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and Sandringham, so now she made formal obeisance to his daughter. ‘Her old Grannie
and subject must be the first to kiss Her hand,’ she said. Elizabeth was ‘absolutely
horrified’, according to one observer. She had managed publicly to conceal her grief at
the loss of her father whom she had so deeply loved and admired; the appearance of his
mother, her grandmother, on such a formal mission was something of an ordeal,
symbolizing as it did the loneliness of her new position in which ‘family’ had to take
second place to ‘Family’.
The transition was abrupt and shocking; a violent, aching wrenching of old roots, the
sudden disappearance of her beloved father. Even within the family the adjustment
would not be an easy one. Elizabeth was now the Queen and head of the family; her
husband was now her subject, her mother and sister in limbo. The formal meeting of her
Accession Council held in nearby St James’s Palace on the following morning, 8
February, was an additional strain. One of those present remembered ‘a slight figure
dressed in deep mourning, entered the great room alone, and, with strong but perfectly
controlled emotion, went through the exacting task the Constitution prescribed’. After
reading her formal Declaration of Sovereignty to the assembled Privy Council, which
involved mentioning her father’s name twice, she said simply, ‘My heart is too full for
me to say more to you today than that I shall always work as my father did.’ Philip
stepped forward and led her out; in the back of the car she finally broke down and
sobbed. Outside from the ramparts of St James’s Palace the Garter King of Arms dressed
in the playing-card costume that was a relic of the Tudor court, proclaimed her
accession: ‘Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the grace of God Queen of this Realm and of
all Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the
Faith…’
That afternoon they drove down to Sandringham, where her father’s body lay and her
mother and sister were waiting, numb with shock and grief. It was as if their world had
come to an end. The King had been the centre of their universe; now he was suddenly
gone and their world had shifted on its axis, its focal point the new Queen. Both were
stunned. ‘Mummy and Margaret have the biggest grief to bear for their future must seem
very blank, while I have a job and a family to think of,’ Elizabeth wrote. Forty years
later an old friend recalled the Queen Mother’s overwhelming grief: ‘She was absolutely
heartbroken, for a few months I thought she wasn’t going to pull herself together. I’m
sure she thinks about him a great deal now, still misses him.’ ‘The Queen minded so
terribly that she became unapproachable as she still is [on a personal level],’ a courtier’s
daughter said, ‘and she lived completely in her own little world and also resented and
was terribly jealous of her daughter becoming Queen so that at one blow not only did
she lose the King but the whole of the happiest and gayest family life of anyone one
knows all fell to pieces at the same time.’
It took Queen Elizabeth several months before she could bring herself even to answer
letters of condolence from personal friends. She told Osbert Sitwell:
It is very difficult to realize that the King has left us. He was so much better, & so full of plans and ideas for
the future, and I really thought he was going to have some years perhaps less anguished than the last fifteen.