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dominant rule in the field in which it was open for him to do so – his own family.
Elizabeth felt that because, as she explained to friends, ‘he has never had any family life
of his own’, this was particularly important to him. Beyond that, her anxiety to adjust
the balance between their relative positions in their public and their private lives was to
make him the ultimate arbiter where their children were concerned. Her own upbringing
had taught her that traditional roles in the family should not be reversed. The Queen
Mother had been the stronger personality of the two, but she had never tried to usurp
her husband’s position as head of the family, although in those areas about which she
felt strongly, like the Windsors and the German relations, her feelings had dominated.
In Elizabeth’s view the family should be run on traditional lines; her role as mother was
to be kept distinct from her position as Queen and because of this she fought far harder
than her mother and her father had to preserve her children’s privacy. Commander
Colville was her employee and his views, however unpopular they may have been with
the public and the press, were her views.
Elizabeth’s instinct to let her husband ‘run the show’ as far as the family was
concerned was to have serious consequences for her eldest son in particular.
‘Motherhood is not the Queen’s long suit,’ a friend said. ‘She likes getting on with her
job and she is extremely busy.’ She kept an hour for the children in the morning and
another for bathtime, but otherwise saw no harm in their spending most of their time in
the company of nannies and governesses just as she and Margaret had. Allegations that
Philip was a distant arm’s-length father when the children were small are untrue
according to his children and their former nanny (backed up by the evidence of Mike
Parker and other people working at Buckingham Palace at the time). Princess Anne told
her father’s biographer how Philip always tried to spend time with them before bedtime,
a pattern which she set for herself when her children were young. Charles’s adored
nanny, Mabel Anderson, described him as ‘a marvellous father. When the children were
younger, he always used to set aside time to read to them, or help them put together
those little model toys.’ 16 The staff remember him as ‘less unbending than the Queen’ at
the time, playing hide and seek with the children before bedtime to the accompaniment
of delighted shrieks. Elizabeth could appear distant and sometimes even formidable.
Once at Balmoral when Charles was a very small boy, he asked his great-aunt, the
Princess Royal, to get down a jar of sweets for him, but then they heard Elizabeth
coming. Charles froze with fright and Princess Mary hastily put the jar back on its shelf.
Charles was depicted as a lonely little boy dressed by his nanny in faintly oldfashioned
children’s clothes of a style and cut which had not changed since the 1930s
and which were made for him by two exclusive Bond Street shops – Rowes and The
White House. The inevitable consequence of his mother’s prolonged absences was that
he, like many upper-class children, was closer and more accustomed to his nannies, first
Helen Lightbody and then Mabel Anderson, than to his mother. His fourth birthday, in
1952, was the first his father had attended; on his fifth his parents were at Sandringham
finalizing plans for the great Commonwealth tour while Charles spent the day with his
grandmother and his Aunt Margaret at Windsor. His mother gave him a helmet and a