70 Years And Counting: The Queen's Legacy | Queen Elizabeth: Majestic Life | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there royalty is a mixture of myth and reality it's the fairytale romance of a princess coming together with living history when it comes in the shape of a queen my goodness you've got the full package there this is a dream and yet it's true [Music] when princess elizabeth was a little girl she didn't expect to be queen one day she was just a little princess special yes leading a rarefied life an unusual life but her father was the duke of york and her mother was the duchess of york and they lived in london in piccadilly quite almost a normal if very grand life she was like princess beatrice or eugenie nowadays i mean she was the daughter of the duchess of york and the duke of york lesser members of the royal family so she grew up with a great reverence for the crown understanding the importance of duty and the monarchy but never got that sort of conceit or big-headedness that sometimes goes with actually being in the job and i believe this gave her a modesty that people respect in those days members of the royal family didn't have to do nearly as much as they have to do now so the duke and duchess of york and their two children prince elizabeth born 1926 and princess margaret in 1930 could pretty much disappear to scotland from somewhere around about the middle of july till perhaps the middle of october and hardly would be seen at all well princess elizabeth was very close to her father and they were a very tight family unit he used to call them the four of us and although they obviously had uh tours and duties to do they were quite a sort of stay-at-home family so incredibly spoiled in many ways beyond anything that any of us can comprehend and yet completely deprived deprived of any kind of normalcy really therefore desperately trying to make normal normalcy within the little tiny world that she can make normalcy within the princesses were very much isolated from other children hence they interacted with each other and they paradoxically would have developed an intense interest in everything ordinary what is it like to ride on the tube they would look at other children playing at a distance and wish that they could talk with them and make friends with them she wanted to join the brownies the girl guides yes that was considered a good idea so they formed a girl guide troop inside buckingham palace and a handful of nice respectable girls formed the girl guy troupe so she was a girl guide she was a brownie but in the safety of a palace princess margaret rose has feet which at the age of seven cannot keep still however that's what you'd expect of a brownie of the leprechaun six of the buckingham palace pack well i mean they were deliciously carefree children they laid it totally normal in life as it was possible under the circumstances and we were wonderfully unsophisticated i mean we enjoyed very silly outdoor games that could keep us happy all day i've talked with one of princess elizabeth's playmates who knew her when she was a very little girl and she said she was great fun to play with but quite undaring she'd never do anything dangerous right from the beginning she was a well brought up well-behaved well ordered little girl she didn't go to school or university in the traditional way she was brought up as young aristocratic women of her generation would be first of all she was educated at home and then later a school master from eaton college gave her special lessons in constitutional history their official source of education was in many ways reliable trustworthy good basic but i have to say inadequate her education was essentially that of her mother let's just say her mother's views on how an aristocratic little girl should be brought up namely to be a debutant to be interested in country pursuits and to be able to make blight dinner party conversation of not too high bad kind and empathically not to be able to stocky elizabeth of course was born in the 1920s in the aftermath of the great war and in the run-up to the second world war it was a time of austerity and through the 1930s it was a time of unemployment it was a stringent and hard tough time for the 14th year out of 15 his royal highness the duke of york spends a night at his camp we're under the industrial welfare movement 400 boys from the public schools and industrial centers are spending their holiday together in the comradeship of the open air i think her parents were a little bit more in touch with what was going on in the real world and i think that was it was a good thing so the queen would have been aware even as a youngster that things were not good on the outside that many of her subjects were having a very very difficult time previous generations of royals that wouldn't have applied they would have been away in their palaces and wouldn't have had anything to do with let's say ordinary people not so in the case of princess elizabeth they were really eye-opening times for the queen particularly i think because of her relationship with her mother the queen mother was always someone who wanted to be involved in society and community famously during the blitz she said that she was glad that buckingham palace had been bombed because she wanted the east end in the face i think similarly they were very much in tune with their times and the queen particularly i think understood the notion of not being seen to be splashing cash at times when things were difficult for other people she was devoted to her father and he to her he always used to say of the two daughters lilibet is my pride and margaret is my joy the younger sister he spoiled rotten he couldn't believe that he created such a glamorous creature a little sister margaret rose was the naughty skittish one in the family right from the beginning princess elizabeth behaved almost as though she was a queen in waiting you can find nothing on record at all of princess elizabeth ever doing anything that would really be considered naughty at the time it was quite an idyllic upbringing because the princesses saw a lot of their parents because they were around a lot more post-abdication all of that changed and i think what was most difficult for the queen when she was a girl was really the transition from what was quite a low-key existence to suddenly being thrust into the spotlight nobody was expecting the prince of wales later edward viii to abdicate until really quite late on and it was a terrible shock for the duke of york to realize that this was the king's intention and that he was then going to have to take over [Music] and i would suggest that it was probably not much before the end of november 1936 that this really dawned on them god save the king the manhood sought the quieter part in life was crowned ruler of the greatest empire in history her father famously of course with his stutter wasn't made for public life but really applied himself as we saw in the film the king's speech to the job of becoming a modern monarch he had not performed terribly well at a speech he'd made at wembley which is a speech which which opens the film and as a result of that there was a feeling that he needed to get treated had it been a century earlier probably people wouldn't even have noticed that he had a stammer before that all king had to do was to stand up or not to fall off his horse as one of the great lines in the film that changed of course in the 1930s with the the invention of radio the queen and i will always keep in our hearts of inspiration of this day may we ever be worthy of the good will which i am proud that i think surrounds us at the outset of my reign his marriage to elizabeth both lyons the future queen mother had an extraordinary influence on his life she was really the one that encouraged him to seek treatment because she really wanted him to be cured when the duke first consulted log they had an extraordinary number of of meetings it was very very intensive indeed it worked out in the first 14 months or so that they met 80 times sometimes meeting as often as once a week at the very beginning or often more frequently than that and he then continued to consult loeb not on such a frequent basis in the late 1920s and 1930s but after the abdication of his brother at the end of 1936 then their relationship really moved up a gear this morning the british ambassador in berlin handed the german government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from poland a state of war would exist between us i have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with germany neville chamberlain the prime minister had already declared war earlier that day this was the first chance for the king the kind of the father of the nation to speak to his people and to speak to the empire the speech which ends the film the king's speech as it's become known now uh was obviously an extraordinary important important speech and log was clearly orchestrating the speech was i'm sure was encouraging him was egging him on in the same way as he appears to be doing in the film in this grave hour perhaps the most faithful in our history