Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  After the Second World War, during which tens of thousands from all parts of Canada gave their lives, the King was keen to visit once more. With his health failing, he would send Princess Elizabeth with the Duke of Edinburgh in his place in October 1951, with a few days in Washington with President Truman added on. Even then, the trip was delayed by a week while the Princess awaited that all-clear after the King’s lung operation. When the Princess and the Duke finally climbed aboard their BOAC Stratocruiser plane, she had that draft accession declaration with her, just in case. The first port of call was the French-speaking heartland of Quebec, where the crowds were as excited as any. From the outset, the Princess made a point of wearing the Maple Leaf brooch that the King had given the Queen ahead of the 1939 tour, a gesture warmly applauded by the media. It was a hugely ambitious tour, designed to carry the royal couple all across Canada and then back again. Much of the journey would be by special Royal Train decorated in the Princess’s favourite ‘surf green’, along with green damask and taffeta curtains and a light-brown carpet. If it was snug and well insulated against the increasingly bracing weather, the Duke found it faintly claustrophobic. ‘I feel like a poached egg. I just can’t breathe on trains,’ he announced as he disembarked in Vancouver.

  To this day, says the Countess of Wessex, a favourite Royal Family story concerns the occasion when the couple returned to the Royal Train in a remote town to find a band, as usual, waiting on the platform: ‘Instead of getting on the train,’ she says, ‘the Duke of Edinburgh went up to the bandmaster and said: “Look, we never get to hear the band because whenever the band strike up the train always pulls out of the station. So it’d be really nice to actually hear you play.” So they started playing. And the train pulled out of the station with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh still standing on the platform!’

  Wreath-layings and military engagements took pride of place. In Ottawa, where the royal couple were greeted by 13,000 children singing ‘O Canada’, they were also entertained to an evening of square-dancing by the Governor-General, Viscount Alexander. The Princess was photographed in a ‘peasant blouse’ and dirndl skirt, but it was the sight of a beaming Duke in turned-up jeans, suede loafers and checked shirt (with the price ticket still attached) that is perhaps the most striking. Sixty years later, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would be photographed in something similar during their first overseas tour.

  Canada’s indigenous Indians were included, although the Princess’s tour of a wigwam took place at a ‘model’ wigwam village in Calgary. The press were delighted to see the future monarch making small talk with characters like Chief Heavyshield, Chief Crowchild, Maurice Many-Fingers and Two Ton Young Man. She appeared especially touched when Mrs Heavyshield suddenly produced a hand-stitched doeskin suit for Princess Anne. All through the tour there were informal moments that would be simply unthinkable at home: a ‘Grub Pile’ lunch of barbecued buffalo and ‘sinkers’ (doughnuts) at the Calgary Corral; a horse-drawn sleigh ride à deux in front of the cameras (with the Duke at the helm); the students of McGill University in Montreal chanting, ‘Yea, Betty! Yea, Windsor! Yea, Betty Windsor!’ It was French-speaking Montreal that attracted a crowd of one million people, the largest of the tour. The sight of them singing ‘God Save the King’ in French would surely have assured any doubters that French Canada was every bit as royalist as Windsor, Ontario. Or was it?

  Back in Britain, the King was so thrilled by the success of the visit that he sent the Royal Train to collect the couple when their liner docked in Liverpool, and promptly made them both Privy Councillors on their return. At a ‘welcome home’ luncheon in the City of London, the Princess was seated next to Winston Churchill. Her speech saluted North America as an inspirational example in a divided world: ‘On this visit, we passed across what is surely one of the miracles of the world today, that vast 4,000-mile frontier without a single gun pointed in fear on either side.’ Canada’s ties with both Britain and the USA were a central theme of her early years as Queen. During her 1957 state visit to the USA, she visited Canada to open parliament wearing what would become known as Norman Hartnell’s ‘Maple Leaf of Canada’ dress. On her 1959 visit to Canada, she would welcome both the Canadian Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, and the US President, Dwight Eisenhower, on board the Royal Yacht for the opening of the St Lawrence seaway and, with it, a new era in US–Canadian trade. Yet it was another demanding tour, all the more so as the Princess had a secret, which she confided to a handful of people, among them Mrs Eisenhower. She was pregnant. These vast trans-continental tours of Canada could not be repeated. Better, surely, to make shorter, more regular visits to a few provinces at a time.

