Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who has died at the age of 101, was the Mother Earth and Mother Courage of her family during almost 80 years of public life. She was queen for fewer than 15 years, during a period which is now beginning to pass out of living memory. Yet her personal popularity continued through half a century of widowhood, unimpaired by changing public reactions to her children and grandchildren, and their mostly broken marriages.
Her contribution to the popularity of the royal family for much of the last century was immeasurable. Her death will be - for all those who (as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales indicated) still read the clock of their own lives partly by royal events - one of the greatest breaches in continuity since the death of Queen Victoria, during whose reign she was born.
In her later years, with her family's reputation in flux, she came to be a less central figure, more of a survivor on the sidelines jauntily weathering falls and illnesses. With her eldest daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, she was, however, always a talisman of the family's good name. Her deliberately small-scale 100th birthday celebration in Horse Guards' Parade, London, on July 19 2000, a parade which recapitulated most of the events of her century, was seen by 7m viewers, just under 50% of all people watching television that night.
When she married the Duke of York (later King George VI) on April 23 1923, her impact on the crowds was comparable to that of Diana's 58 years later. She had been reluctant to marry royalty - "afraid never, never again to be free to think, speak and act as I feel I really ought to". But having accepted the life, she threw herself into it, and carried her husband through the trauma of the 1936 abdication, which brought him to the throne. She matured into the steadfast support of a shy, stammering, but equally steadfast man, who led his country through the second world war and became, in his time, a widely loved monarch. She herself became better at the bland rituals of public duty than any other member of the royal family.
History will probably honour her best for her reply in 1940 - after Buckingham Palace had been bombed while the family was at home - to advice that she should follow other wealthy people in sending her daughters to Canada until the end of the war. She said: "The children will not leave unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does; and the king will not leave the country in any circumstances." She also said of the bombing: "Now at last I can look the East End in the face."
Yet what those who saw her in later life on television, or in the flesh, may find it hardest and saddest to forget is her compulsive informality, her knack of giving the most pretentious function the air of a jumble sale, in the midst of which she would stand, beaming toothily and talking, nineteen to the dozen, with legs placed comfortably apart, and one hand in the air to emphasise a point. At times, she could be uncannily like her pet television character, Ena Sharples of Coronation Street, in a good mood; and at times, as a pop newspaper put it, like "a Gainsborough lady with a hint of a pearly queen".
If one of her favourite texts came from the mysticism of Julian of Norwich ("All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well"), another was a long- preserved press cutting which, amid a wilderness of misplaced pronouns, described her launching a battleship. "On the dais," it said, "stood the Queen, chatting to the bishop, and waving to the crowd. Suddenly - silently - she was in the sea, surrounded by a mass of broken wreckage and the comments of dockyard workers."
Virtually the most serious criticism made of her was unpunctuality, about which she was mostly unrepentant: "They are never ready for one," she would say. The worst gossip spread about her was that she was timorous in dealing with family disputes, mean about paying bills and over-partial to whisky and soda, or gin and tonic in later life. Guests at a Clarence House party shortly before the 1996 opening of parliament were impressed with her relish for martinis.
The story that, when kept waiting for her evening cocktail, she once phoned down to her Clarence House footmen - "I don't know what you two old queens are doing down there, but this old queen is dying of thirst" - is in character. She was partial to the company of homosexuals, such as the playwright Noël Coward, and liked having them on her staff. In return, she was treated as something of a gay icon.
In her last years, her frailty was unconcealable by willpower or make-up. But, if her reserves of energy were running out, her reserves of public regard and respect continued to run deep. Her legend stood undented during the royalty-knocking journalism of the 1990s.
She became a spectre which haunted republicans. In 1993, the novelist Ian McEwan forecast, to a mostly anti-royal conference convened by the Times during a near-collapse in the family's esteem after the disclosure of Charles' and Diana's adulteries: "The outpouring of grief when the Queen Mother dies will be great and there could be a great renewal in the monarchy." The author A N Wilson said: "When one considers the charmlessness and tastelessness of the family into which she married, there can be no doubt who the miracle-worker was."
Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was born at St Paul's Waldenbury, the Hertfordshire house of her parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She was the ninth child, of 10, in an ancient and gregarious Scots family. The Strathmores' seat was the old royal hunting lodge of Glamis Castle, near Forfar, in the Scottish lowlands (Macbeth was not a direct ancestor). The dynasty was founded when Robert II of Scotland married his daughter to his secretary, Sir John Lyon, in the late 14th century.
The family, once the richest in Scotland, spent its fortune in the civil war. During the 18th century, it recovered by intermarrying with a wealthy Durham family, the Bowes. By the time of Elizabeth's father, the 14th earl, the family was not counted wealthy. It was referred to as "impoverished" and lived a socially unambitious, if comfortable, life. Her father worked in the grounds wearing an old coat tied with string. "We did all the usual country-life things together," said Elizabeth's younger brother David. "We looked after our gardens and our bantams, played indifferent tennis and in London went to the theatre."
Elizabeth was taught by a governess, mainly in domestic science, painting, dancing, the piano and French and German (as queen, she broadcast in French to occupied France). She grew up addicted to charades and mimicry, a good ballroom dancer in a group of girl partygoers nicknamed the "Mad Hatters". She was carefree and notably easy in manner, "bird-happy", as the novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote of one of her contemporaries. But it was not an unshadowed upbringing. One brother, Fergus, was killed at Loos in 1915. "It must be splendid to die like that," a friend wrote to her. Two others were wounded in the first world war, and one taken prisoner. Four of her brothers and sisters died before reaching adulthood.
The words "duty", "character" and "endurance" recur through her sayings, as they do through the lives of many less privileged members of her generation. Although she shrank from illness, injury and bad news in general, she made her first reputation as an effective welfare worker when Glamis was turned into a war hospital for five years during her adolescence.
She was never one of the promiscuous debutante set which tried to scintillate around the Prince of Wales, Prince Edward, after the first world war was over. Her father had been put off by gossip about Edward's philandering with married women, and by the gambling and drinking of his group. "If there is one thing I have determined for my children, it is that they shall never have any sort of post about the court," he said. Her future mother-in-law, Queen Mary, said of the adolescent Elizabeth: "She is not one of those modern girls, thank goodness."
According to one convincing theory, Queen Mary had singled Elizabeth out from youth as a potential bride for the younger prince, Albert, Duke of York, known as "Bertie", and later George VI. The couple met as children; he was a close friend of her elder brothers, a visitor to a house which was a liberating contrast to his own home. His mother was so shy that she barely spoke in public during 25 years as queen. His father, George V, ran the monarchy like clockwork, but was so inhibited that Mary once complained that he was incapable of saying to her in person what he wrote in formal love letters on her birthdays.
A friend called Prince Albert, in his mid-20s, "the least self-pleased person in the world". He had inherited his father's perfectionism; but he was introspective, highly strung and entirely overshadowed by his elder brother, Prince Edward. The more earnest and hard-working of the two, he had proved himself in the navy during the first world war. In peacetime, he founded and fostered a chain of industrial boys' clubs. Yet he was "greatly cut off" by a stammer which proved impervious to therapy. He was beginning to develop the despair of the chronic stammerer - the fear that the defect might be mental in origin and incurable.
In theory, he was the second most eligible bachelor in the country. In practice, his father had to warn him that Elizabeth might never accept him. When she did so at the third time of asking, when she was 22 and he 27, he cabled pathetically to his parents from Hertfordshire: "It's all right." She was to say later: "I felt it my duty to marry Bertie, and fell in love with him afterwards."
He was the first prince of the royal blood since Richard II to become engaged to a commoner. For his parents, this was an advantage. The obsessive 19th-century intermarriage of British and European royalty had done nothing to prevent the worst war in history; all it had meant was that one's relatives kept popping up, embarrassingly, on the other side.
