A Brief History of the Private Life of Elizabeth II

by Michael Paterson

  The schedule was unforgiving. For almost a week she was required to attend eight or nine events every day, beginning at around 10 a.m. and going on until midnight, with only two short breaks and two hours or so off in early evening. At a series of receptions she had to meet, greet and shake hands with over a thousand people at a time. Despite the heat and the long days she could never stifle a yawn, let her glance drift over someone’s head or appear uninterested in what she was being told. She could never look anything other than perfectly groomed and permanently delighted.

  After a quarter-century on the throne, Queen Elizabeth was probably the most popular, and honoured, guest anywhere. Not only was she the effective head of the English-speaking world, a symbolic figure whose presence transcended national borders and political systems, she was also the most experienced traveller and speech-maker and participant in formal events among the Heads of State. Her own conduct, as well as the minutely planned efficiency of the arrangements that surrounded her, set a benchmark for others. Her hosts were rarely unimpressed. Henry Kissinger, a veteran statesman whose praise is worth having, said that she had ‘made a unique and enormous contribution to Anglo-American relations’.

  She toured the Commonwealth during the 1970s. Her visits were a celebration of her Silver Jubilee, and were divided into two journeys. One was in spring, the other in autumn, not only to save her the fatigue of an entire continuous round-the-world itinerary but also to ensure that she would be home for the summer and the national celebrations there. Her travels covered an astonishing 56,000 miles altogether. They were intended to show her overseas peoples their sovereign and to reassure the Dominions that Britain – which had shifted its focus to Europe by joining the Common Market in 1973 – had not cut its links with them. Since, to a large extent, this is precisely what it had done, the sentimental ties of monarchy were almost all that was left to bind the former British Empire. Whatever the reality of the situation, there was no doubting the Queen’s enthusiasm for the Commonwealth, or the pleasure her visits gave.

  At home, where inflation and unemployment were rampant, it was seen by the Government as inappropriate that major celebrations should mark the 25th anniversary of her accession. Although she had become Queen in February, the anniversary would be commemorated in June with a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral. The momentum for this built up slowly, because it was not known how the public would react. There had not been a Jubilee since that of George V in 1935. People did not know what it meant, how it should be celebrated or what it would involve. Nevertheless the manufacture of souvenirs began, shops started to fill with commemorative items and local organisations met to plan how their communities would mark the event. It began to look serious when Prince Charles, who had been commanding a ship, left the Navy to work full-time on coordinating the celebrations. One of his tasks was to approve the design of proposed souvenirs, a number of which were abysmal. ‘He cannot believe,’ said a source, ‘that some of these images are supposed to represent his mother!’

  In a reprise of the attitude that had been seen at the time of the Queen’s wedding 30 years earlier, the Government had misread the public mood. Thinking that at a time of national austerity there was no excuse for expensive celebrations, it had not realised how much the British people wanted something to celebrate. As in 1947, so in 1977: the public turned out in droves, elated by the very fact that their recession-hit country was having a party. Her Majesty made extensive tours of Britain to ensure that the atmosphere of celebration was spread as widely as possible. Everywhere she saw bunting, flags and exuberant decorations. All over the country she was asked to unveil or open or launch things that would forever be named after her Jubilee. Municipalities dedicated parks, hospital wings, schools, sports facilities and routes for guided walks. A chain of beacons was lit across her realm, of which she lit the first at Windsor. She was genuinely moved by the reaction of the crowds, which greeted her with undisguised joy. Regardless of the vicissitudes of the time and of people’s views on the cost of maintaining the Royals, opinion polls throughout the decade had given the monarchy a solid, 75-per-cent-approval rating, and even two-thirds of young people were in favour.

  The fact that she was to tour the United Kingdom meant that she was also to visit Northern Ireland. Its Protestant majority was, and is, among the monarchy’s most fervent supporters, but the climate of violence in the Province was such that the Northern Ireland Secretary, Roy Mason, felt it better to cancel. The Queen – as might have been expected – overruled, telling her Private Secretary, who had raised the matter: ‘Martin, we said we were going to Ulster and it would be a great pity not to.’

