All of that was forgotten in 1987 when a Fijian soldier, Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, staged two military coups and went on to proclaim himself acting head of state. It soon became clear that the position of the Queen’s representative, the Governor-General, was untenable. When Commonwealth leaders met in Vancouver, Heseltine discussed the situation with the Queen. ‘I thought there was no point in getting the poor man to keep on going as Governor-General without any local support,’ he recalls. ‘And the Queen agreed with this. I got hold of him on the phone and suggested the time had come for him to retire.’ He agreed and the Queen instructed her Fijian self to resign from the throne of Fiji – which was duly kicked out of the Commonwealth.
Sir William says that Mrs Thatcher was bitterly opposed to the resignation, and that he caught ‘a swing of handbag’ as a result. The British Prime Minister regarded it as nothing less than an abdication. ‘Which it was – that is a reasonable description,’ says Sir William. ‘But Mrs Thatcher thought that was an awful thing to have done.’ However, the Queen was acting as Queen of Fiji, and Mrs Thatcher had no right to intervene – yet another reminder of the constitutional difficulties that can arise when a ‘divisible’ Crown finds it is at odds with itself.
To this day, Fiji and its former monarch have never entirely recognised the divorce. Until recently, the Queen’s official birthday was a public holiday, and she only came off the banknotes in 2012 – long after her ‘abdication’. The Union flag remains part of the Fijian flag (there was talk of dropping it, but no great public appetite); St Edward’s Crown remains on military badges; the Queen’s portraits still hang in many public buildings; and the Queen herself has never formally dropped the title conferred on Queen Victoria – Tui Viti, Monarch of the Fijians.
Thirty years on from that abdication, a large crowd gathers in Norwich outside the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. It is staging a major exhibition called ‘Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific’ and the Queen wants to look round it. Though it is a freezing January morning, four barefoot, bare-chested Fijian men in grass skirts (led by a Fijian Lance Corporal from the Household Cavalry) have formed a guard of honour.
She is reunited with the tabua that she received on her first visit in 1953 and chats knowledgeably with the academics about exhibits like kava bowls, war clubs and baskets. When shown a Fijian bark-cloth wedding dress, the Queen nonchalantly mentions that she knew the bride’s father. She enjoys herself so much that the visit runs on far longer than planned. Also present is the Fijian High Commissioner, Jitoko Tikolevu, dressed in the traditional sulu, a black Pacific version of a kilt. When he is introduced to the Queen, he performs an accolade still reserved only for royalty. He goes down on one knee and claps three times. ‘We still think of her as Queen of Fiji,’ says Mr Tikolevu. ‘We can’t wait for her next visit.’
* Under the Statute of Westminster of 1931, each independent nation within the British Empire had the right to legislate for itself, without the say of the British Parliament. The monarch formally became a separate entity in each dominion – King of Canada, King of New Zealand and so on – enshrining the concept of a ‘divisible’ Crown.
† In 1957, the Tory peer Lord Altrincham used his little-known magazine, the National and English Review, to criticise the Queen for her ‘priggish’ demeanour and ‘tweedy’ court. A keen monarchist, he was concerned that the monarchy was losing touch with the public. The Duke of Argyll called for his execution, and Lord Altrincham was assaulted in the street. Years later he would be thanked by the Queen’s Private Secretary. It had been a useful lesson.
‡ Keith Holyoake was the Prime Minister of New Zealand and latterly Governor-General, the only person to hold both posts.
§ Sir John would resign later in the year, shortly after turning up, inebriated, to present the Melbourne Cup.
¶ Australia won by forty-five runs.
# In 1982, unemployed decorator Michael Fagan broke into the Queen’s bedroom at Buckingham Palace. She kept him talking until help finally arrived. The incident revealed a series of police blunders.
