At the end of her trip, on 10 April, Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to the Hotel de Ville at Fontvieille and was received by the Mayor – he was thought to be a communist but had bought a new suit for the occasion and made a charming speech. On arrival at the Château de Castries, the Duc met Queen Elizabeth at the door holding a lighted candelabrum, as was the custom when the King of France visited a subject. When she left the next day for London, the maid at the Château Légier, who had cooked excellent meals for the party, remarked, ‘La Reine Mère est bien plus commode que Madame.’77
On a shorter visit to Normandy and Brittany in May 1967, Queen Elizabeth used the royal yacht Britannia (in which she had just completed a tour to the West Country) as her base, and had on board Dick Wilkins and her niece Margaret Elphinstone with her husband Denys Rhodes, together with Ruth Fermoy and Ralph Anstruther. Martin Gilliat and Alastair Aird were also in the party and Charles de Noailles joined them. Bad weather rather spoiled the visit, but she enjoyed seeing both the Bayeux Tapestry and Mont-Saint-Michel. Aboard Britannia, Ruth Fermoy took her familiar place at the piano and there was singing and dancing.78
By the late 1960s Charles de Noailles, unlike the Queen Mother, was flagging; he stood aside and the role of her escort was taken on by Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, an elegant Frenchman of her own generation. He had known Queen Elizabeth since the 1930s, and during the war he had been at the French mission in Britain when, he recalled later, ‘she was very kind to the French.’79 He came from an ancient family, and he had connections with great houses all over the country. He was a most sophisticated tour guide and also arranged Italian trips for her.
He found her an easy client. ‘When we first arrive people are delighted, but probably sometimes a little nervous. Not for long though; she’s such a charmer. It’s that extraordinary natural niceness she has, and then that kindness.’80 He thought her love of France was in her Scots blood and she in turn was ‘adored’ by the French, he said. ‘There’s not a village we pass where people are not at their windows or in the street waving at her. I think she’s about the most popular person I know, and in France certainly.’ Her vitality, he thought, came from her curiosity, her sense of fun and her natural good health. He thought her perceptive and able to see people as they really were. She rightly had a sense of her mission and role, and while people were excited to see her he never saw anyone become familiar – ‘they wouldn’t do it because she inspires natural respect in people.’81
Her sense of fun was very much to the fore on these trips and many of them featured moments that could have come from the pages of her beloved P. G. Wodehouse. On a trip to Burgundy, in 1976, the Prince arranged for them to stay at the Château de Sully, as guests of the Duc and Duchesse de Magenta. It was a chilly April; after dinner, attended by a canon of Autun Cathedral who (according to Anstruther) ‘wore a trendy white polo-neck sweater and was obliged reluctantly to say Grace’, they all went on to the balcony and, in a light frost, fed the carp in the moat. The next day the canon showed Queen Elizabeth his Cathedral; a choir of children held pink roses and sang Purcell in her honour.82
An unhappy incident occurred when the Captain of the Gendarmerie who was escorting the cars was thrown from his motorcycle into a ditch. Fortunately he just missed hitting a telegraph pole, but even so he broke his arm in two places and looked alarmingly white as he lay on the ground. The Queen Mother and the Duchesse de Magenta covered him with a rug and a coat and they waited for forty-five minutes, picking violets and cowslips by the roadside, ‘keeping a watchful eye on the Captain’ until an ambulance finally arrived.83
At Cluny, the Queen Mother admired the stallions of the State Stud; at Tournus she stopped to see the Cathedral, its pink brick pillars aglow in the afternoon light. Lunching at La-Roche-en-Brenil with the Montalembert family she met again a dancing partner from debutante days, Comte Willy de Grünne. At one dinner, the Prefet’s wife produced from her bag a mouth organ which she gave to Queen Elizabeth. When the Queen Mother retired to her room, she was serenaded by the son-in-law of the house, who for some reason was known in the family as ‘Naughty Boy’, playing a hunting horn outside. The Queen Mother responded by playing the ‘Marseillaise’ on her mouth organ from the window.84
In 1977 came the turn of the great vignerons in Bordeaux. She stayed at Château Mouton with Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who showed her his cellars and then drove her to lunch with the Baron and Baronne Elie de Rothschild at Château Lafite. In Pauillac the entire town seemed to be on the streets to welcome her; in one village the local pony club formed a guard of honour, all waving Union flags. It was a shorter visit than usual and so at a lunch at the Château de Beychevelle she met all the owners whose great estates she did not have time to visit – Latour, Margaux, Pontet Canet, Yquem.85
When she went to the Dordogne in 1978 she was received by the Mayor of Limoges and the British Consul General, Robert Ford. Her hostess on this occasion was the Baronne Henry de Bastard. Her house, the Château de Hautefort, had just been restored for the second time – after the first restoration one of the neighbours’ children had apparently dropped a cigarette and burned it down.
