Why moving into Buckingham Palace was a defining moment in a remarkable life
It is often the more humble onlooker who brings together the great threads of history and notes the most personal shock, devastation, joy or despair. This was one such defining moment.
“When I broke the news to Margaret and Lilibet that they were going to live in Buckingham Palace, they looked at me in horror. ‘What!’ Lilibet said: ‘You mean forever’?”
So recalled Marion Crawford, the legendary governess Crawfie to the little princesses and who knew and loved them as her own. From that moment, on one bleak December day in 1936, forever it has been, save for her latter years as she spent time at Windsor and Balmoral.
The Duke of York’s elder daughter Elizabeth was only 10 when her Uncle David abdicated a fortnight before Christmas “for the woman I love”. In doing so, he handed the throne lock, stock, barrel and Buckingham Palace to his younger brother and a more than bewildered young family who would have so preferred to have stayed at their real home, 145 Piccadilly, London.
How many times down all these years might our Queen have thought back to that life-changing day for her and for the nation, and profoundly wished she was still in the comparative obscurity of Piccadilly life?
We shall never know because wedded as she was to duty and service, she would have never said. Elizabeth II truly was her father’s daughter.
She knew how the King had struggled with lack of confidence, a stammer and that early misery at being called to a role for which he felt ill-prepared and which he never expected.
She promised us her commitment, her life.
And throughout a reign of amazing change and fortune, many would say that she never knowingly broke that promise.
As she reached her teenage years and then early adulthood, the young Elizabeth also began to grow into that new and heavy mantle laid so summarily upon her slender shoulders as one man threw in his lot with an American divorcee and so bequeathed the throne to another woman who in her wildest dreams was never expecting it.
It’s said that many years later when the controversial Duchess of Windsor finally died, despite barely knowing the old lady and having little to thank her for, at her funeral Elizabeth II was caught in one of those rare moments wiping away a tear in public.
The final realisation that the woman directly responsible for shaping much of 20th century royal destiny was gone, had done what personal grief often failed to do: cracked that almost legendary composure.
This was not only a page turned but a whole book closed. Much was laid to rest that day.
But back in time, as she struggled to come to terms with her new future and greater duties even as her beloved Papa was struggling to be a good King, there were to be long and eventful years of her own reign before the Queen we now mourn watched the laying to rest of that last extraordinary link in the forging of her own royal life.