  By the time she embarked on her next full Canadian tour, the Queen would not only have given birth to Prince Andrew but to Prince Edward, too. Her 1964 trip, ostensibly to mark the centenary of the conferences that led to the creation of the Dominion of Canada, was taking place against an alarmingly different backdrop. A vocal French Canadian separatist movement had threatened demonstrations and violence, so much so that there were calls in Britain for the visit to be cancelled, just as there had been ahead of that 1961 tour of Ghana. In this case, there were the makings of a constitutional crisis. As Queen of Canada, her Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, was advising her to come. Her British Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, had his doubts. He was sufficiently concerned that he asked the Cabinet Secretary for advice on who would trump whom in the matter. In the end, the two leaders agreed to keep in touch as the tour progressed.

  It would be one of the most uncomfortable visits of the Queen’s reign, with tensions already heightened by events over the border in the United States, notably the advent of the civil-rights movement and the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In Montreal, over-zealous policing merely stoked up local resentment towards the royal visitor, particularly after thirty-four arrests on a day of protest that became known as ‘Truncheon Sunday’. The Queen had done her best to foster a spirit of national unity. Two years earlier, she had formally adopted her own Canadian coat of arms, featuring both the maple leaf and the French fleur-de-lys. Now, addressing the provincial parliament in Quebec – in fluent French – she declared: ‘I am pleased to think that there exists in our Commonwealth a country where I can express myself officially in French.’ But the separatists were not listening. The final straw was when Britannia’s gangplank collapsed moments before the Queen was due to walk up it. It was a tour to forget. As Professor Philip Murphy has pointed out, both Lester Pearson and the British Foreign Office began to start contemplating the demise of the Crown in Canada within the next five years. Neither thought that would necessarily be a bad thing, either.

  Three years later, however, the Queen received a rather warmer welcome when she returned to mark both the Expo 67 World Fair in Montreal and the centenary of Canada as a confederation. The latter was clearly an event of pan-Canadian importance, and the Queen sent members of the family to all the provinces that she could not get to herself. At Expo 67, she also turned a potential public relations disaster into a triumph. Sir William Heseltine was the Queen’s press secretary at the time and remembers the long queues of people being kept outside so as not to disturb the royal visitors. ‘The Prime Minister came to have lunch and Prince Philip got at him and said “This is monstrous, all these people queueing up and you won’t let them in. We’re going to go back after lunch and they must be allowed in”.’ The royal couple duly returned and took an unscheduled ride on the new airborne ‘minirail’, receiving a roar of approval from the crowds flooding in below, as word spread of what had happened.

  Canada had always been an enthusiastic founder member of the Commonwealth, pushing for India to stay in back in 1949, producing the first Secretary-General, Arnold Smith, and instigating Commonwealth Day around the world. It was a Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who volunteered to host the make-or-break Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 1973, following the disastrous sla
nging match which had occurred in Singapore. Trudeau had not taken the organisation very seriously in his early days, famously sliding down the bannister at Lancaster House during a prime ministers’ meeting in London in 1969. Sonny Ramphal thinks he liked to play the fool in public to show his French-speaking power base that he was unimpressed by the trappings of British royalty. ‘Trudeau was a slow starter,’ says Ramphal, ‘but he became one of the great Commonwealth leaders.’ Among his contributions was the creation of the ‘retreat’ at Commonwealth summits, in order to achieve quiet consensus. He also had the bright idea of allowing leaders just one adviser each in the conference room – rather than a posse of bruisers – to keep things intimate.

