Elizabeth II’s driver’s license was sold at auction for thousands of dollars

$ 12,017 for a driver’s license, who says that best? The Australian news site ABC revealed the price at which Elizabeth II’s driver’s license was sold on November 8. Auctioned by British auctioneers Reeman Dansie, it had been taught by Violet Wellesley, the instructor who had taught the queen to lead, with orders not to sell it until after the monarch’s death. Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022, long after her instructor died in 1971. But before her death, she took pains to entrust the precious document to a friend’s daughter. This military permit, dated March 1, 1945, was granted to the sovereign when she was a mechanic in the last year of World War II.

The day Elizabeth II led Prince Abdullah

Royal privilege, the queen was not required to have a driving license. Yet she made good use of it, especially during the war, then in a delightfully insolent way. Like this scene told by the British Sherard Cowper-Coles in his memoirs Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Mandarin from the Foreign Ministry (2013). In 1998, Elizabeth II received the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia at Balmoral Castle, her second home in Scotland. She then suggests that he take a tour of the property by car. Prince Abdallah accepts, without imagining that the sovereign will take the wheel of his Range Rover. Yet that’s what it does, bypassing not only its status but also its host’s habits. Indeed, at that time, in Saudi Arabia, women could not drive. Nervous, he would ask his interpreter to “beg the queen to slow down and focus on the road”. Ultimately a very tough and eminently feminist act.

Cover image: Unsplash / Mark de Jong