The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  She was ‘thrilled and delighted’ by it, she told him. First, she said, the Prince himself read it to his granny ‘(Very nicely)’ and then she had read it herself ‘again and again’. He had evoked lovely memories, she said, and she ended by sending ‘an immense amount of gratitude from the Prince’s Granny, Elizabeth R’.106

  A disagreeable occurrence for her in 1996 was publicity over the size of her overdraft which suddenly hit the headlines – £4 million, the papers said. That she was extravagant and lived beyond her means had always been assumed – how could any retired person, even a queen, pay for so many homes, horses, staff and dresses? Her finances were managed by Ralph Anstruther until he fell ill and was replaced as Treasurer by Nicholas Assheton, the former deputy chairman of Coutts. She had a passbook from Coutts that would be brought by hand every quarter, written up by hand and detailing all her personal cheques. Most of them were to dressmakers and those close friends whom she helped. Her racing account was still looked after by Michael Oswald. There were inevitable financial shortfalls, even after her Civil List annuity rose, eventually, to £643,000 to cover her official expenses. As we have seen, the Queen had elected always to cover her mother’s racing losses and other expenses, and thus enable her to continue the style of life to which she was both accustomed and suited.

  Her expenditure would doubtless have been much reduced had she not been so determined, despite her age, to continue leading a remarkably active public and private life. In 1997 she carried out fifty-four public engagements and many private ones. In early February there was an enjoyable family weekend at Royal Lodge for the christening of her great-grandson, Samuel Chatto, the son of Princess Margaret’s daughter Sarah and her husband Daniel. Lord Snowdon was there for the christening and lunch and she made sure that he sat next to her.

  Later that month she gave tea to the President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, and his wife during their state visit, and attended the banquet for them at Buckingham Palace on 25 February. Over the next two days she inspected the Royal Yeomanry, of which she was honorary colonel, in Chelsea, and paid a visit to the National Headquarters of the British Red Cross Society. March followed the usual pattern, with race meetings at Sandown and Cheltenham and the presentation of shamrock to the Irish Guards at Pirbright on 17 March. So it continued throughout the year, with almost all her true and tried engagements, public and personal.

  She had her usual fishing fortnight at Birkhall, and Ted Hughes came. He was recovering from an operation and Queen Elizabeth invited Carol Hughes to come too, although wives did not usually accompany their husbands on these occasions. As always he entered into the spirit of the place and loved his ‘deeply restful and richly happy’ days there.107

  As lord warden of the Cinque Ports, she visited Walmer Castle from 18 to 21 July and went to Sandringham for the King’s Lynn Festival a week later. Prince Charles was there as usual and wrote to her afterwards, ‘I still can’t believe that another year has passed and that, once again, we have walked round the flower & vegetable tent at Sandringham, talked to all those hardy annual people in the crowd and sung Cole Porter songs after dinner with Raymond Leppard.* As always, everything was a very special treat because it was with you.’108 She was at Clarence House for her birthday lunch, before which the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery paraded by in her honour. This year she invited Prince William and Prince Harry and their father wrote to her afterwards that his boys ‘adored it’.109

  She then left as usual for the Castle of Mey on 7 August. There was a sad moment at Mey that summer: Britannia made her last visit. The Conservative government of John Major had decided to decommission the royal yacht and this decision was confirmed by the new Labour government, led by Tony Blair. The yacht had been an effective seaborne embassy and trade platform for Britain for over forty years, as well as being the family’s floating haven both when they were promoting Britain and when they were taking holidays.*

  Britannia anchored off Caithness for the last time on 16 August 1997. The Queen came ashore to Mey leading a large family party which included Prince Andrew and his daughters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Princess Anne and her husband, her children Peter and Zara, Prince Edward and his friend Sophie Rhys-Jones (whom he married in June 1999), and Princess Margaret’s son and daughter, David Linley and Sarah Chatto, with their spouses.