i send that to every household of my people both at home and overseas this message we are at war with god's help we shall prevail in a sense one could say that the second world war came to his rescue because he was there he was played a very statesmanlike role during the second world war and by the end of it he was absolutely entrenched as a beloved king but whether in france with his troops or at home with his bombed people his courage and cheerfulness were an inspiration this was total war and the king suffered with so many of his subjects the bombing of his home princess elizabeth saw in her father this devotion to duty duty really what came before personal happiness and she also saw it in her mother and that is the way that she has structured her own reign you know she's really sacrificed her family in a way she loved her daddy she was a daddy's girl in many ways but she looked at what her father did and respected what he did and tried to follow his example now in the same way he felt that respect for her king george said from a very early age elizabeth seemed very regal and even as a child in the cot she seemed to be very much in control of herself and her emotions he said i look at her and i see queen victoria i see the evidence of a great monarch in the making we don't need a boy to do the job she'll do it better there are several events early in her life which have shaped the attitude and i think the essential seriousness of the queen one the recession the depression years in which she grew up secondly the abdication which was such a trauma in her own family with such upset to her very emotional father through her uncle edward viii not doing his duty as the royal family saw it indulging in his love for a woman and putting that above his duty to the crown and thirdly world war ii during the second world war she and her younger sisters lived at windsor castle really in sort of isolation they lived in the castle people came in to entertain them dances were given parties were given they met young aristocratic soldiers guardsmen of the day well it sounds a bit strange but i think the war was actually rather um an enjoyable time for the princesses and i think princess elizabeth actually said to her governors you know we're smiling too much we're looking too happy because she knew what was going on obviously and she was really interested but they were really had their war years at windsor castle and it was like a great big playground she wanted to join something called the ats the auxiliary territorial service effectively the woman's army although she drives it with apparent composure she had no experience of driving before she commenced her training and for a couple of months she went to aldershot every day and studied how to be a car mechanic um how to change wheels how to take off a cylinder block and when it comes to checking the plugs princess margaret has obviously become suitably impressed yes she did do war work she got into a uniform she did some training she learned how to change the you know the wheel on a on a car she you know got her hands dirty but she then went back at night to the safety of the castle they should come home in the evening and bore the family rigid with the dynamics of uh cylinder blocks and that sort of thing i mean everything this woman does at any age is something she's done seriously [Music] at the end of the second world war when victory in europe was announced and there was huge celebration in the streets of london literally dancing in the streets princess elizabeth asked her father if she might go down into the streets to see what was going on and with a couple of acquitters guardsmen she went down into the streets of london and briefly mingled with the crowds and that really was as close as she got to the reality of war my sister and i realized we couldn't see what the crowds were enjoying so we asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves i remember we were terrified of being recognized so i pulled my uniform cap well down over my eyes we cheered the king and queen on the balcony and then walked miles through the streets i think it was one of the most memorable nights of my life it was the emperor napoleon who said if you want to understand a person you should look at the way the world was in the year that person turned 21. well the queen became 21 in the 1940s and she has the values of a woman of that generation she is decent she is discreet she does her duty one of the extraordinary things about the queen is that she fell in love and married just about the first man she met of course it's a slight exaggeration but she met prince philip of greece as he then was in 1939 when he was a dashing naval cadet at dartmouth naval college she'd met him before family occasions but this was the occasion when by her own account the the spark was struck very dashing and very handsome and i mean quite unusually she actually thought this man is wonderful you know as a 13 year old could think you know handsome prince and never really had any affection for any other man ever since he was astonishingly good looking you know flaxen you know the number of women who swoon at the time and to swoon later and described him as having viking looks and flax and hair and all the rest of it he was an astonishing figure and and in uniform he looked ridiculously good and he he's always maintained a very fitting profile and he looked what he was a young greek god [Music] princeville it was very alpha male quite controlling but and very positive and i don't think princess elizabeth ever met a man like that in her life she was used to going out with uh lord this and lord that and you know people being very deferential to her and suddenly there's someone that comes along and tells her what to do and drives too fast and does all kinds of things and i think he was just so male she was so incredibly in love with him [Music] they were both great-great-grandchildren of queen victoria and by the end of the 1930s prince philip though he had a family his father was in the south of france his mother was back in greece his sisters were in germany and he was in england and he would go to homes houses of people and in the visitors book would write when his address says no fixed abode and princess elizabeth and he became friendly as the war wore on and by the end of the war their friendship was deepening from time to time he used to wind up at windsor castle he saw the queen in one of those pantomimes and and and then at a certain point she was writing to him and indeed had a photograph of a bearded gentleman on her dressing table um which is always quite fun to show in lectures because that is indeed prince philip um in the days when he had a beard and then of course shortly after that the romance developed he was in the royal navy he was a cousin he was certainly eligible he was hugely charming and by 1946 they were in love and ready to get engaged i don't think that prince philip ever fell foul of king george vi particularly but you know she his bride-to-be was very young they were both quite young and he wanted her to wait and you know it's rather touching actually that they went off the only time that they were together on a foreign trip on family just the four of us as he always said george vi was the 1947 trip to south africa princesses became 21 when she was in south africa and made this extraordinary speech dedicating her life to the service of the commonwealth the empire indeed i think she said in those days and it it's very very her that i mean it fits in with this wish to serve first and i think that that's what she's always wanted to do will you the youth of the british family of nations let me speak on my birthday as your representative now that we are coming to manhood and womanhood it is surely a great joy to us all to think that we shall be able to take some of the burden off the shoulders of our elders who have fought and worked and suffered to protect our childhood now she didn't write it herself it was written by one of her private secretaries and given to her to approve but apparently the first time she read it she cried and she said this is exactly what i feel this is exactly what i want to say it showed that her father's faith in her was justified that she had this overwhelming sense of duty not just to britain but to the commonwealth as a whole and that that was going to be the most important thing in her life i declare before you all with my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service enter the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong but i shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me as i now invite you to do it was really her her last time as a daughter in the family she knew that when it was over she was going to get engaged to philip and then marry him the king was naturally anxious that his daughter made the right decision and of course he was also not totally happy at the idea of of this very very close-knit family of four as far as he used to call them being broken up and the additional figure of prince philip who was of course you know an interesting character but he was not entirely