  And so she went, greatly enhancing her popularity – though not with everyone. In the Republic, where her Jubilee was not televised, the Irish Independent sniffed that: ‘The British queen’s visit to the North is one of the most unwelcome arrangements that the inoffensive woman has ever agreed to.’ Nevertheless the reception in Ulster was the most touchingly enthusiastic anywhere. As one of her chaplains put it: ‘She could not believe that people had that much affection for her.’

  The Jubilee itself was celebrated on 7 June 1977. A grey, overcast day that brightened in the afternoon, it was not the test of endurance that the Coronation had been. People slept in the streets all along the processional route from the Palace to St Paul’s, and cheered the golden coach just as they had a quarter-century earlier. As always, the splendour of uniforms, liveries, horse-furniture and brass instruments made the event a visual banquet. The Queen dressed in pink and wore one of the turban hats that were a trademark at that time, Prince Philip was in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, and Prince Charles wore that of Colonel of the Welsh Guards. The Cathedral service, attended by the entire Family and a vast assemblage of the great and good, was followed by lunch at Guildhall, after which they returned to the Palace and appeared on the balcony.

  For millions of her subjects the day was one of local celebration. In countless photo albums there are pictures of long-haired men, and adults and children in flared trousers – that somehow look more dated than the Tudor costume of the Beefeaters – eating sausages at village fêtes, running in egg-and-spoon races, waving from floats or tangled in maypoles. Both Queen and country seemed blessed. A British player, Virginia Wade, won Wimbledon that year. The Queen’s horse, Dunfermline, won both the Pretty Polly Stakes and the St Leger. The Jubilee was the biggest party for a generation and resoundingly demonstrated the monarchy’s ability to make people feel better about themselves. It had happened just in time, for an astrologer had predicted that the Queen would abdicate on the 25th anniversary of her Coronation – in 1978.

  Once the celebrations were over, reality returned. Two years afterwards, as the country was enjoying the sunshine of an August Bank Holiday weekend, news came that Lord Mountbatten had been murdered while on holiday in the west of Ireland. He had regularly spent his summers there and was known, and loved, by local people. He had disregarded the danger of terrorist attack, feeling that he was too old to be a target and that his well-known (and surprising, given his snobbery) left-wing views would also offer some protection. He was blown up by a bomb placed on a small fishing boat in which he was leaving harbour. The explosion killed him, as well as one of his twin grandsons, his son-in-law’s mother and a local boy. Unusually the Queen and Prince Philip were not at Balmoral (as they would be on another August Bank Holiday when death touched the Family) but on a private tour of the Loire chateaux in France. They returned at once, and Mountbatten received a state funeral in London. The last in image of the decade for Royalty was that of a coffin drawn on a gun-carriage by sailors processing through the streets and the Family, grief-stricken but as stoical as always, bidding farewells.

  REVIVAL, 1980–1990

  ‘I meet so many mad people . . .’

  Trooping the Colour. The Mall lined with Union Flags, hanging limp. The crowds, happy in the June sunshine behind the crush-barriers, applauding politely ra
ther than cheering. The red tarmac roadway recently swept, but littered with droppings from the horses that had already passed that way. The policemen stationed at intervals, the sunlight glinting on their silver helmet-plates. The Guardsmen, also precise widths apart. The ones on the left, unlucky to be on the north side and thus having the sun in their eyes, perhaps squinting under the fringes of black bearskin. A husky, aristocratic voice shouting the order: ‘Royal Salute! Pree-sent . . . Arms!’ and the three precise, staccato crashes of hand on rifle-stock as they did so. The officers’ swords dipping in salute. The clatter of a police chopper overhead. The flash of cameras from the shadowed gloom under the trees. The distant blare of band-music and the thump-thump-thump of a big drum, drifting across the Park.

  The Queen loved this occasion. She had known it all her life, and had presided over it many times. She admired the discipline, smartness, perfection with which the Guards regiments went through this solemn and magnificent ceremony, for they showed the same desire to be precise in every detail that characterised her own nature. She was immensely proud that these soldiers, the finest in the world, were hers, and she wondered what the onlookers were thinking as they watched them pass. Those that were her subjects would share her pride. Those that were not would feel envy, and perhaps a touch of awe. While her husband – who was at her right shoulder – naturally favoured the Navy, she had always preferred the Army. She had an Inspector General’s eye for uniforms and a Sergeant Major’s knowledge of drill. She was now in the uniform of the Welsh Guards, whose Colour was to be trooped that day.

