The Ambassador was determined to exceed all expectations. ‘He played a blinder,’ recalls his son, Sir Nicholas Soames. ‘And so did my mother and so did Nanny.’ Although the Soames children had long since left the nursery, their much-loved nanny, Hilda King, would stay with the family for fifty-five years. When the Soameses moved to Paris, nanny came too, happily volunteering for the role of Embassy florist. Come the royal visit, she excelled herself. ‘Nanny did all the flowers for the state visit and I don’t think I have ever seen anything so beautiful in my life,’ Sir Nicholas recalls. ‘She couldn’t speak a word of French but she would negotiate in the French flower market and beat them into submission. It just looked unbelievably beautiful and it was all done by Nanny. At the end, she was presented to the Queen who gave her a signed photograph. She treasured it for the rest of her life.’
It wasn’t just the wishes of the Queen which had to be considered but those of the royal entourage. For example, there had to be ‘special arrangements’ (otherwise known as large gin and tonics) for Bobo MacDonald, the Queen’s dresser. The principal concern of Sir Christopher and his team, however, was to equal, if not outshine, the French in terms of food, drink and elegance.
Round One, however, would go to President Pompidou, with an Elysée Palace welcome lunch of grilled turbot, roast duck, asparagus, cheeses and ‘Trianon’ ice cream, with Meursault 1969 to accompany the fish and Château Lafite Rothschild 1961 for the duck. Before sitting down, the two heads of state had gifts to exchange. Mindful, perhaps, of her first meeting with M. Pompidou at that 1948 art exhibition, and of Madame Pompidou’s interest in contemporary art, the Queen had chosen an abstract painting by Graham Sutherland, called ‘Form in an Estuary’. Though Sutherland’s technique had so displeased the Ambassador’s mother-in-law, Clementine Churchill, that she had consigned his portrait of Sir Winston to a bonfire, the former war artist was a great favourite of the Queen Mother and had been awarded the Order of Merit in 1960. For Madame Pompidou there was an equally contemporary piece, a brooch with ‘E II R’ in polished gold, shining ‘through the facets of a citrine surrounded by eighteen-carat gold textured wires with pavé diamond darts and scattered diamonds’. Laid out on a table was the badge and ribbon of the GCB for M. Pompidou. As per Roger du Boulay’s suggestion, it was formally presented as ‘of the Bath’, not ‘du Bain’. There would be no decoration for the Queen, since she had received the Légion d’honneur on her previous visit. However, the Pompidous had commissioned a hand-made tablecloth and bedspread for the monarch. For Prince Philip, there was a Sèvres porcelain grasshopper.
After lunch, the couple were driven to a residence as palatial as Buckingham Palace, the Grand Trianon at Versailles, which had been renovated at great expense by General de Gaulle to flatter foreign visitors. The first beneficiary after that had been British, too – former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. If all the replica eighteenth-century gilt and velvet had amused the Huddersfield-born chemist’s son, one can only wonder how it went down with the man who occupied it ahead of the Queen, Leonid Brezhnev. The curators had been thrilled at the prospect of finally having real royalty in France’s grandest royal palace. They were, however, a little disappointed when the recce party from Buckingham Palace had ruled out use of the almost parodically opulent royal bedroom suite, with its vast gilt bed. The Queen and the Duke had, instead, opted for the simpler, quieter ‘Consort’s Bedroom’.
There was no time to explore, though. Within fifteen minutes of her arrival, the Queen was due to hold a reception for the entire Paris Diplomatic Corps. Every detail would be scrutinised by these gimlet-eyed followers of protocol. In Britain, and around what some still called ‘the old Empire’, there was continued alarm – if not fury – about Britain’s embrace of Europe at the expense of old allies.
WAR OF WORDS
Back in Westminster, the Shadow Europe Minister, Peter Shore, would denounce the royal trip as ‘ill-advised and mistimed’. It was certainly unusual for a former Cabinet minister to attack a state visit while it was actually in progress, but Shore was adamant that a constitutional line had been crossed. There was nothing wrong with promoting friendship with France, but it was quite wrong ‘for the Crown to be used, as it has been used this week, to give authority to a particular treaty’.
