Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  With his wit and unstuffy demeanor, Plunket found a kindred spirit in Martin Charteris, who helped create a more open atmosphere around the Queen. The two men had been with Elizabeth II from the beginning, their admiration for her intensifying as their loyalty deepened. They both had country homes, but in London they each lived near the Queen, Plunket in a small bedroom, bathroom, and office in Buckingham Palace, and Charteris in an apartment on Friary Court in St. James’s Palace.

  Although he had served only as assistant private secretary for nearly twenty years, Charteris had his fingerprints on every important decision, and he was close to the Queen’s children, particularly Charles, who felt “Martin was someone he could relate to,” said Gay Charteris. But as the 1960s ended, the long-serving courtier figured his career would conclude where it began. Michael Adeane was just three years older, so when he reached retirement age, a promotion to private secretary “would have been too late for Martin,” said his widow.

  “One of the pleasant things about the Royal Household,” David Bruce observed early in 1969, “is the admiration entertained by everyone in it for the Queen. I believe this is thoroughly deserved.… The atmosphere of cordiality in which she swims certainly impresses one as being completely genuine.” She holds her employees to high standards, treats them with respect and fairness, only rarely showing anger.

  IN ADDITION TO her cadre of courtiers, the Queen from the outset has surrounded herself with an equally capable group of ladies-in-waiting, organized into a strict hierarchy, with medieval titles and clearly delineated tasks. They are almost exclusively drawn from the aristocracy, many of them are friends of the royal family, and all have shared interests, inbred caution, an intricate understanding of court etiquette, and sociable personalities.

  The “head girl” beginning in 1967 was Fortune FitzRoy, the Duchess of Grafton, the Queen’s Mistress of the Robes, although she had nothing to do with what the monarch wore. The position has historically been held by a duchess, and Fortune took over when the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire retired. Fortune Grafton was an experienced hand, having served in the second echelon as a Lady of the Bedchamber—again, bearing no relationship to the monarch’s bedroom—since 1953. The third tier are called Women of the Bedchamber. Both the second and third levels have “Extra” ladies who are pulled in on special occasions, bringing the typical total to eleven.

  As the senior lady-in-waiting, Fortune Grafton accompanies the Queen to the most prestigious events and tours, and the Ladies of the Bedchamber work in rotation at home and abroad, while the Women of the Bedchamber focus primarily on dealing with correspondence as well as attending the Queen on various occasions. All the ladies-in-waiting are adept at circulating through receptions, running interference for their boss by engaging overeager guests in conversation, or arranging for introductions.

  The ladies understand—as do the equerries who perform the same duties—that even if Elizabeth II seems to be ignoring them, she always knows where they are. When she directly stares at them, she needs something done. They also know from her body language when she is ready to move along and one of them needs to step in to pick up the conversational thread. Sometimes she may shift her handbag or twirl her ring. The cues are subtle—the result of learning to read her over the years rather than any specific instructions she has given. “There are no set plays,” said one former senior aide. “It is just intuition, like a wife knowing from long experience when her husband is ready to leave a drinks party.”

  The ladies-in-waiting have finely tuned antennae for what they call the “Awkward Squad,” those who need to be calmed before meeting the monarch. On receiving lines, they stand ready to hold bouquets and unanticipated gifts pressed into the Queen’s hands. “She will say, ‘Can you cope? If you can’t, get one of the policemen to help you,’ ” said one of her veteran attendants. “She will be given an enormous basket filled with flowers, and she will turn and say, ‘What are we going to do with this?’ ”

  Most of the time they do their drill perfectly, but when they miss their mark, they can get what Elizabeth, the Countess of Leicester, for twenty years a Lady of the Bedchamber, called “a glare.” Once when Lady Susan Hussey, a Woman of the Bedchamber, began arguing with historian Paul Johnson in a “fierce whisper,” the Queen, who was standing nearby, gave them a “comprehensive monarchical glance” and “said sharply, ‘stop bickering, you two!’ ”

  Riding in the car with the Queen, her ladies-in-waiting generally let her take the conversational lead. “It would be ghastly for her to have a talkative lady-in-waiting,” said Esme, the Dowager Countess of Cromer, who was appointed in 1967. “She would have to be thinking about what to do, whom to meet, giving speeches. It would drive her mad to have a wretched woman talking away, so I would keep my mouth shut.”

