The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

This year was the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne. The Golden Jubilee celebrations were due to begin with official visits by the Queen to Jamaica, New Zealand and Australia. Members of Queen Elizabeth’s Household felt that she was determined not to cause any disruption to these tours and was intent on husbanding her remaining strength a little longer. The Queen telephoned her mother every day she was away and when she returned to Britain on 3 March she went straight from Heathrow Airport to Royal Lodge to see her.

  Still Queen Elizabeth carried on and still she saw people; on 5 March she held a lawn meet and lunch for the Eton Beagles and discussed future dates with them. Then, as usual, she held her house party for the Grand Military Race Meeting at Sandown Park. On this occasion the Queen had arranged to receive her mother’s guests. But at the last minute Queen Elizabeth appeared and greeted them herself. Her horse First Love distinguished himself by winning again at the race meeting – her last ever runner. She could not attend the Cheltenham races but she watched them on television. As luck would have it, the Gold Cup on 14 March was won by Best Mate, trained by Henrietta Knight, daughter of her great friend of many years, Guy Knight. She was ecstatic, her lady in waiting Angela Oswald recorded.37

  Easter fell early that year, on 31 March, and by the week before Easter Queen Elizabeth was weakening further. She was visited regularly by her local doctor, Jonathan Holliday, the Apothecary to the Household at Windsor; and Gill Frampton, the nursing sister at the Castle, came every afternoon to change the bandages on her legs and to give her a light massage if she wished. She was not eating much now but she might take a small glass of champagne with scrambled eggs in the evening – this reminded her of late-night suppers with the Duke in the early days of her marriage, she said.38 She had decided not to have a lady in waiting with her now, but her niece Margaret Rhodes came regularly to Royal Lodge from her own house a few hundred yards away in the Great Park. On Palm Sunday, Canon Ovenden held a service for her in the Saloon, the room in which she had entertained so many friends over so many years.

  That week she made many telephone calls from her bedroom. Michael Oswald was pleased to hear her, but it was clear to him that she was saying goodbye; she gave him a list of things to do and people to thank for all that they had done for her. She rang Johnny Perkins, her faithful neighbour in Norfolk and frequent visitor to Mey, to thank him for freesias that he had sent her. She telephoned the Princess Royal and asked her to take some of her horses.

  It was obvious that she would not be able to join the rest of the family for Easter at Windsor Castle. On Wednesday 27 March her Private Secretary, Sir Alastair Aird, went down to Royal Lodge to talk to her staff and to wish them a happy Easter. When Queen Elizabeth heard he was there she asked to see him. ‘I found her in the Saloon sitting in a winged chair with her feet up and covered by a rug. I took a chair and sat immediately opposite her for her eyesight was very bad and she had very limited lateral vision. We discussed a few things and I told Queen Elizabeth whom I had seen recently – she always liked to be kept up to date with news of her Household and friends. She had a smile on her face and I suddenly had the feeling that this was the last time we would meet and that she was in her own way saying goodbye to me.’39

  Over the next two days Queen Elizabeth weakened further; by Good Friday she was unable to lift her head from the pillow, but she remained in complete control. She asked Leslie Chappell to take a box from the drawer of her desk. In it he found a pair of cufflinks for himself and a brooch with her ‘ER’ cypher for Jacqui Meakin, a token of affection for their care.

  On Saturday morning Dr Richard Thompson, Physician to the Queen, and Dr Jonathan Holliday came to see her. They realized she would not last the day. Dr Thompson called first the Queen and then the Prince of Wales, who was dismayed because he was in Switzerland and would not be able to return in time to be with his grandmother. The Queen, who was riding in the Park, went at once to Royal Lodge and Queen Elizabeth was able to say goodbye to her daughter.

  Canon Ovenden arrived as Queen Elizabeth lapsed into unconsciousness. He held her hand, prayed aloud and read her a Highland lament:

  I am going now into the sleep,

  Be it that I in health shall wake;

  If death be to me in deathly sleep,

  Be it that in thine own arm’s keep.