  Lunch that day was fun but somewhat melancholy. Conscious that without their resident muse, Martin Gilliat, their collective writing skills were much diminished, Queen Elizabeth’s Household had gone for the best – they secretly asked Ted Hughes to come up with some lines to be sent to the Queen as she sailed away for the last time. His verse ended:

  Whichever course your Captain takes, you steer

  Into this haven of all our hearts, and here

  You shall be anchored for ever.

  The reply from the yacht was similar in spirit:

  My what a marvellous time we have had,

  Visiting you at your castellated pad.

  We couldn’t have had a better time,

  Seeing the garden in its prime.

  Glasses filled with Dubonnet, gin and Pimm’s,

  Loosened our tongues and our limbs!

  Oh what a heavenly day,

  Happy, glorious and gay.110

  That autumn, the Queen and many members of the family attended the decommissioning of Britannia at Portsmouth. Queen Elizabeth did not go. As with other aspects of life she considered disagreeable, she turned away from the subject. Her friends and Household knew not to mention the yacht to her again.

  On her departure from Mey, she spent the last weekend of August as usual at Balmoral before moving on to Birkhall. That weekend, on the night of 30–31 August 1997, came disaster. The Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash in Paris. Her drunken driver had been speeding to escape an insistent swarm of press photographers.

  *

  IN THE EARLY hours of Sunday morning, 31 August, the Queen wrote her mother a note to be given her when she awoke, telling her of the tragedy.

  At Balmoral everyone’s first concern was for the Princess’s sons, William and Harry. Fortunately they were there with their father and the rest of the family, all of whom rallied to help them in different ways. But time to cope with shock and loss were not permitted to any of them. This at once became a national tragedy and the tone was set by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who a few hours after her death eulogized the Princess of Wales as ‘the People’s Princess’.

  There was an extraordinary outpouring of grief across the country which grew more intense throughout the week. This was a remarkable testimony to the Princess’s popularity, but some of it was self-indulgent and passions were inflamed by non-stop broadcasting of events and shrill demands from tabloid newspapers. ‘SHOW US YOU CARE’ one front page screamed at the Queen. Whether intentionally or not, such attacks upon the monarch helped deflect public attention from the fact that the Princess had died in a flight from press harassment.

  In this turbulent week, the Queen was very much at the centre of the family, as well as the centre of the press storm. It is safe to say that, in the unchanging peace and seclusion of Balmoral, the family was stunned by this extraordinary, sometimes angry outpouring of emotion. So were millions of other people in the country. At the Castle Robin Janvrin, now the Queen’s Deputy Private Secretary, calmly helped navigate a course through all the swirling cross-currents. At the end of an agonizing, perplexing week, the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and his sons flew down to London. They talked to people in the crowds outside the palaces. The Queen then made a live television broadcast in which she spoke, as both queen and grandmother, of her admiration for the Princess of Wales and her gratitude that people had shown how much they cared.

  Queen Elizabeth also flew down to London on 5 September for the funeral on Saturday 6 September. She returned to Birkhall immediately afterwards to rejoin the friends who had already been invited to stay. Characteristically she said very little a
bout it to her guests. A few days later, Princess Margaret wrote to her sister to express ‘my loving admiration of you, how you kindly arranged everybody’s lives after the accident and made life tolerable for the two poor boys … there, always in command, was you, listening to everyone and deciding on all the issues … I just felt you were wonderful.’111

  But the public reaction to the death of the Princess brought home to many observers how much had changed in Britain since the death of King George VI and how hard it was for the monarchy to keep pace with these changes. It was, and remained later, difficult to define just what the widespread display of emotion meant. One argument, put forward by the constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor, was that it showed that, although the British were still a monarchical people, they wanted a demystified monarchy, in touch with their needs, ‘a practical monarchy’.112 That is, in effect, another way of describing the welfare monarchy, represented by the work that Queen Elizabeth did throughout her life for her charities and other patronages.

