By Alan Cowell
Elizabeth, the child on the right, in 1936, the year that King George V, her grandfather, died and King Edward VIII, her uncle, abdicated.Credit...Associated Press
In a way, the mystique of the monarchy was no surprise: The queen was born into a world apart. She never attended school or classes; she was brought up and educated at home by nannies, governesses and private tutors.
From the beginning, her encounters with the public were scripted and limited. From the moment her uncle King Edward VIII abdicated in a scandal over his relationship with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson in 1936 — when the future queen was 10 — she entered a line of succession that set her far apart from Britons as a figurehead-in-waiting.
When her father, King George VI, died, she was 25, a young woman whose known interests were limited to horseback riding and tending to her entourage of corgis.
But it was that upbringing, steeped in the values of a monarchy that had faced none of the pressures of the television era and postwar Britain, that made her often seem grudgingly slow to adapt to a world much different from the one she had been born into.
The Young Princess
Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, daughter of the Duchess and Duke of York, was born on Bruton Street in central London in the early hours of April 21, 1926. At her birth she was third in line to the throne after her uncle and father, but the prospect of her attaining the crown seemed remote.
