What It Takes To Be Royal

Five years into Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, and with the Commonwealth of Nations still in its infancy, Reader's Digest was invited to go behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace with the world’s most influential royalty

- FRANCIS DRAKE AND KATHARINE DRAKE

AT ADMIRALTY ARCH IN LONDON, a bobby [a British police officer] is holding back traffic, extending the right of way for a sprightly horse-drawn carriage whose maroon door panels display the royal arms. Inside the carriage are some worn red-leather cases—the Queen’s boxes, containing top-secret reports and memoranda flown in daily from all over the world. At Buckingham Palace, a Queen’s messenger descends with the boxes—one of them a top priority Foreign Office box—and carries them through nearly half a mile of corridors to a room on the second floor of the palace.

This famous room is the Queen’s ‘office’. About 99 per cent living room, it is spacious and handsome, with a subtle colour scheme of green and oyster grey, against which the light reflects a rich gleam from period porcelains, crystal, gold leaf, silver and glossy tabletops. Staring down from the walls, some dozen ancestors, combining looks of melancholy virtue with heavy, full-lipped mouths, share a family resemblance.

This is a feminine room—all that challenges it is a man-size mahogany desk, right-angled in a huge bay window overlooking the palace garden. The desk is awash in official-looking papers and, from it a wall of photographs juts up, a cheerful hodgepodge of children, family groups, uniforms, wedding gowns, boats, dogs, horses.

Sitting at this desk, pen in hand, brows puckered, is one of the most remarkable young women of our time— Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. But neither hereditary titles nor the documents before her reflect Elizabeth’s personal record of achievement—the fact that in five brief years her effort and personality have made her the best-loved, best-known, most traveled, most energetically dedicated sovereign in the history of the realm.