easy either i mean it wasn't he wasn't going to just arrive on the scene and not make an impact and i think the king was well aware of that too with news of growing preparations for the royal wedding come these notable pictures of the royal family accompanied by lieutenant philip mountbatt people at court weren't sure who this man was princess elizabeth was a perfect princess she was beautiful she was well brought up she knew how to behave nobody was quite sure about prince philip who was he where were his parents his grandfather the king of greece had been assassinated his own father in the year of prince philip's birth was put on trial in a show trial and due to be possibly executed he escaped into exile this is prince philip's father with his family and they settled in france prince philip's upbringing was in a sense difficult i mean he was born famously on a kitchen table in corfu and he was evacuated in an orange box on board a british destroyer and he led a life of comparative and i think it's reasonable to say comparative penury in france then at the end of the 1920s his parents split up his mother had a breakdown ended up in asylum in switzerland his father floated down to the south of france where he ended up with a girlfriend living in a boat off the french riviera he always said to me that he was essentially pan-european i don't know what he was he certainly he is categorized as being filled with the greek but he doesn't have any greek blood in him at all they were the the greek royal family of which he was a member were parachuted in they were rental royals um insofar as he comes from anywhere i guess he comes from germany probably and you know he himself said you know why should i like the greeks they would treated my family appallingly which they did you know so the idea that he's greek is very far from truth so people didn't know who this prince was he hadn't been to a proper english public school he hadn't been in the brigade of guards he'd been to the school called gordonstuden founded by a german brings prince max of baden you know it founded zalam uh he joined the royal navy well mentioned in dispatches that isn't bad but who was he and so when the engagement happened there were lots of people around the queen and the king at the time who had their reservations homage and rejoicing side by side with glowing pageantry marks britain's greatest royal occasion since the coronation the royal wedding was seen as a sort of new elizabethan age the country was in a terrible state it was very austere right after the war and suddenly this beautiful bride because the casino prince elizabeth was incredibly beautiful and this hanson naval officer were going to carry the country out of the doldrums of war and present them with a golden future but the feeling was very much of their wedding it was like a fairy tale [Music] [Applause] before long the calls of the people were answered as onto the famous balcony came the bride and bridegroom the time of the wedding of princess elizabeth and prince philip his sisters were not invited simply because they were germans living in germany with you know german husbands one of whom was still going through the de narcification process so you know they had to be careful i think the british public on the whole regarded the marriage of prince philip to the future queen as a welcome blessed relief you know from a time of considerable austerity and awfulness and there was more rationing paradoxically after the war ended than there had been during the war itself and one of the charming things is that i think of the 1700 or so wedding presence that were officially listed several hundred were nylon stockings which ladies loyal ladies in the country decided to send to the princess they knew in those hard times what every girl wanted may the present happiness of our princess and her sailor husband grow ever deeper for the years to come [Music] [Applause] after her marriage to philip they'd had their first two children pretty rapidly she wanted more she had to delay her family that's why her children come in two tranches as it were one before her coronation one once she'd played herself in and settled and she had had this wonderful experience for just about a year with philip of being a naval officer's wife philip had insisted after the marriage that he should pursue his naval career she wanted him very much to do this the royal family agreed and so he actually went off to malta where the british navy had still a large contingent in those days he was given his own ship she went out there not as a princess but as the captain's wife and for the first and only time in her life she drove her own car she went to hairdressing salons she met friends in cafes for coffee she had something resembling ordinary life and it had been her wish and hope that that could continue for several years [Music] it was obvious that she meant to enjoy herself she had no restrictions she could move about on her own in morta it was a absolutely novel for her you know i think officially she was the boss but in private life i think philip ran the show that's my impression yes i seem to pass her around most of the time you know and i shouldn't say this perhaps i've i've heard him swear to you [Music] the thing about queen and prince philip is that they both as it were they're very very well matched i mean she took on somebody her own size i mean he is the one person who can categorically tell her if something is not going well he can talk to her directly and he does and it's been a very very interesting relationship which has lasted um now you know very nearly 64 years i think the queen herself will be the first to admit that prince philip isn't somebody who minces his words he's got an opinion on everything and he doesn't mind expressing it um and for the queen herself when you consider that she's surrounded by a lot of lackeys and perhaps a lot of yes men actually having a man in her life to tell her what he thinks um of what she's doing is probably a refreshing change he does wear the trousers behind palace doors and he's the head of the family and he's made a lot of changes at buckingham palace which have been for the better i think he likes to avoid comparisons with prince albert and um doesn't didn't want to be called a consort and he wanted to be an individual in his own right and if you say anything about prince philip it's certainly that he's an individual i think that perhaps some of the queen's character that she has today because she's very funny and can be incredibly waspish i think a lot of that sort of comes from being around someone as sort of strong as prince philip and it's a it's an enduring love she has for him i think he would have been so different to princess elizabeth herself and you know in many happy marriages that is the key it's the differences between people that make it work and i think that was that's i think what has been the glue that has held that marriage together so well all too often i fear prince philip has had to listen to me speaking he is someone who doesn't take easily to compliments but he has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years i remember a few years ago i went to the theater with them one evening and sat in the royal box with them and the interval came and i came out and during the interval i walked with the queen and i walked behind obviously with the duke of edinburgh the queen went first and she was introduced to all sorts of celebrities during the interval and i stood at the side of the room with the duke of edinburgh and he looked across the crowded room towards the queen it was quite a small woman and she was surrounded by people meeting her and bowing and shaking her hand and he leant against the wall he was holding a drink and he caught her eye and across the crowded room as she smiled at him he merely lifted his glass and toasted her i thought yes of course there is some special relationship between these two people the king's unexpected death changed everything not only for elizabeth but for philip too as a couple they had enjoyed a blissful existence in malta where the duke of edinburgh was then based as an officer in the royal navy and their first tour so to speak was brought to an abrupt halt when they heard news of the king's death where in kenya of course it was the duke of edinburgh that broke the news to princess elizabeth and understandably she was devastated you get this extraordinary vision of the queen coming down the steps to meet all these uh ancient ministers like winston churchill born in 1874 who'd served in queen victoria's army junior minister under edward vii who was then her prime minister atlee and eden and matt batten and duke of gloucester and all these other figures that were standing there and the old cars that came to meet her and and she arrived back into her country to to take over the reins of being sovereign from that moment when she stepped onto the runway back in britain people were bowing to her and she was the new queen and for both of them it really brought to an abrupt end what had been as normal a marriage as possible for a royal couple and they were