  She loved the horses, too: the huge Cavalry Blacks of the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals, the light draught horses of the King’s Troop, the placid, lumbering piebald drum-horses that were so popular with the crowds. She herself had recruited one of these. While in Edinburgh she had spotted him, pulling a cart. Now this horse, Cicero, carried a pair of great silver kettledrums, and was much too grand to want reminding of his humble origins.

  Her own horse, a mare called Burmese, had been a gift from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and had served with her at this event since 1969. She was as quiet and disciplined as any of the military mounts on parade that day. She moved at a steady pace. There was no hurry. The distance between the Palace forecourt and Horse Guards’ arch had been measured to the second, so that the Queen would reach it precisely as the clock overhead was striking 11. The crowd in the stands would rise in their seats, the troops would present arms, the national anthem would be played in that slow, languid tempo, and the Royal Standard would be broken from the roof of the building just as her horse came to a halt.

  She was almost at the Admiralty Citadel, where the procession turns right into Approach Road and the parade ground, when there were sudden noises on the right. Shots. Someone was firing shots.

  There was a communal gasp. Police spun round, scanning the faces behind the barriers. Heads ducked instinctively throughout the crowd, but when people looked up the Queen was still sitting on her horse in the same straight-backed posture.

  On duty at that corner was Lance Corporal Galloway of 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards. Like other ‘street liners’, his function was to present arms as Her Majesty went by. He was about seven yards from her when, as he later recalled in the laconic language of a military report: ‘There was a noise which I thought was the crowd clapping; then I recognised it was gunfire. I turned round and saw a man pointing a gun at the Queen, and as I turned he fired the last shot. The crowd was shouting and he was being pushed forward. I leaned across the barrier, grabbed him by the hair and pulled him into the Mall [where police took hold of him. Then] I returned to my position.’

  Onlookers saw the Queen pat her horse’s neck in a calming gesture. Her Majesty later said that the animal had become nervous not because of the shots but owing to the sudden activity as other riders closed in protectively around her. The procession moved onto the parade ground as if nothing were amiss, though the waiting audience had heard the noise and was straining to see. The television commentator paused only for seconds, briefly announced that shots seemed to have been fired at the Queen, and resumed. The ceremony went ahead entirely as usual, and she rode back along the Mall when it was over.

  In terms of coolness in adversity, that day in June 1981 was Her Majesty’s finest hour – a tribute not only to her personal courage but to the training she had received. The man responsible, one of those disturbed and attention-seeking youths who seem so often to be behind such acts, had been armed only with a starting pistol, which he fired six times. The Queen had not been in danger, though naturally no one could have known that. The perpetrator, Marcus Sarjeant, had sought to become ‘the most famous teenager in the world’ through this act. He would have used a real weapon and live bullets had he been able to obtain them. Sentenced to five years in jail, he was to write to the Queen to apologise. He received no reply.

  It had already been a dangerous year for world leaders. In March, another disturbed young man had attempted to shoot Ronald Reagan in Washington. Although the President was hit only by ricochet, the bullet passed within an inch of his heart. In May, Pope John Paul II had been hit four times by a would-be assassin’s bullets in St Peter’s Square. His attacker, a Turk called Mehmet Ali Ajca, had originally decided to shoot the British monarch but, on learning that this was a woman, had sought another victim. In the same month a bomb had exploded in the normally peaceful Shetland Islands while the Queen was opening the new oil terminal at Sullom Voe. The device was small, and it damaged only a boiler in a part of the premises Her Majesty was not visiting. Nevertheless this was seen as an assassination attempt, and these were fraught times for those charged with Royal protection. As a result of the incident in the Mall, police were ordered on all future occasions to face into the crowd, not away from it, and those sitting in the stands for the ceremony were subjected to searches.

