Various accounts were given of the level of her knowledge, some of them doubtless exaggerated, in order to demonstrate her fitness for the tasks ahead. It was said that, in addition to French, she was fluent in German. When she was eighteen, The Times claimed she was highly musical and although ‘like some others of her sex, she is no mathematician,’ she was familiar with ‘many classics’ in English and French.50 When a magazine editor wrote to the Palace to check a list, supplied by ‘a friend near the Court,’ of books and authors the Princess had allegedly read, a courtier replied firmly that the list could be published as correct. It consisted of ‘many of Shakespeare’s plays,’ Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Coleridge, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Stevenson, Trevelyan’s History of England, Conan Doyle, Buchan and Peter Cheyney.51 To this remarkably large collection might be added the Brontës: at the end of the war, Lisa Sheridan found the Princess reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and expressing a preference for historical novels and stories about the Highlands.52 Was it true? If such accounts were even half accurate, the Princess would have been a strong candidate for a place at university, where she might have extended her intellectual range. Neither university nor even finishing school, however, was considered as a possibility. Instead, like a butcher or a joiner, she apprenticed for the job she would be undertaking for the rest of her life by doing it.
Her first practical experience of the grown-up world of royalty was to head a regiment. In January 1942, following the death of the Duke of Connaught, she was asked to take his place as honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards – a natural choice, some felt, in view of her contact with the Grenadiers at Windsor. The offer was accepted, and on her sixteenth birthday she carried out her first engagement as Colonel at Windsor Castle, inspecting the Grenadiers in the company of her father. Thirty reporters and ten photographers were granted press passes to cover the event.53 Cecil Beaton marked it with one of his most famous pictures, which shows the Heiress Presumptive in uniform, fresh-faced and half-smiling, with her jacket unbuttoned and her hat at a coquettish angle. Afterwards, she was hostess to more than six hundred officers and men, entertained by the comedian Tommy Handley.54 The Grenadier Guards were delighted by their acquisition, and those who dined with her in the officers’ mess recall her as ‘charming, and very sincere’.55 Yet despite this dramatic début, Buckingham Palace kept up the fiction that the Princess was still a child, and American press requests for help with a story about her were met with the incomprehensible denial that she was entering public life.56
Adulthood could not be postponed for ever. Princess Elizabeth’s coming-of-age, when she was entitled to succeed to the throne without need for a Regent, took place when she was eighteen, in April 1944. There was no débutante ball to celebrate the occasion. Instead, it was accompanied by the Princess’s graduation from a nursery bedroom to a suite. Here she was pictured by Lisa Sheridan, as if she were part of the interior design. ‘The upholstery is pale pink brocade patterned in cream,’ it was revealed. ‘The walls are cream, hung with peaceful pictures of pastoral scenes. The Princess’s flowered frock harmonized admirably with her room.’57 There were other changes, to mark her rise in status. She was assigned her own armorial bearings, and her own standard which flew in whatever residence she happened to be occupying. She also acquired a ‘Household’ of her own, including, in July 1944, a lady-in-waiting. Meanwhile, she had unwittingly stimulated a minor constitutional controversy which engaged the best legal brains for several months.
The 1937 Regency Act, which had been passed following George VI’s accession, had provided for two forms of delegation of royal powers: to a Regent, in the event of a child under eighteen succeeding, or of the total incapacitation of a monarch; and to five Counsellors of State, composed of the Consort and the four next in line of succession, in the event of the Sovereign’s illness or absence abroad. However, the provision disqualified anybody not ‘a British subject of full age,’ which effectively meant that Elizabeth could succeed her father as Monarch with full powers at eighteen, but not deputise for him as a Counsellor until she was twenty-one.58
Nobody noticed this anomaly until an eagle-eyed lawyer pointed it out to the King’s private secretary, Sir Alexander Hardinge, in the autumn of 1942. Hardinge at first dismissed it. It was ‘common sense,’ he replied to the lawyer tartly, to regard the Princess as fully of age if she could succeed without a Regent.59 The Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, however, disagreed: due to bad drafting, the law and common sense did not coincide.60 There the matter might have rested, had not the King himself indicated his desire to have his daughter as a Counsellor of State. The Lord Chancellor was once again consulted, and recommended to the Prime Minister that the law be changed in order to permit the Heiress Presumptive to become a Counsellor, bearing in mind ‘the qualities of the young lady and the wish of her parents’.61 As Allied troops invaded Sicily in July 1943, George VI spoke to Winston Churchill on the matter, and secured a promise that it should be brought up at War Cabinet, with a view to a quick Bill. ‘He quite agrees this should be done,’ wrote the King.62 Cabinet assented, and in October, the Labour Home Secretary in the wartime Coalition, Herbert Morrison, introduced legislation, arguing that the responsibility would give the Heiress valuable experience.
The new Act received the Royal Assent in time for the eighteen-year-old Princess to become a Counsellor, along with her mother and three others, during her father’s visit to Italy in July 1944. In his absence she performed her first constitutional functions, which included signifying the Royal Assent to Acts which had been passed by Parliament. Yet she was still not ‘a British subject of full age’, or legally old enough to vote in an election.
A further question also arose in connection with the Princess’s eighteenth birthday: the possibility of a change of title. During 1943, letters and articles appeared in the press suggesting that, in view of her unchallenged position as Heiress, it would be appropriate to designate her ‘Princess of Wales,’ an idea first mooted in 1936. In August, Pwllheli Town Council petitioned the Prime Minister on the subject,63 recommending the Princess’s birthday as a suitable moment. At the end of the year, the Carmarthen Journal reported that no project in recent years had been more popular,64 and early in 1944, the Welsh Parliamentary Party, composed of Conservative, Liberal and Labour MPs, joined the campaign. It was pointed out, on all sides, that such a gesture would be greeted with enthusiasm in the Principality, with great benefits to Anglo-Welsh relations.
The Palace, however, demurred. While appreciating the sentiment behind such a proposal, it was unwilling to be swept along by a wave of populist fervour. The key issue, it decided, was the precedent for such a bestowal of title, and the lack of one. The title ‘Prince of Wales’ had only ever been given to the Heir Apparent. Princess Elizabeth was merely Heir or Heiress Presumptive. Could the Princess perhaps be promoted from Presumptive to Apparent? The Home Office was asked to investigate. ‘I have looked into your question about HRH Princess Elizabeth’, J. A. R. Pimlott, a Home Office official, wrote to Sir Eric Miéville. ‘Where the heir to the throne is a woman her right of succession is defeasible at any time by the birth of a son to the reigning Sovereign. HRH Princess Elizabeth therefore remains Heir Presumptive till she in fact succeeds.’ This had been true, he pointed out, of Victoria in 1837. Though Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV, had no child for seventeen years, it was thought constitutionally advisable in proclaiming the accession of Queen Victoria to guard against the possibility of a posthumous birth. The new Sovereign was therefore proclaimed Queen ‘saving the rights of any issue of his Late Majesty King William IV which may be born of His Late Majesty’s Consort’.65
This, however, was not the end of the matter. Though it dealt with the Presumptive-Apparent problem – by definition, no female could be Apparent – it did not dispose of the issue of whether there was any precedent