suddenly thrust into the limelight [Music] it was a mortal blow to prince philip because he realized that family life as he knew it was over i mean he realized it in a way before she did the enormity of the situation hit him suddenly she's queen and she can't be the wife anymore the mother she can't be the mother anymore i mean there was just she really had very little time to be with her children so prince philip in a way sort of became the house husband from 1952 as soon as she became queen she was off on lots of royal tours and in the early days they were very lengthy they often went by ship so i think there was a a distance between her and her children that hadn't applied in her own case basically prince philip in a way lost his wife lost his wife to the role of duty [Music] what would have struck journalists at the time is her relative age and innocence in the scheme of things she was certainly a very well read and well-schooled woman of her tender years in those days that said she had no experience really at all of even married life let alone being queen i think people would have wanted to know how she felt she was going to cope with such a huge burden on her shoulders at such a young age when she's just starting out in her marriage and starting a family if you lose a parent any age is difficult uh if you're going to be the next monarch if you know that your father dies and you're going to step into the job one can't begin to imagine the sort of weight of responsibility the weight of apprehension and suspension that that would give you uh so i think that when her her father died it was a cataclysm both personally and then she had to face the fact that she was going to be the monarch of the united kingdom there was anxiety to start with when george vi died so young a father figure how could this young girl cope and then it was actually winston churchill who in his speech of mourning and farewell to george vi and welcome to the new queen pointed out that here she was modern elizabeth coming to the throne at the same age as the first queen elizabeth in tudor times and here perhaps britain and the whole commonwealth had the chance of a modern elizabethan age [Music] i think the coronation again coinciding with the roll out of tv around the world meant that it was one of the first and biggest televised events of its kind television was just taking off lo and behold we had the coronation in 1953 so many people acquired their television sets for that my family did we sat in the house my dad bought a television the neighbors came around as in so many other cases and really that set television going as well i think there was very much the notion that this should be a world event and that everybody in the commonwealth should be able to enjoy what was an occasion where they would be seeing their queen crowned she was very worried that she might make mistakes that would be recorded live on television there's also several very emotional private moments in the service like when she took communion another moment where she has to bear most of the upper part of her breast and have the coronation oil anointed there she didn't want that to be shown on television the people wanted to see royalty they wanted to not just be able to watch them physically in london but i think they really needed to see this happening and the bbc um really pushed for the coronation to be televised um and it wasn't the queen that said no or indeed the queen that said yes it was actually her advisors were very sniffy about it and said no no it can't possibly be the case because they'll be men with cloth caps and pubs you know they won't be deferring there was a national outcry you know they said people said look you know it says the queen should be crowned in the sight of all the people and these days the people are watching their tellies it was televised as we know and of course it was a huge huge success and a sort of bringing together of the commonwealth and the whole world in fact i think for the queen it was a very uh momentous occasion in her life not just because of the world while following but because she's a deeply religious woman and making her vow before god in such austere circumstances to serve her country was really a defining moment for her in her life she'd always had a strong sense of duty but that became even stronger and you know her coronation was a religious service as much as anything else and she was very much at the center of a religious um ceremony presided over by the archbishop by her archbishop and all the rest of it and i think that um what really changed her life totally um at the current at the first of all the accession but even more so after the coronation in 1953 was the sense that she was on her own she was chosen by god if you like very very soon after the coronation the euphoria of that great event was overshadowed by the margaret turns end affair the queen was in conflict there because as head of the church of england she could not really permit her sister to marry a divorced man but as the sister of princess margaret she obviously was very keen that princess margaret should be happy and it wasn't easy [Music] in the 1950s it was a very different period from today the family meant a great deal divorce was terrible the idea of going out with a married man was frowned upon a married man with children who was going to divorce to marry a royal princess was just unheard of probably the the queen just didn't want to believe what she even if she thought it might be possible what happened in that particular situation was that they separated the couple they sent peter town and turned it off to um brussels as a narrati and by the time he returned in 1955 when the general public all getting tremendously excited at the thought that princess margaret was now 25 and could some extent do what she wished [Music] in fact i think you know the path of love had as it were run through and by the time princess morgan realized there was a possibility of her civil list allowance ceasing and possibly losing her royal titles and things it was over princess margaret's personal message issued from clarence house i would like it to be known that i have decided not to marry group captain peter townsend i am deeply grateful for the concern of all those who have constantly prayed for my happiness because of their closeness the queen during the whole group captain townsend period was very supportive of margaret because it was really their mother who they didn't want to let in on the notion of the relationship and i think elizabeth and philip counselled margaret as much as they could through that and it's sometimes been misreported that it was the queen that said that this relationship couldn't be allowed actually she was devastated that when push came to shove it was the government who said actually we can't allow you to marry this man and i think she had a lot of sympathy for margaret because after all the queen knew what true love was she had married the man of her dreams she obviously played a part in it an important part and it could not have been done without her agreement the problem the queen as i think often had is as it were the role of the queen as queen and the role of the queen as a person i mean in some extent they're two different two different people and the queen has been known sometimes to turn to a private secretary um who produces something for her to look at and to ask her the question you know what should the queen do at the beginning of the queen's reign the massive tour of the commonwealth that she undertook the best part of a year in the newly built yacht the britannia was obviously partly a celebration of her accession but it was mainly a thank you to the british commonwealth to australia new zealand canada south africa india the african countries that have contributed so many men and lives to the war effort against germany and and japan when the queen came to the throne we still had the british empire it was very much part of all of our lives i remember i was young but i can remember hard to think of it now but we we had influence all over the globe real influence and the queen was queen of all those countries as well it became the commonwealth a much looser association of mostly friendly countries the queen has always taken that extremely seriously of all the jobs that she does that i think possibly she would say herself the two that really matter to her are being head of the church because she takes a religion extremely seriously and being head of the commonwealth i would say that the queen has adopted the commonwealth almost as one of her sort of prime causes i mean rather like a a prime minister with a new government identifies an area that he wishes to be identified with it's true to say that that's what the queen is considered to be very important and she never misses these commonwealth heads of government meetings you know she has prime ministers all over the world and she has said that sometimes when she goes to these meetings she sees she feels a bit like a doctor she sees four prime ministers in the morning and four in the afternoon and they all tell her