Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  On her first visit to a racecourse that she would come to know very well over the years, the Princess was welcomed by some of the largest crowds ever seen at Longchamp. Even France’s communist papers hailed the visit a success. For criticism, one had to turn to Scotland, where church organisations complained that a princess who should be offering ‘guidance’ to the young had gone racing on a Sunday. Yet there was no doubt the trip had been a diplomatic triumph. British papers likened it all to a reverse Norman Conquest, a view shared by Jock Colville, who said: ‘In four hectic days the Princess conquered Paris.’ In his report to the Foreign Office, the British Ambassador, Sir Oliver Harvey, noted that ‘it was an unusual experience to see the townsfolk of Paris cheer an English Princess from the Place de la Bastille’.

  It was soon back to Britain with a bump, in more ways than one. As the Vickers Viking of the King’s Flight came into London Airport, there was a sudden explosion of emergency Very lights, to alert the pilot that he was on course for the wrong runway. Within hours the Duke would be back at work at the Royal Naval Staff College, while the pregnant Princess caught up with the King and Queen. Although she had not returned with the perambulator or the case of Camembert, she had accepted a bottle of Grande Reserve 1798 brandy from the Tour d’Argent, for the King.

  And so began a French connection that would see the Queen visit France more than any other non-Commonwealth nation. And it would be in France, years later, that she helped lead Britain into a turbulent adventure that would result in one of the greatest political crises of her lifetime.

  FRENCH LESSONS

  The Queen has been known to reflect ruefully that she would have liked a more rounded education than the one she received in her Windsor Castle schoolroom. There was certainly a difference of opinion between her grandmother, Queen Mary, who argued for a more disciplined educational programme, and Queen Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, who believed that lessons should be interspersed with breaks for ponies and games of racing demon.

  But the Queen evidently had excellent tuition in two areas. One was constitutional history thanks to Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of nearby Eton. Himself an Old Etonian, he had returned to the school as a ‘beak’, or master, in the reign of Queen Victoria. Having spent his entire adult life teaching classrooms full of boys, Marten would absent-mindedly chew his handkerchief and address the solitary Princess as ‘gentlemen’. She would prove a model pupil, however, and Marten’s reward was a knighthood, conferred by the King, in front of the whole school, in 1945.

  The Princess’s other strong subject was French. Not only was it still the lingua franca of the royal houses and embassies of Europe, but it was essential for any future sovereign of Canada, with its substantial French-speaking population. The Princess’s main tutor was Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, who had escaped to Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War with her husband and two young sons. While her husband joined General de Gaulle’s Free French forces, ‘Toni’ de Bellaigue began teaching French to the daughters of the King’s Private Secretary, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. In 1941, he recommended her to the King and Queen as a tutor for Princess Elizabeth and her younger sister, Princess Margaret. Both girls would end up speaking excellent French. Years later, Toni de Bellaigue recalled that her elder charge was ‘très naturelle . . . a strong sense of duty mixed with joie de vivre’.

  It was Queen Elizabeth, rather than King George VI, who was the great royal Francophile. Wartime relations between General de Gaulle and both the King and Prime Minister Winston Churchill could be prickly at the best of times. Queen Elizabeth, though, would enjoy a lifelong rapport with the General. As Duchess of York, she had been both entranced and shocked during her own early visits to Paris. ‘Too disgusting,’ she wrote home from her first visit. ‘Women with no pants.’ As Queen, her love for the place was sealed in 1938 when she accompanied the King on his state visit to France. The largest Union flag ever seen was flown from the Eiffel Tower, while the French government had invited the Queen to select coverings for the royal quarters in advance. There was even a nod to her Scottish ancestry, in the form of a Loch Ness monster floating in the Seine.

  Two years later, after the fall of France and the retreat from Dunkirk, much of Britain – the King included – subscribed to the view that ‘we’re better off alone’. Not so the Queen who, on the fall of Paris, broadcast to the women of France, in French. Come the end of the war, de Gaulle would be effusive in his thanks to her. As Queen Mother, she would enjoy regular summer holidays in France, touring the Loire Valley and Provence to cries of ‘Vive la reine’, reducing sentimental mayors to tears and, on one occasion, playing the Marseillaise on a mouth organ.