Chapter 6
THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
‘A ten-gallon tiara’
Diplomats and politicians have long talked up the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States, even if the phrase is much more common on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Equally, there are commentators in both Britain and the USA who regard any notion of a ‘special relationship’ as sentimental, subservient wishful thinking on the part of the British establishment. There have certainly been some strong individual pairings between Number Ten and the White House, notably Churchill and Roosevelt, Thatcher and Reagan and, latterly, Blair and George W. Bush. However, historians will note that there has been a more subtle, yet more consistent ‘special relationship’ operating between the White House and Buckingham Palace throughout the reign of Elizabeth II. It is not one forged in late-night crisis talks or the heat of battle. Rather, it is an enduring bond that is equally strong, but built on familiarity and the personal touch – be it the decision to play the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ outside the Palace the morning after 9/11 or a simple invitation to tea, on learning that a nonagenarian Henry Kissinger was passing through London. Unlike the Queen’s dealings with most countries, which have followed a well-established pattern, this is a friendship that has broken the bilateral mould. There can be few people in the USA, let alone the rest of the world, who have lived through the administrations of sixteen presidents – more than one-third of the total – and met twelve of them. Monarch Number Forty (since 1066) has met Presidents Thirty Three to Forty Five (with one exception, Number Thirty Six, Lyndon B Johnson).
Of the handful of private foreign holidays that the Queen has enjoyed in her life (all horse-related), five have been spent in the USA. In 2018, the Royal Family welcomed their first American Princess. Yet, the Queen’s own ‘special relationship’ goes back to the nursery.
American influences were making an indelible mark on Princess Elizabeth as a little girl. By far the most important foreign tour that her parents undertook was their 1939 trip to Canada and the USA, just before the Second World War. No reigning British monarch had set foot in the United States before and the US leg of the tour was, in part, to bolster popular support for Britain ahead of any forthcoming hostilities in Europe. It was also designed to boost the profile of King George VI in a country where his elder brother had been very popular. That Edward VIII’s love for an American had cost him his throne had made him a sympathetic, even heroic, figure to many. The ticker-tape welcome from a crowd of between three and four million in New York was proof that the new King and Queen had made their mark. It would, though, be an extremely stressful challenge for a naturally shy monarch of a nation on the cusp of war. Writing home after being knighted on the Royal Train somewhere near Buffalo – ‘the first Englishman to be so treated by his Sovereign on American soil’ – the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, complained of the hosts’ ‘monstrous’ lack of organisation. ‘The President’s happy-go-lucky temperament is largely to blame,’ he told his wife, Joan. However, the royal couple were rather enjoying the informality. The Queen wrote an excited letter to her daughters about a memorable picnic lunch: ‘All our food on one plate – a little salmon, some turkey, some ham, lettuce beans & HOT DOGS too!’ While some Americans were appalled at the idea of serving hot dogs to a king, the Royal Family would never forget it.
Growing up in wartime Windsor, the future Queen was acutely aware of the strain on her father as he tried to buoy the morale of a nation facing invasion at any moment. As such, she could sense the redemptive significance of America’s entry into the war. Come victory and the drab, near-bankrupt years of austerity that followed, it was America that represented fun and glamour. Like so many others, the Princesses were entranced by the explosive arrival of the first American musical after the war, Oklahoma! (Princess Margaret reportedly went to see it more than thi
rty times). Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip watched it together as a courting couple in 1947; ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ has been one of ‘their’ songs ever since.
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Her first experience of the US came not long after the birth of Princess Anne when she flew over the border during her 1951 tour of Canada, to visit President Harry Truman at the White House. Britain and the USA were fighting side by side yet again, this time in Korea. Truman was enchanted by his visitor, famously remarking: ‘When I was a little boy, I read about a fairy princess – and there she is.’ Washington turned out in force. At a single British Embassy reception, the Princess was required to shake 1,574 hands. It was just a foretaste.