they're different problems and who better to talk to than her because she's not going to tell us what they say and equally of course she's known all their predecessors way back into the 1940s before a great deal of them were born and the queen doesn't mind if these countries wish to not have her as queen anymore as long as they remain in the commonwealth that's that's the thing that she's most keen on likes to keep the link going princess elizabeth as princess and queen has always been guided by a great sense of duty when she became crowned queen one of the symbols of authority that she took was what's called the wedding ring of england she considered herself and she considers herself married to england britain australia the british commonwealth all the countries that acknowledge her and that for her is the most important thing i don't think she has yet seen the film called the queen because she's not interested in herself she doesn't read about herself she is not preoccupied with herself she doesn't belong to the me me me generation she isn't touchy feely as a human being there are no photographs in existence of the queen and prince philip walking along holding hands they reflect their generation that's not what they want you to see you may want it it may reflect what you are looking for in royalty that's not what they're going to give you i think there are two big influences on the queen's approach to her job one was the example of what happened with her uncle with the eighth king for such a short time never even crowned i think that would have instilled in her the idea that you do not walk away from what is your duty what her father had done she carried on and i think succeeded even more if you like she was even more taken to people's hearts than her father had been it's wonderful she's our monarch for her to take her time it's wonderful can't believe it i made it one of the most interesting things i ever heard about the queen said to me by one of her private secretaries and it was this that the queen sees it as her duty to walk at the pace of the slowest person in the land so that nobody in the country feels left behind so there is the duke of edinburgh thrusting going forward trying to do this trying to do that trying to change this and there is the queen quite steadily walking along at the pace of the slowest person feeling okay this is the way it is everyone should be included in this and so the queen has actually been hugely inclusive in the way that she's run things [Music] i think the strength of the queen is she's seen it all come and go there is no doubt at all that she had a special feeling for winston churchill none whatsoever because she'd known him since she was literally a little girl she sat on winston churchill's knee he was a friend of her parents her father went through the second world war with winston churchill she was a young girl in her mid-twenties when she became queen and winston churchill the grand old man of european politics was her first prime minister he was the special prime minister since then i think she's seen them come and go and been very skillful at not letting them become too intimate with her james callaghan a british prime minister said to me once you know royalty they offer you friendliness not friendship there is a difference worked for a succession of prime ministers who have enormously valued the um what they get from their weekly audience with the queen in terms of uh very penetrating and shrewd questioning and expressions of judgment and view the idea has always been that at least once a week on a tuesday the prime minister makes time clears his diary and goes over to buckingham palace to talk to the queen the prime minister just sits and talks in total confidence totally openly with the queen about what's going on she she listens she does much more listening than anything else a few years ago i found myself at a private party in a corner making conversation with the queen and i found myself talking about uh the prime minister of the day john major and i found myself saying to the queen or you had an audience with him today the reset there was a recession at the time and um i said you know um it's very bad the recession she is very bad and she said you know i've been queen since 1952. i said i do know that your majesty she said you know i've had 13 prime ministers i said oh yes i know that do you mention you know we have one of these recessions every few years and i'm not sure any of my prime ministers knows what to do about it she's very dry the queen she's got a very good sense of humor behind it no she's not quite she's not as much of an actress as the queen mother i would say that if you succeeded in making the queen laugh you can be genuinely 100 certain that you have amused her she is a very amusing person people always think the queen is looking rather serious this is simply because she's a bit older now and she's got one of those faces that looks solemn when it's in repose but when she smiles her face is absolutely transformed and she looks wonderful radiant but she's also very amusing and does impressions some impressions of individuals but she does accents she can go to a place and come away and do you impressions of people when i just first joined majesty in 1983 the queen and prince philip did a tour of jordan and i remember going on it the queen said to me what do you find to write about in your magazine and i said oh your family man and she said well i use it as a diary to know what they're all doing one story i rather like about the queen was that she always wanted to see a supermarket and once in norfolk she was put on her sort of husky in her head scarf and she had claimed that she hadn't been to a supermarket other than when she'd been opening one so she wanted to go along and say she was walking up and down the aisles and a little old lady spotted her there went up to her and said my dear i must tell you you look awfully like the queen to which the queen replied thank you that's very reassuring that's very much the queen people look to the monarchy especially um in time because they are above politics they're not there because we've elected them they're there maybe they don't even want to be there but they're there and they've devoted their lives to duty which is really important that we see that which is why the behavior of some of the young royals in the 80s was so damaging to the monarchy but i think because they're above politics and because we know people like prince charles really care he does really care about this country and its people we want to look up to them it's really no secret that she has her differences with prince charles i mean she loves him obviously as her eldest son but she feels that his espousing of quite controversial causes is dangerous for the monarchy now prince charles in his own defense would say well this is only while he's prince of wales that when he becomes monarch in due course all of that would end and he totally understands the impartiality that a modern constitutional monarch has to have i think when you look at charles and andrew you can probably make comparisons with william and harry in that andrew's despair to the air as harry is and they can both get away with a bit more and they might be labelled party princes or playboy princes because they haven't got the burden of responsibility on their shoulders they aren't going to be the future king andrew seems to have an extraordinary place in our heart that he can do no wrong or if he does she forgives him he also had a very gung-ho image in that he was out in the falklands and flying helicopters and generally being quite macho and it fitted in with that whole top gun image he had a bit of a hollywood image at the time and it was easy to label him as randy andy because of the excitement that title might bring to the royal family as far as the press were concerned anyway there's sometimes a perception of aloofness and distance which was certainly bridged now i think i would i would i would twist that slightly and say to you that perhaps that's the way that other people think we want to be rather than necessarily the way that we would choose to be do you understand the difference yes i do but what is what is then preventing you from being that um probably again other people's perceptions rather than our own desire because when you when you actually see and and understand and feel what it is that for instance you've seen what prince william is doing in in australia and new zealand he was able to do that the the difficulty is is being able to do that all the time because there are times when things have to be more formal i for one think that that the royal family is relevant i think it's relevant probably more so in the 21st century than we really either want to or realize when it comes to andrew and edward these are her indulged younger sons and she's she's fond of them and perhaps she's less critical of them than she is of of of charles i think everybody that saw it's a royal knockout realized that it was an incredibly undignified thing to do and although it made great television um it was almost embarrassing watching