  The ladies-in-waiting often spend long hours on their feet, keeping up with their indefatigable boss, and since they have plenty of money, they can afford to work virtually as volunteers, with token compensation and small allowances for expenses. They can be rivalrous over choice assignments, but they tend to keep their competition among themselves. The point of their position is the honor of serving the monarch, and admission into an exclusive club where it is “easy to relax into luxury,” wrote Frances Campbell-Preston, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother.

  While staying in one of the royal residences, they can choose from a pool of lady’s maids to take care of their daily needs, and while on duty at Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s attendants gather in their own sitting room on the second floor, opposite the nursery. Most days they have lunch in the household dining room with the private secretaries, equerries, and other senior officials. In the late afternoon they congregate for tea and drinks in the Equerry’s Room. “We never talked about the Queen and Prince Philip,” recalled Esme Cromer. “Never any complaining, or making observations. We were all very discreet, always. There was no telling stories, ever.”

  As with her top advisers, the Queen has always called her ladies-in-waiting and equerries by their Christian names. The staff (never servants, a word she dislikes) such as footmen, maids, and housekeepers go by their surnames, except for the Queen’s closest personal aides, her dresser and her page. Two decades into the Queen’s reign, dresser Bobo MacDonald was sui generis in the Palace hierarchy—a mother figure who had been caring for her boss’s most private needs since she was a baby, generally acknowledged to be the sovereign’s eyes and ears. In Buckingham Palace, the small, bespectacled Scotswoman lived in an apartment above the Queen’s, where she had her meals served by liveried footmen instead of eating with the other staff in the dining room. She styled her wavy hair similarly to Elizabeth II and wore a triple strand of pearls as well as silk dresses tailored by royal couturier Norman Hartnell.

  Nobody outside the family could match Bobo’s knowledge of the Queen or the unbroken link to her childhood. They had shared a bedroom until Princess Elizabeth was a teenager, including the war years in Windsor Castle. Bobo had been there for the Queen’s honeymoon, the King’s death, the unfettered idyll in Malta, the months when Philip was traveling, the births of four children, the holidays, the foreign trips. “Bobo could say anything to the Queen, like ‘You look awful in that dress,’ or ‘You can’t wear green,’ ” said Margaret Rhodes. “She was a confidante, very much so.”

  Elizabeth II’s principal clothing designers, Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies, understood that Bobo not only organized the Tuesday afternoon fittings, but that her conservative taste weighed heavily in her employer’s selections. To a certain extent, the Queen viewed her wardrobe as a military officer regards his various uniforms, clothes to be worn as the occasion required. But as Crawfie had observed when Elizabeth II was a princess, she took pleasure in crafting her look. “The sketches were put all over the floor and the rolls of fabric,” recalled Valerie Rouse, a vendeuse for Hardy Amies. “She used to crawl around the floor saying, ‘Well, I’ll have this with that.’ She absolutely knew she didn’t w
ant too many shoulder pads. She didn’t want it too short. She did a lot of sitting down and waving.”

  Bobo inclined toward the practical and comfortable, especially in the winter when she fussed about her “little lady” being warm enough. She also considered accessories her bailiwick, particularly the Queen’s boxy handbags that gave the couturiers fits. Bobo developed such a dislike for Amies that when the Queen knighted him she said, “Bobo will give me hell for this.”

