‘All our hopes rested with this one woman and how she was going to change everything,’ said Lady Jane Rayne, one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour. ‘The war had changed an awful lot of things,’ Lady Anne Glenconner, another of the Queen’s maids of honour at the Coronation observed, ‘but for the Coronation, we really went back to before the war, you know. Everything started again as though the war hadn’t been.’

Indeed, at this point, the couple were adored in very much the same way as the Prince and Princess of Wales were thirty years later. Thousands of people would turn out to cheer them on foreign tours and they were talked about and written about as characters from a fairy tale. ‘In the first years of the Queen’s reign, the level of adulation – you wouldn’t believe it,’ Prince Philip said years later. ‘You really wouldn’t. It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.’

Philip’s role in the Coronation was to kneel before his wife, taking the ancient oath of fealty: ‘I Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship; and faith and truth will I bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.’ He then had to stand and kiss her cheek and back away. At the rehearsal, possibly feeling a bit emasculated, he did not play his part with any conviction. In fact, he mumbled the words at high speed, missed the Queen’s cheek and retired backwards fast. The Queen told him off: ‘Don’t be silly, Philip. Come back here and do it properly.’

Of course, he performed seriously on the day, but his touch on the crown was a little heavy-handed and the Queen had to fleetingly adjust it. But the incident in the rehearsal illustrated just how committed the Queen was to doing things right at all times; she understood it was an important part of her role, and that she had a duty to fulfil.

But for the Queen, it was important to get it right for another reason. ‘The Queen is a person of very deep faith,’ said Michael Mann, former Dean of Windsor. ‘She looked on the Coronation in the way in which the Coronation is intended.’

‘The Coronation was a deeply moving spiritual experience for her,’ her cousin Margaret Rhodes said, ‘especially the part which wasn’t filmed – when she stood bareheaded wearing only a white linen shift as the Archbishop of Canterbury marked the sign of the cross on her with the words, “As Solomon was anointed by Zadok the priest, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated as Queen over the people thy God hath given thee to govern.” ’