uh the way that some of the members of the royal family behaved i mean actually diana wanted to do it and prince charles wouldn't let her he was quite right um and of course edward came out a bit very badly because he really did go into a sort of funk have you been watching it yes what did you think of it thanks well prince edward didn't have a great press in those days because i think he was very much in his elder brother's shadow as the youngest child he didn't do very well in the royal marines and so was labelled soft if not gay in some quarters which was later denied by his wife in the ill-fated interview she gave to the fake shake not knowing that he was undercover at the time headlined mayan mai edwards not gay and i think really he suffered a bad press because he tried to have his own endeavors and he ran ardent his production company it didn't do very well i think the nail in the coffee coffin was when he went and filmed prince william um at eton um when he had been expressly told not to and uh that really ended his career and the queen didn't want the bad publicity uh on this particular occasion we are celebrating something which is really an accident at birth over which i had no control and for which i seriously owe one very important thank you which is to my mother and father i think people will say that princess anne is her biggest support and that is both personally as her only daughter but also in a professional sense in that she is an absolute tireless workhorse for the royal family she carries out multiple engagements most days of the week and in that respect she is the firm's number one performer and the queen really admires that in her daughter i think probably princess anne actually is more like prince philip than her mother in some other respects she's also very straight talking and no-nonsense but i think the queen's close with all of their children [Music] [Applause] it's really her grandchildren on whom the queen focuses [Music] she is a great matriarch the queen she loves having all the family around her and that's why her time at sandringham at christmas and balmoral in the summer are very precious to her because those are times when she can be a matriarch for a few weeks at least [Music] the royal family has reflected family life in general because behind palestine they are a normal family with normal problems and normal emotions in fact they're under more pressure really than the rest of us because their moves are all scrutinized and if there's problems in the relationship the cameras are there to pick it up and that very much happened of course with prince charles and diana [Music] but the interesting thing about diana spencer who became princess diana was that she rather came out of nowhere no one no one really spotted her although she had some royal connections in her family she wasn't the usual type of girlfriend that i remember prince charles accompanying to places a lot of his girlfriends had a past and we the press knew that that prince charles had to find at that time definitely find someone who had no past and then lady diana spencer appeared and you know it was it was a gift to all of us she was a young girl and quite naive at the time as we know but i think actually prince charles's parents were relieved that he had decided to marry someone he had quite a long period of bachelorhood where he couldn't seem to settle down and it was actually attracting the wrong kind of headlines was he a playboy prince was he not able to make decisions was he not able to commit and suddenly this beautiful young girl came into his life and it really improved his pr enormously because not only had he managed to settle down but was such a gorgeous and glamorous figure i was always very much actually a diana spencer fan and of course it was terribly interesting to watch how she emerged from that chrysalis that early chrysalis into the girl that she became and she was very very good at those royal duties and of course they were for time really completely a dream team they could have gone anywhere and done anything everybody wanted to see them [Music] the problem for diana spencer and what she really fell victim to was a was a time warp by the 1970s when diana spencer appeared on the scene most people couldn't care less whether the bride walking up the aisle was a virgin or not in ordinary life but when it came to the royal family we still expected this old-fashioned view it meant she was much younger than prince charles and prince charles of course as we since discovered was already committed emotionally to another woman and that was camilla but paul camilla's problem um was sort of catch-22 and when she met prince charles she fell in love they went to bed together but that sort of automatically ruled her out as a future queen it sounds ridiculous it sounds primitive and it was um and of course in two or three years prince andrew fell in love with fergie she didn't pretend she was a virgin she had boyfriends in the past everybody had moved on by that time but diana was caught in this particular trap and it's the basis for really the tragedy that became her life and prince charles's life and an enormous challenge to the monarchy and to the reputation of elizabeth ii one of the many many problems that that diana had was i don't think anyone actually explained to her the enormity of what she was doing and you'd think her father would have done because he was one person that did know it and diana was just thrown in at the deep end she went to live in buckingham palace she was incredibly lonely she was looked after by a foot man actually was a friend of mine and prince charles was away travelling a lot and i think she thought it was all going to be wonderfully romantic and they'd be having candlelit suppers in buckingham palace and he would sort of whisk her away on a white charger but it wasn't like that at all she hardly saw him well we didn't cover her unhappiness until probably about 1987 when it became so obvious that she was unhappy the queen was immensely distressed by what was happening in the marriage of charles and diana for a number of reasons obviously the the threat that it carried to the reputation of the royal family but particularly to the happiness of the couple and particularly their ability to be parents to william and harry whom she loved dearly as a grandmother but also who represented the future of the royal family so there was a whole complex of emotions going on in here the queen actually tried to bring diana under her wing but diana was very reluctant she thought you know she didn't want to have supper with the queen that was too boring and also she found it a bit daunting i mean the queen would invite her to come and have lunch with her or have supper with her and diana really didn't want to do that and so she'd find excuses and so they never really formed a very close relationship at a time when it might have really helped diana to do so when the marriage really started to break down diana used to go and see the queen now nobody sees the queen without an appointment but diana used to wait in the pages vestibule until the queen's last visitor if you like um had left and then she'd dash in before the next one and she'd just cry and say everybody hates me i hate my mother i hate my sister i hate my husband and the queen not used to this kind of moral confrontation just didn't know how to handle diana it really threw her and as a result she sat on the fence with diana it would be a great mistake to think that she blamed diana for what went wrong if anything i believe that she and her husband prince philip put more of the blame on prince charles than on diana because after all he was the one who had this extra girlfriend who was by then not a secret to the royal family he was the one the older um partner in the in of the couple whose job it was to steer things through he was the royal who'd spent all his life getting ready for this i just think from everything i know about the queen and everything everyone's told me she tries not to interfere with with her children's lives she probably should have done i think that could be the great mistake of her reign is that she didn't interfere between charles and diana and say now enough is enough i don't care if you loathe each other you're gonna have to stay together she didn't do that [Music] prince philip made a very concerted effort to commune with diana i've seen the letters that he wrote to her and i've seen her replies and they're very moving and they were very constructive on his side desperately trying to find a way of keeping her in the fold and trying to work out a balance where the things that she might do with prince charles that they did both like doing they should do more of in the hope that things would settle down i asked prince philip about it once and he said to me simply we're a family we are a family these things happen in families and they coped with it as a family would and their reaction to it was that of parents of their particular generation actually the royal family were very fond of diana and even after the divorce there were lots of letters exchanged between