Elizabeth was unknown to press and public, but her popularity was established at speed. She was a great novelty - a member of the royal family who smiled in public. The wedding, on April 26 1923, was the first marriage of a king's son since 1382 to be held outside a royal chapel. It drew extraordinary (for the time) crowds to Westminster Abbey. That night, a guest at the Bowes-Lyon clan's wedding party was one of the few people to pay any attention to the bridegroom. "Thank God she has married a good man," he said. In mid-honeymoon, Elizabeth caught whooping cough.
Her personality won her concessions made to no previous guest of George V. The biographer Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote: "To no one else would the king have said - as he did when his son and daughter-in-law arrived two minutes late for dinner and she apologised, 'You are not late, my dear. I think we must have sat down two minutes too early.'" When the old king died, Elizabeth said in a letter to his doctor: "Unlike his own children, I was never afraid of him."
Soon after the marriage, Albert embarked on a new speech therapy, which meant long sessions of daily practice for them both. He ventured to take on more public speaking duties, with his wife always sitting nearby, her lips moving in time with his. His speech improved to the point where, in 1927, George V decided to risk sending the couple on their first major assignment, the opening of the Australian federal parliament. The Australian prime minister, Stanley Bruce, was openly disgusted at the king's choice. He and his public had wanted the Prince of Wales, who had made a wildly successful tour seven years earlier.
The Yorks' visit meant that the duke and duchess missed seven of the first 14 months in the life of their first child, the present Queen Elizabeth. Early on, it seemed to be the young duchess who was drawing the crowds. Albert once drove through the streets without her, and went unrecognised. It seemed to confirm his lifelong pessimism about himself. "They don't want to see me," he said.
Then his wife went down with tonsilitis. After initially wanting to cancel the tour, he continued alone. He got overwhelmingly good receptions and delivered the opening speech in parliament at Canberra - under film lights - with scarcely a falter. An Australian reporter following the trip found that, almost everywhere, people liked Albert better than his brother. "This fellow's trying to do his job better than the other," was one remark. The birth of the duke's self-confidence is dated from that time; gradually, as they were given more public duties, and Elizabeth had another daughter, their friends felt that it was she who was beginning to lean on him for support.
Nevertheless, during the abdication crisis nine years later, serious consideration was given to passing on the throne to his younger brother, the Duke of Kent. Neither Albert's elder brother, then Edward VIII, nor the king's advisers, nor the government, believed that he could cope with - as Edward put it - the public strain and private drudgery of a constitutional monarch's work. According to one account, it was Elizabeth's popularity that tipped the scales.
On December 11 1936, Albert came to the throne, taking the name George VI, with Elizabeth as Queen Consort and last Empress of India. "I'm afraid there are going to be great changes in our lives, Crawfie," she told the children's nanny. The Independent Labour MP, James Maxton, tabled a Commons motion to replace the monarchy with a republic; it was defeated by 403 votes to 5.
They were crowned on May 12 1937, with three Indian maharajahs riding as honorary aides-de-camp ahead of a golden coach. Elizabeth's throne at Westminster Abbey was placed level with the king's. She was the first queen consort to be appointed a counsellor of state, one of the tiny group authorised to sign royal papers as a deputy to the monarch, and the first queen since Victoria to hold investitures. Economics and Latin were added to the tutorial curriculum of the young Elizabeth as heir to the throne. The princesses got used to having parents who worked office hours over black boxes. David Bowes-Lyon said: "Nothing in the abdication cut so deep as the changed future for their children."
In his farewell broadcast, the abdicated King Edward had said of his brother: "He has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me, a happy home with his wife and children." But Elizabeth refused to meet or to forgive Edward or his American divorcee wife, the Duchess of Windsor, for years afterwards.
It was from the start an earnest monarchy, if not as informal as the Dutch royal family. Elizabeth made housing a special interest; she paid a series of unofficial visits to poorer parts of London. When they opened the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, the couple were at the function for only four hours and spent two days touring unemployment relief schemes in Scotland. Soon after their successful 1939 tour of north America - Elizabeth said "it made us"- they were inspecting gas masks and barrage balloons. As she left London by train to launch the liner Queen Elizabeth, she saw the first children being evacuated from the capital.