  Monarch and faithful servant had a tight partnership, but few knew what passed between them, which made Bobo a powerful presence. “She knew everything about the Queen,” said a long-serving footman. “They were stuck with each other. Miss MacDonald was not going to hand anything over to others.” Nearly everybody—from the Lord Chamberlain to the housemaids—was intimidated by Bobo’s strong personality, although she was “quite friendly when thawed,” wrote valet John Dean, and had a good sense of humor. When the Queen visited a stud farm in Normandy owned by the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier in 1967 to see the stallions that had been covering her mares for several years, Bobo wandered away from the château for a walk in the woods and got lost, only to be arrested by the French secret service—a cause for much merriment among the royal party.

  THE QUEEN’S SMALL group of good friends has been known for the same rigorous discretion as her most faithful retainers. She has never particularly encouraged new friendships, but she has been open-minded enough to enlarge the circle from time to time. To be a friend of the Queen is an inherently lopsided experience. Those admitted to the inner sanctum understand the rules and have an instinctive sense of the invisible barriers. The women curtsy when they meet her, she kisses them on the cheek, and they feel free to return the affectionate gesture. They know how to make her relax and laugh, and she lets down her guard enough to share her piquant views of people and events, if not her innermost feelings.

  They can seek her advice, which Patricia Brabourne described as “sound, very human, very wise.” But they don’t pick up the phone and unburden themselves. Above all, they are respectful. Even David Airlie (the 13th Earl), who first met her as a five-year-old, would never say “Oh, come off it.” One ironclad principle is to avoid repeating her precise words—what has been called a “ring of silence.” “Those who see the private side don’t say anything specific for fear of violating her trust,” said the son of one of her lifelong friends. Yet those who know her best have a knack for speaking perceptively about her character and personality without betraying confidences.

  “She is not someone who is enormously intimate,” said a friend of nearly six decades. “She is a wonderful friend, hugely amusing and incredible. She is straightforward and down-to-earth, and she is thoughtful. If one of one’s children is terribly ill, she will know, and say ‘How is so and so.’ But you can’t go too close. There is an aura. You wouldn’t treat her like your best friend sitting on a sofa. It is not because she is doing it on purpose. It is just part of her. You cannot encroach on her personal life. You just don’t go there.”

  Superficially, the Queen’s circle might easily be dismissed as tweedy toffs, but in fact the men are capable and accomplished, the women bright and lively, all made of strong stuff and utterly reliable. “One of her greatest strengths is she is not associated with the old landed peerage,” said Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury, very much of that group, which also includes the grand dukes of Marlborough, Devonshire, and Beaufort. “She doesn’t have a clique. She has old friends, and the people she is related to. She is family minded.”

  For friendship she has relied on her extended network of cousins on the Bowes Lyon side, mainly Mary Colman, Jean Elphinstone Wills and her sister Margaret Rhodes, Mountbatten cousins Patricia Brabourne and Pamela Hicks, as well as Henry “Porchey” Carnarvon, Hugh Grafton, and Rupert Nevill, who all knew her from the wartime days in Windsor Castle, longtime family friends in the sporting set such as the Earls of Airlie and Westmorland, and Sir Eric and Prudence Penn, who were linked to the Queen in several different ways. Prudence had been a friend from teenage years, and her husband served more than twenty years at the Palace organizing ceremonial events. His uncle and de facto guardian, Arthur Penn, had been one of the Queen Mother’s best friends and advisers, and had doted on the Queen as a child, calling her “the Colonel.”

  “There is absolutely no such thing as snobbism for the Queen,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Dukes and butlers or maids are all treated with courtesy and friendship.” Much the same could be said for her attitude toward Americans. Woven through her friendships are a remarkable number of strands from Britain’s former colony. David Airlie’s wife, Virginia, is the daughter of John Barry Ryan and his wife, Nin, who were prominent in New York and Newport society. Porchey himself had an American mother, Catherine Wendell from New York, and his wife, the former Jean Wallop, grew up in Wyoming. Her paternal grandfather, the 8th Earl of Portsmouth, had settled in the United States and married the daughter of a Kentucky judge. Jean’s first cousin is the Queen’s childhood friend Micky Nevill, the daughter of an American mother and the 9th Earl of Portsmouth.