  This had been the first notable occurrence in a decade that would bring mixed fortunes to Britain and its Royal Family. The events that defined it almost all took place in its first half: the Falklands campaign – a short and distant, but full-scale war, in which her second son took part; the race riots in British cities and the interminable miners’ strike of 1984, a nasty showdown between the trade unions and a government that sought to break their power. As in the 1970s, the news images that filled television screens were often ugly and disturbing – pickets, riots and burning buildings – but this time there were also burning warships, hit by Exocet missiles. Terrorism continued to be a plague – one bomb went off within earshot of the Queen and killed members of her Household Cavalry. These were grim years, but at least the country was seeing a return to prosperity.

  Once again, it was the House of Windsor that provided the brighter moments, the excuse to celebrate. The Queen’s two eldest sons were married in ceremonies that were watched by television audiences throughout the world, and the women they brought into the Family changed public perceptions of royalty for a generation. There were Royal grandchildren at frequent intervals: Zara (1981), William (1982), Harry (1984) and Beatrice (1988). The Royal Family now had more members than at any time since the reign of Victoria. Such interest was generated by these events that two new magazines, Royalty and Majesty, began publication.

  During these years, as during the decade that followed, the Queen’s life would largely be defined by the activities of her children. It was the 1980s that became a watershed between an old-style monarchy and a new. The change was to cost it a good deal of dignity.

  The focus for a great amount of public sentiment was Charles’s wedding to Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981. The Prince had reached the age of 32 without marrying and there was a certain impatience both within his family and in the public at large. His father, who had married at 26, told him pointedly that unless he made a decision soon there would be no suitable brides left. Charles had always been of an indecisive nature, but he was also happy with the informal friendships he already had, one of which was wit
h the married Camilla Parker Bowles. Both his parents wanted not only to see him settled but also to have the succession secured.

  The Prince had had no shortage of girlfriends, most of them from upper-class English backgrounds, many of them seemingly suitable in temperament. One of these, Lady Sarah Spencer, had a younger sister whom Charles met at a shoot on her family’s estate. Even as a teenager, Diana projected considerable charm, humour and personality. She was athletic, tomboyish, affectionate and possessed a winsome beauty that had not yet quite blossomed. Her family was well-versed in the ways of the Court (her grandmother was a close friend of Charles’s grandmother) and she had lived for some years on the Sandringham Estate, thus enabling the press to suggest that she was ‘the girl next door’. She was sufficiently young not to have a ‘past’. She was not academic – her school record was lamentable – but she had less quantifiable attributes of grace and empathy that promised well. For months during the winter of 1980–1981, speculation mounted that the 19-year-old was going to marry Charles. She was besieged by the media – followed in the street by press photographers – and she endured the attention with seeming patience and good humour. Her trademark shyness, her habit of keeping her head demurely lowered, peering at the world through falling blond locks, made her an instant icon.

  In theory, Diana was a highly suitable future queen. She came from the landed aristocracy whose world was so familiar to Her Majesty. She appeared to enjoy the same country pursuits. Her appealing modesty and her patent affection for children suggested that she would win the nation’s affection with ease (she did) and slip comfortably into a life of public duty (she didn’t), but even before she was married a different personality was becoming evident.

  Charles proposed during a dinner, and allowed her to consider her answer for some weeks while she made a trip to Australia. Their engagement was announced after her return, on 24 February 1981, when a series of pictures was taken of the couple in the Palace gardens. At five feet 11 inches – the same height as her fiancé – she seemed doomed to wear flat shoes for the rest of her life, but this seemed the extent of her problems. ‘With Prince Charles by my side, I cannot go wrong,’ she was quoted as saying. The wedding date was set for 29 July 1981, and a public holiday was declared. Souvenir-manufacturers rubbed their hands. The nation got ready to celebrate. The preparations were so ubiquitous and the general sense of mounting excitement so great that they threatened to produce a sense of overkill, and T-shirts were sold with the legend ‘What Wedding?’ printed on them. The Queen was both happy and relieved. A spouse had been found for her son who appeared entirely suitable, and of whom both the Family and the Commonwealth were fond. Diana seemed to ‘tick every box’.