Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  But Janvrin and his colleagues did make the occasional misstep, such as when they arranged for the Queen to greet people outside a McDonald’s restaurant in a display of populism. Determined to cast the visit in a poor light, the press ran photographs of her Rolls-Royce under the fast-food sign, making the appearance look contrived. Elizabeth II had a word with Robin Janvrin afterward, but she didn’t belabor the matter. “She has incredibly good instincts about how something will be perceived,” said Simon Lewis. “I was struck by her pragmatism and her sense of what would work. She has a finely tuned sense of the moment. On occasion ideas would be put to her and she would say, ‘We can’t do that. It’s far too grand.’ ”

  THE FINAL YEARS of the twentieth century brought the Queen a new round of worries, this time about her mother and her sister. The Queen Mother was inevitably growing more fragile as she neared her hundredth birthday, although she still had her doughty spirit, refusing offers of a wheelchair and even balking at using a cane. “Time is not my dictator,” said the Queen Mother. “I dictate to time. I want to meet people.”

  She continued her royal rounds even after she had her right hip replaced in November 1995. While visiting the Sandringham Stud in January 1998, she fell and broke her left hip, which required a second replacement surgery. At age ninety-seven, she made another remarkable comeback and appeared at the end of March at St. James’s Palace for her annual Clothing Guild meeting—the first of forty-six public engagements that year.

  Margaret’s problems were psychological as well as physical. She had suffered from a range of ailments over the years—migraines, depression, bronchitis, gastroenteritis, and alcoholic hepatitis—resulting mainly from her excessive drinking and smoking. She had surgery in 1985 to remove a small portion of her lung. Although it wasn’t malignant, she had tried—unsuccessfully—to stop smoking, and she had cut back on her Famous Grouse whisky.

  The two sisters kept up their daily phone calls, and when Margaret traveled overseas, she would call the Queen first thing on arrival. At Balmoral, Margaret “was almost like a poor relation,” said one courtier. “The Queen felt sorry for her.” “Sometimes Margaret was a very lonely person,” said her longtime friend Jane Rayne. “After Tony, then Roddy, no one else made her happy,” observed a man who was friendly with Margaret. “At dinner parties she would often indicate that I should drive her home. She would ask me in, and offer me a drink, then she would talk about all her personal problems.”

  In late February 1998 Margaret suffered a mild stroke at age sixty-seven. She recovered well, although she showed signs of fatigue as well as forgetfulness. Almost exactly a year later, she badly scalded her feet while taking a bath in her house on Mustique. The Queen arranged for her to be flown by Concorde back to England, where she was treated at King Edward VII Hospital. Afterward she had difficulty walking and often relied on a wheelchair. There were other signs of decline as well. Since the early 1980s, Margaret had faithfully corresponded with Nancy Reagan, but in 1999 her lady-in-waiting Annabel Whitehead had to begin writing on her behalf.

  As late as May 1999 the Queen was unsure whether her ailing sister could attend the wedding the following month of Prince Edward to thirty-four-year-old Sophie Rhys-Jones, a middle-class career woman who bore a passing resemblance to Diana. The daughter of an auto parts salesman and a homemaker, Sophie had grown up in the Kentish countryside and attended Kent College Pembury, a well-regarded girls school. After working in a variety of public relations jobs, she started her own firm in 1996. She met Edward while promoting a charity tennis tournament in 1993, and after dating for five years, they announced their engagement in January 1999.

  Following the debacle of It’s a Royal Knockout, Edward had made a modestly successful career as a producer of films including documentaries on haunted castles in Wales, his great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, and the restoration of Windsor Castle. But as the last of the Queen’s children to marry, thirty-five-year-old Edward had also been subjected to such a persistent whispering campaign about his sexuality that Sophie herself denied publicly that he was gay. “How I’d love to be able to go out and sing from the rooftops: IT IS NOT TRUE,” she said. “I want to prove it to people, but it’s impossible to do that.”