The need to placate the Commonwealth nations, and particularly the Queen’s realms, had not escaped Soames and his masters. There would also be a series of small but significant gestures towards the Commonwealth members of the Diplomatic Corps. They would be welcomed at Versailles ahead of all the other ambassadors and would also have their own photograph taken with the Queen.
At the same moment the final touches were being applied to the centrepiece of the whole visit: the speech to be delivered at that evening’s state banquet. It would be the definitive statement on Britain’s relations not just with France, but with the new European political edifice. The Queen would deliver it on live television beamed across the continent. Any sovereign’s speech during a state visit is always the result of three-way collaboration involving the embassy, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Palace – plus occasional input from the Prime Minister’s office in Downing Street. On this occasion the process would be far from straightforward and offers a fascinating insight into the competing priorities at the Palace and the FCO. It shows that, far from merely parroting a set text written by her officials, the Queen has had considerably greater involvement in some of her major pronouncements over the years. On the issue of the UK’s entry into Europe, the British government view in 1972 can be summed up simply as ‘full steam ahead’. At the Palace, the view was unquestionably ‘steady as she goes’.
Stored in the National Archives at Kew are successive drafts of the Queen’s speech that night. First crafted by Sir Christopher Soames, it began as a stylish and occasionally Churchillian piece of oratory, which would not have sounded out of place if the Queen were a politician addressing a party conference or pouring treacle over some trade summit. The text hailed France as a ‘treasure house of the human spirit, a gallery of all that is creative . . . I rejoice that I shall be able to see what survives of our common past and what is being fashioned for our common future.’ A recurring complaint from Eurosceptics over the years is that the British public were never told the whole story when Britain joined the Common Market, that they were merely led to believe it would be a latter-day version of the Hanseatic League – the alliance of cities and merchants of the Middle Ages. Yet it is hard to fault the Foreign Office’s candour in this attempt. ‘This is not simply a mercantile league designed to bring about certain profitable adjustments in our national economies, important though that may be,’ wrote Soames and his team. ‘It is much more. It is a beginning, a point of departure, a turning point in the history of Europe. The destinies of the peoples living on either side of [the Channel] have permanently and irrevocably been joined. This is the size of the change we are seeking to bring about. This is the ultimate meaning of our accession. That is the measure of our faith in the European future.’
Alongside this rich encomium of all things European, there was also an acknowledgement that the Commonwealth – or what the text called ‘traditional interests’ – had to be ‘considered and safeguarded’. However, some things were already beyond the point of no return. ‘Some longstanding ideas have been re-shaped by circumstance.’
This was going too far. The European debate was certainly not settled in Britain. For the Queen to ‘rejoice’ and proclaim her ‘faith’ in a ‘European future’ would be difficult territory, with Parliament still sharply divided on the issue. Back at the Foreign Office, senior diplomats started suggesting their own amendments to Soames’s draft. C. M. James of the Western European department ran a line through the section on ‘permanent and irrevocable’ change. ‘Too strong when Parliamentary assent still in the balance,’ he wrote in the margin. ‘Brings the Queen too much into the political arena.’
The next FCO draft would still in
clude a ringing endorsement of European integration. This was to be a ‘partnership speaking on great matters with one voice and gathering the genius of many’.
No sooner had this text reached Buckingham Palace in April 1972 than the Queen’s Private Secretary, Martin Charteris, started pruning. Out came any lines that might have seemed arrogant and antagonistic to a Commonwealth audience. They included the phrase ‘Europe – with its predominant share in the world’s commerce, its unique sophistication’.
