Isolated in degree, Elizabeth remained curious about other people. She frosted a cake her mother sent to unemployed young men in the Welsh town of Blaina and dictated a letter to a lady-in-waiting asking to be told “how many people have slices of cake to tea”. In the summer of 1937, she contributed an article about looking out of the window at Buckingham Palace to a magazine called The Snapdragon, written by her friends. She did not protest her gilded confinement. Watching the evening court proceedings in her rose-patterned T-shirt, she told Margaret, “One day you and I will be down there sharing all the fun. And I’ll have a perfect huge train, yards long.ˮ As part of her education, her parents arrested her at the reception of foreign dignitaries. At age 12, he delivered a carefully rehearsed welcome speech in French to President Lebrun of France and met the new American ambassador, Joe Kennedy. Her parents shared their thoughts on many aspects of royal life. “One feels how important it is that the people see their King and not only as a symbol,” her mother wrote to her from Canada in May 1939, a lesson the princess remembered when she became head of the Commonwealth. .
The love of her life
Around the time of her 13th birthday in 1939, Princess Elizabeth began constitutional history lessons with Eton’s vice-chancellor Henry Marten: together they spent six years reading and annotating William Anson’s three-volume Law and Custom of the Constitution. “Note how it brings the human element throughout its history,” her mother told Elizabeth: Marten used examples from recent royal history, including the reign of Queen Victoria, to illustrate constitutional theory. He praised developments in the relationship between sovereign and subject, celebrating George V’s use of broadcast technology in his Christmas message to forge a bond between the King and his far-flung people. Elizabeth also studied European history with an immigrant Belgian aristocrat, the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, known as ‘Toni’. Despite Elizabeth’s conscientiousness, her acquaintance with Marten lacked the excitement of another meeting that year that shaped her future. On July 22, 1939, at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, Elizabeth met the man she was to marry. She was 13, five years younger than her handsome, blond third cousin, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, and fell in love instantly, never quite recovering. Their wedding took place months after her 21st birthday, in November 1947. With her parents’ agreement, Elizabeth would have married Philip earlier. She had told a friend that “Philip was her boyfriend when she was 15.
Windsor Castle during the war
But in September 1939, the outbreak of World War II, in which Philip was serving in the British Navy while Elizabeth remained at school, curtailed any possible meeting. From May 1940, Elizabeth and Margaret lived quietly in the five-room royal nursery in the Augusta Tower of Windsor Castle. Described as a “country evacuation house”, their whereabouts were kept a secret from the public. their parents would come with them from Buckingham Palace at weekends.