Among their private concerns after the war was their daughter Elizabeth's engagement to Prince Philip of Greece, which immediately followed a family tour of South Africa in the last year - 1947 - when it could be treated as a respectable member of the Commonwealth. A return visit to Australia was planned for 1949, but it had to be cancelled because of the king's illnesses. As early as May 1940, a 50-year-old working-class woman who kept diaries for Mass Observation, the forerunner of opinion polls, reported hearing "on every side pitying remarks about the worn and tired looks of the king. He looks far from being a strong man and it must be weary to be a king."
Crowds looking through the windows of George VI's car, as he toured during the late 1940s, saw a greying, spent man with cadaverous cheeks. In middle age, he was already being referred to as "the old king". In 1949, Elizabeth took over his public duties, asking "to be granted not a lighter load but a stronger back". He died on February 6 1952, the long struggle for achievement over. The cause was lung cancer.
Mass Observation's collated accounts found an intensity of public regret probably not equalled since the death of Queen Victoria. Elizabeth said in her public message three days after the funeral: "He loved you all, every one of you, most truly. Now I am left alone to do what I can to honour that pledge without him." The Times said that no monarch in history had owed more to his wife.
With her eldest daughter prematurely on the throne, Elizabeth was expected to fade into the future of a Clarence House dowager widow, like Queen Mary - a future of embroidery and the occasional unstressful public appearance. She did go through a period of depression and loneliness. She bought and renovated the tiny Castle of Mey, on the Caithness coast, as a retirement retreat. In 1954, however, she was asked to go alone to the US to receive the proceeds of an educational fund collected in honour of her husband. The visit was a success, with cab and truck drivers in New York and Washington shouting her name out in the street. Wartime gratitude had lasted. She was still in demand.
In the first decade of widowhood, Elizabeth toured - thanks to the advent of jet travel - 22 countries, far more than in her 28 years of marriage. She became the family's trouper and globetrotter. She was the first royal to fly by Comet; and 20 years later the first to go by Concorde. She was the Mambo Kazi (big mother) to Rhodesian chiefs in 1957, the "queen of mothers" to the Canadian government in 1958, a rainmaker to some of the Masai in Kenya in 1959 and (briefly) a hula-hula dancer in Honolulu in 1966.
In 1966 she underwent a serious operation for an abdominal obstruction. Thereafter her overseas travel was restricted. But in a representative later year, 1970, she carried out 211 public engagements in Britain and was an often active president or patron of over 300 organisations ranging from Dr Barnardo's to the Salmon and Trout Association.
In early widowhood, she managed, through her industry, to take over some of the workload during her elder daughter Elizabeth's family-forming years. When this was impossible, she looked after the children. It was to her that the young Prince Charles turned in bewilderment amid the flash bulbs when his mother, the new Queen, came home from an overseas tour to a London station in the early 1950s, just as it had been to Queen Mary, rather than the Duchess of York, that the infant Elizabeth had turned when her parents returned from the Australian tour in 1927; a sad echo down the years.
As Queen Mother, Elizabeth was involved in two family crises of public dimensions. The first - with some echoes of the abdication - was from 1952-55, over whether her younger daughter Margaret should marry the Comptroller of Elizabeth's household, Group Captain Peter Townsend, an innocent party in a divorce. The advice of the Queen Mother and the present Queen was that she should not; and she did not. The second crisis was from 1975-78, over the breakdown of Margaret's marriage to Lord Snowdon, in which the reformed divorce laws said there could be no innocent or guilty parties. This time Elizabeth was the first to appear in public with Margaret and to offer hospitality to Snowdon. Few were surprised. In May 1972, she had placed her hand on the arm of the ailing Duchess of Windsor at the funeral in St George's Chapel, Windsor, of the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, whose abdication she felt had shortened George VI's life. In 1986 Elizabeth attended the duchess's funeral in the same chapel, marking the close of an old feud.
