Remembrance
In an appreciation, Hamish Bowles recalls the late monarch’s twisting path to the throne, her legacy of staunch leadership, and her unfailingly good style, as chronicled in the pages of this magazine over many decades.
In September, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest reigning monarch, died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, age 96 and surrounded by her children, including King Charles III. Through the 70 years of her reign— years of steadfast service to her country and the Commonwealth— the queen was globally revered and widely beloved as she weathered a roiling century (and some personal storms) with enduring equanimity and grace. She witnessed history being made and was a part of it. Her knowledge of world events, politics, and power structures was nonpareil. Known to us all as a symbol of stability, she was at once perceived as an extended member of her subjects’ families and a fierce guard of her own inner world, remaining in many ways inscrutable to the end. Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary (carefully named for one distinguished British monarch, her great-grandmother Queen Alexandra, and her devoted grandmother) made her formal debut in Vogue in the issue published August 15, 1927, flashing a beaming smile for the society photographer Marcus Adams and even coaxing one from her grandmother Queen Mary. The young princess had been born to a famously happy home. Her father, Prince Albert, was the excruciatingly shy, stuttering second son of the martinet King George V and the frigidly correct Queen Mary. His glamorous older brother, Prince Edward—known to friends and family as David—was destined to be king, and so not too many eyebrows were raised when Albert fell madly in love with a woman who would become, as Vogue put it, “our first consort in centuries not a royalty born.” Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was raised at Scotland’s storied Glamis Castle, a place of doughty stone walls and spiky gray turrets built at the turn of the 15th century. She and Albert were married in April 1923 at Westminster Abbey, and their eldest daughter was born three years later. Princess Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, was born at Glamis Castle in 1930. Marcus Adams also photographed the solo portrait published in the May 1, 1928, issue of Vogue, in which the infant princess—dressed in a coral necklace, holding a silver rattle, and backlit to accent her aureole of pale curls—was included in a portfolio of “Young Persons of Importance.” In 1937, the year that Princess Elizabeth’s uncle David was due to be anointed King Edward VIII, he succumbed to the jet-set charms of American divorcée Wallis Simpson, whom he had met in 1930, renouncing his throne in order to be with “the woman I love.” And so David’s stammering younger brother Bertie suddenly found himself king, crowned as George VI, and David was created the Duke of Windsor.The queen’s parents may not have possessed the shiny, hollow glamour of the Windsors, but these were not qualities that had distinguished King George V and Queen Mary either. Instead, the new royal family made a virtue of their ordinariness, presenting themselves as a close-knit nuclear family leading lives of cozy domesticity that many middle-class Britons could identify with. When the nation wanted Cinderella romance, pomp, and ceremony, however, they could provide that too. In 1939, when she was 13, Vogue deemed Princess Elizabeth “very self-possessed.” She had now graduated from coral beads to a diamond bracelet that her father had gifted her for this significant birthday; her mother gave her her first long silk stockings. “She has her own sitting room at Buckingham Palace,” Vogue noted, “orders her own flowers, arranges menus and issues invitations for her own parties, and is patroness of a charity.” By the time Vogue published its February 15, 1943, issue, however, this decorous life was over: Britain was at war, and when the 16-year-old Elizabeth appeared in the magazine, posing for Cecil Beaton, she now wore a martial hat and the diamondset badge of the Grenadier Guards, of which she was the honorary colonel (“the first woman in English history to command a senior regiment of foot guards”), pinned to the lapel of her tweed jacket. Happily, Cecil Beaton was back for a photographic portrait published after the war on March 1, 1946. This time, “the Heiress Presumptive to Britain’s throne and the handsome symbol of Britain’s continuity”—now 19—was pictured against one of Beaton’s famous backdrops (blown up from the detail of a Fragonard painting), wearing a dress of
Known to us all as a symbol of stability, she was at once perceived as an extended member of her subjects’ families and a fierce guard of her inner world