  Her toasts were famous – a glass raised high in homage to all that she admired and then plunged down in disapproval of the villain of the moment. ‘Up with de Gaulle,’ was a regular refrain at the Clarence House dinner table. Marc Roche, London-based correspondent of Le Monde for many years and the Queen’s French-language biographer, says that de Gaulle always felt it was Queen Elizabeth who had made wartime London ‘bearable’. Roche was also reliably informed that the Queen Mother, never known for her love of football, had insisted on a toast to the French after learning of their 1998 World Cup triumph over Brazil.

  ‘She just clicked with the French – and it’s the same with the Queen. She just clicked, too,’ explains Roche. He points to the fact that France is one of a tiny handful of places where the Queen has gone ‘on holiday’, albeit to inspect horses in Normandy. ‘It’s the country she has been to more through her heart than reason,’ he says. The feeling is entirely mutual, he adds. He goes so far as to suggest that the Queen Mother and the Queen have actually helped salvage France’s own post-war sense of honour. For Roche believes that the royal friendship with de Gaulle and the Free French went a long way to bolstering the wartime narrative that France would prefer to remember, as opposed to the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain.

  ‘The record of France was bad. It is such a raw issue,’ says Roche. ‘The deportation of Jews by the French without the Germans asking; the Gestapo being swamped with denunciations. It was a terrible episode. But the Queen and the Queen Mother knew de Gaulle, and de Gaulle is what saved the honour of France. The Queen has helped to legitimise the record of wartime France. She may have done it subconsciously but I believe it is why the older generation, in particular, love her so much.’

  By choosing France as her first European destination, Roche argues, and by returning so often, both in a public and private capacity, the Queen has earned herself a unique place in the French collective memory.

  Her appeal extends to the younger generations, too, he adds. It is normally a strict in-house rule (and a source of national pride) at the French offices of Vanity Fair that the French edition of the magazine never copies its English-language namesakes. That rule was cheerfully torn up when the July 2017 edition appeared on the news-stands with the same Annie Leibovitz portrait of the Queen that had already appeared in the British and US editions. The headline, however, was thoroughly French: ‘La reine du cool’.

  British commentators routinely make the point that, having decommissioned their own monarchy so forcefully, the French have been trying to add a certain royal lustre to their presidents ever since. The former British Ambassador to France, Sir Christopher Mallaby, has likened the sentiment to those who wish to impose something on others, but ‘Not In My Back Yard’. ‘The French think that monarchy is a splendid arrangement for other people, but not for themselves,’ he told a Foreign Office seminar on UK–French relations in 2014. ‘They are NIMBY monarchists.’

  1957

  Following that first visit as a Princess in 1948, the Queen’s return to Paris in 1957, for her first state visit as monarch, was an even more exuberant affair. The authorities estimated that the crowds that gathered along the river to watch another ‘promenade sur la Seine’ were the largest to view the Queen since her coronation four years before. Once again, he
r fluent French was a factor. ‘There is a quality in Her Majesty’s voice which the French as a whole find profoundly moving,’ the British Ambassador, Sir Gladwyn Jebb, wrote in his confidential despatch to the Foreign Secretary afterwards. When she visited the Opéra, the crowds grew so big and disobedient that mounted police drew their swords.

  The most striking aspect of the visit, Jebb went on, was the reaction in the ‘faubourgs rouges’ – the left-leaning areas on her itinerary. In Lille, then ‘an overwhelmingly working-class town’, the warmth of the welcome at a Renault factory was only soured by the way the workers ‘were kept in the distance by the management’. It was a similar story at a textile factory in Roubaix. ‘The most remarkable aspect of the visit was the tremendous ovation that the Queen received from the workers,’ Jebb reported.

