![]() Yet as queen, Elizabeth looked more to her steely and stolid grandfather George V - a reformer who believed in leading by example. ![]() The royal family - George VI, Queen Elizabeth, princess Elizabeth and princess Margaret - referred to themselves as "we four", Mr. "Princess Elizabeth was quite a good tap dancer and mimic and could be very funny when she wanted to be," said royal biographer Andrew Morton, whose study of her close but often strained relationship with Margaret appeared in 2021.Īnd she "could be depended upon to do what was asked, keeping her toys and clothes in perfect order".Īn introvert, she adapted easily to the "magnificent isolation" of royal life spent surrounded by scores of servants and courtiers. She made sure the girls had an "insulated and care-free childhood" in contrast to the suffocating Palace strictures their father suffered. Her tough-minded mother, also called Elizabeth, was her emotional lodestar. Until the "shock" of the abdication, she had been brought up exactly like her more outgoing younger sister Margaret. Until her "Uncle David" - Edward VIII - abdicated to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson in 1936, she had only an outside chance of reigning.Įven as heir apparent, the birth of a baby brother would have sent her back into relative aristocratic obscurity under succession laws in place at the time that gave precedence to males.Īll changed for "Lilibet" when she was 10 and her reluctant, stammering father became George VI. ![]() Although Elizabeth Windsor became the very definition of the word, she was not born to be queen.Īn accident of history brought her to the throne.
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