The royals - Kitty Kelley [47]
Philip was partly forgiven that summer when the Palace announced that Princess Elizabeth was canceling her schedule for six months. The official bulletin of June 4, 1948, read, “Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, will undertake no public engagements after the end of June.” The message indicated that the Princess was pregnant.
“Royal decorum prohibited using the actual word,” said biographer Anthony Holden. “You had to read between the lines to understand that she was pregnant. In those days, physicians referred to pregnancy as ‘confinement,’ and the due date of birth was the EDC, or estimated date of confinement. After the birth, she started breast-feeding, but that news wasn’t reported either because the word ‘breast’ was taboo in relation to royalty. This antediluvian mentality was prevailing thirty years later when I wrote a biography of the royal baby Prince Charles and mentioned that his mother had breast-fed him. I submitted my manuscript to the Palace for corrections, and John Dauth, press secretary to the Prince, rang me up in near hysteria.
“ ‘The sentence about breast-feeding must be deleted. Absolutely and at once.’
“ ‘But why?’ I asked.’ ”
“ ‘One never mentions the royal breasts.’ ”
“ ‘Perhaps I could paraphrase and say, “The Princess fed the baby herself”?’
“ ‘That still implies the royal breasts, and the royal breasts must never be exposed.’ ”
“In the end,” said Holden, chuckling over the prudish restraints of royal protocol, “I deleted the sentence.”
When the heir became apparent, Prince Philip looked like a hero. Not only had he ensured the line of succession and the continuation of the monarchy, but he had also produced a boy. The future King, Charles Philip Arthur George, was born by cesarean section at Buckingham Palace six days before his parents’ first wedding anniversary at 9:14 P.M. on November 14, 1948. He was taken by forceps and weighed seven pounds six ounces.
His mother had insisted he be delivered in her suite at Buckingham Palace and not in a makeshift hospital wing. “I want my baby to be born in my own room, amongst the things I know,” she said.
When she was a child, Elizabeth had told her governess, “I shall have lots of cows, horses, and children.” When the twenty-two-year-old Princess became pregnant, Crawfie could not quite believe that she was going to have a baby.
“Are you frightened at all, Lilibet?” she asked. “What do you feel about it?”
Elizabeth said she was looking forward to the experience. “After all, it is what we’re made for.”
One morning her governess found her depressed after reading a newspaper account about the divorce of an acquaintance of hers who had small children.
“Why do people do it, Crawfie?” Elizabeth asked her governess. “How can they break up a home when there are children to consider?”
Crawfie tried to explain that some personalities were incompatible and some homes unhappy, but the Princess, who had been raised in a royal palace by loving parents and servants, did not seem to understand.
“But why did they get married in the first place?” she asked.
Crawfie eased the subject back to her impending delivery.
“She said she did not mind whether her first child was a boy or a girl,” said John Dean, valet to Prince Philip, “but I believe the Duke was looking forward to having a son.”
The King was convinced that the baby was going to be a girl because female genes ran strong on both sides of the family: Philip was the only boy following the birth of four girls, and Elizabeth was one of two girls. The genetic probability of a girl worried the King, who wanted his grandchild to be given the royal treatment, which included the bows and/or curtsies that accompany the HRH style. Since the creation of the House of Windsor in 1917, that style—His