diana and prince philip prince philip very much wanted that relationship to stand the test of time not because of the image of the royal family being dented by their divorce but because he really was fond of diana and wanted the relationship to last for the couple's benefit and for the boys the queen was curiously on diana's side certainly while the marriage was breaking up now when it comes to a question of what she thought of diana's behavior after the marriage broke up and her succession of boyfriends and particularly dodie fired and all that sort of thing that's another issue i once asked the duke of edinburgh why he felt the press approach to the royal family was as it is and where it had begun to go wrong and he told me in terms it began to go wrong when rupert murdoch arrived here and i think he would say that the sort of day-to-day insidious gnawing away at the views of the royal family really began when rupert murdoch arrived in this country the royal family are convinced and i've spoken to prince charles about it i've spoken to other members of the royal family they are convinced that murdoch was out to destroy them they really are and they i mean prince charles banged on about murdoch and the murdoch press and they almost seem to think that there's a murdoc plot that i'm not talking about actually now but say you know like 10 years ago it's terribly easy for journalists to latch on to an alleged failing and to say that um prince philip has committed another gaffe i think he's been rather unfairly treated prince philip is known for his gaffes and he's known for not mincing his words and saying what he thinks and often people like me in in the press like to interpret that in a certain way to make a good headline and i don't think there's anything wrong with that because often he has made controversial comments that said often i've observed prince philip and really all he's trying to do is put people at ease and the way he thinks he should put people at ease is by cracking jokes and i recently profiled him for his 90th birthday and he uh suggested to a chef who was collecting an award that it was no wonder he was a good chef because he was certainly the size for it and this man was enormous and wasn't offended at all thought it was hilarious and i think people quite like being singled out by the duke of edinburgh i think the notion of rupert murdoch coming and being a republic staunch republican and from australia didn't really change things that much because at the time 80s and 90s the stewardship of the sun was very much kelvin mckenzie's domain and he realized in fleet street more than anyone that diana was going to sell papers and in that respect it was what the readers wanted and if you look back to those times in the 80s of how many resources were thrown at royal stories you'd have royal reporters sent across the world they spent hardly any time in britain all they did was follow roars around on their holidays one of the things that disturbed distressed the queen and prince philip about diana princess of wales and about sarah ferguson who married the young duke of york was that the attention they got they may have thought that it was for them as individuals and the duke of edinburgh said to me once you know when the queen first became queen and went on tours in the early 1950s millions millions of people came out of the streets and cheered and if the queen had taken that attention for herself it would have been corrosive she never did she knew the attention the adulation was not for her it was for the position of being queen one of the things that makes them feel a bit distressed about the way they are presented and i've discussed this with the duke of edinburgh is that people now regard them as part of the celebrity culture they're not they think of themselves as part of history there is blood in their veins that has been coursing through royal veins since before 1066. the queen's mantra when it comes to her family has always been never complain and never explain and in that respect she's always remained resolutely silent on issues such as love marriage divorce that she's someone to whom the public display of emotion is is um offensive it's rude you know you keep those things to yourself you don't lay them on other people you keep them to yourself you suffer your pain and your elation and your difficulty privately probably the most demonstrative she ever was when she talked about her annis horribilis well 1992 was the worst year so the queen says of her life she called it her anna's herbalist now there was the divorce of andrew and fergie before that there was the fire at windsor castle when the queen sort of almost saw her it was on her wedding anniversary and i think she almost felt her life was going up in flames and then of course the separation of the prince and princess of wales which really was something the queen had tried incredibly hard to help them avoid she said you know just try a bit longer just try a bit longer and then she realized that you know it wasn't going to work so that was a really rotten year for her shortly after the winds of fire the queen was scheduled to make a speech and she didn't duck the issue she didn't avoid it she was ill herself she had a terrible sore throat from the from the smoke and from a cold that she was suffering from and all of this added up to this poignant um image of this middle-aged elderly woman who'd seen her home burnt down who'd seen her children divorce it has turned out to be an anus horribilis it hadn't been latin she wouldn't have been able to say it but suddenly it provided her with a format for broaching this dreadful subject and she did and of course people loved her the more for it and and and ran it round and and gave her the emotional support that the monarchy has so often offered to them [Music] i was asleep in bed and the phone rang and one of my bosses said nick there's been a car crash in paris dodie fired he's dead and we think the princess is dead too so i obviously got up dressed went straight to the studio in the middle of the night and then was really on television i have to say for the next week really we have a flash here from the press association newswire saying that dana princess of wales has died in a car crash in paris [Music] what happened was of course that the week after diana died was a long week from a media point of view so on the sunday you had the shock the next day it was discovered turned on the paparazzi or perhaps even on the same day that had pursued the car then after that it was discovered that the chauffeur had more alcohol in his blood than he should have done so he was the next one to be blamed and then once they'd finished with that they turned on the queen and the press played it up like anything they played up the fake thing of the flag there being no union jack flying at half-mast on buckingham palace i tried to tell itn time and time again why don't you film windsor castle which has its flag at half-mast surely that makes a certain point didn't quite fit what they were interested in they wanted the stark flag pole the monaco did not care and so forth we didn't whip up hysteria and i always get a bit cross when people accuse us of that the british people felt very deeply most of them about diana they felt her loss personally and we were very aware that we shouldn't inflame people we shouldn't say oh the queen's being terrible she hasn't come down to london to meet the crowds we tried to be very careful about what we were doing but the story just swept along no one could have imagined what would happen to diana and what would happen in the days that followed with diana's death the queen did what she's always done remember she likes continuity and she did what her father would have done and what her grandfather would have done so they button down the hatches stay at balmoral on the outward act as if nothing so terrible has happened but she completely misread the mood of the country because within the ivory tower of balmoral you don't know what's going down in london the queen as somebody who had been through the war and her generation respond to things like car crashes in which ex-daughters-in-law are killed in a different way to the more touchy-feely way that the younger generation responded to that her job was to look after these boys at this traumatic terrible moment in their lives that became her priority and that was very much the reason why she did not want cameras paraded around she did not want to make public statements she certainly wanted to keep william and harry away from attention and she thought let's go down at the last moment there was the practical matter of not disturbing people at the palace but more important it just means the boys can focus on this one thing paying tribute to their mother at the funeral and then come home well of course that was not how people in london nor indeed through the media people around the world saw it the image of the queen took a serious dent in that first week they seemed to misjudge the the the mood of the nation and i think that the silence from the royal family for those early days and nothing happening