  Unlike the other royal siblings, Edward and Sophie had a relatively low-key wedding in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on June 19 that they organized as much as possible on their own. The Queen gave them the titles of Earl and Countess of Wessex and set them up in a fifty-six-room Victorian house in Surrey called Bagshot Park that was criticized as excessive for their position in the royal family. They both continued in their jobs and were known professionally as Edward and Sophie Wessex, determined to combine royal life with everyday work.

  ELIZABETH II LOST one of the stalwart figures in her life that December with the death of Martin Charteris at eighty-six. He had been diagnosed early in the month with advanced liver cancer and was immediately admitted to King Edward VII Hospital. While he was there, the Queen came for an hour-long visit. “They picked up right away on topics that were current,” recalled Gay Charteris. “They talked about all sorts of issues. I had never seen them talk that way together.” At no point did the Queen commiserate with her long-serving adviser about his terminal condition. “She knew that was pointless,” said his widow, “and that Martin wanted to talk about the kinds of things they had talked about when he worked for her.”

  After three weeks, he left the hospital and died at his home in Gloucestershire on December 23. A year later the Queen invited the Charteris family to Windsor Castle for the installation of a cast-iron fireback that he had been sculpting in the last year of his life. He had died before finishing it, so a young sculptor at Eton completed the job. The design had all the royal emblems, and in a fanciful touch, three corgis as well. “I know if Martin had lived, one of the corgis would have lifted its leg,” said his widow. The Queen placed the fireback in St. George’s Hall, a reminder of the man who was her friend as well as her courtier.

  TO CELEBRATE MILLENNIUM Eve on December 31, 1999, the Blairs invited the Queen and Prince Philip, along with Anne and her husband, to the vast Millennium Dome in Greenwich. Originally intended as an exhibition center that would symbolize New Labour’s “Cool Britannia” image, the dome had been plagued by cost overruns and poor planning. Tony Blair promised that the opening night extravaganza would be nothing less than “the greatest show on earth.” It featured acrobats in the nether reaches of the structure, a concert, and, shortly before midnight, a prayer read by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Alastair Campbell observed that Elizabeth II “at least managed the odd smile,” while the others “looked very pissed off to be there.” Anne, in particular, “was like granite.” One reason may have been the absence of heat, which caused the Queen, among thousands of other guests, to keep her coat buttoned. “It was pretty clear they would rather be sitting under their traveling rugs at Balmoral,” recalled Campbell. As the clock struck twelve everyone was expected to link arms and sing “Auld Lang Syne.” The Queen merely stared ahead and lightly clasped the fingers of Blair and Philip, who gave her a rare public kiss on the cheek. Even Blair called the touchy-feely moment “ghastly.”

  Despite her obvious discomfort on New Year’s Eve, the Queen had established a fond relationship with Blair. She had presided over the opening of the Scottish Parliament and witnessed the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales—two essential pieces of New Labour’s program to devolve some legislative powers away from the British Parliament in Westminster after decades of nationalist pressure. “The Queen had a central role in the devolution process,” said Simon Lewis. “So it was important for her to be there and visible. As the country was changing, she needed to be seen to be involved.” In accepting devolution, she was careful to point out that politicians should be mindful that “the kingdom can still enjoy all the benefits of remaining united.… The parts are only fragments of a whole,” and with unity “we can be much more
than the sum of those fragments.”

  In the early going, Blair was not as assiduous about his weekly audiences at the Palace as he later became, and he was known to do an irreverent impersonation of Her Majesty: “Now Blair, no more of this people’s princess nonsense, because I am the people’s Queen.” In time, he developed a “high regard for her street smarts,” said Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and her skill “at assessing people and situations.” Blair recognized that she kept her finger “steadily on the national pulse—more, probably, than people would perhaps perceive.” “Her quality is the ability to get underneath what is happening,” Blair said. “It’s not just a question of knowing the facts on this and this and this.… It’s also being able to sense … the small p politics of something.”