  O God of grace, to new life I wake;

  O be it in thy dear arm’s keep,

  O God of grace that I shall awake!40

  Queen Elizabeth died at 3.15 in the afternoon of 30 March 2002, Holy Saturday, a contemplative day for Christians anticipating the resurrection. At her bedside were her daughter the Queen and her grandchildren, Sarah Chatto and David Linley.

  The following afternoon her oak coffin was borne to the Royal Chapel and in the evening Canon Ovenden celebrated Evensong for all the members of her family who could be there.

  *

  QUEEN ELIZABETH’S funeral was to be the most solemn state occasion since the funeral of her husband the King, half a century before. She had been diligent in planning it herself and Operation Tay Bridge, as it was codenamed, was regularly updated. On Tuesday 2 April her coffin was driven from Windsor to the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace, where her family, friends and Household were able to pay their respects in private.

  The public part of the ceremonies began on the morning of Friday 5 April. The coffin was placed on the same gun carriage that had borne the remains of her husband the King fifty years before, to be carried from St James’s Palace to lie in state in Westminster Hall. The coffin was draped in her personal Standard and on it lay the crown made for her Coronation in 1937. The Koh-i-nûr diamond, given to Queen Victoria, the first Empress of India, and now set in the crown of Queen Elizabeth, the last Empress, flashed in the sunlight. Next to the crown lay one wreath – the card read simply, ‘In Loving Memory, Lilibet’. The procession began to the sounds of Mendelssohn’s Funeral March played by the bands of the Scots Guards and the Irish Guards. As it moved off, the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery started a twenty-eight-gun salute in Green Park. The boom of the guns echoed once every minute until the procession reached Westminster Hall.

  In bright spring sunshine a quarter of a million people lined the streets. More than 1,600 servicemen took part, marching slowly to the beat of a muffled drum as the coffin was taken down the Mall and across Horse Guards Parade and thence past the Cenotaph on Whitehall to Westminster. There were contingents from all the regiments associated with her, from both Britain and the Commonwealth. They included the Witwatersrand Rifles, the Transvaal Scottish, the Cape Town Highlanders, the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps, the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, the Toronto Scottish and the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada. Walking beside the coffin were ten pallbearers, eight of them colonels of her British regiments – the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Black Watch, the Light Infantry, the Royal Anglian Regiment, the King’s Regiment, 9th/12th Royal Lancers, the Queen’s Royal Hussars, 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards, the Royal Army Medical Corps – together with the Captain of HMS Ark Royal and the Commandant of the Central Flying School of the Royal Air Force.

  The Queen Mother’s grandsons, the Prince of Wales, Prince Andrew, the Earl of Wessex and Viscount Linley, together with Prince Philip, Princes William and Harry and Peter Phillips, all marched behind the coffin. Breaking with tradition, the Princess Royal marched with them. The Prince of Wales was visibly distressed; as Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire wrote of him, ‘My poor friend’s steely face made us all realise how much he loved her and relied on her.’41 In the procession, Queen Elizabeth’s grandchildren were followed by other members of the Royal Family and of the Bowes Lyon family, her Household and staff, including her Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, and her Private Secretary Captain Sir Alastair Aird. Among the staff who marched were her page, William Tallon, her Head Chauffeur, John Collings and her Head Chef, Michael Sealey. Then came senior military pe
rsonnel, including the Chief of Defence Staff, the Chief of Air Staff and the Chief of Naval Staff.

  The Queen, with her niece Lady Sarah Chatto, drove by car to meet the coffin as it arrived at the door of Westminster Hall exactly thirty minutes after it left St James’s, and as the last of the echoes of the twenty-eight guns fired in salute died away. Members of the House of Lords stood along the west side of the Hall and members of the Commons along the east as, led by Black Rod, the coffin was carried by the bearer party from 1st Battalion Irish Guards into the vast and magnificent medieval space.

