![]() In an extraordinary existence, shared experience also offers understanding for the Queen, the company of family members holds out the possibility of unwinding and being off duty. Here, then, is the real key to the Queen’s closeness to her favourite cousins: blood ties offer the surest guarantee of trust in a life in which little is private. A secretary of the late Earl Mountbatten of Burma – himself a cousin through Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice – suggested that the Queen finds it “very difficult to relax unless she is surrounded by those with whom she feels at home”. Less to the fore is any examination of why, in some instances, her cousins have remained at the heart of the Queen’s circle. Not all necessarily spend a great deal of time with Her Majesty. With a keen ear for a soundbite – forthright Princess Olga describes Queen Mary as suffering from a ‘kind of upmarket kleptomania’ – its focuses are greater or lesser degrees of eccentricity and diversity: Lord Ivar Mountbatten’s second spouse is an airline cabin services director called James Coyle, while Victoria Pryer runs a delicatessen in north Norfolk. ITV’s The Queen and Her Cousins, screened next Thursday, trains the spotlight on a handful of Royal and non-Royal relatives, including Victoria Pryer, the daughter of a Scottish cousin, Margaret Rhodes, Princess Olga Romanoff, whose mother fancied her as a bride for Prince Charles, and Lord Ivar Mountbatten. Since both boys struggled to relax in the presence of their irascible royal grandfather, the gusto they brought to party games was almost certainly constrained. The only guests of Princess Elizabeth’s own age were her cousins, the Lascelles boys, afterwards a director of the Royal Opera House and president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club. Their guest list was dominated by royal uncles and aunts, the princess’s pink-iced birthday cake, made by the King’s chef, a sole concession to childishness. Family-only events and decidedly grown up, her birthday parties as a little girl were hosted at Windsor Castle by her grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary. Instead baby Princess Elizabeth celebrated with a carriage ride with her cousins George and Gerald Lascelles, the sons of her father’s sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and eight-year-old Alexander Ramsay, Elizabeth’s third cousin once removed, who inspired the naming of her first canary, Sandy. Absent on tour in Australia, her parents missed her first birthday. Then there were second and third cousins, like Princesses Ingrid and Sybilla, on her father’s side offspring of a ‘Royal mob’ that extended across continental Europe from Russia and Romania in the east to Spain in the west, from the northern monarchies of Norway and Sweden to Greece’s imported German-Danish dynasty in the south, on her mother’s side a tight-knit web of Scottish aristocrats.Īs a small child, the Queen’s social life was dominated by these extended family members. The Queen’s father had four siblings who survived to adulthood, her mother eight: so from birth the Queen was richly endowed with first cousins. ![]() Ingrid was also a granddaughter of Elizabeth’s elderly godfather, her great-great-uncle, the Duke of Connaught.įamily, especially her extended cousinhood, has always played an important role in the Queen’s life so it was only a matter of time before TV producers identified in this extended clan for frothy entertainment. ![]() Both were also Elizabeth’s cousins, great-granddaughters of Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. ![]() ![]() Older bridesmaids included Princess Ingrid of Sweden and Princess Sybilla of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Our future Queen was described then as standing “on a pew, chatting to the other three juvenile bridesmaids”, among whom was another second cousin, Lady Mary Cambridge. Newspapers labelled it her first official public appearance’ It was Octoand, at the tiny village church of St Mary, Balcombe, five-year-old Princess Elizabeth of York, afterwards Elizabeth II, was one of 12 bridesmaids at the wedding of Lady May Cambridge, her second cousin. ![]()
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