A Majestic Marriage Part Two
s she had on the morning of her parents’ coronation, on her wedding day Elizabeth looked out of the window on to a Mall already dense with crowds, in this case streaked with the pewter shadows of a dull, cold day. Thousands had spent the night under the bare November trees, and, according to one report, ‘many women had slept peacefully in the gutter on blown-up rubber mattresses, in sleeping bags, swathed in travelling rugs or blankets’. Margaret, always Elizabeth’s closest companion and today her principal bridesmaid, is absent from records of this last unmarried awakening. Available sources do not reveal whether Elizabeth’s thoughts returned to her parents’ coronation, whether remembrances of