  When Jean Wallop arrived in England in 1955, she met the Queen over drinks at the London house of her cousin’s friends, Gavin Astor, the 2nd Baron Astor of Hever, and his wife, Irene. “I nearly died of fright,” she recalled. “The idea of the Queen was intimidating. She was a star, but she made me feel fine.” Wallop was impressed immediately by Elizabeth II’s “tremendous steadiness. She is difficult to know, but it is worth the wait. You sort of become friends. It takes a long time to know her.”

  Being entertained privately by her friends has long been an important escape valve for Elizabeth II, and she is equally comfortable in a grand country estate or a tiny mews house. The hostess sends her the guest list, but the Queen relies on her to organize the seating for luncheon or dinner. She arrives in a small car, accompanied only by a detective, who discreetly sits in another room. Over dinner at John and Patricia Brabourne’s in 1966, Noel Coward found the Queen to be “easy and gay and ready to giggle.” Two years later she was in high spirits at Raffles nightclub on the King’s Road for the twenty-first birthday party for the Brabournes’ son Norton Knatchbull. She even showed up that year at the wedding of lady-in-waiting Henriette Abel Smith’s daughter, where the groom wore a flowered caftan and Mick Jagger was a guest.

  MORE OFTEN THAN not, Philip has been by her side for these private moments. Approaching his fiftieth year as the 1960s drew to a close, his life as consort was a swirl of activity, with an average of 370 solo official engagements a year, many of them overseas. He was, if anything, becoming even more combative in his public persona. “You have mosquitoes. We have the press,” he told the matron of a Caribbean hospital in 1966, provoking a protest from the royal reporters that he finally quelled by apologizing. Several years later he remained unrepentant, telling an audience at Edinburgh University, “I get kicked in the teeth for saying things.” He insisted to a Scottish television interviewer that “the monarchy functions because occasionally you’ve got to stick your neck out.… The idea that you don’t do anything on the off-chance you might be criticized, you’d end up living like a cabbage and it’s pointless. You’ve got to stick up for something you believe in.”

  While touring North America in the autumn of 1969, Philip followed his own advice—and generated unfortunate headlines in the process. He first told a group in Ottawa, “The answer to this question of the monarchy is very simple. If the people don’t want it, they should change it. But let us end it on amicable terms and not have a row. The monarchy exists not for its own benefit, but for that of the country. We don’t come here for our health. We can think of better ways of enjoying ourselves.” Having annoyed the Queen’s subjects in Canada, he then made his way to the United States to stir up even more controversy.

  It had been ten years since the Queen had been to America, but Philip had made several subsequent trips to promote trade with Britain and gather su
pport for his favorite causes. During a ten-day swing in 1966, he even jumped into a swimming pool on a dare at a Miami Beach reception to secure a $100,000 donation for the Variety Club charities. Three years later, President Nixon organized a stag dinner for the duke on November 4, with 105 men from the administration, Congress, military, and judiciary as well as leaders from business, communications, and academia.

  By sheer happenstance, Barbara Walters of NBC’s Today show was at the White House filming an interview with Nixon’s daughter Tricia. When Walters saw the president, she chided him for failing to include any women in his dinner that evening for Philip. He tried to make amends by offering to persuade the duke to appear on her show, a request that had already been turned down. “I had never thought of the President of the United States as a booking agent,” Walters recalled.

  But the next morning, Philip was on the air when Walters asked, “Might Queen Elizabeth ever abdicate and turn the throne over to Prince Charles?” “Who can tell?” Philip replied. “Anything might happen.” His flippant remark made a big splash in the British press and prompted an outpouring of support for the Queen in the streets before the Palace issued an emphatic statement that she would remain on the throne. Walters wrote to apologize to Philip for causing such an uproar. He thanked her, saying he was happy to have been the “means of unlocking such a spectacular display of cheerfulness and goodwill … particularly in this day and age when most demonstrations seem to reflect nothing but anger and provocation.” To Nixon, he declared that he had found Walters “particularly charming and intelligent.”