Word: elizabeth
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Accession to the throne made Elizabeth no less approachable. As mother to the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, she schooled them in such ladylike arts as dancing and drawing. As wife to the shy and stammering King, she encouraged him through his speeches and put him at ease with her outgoing charm. Dressed often in flamboyant wide-brimmed hats, Britain's first commoner Queen in almost four centuries never stood on ceremony. "She came into royalty from the outside," remembered an old friend, "and she brought a naturalness and spontaneity that are trained out of royalty...
...bring an end to Elizabeth's challenges. Her husband fell ill in 1947 and five years later died of lung cancer at 56. As the King's young widow, she found solace in her beloved Scotland, where she purchased the Castle of Mey, which became a favorite retreat. The new role she chose for herself was to help her daughter, then just 25, shoulder the burdens attendant upon a queen...
...Queen Mother, Elizabeth was an implacable defender of the Royal Family against modernity and change. For instance, she objected to the notion that the royals should pay taxes. And still smarting from the scandal of Edward and Mrs. Simpson, she in turn demanded of family members the highest standards of morality and behavior. So the sexual, social and financial shenanigans of the past two decades, floodlit by a prurient and deference-be-damned press, strained her relationship with the younger royals. When the extramarital affairs of the Prince and Princess of Wales became common gossip, both got a dressing-down...
...Elizabeth, the Queen Mum, never ceased to think of herself as a country lass from Scotland. She spent each August at the Castle of Mey, listening to her bagpipe records and fishing for salmon with Prince Charles. Sometimes she would simply tramp through the rain, chatting with the locals. Once, it is said, she noticed a farmhand struggling to herd his lambs into a pen. Instantly she clambered over a stone wall to help out. It seemed, she later said, the neighborly thing...
That lively spirit and unaffected dignity disarmed even her enemies. A trouble-making South African once approached her with this challenge: "I don't think much of royalty. I think South Africa ought to be a republic." Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, "That's how we feel in Scotland too, but the English won't allow it." Such remarks were rarely for public consumption and often self-deprecating: "You think I'm a nice person," she told her friend Woodrow Wyatt in the 1980s. "I'm really not a nice person...