Good queen, bad subject

There is a paradox at the heart of all books about the Queen. The very thing which makes her such a successful constitutional monarch is what makes her an impossible subject for biography. We do not know anything about her. The only book which brings her to life as a person is Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses (reprinted by Orion, £8.99), a vivid picture of nursery life when Lilibet and Margaret Rose were growing up at 145 Piccadilly. Crawfie saw it all — the neatness, the horse-obsession, the deference to the rather awful mother, the selfless sense of duty, and the goodness.

No wonder this truth-teller had to be banished, punished forever. The young Earl of Essex, riding hotfoot from Ireland, covered in mud and sweat, burst in on Queen Elizabeth I at Nonsuch Palace at ten o’clock one  morning. He saw the poor old lady several feet away from her wig-stand, with bedraggled grey hair about her ears and no make-up or jewels. He died a year later on the block. Crawfie survived, and so suffered a less glamorous but no less definite punishment — to live out her sad days in a humble house near Aberdeen, mourning her young princesses.

Kate Williams brings this out vividly in Young Elizabeth: The Making of Our Queen (Weidenfeld, £12.99). It was deft of Williams to concentrate upon little Lilibet as her subject, and this was my favourite of  the many royal books which have been published in the last six months.

After she had grown up, married, and became the Queen, Lilibet’s personality faded from view. Either she had achieved some sort of spiritual act of self-forgetting, or she is simply lucky enough to be an unselfish, unshowy sort of person of whom there is not much to say. It does not mean she is unimpressive; merely that you would not envy the person who tries to write more than one side of A4 about her character.