On the first evening of her visit Queen Elizabeth attended a pre-dinner reception at the chateau for the Mayor and local notables. ‘This was a great success,’ noted Anstruther wryly, ‘too great, in fact, as they were still there after dinner.’ She was fascinated by the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux which were opened especially for her. That was followed by lunch in a charming country hotel and then a visit to the beautiful town of Sarlat.86
Her host and hostess in Lorraine in 1979 were the Prince and Princesse de Beauvau-Craon, at their magnificent early-eighteenth-century chateau, Haroué. The Queen Mother’s hostess was struck by the fact that, along with her police officer, her dresser, two chauffeurs, a footman and a page (whose main task appeared to be mixing extremely dry martinis), she brought a hairdresser with a broken arm. This, the Princesse gathered, was because Queen Elizabeth wanted him to see France.87
As with all of her visits, this one began with a reception for the local authorities. The Mayor and the municipal council came to Haroué for drinks and presented her with a medal, which she examined closely and gave to Ralph Anstruther, saying, ‘Gardez-moi ce trésor.’ They were enchanted. According to her hostess, ‘Elle rayonnait’ – she radiated warmth; although the visit was officially incognito, going about with her was ‘rather like following a pop star’; people waved out of their windows and exclaimed, ‘Qu’elle est mignonne!’88
There was a long drive in pouring rain to Selestat in Alsace, for lunch at a restaurant with Commandant Paul-Louis Weiller, an air ace in the Great War. The restaurant served soup with frogs legs in it, even though Clarence House had insisted that she did not like them. Laure de Beauvau-Craon recalled that Weiller had been called ‘froggie’ in England in his youth, and was determined to make his English guests pay the penalty. Outside the window, a band played gamely in the rain.
It had become part of the pattern of the visits that Johnny Lucinge would organize a private dinner at a restaurant, and this time it took place at Le Capucin Gourmand in Nancy. A crowd of striking workers gathered outside the restaurant: according to Princesse de Beauvau-Craon, they had been locked out of their factory and wanted to force the Prefet, who was among the diners, to intervene, although Le Figaro reported later that they had intended to kidnap the Queen Mother to draw attention to their dispute. An unlikely story, perhaps; but it seems an angry crowd surrounded her Daimler as she left the restaurant. According to the Princesse, the Queen Mother behaved like ‘un torero face au taureau’. She walked slowly towards the strikers, beamed at them and started to talk to them. She got an ovation and shouts of ‘Vive la Reine!’89
She loved the beautiful library at Haroué and one evening, as she sat there with a glass of champagne, hearing that Ralph Anstruther and others in her party were missing, she said, ‘They must have found a low joint in Nancy.�
�� Her host and hostess told her that the family had buried its silver in the grounds of the chateau during the war but never found it again. To their surprise the plane which arrived to take Queen Elizabeth home brought out a large package from Harrods which she had ordered – it was a metal detector. Sadly, after digging several holes in the garden the Princesse discovered only water pipes, and her husband put an end to her searches.90
In 1980 Queen Elizabeth stayed with Monsieur and Madame Kilian Hennessy in Cognac, where she was offered brandy from the year 1800 to taste, before visiting historic châteaux and Romanesque churches.91 In May 1981, she returned to the Loire, eighteen years after her first visit, and stayed at the moated Château de Serrant, near Angers; this was once the property of an Irish Jacobite family which had assisted Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45, and now belonged to the Prince and Princesse de Ligne-La Tremoille. She watched a display by the Cadre Noir at the cavalry barracks at Saumur, and went to Gennes to lay a wreath of poppies at the memorial to the cavalry cadets who had defended the bridge over the Loire in 1940 and held up the German advance; they were nearly all killed.92 She was delighted with this trip, writing to Ralph Anstruther, ‘I thought that this year it was better than ever.’93
In 1982 she made what was inevitably a rather formal trip to Paris to open the new wing of the Hertford Hospital, of which she was patron. She stayed at the British Embassy and called on President Mitterrand. Johnny Lucinge gave a cocktail party at his flat and among the many guests was Princess Olga, the widow of her old friend Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, who had died in 1976.
