I spent last weekend with friends in Bran, the favourite mountain refuge of Queen Marie of Romania in her later years. I’m reading her biography at the moment, and came across a lovely entry in her diary in 1934. Queen Marie was in the UK in the spring of that year to promote her book, ‘The Story of My Life’. When she was in Scotland she visited the Duke of York (who became King George VI two years later) and his family. Marie was entranced by his daughters, and especially his eldest daughter who must have been eight years old at the time. “Little Elizabeth”, she wrote “is just as adorable as she was always said to be. A quite perfect child, friendly, polite, unselfconscious, amiable & intelligent and into the bargain pretty. Little Margaret Rose is a replica in small and is also a delicious child. I fell in love with the whole family.”
This year, ‘Little Elizabeth” has celebrated her Diamond Jubilee – sixty years on the throne of the United Kingdom. In all the many tributes that have been paid to Her Majesty The Queen, I find Queen Marie’s particularly apposite. She recognised in her eight-year old cousin just the set of qualities that would make Queen Elizabeth II so successful as our Head of State. Perhaps it takes a Queen to know a Queen!
