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die than serve in that ship again, while another described him as ‘stamping about like a
––– tiger’. With Magpie he went on several official jaunts, and that December, with
Magpie acting as escort, he took Elizabeth on board HMS Surprise to Greece to visit his
royal relations, his cousin King Paul and his wife, Queen Frederika, a Hanover to whom
he was related by marriage. They visited Rome officially in April 1951. The Embassy
gave a very grand party to celebrate Elizabeth’s birthday on the 21st, which she did not
enjoy because all she really wanted to do was go and dine in a Roman restaurant. ‘She
wouldn’t speak to Philip for quite a few days. I mean he could have thought of it,
couldn’t he?’ one of the party said. The sophisticated Romans criticized Elizabeth for her
unfashionable clothes, criticisms which were widely reported in the American media.
Elizabeth, who had led such a sheltered, grand but unsophisticated existence, found the
glamorous Romans in their couture clothes and fantastic jewellery unfamiliar and
intimidating. The undisguised enthusiasm of one Roman princess for Philip made her
giggle, but she was shocked by the utter disregard of Lent in the capital of Catholic
Christendom. At a period when self-denial was supposed to be the order of the day and
even weddings were not celebrated, the Roman aristocracy gave endless parties at
which they danced the night away. ‘It was a growing-up process for her,’ one of her
entourage said. At home there were the inevitable protests against the heir to the throne
being received by the Pope. It was her first experience of press criticism, made perhaps
all the more painful by the easy triumph of the Paris visit two years earlier.
Since June 1950, before the birth of Princess Anne, Elizabeth had been extending her
experience of public affairs by reading Cabinet papers and memoranda. 21 Now her brief
period of freedom was almost over. Her father was dying, although neither he nor his
family were yet aware of it. ‘The King walked with death,’ Churchill was to say of him.
The possibility of a fatal thrombosis was always there. At the opening of the Festival of
Britain Exhibition in May 1951 he looked extremely ill; after the investiture of his
brother, the Duke of Gloucester, as Great Master of the Order of the Bath, he had a
temperature and, feeling as if he had ‘flu, retired to bed. The doctors diagnosed a small
area of ‘catarrhal inflammation’ on the left lung. The King, relieved, wrote to Queen
Mary that the condition had been on his lung for only a few days at the most ‘so it
should resolve itself with treatment’. He took a Whitsun break at Balmoral with the
Queen and Princess Margaret. The Queen, always oblivious to ill-health in herself and
those round her, did not appear particularly concerned about her husband, but one of
her ladies-in-waiting listened to his continual coughing with foreboding. The King felt
very tired; the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950 had worried him
deeply, and in December fears that the Americans might be going to deploy the atomic
bomb there sent Prime Minister Clement Attlee on a flying visit to Truman. ‘The
incessant worries & crises through which we have to live have got me down properly,’
he wrote to a friend. He placed as much reliance on homeopathy as he did on his clinical
doctors, principally on Sir John Weir whom he had made one of his official physicians
on his accession in 1937. The entire royal family was interested in homeopathy; Weir
treated not only the King but also the Queen, Queen Mary and the Duchess of