Juvenile guests were rare. However, the King and Queen had to entertain official, and especially foreign, visitors who were invited to stay with increasing frequency as fears about the international crisis grew. According to Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth began to take an interest in politics at about this time, ‘and knew quite a bit of what was going on in the world outside’.44 She certainly had a unique vantage point compared with most other children of her age. In one month in 1938, four kings, a regent and a crown prince called on her parents, mainly on trips to London to rally support in defence of their countries. Visitors to Windsor early in the reign included the newly appointed American Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, and his wife Rose, who stayed for a weekend in April 1938. Rose Kennedy was moved by her brief contact with British royalty, especially its younger members. She recorded in her diary that she ‘found it a great conversational convenience’ that her own large brood included two children, Teddy and Jean, who were about the same ages as the princesses. During her stay, she watched out for the royal daughters, much as one might look out for rare and exotic birds when visiting their habitat, and she was not disappointed. While walking in the park surrounding the Castle, she and Joe ‘ran into Princess Elizabeth hiding behind the shrubs. She had on a pink coat and was hatless and she smiled at us’. The Kennedys saw her again over luncheon, when Elizabeth and Margaret appeared together, clad identically in rose dresses with checked blouses, red shoes with silver-coloured buckles, white socks and necklaces of coral and pearl. Elizabeth, not quite twelve, was placed next to the wicked old envoy, to his saturnine delight. After the meal, the princesses were required to accompany their parents and the ambassadorial couple as they walked ‘very informally’ over to Frogmore.45
Learning how to handle distinguished guests was one important part of an Heiress’s education, and was soon extended. Shortly after the Kennedy visit, Princess Elizabeth was promoted from white socks to silk stockings, receiving a box from her mother as a birthday present.46 She started to attend the huge, thousands-strong, garden parties held annually at Buckingham Palace. She also began occasionally to take a leading role at small-scale semi-public events, presenting rosettes at children’s pony shows, and cups and shields to children at the Bath Club. When she was thirteen, she was allowed to accept the presidency of the Children’s League of the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital, which had been named after her.
There remained the question, both practical and philosophical, of what an Heiress Presumptive and future Queen should be educated to be like – a conundrum that had not faced the Court or Government since the 1830s, when Princess Victoria’s education had been entrusted to the remarkable Baroness Lehzen. Marion Crawford had been employed to help the princesses become lady-like, not monarchical. After George VI’s accession, there was a hesitant appreciation that being lady-like was not enough, but there remained a tension between the training felt suitable for a Head of State, and the needs of an idealized princess. The result was an incongruous mix. If the notion, as an authorized account claimed, that the Princess was subjected to ‘a strenuous tutelage increasing in measure with the passing years’,47 was simply a pious invention, there was at least some expansion of the curriculum. Princess Elizabeth began to take twice weekly lessons in constitutional history at Eton College, close to Windsor Castle and Royal Lodge, given by the Vice-Provost, Henry (later Sir Henry) Marten. Later this tuition was supplemented by that of the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, who taught both princesses French, French literature and European history.48 Yet there was also a deep concern to avoid the taint of an ‘intellectual’ as opposed to ‘practical’ princess. It was therefore announced that she was taking cooking lessons in the Royal Lodge kitchens, that she sometimes baked cakes in her little Welsh cottage which were sent to children in hospitals or to unemployed areas, that she had learnt to sweep and scrub and to polish furniture, and that Queen Mary, ‘a keen housewife,’ had admired her efforts.49
Marten did his best. The theme of his tutelage combined the traditional and the modern, reminding the Princess of where she came from, but also of the changes wrought by modern conditions. Later, he recalled teaching her that the British Monarchy was exceeded in antiquity only by the papacy, that it went back more than a millennium to King Egbert, ‘the first to unite all England,’ and that the secret of its survival was its ability to adapt. He also taught her what he considered the two great events affecting the Monarchy in their own time, the 1931 Statute of Westminster and the advent of broadcasting. The Statute, he explained, had founded the modern British Commonwealth by making a common allegiance to the Crown the sole surviving link between Great Britain and the Dominions; while broadcasting enabled the Royal Family, by talking personally on the air, to sustain that link.50 How much his pupil retained is hard to say, though he may have fired her interest in the past a little. When Princess Marie Louise apologized over dinner at Windsor during the Second World War for indulging in an old lady’s reminiscences, the teenage Princess replied: ‘But Cousin Louise, it’s history, and therefore so thrilling.’51 But perhaps she was just being polite.
Yet if the Princess began to build up an academic knowledge from her tutor, as well as an extraordinary acquaintanceship with some of the major players on the world stage, if she was known to millions of young people all over the world and occasionally seen by a few thousand of them – she nevertheless remained separate from all but a handful of carefully selected contemporaries, with few of whom she could ever be close. There is always a sense of the goldfish bowl, and the lack of any direct contact through the glass.
In some ways, she was very mature for her age. Physically, she developed early, with ‘big bosoms just like her mother’, as a member of a courtier family, who played kick-the-tin with her at Balmoral in the late 1930s, fondly recalls.52 In other ways, silk stockings notwithstanding, she was held back in childhood. Marten remembered teaching ‘a somewhat shy girl of thirteen who when asked a question would look for confidence and support to her beloved governess, Miss Crawford.’53 Crawfie herself suggests a lonely, yet self-sufficient, child, and one with her own private world of perplexity. She recalled seeing her stand for hours at the window at Buckingham Palace, looking down the Mall towards Admiralty Arch, and that she would ask her questions ‘about the world outside’.54 The picture of a young princess who lacked nothing except social intercourse with people who did not think of her, first and always, as a princess, is confirmed by Elizabeth’s own recollections. When she was having her portrait painted in the Yellow Drawing-Room by Pietro Annigoni shortly after her own Accession, she told the artist that she had spent hours as a child in the same huge, magnificent room, looking out of the windows. ‘I loved watching the people and the cars there in the Mall,’ she said. ‘They all seemed so busy. I used to wonder what they were doing and where they were all going, and what they thought about outside the Palace.’55
WAR, AND THE threat of war, ups the value of Monarchy. As the danger from Hitler grew, and the rearmament programme gathered pace, the King and Queen became increasingly busy as hosts, ambassadors and patriotic symbols. Two days