She managed to celebrate her son’s first birthday, but afterward she was abroad, and separated from her son, for long intervals. Yet she was often away from Charles in his infancy, spending as much time as she could with her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, an officer in the Royal Navy, who was posted to Malta in October 1949. Delighted with her firstborn, Elizabeth breast-fed him for two months, until she contracted measles and was forced to stop. The Archbishop of Canterbury doused the little prince with water from the river Jordan that had been poured into the gold Lily Font, designed by Prince Albert and used for all of his and Queen Victoria’s children. In December, four-week-old Charles was christened beneath the ornate dome of the Music Room at Buckingham Palace. It was only when her father unexpectedly took the throne, in 1936, on the abdication of his older brother, King Edward VIII, that Princess Elizabeth assumed her position as next in line. “Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being born, he was being looked at by outsiders-but with great affection and good will.”Ĭharles was hemmed in by high expectations and scrutiny from the start-unlike his mother, who had 10 relatively carefree years of childhood. “Just a plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s private secretary. Under the 46-foot-high ceilings-juxtaposed with the monarch’s massive throne draped in red-and-gold embroidered velvet-the infant was swaddled in white blankets and placed in a simple cot for viewing by the royal courtiers who served his grandfather King George VI and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth. While his 22-year-old mother, Princess Elizabeth, rested in her bedroom suite in Buckingham Palace, her newborn heir was brought to the vast gilded ballroom by the royal midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Before the stroke of midnight on November 14, 1948, Prince Charles Philip Arthur George officially became public property.
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