ABSTRACT
The abdication was a tremendous blow for the royal family: it was a painful object lesson in how not to be a modern constitutional monarch. An extremely happy marriage served George VI well during the abdication crisis. Understandably the Duke and Duchess of York tried to shield their children from the scandal. Elizabeth was confirmed during the Second World War, a particularly trying time to go through the difficult phase of adolescence. Shortly before the marriage on 20 November, Elizabeth told her mother that the long wait ‘was all for the best’. Charles’s school days improved greatly in January 1966 when he flew to Australia to attend Timbertop, an extension of Geelong Grammar School, some two hundred miles north of Melbourne. The royal family both mirrors and matches that of most of its subjects.
