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had been told that he might not last the weekend. On the day after she heard from
Lascelles of his conversation with Colville she wrote Churchill a personal letter from
Edinburgh, where she and Philip were on their post-Coronation tour of the United
Kingdom. It is hardly surprising under the circumstances that the result was somewhat
stilted. ‘My dear Prime Minister, I am so sorry to hear from Tommy Lascelles that you
have not been feeling too well these last few days,’ she wrote. ‘I do hope that it is not
serious and that you will be quite recovered in a very short time.’ Having skimmed over
the surface of Churchill’s health she resorted to the safer subject of the local weather.
‘Our visit here is going well and Edinburgh is thrilled by all the pageantry,’ she informed
him. ‘We have been lucky in having fine weather, but I fear that it is now raining after
a thunderstorm…’ 13 Churchill was, according to Moran, ‘thrilled’ by this letter. He
replied immediately giving her some account of ‘the circumstances in which he had been
stricken down’ and ‘spoke of his plight as if it had happened to someone else’. He told
her that he hoped he might soon be up and about and able to carry on his work until the
autumn, when Eden would be well enough to take over.
Against all the odds and his doctors’ predictions, Churchill survived, gradually
regaining most of his faculties. By the last week in July he was well enough to move
from his home at Chartwell to his official residence, Chequers, and on 2 August he drove
over to Windsor to see Elizabeth. He had still not made up his mind to retire, telling her
that he would make the decision in a month’s time when he saw whether he would be fit
enough to face Parliament and the annual Conservative Party Conference in October.
Two weeks later Elizabeth sent him an invitation to spend the day with her at Doncaster
races to watch Aureole run in the St Leger and go on to Balmoral afterwards. Ignoring
the advice of his doctors and his wife, Churchill insisted on accepting the royal
invitation and on 11 September he and Clementine travelled by train to Doncaster to
watch the St Leger from the royal enclosure and then travelled on to Balmoral on the
royal train. He accompanied Elizabeth to Crathie Church for Sunday service, last having
been there with Edward VII forty-five years previously, long before she was born. There
was a crowd waiting to give him unprecedented cheers. Elizabeth told a friend that she
found the improvement he had made since she had last seen him at the beginning of
August ‘astonishing’.
Since the day of his stroke in June 1953, however, one question had been present both
in his and Elizabeth’s mind: when would he resign? Eden had returned home from
Boston still extremely frail but clearly expectant; the unspoken question hung in the air
whenever he was with Churchill. Churchill was determined to face the Conservative
Party Conference the next month, where delegates watched like hawks during his major
speech. The stroke was still a secret (though rumours about it were doing the rounds),
but Churchill’s Margate performance convinced his audience that he was not finished
yet. It had been thought that he would resign and hand over to Eden before the Queen’s
departure in November for the Commonwealth tour. Churchill’s reluctance to relinquish
the reins of power was to cloud the political horizon for the next two years. ‘The
Queen’s going away from the country complicates things,’ Colville told Moran. ‘The PM