Queen Elizabeth II Archives | Richard M. Langworth

HM’s Nazi Salute: Relevant to What?

18 July 2015 Comments 0 Comments

Stiff-Arm Salute: Must We Know Everything?

Claiming it is “historically relevant,” the Sun defended publication of a six-year-old Princess Elizabeth, coached by her mother the future Queen Elizabeth and her uncle the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII, still later the Duke of Windsor) raising her arm in the stiff salute now identified with the Nazi party. It’s “in the public interest,” wails the Sun.

It’s in the interest of selling newspapers. Buckingham Palace responded:

“Most people will see these pictures in their proper context and time. This is a family playing and momentarily referencing a gesture many would have seen from contemporary news reels. No one at that time had any sense how the salute would evolve.…

60 Years On: “A Sparkling Presence at its Summit”

3 June 2012 Comments 0 Comments

“We may think of Churchill as an amiable or even reverent agnostic, who conceived of himself not as a pillar of the church but perhaps as a flying buttress. He did not invoke the Deity casually or cynically, a fact which confers its own interest upon his touching and heartfelt reply to the Queen’s letter following his retirement as prime minister in April 1955.

“The monarchy signified for Churchill something of infinite value, at once numinous and luminous; and if you will allow the remark in parenthesis, ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimes long for someone at the summit of our public life who can think and write at that level?” —Professor David Dilks

Our Island no longer holds the same authority or power that it did in the days of Queen Victoria.…