In 1983 it was the turn of Champagne, where she stayed again with the Kilian Hennessys in a house which had belonged to the Chandon family. Champagne flowed throughout an excellent dinner. She was driven around the miles of Moet and Chandon cellars in an electric car.94 In Epernay she talked to a survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Madame Servagnat, who with her husband had been in the wartime Resistance and had helped British airmen shot down over France. Queen Elizabeth praised her courage. ‘Vous avez donne l’exemple,’ Madame Servagnat replied.95
In 1984 the Queen Mother visited the Sarthe region, south-west of Paris, and stayed with the Comte and Comtesse René de Nicolay at the Château du Lude on the River Loir. The streets of the little town of Le Lude were decked with Union flags and Tricolours, the Mayor received her with a ‘vin d’honneur’ and the town band played ‘God Save The Queen’ and the ‘Marseillaise’ before enthusiastic crowds.96 ‘She is very bon vivant,’ the Comtesse later recalled.97
At the Château de Bournel, a large nineteenth-century house in Franche Comté, the following year the Marquis de Moustier was on the doorstep to greet her, but the rest of the family were all off hunting a dormouse in the dining room. Eventually they were presented to her. This house, which had wonderful views of the ‘ligne bleu des Vosges’, was unusual in France in that it had passed intact from father to son for many generations. After visiting Besançon and other sights of the area, the Queen Mother was presented with a substantial and very heavy local cheese which was much appreciated after her return to Clarence House.98
One should not underestimate the difficulty to which Queen Elizabeth’s guide, Johnny Lucinge, was put in organizing these tours. The diarist James Lees-Milne, who could be unkind, recalled talking about it to Lucinge:
He has taken the place of Charles de Noailles in that he stays annually at Sandringham with the Queen Mother and pilots her around France each summer. Told me the difficulty was finding suitable hosts who were rich enough and possessed large houses with rooms enough and servants enough to accommodate her retinue, consisting of himself, Lady Fermoy, the Graftons, two maids, two valets, two detectives. He had just come from Sandringham and said the Q.M. is the only member of the Royal Family one could call cultivated. She has humour, and is never overtly critical. Interested, reads her prep. before making visits.99
Johnny Lucinge’s daughter, the Marquise de Ravenel, later recalled that when her father ran out of castles in France, he looked to Italy, where fortunately he had good friends.100 Queen Elizabeth was happy to go there.
In October 1984 she visited Venice on behalf of the Venice in Peril Fund. This was the first time she had been to the city since she and the Duke of York had travelled on the Orient Express to the wedding of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Princess Olga in 1923. All they saw of Venice then was the railway station.
She joined the royal yacht Britannia at Ancona and sailed into Venice on 25 October. As well as her usual guests, she had invited the archiect Sir Hugh Casson and his wife on this trip.* He had accepted with great pleasure in a note adorned with a watercolour sketch of a corgi reclining in a gondola, adding that he had ordered himself a sailor suit.101 She entertained on board numerous Italian officials and nobles and, although her health was now failing, the ninety-year-old explorer and writer Freya Stark came from her villa at Asolo in the Veneto.† Queen Elizabeth had long admired Dame Freya’s work, and in 1976 she had invited her to stay at the Castle of Mey; they had kept in touch since then with letters and Christmas cards.