Any words which suggested that the Queen might personally share the Europhile passions of her senior diplomats and her Prime Minister were chopped. The FCO wanted her to say: ‘It gives me great satisfaction to know that the ties between our two countries are being multiplied.’ With a judicious stroke of the Charteris pen, this was reduced to: ‘Every day, the ties between our two countries are being multiplied.’ Thus was sentiment deftly transformed into mere fact. On 28th April, Charteris sent his provisional draft back to the Foreign Office, with a covering letter that made it quite clear there might well be further royal editing. ‘The Queen may, of course, make massive alterations to the text.’ So much for that received wisdom that the Queen would read out a telephone directory, if her Prime Minister placed one in her hands. Here was her most senior official stating that she would have no hesitation in making ‘massive’ changes to her government’s words. And she did.
On 4th May, Charteris sent back the Queen’s own revised version. As Soames would observe later in his despatch, the Queen had indeed been choosing her words carefully. Gone was the reference to ‘a common enterprise, dominated by no single focus of national power’. Gone was ‘a partnership speaking on great matters with one voice and gathering the genius of many’. More importantly, there was no mention whatsoever of a ‘turning point in history’.
And there was one further vintage example of royal editing, in the closing section. The earlier versions had contained the line: ‘I delight that our two countries have found this common sense of purpose.’ This came back from the Queen as: ‘I hope that our two countries will find a common sense of purpose.’ In other words, they hadn’t found it, and she was not delighted.
If the Foreign Office mandarins were unhappy with this watered-down version of their hymn of praise for Europe, the Foreign Secretary was not going to rock the boat. Sir Alec Douglas-Home professed himself perfectly happy. ‘Another splendid speech,’ he scribbled on his copy of the text a few days before the visit began. His only query concerned another speech that the Queen was due to give on the second day of her tour, to the city council of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville. It included the line: ‘Much of the destiny of Europe has flowed through London and Paris like their rivers.’ ‘It’s very good,’ Sir Alec noted politely. ‘But does destiny flow like a river? I can’t make up my mind!’
VERSAILLES
The refurbished Palace of Versailles had seldom looked quite like this since the days of Marie-Antoinette. As Sir Christopher Soames would write to the Foreign Secretary when it was all over: ‘Versailles that evening seemed restored to the purposes for which it had been built, a dream of vanished royal splendour.’ President Pompidou had arranged a ballet performance – a truncated version of the ghostly Giselle – before leading the Queen through to the Galerie des Cotelle and dinner for 150 at a table lit by 480 candelabra.
It would still be many years before state banquet etiquette permitted speeches before food, however. In 1972, etiquette still demanded after-dinner oratory. The Queen and President Pompidou would have to work their way through a dinner of Périgord foie gras (served with a 1949 Château d’Yquem), lobster pie, leg of St-Florentin lamb, iced gateau and strawberries, before this crowning moment. In as much as Britain’s entry to the European Union ever had a coronation, this was probably it. Thanks to the enduring influence of Toni de Bellaigue (and, possibly, a little help from Linguaphone, too), the evening would be conducted almost entirely in French.
President Pompidou began the speeches by assuring the Queen of the ‘unanimous reactions of friendship and respect’ of the French people – feelings based on ‘deep sympathy for the person who bears the weight of the Crown with such grace and dignity’.
Describing Britain and France as ‘the two oldest European nations’ (a claim with which many might legitimately quarrel), he recalled how they had both been ‘at daggers drawn and yet passionately attracted to one another’. The members of the Foreign Office speech-vetting committee had been so nervous about the subject of General de Gaulle that they had even advised the Queen not to utter his name, unless President Pompidou should bring him up first. Christopher Ewart-Biggs, then minister at the British Embassy,* had warned that it would be ‘untactful’. Yet President Pompidou had no such reservations about bringing up his predecessor. ‘We shall not forget that in 1940, when France was literally submerged by Hitler’s might, Britain alone refused to yield and saved the freedom of the world,’ he declared. ‘We shall not forget that by welcoming General de Gaulle on your soil, you enabled first Free France, then the whole of France to keep on fighting.’