  These were the dying days of the short-lived Fourth Republic when the French head of state was still a relatively ceremonial figure. Her host, President René Coty, would soon give way to the Fifth Republic and its first executive head of state, General de Gaulle. During his 1960 state visit to London, the General would be charmed by the Queen (and, as ever, by her mother). He would later describe the House of Windsor as the world’s ‘only legitimate monarchy’. Yet if he loved Britain’s Royal Family, the same did not apply to her government. Britain’s relations with France would remain distinctly cool for a decade, during which the General would twice veto British membership of the new EEC. France and Germany were the two dominant powers in the early common market (as, indeed, they remain today) and Britain was not joining as long as France had a president determined to blackball his neighbour across the Channel. Much as he liked the Queen personally, de Gaulle would do her no favours in Canada, either, as he stirred up the crowds in French-speaking Quebec, addressing separatist rallies with cries of ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ All that would change in dramatic style, in 1972.

  BRENTRY

  Following the resignation of the General in 1969, France would quickly come round to the idea of Britain in the EEC, thanks to that former civil servant who had welcomed the Queen to his exhibition in 1948. Georges Pompidou had been elected President of France in 1969 and was setting France on a new path. He wanted British involvement in the new European project and he had both a strong ally and a kindred spirit in Downing Street – the passionately pro-European Edward Heath. By 1971, provisional terms for Britain’s membership had been agreed. Heath not only needed to get it through Parliament. He wanted Britain’s entry to be marked in triumphalist style with a spectacular and grandiose celebration of shared values, while also reassuring sceptics that Britain’s national identity was not about to be lost in the European mix. There could surely be no better illustration than a state visit to France by the Queen. And whereas her previous visits had been largely remembered for the spectacle, this one, both governments agreed, should go down in history for its substance, too.

  The man in the middle was a diplomat of great stature and style, who also happened to be married to Sir Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary. Sir Christopher Soames had been appointed British Ambassador to Paris while General de Gaulle was still in charge of France (and while Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of Britain). British Embassy staff of the period have fond memories of a charismatic figure described by one of his team as ‘the Great Pachyderm, winning support and affection everywhere with tremendous trumpetings, brushing aside opposition with a genial sweep of the trunk and occasionally a savage prod from the tusk’.

  Soames had found himself ostracised by de Gaulle when a confidential report to London, accurately detailing his lunch conversation with the President about Britain’s European prospects, was leaked by Wilson to other European leaders. Following the arrival of Pompidou, however, Soames was back in favour at the Elysée. In October 1971, his Foreign Office masters asked him to sound out French thoughts on a state visit by the Queen. He went directly to Pompidou, who welcomed the idea ‘avec tout coeur’ – so much so that he already had a date in mind. He hoped the Queen would come in May 1972. Having already booked in the Queen of the Netherlands for June, Pompidou wanted the British visit to have star billing.

  The excitement on the French side was in danger of spiralling out of control, as the Foreign Office archives reveal. Soon afterwards, at a party in honour of the Russian premier, Leonid Brezhnev, the French Foreign Minister, Maurice Schumann, had been heard boasting that France had forced the Queen to tear up her own rules. It had always been British policy that there should be just one state visit to a country in each reign. Monarchs would, of course, make multiple tours of the Empire, but no more than one official visit to a ‘foreign’ land. Since the Queen had already paid a state visit to France in 1957, so Schumann noisily proclaimed, France was clearly a very special object of royal favouritism. Earwigging furiously at the same party, Soames was quick to report back to London. ‘I know the Queen is understandably anxious not to give the impression that we are running after the French,’ he wrote to Sir Denis Greenhill, head of the Foreign Office. ‘Too much of this sort of stuff in the French press may well quite reasonably infuriate her – and a lot of others beside.’

  In his response, Greenhill admitted that the one-country-per-reign rule did, indeed, exist, but would now be abolished. After all, the Queen was still only in her forties. As Greenhill pointed out to Soames, if the Queen could only go to a country once, then she would soon be reduced to state visits to ‘relatively unimportant countries’. Eventually there would be nowhere left to visit at all.

