A heart of gold — and steel

By the morning of Tuesday 9 April 2002 some 200,000 people of all ages had filed past the lying in state of the coffin containing the mortal remains of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. By the time she died, aged 101, Queen Elizabeth was a figure as familiar in the national consciousness as Winston Churchill. This is the first full- length biography — and who better to write it than Hugo Vickers, whose fascinated gaze has been riveted on the royal family since he was a schoolboy at Eton?

Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, as she was when she married Albert, Duke of York, later King George VI, in 1923 was not initially enamoured of her royal prince, whom Harold Nicolson unkindly described as ‘just a snipe from the great Windsor marshes’. She was in love with a notorious heart-breaker, James Stuart, and, had she been given the opportunity, would probably have preferred to marry the glamorous heir to the throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, always known as David. But with Stuart deliberately removed from the scene and David’s interest otherwise engaged, she chose to take, at the third time of asking, his younger brother ‘Bertie’.

Small, with a heart-shaped face, striking blue eyes, dark hair, and an unquenchable joie de vivre, Elizabeth’s charm had bowled over a series of admirers before her marriage. In public life she had the same effect, conveying to crowds her joy at seeing them, to individuals her absolute interest in them. Instinctively she understood what people expected of a queen, interacting with crowds in almost the same way as Diana, Princess of Wales. She was a star with a natural gift for public relations and the projection of an image. Beyond that she had the confidence of a tough Scottish aristocrat and an inbred sense of duty.