarchy as such, but of one particular monarch working in one particular century with one particular set of inherited skills.

The evidence tells us finally that the silence was never empty. Those who worked closely with her, from Churchill to Major to Blair to Cameron to May to Johnson to Truss, all recorded the same impression. She was sharply observant, well-informed, frequently amused, occasionally exasperated, and never in her private weekly audiences anything other than fully engaged.

Churchill, who had served her great-great-grandmother Victoria, said that he had not expected to be so charmed by a young woman of 25. Harold Wilson said that the weekly audience was the only meeting in his diary that he genuinely enjoyed. Even Thatcher, with whom relations were reportedly cool, said in her memoirs that the Queen’s grasp of state papers was formidable.

The silence, in other words, concealed an active mind. It was not that she had nothing to say. It was that she had decided very early that the saying of it was not her job. If this account has been useful, subscribing to the channel costs nothing, and there are more stories like this one queued.