The Queen Mother, who had been a great friend and who had, Crawfie maintained, given her permission to write the account, never spoke to her again. Although hers was a touching account of the childhood of the Queen and Princess Margaret, Crawfie was demonized by the press.
It has been called the original "nanny diaries" because it was the first account of life with the Royals ever published. The Little Princesses was first published in 1950 to a furor we cannot imagine today. Beginning at the quiet family home in Piccadilly and ending with the birth of Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace in 1948, Crawfie tells how she brought the princesses up to be "Royal," while attempting to show them a bit of the ordinary world of underground trains, Girl Guides, and swimming lessons.
Enter Marion Crawford, a twenty-four-year-old from Scotland who was promptly dubbed "Crawfie" by the young Elizabeth and who would stay with the family for sixteen years. They already had a nanny-a family retainer who had looked after their mother when she was a child-but it was time to add someone younger and livelier to the household. In the early thirties, the Duke and Duchess of York were looking for someone to educate their daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, then five- and two-years-old. The Little Princesses shows us how it all began. The family moved to Buckingham Palace, and ten-year-old Princess Elizabeth became the heir to the crown she would ultimately wear for over fifty years. Suddenly the little princesses' father was King. We all know how the fairy tale ended: When King George died, "Uncle David" became King Edward VIII-who abdicated less than a year later to marry the scandalous Wallis Simpson. Their father was the Duke of York, the second son of King George V, and their Uncle David was the future King of England. Once upon a time, in 1930s England, there were two little princesses named Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. Royal Discord seeks to redress the balance and restore the members of this remarkable family - with their undoubted strengths and their undeniable weaknesses - to a fitting place in the pageant of not just British but European history.ĬLICK HERE TO GET BOOK Book The Little Princesses Description/Summary: And their four sisters are even less remembered.
Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange is the only English princess ever to rule in her own right in a foreign country but she is virtually unknown. His brother, the Duke of Cumberland, has been dismissed simply as the Butcher of Culloden and his lifetime achievements overlooked. To make matters worse, Frederick has usually been viewed through the distorting glass of his father's often unreasonable animosity rather than for his actual contribution. This, and the tendency of European royalty to use a very limited number of Christian names, has caused a genealogical 'blurring' that has erased the family of George II from the consciousness of history. The family has been further neglected because the early death of his eldest son, Frederick, the Prince of Wales, meant that the succession passed to George's grandson, the familiar 'mad' George III. It has been said that he was the first British king to wield little real power, but he was the first genuinely to understand the concept of constitutional monarchy and allow his ministers to guide him, although he certainly made them suffer in the process. He was a German, the last British monarch to have been born outside of Great Britain, but by the end of his long reign the House of Hanover was firmly established as the British ruling family, while the dangerous and more legitimate claims of the Stuarts had finally been laid to rest. The family of George II has been ill-served by history and by most historians. CLICK HERE TO GET BOOK Book Royal Discord Description/Summary: