Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Profumo initially denied his sexual intimacy with Keeler both to Macmillan and to the House of Commons, but in June he was forced to resign in disgrace after admitting he had lied. Macmillan was compelled to tell Parliament that he had been “grossly deceived”—which David Bruce called “pitiable and extremely damaging.” Bruce feared that confidence in Macmillan had been “greatly undermined.”

  To the Queen, the prime minister wrote a letter expressing his “deep regret at the development of recent affairs” and offering his apology for “the undoubted injury done by the terrible behavior of one of Your Majesty’s Secretaries of State,” adding that he had “of course no idea of the strange underworld” of Profumo and his coterie. Elizabeth II replied with what Alistair Horne described as a “charmingly consoling letter … sympathizing with her prime minister over the horrible time he had been experiencing.”

  Profumo withdrew from the public stage and devoted the rest of his life to working quietly on behalf of the poor and homeless. Years later he was discreetly befriended by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who so admired his dignified and responsible service that for her seventieth birthday party at Claridge’s in 1995 she seated him next to Elizabeth II. The Palace approved his place of honor, reflecting the Queen’s tolerance and capacity for forgiveness. She shared Thatcher’s respect for Profumo’s dedication to good works, and that evening she was seen “in animated conversation with him,” recalled Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, one of Thatcher’s senior advisers.

  As David Bruce feared, Profumo’s conduct had seriously damaged Macmillan, who told the Queen in September 1963 that he planned to relinquish his party’s leadership before the next general election the following year. Less than a month later he was stricken with severe pain from an inflamed and enlarged prostate and was rushed into surgery on October 10 to remove what was thought to be a malignant tumor. The operation was successful and the tumor benign. Yet in a panic not unlike Eden’s, Macmillan nevertheless decided to resign immediately, and the Queen interrupted her annual summer holiday in Balmoral to return to London.

  The drama that unfolded over the following week cast Elizabeth II in an unnecessarily bad light as Macmillan schemed to prevent his deputy, Rab Butler, from succeeding him. Through an extraordinary series of maneuvers, Macmillan set himself up as the ultimate arbiter by interviewing all four candidates from his sickbed at King Edward VII Hospital. He chose his sixty-year-old foreign secretary, the 14th Earl of Home, as the leader who would attract the most Conservative Party support. Macmillan buttressed his case with a poll of the cabinet showing ten ministers in Home’s favor, three for Butler, and three each for the other two candidates. However, the backing of the party rank and file was not as clear-cut.

  Because of his post-operative confinement, Macmillan sent his letter of resignation to the Palace and arranged with private secretary Michael Adeane for the Queen to visit him in the hospital for their final audience. On the morning of October 18, 1963, the Palace announced that Macmillan had resigned. Shortly afterward the Queen, dressed in a peacock green coat and hat, set out for the hospital. Macmillan awaited her in his bed, which had been wheeled into the boardroom. He wore an old brown sweater over a white silk shirt, and he was tethered to a tube draining bile into a pail under the bed, with a bottle nearby in case he had an accident of incontinence.

  As Elizabeth II entered the room, Macmillan was enchanted by her “firm step, and those brightly shining eyes which are her chief beauty.” The prime minister’s physician, Sir John Richardson, recorded that “there were in fact tears in her eyes.” Seated in a tall chair at his bedside, the Queen “seemed moved,” Macmillan later wrote, and said “how sorry she had been to get my letter of resignation.” From that moment, he was a former prime minister, and she had no constitutional necessity to heed his advice. In fact, in the two previous situations in which she had used her prerogative to select a leader for the Tory party, Churchill and Eden had specifically withheld any official guidance following their resignations.

  Yet according to Macmillan, “the Queen asked for my advice as to what she should do,” and he obliged by reading aloud his memorandum arguing the case for Lord Home, adding that she should send for him “immediately.” Macmillan also urged her to refrain from appointing Home directly as prime minister. Instead, she should instruct him to “take his soundings” and report whether he had sufficient support from his party to form a government.

  The Queen followed her former prime minister’s counsel to the letter. Home received the backing of the cabinet, including Butler, for whom refusing to serve as one of Home’s ministers would have been an act of disloyalty. The next morning, Home renounced his peerage and traveled to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands—the act of being officially received as the head of government, which requires picking up the Queen’s hand and brushing it lightly with the lips—as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, her fourth prime minister.

  The selection process was criticized in the press and among politicians in both parties. Despite his oft-professed concern for constitutional propriety, Macmillan had boxed in the Queen, critics agreed, by virtually compelling her to take his advice after he had resigned. And for all his insistence on guarding her prerogatives, his actions effectively ended her role in naming the leader of the Tories. Not long afterward, the party adopted new Labour-style rules for choosing its leader through an election.

  Critics blamed Macmillan and the familiar “magic circle” of aristocratic men for shaping a decision that should have been based on wider soundings. But Elizabeth II could be faulted as well for failing to organize her own independent canvassing beyond the cabinet—especially after being accused of consulting too narrowly for her selections in 1955 and 1957—and for yielding to Macmillan’s anti-Butler agenda. It was her most controversial decision to date, a curious abandonment of the astute political judgment she had developed in the twelve years of her reign.

  Palace aides pointed out that Douglas-Home happened to be her personal preference as well. She reportedly regarded Butler as “too remote” and “too complex,” while Douglas-Home was another Old Etonian—also taught by the eccentric Sir Henry Marten—and a longtime family friend with whom she enjoyed country pursuits on their Scottish estates. Thin to the point of frailty, her new prime minister was a consummate gentleman with a fondness for flower arranging. David Bruce considered him “excruciatingly amusing.”

  He was a familiar presence in the Queen’s official life as well, not only as a member of Macmillan’s cabinet, but also the highly dignified peer who carried the Cap of Maintenance on a stick at the Opening of Parliament. He took a progressive stance when he introduced the Life Peerages bill in the House of Lords in 1957, adding mischievously that “taking women into a parliamentary embrace seemed to be only a modest extension of the normal functions of a peer.” Further to his credit, he was an experienced hand in foreign policy with knowledge that included a year spent reading Marxist works including Das Kapital during his youth when he was afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine. He regarded the Queen as a “friendly headmaster receiving the head prefect in his study,” always listening intently, quizzing him astutely, and expressing concern about his problems.

  Macmillan was sixty-nine when he retired, and he would lead an active life for twenty-three more years. The Queen wrote him a long and heartfelt letter while he was still recuperating, thanking him for being her “guide and supporter through the mazes of international affairs and my instructor in many vital matters relating to our constitution and to the political and social life of my people.” She offered him an earldom so he might “continue to take part in public life from the benches of the Upper House,” as well as the Order of the Garter, both of which he rather imperiously declined. More than two decades later, on his ninetieth birthday, he would finally relent, accepting the title of Earl of Stockton, conferred personally by the Queen as one of the rare hereditary peerages in the late twentieth century.

  WHEN TH
E TRANSFER of Conservative power took place in October 1963, Elizabeth II was four months pregnant. Her nest was already two thirds empty, with Charles at Gordonstoun, and Anne off to boarding school at Benenden that September. By November the Queen had essentially retired from public appearances, although in mid-month she came to a black-tie dinner party given by Ambassador David Bruce and his second wife, Evangeline, at Winfield House, their residence in Regent’s Park. Because of her condition, the Queen asked that it be a small party, with just sixteen guests, all of whom she approved after discussions between Bruce and Michael Adeane.

  “It is almost incredible how much detailed planning is involved in a dinner for the Queen,” Bruce wrote in his diary. The Polish butler, Russian chef, four footmen, and countless maids prepared “as if for a mammoth carnival,” including chasing down unfounded rumors that the Queen disliked soup and would only drink tomato juice while pregnant. The one admonition to the chef from the Palace was not to garnish his pastry with Amorini, the small Italian chocolate heart-shaped candies coated in bright colors or edible silver. When asked, the Queen said she was indifferent whether women wore long or short dresses.

  It was a high-powered but lively British-American group: Mollie and Robert Cranborne (the future 6th Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury); Conservative politician Ian Gilmour and his wife, Caroline (a daughter of the 8th Duke of Buccleuch); American journalist Walter Lippmann and his wife, Helen; Lee and Stas Radziwill; the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire; Michael Adeane; Tory cabinet minister and future prime minister Edward Heath; and Katharine Macmillan (the wife of the former prime minister’s son, Maurice). The Queen knew everyone except the Lippmanns, and she was pleased to greet the Bruces’ spaniels as well.

  “All went with a swing,” Bruce recalled. “The Queen appeared to like all the dishes and wines, she was ready and gay in conversation, as was her husband.… She blends openness with dignity, has a dazzling complexion, and cordial, sympathetic, unaffected manners.” After dinner she talked first to Walter Lippmann, then moved on to each of the men, while Philip conversed with the women. It was nearly midnight when the royal couple left.

  Just ten days later, on the 22nd of November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “The unprecedented intensity of that wave of grief mixed with something akin to disaster swept over our people,” Elizabeth II recalled. Prince Philip and Alec Douglas-Home flew to Washington for the funeral, but because of her pregnancy, the Queen’s doctors advised her against attending the memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. She insisted on having her own service at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, to which she invited nearly four hundred American servicemen stationed in England.

  Some eighteen months later, on May 14, 1965, she would preside over the dedication of a unique memorial to the fallen president: an acre of land at Runnymede, the site where King John sealed the Magna Carta in 1215, given by the British people to the United States in perpetuity. Marking the ground was a plinth with Kennedy’s birth and death dates along with an inscription from his inaugural address: “Let every Nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” A committee chaired by David Ormsby Gore oversaw the fund-raising, design, and construction of the memorial, all of which the Queen followed with marked interest.

  At the dedication, Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh accompanied Jackie Kennedy and her children up a woodland path to the memorial site. Four-year-old John Kennedy Jr. gave the Queen a small bow, and his seven-year-old sister, Caroline, dropped a quick curtsy. As they climbed the hill, Prince Philip tenderly held John’s hand.

  During the ceremony, Macmillan spoke sentimentally of his late friend and ally, and Elizabeth II’s graceful remarks showed “generosity, sympathy and understanding,” recalled David Bruce. She touched on JFK’s many ties to Britain—his life in England during the “doom laden period” before World War II, the death of his elder brother, Joe, “on a hazardous mission” during the war, and his “dearly loved sister” Kathleen, who lay “buried in an English churchyard.” The Queen talked of Kennedy’s “wit and style,” adding that “with all our hearts, my people shared his triumphs, grieved at his reverses, and wept at his death.” Jackie did not speak, but issued a statement of thanks to the British people, saying “you share with me thoughts that lie too deep for tears.”

  ON MARCH 10, 1964, the thirty-seven-year-old Queen gave birth to her fourth child, Edward Antony Richard Louis, in the Belgian Suite at Buckingham Palace. She remained out of the public eye until May, but she kept up with her office work. When her baby was barely a month old, her government boxes revealed a disquieting secret she would be compelled to keep until its unmasking fifteen years later. Sir Anthony Blunt, since 1945 the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the man responsible for the art collections in her palaces, was a spy for the Soviet Union. In exchange for “immensely valuable” information about Soviet collaborators, the British intelligence service gave Blunt immunity. “The Queen knew for years that this man was a spy,” said Peter Rawlinson, Baron Rawlinson of Ewell, the government’s solicitor-general, who arranged the immunity deal. “It was essential to keep him in his position at Buckingham Palace looking after the Queen’s pictures. Otherwise Russia would have realized that his cover had been blown.”

