“Young, Gleaming Champion” Elizabeth II

As this issue of Finest Hour makes clear, Winston Churchill served under six monarchs. His extraordinary tenure of sixty-two years and thirty days as an MP began when he was elected during the reign of a monarch who came to the throne in 1837 and ended with a queen who still graces the throne today, 182 years later. And Queen Elizabeth II herself became the longest-reigning British monarch on 9 September 2015, when she surpassed her great-great grandmother, Victoria, who had served for sixty-three years and 216 days.

Churchill was fifty-one years old when Princess Elizabeth was born on 21 April 1926. When they first “met,” just over ninety years ago, in September 1928, Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was visiting Balmoral as Minister in Attendance on King George V. The only other guest at the Royal Family’s Scottish estate that day was Princess Elizabeth of York, then aged two. With no expectation that their futures would become entwined, Churchill wrote to Clementine, who had not accompanied him, “[The Princess] has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.”¹

The King’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was then a youthful thirty-four, and there was little prospect that Churchill’s relationship with the eldest daughter of the King’s second son, the Duke of York, would deepen.

Heir Presumptive

How quickly things changed. Eight years later, the Prince of Wales, who had become King Edward VIII on the death of his father in January 1936, abdicated in December of the same year, and the Duke of York became King George VI. The Princess Elizabeth thus became the heir presumptive. Despite the change, not much significant interaction between Churchill and Elizabeth ensued. There was, of course, the incidental contact that flowed from Churchill’s deep relationship with Elizabeth’s father, and she was, and remained ever after, very conscious of the growing intimacy and mutual respect between the