  Queen Elizabeth’s coffin was placed on a catafalque in exactly the same spot where her husband had lain in 1952. The Queen and other members of the Royal Family gathered around and the Archbishop of Canterbury said prayers. Four officers of the Household Cavalry then took their places around the catafalque for the first Vigil of the Watch. Officers from many different regiments would stand guard day and night until the funeral. As had happened with the coffin of King George V, one watch was held by her four grandsons, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and Lord Linley.

  After the short service, the Queen drove back along Whitehall to Buckingham Palace. Suddenly a ripple of applause ran through the crowd and the Queen was clapped all the way up the Mall. It was an extraordinary moment, a spontaneous burst of popular sympathy, a recognition of all that the Queen had had to endure in recent years, culminating in the death of her sister and her mother in such a short space of time. She was visibly moved and she said to one of those with her that this moment was one of the most touching things that had ever happened to her.42

  That was just the beginning. For the rest of the week, the people of Britain confounded opinion-makers. The government had hugely underestimated the impact of her death – people came in their hundreds of thousands to pay their final respects to Queen Elizabeth and what she had represented. The scheduled opening hours had to be lengthened to twenty-two hours a day. Despite biting weather, people queued patiently, waiting their turn in lines that stretched along the Embankment and across the river, to pass by the coffin. The Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (of which Queen Elizabeth had been patron and then president) passed along the lines, carrying flasks of hot tea.

  Prince Charles broadcast an emotional tribute to his grandmother, ‘the original life enhancer – at once indomitable, somehow timeless, able to span the generations. Wise, loving, with an utterly irresistible mischievousness of spirit.’ Above all she understood the British character, ‘and her heart belonged to this ancient old land and its equally indomitable and humorous inhabitants.’ He had dreaded her death, which he somehow thought would never happen. He praised her for the fun, laughter and affection she had created around her, for her ‘sparklingly wonderful letters’ and for seeing the funny side of life – ‘we laughed till we cried, and oh how I shall miss those laughs.’ She had wisdom and sensitivity too, and she was ‘quite simply, the most magical grandmother you could possibly have, and I was utterly devoted to her. Her departure has left an irreplaceable chasm in countless lives but, thank God, we’re all richer for the sheer joy of her presence and everything she stood for.’43

  The night before the funeral the Queen made a short television address in which she too spoke with emotion. She said, ‘the extent of the tribute that huge numbers of you have paid my mother in the last few days has been overwhelming. I have drawn great comfort from so many individual acts of kindness and respect.’ She hoped that at her mother’s funeral ‘sadness will blend with a wider sense of thanksgiving, not just for her life but for the times in which she lived – a century for this country and the Commonwealth not without its trials and sorrows, but also one of extraordinary progress, full of examples of courage and service as well as fun and laughter. This is what my mother would have understood, because it was the warmth and affection of people everywhere which inspired her resolve, dedication and enthusiasm for life.’44

  The next morning, Tuesday 9 April, the bearer party from the 1st Battalion Irish Guards carried her coffin from Westminster Hall into the sharp sunlight and laid it again on the gun carriage. It was drawn by the King’s Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery, to the Abbey for her funeral. Some 200 pipers and drummers, playing ‘My Home’ and ‘The Mist Covered Mountains’, accompanied the coffin. Nine senior members of the Royal Family followed behind; all were sombre. But the service was joyful, with lessons from Ecclesiastes and Revelation, and a reading from Pilgrim’s Progress. The hymns included ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise’ and ‘Guide me, Oh thou great Redeemer’. The anthem was Brahms’s setting of Psalm 84 – ‘How lovely are thy dwellings fair’.