  For all his bluster and charisma in front of the cameras, Trudeau was less of a showman in the presence of the Queen. Indeed, it seems he was as nervous of her as anyone else. We know that, because he is perhaps the only Prime Minister in history who has gone through an entire private royal audience with a third person in the room. It happened during the filming of Royal Family, the original royal documentary, in 1968. BBC technician Dave Gorringe was present to record a few snippets of conversation as Trudeau came for his first audience. ‘I vividly remember, he was a Robert Redford type and a lovely man,’ Gorringe told William Shawcross years later. ‘The Queen was making all the going and his answers were not very good and it lasted about ten minutes. She eventually pushed a buzzer for the door to open. He walked out and the doors closed and she said: ‘Well, he didn’t have much to say for himself, did he?” ’

  It was not a charge that could ever be levelled at the Duke of Edinburgh. In 1969, he famously told an Ottawa press conference that ‘we don’t come here for our health’. As he put it: ‘The monarchy exists in Canada for historical reasons . . . I think the important thing about it is that if at any stage people think that it has no further part to play, then for goodness’ sake, let’s end the thing on amicable grounds without having a row about it.’ By now, however, the Canadian republicanism seemed to be on the wane.

  A fiery French Canadian lawyer, Trudeau had never been a monarchist, but neither would he turn out to be avowedly republican. ‘He was probably a republican, or at least started as one,’ says a former royal Private Secretary. ‘But I think he was beguiled by the Queen. He was a very shrewd politician and he knew there was not much in it for him. He was a class act, too. I remember he made a speech at a state banquet at the Ottawa national hall. It was white tie – the Queen in her white fur which we don’t mention any more, given to her by the Hudson Bay Company – and it was a dazzling evening. He made the most perfect speech, a mixture of French and English without looking at a note at all.’

  Trudeau preferred to make the monarch, and the trappings of monarchy, more Canadian rather than seek a replacement. Over the years he developed a good rapport with the Queen, who was happy to indulge what Ramphal calls Trudeau’s ‘boyish antics’. There was one potentially tricky evening when Trudeau invited a local (republican) student leader called ‘King Steve’ to join a dinner on board the Royal Yacht in Vancouver. Some members of the Royal Household were nervous, even more so when a van screeched to a halt on the quayside to deposit the young man, amid chants of ‘Steve for King’. The Duke of Edinburgh, however, was adamant that if the student had been invited to dinner, then ‘to dinner he must come’. Jock Slater, the Queen’s equerry at the time, remembers that Steve was late and ‘oddly attired’ but he escorted him into the Drawing Room to be presented to the Queen. It later emerged that ‘King Steve’ had come prepared to deliver a republican speech but had lost his nerve. ‘He was overawed and subdued,’ says Slater, ‘and what he planned to say never happened.’ Slater recalls the evening for another reason. Trudeau’s wife of a few weeks, Margaret, was already pregnant with the future Prime Minister of Canada.

  All through the Seventies, Canada would see plenty of the Royal Family. Prince Andrew was despatched to spend six months at a Canadian school, just as Prince Charles had enjoyed part of his education in Australia (Prince Edward would do the same in New Zealand). In 1976, the Queen came to open the Montreal Olympics, where Princess Anne was part of the British equestrian team. And the Queen Mother was never parted from her beloved Canada for long.

  In 1982, Trudeau invited the Queen on a short visit with a very profound purpose. She was to sign the Canada Act, as publicly as possible, in front of the cameras and the people. In doing so, she severed the very last constitutional ties with Britain. ‘The constitution of Canada has come home,’ declared the ever-theatrical Trudeau. The Queen was privately said to be delighted that there was now less chance of being dragged into a constitutional row.

  As the future of the monarchy became more uncertain in the southern hemisphere, it became sedate and settled in the Queen’s great North American realm. Opinion polls would dip during the dark years of the Nineties and nudge upwards alongside the Jubilees that followed.

  The Queen would endure one excruciating episode in 1995, just as Quebec was preparing to vote in a referendum on independence. A prankster from a French-speaking Montreal radio show called the Palace posing as Jean Chrétien, the former Justice Minister and the architect of the Canada Act, who had gone on to become Prime Minister. The radio hoaxer had managed to get through to the Queen herself. For seventeen minutes, the semi-serious conversation meandered, mainly in French, even touching on royal plans for Hallowe’en. Much of it was then broadcast across Quebec a few hours later. No great harm was done, however, except perhaps to the separatist cause. The pro-independence campaign failed, by just 1 per cent. Some have suggested that the Queen’s fluency in French, and her ready knowledge of all things Québécois, might have persuaded some voters that the Canadian Crown was not such a remote institution after all.