  There was another, not necessarily conflicting suggestion, that the week’s events showed a yearning for the ideal of monarchy. Monarchs used to have a vital, sacred role in society, but few traces of this remained at the end of the twentieth century. Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Wales (and later Archbishop of Canterbury), pointed out that in our secular society there was no easy way for the monarch to represent the sacred, the unquestioned given in human affairs. Perhaps, as Williams argued, what we saw was ‘a potent lament for a lost sacredness, magical and highly personal, but equally a ritualised focus for public loyalty. The lost icon was not simply the dead princess; it was a whole mythology of social cohesions around anointed authority and mystery – ambiguous, not very articulate and not easy for either right or left in simple political terms.’113

  Life at Birkhall had to continue. On 8 September Queen Elizabeth flew to Fort George in Inverness-shire to visit the 1st Battalion The Black Watch; the visit marked the sixtieth anniversary of her appointment as colonel-in-chief of the regiment. In the next few weeks the Prince of Wales brought his sons to stay with her twice at Birkhall.

  After Queen Elizabeth returned to London her winter programme was less onerous than in the past but, as usual, she visited the Field of Remembrance at St Margaret’s, Westminster on 7 November. She went to the Royal Smithfield Show at Earls Court on 27 November and, in fine form, attended the Middle Temple Family Night dinner on 4 December.

  *

  NINETEEN-NINETY-EIGHT began badly. While visiting the horses in the stable at Sandringham on 25 January, Queen Elizabeth slipped, fell and broke her left hip. She was taken by ambulance first to the hospital in King’s Lynn for examination and then to King Edward VII’s Hospital in London. She was in great pain and the ride was far from comfortable for her. In such circumstances, Ian Campbell, the doctor from Sandringham who accompanied her, was astonished when she said to him in the ambulance, ‘You’ll miss supper, won’t you?’ At the hospital she immediately ordered sandwiches for him and the nurse who had travelled with them.114 That evening Roger Vickers, with Dr Robert Linton as anaesthetist, operated on her and replaced her broken hip. She returned to Clarence House on 17 February to convalesce.

  She cancelled a mere seven official engagements as a result of the accident and operation. Altogether she had forty-six official engagements in 1998. She was able to make a brief appearance at the lawn meet of the Eton Beagles at Royal Lodge on 3 March, but she cancelled her Musical Weekend that year and she was disappointed to forgo her annual visit to the Irish Guards in Münster, Germany, to present them with shamrock. Her first public engagement was to attend the annual general meeting of Queen Mary’s Clothing Guild in St James’s Palace on 25 March.

  After Easter at Windsor she flew to Scotland to spend two weeks at Birkhall. Ted Hughes, who was by now seriously ill with cancer, came again with his wife to experience what he had called, after his last visit, ‘the healing warmth of your kindness to me’.115 It was to be their final encounter. The fishing was not at its best that spring but Hughes was pleased because that gave them ‘more time to lounge and loll and gaze and meditate’.116 He particularly enjoyed an afternoon when, after lunch at Polveir, they just sat and listened to the river.

  He had brought the Queen Mother his new book Birthday Letters,117 a series of poems about his life with Sylvia Plath. When the Queen Mother asked him why he had published them, he replied that he thought it was important for him as ‘a kind of purging’, and he had done it both for his children and for himself.118 Since he had published the book (and ignored everything the critics had said about it), ‘I have felt vastly unburdened. It has quite changed my life and whole outlook for the better.’ He thought that Queen Elizabeth had helped change his life too. ‘When I remember your gesture and your words, “We must be strong!” I feel it like a huge smile of joy, like a surge from a tremendous battery, going through me as well. And I remember it constantly.’119

  He needed all such strength to resist his illness. On 16 October he and Carol went to Buckingham Palace where the Queen bestowed upon him the Order of Merit.120 A few days later, on 28 October 1998, Ted Hughes died.

  Queen Elizabeth sent a wreath of yellow, white and cream flowers; they accompanied his coffin, and Carol Hughes then cast them upon the waters of his favourite river, the Torridge in Devon.121 The following May Queen Elizabeth attended Hughes’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey. She walked up the long aisle on the arm of Prince Charles. At the end, the congregation heard Hughes’s rich Yorkshire voice reading the Song from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. As it echoed round the ancient church many were moved to tears.