Her next visit – as Queen – was of an entirely different magnitude. Britain was just recovering from the embarrassment of its Suez adventure. The bilateral relationship had suffered and it fell to the Royal Family to help the British government patch things up in the autumn of 1957, starting with a trip to mark the 350th anniversary of the first English colony at Jamestown. The pace was relentless. During a fifteen-hour visit to New York, the Queen managed to address the United Nations, attend a mayoral lunch for 1,500, an English Speaking Union dinner for 4,500 and a separate Commonwealth ball for 4,500. An estimated one million people turned out to welcome her to Washington DC, where the Queen got on famously with the Eisenhowers. The President had even laid on the celebrated Fred Waring and his band for the state banquet at the White House. Come the allotted moment, the Queen and the first lady simply carried on talking, engrossed in their conversation. The President eventually had to turn to his master of ceremonies, actor Ted Hartley, and tell him: ‘Ted, please tell Mrs Eisenhower and Her Majesty to cut it short. We can’t keep Fred Waring waiting.’
As well as the usual formalities, the Queen and the Duke paid their first visit to a supermarket. ‘How nice you can bring your children along,’ she told shoppers as she marvelled at the sight of a frozen-food section. One day was also set aside for some serious horse talk at the estate of the Anglophile philanthropist Paul Mellon, in the aptly named Upperville. The visit was an unqualified success and ‘buried George III for good and all’ according to the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.
It was in 1959 that the Queen first entertained a US president at home, when President Eisenhower spent two days with the monarch at Balmoral. Eisenhower found the experience so agreeable that he asked the Queen for ‘her’ scone recipe (though not her own, she duly transcribed it in her own hand). Two years later she welcomed President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, to dinner at Buckingham Palace, following the President’s meeting with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. The television series, The Crown, would portray a jealous Queen and a miserable first lady (the latter injecting drugs in order to get through the evening). Both storylines were invention. Jackie Kennedy and her sister came back for lunch the following year, though the Queen would never see John F. Kennedy again. His assassination would touch her deeply at a time when she was heavily pregnant with Prince Edward. Doctors advised her against attending the national memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral, so she held her own at Windsor instead and invited 400 US servicemen. She would take a close personal interest in the Kennedy memorial, erected nearby at Runnymede, and made a stirring speech at its inauguration, saluting a man who ‘championed liberty in an age when its very foundations were being threatened on a universal scale’. Prince Philip held the hand of John Junior, the little boy who had moved the whole world by saluting his father’s coffin at the funeral. Hence the added poignancy when that same four-year-old performed a respectful bow to the Queen.
Britain’s decision to stay out of the Vietnam War meant that the paths of the Queen and President Lyndon B. Johnson never crossed. The President had little time for Prime Minister Harold Wilson, whom he called a ‘creep’ for his pacifism over Vietnam, but Johnson had been extremely keen to meet the Queen at the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. In the end, bronchitis and strict orders from his doctors ruled out a trip to London.
Yet again it was the Queen who helped soothe any bilateral bruising when she invited Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, to lunch with the family in 1969. ‘Both my daughters follow you very closely,’ the President joked with Prince Charles.
The moment was captured in the very first royal documentary, Royal Family, as was the arrival of the new American Ambassador, Walter Annenberg, to present his credentials. It would become a famous moment, after the Queen asked him how he was settling in. Overcome with nerves, the Ambassador dissolved into incoherent babbling about ‘the discomfiture as a result of a need for elements of refurbishment and rehabilitation’. He was much mocked in the press as a result, though the Queen’s Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, Alistair Harrison who looks after royal relations with all the diplomatic missions, says it happens to the most distinguished envoys: ‘It’s a very colourful and potentially very enjoyable ceremony but it does happen that some ambassadors get quite nervous about it. It’s important to know what you’re going to say to Her Majesty. Be relaxed, be ready for quite a wide ranging conversation and don’t worry if you make a mistake. Everybody does.’* At least Annenberg was spared the fate that befell one more recent arrival. ‘I did have an ambassador whose mobile phone went off very loudly during the audience,’ says Harrison. ‘The Queen took it totally in her stride and, if anything, was slightly amused. The Ambassador was very embarrassed.’ A fervent Anglophile, Annenberg has been remembered with gratitude by prime ministers ever since, having paid for the indoor swimming pool at Chequers.
