In the August 1977 issue of Esquire, we explored all the things that made Queen Elizabeth II one of the most unique people on the planet.
This article originally appeared in the August 1977 issue of Esquire. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access.
The royal eyes are very blue. The royal skin is much admired. The royal smile is often fixed.
She is not shy with strangers.
She weighs one hundred nineteen pounds.
The queen is five feet four inches.
In certain smart London circles, she is known as The Big Chick.
In her presence, one curtsies or bows slightly from the neck, not from the waist.
One is not introduced, one is presented.
One does not shake hands with her. She shakes hands with you.
She does not pluck her eyebrows.
The royal hair is chestnut brown.
She likes people to stand up straight when they talk to her.
The queen speaks the King’s English in a rather high-pitched voice.
Officially, she has no opinions.
Her family call her Lilibet. Tradesmen and servants call her Your Majesty. Everyone else calls her ma’am.
On her mother’s side, she is primarily Scottish, with a mixture of English, Irish and Welsh blood. On her father’s side, she is predominantly German, with some Danish and Hungarian ancestry.
She is George Washington’s second cousin seven times removed. That is, she is nine generations in descent from Washington’s great-aunt Mary, wife of John Smith of Purton, Virginia.
She was born in London on Wednesday, April 21, 1926, at two-forty a.m.
Her name was Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of York.
She is the only British monarch to have been born in a private house with a street number.
For the first month of her life, the young princess was breast-fed.
At five weeks, she was christened in a private chapel in Buckingham Palace in a gold lily font filled with purified water from the River Jordan. She cried.
She did not see her parents for the second six months of her life.
During that period, her parents toured Australia and New Zealand and were presented with three tons of toys for her.
At the age of one, she shook hands with Lindbergh.
As a child, she was kept apart; she rarely saw a man with his hat on.
Like most members of her class, she was badly fed.
At the age of three, she was on the cover of Time for setting international nursery fashions.
The young princess’ menagerie included several Welsh corgis and Shetland collies, two fawns, fifteen blue budgerigars and some ponies.
As a child, she had a habit of jumping out of bed several times each night to check that her clothes were neatly arranged and that her shoes were set in order.
She kept detailed accounts of how she spent her shilling-a-week pocket money.
She never went to school.
A preacher in Scotland promised the young princess a book. Elizabeth thanked him and asked that it not be about God. “I know everything about Him,” she said.
The first biography of her was published when she was four.
On learning the phrase “my goodness,” she was told by her mother, the duchess of York, that it was not pretty and should not be repeated.
Elizabeth stood during many of her private lessons so that she would grow accustomed to standing for long periods of time without tiring.
The subjects that she disliked most were geography and maths.
The archbishop of Canterbury once discovered her leading her grandfather, King George V, by his beard—pretending he was a horse as he shuffled along the palace floor on his hands and knees.
She has ridden since the age of three.
She once said that if she ever became queen, she would make a law banning the riding of horses on Sunday, since horses should have holidays, too.
WHO WILL THE PRINCESS MARRY? first appeared as a headline when Elizabeth was four.
Asked, when she was twelve, with whom she would like to change places, she replied, “A horse.”
As a teenager, her favorite film stars were Gary Cooper and David Niven.
The young princess liked to listen to Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Her favorite tunes were Night and Day, Sentimental Journey and Jean Sablon’s swing arrangement of Sur le Pont d’Avignon.
She is fluent in French.
She met Prince Philip when she was thirteen.
She has loved only one man.
She would not have been permitted to marry a Roman Catholic.
She married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten R.N. when she was twenty-one.
Since the second year of their marriage, she and Prince Philip have slept in separate bedrooms.
She is not permitted to get divorced.
The night she became queen (February 5, 1952), she was sitting in brown slacks and a bush jacket in the branches of a giant fig tree in Kenya and watching the rhinoceroses coming out of the jungle to drink.
Like the queen for whom she was named, Elizabeth I, she succeeded to the throne at the age of twenty-five.
Unlike Elizabeth I, she does not rule—she reigns.
She is the sixth sovereign queen and the forty-second sovereign of England since William the Conqueror.
