Free Elizabeth the Queen by Sally Bedell Smith

Palace that dramatist Noel Coward called a “sensational evening.… Everyone looked shiny and happy.” Elizabeth and Philip were “radiant.… The whole thing was pictorially, dramatically and spiritually enchanting.” As was his habit, the King led a conga line through the state rooms of the palace, and the festivities ended after midnight. Philip was in charge of distributing gifts to his fiancée’s attendants: silver compacts in Art Deco style with a gold crown above the bride’s and groom’s entwined initials and a row of five small cabochon sapphires. With typical insouciance, “he dealt them out like playing cards,” recalled Lady Elizabeth Longman, one of the two non–family members among the eight bridesmaids.
    The morning of the wedding two days later, Philip gave up smoking, a habit that had kept his valet, John Dean, “busy refilling the cigarette boxes.” But Philip knew how anguished Elizabeth was by her father’s addiction to cigarettes, so he stopped, according to Dean, “suddenly and apparently without difficulty.” Patricia Brabourne, who was also with her cousin that morning, said that Philip wondered if he was being “very brave or very foolish” by getting married, although not because he doubted his love for Lilibet. Rather, he worried that he would be relinquishing other aspects of his life that were meaningful. “Nothing was going to change for her,” his cousin recalled. “Everything was going to change for him.” Before he left Kensington Palace, where he had spent the night in his grandmother’s apartment, Philip indulged in a favorite royal ritual by downing a gin and tonic.
    Outside Westminster Abbey, tens of thousands of spectators gathered in freezing temperatures to welcome the princess and her father in the Irish State Coach. Two thousand guests enjoyed the splendor of the 11:30 A.M. ceremony in the Abbey, an event that Winston Churchill called “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.” Elizabeth’s dress by Norman Hartnell was of pearl-and-crystal-encrusted ivory silk satin, with a fifteen-foot train held by the two five-year-old pages, Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Michael of Kent, who wore Royal Stewart tartan kilts and silk shirts. Her tulle veil was embroidered with lace and secured by Queen Mary’s diamond tiara, and Philip’s naval uniform glinted with the new Garter insignia pinned to his jacket. The men in the congregation wore morning dress or uniforms, while the women were resplendent in long dresses, elbow-length white gloves, splendid jewels, and either tiaras or hats, many bedecked with feathered plumes. The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, presided, telling the young couple that they should have “patience, a ready sympathy, and forbearance.”
    After the hour-long service, the bride and groom led a procession down the nave that included five kings, five queens, and eight princes and princesses, among them the crowned heads of Norway, Denmark, Romania, Greece, and Holland. Philip’s mother was present, but his three sisters and their German husbands were pointedly not invited. Also noticeably absent was the king’s brother, former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, and his wife the Duchess, for whom he had abdicated the throne. The estranged Windsors were living in Paris, unwelcome in London except for periodic visits. Although their exile may have seemed harsh, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and their advisers had seen no alternative. A king and former king living in the same country would have resulted in two rival courts.
    While the bells of the Abbey pealed, Elizabeth and Philip were driven to Buckingham Palace in the Glass Coach, preceded and followed by the two regiments of the Household Cavalry on horseback, wearing full ceremonial dress: the Royal Horse Guards in their blue tunics, the Life Guards in red, all with white leather breeches, black thigh-high boots, shiny steel cuirasses, and gleaming helmets with