ProloguePROLOGUE The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, accompanied by The Princess Margaret, were present this evening at a Ball at Hampton Court given by Officers of the Household Brigade. --Court Circular, May 30, 1953 In the late afternoon of May 29, 1953, in one of the 775 rooms of Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth II dressed in a rose-colored crinoline gown to attend a ball at Hampton Court. Five feet four inches in height, with her mother''s "wonderful blue eyes," her father''s dark hair, and a chin and cheekbones that advertised her descent from the House of Teck via her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth had not changed much in temperament since a journalist described her as a child who was "happy natured but serious."1 She was helped into her ballgown by her dresser Margaret MacDonald, the forty-nine-year-old daughter of a Scottish railway worker. MacDonald--nicknamed Bobo by Elizabeth--had joined royal service as nursery maid when Elizabeth was born in 1926 and never left.2 A dresser''s title was "a bit misleading," thought one of MacDonald''s successors. With corsets and hoops consigned to the past, a dresser''s job was, by 1953, comparable to a stylist''s: "[our] role is to lay everything out for her and sometimes help zip her up or fasten a tricky piece of jewellery."3 Outside, from just beyond the palace perimeters, the Queen and MacDonald could hear the sounds of revellers celebrating Elizabeth''s forthcoming coronation, due to take place three days later.

The twenty-six-year-old Elizabeth II, who had acceded to the throne following her father''s death from cancer fifteen months earlier, had spent the first part of her day with a bedsheet tied to her shoulders as a stand-in for the robes she would wear on June 2. Her movements--the coronation was as much choreography as it was theology--were perfected with the help of tape on the Buckingham Palace floors, marking out the space she would process through in Westminster Abbey. As she rehearsed, Elizabeth listened, over and over again, to audio recordings of her father''s coronation sixteen years before. Afterward, the Queen held two audiences. First, she welcomed Haiti''s new ambassador to Britain, who was accompanied to the palace by his secretary, Gerard Baptiste, and his attaché, Adaline Maximilien; afterward, the Queen met with Sir William Strang, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.4 Then it was upstairs for a change of dress, which ended with MacDonald fastening the clasp of "a heavy diamond and ruby" necklace and fixing a diamond tiara into Elizabeth''s hair.5 The ball was being thrown in the Queen''s honor by officers of the Household Brigade, the army cavalry units responsible for guarding state occasions in London, to celebrate her imminent coronation. It would also be the first time in 193 years that Hampton Court Palace had hosted its sovereign for a major event.

6 Both of the palaces that hosted Elizabeth II that evening owed their current status to the actions of her four-times great-grandfather, King George III. Buckingham Palace had become indelibly associated with the public image of the British monarchy after George III bought it for £21,000 from the Duke of Buckingham''s son in 1761 as a wedding gift for his German wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.7 At the same time as he was turning Buckingham House into a palace, George III consigned Hampton Court to oblivion as a royal residence. He opened its gardens to the public and subdivided its abandoned apartments into living quarters for revolution-fleeing royal cousins, down-on-their-luck bishops'' widows, and retired servants. Dressed for the ball, the Queen joined her husband, Philip, and her sister, Margaret, in a Rolls-Royce that drove out the gates of Buckingham Palace. Following in a second car was Elizabeth''s lady-in-waiting for the evening, Lady Margaret Hay, accompanied by her equerryI, twenty-nine-year-old Captain Johnny Spencer, Viscount Althorp, who three decades later would become father-in-law to Elizabeth''s eldest son, Charles, through the marriage of his daughter Lady Diana Spencer. In her car, Elizabeth sat next to her twenty-two-year-old sister, described by their mother as having "large blue eyes and a will of iron."8 Their grandmother judged Margaret "more complicated and difficult" than Elizabeth, summarizing her as espiègle , meaning intelligent and wild without necessarily intending to be bad; one of her mother''s friends called Margaret "naughty but amusing.

" Writer Gore Vidal thought she was "too intelligent for her role in life" as a member of the royal family, as did the Conservative Party politician Norman St. John-Stevas, who considered the princess "one of the cleverest women I''ve ever met." Far less impressed was a courtier''s wife, who thought that Margaret''s "nature was to make everything go wrong. Nice one day--nasty the next. She had everything, and then she destroyed herself."9 In the decades ahead, Princess Margaret would become one of the most unpopular members of the royal family, nicknamed "Her Royal Lowness," criticized by politicians and journalists for her extravagance, then pilloried and impersonated by comedians who lampooned her as haughty, arrogant, and useless.10 But as of 1953, she was still admired as young, beautiful, and stylish, and there was a great deal of sympathy for her at the grief she felt after her father''s sudden death. Ahead of the sisters in the car sat Elizabeth''s husband, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who thirty years earlier had been born on a kitchen table in Corfu as his parents fled a coup that pushed his uncle off the Greek throne.

Boarding at a school in Germany run by a reliable royalist who had served as secretary to the last chancellor under the old German monarchy, Prince Philip had come to Britain when his Jewish headmaster had to flee a Nazi arrest warrant in 1933.11 He completed his education at the school his headmaster founded in Scotland, joined the Royal Navy, served in the Second World War, became a British citizen, and fell in love with the King''s eldest daughter not long after victory.12 Their wedding took place in November 1947, just after Philip was created Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich by his future father-in-law, King George VI. The Duke of Edinburgh was tall, blond, energetic, handsome, and eye-wateringly tactless. In conversation with a friend, Elizabeth''s private secretary, Sir Alan ("Tommy") Lascelles, summarized Philip as "rough, ill-mannered, uneducated, and would probably not be faithful."13 The swipe about his education was made because Philip had attended the newly established Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland rather than the sacred bastions of old money at Eton, Harrow, Winchester, or Marlborough (Lascelles''s alma mater).14 Philip, who regarded Lascelles as chief in the cabal of insufferable palace snobs--the grim-faced "men with moustaches," as Margaret dubbed them--proved how prepared he was to ruffle feathers in his quest to modernize the monarchy, particularly after he was appointed to the chair of the committee that organized his wife''s coronation. In that capacity, he had waged a successful campaign to allow cameras into Westminster Abbey to make the ceremony the first televised coronation in history.

The BBC was so thrilled by the decision that it installed two new television transmitters--one in the north of England in County Durham, the other just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland--to improve coverage across the United Kingdom for the big day. It proved a worthwhile investment: the coronation inspired a revolution in British television ownership, which surged from 1.2 million to 3 million households, enabling an estimated 27 million--in a population of 50 million--to watch the ceremony''s live broadcast.15 In the hour or so that it took Elizabeth, Philip, and Margaret to travel from the newer Buckingham Palace to the older Hampton Court, Elizabeth''s image gazed back at them again and again. They drove beneath celebratory arches, tons of red, white, and blue bunting, and past shop windows, lampposts, private homes, factories, and government buildings decorated with royalist slogans such as "Happy and Glorious," "God Save Our Gracious Queen," "God Save the Queen," "Rule Britannia," "Vivat Regina," "Long Live the Queen," and "God Bless You, Ma''am." Tabloids were posting front-page countdowns to the ceremony--even the left-leaning Daily Mirror , which on the day of the coronation itself would break the record for daily sales of a British newspaper with 7 million copies.16 The monarchy''s critics were either bemused or offended by the intensity of the public''s devotion to Elizabeth II. Few skeptics were concerned with criticizing the Queen directly, since, at that s.