And there was some eloquent straight-talking, too: ‘Not so long ago, your country seemed to consider the Economic Community as one of those continental conditions which, for more than three centuries, Britain had been set stubbornly and successfully to destroy. On her part, France saw in Britain a country determinedly turned toward the ocean, that is to say on the fringe of Europe. We have now convinced each other of the contrary. For the first time in more than ten centuries, from the Sea of Norway to the Mediterranean, the peoples of western Europe are definitely committed to follow the path of economic integration and political co-operation.’ There could be ‘no afterthoughts’, he said firmly. Just over four decades later he would be proved spectacularly wrong. On a night like this, however, Brexit must have seemed as implausible as a last-minute appearance from Louis XVI.
Finally the Queen rose to address the guests with a speech that had, by now, been distilled more carefully than a five-star brandy. Some – though not all – of her amendments had been accepted. The Foreign Office had succeeded in putting some of its preferred options back. In her draft, the Queen had written: ‘There is now the prospect that this ancient relationship may be given a new dimension.’ On the night, the ‘may’ had been altered to ‘will’. And the Foreign Office had significantly upgraded what would today be called the ‘big vision’: it was ‘a turning point in history’, after all. Who had insisted on re-inserting this line? Might it have been the Prime Minister himself? Downing Street always has the last say on such matters. At the end of the battle of the speech drafts, between the most Europhile British government in history and the innately cautious Queen and her courtiers, it would appear that the honours were even. There was one section of her speech that had sailed through every draft from beginning to end without a problem. It was one that brought a welcome note of levity on the night. ‘We may drive on different sides of the road,’ said the Queen, ‘but we are going the same way.’
Though the speeches were over, the evening certainly was not. The two heads of state emerged for an after-dinner reception in Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors for 2,000 people. ‘Only the television lights and the crush of prominent French men and women using their elbows to get near The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh marred the great reception in the Galerie des Glaces,’ wrote Sir Christopher Soames in his despatch afterwards. The French media were entranced by it all. In the words of Le Figaro, the Queen’s speech and her presence represented nothing less than the ‘consecration’ of a new era.
VIVE LA DIFFERENCE
The tone of the visit had been firmly established. Now it was time for both sides to enjoy the ambience and the mutual admiration. The following day, the Queen was feted at the Hôtel de Ville as she addressed the municipal council of Paris. In the same rooms where Edward VII had proclaimed the Entente Cordiale in 1904, the Queen saluted Paris with some of the more flowery language that she and her advisers had e
xpunged from the state-banquet speech the night before. ‘For us, she is like no other city; rather, she is a light that shines in the imagination,’ she noted, once more in fluent French. ‘She is timeless, yet she moves with the times.’ Despite the Foreign Secretary’s misgivings about whether destiny could ‘flow’ like a river, the Queen rather thought it could: ‘Much of the destiny of Europe has flowed through London and Paris like the Seine and the Thames . . .’
Once again, the French media commended the Queen’s sense of style – particularly her turquoise beret – and were equally impressed by her choice of guests for a small lunch party that followed at the British Embassy. Rather than inviting the usual civic worthies, the Queen had replicated the ‘informal’ luncheons that she and the Duke of Edinburgh had already introduced at Buckingham Palace. At home, every few months, a dozen eminent people at the top of their trades – a theatre director, perhaps, plus a bishop, a chief constable, a professor, and so on – would receive a call from the Deputy Master of the Royal Household asking if they might like to have lunch with the Queen. After the initial guffaws and replies of ‘pull the other one’, they would be invited to ring the Palace switchboard, ask for the Deputy Master and establish that the invitation was, indeed, genuine. Few have ever declined. The Queen decided to do exactly the same in Paris, mixing together a leading physician, a television executive, the novelist Jean d’Ormesson, and the couturier Pierre Balmain.
For the embassy kitchens, this was just the first challenge of the day. That evening, it was the Queen’s turn to host the President to dinner. The Ambassador was in his element – food was always a central plank of British diplomacy during the Soames years. ‘The first thing Soames did each day was have a meeting with the cooks to decide what was going to be eaten,’ says Sir Roger du Boulay, who served as his Head of Chancery and well remembers his boss’s attention to detail. ‘He would say: “We haven’t thought about the colour. We need some colour – tomatoes or carrots!” And even his house wine would be a fine claret.’
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 37