The Wedding to End All Weddings – 20 November 1947
Big puffy fairytale nuptials that establish a new royal name overnight – Diana, Fergie, Kate, Meghan – are now considered standard fare but a large celebrity-style wedding is a relatively recent confection. Pomp and pageantry had been identified as the life blood of popular British monarchy in the late nineteenth century but it was rarely associated with weddings. Jubilees (Victoria’s were Golden and Diamond, George V’s Silver) and coronations (three in the first half of the twentieth century) provided the show stopping displays of imperial wonder that made the world gasp at Britain’s regal mystic, not the more modest betrothals of princes and princesses. That tradition was cemented in place by our late great Queen.
The then heir to the throne, Elizabeth, Britain’s unimpeachable princess, captured the world’s imagination in 1947 with her dashing naval war hero, Philip. Microphones peppered Westminster Abbey, Pathé’s largest lens were trained on the procession route, inside the Abbey global media jostled for a better position, and across the Channel in Paris electricity rationing was suspended so listeners could tune in to all the action.
Out on London’s cold pavements, the public patiently waited for the proceedings to start. It had been a long night – ground sheets, flasks, hot chestnuts – but worth it for a glimpse of royal flesh. It was the appearance of Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary, that heralded the beginning of the A-list cast: her car travelled “at the proper speed of a slow coach and she could be seen making her usual gesture and erect as she was on Jubilee day.” And then the arrival of the tour de force: at 11.15am advancing from the far end of Whitehall, the first military horsemen moving at a well controlled trot came into vision, their helmets gleaming through the morning mist, their red plumes penetrating the gloom. There she was encased in glass, suspended on wheels, drawn by horses, “crystalline, gorgeous and revealing”, the Princess with her Father-King. The crowd, (seven women to one man) attempted a roar, it sounded more like a scream and bells sang in the sky: how everyone loved their innocent British bride. And in that moment, touched by their attentions, Elizabeth loved them right back.
Inside the Abbey, Philip walked up the aisle. Apparently he had a cold. Perhaps he was just tired (he’d overslept, his stag-do went on after midnight), and nervous. It was a big day, his moonshot moment, at last Philip was marrying up into the Premier League of royalty. With his lint-coloured hair and his father’s sword, he appeared dignified, composed even and the new Duke’s timing was impeccable: when the fanfare trumpeted the arrival of his fairy bride he looked up and smiled at the Queen – “an inflated tangerine, her hat resembling a Don’s perked up with ill-gotten plumage”. His future mother-in-law was unmissable.
This was peak Family Monarchy, a brand established by avuncular George V thanks to his uxorious relationship with Mary and the new rule, passed in 1917, that their children no longer had to marry (foreign) royals but instead could marry English men and women. Finally romantic unions were on the cards and his son, Bertie, wasted no time in bagging a Scottish aristocrat, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons, the ninth child of the Earl of Strathmore, a woman later renowned for her boxy hats and self-styled title, the Queen Mother.
A reluctant king, George VI quickly capitalised on the one asset he enjoyed that his abdicating brother Edward didn’t: Bertie was the twentieth century’s archetypal family man. Loyal, devoted and doing his best with an appropriately unsexy wife Elizabeth (“just above the average country house type”) and two dear, identically dressed, unsophisticated daughters.
It was this familial idea that was relentless pumped during World War II. ‘Us four’, ‘The Firm’, stayed put in Britain and did their bit; they were photographed visiting bomb sites, surveying march-pasts and waving from their balcony. The shocking death of the Duke of Kent in a plane crash underscored the ‘one of us’ mentality. Even royalty understood what grief meant. This new opiate for the masses – a pin-up nuclear family – helped whitewash memories of the abdication and reasserted the Windsors’ popularity in the post-war era when peaches-and-cream Elizabeth and her dashing war hero husband took the brand to new, unexpected heights.
1947 was a record-breaking year for weddings. 401,201 couples crashed down the aisle with the average age of the bride falling to an unprecedented twenty-two. Elizabeth was even younger at twenty-one. Her wedding was the exemplar for all other weddings. The Princess, veiled, and Philip were reminded of their role in marriage by the Archbishop of York. In the Godly act of matrimony, apparently they were no different from any cottager in the Dales, (clearly a sermon written for a home audience). Marriage was an unselfish union: “Love must always be unselfish and unselfishness is the true secret of a happy marriage.” The Anglican Church saw their opportunity and seized it with both hands. Wedlock means “thoughtfulness and patience, ready sympathy and forbearance, talking over and sharing together.” This was heavy stuff; religious, quasi counsellor messaging that reminded a country where half a million houses had been destroyed that the British were a “people who have a deep and instinctive love of their homes.” One quarter of married couples still lived with their parents. Did it matter what the Archbishop said? Was anyone listening to the actual words? Or were they just focused on the sentiment, the soap opera, this wedding and their future wedding, royal hopes and their own dreams?
A “dream couple” – the Princess with her “wonderful complexion” and the Prince “so devastatingly handsome”, Elizabeth and Philip were perfect symbols of marital bliss. Their only lines were scripted, the only kiss they shared was private (in the Confessor’s Chapel where the Register was signed), even their hand writing conformed to gender norms. His signature “looped and tall and princely” and hers so “girlish” in comparison. The register beneath a glass top was later guarded by a police sergeant. The bouquet went on display as well (a little wilted but then everyone was tired). London had just thrown its first proper royal party since the coronation in 1937.
This very public springboard into one of the world’s most famous marriages came to define an era. Twenty-five years later, to mark her Silver Wedding Anniversary, the Queen would share the secret ingredients of their shared success – to work a Christian marriage required “tolerance and understanding.” These were words echoed by Philip twenty-five years later to mark the Golden Wedding Anniversary when he explained: “you can take it from me, the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.” Together the monarch and her Duke were the symbols for the last generation who got married and (mostly) stayed married come what may.
But by the end of the twentieth century society had irrevocably changed. The posh propensity to turn a blind eye to marital misdemeanours no longer washed in a culture where divorce was commonplace, and modern celebrity promised riches outside the royal club. Elizabeth and Philip would prove an impossible double act to live up to.
In his 1994 semi-authorised biography about the then Prince of Wales, Jonathan Dimbleby explores Charles’s early years; implicit is the idea that somehow the Prince’s remote upbringing explains the failure of his first marriage. But if any blame can be apportioned to his parents it was that they had pulled off their own marriage too successfully. The seeds of Charles and Diana’s failure partly lay in the reflective glory that Elizabeth and Philip’s union cast across a rapidly changing social scene and the expectations it produced. As the knotty intervening years have proved, family monarchy – a stunningly successful twentieth century brand that reached its apogee in November 1947- has finally run its course. What the new royal narrative for the twenty-first century will be is a question that is still waiting for an answer.
Dr. Tessa Dunlop is a historian, writer, broadcaster and the author of Elizabeth & Philip: A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy.