  The Queen would look back on it with a certain degree of amusement. As she reportedly told (the real) Chrétien years later: ‘I didn’t think you sounded quite like yourself. But I thought, given all the duress you were under, you might have been drunk.’

  Returning for her Golden Jubilee in 2002, not long after the death of the Queen Mother, the Queen told banquet guests one of her mother’s favourite stories about that first visit by a reigning monarch in 1939. Queen Elizabeth had met two Boer War veterans who had been debating whether she was actually English or Scottish. ‘My mother paused, and then replied: “Since I have landed in Quebec, I think we can say that I am a Canadian”. Ladies and Gentlemen, my mother, like most mothers, often had the last word. But in this case I know exactly how she felt.’ The Queen added: ‘I treasure my place in the life of Canada and my bond with Canadians everywhere.’

  By 2015, the Queen would be having audiences with another member of the Trudeau family when Justin Trudeau, eldest son of Pierre (who had died in 2000) led the Liberal party to victory in the general election. Later that year, as one of the new boys at the 2015 Commonwealth summit in Malta, Trudeau junior was invited to make the banquet toast in honour of the Queen. After he pointed out that she had performed her first official Canadian duty in 1935 – appearing on a postage stamp at the age of nine – he reminded the assembled heads that his father had been the Queen’s fourth Prime Minister while he was her twelfth. Rising to respond, the Queen joked: ‘Thank you, Mr Prime Minister of Canada, for making me feel so old!’

  Though the Queen met him several times as a baby, Justin Trudeau’s earliest memory of her comes a little later. ‘I remember one day having to rush home from school because she was going to stop by for lunch and we had to be there to receive her,’ he says. ‘I was terribly worried because although I was going to get changed into better clothes, I was going to have to wear the same shoes and I needed to keep them clean all morning. And I don’t think I was able to.’

  Later in life, it would be his brightly-coloured socks rather than his shoes which would attract royal attention. Heading for his audience with the Queen ahead of the 2018 Commonwealth summit in London, he revealed that he had chosen a pair of grey socks covered in
pink moose. ‘They match the suit,’ he explained.

  Having attended the 100th anniversary of Canada in person, the Queen had given up long-distance by the time that 150th anniversary came round in 2017. So, she asked the Prince of Wales to represent her. ‘Each time he comes he feels a bit more of Canada seeping in to his bloodstream,’ explained the Governor-General David Johnston, as he prepared his residence, Rideau Hall, for the Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall. ‘I try to make it as homely as possible; to make it their home.’

  After travelling to Parliament Hill, Ottawa, in the royal horse-drawn carriage, the Prince spoke on the Queen’s behalf, praising Canada as ‘a champion of human rights; as a peace-keeper; a responsible steward of the environment; and as a powerful and consistent example of diversity and the power of inclusion’. Mr Johnston then flew over to London to celebrate with the Queen at Canada House. A broad cross-section of UK-based Canadians were gathered in one room and a broad cross-section of royal Canadian treasures were in another. The exhibition ranged from the letter confirming Queen Victoria’s approval of the name ‘Canada’ to the puck that the Queen threw at a Vancouver ice-hockey game on her Golden Jubilee tour. Ahead of this visit, the Queen had given much thought as to how she might mark the 150th. She had asked the Royal Librarian, Oliver Urquhart Irvine, to assemble facsimiles of all the key documents and images from Canadian history and create a one-off commemorative book at the Windsor book bindery. This was to be her present to the people of Canada. They, in turn, had one for her: a brooch in the shape of a Northern Star snowflake, crafted with diamonds and sapphires (it was the year of her Sapphire Jubilee). It would be a companion piece to that Maple Leaf brooch, which King George VI gave to his Queen in 1939. ‘We are blessed that you are our Queen,’ the Governor-General told her. ‘Thank you for your selfless service to our country.’