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Newmarket races earlier that month he had had a sharp exchange with Lord Durham, a
leading coal-owner, telling him that he was sorry for the miners. When Durham angrily
retorted that they were ‘a damned lot of revolutionaries’, the King told him, ‘Try living
on their wages before you judge them.’ Against this grim background, Princess
Elizabeth’s birth registered as a happy dip on the graph of subversive incidents
presented weekly to the Cabinet by Wyndham Childs, head of Special Branch.
As a sign of her membership of the royal family, a Government minister, the Home
Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, waited in the next room while the Duchess of York
went through long, difficult hours of labour before the baby was born. This antiquated
royal custom was supposedly designed to prevent the repetition of a rumoured
changeling being brought in in a warming-pan and substituted for the royal baby in
1688, but it was in fact an even more ancient relic of the days when kings performed
every important function in public, or rather in the presence of privileged courtiers. This
applied even to the most private functions; the original task of the court official entitled
the Groom of the Stool had been literally that, to wipe the royal bottom.
In any case, as far as Elizabeth was concerned, precautions against changelings
seemed particularly unnecessary. She was third in the line of succession to the throne,
while her uncle, the Prince of Wales, was still expected to marry and have children.
Even if he did not, her mother was only twenty-five and could presumably produce a
boy who would supersede her. The Duchess of York had wanted a girl and the royal
grandparents were delighted with their first female grandchild (they already had two
male grandchildren, George and Gerald Lascelles, sons of Princess Mary, the Princess
Royal). ‘The baby is a little darling,’ Queen Mary wrote after visiting Bruton Street that
afternoon, ‘with a lovely complexion and pretty fair hair.’
She was named Elizabeth Alexandra Mary after her mother, her grandmother and her
great-grandmother, Queen Alexandra, who had died in November the previous year,
aged eighty. Her father had particularly wanted his daughter to be called after her
mother; the fact that it had also been the name of a reigning queen, the formidable
Elizabeth I, seemed to him irrelevant. Another possibility, Victoria, was dismissed. ‘I
have heard from Bertie about the names,’ George V, whose approval had first to be
given, reported to Queen Mary. ‘He mentions Elizabeth, Alexandra, Mary, I quite
approve and will tell him so, he says nothing about Victoria. I hardly think that
necessary.’ Victoria, the indomitable, strong-willed matriarch, who had shaped the royal
family for the twentieth century, was, however, to be a powerful role model for
Elizabeth and it would not be long before comparisons began to be drawn between
them.
Elizabeth was christened in the private chapel in Buckingham Palace (later destroyed
by a bomb during the Second World War) on 29 May, just over two weeks after the
General Strike had ended. There were strong echoes of Victoria about the ceremony: the
gold, lily-shaped font used for her children’s christenings was brought up from Windsor
Castle for the occasion and the baby wore a heavy satin and Honiton lace christening
robe which had been made for Victoria’s eldest daughter and used by all subsequent