The royals - Kitty Kelley [277]
AP/Wide World
Queen Elizabeth and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt riding in the presidential limousine during a parade welcoming Their Majesties to Washington, D.C. The King and Queen visited the White House to appeal for U.S. intervention into World War II.
Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
Princess Elizabeth became engaged to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten on July 9, 1947, against the initial objections of her parents. Philip had renounced his Greek royal title and adopted his maternal grandfather’s German surname.
Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
On November 20, 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey. “I don’t know whether I’m being very brave,” the bridegroom told a relative, “or very foolish.”
Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
“IT’S A BOY,” read the sign tacked to the gates of Buckingham Palace on November 4, 1948, to announce the birth of Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. The King and Queen, pictured with Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh after the christening of their first child.
Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
After a three-month royal tour, Princess Elizabeth returns to London with her husband. She greets her young son, Charles, with a pat on the shoulder as Philip hugs her mother.
AP/Wide World
The grieving women of Windsor at the funeral of King George VI on February 6, 1952. The King’s daughter, Elizabeth; his eighty-five-year-old mother, Mary, who died thirteen months later. The King’s widow, Elizabeth, later styled herself as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Archive Photos
Surrounded by her family, Elizabeth II waves to her subjects from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after her coronation on June 2, 1953. After fourteen years of austerity from war, reconstruction, and rations, Britain spent $300 million during coronation week. The Queen’s gown cost her government $1 million.
UPI-Corbis/Bettmann
The new Queen meets her favorite Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. “He was always such fun,” she said. Churchill admitted he had fallen “a little in love” with his monarch, whose portrait he hung above his bed.
Harry S. Truman Library
Princess Elizabeth with her favorite U.S. President, Harry Truman, during her first visit to Washington, D.C., in 1951.
Archive Photos
Archive Photos
Princess Margaret rebounds from Peter Townsend with Antony Armstrong-Jones, the commoner who became the Earl of Snowdon. They married on May 6, 1960, and produced two children, David and Sarah.
Globe Photos
Roddy Llewellyn met Princess Margaret in 1973 when she was forty-three and he was twenty-three. Their public love affair caused the Queen to denounce her sister for having “the lifestyle of a guttersnipe.”
Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
HRH the Princess Margaret becomes the first member of the British royal family to divorce. She was not immune to the scandal she caused. She suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized with gastroenteritis and alcoholic hepatitis. She also threatened suicide.
a.c.
Rumors about the Queen’s splintered marriage first surfaced in February 1957 in U.S. newspapers. The Queen’s press secretary denounced the stories: “It is quite untrue that there is a rift between the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh…. It is a lie.” Yet, the royal couple, who had been apart for four months, staged a very public reunion for photographers.
Archive Photos
From the Queen’s personal scrapbook: Her Majesty in bed with her children, Anne (age thirteen), Charles (age fifteen), and Andrew (age four, after the birth of her last child, Edward, in 1964. This photo appeared only once in England. After it was published in the Daily Express, the Palace announced: “Since the photographs are of such a personal kind, the Queen would naturally prefer that they not be published. For that reason, we are unable to approve their future publication.”
Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
A forlorn Prince Charles, thirteen, dogged