  Like his predecessors, Blair came to regard the Queen’s audience room as a sanctuary. “He was always working flat-out, one meeting after another,” said another of his advisers. “When he climbed into the car with his private secretary it was a moment for decompression. It was a time of tranquillity for him, to walk in and sit down and talk about what the Queen wanted to discuss.” He appreciated that she was “very to the point” and “very direct.” He learned, he later wrote, that “you don’t get matey with the Queen. Occasionally she can be matey with you, but don’t try to reciprocate or you get The Look.”

  Cherie Blair mellowed in her view of the royal family after a rocky beginning in which she had frosty exchanges with both Princess Margaret and Princess Anne, who declined to call her Cherie because, said Anne, “it’s not the way I’ve been brought up.” “I have a soft spot for Prince Philip,” Cherie said. “He and I share a great interest in the Internet.” The prime minister’s wife enjoyed the barbecues at Balmoral that initially flummoxed her husband when “the person who you have grown up with as the Queen” was “fussing around you and looking after you.” Mostly Cherie was impressed by the way Elizabeth II played with the Blairs’ two-year-old son, Leo, during a visit to the Highlands, patiently teaching him how to toss biscuits to the corgis and reacting with benign tolerance when he threw a handful around the room.

  Elizabeth II, as always, was circumspect about her own views of her tenth prime minister, although once when asked by a friend she said, “I think he’s in the wrong party.” “It was a throwaway observation,” explained her friend, “matter of fact, reflecting a common perception that he was not a traditional Labour Party figure.” Philip was predictably more outspoken, telling Gyles Brandreth that he was a modernizer but “not for the sake of buggering about with things in some sort of Blairite way.”

  IN MARCH 2000 the Queen traveled to Australia for her thirteenth visit at a time of uncertainty in the country’s relationship with Britain. The previous November there had been a landmark referendum on the future of the monarchy. By 54 percent to 45 percent, Australians had voted to keep the Queen as their head of state despite opinion polls indicating strong republican sentiment. In the view of many observers, the people had rejected the republican proposal only because it advocated electing a president by both houses of parliament rather than directly by the country’s twelve million voters—reflecting more of a distrust of politicians than an endorsement of the sovereign.

  When the Queen had greeted Martin Charteris in his hospital room a month after the vote, “the first thing they talked about was whether Australia would become a republic,” said Gay Charteris. Elizabeth II took the philosophical view that someday the British sovereign would no longer serve as the monarch of Australia. In a speech on March 20, 2000, at the Sydney Opera House, she struck a balance—on the one hand reminding her listeners that she had “felt part of this rugged, honest creative land” since she “first stepped ashore” in February 1954, while frankly acknowledging that “the future of the monarchy in Australia is an issue for you, the Australian people, and you alone to decide by democratic and constitutional means.” She pledged that “whatever the future may bring,” her “lasting respect and deep affection” would “remain as strong as ever.”

  The well-being of her mother and her sister remained a major preoccupation for the Queen, especially when she was away for two weeks in distant Australia. “The Queen was always wondering if her mother would be all right, would she fall again, and that poor old leg was never healing,” said her cousin Pamela Hicks.

  With the Queen Mother pointing toward her one hundredth birthday in August, Elizabeth II organized a series of unforgettable occasions. The first, a grand ball in the state apartments at Windsor Castle on Wednesday, June 21, also celebrated the seventieth birthday of Princess Margaret, the fiftieth of Princess Anne, and the fortieth of Prince Andrew. The list of more than eight hundred guests included European kings and queens, princes and princesses, leading figures from the British aristocracy, flamboyant international celebrities, and royal estate managers and horse trainers. Longtime royal nanny Mabel Anderson was there, along with Roddy Llewellyn and his wife, Captain Mark Phillips and his new wife, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband. Bars were set up in four different rooms, and three dance bands alternated in the Waterloo Chamber while a disco boomed in the Queen’s Presence Chamber.

