Mother of Four

By Melvin Maddocks

MAJESTY: ELIZABETH II AND

THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

by ROBERT LACEY

349 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$12.95.

Shortly after Elizabeth II began her reign, John Osborne, king of the Angry Young Men, took time between hit plays to pronounce the British monarchy moribund--"A gold filling in a mouth full of decay." But how unpredictable history can be, as kings and queens are the first to know. Osborne has long since been dethroned, while Her Majesty --cresting on '70s nostalgia and God only knows what other divine rights --has never been more popular.

Biographer Robert Lacey's task is to relate the woman who happens to live in Buckingham Palace to this "flourishing of the British constitutional monarchy"--one of the more "curious social phenomena of the 20th century," as he rightly observes. It is no easy job, and the word paradox gets used freely. In the end, Lacey, the author of a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh (and a staffer on the London Sunday Times), has spread his cloak over the puddle and gallantly invented a second Elizabeth to walk across it. If this act of prestidigitation is not a work of art, it is a work of considerable artifice.

Sensible Shoes. In effect, Lacey has treated Elizabeth as a minor character in a Jane Austen novel. An "unassuming mother of four" who dotes on a "quiet life in the country surrounded by horses and dogs," she tramps over for tea in her sensible shoes and serves modestly to swell a scene or two, mostly by making other people look brilliant. But how to turn her into a heroine?

Even as a child, "Lillibet," as royal baby talk dubbed her, proves a hard act for Lacey to humanize. It is as if she were born with her crown on. Her grandfather George V had written to her father George VI: "Now that you are five years old I hope you will always try and be obedient and do at once what you are told, as you will find it will come much easier to you the sooner you begin." The advice helped give her father a lifelong case of the stammers. Elizabeth appears to have thrived on it, suffering nothing worse than an occasional sinus attack. By the time she was eight she was joining in on the royal discipline, chiding Sister Margaret Rose, age 4, for exposing too much leg in public.

Ginger Cookies. What can a poor legendmaker do with a late 20th century woman whose avowed model is Queen Victoria? By way of apology, Lacey theorizes that the sepulchral gloom of blacked-out Windsor Castle during World War II helped turn a "serious child into a serious girl." Certainly nobody could work harder than Lacey to put a little color in the girl's cheeks. He makes the most of her first meeting at 13, over ginger cookies and lemonade, with the brilliantly blue-eyed naval cadet who was to become her husband. Whenever possible the subject is shown to smile. The jolly shrieks of bathtime splash parties as a child are succeeded by laughter rolling under the royal couple's bedroom door at night--at least according to the guards posted there. The Queen, Lacey maintains, is a fun girl at charades. He does not neglect to point out her kicking off her shoes while initialing documents at her desk or, kerchief on head, chopping up meat for her beloved corgis.

Still, nothing can keep the portrait from coming out a negative. Her Majesty's surest instinct is for what is not done; her habitual expression is the absence of an expression. Her strength, Lacey is driven to argue in an ultimate paradox, is "the absence of a forceful . . . personality."

Scrambling to disguise his and her dilemma, Lacey describes everything colorful that surrounds his royally willed vacuum, from the 15 blue budgerigars she owned as a child to members of the family less addicted to duty: the court scamps. Uncle Edward ("the rogue factor") and his Wally. Sister Margaret and her Peter and her Tony. Even the fairly well-behaved Philip; for with his "compulsion to keep everyone around him laughing," he also favors a style of persuasion, Lacey warns, that "verges on thuggery."

Unlike them, this thoroughly admirable, thoroughly ordinary Queen has no apparent need to be "a modern person in an ancient institution." Does the Age of Me want an archaic model of unquestioning dutifulness and near total self-abnegation? It has one in the woman now on the throne, and Lacey may be correct when, in a last desperate attempt to dramatize his subject, he looks ahead another 25 years and prophesies, "Elizabeth II is made to be an inspiring old Queen." Melvin Maddocks

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