The weather was poor and the tides were extreme during this visit. Rear Admiral Paul Greening, the Flag Officer in command of the royal yacht, was nervous that Queen Elizabeth’s frequent tardiness might cause problems. It did. On one occasion her launch ran aground in the mud,102 and the church of San Nicolo dei Mendicoli, where parishioners were eagerly awaiting her, could be reached only by taking all the other passengers out of her motor boat.103 In St Mark’s Square, sudden rain forced her into the Cafe Florian, where she and her party were given a welcome tea. She was accompanied everywhere by swarms of photographers who, naturally, demanded that she be seen in a gondola. Her staff finally gave in and she made a short gondola ride with Admiral Greening. ‘A really memorable spectacle,’ commented the lady in waiting.104
Afterwards Hugh Casson sent her a booklet of sketches of the trip, which delighted her. ‘Every page brings back memories,’ she wrote to him, ‘mostly blissful, and one or two funny, like the speeches in Church! The Service was marvellously chaotic, & most enjoyable – wasn’t it? It is quite difficult to take in so much beauty in a few days, and your heavenly and lovely drawings will always be a great joy to me.’105
Johnny Lucinge arranged a trip to Tuscany in 1986. She stayed with Duke Salviati and his wife in their country house at Migliarino. Sir Harold Acton was among those who came to dine with her there.* The next morning the Duke showed her around his greenhouses; he had started a business propagating seedlings for export and now employed 300 local people. For lunch they drove to the Villa Reale at Marlia, which had belonged to Napoleon’s elder sister, Elise, when she was Duchess of Lucca and Grand Duchess of Tuscany.
One of the high points of the trip for the Queen Mother was a visit to the Villa Capponi, where she had stayed with her grandmother before the First World War. She looked again at the view over Florence she had first seen some eighty years earlier, then drove to Sir Harold Acton’s home at La Pietra. In yet another villa with an exquisite garden, she met Pietro Annigoni, who gave her a book of the frescos he had just painted for Padua Cathedral. On the last evening, Johnny Lucinge took her party to dinner at the restaurant Solferino in the village of Marcario-in-Piano; after an excellent alfresco meal, in the company of a group of friendly doctors from Lucca, the party drove to Pisa to see the Tower, the Cathedral and the Baptistery. The Queen Mother talked with a group of students who had a guitar and were singing Neapolitan songs.106
In her six-page letter of thanks, she told Johnny Lucinge that he must be a magician to be able to conjure up such beautiful houses. The Duke, she said, ‘with his splendid Graeco-Roman head made us feel so happy’ and the villas, ‘the gardens, the picnics, the fun of it all, will always remain a happy wonderful memory’. She loved the evening at Pisa and the charming restaurant dinner, with all the doctors. ‘I couldn’t help wondering about their patients.’107
In 1987 she visited the Palladian
villas of the Veneto. She stayed at the Hotel Cipriani in Asolo and saw Freya Stark again. In the Villa Maser she admired the frescos by Veronese, and visited the only country church that Palladio built; the same afternoon, in Castelfranco, she visited the eighteenth-century theatre – a young boy played the British National Anthem on the piano as she arrived. She then went to the Duomo San Liberale to see Giorgione’s Madonna and Child. She went shopping for local china and tried the fiery local grappa; wherever she went she was greeted by enthusiastic crowds.108
In June 1988 she took her party to Sicily and Naples in Britannia. She was not feeling well when she flew out from London and was rather dreading her crowded schedule. But the Mediterranean sunshine revived her and she carried out an exhausting round of official and private visits with her habitual zest and energy. In Salerno she laid a wreath at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Battipaglia, and met the gardener and his son who together had looked after the graves since 1945.109
She entertained on board Britannia – one night her grandson Prince Andrew, who had joined the Royal Navy in 1979 and whose ship HMS Edinburgh was in the Bay of Naples, came to dinner – and she was feted and feasted in beautiful palazzi in both Sicily and Naples. The Archbishop showed her over the exquisite Cathedral at Monreale above Palermo, and then gave the party tea in his palace.110 Hugh Casson, whom she had again invited aboard, was impressed by her stamina; after each full day’s sightseeing ‘at six-thirty every evening she’d give a party on the ship for all the local dignitaries, and at eight-thirty it would be a dinner party, and at midnight she’d have the officers from the wardroom for a last drink before going to bed.’111 The British Ambassador in Rome, Sir Derek Thomas, agreed – he reported to the Foreign Office that ‘Her sparkling personality, her unflagging energy, and her keen enjoyment of life – so manifestly undulled by the passage of years – were universally admired by all whom she met.’112
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