  In his eulogy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, said that the vast crowds who had passed before her had understood that, in George Eliot’s lovely phrase, there was about her ‘the sweet presence of a good diffused’. He felt that the one verse in scripture which captured her best was from the Book of Proverbs: ‘Strength and dignity are her clothing and she laughs at the time to come.’ Her strength and her dignity were clear; her laughter ‘reflects an attitude of confident hope in the face of adversity and the unpredictable challenges of life’. Moreover, she had a deep, simple and abiding faith ‘that this life is to be lived to the full as a preparation for the next’. He ended by quoting again from the Book of Proverbs. ‘It says simply of a woman of grace, “Many have done excellently, but you exceed them all.” ’

  After the blessing and Last Post, Garter King of Arms proclaimed the Styles and Titles of Queen Elizabeth, which served to remind the congregation of the great history of her country in which she had so memorably played her part:

  Thus it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory life into His Divine Majesty the late Most High, Most Mighty, and Most Excellent Princess Elizabeth, Queen Dowager and Queen Mother, Lady of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Lady of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, Lady of the Imperial Order of the Crown of India, Grand Master and Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order upon whom had been conferred the Royal Victorian Chain, Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Dame Grand Cross of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John, Relict of His Majesty King George the Sixth and Mother of Her Most Excellent Majesty Elizabeth The Second by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, Sovereign of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, whom may God preserve and bless with long life, health and honour and all worldly happiness.

  As Queen Elizabeth’s coffin was borne from the Abbey by the Irish Guardsmen, the organ played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat, while high above the bells of the Abbey were rung half muffled to a peal of Stedman Caters, comprising 5,101 changes. Outside the Abbey, pipers from all her regiments played the forlorn lament, ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’.

  Followed by the royal cortege, her coffin was driven up the crowded Mall towards Buckingham Palace as two Spitfires and a Lancaster bomber flew overhead in a final wartime tribute. Along the route to St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle thousands of people had gathered to watch her pass by for the last time. Some people crossed themselves, some bowed, others waved or threw flowers or raised glasses in a last toast.

  That evening, in the King George VI Memorial Chapel, in the presence of her daughter, her grandchildren and her great-nephew Lord Strathmore, Queen Elizabeth was laid to rest beside the King, together with the casket containing the ashes of their daughter Princess Margaret, her epic journey finally completed.

  * Each year Queen Elizabeth presented a book to the prizewinner, who would come to Sandringham with the Head Teacher to receive it. Springwood is a long-established comprehensive school in King’s Lynn.

  * The Royal Collection includes paintings, drawings, manuscripts, books, furniture, ceramics, gold, silver, glass, clocks and many other works of art collected by British monarchs and other me
mbers of the Royal Family over centuries. It is unique in the sense that, unlike the collections of other European royal houses, the British Royal Collection is the property of the Crown, not the state.

  * Hon. Jean Elphinstone (1915–99), second daughter of sixteenth Lord Elphinstone and Lady Mary Bowes Lyon, married 1936 Major John Wills. Major Wills, born in 1910, died a few weeks before his wife, in September 1999.

  * Guests this summer included Queen Elizabeth’s factor Martin Leslie and his wife Catriona, her former equerry Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton and his wife Susannah, Ashe Windham and his wife Arabella, her racing manager Michael Oswald and his wife Lady Angela, and John Perkins, a friend from Norfolk.

  * The Brig O’Dee was built in 1748 as part of the military pacification programme after the 45 Rebellion.

  EPILOGUE

  ELIZABETH BOWES LYON might reasonably have expected to live a pleasant and relatively privileged but inconspicuous life, marrying into a family like her own, raising children, supporting her husband, her community and her charitable causes, and ending her days quietly, rich in good works and grandchildren. Instead, fate dealt her an extraordinary hand. This book has attempted to show what she made of it, to discern the qualities which enabled this young Scottish aristocrat, who surprised herself by marrying into the Royal Family, play such a central role, as wife and mother, as grandmother and great-grandmother, in the life of the nation.

  Queen Elizabeth’s century, the twentieth, started (as the historian John Roberts pointed out)* with both optimism about the march of progress and pessimism about the tide of materialism. No one could then have predicted either the horrors or the scientific and social advances to come. One hundred years later, Roberts wrote, facts are more accessible than ever but the events of the twentieth century will go on acquiring new meanings ‘as they drop below the horizon of memory’. All we can do now is look back upon these years ‘and search them for guidance’.1 In that respect, the long life of Queen Elizabeth offers a fruitful study.