It was at Chequers that the Queen met Nixon once again, when he dropped in for lunch during his brief stopover for talks with Edward Heath in 1971. Heath’s preoccupation with Europe, to the exclusion of all else, was starting to worry Henry Kissinger at the State Department in Washington. It was the Royal Family who would keep the flame of the ‘special relationship’ aglow, with visits to the Nixon White House by the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Princess Anne. Gerald Ford was in the White House by the time of the Queen’s next presidential encounter, when she crossed the Atlantic for her sensational 1976 state visit.
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Having ‘buried’ George III during her previous tour, the Queen would find that her ancestor was anything but forgotten this time as the USA marked its 200th birthday and the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. Despite the passage of time and all those familial bonds between the USA and the UK, it was an anniversary that had still required a degree of delicacy. After the idea of a royal visit had been suggested by President Nixon as far back as 1973, the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Robert Armstrong, wrote to his opposite number at the Palace wondering ‘whether it was right for The Queen to be associated with the celebration of a rebellion from the British Crown’.
By 1976, post-Watergate, there was a new President in the White House and a new Prime Minister in Downing Street. The Queen was delighted to take part in America’s celebrations. Even so, the British side felt it was probably best to allow the USA to let off Independence Day steam before despatching the Queen to join the party. She would not be there for 4th July. ‘Forgiveness can only go so far,’ as a British Embassy spokesman explained to The New York Times. So plans were made for the Queen to sail in from Bermuda in the Royal Yacht on 6th July. Having endured a Force Nine gale, which laid low most of the royal party, though not the Queen herself, George III’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter stepped ashore in Philadelphia, where the founding fathers had issued their world-changing statement of defiance. There she presented a 6.5-ton bicentennial bell cast by the same London foundry that had made the original Liberty Bell in Independence Hall, and went on to deliver a well-remembered speech. Bearing the unmistakeable imprimatur of her Private Secretary, Martin Charteris, it managed to paint the American Revolution as a triumph on both sides of the Atlantic.
‘It seems to me that Independence Day should be celebrated as much in Britain as in America,’ sh
e told thousands of Pennsylvanians. ‘Not in rejoicing at the separation of the American colonies from the British Crown but in sincere gratitude to the Founding Fathers of this great Republic for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson. We lost the American colonies because we lacked that statesmanship “to know the right time, and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep”.’ Placing the blame not on her ancestor, but firmly on his quarrelsome ministers, she went on: ‘We learnt to respect the right of others to govern themselves in their own ways. Without that great act in the cause of liberty, performed in Independence Hall two hundred years ago, we could never have transformed an Empire into a Commonwealth!’ It was, she said, the beginning of one of history’s great partnerships, through war and peace: ‘Together, as friends and allies, we can face the uncertainties of the future, and this is something for which we in Britain can also celebrate the Fourth of July.’
For this state visit, the Queen would be accompanied by her new Foreign Secretary, Anthony Crosland, and his American-born journalist wife. She wrote a famous account of the tour, in which she recalled the Queen’s advice on how to get through arduous tours like these. ‘One plants one’s feet like this,’ the Queen told her. ‘Always keep them parallel. Make sure your weight is evenly distributed. That’s all there is to it.’
The advice would be invaluable, with a punishing itinerary in 100-degree heat up the eastern seaboard of the USA. At the White House, President Gerald Ford welcomed the Queen to a state banquet for more than 200 guests – including Hollywood stars Cary Grant, Telly Savalas and Merle Oberon, plus corporate A-listers such as J. Willard Marriott of the Marriott Corporation and Henry Heinz II. Ford did his best to emphasise the positive side of Britain’s colonial exploits on this side of the Atlantic. ‘Nearly four centuries ago, the British came to a wilderness and built a new civilisation on British custom, British fortitude, British law and British government,’ he told the Queen. Thereafter, the United States ‘established a nation that adapted the best of British traditions to the American climate and to the American character’.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 30