For her 80th birthday, she was woken at dawn by bagpipes and the sound of hundreds of sightseers singing "Happy birthday to you" outside Clarence House. News film taken at the time epitomises the zest of her old age. It shows a woman in a flowerpot hat peering gleefully through the windows, like a child. At a celebratory service in St Paul's, Dr Coggan - the sixth of the eight Archbishops of Canterbury she knew - said that, in wartime and postwar stress, she and George VI "taught us afresh what duty means". Prince Charles said in an interview: "For me, she has always been one of those extraordinarily rare people whose touch can turn everything to gold ... the most wonderful example of fun, laughter, warmth, infinite security."
Willie Hamilton, the former Labour MP who was, for 20 years, a parliamentary arch-scourge of royalty, said: "My hatchet is buried, my venom dissipated. I am glad to salute a remarkable old lady. Long may she live to be the pride of her family. And may God understand and forgive me if I have been ensnared and corrupted - if only briefly - by this superb old trouper."
In 1982, the Queen Mother made 63 official visits in Britain, attended 29 receptions, presided over two privy council meetings, gave 15 audiences to diplomats and visited two overseas countries. An opinion poll found her still rated the best member of the royal family for public duties. And even by her 90th birthday, the tempo of her engagements had "slowed down not at all", according to the palace.
In 1992, at Princess Margaret's suggestion, she had hundreds of private documents destroyed, after it was realised that piles of them were strewn around her sitting room. "I am disappointed but not surprised," said royal biographer Philip Ziegler. "The Queen Mother has always managed to keep her private life private." She refused innumerable appeals to leave even an official spoken record of her life and momentous times.
In November 1993, a Sky News reporter mistakenly triggered reports throughout Australia of her death. A member of her staff said: "She has a subtle sense of humour and had a quiet smile." Just before Christmas 1994, another rumour that she was on the brink of death swept the media. It evaporated when she was heard talking hectically in a private dining room at the House of Commons.
Five years later, in January 1998, having already had two hip replacement operations, the Queen Mother broke a hip in a fall, but hobbled out of hospital on crutches 23 days later. Within less than a month, she watched racing at Sandown Park - What A Truly Amazing Woman, said the Daily Express headline. Later that year, the columnist Woodrow Wyatt's posthumously published diaries claimed she had regularly toasted Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. "She adores Mrs Thatcher and thinks she is very brave and has done tremendous things," Wyatt wrote. A friend was quoted as saying, "She will feel utterly betrayed."
Even this late in life, eating-in and dining-out on an Edwardian scale was still among her passions. The Castle of Mey was kept going so that she could use it for a few summer weeks. In 1999, she reportedly had a £4m overdraft at Coutts bank, more than six times her £643,000 annual civil list income. Her staff included three chauffeurs, two pages, five housemaids and three secretaries - "Going it a bit," said the Sun.
In her 100th year, reports about her fitness and ability to take an interest in life differed. One indication came in the members' report of the London Library, whose library committee chairman, Nicolas Barker, wrote: "Her visits to the library have been memorable occasions and her practical interest in our affairs has never diminished. We sought leave to present a birthday tribute and asked whether it should be a formal address or something more practical." Back came the prompt reply that nothing would please her more than an up-to-date bird book. A copy of the two-volume Birds Of The Western Palearctic (OUP, 1998) was inscribed "with thanks to Her Majesty for nearly half a century of keenly interested patronage".
One penalty of longevity was to outlive her daughter Margaret; on February 15 2002, Elizabeth insisted on being at the funeral, 50 years to the day after that of her own husband.
Elizabeth once said that what most helped her to get back into harness after George VI's loss was a quotation from William Blake that she discovered in an annual report of one of her 300 organisations, the North Islington infant welfare centre: "Labour well the minute particulars, attend to the little ones/ And those who are in misery cannot remain so, long."
She would have seen as her own most important message the advice she gave to students as chancellor of London University, and on innumerable other public platforms: "Do not, in today's tumult, lose sight of the ancient virtues of service, truth and vision." But what she taught best was herself. As her biographer Dorothy Laird said, she managed to bring private affections into public life.
· Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Windsor, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, born Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, August 4 1900; died March 30 2002