  There had been grumbling four years earlier when the press revealed that the Queen Mother was running an overdraft at Coutts bank of £4 million. Critics questioned the Queen’s acceptance of her mother’s extravagance, and the £643,000 allocated for her annual Civil List allowance. But few begrudged the ninety minutes of pageantry at Horse Guards Parade on July 19 in tribute to the Queen Mother’s century: a cast of thousands in a gaily costumed procession, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, servicemen, choirs, bands, bulls, sheep, chickens, horses, one hundred doves, and an aerial display by vintage RAF airplanes. Earlier that week there had been a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral and congratulatory messages from the House of Lords and the House of Commons.

  Two weeks later on August 4, 2000, the day she turned one hundred, the Queen Mother rode with the Prince of Wales in a flower-bedecked carriage up the Mall to Buckingham Palace, where a crowd of forty thousand waited to cheer her arrival. “It was three years after the death of the Princess of Wales and I was struck by how far the monarchy had come,” said Simon Lewis. “I was standing in the forecourt at Buckingham Palace thinking, ‘If there was any question how people feel about the monarchy, there was a sense of joy that day.’ It was a tiny reminder that the institution had come through tough times and was in great shape.”

  PLANNING BEGAN THAT summer for the Queen’s own celebration two years later of her Golden Jubilee, marking fifty years on the throne. The task fell to Robin Janvrin, who had taken over as private secretary when Robert Fellowes retired in 1999. The son of a vice admiral, Janvrin had graduated with honors from Oxford and served as an officer in the Royal Navy and as a diplomat before joining the royal household in 1987. Having witnessed some of the worst years of the Queen’s reign, he had become the leading modernizer among her top advisers.

  His first recruit was Simon Walker, head of communications for British Airways, to replace Simon Lewis, who was returning to British Gas following his two years at the Palace. A South African by birth, Walker was outside the classic courtier mold, having worked not only in the Labour Party but for John Major in his last two years at 10 Downing Street. The Queen’s advisers wanted another press manager with an outside perspective and a more realistic idea of how stories would play. After a half dozen meetings with various officials in the household—mainly to determine if Walker harbored republican ideas—Janvrin said, “Only one person can decide if you are right for the job, and that is the Queen.”

  Walker’s interview with Elizabeth II was late on a Wednesday afternoon in June 2000. She asked if he minded standing since she had been sitting for a portrait for three hours. As they talked, one of the Queen’s corgis insistently tugged at Walker’s trouser leg, which made standing still a challenge. The Queen didn’t try to stop the dog, nor for that matter did she seem to t
ake notice at all, and Walker began to think that his ability to endure the distraction was meant to test his unflappability.

  Their conversation was friendly and informal, and the Queen was well briefed. Her purpose was not to conduct the sort of forensic interview common in private industry, but rather to get a sense of how Walker might fit in and work with her. “There was definitely a subtlety to it,” he recalled.

  Walker joined the household in September, when preparations for the Golden Jubilee got under way. He and his colleagues were mindful of “Millennium fatigue” created by Blair’s overhyped approach to the dome. “Under-promise and over delivery were seen to be critical to the Jubilee’s media prospects,” recalled Walker. The festivities would avoid simply copying the Silver Jubilee and its multitude of street parties, emphasizing instead inclusiveness to capture the multicultural changes that had occurred during the Queen’s reign. The focus would be on the Queen herself rather than on the institution of the monarchy, and communities of all stripes would be encouraged to celebrate in their own way, along with the major events forming the centerpiece of the official celebrations in London.

  One striking emblem of the modern mood at the Palace was the portrait in progress on the day Simon Walker met the Queen. Of all the depictions of the Queen throughout her reign, it was one of the most controversial. The artist was Lucian Freud, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living realist painter, and the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The idea for the painting had come from Robert Fellowes, whose portrait Freud had painted in 1999. It was a risky commission, since Freud’s portraits (including the one of Fellowes) were often brutal, even grotesque images, rendered in thick brushstrokes. Freud said his goal was to produce “the interior life or ‘inner likeness’ behind such an instantly recognizable face.” For that reason, he remarked that his task was as challenging as “a polar expedition.”