In The Critic, Andrew Roberts outlines the relationship between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II:
Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Winston Churchill, with Prince Charles and Princess Anne in the foreground, 10 Februrary 1953.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
Winston Churchill was besotted with Queen Elizabeth II: the word is precise. He worshipped and adored her. His relations with some other members of the royal family were, on occasion, complicated — not least when King Edward VII was sleeping with his mother. But for the late Queen he had nothing but an almost puppy-dog love.
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When King George VI died unexpectedly on 6 February 1952, aged only 56, Churchill was devastated, weeping copiously both on hearing the news and at the funeral. Of the new monarch he told his private secretary, Jock Colville, that “he did not know her and that she was only a child”.
Nonetheless he saw an opportunity of romanticising the country’s situation. “Famous have been the reigns of our queens,” he said in his BBC broadcast on the King’s death. “Some of the greatest periods in our history have unfolded under their sceptre. Now that we have the second Queen Elizabeth, also ascending the Throne in her twenty-sixth year, our thoughts are carried back nearly 400 years to the magnificent figure who presided over and, in many ways, embodied and inspired the grandeur and genius of the Elizabethan Age.”
Although she was his sixth sovereign, Churchill was the new Queen’s first prime minister and old enough to be her grandfather. For all the 51-year age difference — or perhaps because of it — Churchill quickly grew devoted to her. “There was one lady by whom, from 1952 onward, Churchill was dazzled,” noted Colville. “That was the new Queen. Here was a woman whom he respected and admired more than any man.”
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On 24 January 1965, 70 years to the day after the death of his father Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston died. The Queen waived all custom and precedent to attend his funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. She added a message in her own handwriting to the wreath of white flowers that was placed upon his coffin: “From the Nation and the Commonwealth. In grateful remembrance, Elizabeth R.” It echoed that which Churchill had placed on her father’s coffin, simply saying “For Valour”, the motto of the Victoria Cross, and a reference to the late king’s moral and physical courage during the Second World War, and perhaps also at the battle of Jutland in 1916.
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The Queen decided Churchill should have a State funeral following his stroke in 1953. Once he had recovered, she told him so. The plans had to be rewritten several times over the next 12 years because, as Lord Mountbatten joked, Churchill kept on living but the pallbearers kept on dying.
There is a powerful symmetry to the friendship of monarch and premier that the next State funeral after Churchill’s was to be the Queen’s own, a full 57 years later.
