OUR FUTURE QUEEN

By WILSON HARRIS

pRINCESS ELIZABETH will be seventeen next Wednesday, which means that she is ceasing to be a child. Her life has so far, most rightly, been spent in her home rather than in the public eye, and her future subjects know relatively little of her, apart from the admirable broadcast talk she gave three years ago, to the children of the Empire, at home and overseas, when she was only fourteen. Now that the Princess stands on the threshold of public life, they may feel some natural desire to know something of how she is being prepared for the high office that will one day be hers, and the Queen has shown a gracious readiness to make available such information as is relevant for that purpose.

It is more than a century, though not much more, since a girl of seventeen stood first in succession to the Throne, and some com- parison between the heir-presumptive of that day and the heir-pre- sumptive of this is not only inevitable but instructive. What part Princess Victoria's native qualities, and what part the training she received, played respectively in fitting her for the great responsibili- ties she so greatly sustained is not to be precisely estimated. What is certain is that with one arguable exception she was the greatest Queen this country has known, and among its greatest sovereigns. Yet in all but one respect—a childhood shadowed by a war, which has cut off the opportunity of foreign travel at an age when its educational value would be great—the advantage is with the Princess of today. First and foremost, she is far more fortunate in her parentage and early surroundings. The Duke of Kent had his qualities, but all his associations were German, and his wholly German wife was a well-meaning but limited woman. The secluded household at Kensington, then well outside London, was permeated by the influence of the German Fradlein Lehzen, the German Prince Leopold, the Duchess of Kent's brother, and the half-German Baron Stockmar. (Sir John Conroy did nothing to offset it, for the Princess most cordially disliked him.)

Princess Elizabeth was born in a house in a London street, and spent most of the first ten years of her life in a house in another London street, Piccadilly, with cars and buses and taxis—all that makes up the swift and shifting life of London—speeding ceaselessly past its windows day and night. It was the comfort of an English home like a thousand others, rather than the luxury, or imagined luxury, of a palace. There the Princess was taught to read by her mother. Till she was seven her education was confined to reading and writing (Princess Victoria was tutored in the latter by the writing-master of Westminster School), French, the piano and dancing. Then Miss Crawford, Scottish, an Edinburgh graduate, well-travelled, a lover of fresh air and exercise, was brought south to institute a very different tutelage from that exercised over the Princess of the 5820's by Fratilein Lehzen. But King George's two daughters—for Princess Elizabeth is happily not, like Princess Vic- toria, an only child—are well-provided with teachers of special sub- jects, such as French, German and music. Princess Elizabeth today reads history with the Vice-Provost of Eton, on the basis of such works as Trevelyan's History of England, which could not be im- proved on, and Muzzey's History of the United States, which for this particular purpose possibly could (but how many English girls of sixteen read American history at all?), together with European history in outline. In Biblical history Canon Crawley, of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, has been her guide. A natural linguist, she speaks

French and German fluently and with an excellent accent. She has read some Moliere, some Corneille, some Daudet, and she knows many of " Les Cent Meilleurs Poemes Francais " by heart.

The Princess's explorations in the field of English literature are of greater interest, and perhaps greater significance. Time for read- ing at large is limited, for the formal educational regimen is treated seriously. But in or out of " school hours " she has read most of Shakespeare ; The Canterbury Tales ; a good deal of Coleridge, Keats, Browning and Tennyson ; some of Scott, Dickens, Jane Austen, Trollope and R.L.S. ; while in lighter moments she turns to Conan Doyle (I hope The White Compqny as well as Sherlock Holmes), John Buchan (I hope Montrose as well as Greenmantle), and P. G. Wodehouse (whose hold was as potent over a Prime Minister of seventy as over a Princess not yet seventeen). That is a wide and wholesome range, that would provide a sound basis of literary knowledge and taste for any girl in her last year of school. Compare Princess Victoria writing (when on the verge of seventeen) to Uncle Leopold about Sully's Memoirs, in which she finds " a great deal which applies to the present times," and, a little earlier, of Russell's Modern Europe and Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. The advantage again is with our Princess of today.

But life has more sides than the literary, and no picture of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret would be just which neglected the delight they take in riding and swimming, in music and singing, in holidays on the moors round Balmoral, and—in the country, where they moved from London early in the war—the production of a pantomime ; one has been achieved with marked success and another is in rehearsal now. Here in some respects heredity can be traced ; Princess Victoria was a skilful horsewoman, a good musician, and a singularly keen dancer. But there is no reason to suppose that she was .a swimmer, and much reason to suppose that she was not. Princess Elizabeth was professionally taught, passed her life-saving tests and gained her badges at the Bath Club, and finds water— with pennies to dive for and the crawl-stroke to practise—a hardly less natural element than air. As is generally known, she was a Guide for years—till the war in a company composed mainly of children living in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, and since then its the country, where local children and others from an evacuated school form the nucleus. Now the Princess is a Sea Ranger, and gets manifest interest and enjoyment from the weekly meetings. The scope of the Rangers is wide. A system of pre- war training has been developed, known as Home Emergency Service, which includes First Aid and Home Nursing, Child Welfare, and various forms of Civil Defence. Princess Elizabeth is concerning herself particularly with the last, and acquiring incidentally a good all-round knowledge of electricity. It may be added that she listens regularly to the wireless, and follows the war news closely. In that connexion another parallel presents itself. " Strong sympathy with the Army is a main characteristic of her career," wrote Sir Sidney Lee of the Princess Victoria. "Another trait in the Princess's character," writes one who knows Princess Elizabeth well, "which certainly comes down through generations on the King's side, is the love of the Army and its tradition "—in particular, naturally, of the Grenadier Guards, of which she is Colonel.

Such has been and is the childhood of our future sovereign. As has been said, it is right that her future subjects should know some-

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thing of it, enough to assure them that the Princess is being fitted in body and mind against the day—still, we trust, far distant— when the vast responsibilities that attach to the headship of the British Commonwealth will rest on her. A constitutional sovereign's office is no sinecure. There are always State papers to master. Decisions of real moment may be called for. Resignations of Ministries have to be accepted, involving an invitation to someone, not always plainly indicated by circumstance, to form a new Cabinet. King George the.Fifth, the moment 'he succeeded, had to grapple with an acute political controversy. These are not contingencies for which a girl of seventeen can or ought to be specifically prepared. It is enough that she should acquire a working knowledge of the history and constitutional practice of her country, and that her character should develop a quiet strength that can be drawn on as need arises.

That belongs to the Princess's inner life, about which it would be an impertinence to say a word. Of her outer life we know something—as, for example, that she was confirmed at Windsor in March last year—and we shall know more as the moment approaches when she will be appearing more often with her parents, or even without them, on public occasions. That we have known relatively little hitherto is matter rather for satisfaction than regret, for it means that her childhood has been wisely guarded and sheltered, and her personality allowed to develop as it would, unstrained by any undue consciousness of status. " The fierce light which beats upon a throne " probably oppresses King George, and oppressed his father, little, but youth should be spared that white illumination so far as may be. The Princess may have years of service as Heir Presumptive before her. She may at any moment by the caprice of fate be summoned to the most exalted position in these realms. We can rejoice to know how well the preparation for either lot has been achieved by a training that has never threatened to dim the freshness or mar the simplicity of her girlhocd.