Becoming Queen
SARAH GRISTWOOD explores a major new biography of Elizabeth II that pays particular attention to how her formative years have shaped her reign
To write the life of Elizabeth II poses several problems – especially in the present moment. A key issue is the sheer length of that life and reign, providing a wealth of material that makes in-depth coverage of the whole a matter of several volumes or an impossibility.
Matthew Dennison, acclaimed biographer of figures from Beatrix Potter to Livia, wife of Roman emperor Augustus, tackles this problem by concentrating on the story of the girl who became the Queen. In a text of some 500 pages, it’s page 100 before we reach the abdication that set her father onto the throne as George VI, and we’re virtually halfway through before her accession.
Dennison dwells on such details as the pair of dolls that the French government gave to princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the summer of 1938.
These playthings came lavishly equipped with accoutrements including beach pyjamas and country tweeds; dresses for the morning, for Ascot, and for aperitifs; gloves and macintoshes; 20 miniature bottles of scent; and a swagger coat of baby leopard –
“in total, £5000 worth infant-sized French finery”.
Every biographer of the Queen has to make these decisions, of course. The political writer Ben Pimlott went the other way 25 years ago, expending less than 10 per cent of his text on the years before the Second World War. And Dennison touches skilfully on the fascinating dichotomy of a life lived in public and Elizabeth’s private identity, couching her life in terms of a fairy story.
The justification for the pages spent on the early years is how their dominant lesson – adhering to the template set by her grandfather George V – would come to define Elizabeth’s sovereignty. The late Prince Philip, the moderniser, is briskly summed up as “a sensitive bully, ripe for iconoclasm”.
Dennison’s extensive research throws up fresh and unfamiliar details. He displays his political chops in his handling of, for example, the Suez crisis and, though his view of the Queen is overwhelmingly supportive, he raises issues where necessary.
The book gets into difficulties in its final stretch, however. Dennison tackles the past 15 years in some 20 pages,
but those years have seen an awful lot of water pass under the bridge: the coming to the fore of a new generation and the withdrawal of some of the old; a shifting in the balance of power within the royal family; and a reassessment of the family’s popularity.
It is the author’s bad luck that a veritable flood of such changes has overtaken the royals even since the completion of his book, which ends by describing the addresses made to the nation by the Queen during the first months of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Since then Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and the death of Prince Philip, have sparked widespread debate that extended beyond those events themselves to query the future of the monarchy and, by implication, the Queen’s legacy. It’s hard, then, to avoid coming away with a sense of disappointment that Dennison does not tackle those questions to a more significant degree.
Sarah Gristwood is an author and historian
whose latest book, The Tudors in Love: The Courtly Code Behind the Last Medieval Dynasty, will be published by Oneworld this autumn
Dennison touches on the fascinating dichotomy of a life lived in public and the Queen’s private identity, couching her life in terms of a fairy story