the no mention of diana at crafty church at the service uh no flag coming down at buckingham palace you know that in itself caused um probably a lot of anger with people now i know it's tradition that their flag flies at buckingham palace when only the royals are there but i really would have liked to see the flag flying half-mast there as well they're the most cold people on this earth i mean all these people here today are showing the strength of the nation and she hasn't said anything the queen [Music] well the queen when she came back to buckingham palace from scotland i think she was actually extremely nervous because she could feel the hostility of the cloud so she did a walkabout and actually she heard him say oh about time you've come you know you they can hear an awful lot of things that the crowd would say and then i think a woman actually gave her um a bunch of flour and said oh would you like me to place it for you and woman said no mom it's for you and that sort of broke the ice it was that moment and i think suddenly people saw her instead of feeling all prickly and angry they suddenly thought my goodness this is this is a grandmother and she's got to deal with all this i suppose it was a sort of natural feeling of sympathy in many ways for the queen plus the fact i remember this terribly well the queen went on television live from buckingham palace to address the nation in the middle of all of that and it was a very masterful speech what i see to you now as your queen and as a grandmother i say from my heart first i want to pay tribute to diana myself it did just the right thing it said just the right things you used the famous words as your queen and a grandmother that was a very important thing to say to remind people that she isn't just some remote figure but she has a family children grandchildren and all the sorrows and pleasures that that brings to everybody for a woman who's thought of as conservative and a bit stick in the mud she's always shown throughout her reign in moments of crisis the ability to think on her feet and switch and change and of course what was also very interesting about that was that there was a time when prince william wasn't terribly keen to walk in the procession because he thought the whole thing had turned into a terrible ghastly media shenanigans but the night before prince philip said to him i think when you're older you would regret it if you didn't walk in your mother's procession and i will walk with you and that's an immensely supportive grandfather i think he got it absolutely right and there's a moment if you look at the footage of that that they're passing under whitehall and they think the cameras aren't on them and prince philip sort of leans over and says how's it going that's what you need from a grandfather an occasion of that kind i think there's no question about it that the royal family had some difficult times in the late 80s and i suppose almost right the way through the 90s it shows tremendous regenerative powers of the hereditary system in that this year in which we speak now which is 2011 been a very exciting year for the royal family and when prince william was getting married of course there's always excitement about a good looking prince getting married at the same time of course they are actually very interested in the queen as she approaches the diamond jubilee and of course the the whole thought that that the queen presiding over this family might you know be seeing perhaps even a you know another generation of the house of winds are in direct line of succession to the throne in her diamond jubilee year or very soon afterwards well that's all very exciting indeed the queen symbolizes stability and sovereignty means permanence and the ability to go on and on people like me who are sort of monarchists we like the royal family and the queen not only for political reasons because we think it's a good system but also for historical reasons i would say for emotional even aesthetical reasons it's a much more wider thing there is a great affection for the queen of the royal [Music] family the effect of having uh a monarchy or a crown presiding over our society is to make us very hierarchical everybody's got their place god bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations if you're a plane mister there's a gentleman above you and a squire above and a squire is a knight above a knight as a baronet above a baron it is a baron of above a baroness of i can't above if i count as an earl above an earl is a marquis of other mark which is a duke of avoduk is a royal duke and then a royal duke bars and scrapes to the crown so it is a hierarchical society we've definitely got a a class distinction within the households of the royal family at the very top you could call it the aristocracy if you like of the royal household that is the members then you've got a sort of a middle class area which may well be described or is the officials and then of course you've got the downstairs area the working class if you like which is called the staff the three classes are completely separate they do not socialize in any way they don't eat together the lower orders have to address the upper ones as sir or madam the whole thing is very very class based very much like it was in victorian times if you want to receive the accolade the way that i recommend you go down stop behind it as i am here take the handrail in your right hand your left foot on the left side and just go down on the right knee so you stop and it's one two three very nice and easy and quite comfortable the key person for any monarch in modern times has been the private secretary and this tends to be a very very senior figure who's been in royal service for many years in our country the monarch does not have any real power and there are times when people almost wish they would and it's the job of that adviser to steer her majesty through all the problems that arise [Music] being the sort of character that she is she has always accepted her role in life and she is very very dutiful somebody once wrote of her that she possesses that calm level gaze conscious of duty fulfilled i've been writing articles and books about the royal family for just about 40 years since the early 70s and i have to say that though i think i know the queen and the monarchy pretty well the essence of the queen remains an enigma to me that i think is her strength and that is i think how it should be i think she's absolutely fascinating for the fact that she has been on the throne all these years celebrating her diamond jubilee and actually while we can make a historic record of every second of her reign what we don't know much about is the queen herself and as a woman and how she's been as a mother and what she's felt as she's seen these momentous historical events take place her emotions have always been kept under lock and key and that's why she is one of the most elusive figures of our time she's got one personality when you are a friend another personality with her family she's got their wonderful mimicry which she can do and then she's got her formal personality i don't think anyone maybe no one will ever will get to the root of her i think people find her endlessly fascinating for what is going on behind the facade and of course why she's also fascinating is because deep down we know we'll probably never find that out [Music] she has been consumer at preserving her own privacy her own values her own ideas her own sense of self and mystery and enigma is a very important element of the magic her strength always has been steadfastness that she takes the good and the bad in her stride that she has a takes a very long view of everything people admire her longevity they also admire her consistency there she is she keeps on going [Music] the queen is one person who can get a crowd together and we witness that time and time again and people are then surprised afterwards to see so many people out there celebrating with her but she is one of those public figures that people will turn out and see and that history has repeated itself in that respect the silver jubilee the golden jubilee again was poo poo even people said before the royal wedding does anyone really care you look at the male and make your own mind up i think the queen is constantly surprised of the great feeling of goodwill she gets from her people and i find that strange after all these years that it's still so rather charming that it still surprises her i mean it's extraordinary she is still there she was there in 1952 60 years later she's still there the same queen the same smile she goes to the same things year in year out it's what a poet once described as the security of known relationships we know where we are with the green she doesn't let you down she's always there

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 1,238,014

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, queen elizabeth ii, british royalty, queen of england, britain''s monarch, the crown, english royalty, queen elizabeth

Id: GyukAXKsHtg

Length: 94min 39sec (5679 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2020