tulle fluttering with sequined butterfly embroidery created by Norman Hartnell. In 1938, the dashing, flaxen-haired Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark had entered the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where he first met the young Princess Elizabeth, then 13, and her sister when they came to visit. The former was struck by the young man whom Vogue’s writer Ray Livingston Murphy (a biographer of Lord Mountbatten) considered “tall, blonde, with the shoulders of an athlete, a firm chin, and frank eyes.” The young princess and lieutenant began to correspond, she kept his photograph on her desk, and romance eventually bloomed. The couple wed on November 20, 1947. “The Wedding became a pageant to refresh the inner eye,” noted Vogue in the January 1948 issue, “to expand the historical imagination. At its center were two young people, surrounded by the full resources of the church and royal state—gold plate on the high altar, trumpeters, glass coaches, tiaras, Household Cavalry, mediaeval standards.” British Vogue surrendered its assigned press seat to the Polish-born expressionist painter Feliks Topolski, who had lately distinguished himself as an official war artist, and American Vogue shared his wonderfully evocative lightning sketches of the scene— capturing, in his impressionistic brushstrokes, such recognizable figures as the dowager Queen Mary in one of her distinctive toque hats. The princess was dressed by Hartnell in a gown of British woven silk satin, inspired, as the designer noted, by Botticelli’s Primavera and embroidered with seed pearls in foliate designs. The bloom-shaped pieces cut from the dress to form the design were reembroidered onto the veil, and the effect was suitably romantic and theatrical for a nation starved of glamour through the make-do-and-mend war years and the rationing and austerity to
“She holds the affection and admiration of a world which watched her grow up,” wrote Vogue of the queen in 1953
follow. (Although fashion-forward Princess Margaret had already embraced the soft-shoulder romance of Christian Dior’s New Look, her elder sister still followed the hard-shoulder wartime line.) Prince Philip’s role was clear: to support his wife and stabilize the crown. “He told me the first day he offered me my job,” Michael Parker, the prince’s first private secretary, related to his feisty biographer Fiammetta Rocco, “that his job—first, second, and last—was never to let her down.” Six years after their wedding—in the middle of a royal tour of Africa, India, and Australia— this role became preeminent when the self-effacing King George VI died of coronary thrombosis at the age of 56 and his eldest daughter ascended to the throne. Forced to give up his naval career, Prince Philip instead devoted himself to public service: Over the ensuing decades he became the diligent patron, president, or member of more than 780 organizations, and by the time he retired from official duties in 2017, at the age of 96, he had completed a giddying 22,219 solo engagements—and, of course, many more with his wife. “The catching excitement in this Coronation of a young Queen,” wrote Vogue in 1953, “goes far beyond the people of her own Dominions, for she holds the affection and admiration of a world which watched her grow up.” Hartnell again rose to the occasion with a magnificent coronation robe of stiff white satin embroidered in silken thread and spangles with the symbols of the four countries that compose the United Kingdom—the rose of England, the thistle of Scotland, the shamrock of Northern Ireland, the leek of Wales—and the flower symbols of the Commonwealth nations. The dress represented the spirit of monarchy translated into cloth. Over the decades, Hartnell, Sir Hardy Amies, Sir Ian Thomas, Stewart Parvin, and latterly Angela Kelly dressed the queen in daytime ensembles of striking and uniform color, hat to garment, so that she would stand out in a crowd and in evening dresses designed to set off royal orders and jewels—and in many instances pay subtle homage to host nations (wattle-flower embroideries for Australia, maple leaves for Canada, green and white in Pakistan like the colors of that country’s flag, California poppies for a visit to the Reagans). In 1957, Vogue thrilled to news of a visit by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip to America that October. “There is more to this welcoming wave of excitement than pure romanticism: much more than pure curiosity,” its story read. “There is also the solid, ungrudging respect that most of us feel for a young woman, barely out of her twenties, who performs an enormously complicated and taxing job with courage and sensitivity, industry and intelligence.” Vogue later celebrated the engagement of the couple’s daughter, HRH Princess Anne, to Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, and subsequently
the marriage of her elder brother, then the Prince of Wales, to winsome Lady Diana Spencer, and in turn the marriages of their sons Prince William and Prince Harry to Catherine Middleton and Meghan Markle, respectively.
The queen was a beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and in his first address as sovereign, her son King Charles III acknowledged “the most heartfelt debt any family can owe to their mother; for her love, affection, guidance, understanding, and example.”
But above all, she was the monarch. To celebrate the queen’s silver jubilee in the May 1977 issue, Vogue ran a portrait by Andy Warhol and commissioned the 84-year-old writer Rebecca West to consider that reign. “She is,” West opined of Her Majesty, “one-third a constitutional monarch, one-third a myth, one-third a woman.”
“I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service,” the queen avowed in a broadcast on the day of her coronation, “throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust,” and the solemn compact that she made then with her people, she stayed true to through eight decades. Two days before she died, the queen was performing official duties, appointing Britain’s new prime minister—the 15th of her reign.
“What has to be the extent of her dedication only she knows,” wrote Elizabeth Bowen in 1953. “How dare we compute the weight of the crown?” □