New Mom Queen Elizabeth Joked There Was 'Something Happening All the Time!' After Welcoming Charles
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Queen Elizabeth was a young wife and mother when she took the throne
Before she was Queen Elizabeth, she was a new wife and mother.
In a letter from her honeymoon, the then-Princess Elizabeth told her cousin Margaret Rhodes she was "blissfully happy," as told in a collector's edition of PEOPLE dedicated to the late monarch, who died in September.
"I'm enjoying being married to the best and nicest man in the world," she said of life with Prince Philip.
After their royal wedding in November 1947, the newlyweds relaxed at Broadlands, the 16th-century Hampshire estate owned by Philip's uncle Lord Mountbatten, and at Balmoral, the royal retreat in Scotland. They tromped around the woods hunting deer, with the carefree royal wearing army boots and a leather vest.
She joked to Rhodes in a letter, "I couldn't help wishing that a photographer would come along, just for once, as he would never have believed what he saw!"
Related:King Charles Remembers Queen Elizabeth on the First U.K. Mother's Day Since Her Death
Prince Philip, too, was very much in love.
"Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me," he wrote to his mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother — though his rakish side was also on display. When a friend said of his wife, "I never realized what lovely skin she has," the prince replied, "Yes, she's like that all over!"
Within three months of tying the knot, Princess Elizabeth was pregnant with their first child. Despite suffering from morning sickness, their social life continued to be a whirl of races, restaurants and nightclubs. For a costume party at the Duchess of Kent's home, she dressed "in black lace, with a large comb and mantilla, as an Infanta [a Spanish princess]," wrote diarist Chips Channon, and "danced every dance until nearly 5 a.m."
The future King Charles was born on Nov. 14, 1948, at home on the second floor of Buckingham Palace. Prince Philip had been playing squash and, still dressed in sneakers and sports clothes, arrived to cheers from the waiting crowd, then gave his wife a bouquet and a kiss.
Two weeks later, the excited new mother wrote to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge, "I had no idea that one could be kept so busy in bed — there seems to be something happening all the time!"
When Prince Philip resumed his naval career in the fall of 1949 as first lieutenant aboard the destroyer HMS Chequers based in Malta, Princess Elizabeth made it clear that she would join him.
For the next two years, she divided her time between London and a hilltop villa on the island while Prince Charles remained at Clarence House in the care of his nanny and doting grandparents.
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So began what she would later call the happiest years of her life. Princess Elizabeth's days were occupied with ordinary pleasures — driving alone, going to the hairdresser and shops, handling cash for the first time.
"It was the only place that she was able to live the life of a naval officer's wife, just like all the other wives," Lady Pamela Hicks, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, told the Daily Mail. Inheriting the throne felt a long way off.
PEOPLE is looking back at the Queen Elizabeth era with a newly revised special edition. It is available now wherever magazines are sold.
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