  A spot of French bragging at grand diplomatic receptions was a relatively minor concern. Britain’s entry in to the EEC was far from complete. Embracing the Common Market, as most knew it in Britain, had serious implications for British farming and fishing as well as for all those Commonwealth cousins and allies whose economies had long depended on exports to the mother country. There was anti-EEC feeling at both ends of the British political spectrum.

  In the very week that Soames was sounding out Pompidou, the House of Commons was in the midst of a furious debate on Britain’s European future. And yet the government were already attempting to embroil the Queen in it. It prompted a stern warning from her Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, that there should be no further discussion of a state visit until Parliament had voted on the matter. On 28th October 1971, MPs voted by 356:244 that Britain should move towards membership of the EEC. Even this was not the end of the matter. It was merely the start of months of further parliamentary debate on the terms of the deal. The issue remained a deeply divisive – even toxic – one. Yet Heath and his ministers had no compunction about getting the Queen on board already. Britain was on its way into Europe, and planning for the great state visit could begin in earnest.

  The following day the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, met the French Ambassador, cheerfully assuring him privately that ‘there should not be too much trouble’ getting all the relevant legislation through the House of Commons before the visit. The FCO’s main worry was the Germans. If Britain was about to send the Queen on a headline-grabbing tour of France, it would surely infuriate the other main power. ‘The Germans are likely therefore to think that the balance has swung heavily in favour of France,’ Lees Mayall, Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, warned Adeane at the Palace. The FCO had a crafty solution. Before announcing the French visit, it wanted the Queen to issue an invitation to the President of Germany, asking him to pay a state visit to Britain. German honour was duly salvaged. Gustav Heinemann would, indeed, be welcomed by the Queen a year later.

  News of the Queen’s proposed visit to Paris went down extremely well in the media. The Times applauded the end of the one-state-visit-per-country rule while The Sunday Telegraph (then a staunchly pro-European publication) proclaimed it would stop ‘the antis’ complaining. The excitement seemed to have got the better of the Prime Minister, too. There was mild panic at both the Palace and the FCO when it appeared that Edward Heath was thinking of coming along, too. By tradition, the
Queen would always be accompanied by a Foreign Office minister on her travels, on the understanding that he or she would keep a low profile. The whole point of such visits was that they were above politics. A Prime Minister was certainly neither expected nor welcome. In later years the rule was relaxed on a handful of special occasions, such as brief appearances by David Cameron at state banquets in Dublin and Berlin. In 1971 however, there was no royal or diplomatic appetite to have Heath in the royal entourage, however much this grand projet had been his handiwork. In a Foreign Office memo on 29th October 1971, Lees Mayall warned his colleagues of a ‘difficulty’. After his weekly audience with the Queen, Heath had intimated to her Private Secretary ‘that he might like to accompany her’. Could anyone offer a precedent for this?

  The Queen’s opinion on her British prime ministers (thirteen of them, up to the point of Theresa May) has always been as well guarded as her thoughts on so much else. It is, though, safe to say that Heath would never feature in her top five, and probably not in her top ten. Though only Margaret Thatcher was closer to the Queen in terms of age, Heath was never very comfortable in her company. ‘He was a bachelor whose only passions were sailing and classical music. I don’t think there was a lot of small talk,’ says one former member of the Royal Household.

  Not long before, Heath had also banned the Queen from that 1971 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Singapore, an instruction that would grate with her for evermore. So, having scuppered her own travel plans in 1971, Heath was certainly not going to receive any encouragement from the Queen to be part of her next adventure. A few weeks later, the Foreign Office’s Charles Wiggin wrote to Lees Mayall confirming that there was no precedent for a prime minister to join a monarch on a state visit. Heath, he hoped, had been ‘three-quarters joking about the idea’. The Prime Minister was determined not to be omitted entirely from the bilateral razzmatazz of the state visit. He would choose the very week of the state visit to take his first flight in Concorde, the great UK–French collaboration, although, when it happened, the British public would have to study their newspapers closely to find any mention of it.