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly work hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

  Until the end of Queen Elizabeth’s life, Ted Hughes remained always in the pantheon of people to whom she raised high her glass at dinner.

  * Penelope Mortimer, Queen Elizabeth: A Life of the Queen Mother, 1986.

  * See this page. She had given a number of her dresses and hats to the costume department of the museum.

  * Mr William Slack, Sergeant-Surgeon to the Queen, carried out the operation and Dr Derek Cope was the anaesthetist.

  * Her tour staff were not the only ones worried about her. The Queen was concerned about the heavy programme for this tour, and gave strict orders that no ‘extras’ should be added. When Queen Elizabeth expressed a wish to go up the CN Tower, Sir Martin Gilliat told Harris Boyd, the Canadian Federal Coordinator of the tour, that there was nothing for it – they would have to arrange the visit. There was initial relief when the weather seemed to rule it out; but Queen Elizabeth got her way in the end. She had not yet made her regular telephone call to the Queen; Boyd suspected that she put it off until after the CN Tower visit, for fear of being forbidden to go up. As he remarked later, the Queen Mother always went outside her programme.

  * Galen Weston, successful Canadian businessman whose fortune came from one of the oldest family businesses in Canada, the George Weston Food company. His wife, Hilary, served as lieutenant governor of Ontario 1997–2002. In the 1980s they took a long lease on Fort Belvedere, King Edward VIII’s favourite home, in Windsor Great Park.

  † Unfortunately this memorial was later vandalized and extinguished. Complicated plans were devised to enable her to light another flame in London and for it to be flown back to Canada, but this proved too difficult and eventually she authorized its relighting by someone else.

  * On 20 July 1982 the IRA exploded a nail bomb placed in a car in Hyde Park as a detachment of sixteen horses from the Queen’s Life Guard (found from the Blues and Royals) was passing, en route to a changing of the guard. Three soldiers were killed, as were seven horses. Sefton suffered serious injuries including a severed jugular. Under the orders of Lieutena
nt Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles, a groom used his shirt to staunch the wound in Sefton’s neck and after extensive surgery the horse survived. He became something of a national hero and in his name hundreds of thousands of pounds were raised to construct a new surgical wing at the Royal Veterinary College.

  In an even worse atrocity, on the same day another IRA bomb exploded under the bandstand in Regent’s Park when a band from the Royal Green Jackets was giving a concert. Seven members of the band were killed and many in the audience were wounded.

  * SOE’s mission was to conduct unconventional warfare against the Germans throughout Europe in preparation for the eventual Allied invasion. Many of the secret agents were betrayed, arrested by the Gestapo and executed or sent to concentration camps. The memorial that Queen Elizabeth unveiled in Valençay commemorated the ninety-one men and thirteen women members of SOE who had given their lives for the freedom of France. After Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2002, the Princess Royal became patron of the Special Forces Club.

  * In November 1990, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Coventry, Queen Elizabeth had visited the city for a service of reconciliation attended also by Dr Richard von Weizsäcker, President of the Federal Republic of Germany. The ceremony called for Queen Elizabeth to exchange ‘Symbols of Peace’ with the President. These were her words: ‘Mr President, I present to you this Cross of Nails from Coventry – a symbol of reconciliation, friendship and peace. May God bless the people of your country.’ The President presented a ‘Bell of Peace’ to Queen Elizabeth. (RA QEQMH/PS/ENGT/1990: 14 November)

  † In May 1982, the Sunday People had published a story that she had refused to attend Harris’s ninetieth birthday as a ‘deliberate slur’. Sir Arthur wrote to Martin Gilliat to say that he was used to this sort of ‘sensational sneer and smear’ and always just ignored it. Sir Martin clearly felt that he should reassure Harris and wrote to him: ‘As you know from those far off days of World War II, both The King and Queen Elizabeth have always had a very special regard for you and it is a source of real sadness to Her Majesty that owing to long arranged commitments she cannot be at the 90th birthday dinner which is being given in your honour.’ (RA QEQMH/PS/GEN/1982/Harris)