Queen of Hearts

Queen Elizabeth and King George VI during the Blitz, 1940

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The Queen Mother

The Official Biography
by William Shawcross

Knopf, 1,120 pp., $40

In Brideshead Revisited Anthony Blanche warns Charles Ryder against what he calls “simple, creamy English charm” because, as he says, “Charm is the great English blight. . . . It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art.” This was certainly not the case with Elizabeth (1900-2002), the consort of George VI and mother of Elizabeth II, whose charm profoundly endeared her to her subjects. It also suffuses this admirable new biography, which chronicles how Elizabeth’s Edwardian upbringing formed not only her strong, resilient, dutiful character but her abounding sense of fun.

Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, the ninth of the Earl of Strathmore’s 10 children, was born on August 4, 1900, at the family home of St. Paul’s Walden Bury, near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, though the failure of her father to register a birth certificate gave rise to speculation that she might actually have been delivered in a horse-drawn ambulance in Mayfair. The Bowes were a raffish lot: spendthrift, hard-drinking, and mad for horses. One of her 18th-century ancestors, known as Stoney Bowes, was described by a contemporary as “surely the lowest cad in history. . . . He was the type of seedy, gentlemanly bounder. . . . He was cunning, ruthless, sadistic, with rat-like cleverness and a specious Irish charm. He was a fortune hunter of the worst type.” Doubtless it was this louche ancestry that gave Elizabeth so much of her own delight in the turf, strong drink, and the society of courtiers.