Her official title is Her Most Excellent Majesty by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
She is queen of eleven countries.
In England, she is Anglican. In Scotland, she is Presbyterian.
In the irreverent British press, she is known as Brenda, “a demure, upper-class housewife living mainly in London.”
She has never yawned in public.
Her morning alarm clock is a pipe major in Highland dress playing outside her window.
She is not permitted to vote.
She prefers plain English cooking.
Giving royal portrait commissions, she occasionally says as she enters the room, “Now then, with teeth or without?”
She maintains sixteen royal homes and palaces.
At Buckingham Palace, one man of her three-hundred-seventy-five-member household staff is employed to do nothing but wind up the three hundred palace clocks.
She has six hundred rooms in Buckingham Palace, ten thousand windows and more than a mile of corridors.
She once taught General Eisenhower the Highland fling.
She never breakfasts in bed.
She has a staff that waits on the staff.
Apart from the one-pound notes she puts in the church collection bag each Sunday, she rarely carries money.
The queen does not tolerate familiarity from anyone but members of her immediate family and childhood friends.
She has a weakness for chocolate mints.
She goes shopping once a year.
The queen gave birth to every one of her four children at home.
Deer stalking is one of her enthusiasms.
The royal tea is brewed from bottles of Malvern water, and the queen carries the bottles with her wherever she travels in the world.
Horse racing is her favorite sport.
She dislikes ivy, dictating letters, plane trees, spending more than an hour at lunch, magenta, waste and raw fish.
She likes things that last.
Whenever possible, she buys British.
Her rooms always contain freshly cut flowers. Among her favorites are pink carnations from Sandringham.
She never flies in helicopters.
She discourages presents from the public.
She finds the Turf Encyclopedia Britannica “completely absorbing.”
The royal family’s country clothes are worn until they are decently shabby.
Her staff is contractually forbidden to talk or to write about her personal life.
Her personal collection of paintings is particularly rich in works by Holbein, Van Dyck, Canaletto, Rembrandt and Rubens.
The value of her stamp collection is estimated at more than a million pounds.
She maintains one of the finest collections of objets d’art in the world.
She is the duke of Lancaster.
She can outwalk most men her age.
She is a stickler for punctuality.
Her favorite pastime is the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle.
Using a silver fork and spoon, the queen herself mixes the food for her corgis every day.
Her yacht, Britannia, has the largest crew of any yacht in the world.
She suffers from sinus trouble.
She feels most at home with her childhood friends and her horses.
Her signature is almost identical to her mother’s.
Other than breakfast, she eats less than half a dozen meals a year alone with her husband.
Her favorite colors are blue and green.
She has two separate birthdays, one public, one private.
She is good at jigsaw puzzles.
Since 1952, her horses have won some two hundred ten races.
The queen does not gamble.
The queen’s letters and telegrams are sent free.
She is the only person in the United Kingdom who pays no taxes.
The queen has three couturiers.
She rarely raises her voice.
She has her own private train, the Royal Train, and her own fleet of planes, the Queen’s Flight.
She entertains twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand guests a year at Buckingham Palace.
When she knighted Gordon Richards, the jockey, in 1953, the queen said to him, “Arise, Sir Gordon,” then smiled and added, “I see you had a good day at Brighton yesterday.”
A literary must for her each year is the new Dick Francis thriller.
The queen takes six weeks’ holiday at Christmas, four at Easter and two weeks in the late summer and early autumn.
One of her closest confidantes is her oldest friend, Bobo MacDonald, the queen’s dresser.
Her favorite lipstick is pinky red.
The queen prefers pine-scented soap.
She is often bored watching Prince Charles playing polo in Windsor Park.
The royal schedule is filled six months in advance.
At formal dinners, she changes the direction of the conversation after the second course.
She has never been known to lose her temper; rather, she tends to display cold looks of royal displeasure.
She is a colonel married to a colonel.
She is the second richest queen in the world.
She does not use the royal we, as in, “We are not amused.”
While driving in her limousine through crowded English streets, the main phrase she hears inside is, “Itsthequeen .... Itsthequeen .... Itsthequeen .... Itsthequeen .... Itsthequeen .... ”
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