The royals - Kitty Kelley [298]
* In response to this author’s query about the title of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the Buckingham Palace Press Office offered a different interpretation: “No other widowed Queen Consort in English history has held a title such as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, as no widowed Queen Consort has either had a reigning Queen as a daughter or lived to see her daughter crowned.”
* Prince Philip’s family—through the marriage of King George I of Hellenes to Grand Duchess Olga, granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I—includes sixteen kings of the House of Oldenburg, seven tsars of Russia, six kings of Sweden, and three kings from the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg-Beck.
† The liberal politics of the Mountbattens shocked their conservative household staff. When a vote canvasser for the Labor Party called on them, Mountbatten said: “Don’t worry about us. It’s the servants you want to work on.”
* When Mountbatten was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, he arrived at Buckingham Palace to be greeted by Prince Philip, also wearing the same uniform. Someone asked, “Who salutes whom when you two meet as Admirals of the Fleet?” Philip said, “We salute each other, but only one of us means it.”
* The coronation became the most expensive celebration in British history. The U.K. government spent more than twenty-five times as much as the U.S. Treasury spent on President Eisenhower’s inauguration in January 1953. British subjects withdrew $25 million from private savings accounts in less than two weeks to spend on the festivities. The spending spree prompted a sober editorial in the London Times that chided the British for taking “a holiday from reality.”
* The Queen chose the photograph of herself and her husband in the state coach being driven to the opening of Parliament on November 4, 1952. She had been agitated that day because the procession was late. And she became upset when photographers crowded around. Then Prince Philip said, “Darling, give them one of your best.” That made her laugh, which produced a smiling photograph—one of the few that did not make her look like a vinegary schoolmarm.
* The term “Queen of England” is universally used and understood. Technically, the proper style is Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
* Upon her return from England, Jacqueline Bouvier became engaged to John F. Kennedy. They married on September 12, 1953. Seven years later he was elected President of the United States. His First Lady decided to wear hats “just like the Queen of England.” She appointed her own couturier like the Queen and issued orders that she wanted her dresses, like the Queen’s, to be originals. “Just make sure no one has exactly the same dress I do,” she wrote to her designer, “or the same color or material.” For her husband’s inauguration, she imitated the Queen by wearing a white gown with a scaled-down version of the Queen’s coronation cloak.
† While Britons were shamed by the abdication of King Edward VIII, Americans were enthralled, and so, naturally, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor spent a great deal of time in the United States. They became part of New York’s café society and what passes for high society in Palm Beach.
* The conquest of Mount Everest so captured the four-year-old imagination of Prince Charles that he climbed over the largest pieces of furniture in the Palace, announcing that he was “mountaineering.” He snatched the towels from most of the Palace bathrooms to make “base tents.”
† Miniver was a plain white fur esteemed in the Middle Ages as part of a costume.
* The gold