  If she was unnerved by the revelation of Blunt’s treachery, she gave no sign. “I find that I can often put things out of my mind which are disagreeable,” she told one courtier. Partly from training, but also her instinctive discretion, Elizabeth II had accustomed herself to absorbing information from so many different sources—intelligence reports, cabinet papers on proposed government reforms, a conversation with a judge on problems in the courts—that she learned how to seal off sensitive information. “She has a compartmentalized brain, with lots of boxes,” said Margaret Rhodes. “She can appear frightfully jolly while a constitutional question is going on in another part of her mind.”

  Less than a week after Blunt made his shocking confession, Elizabeth II was hosting one of her springtime series of “dine-and-sleep” gatherings at Windsor Castle. “She talked of all sorts of things,” David Bruce recalled, “including such political questions as Laos, Cyprus, and Zanzibar, revealing extensive briefing and reading. On lighter topics she was humorous and communicative.”

  These periodic entertainments, which Queen Victoria began in the nineteenth century when the court was officially in residence at Windsor each April, bring together eight to ten prominent guests drawn from the arts, diplomacy, the clergy, business, the military, academia, the judiciary, and politics for a leisurely evening of dinner and conversation. Although formal in structure, the Windsor dinners are more relaxed than the Buckingham Palace luncheons organized for a similar purpose. “She regards Windsor as her home,” said Alec Douglas-Home, “just like anyone else’s home. It’s hard for us to realize.” In addition to the Easter season, Elizabeth spends every possible weekend at Windsor and takes pride in being its chatelaine. She inspects the guest rooms before the visitors’ arrivals and selects reading material for their enjoyment.

  The pattern of the dine-and-sleeps has varied little from the days of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who revived them after World War II. Each couple arrives between six and seven o’clock, to be greeted by an equerry and lady-in-waiting and escorted to their suite in the Lancaster, York, or King Edward III tower. The customary accommodation includes two large bedrooms and bathrooms, a ladies’ dressing room and commodious sitting room furnished with desks equipped with writing paper and pens, tables laden with mineral water, decanters of whisky, sherry, and gin, cornucopias of fruit, bowls of peppermint candies, jars of biscuits, and vases of fresh flowers.

  She assigns a footman and housemaid to serve as each guest’s valet or ladies’ maid. Their job is to unpack the suitcases, fold underwear in gauzy organza bags, line up cosmetics and perfume
bottles in perfect order, whisk away clothing for washing and ironing (“better than any dry cleaner in London,” said the wife of a Commonwealth diplomat), draw the bath at the guest’s requested temperature, drape a large bath towel over a nearby chair, lay out clothes, and before departure time repack everything with tissue paper. The size of the staff and level of pampering are unequaled, although museum director Roy Strong found it “unnerving to be descended upon by so many.”

  The houseguests meet in one of the castle’s vast drawing rooms, where the Queen and Prince Philip, accompanied by the inevitable scuffling corgis, join them, along with a half dozen courtiers, for a round of drinks. The Queen tells stories about previous visitors, slipping into personalities and accents, and laughs about her misbehaving corgis. “It is always amusing to see when dogs fail to obey a royal command,” recalled one former courtier. Everybody is then escorted back to their rooms off the 550-foot, red-carpeted Grand Corridor curving along the east and south sides of the castle quadrangle.

  Racing the clock, the guests have less than a half hour to change for dinner in the State Dining Room, which begins with drinks at 8:15 before the prompt arrival of the Queen and Prince Philip fifteen minutes later. Elizabeth II wears a long gown and glitters with large diamonds at her neck, ears, and wrists. Philip appears in a dinner jacket of his own design, a black-tie version of the “Windsor Uniform” originally created by George III for gentlemen at court: dark blue velvet, with brass buttons, scarlet collar, and cuffs.