The royals - Kitty Kelley [65]
I did but see her passing by
Yet I will love her ’til I die.
Even the elderly Prime Minister fell in love with the young Queen. “ ‘Gracious’ and ‘noble’ are words familiar to us all in courtly phrasing,” said Churchill on the eve of the coronation, “but tonight they have a new ring in them because we know they are true about the gleaming figure which Providence has brought to us in a time when the present is hard and the future veiled.” He was so enraptured with the photograph of the Queen smiling from her carriage window with her left arm raised in a wave that he ordered a large print, which he had framed. He hung the picture over his bed at his country estate, Chartwell.
The Archbishop of Canterbury also succumbed to the monarch’s considerable charm. “On Coronation Day,” he recalled, “this country and the Commonwealth were not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The London Times wrote: “The Queen represents the life of her people… as men and women, and not in their limited capacity as Lords and Commons and electors.”
To her subjects, the Queen was an exemplar of respectability and the epitome of rectitude. She and her handsome husband and their two young children personified the ideal English family with simple values and ordinary virtues. In 1953 Britons revered their sovereign as someone ordained by God. Someone entitled to devotion. Someone they would lay down their lives for without hesitation. Allegiance to the monarchy filled a basic human need to believe in a cause beyond self-interest—something grand and momentous that excited the fervor of religion and patriotism. During the darkest days of the war, the royal family had made people feel good about themselves and the sacrifices they were making. When the King and Queen drove from Windsor to London every day during the Blitz to share with their subjects the risk of being bombed, they inspired fortitude. They fulfilled the fantasy of royalty, which was to always behave splendidly. To be above mere mortals. To be as noble as the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. By meeting these grandiose expectations, the King and Queen brought reverence and respect to the House of Windsor and bestowed a magic on the monarchy that made it unassailable.
The magic of the throne, heightened by the glamour of palaces and heart-stopping pageants, was so enchanting in 1953 that hordes of foreigners swarmed into London for the coronation, hoping for a glimpse of history. Americans, especially, were drawn by the allure of shining armor, prancing horses, and gilded coaches. They flocked to London in droves, captivated by the prospect of dancing at Hampton Court or attending a tea party at Buckingham Palace. The young Queen was so well liked in America that in a U.S. popularity poll she topped President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most revered man in the country. In 1952 Time magazine named her “Woman of the Year,” an honor previously bestowed on only one other woman—Wallis Warfield Simpson in 1936.
Major American newspapers, news services, and networks sent reporters to cover the coronation. The Washington Times-Herald sent a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, whose fascination with royalty eventually revolutionized fashion in the United States.* To cover the coronation, she crossed the ocean on the SS United States and reported back to her newspaper, “The passenger list aboard this ship reads like the Mayflower in reverse.” She cited names like Freylinghusen, McLean, Reventlow, Arpels of Van Cleef & Arpels, CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite, Whitelaw Reid (publisher of the New York Herald Tribune), and the Duke