Elizabeth the Queen

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Forty years after her father’s death, Mary Soames was appointed to the Order. When she came to Buckingham Palace, the Queen had laid out the insignia on a grand piano. “Well, here it is,” said Elizabeth II. As she pointed toward the collar, she said, “That is your father’s chain!” “Oh, Ma’am,” replied Mary, “that can’t be.” Feeling slightly abashed at contradicting the monarch, she explained that the collar was in a display case at Chartwell, the Churchill home in Kent. “I caused it to be retrieved,” said the Queen with a twinkle, explaining that she had arranged for a replica to go on display.

  Garter Day, which is held on the Monday after Trooping the Colour in June, is a particularly enjoyable fixed point on the Queen’s yearly calendar. The Garter knights meet at Windsor Castle to witness the installation of new members in the Garter Throne Room. Conjuring a medieval tableau, they wear their gleaming chains and badges over heavy dark blue velvet robes embellished with white satin bows on the shoulders. “Whoever invented these robes wasn’t very practical,” the Queen once remarked, “even in the days when somebody wore clothes like these.” As she administers the oath and exhorts the knights in their faith, “she is highly practical, quick & neat,” noted Deborah Devonshire when her husband, Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, was invested. “The language is thrilling, ancient & rather frightening, nothing but battling with things & people.”

  The Queen treats the knights to luncheon in the Waterloo Chamber, a long gallery with an intricately carved ceiling and clerestory windows resembling a man-o’-war ship from the nineteenth century. The table is splendidly set with silver gilt and flowers. Like other royal banquets, there is “no hanging about for a slow eater,” Deborah Devonshire recalled.

  Following the luncheon, the knights ready themselves for a colorful procession, fastening their robes and adjusting their badges, collars, and flat black velvet hats with waving ostrich plumes. They walk from the main part of the castle down a cobbled street to St. George’s Chapel, preceded by regimental bands in gold tunics, the Military Knights of Windsor in scarlet uniforms, and Officers of Arms in scarlet and gold tabards and black knee breeches, passing by dismounted members of the Household Cavalry lining the route. Many of the Garter knights are elderly, and some shuffle unsteadily under the weight and volume of their robes. “The Queen is always very concerned for their well-being,” said Lieutenant Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, former Comptroller for the Queen. “She will say, ‘Pay attention to this one. Make sure he is not puffed,’ so I would take him by a shortcut.”

  Garter Day is one of the monarchy’s popular tourist attractions, with eight thousand spectators each year, and a thousand more filling St. George’s Chapel for the service of thanksgiving, where the Garter knights are tucked away in the choir stalls. Afterward, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and knights ride in carriages and cars back to the castle. “It’s always very lucky to plod downhill and not uphill,” the Queen observed. Once the royal family members take their leave, the Companions meet in the Waterloo Chamber for tea, a happy atmosphere of “hats off, hair down, and general relaxation,” recalled Deborah Devonshire.

  IT WOULD BE more than a decade before Harold Wilson, the Queen’s first socialist prime minister, would participate in the rarefied rituals of the Garter—pageantry he embraced with enthusiasm. In the meantime, he pursued an agenda of wide-ranging social reforms and increased government spending on housing, pensions, health, and welfare subsidies. Once a government captures a working majority in Parliament, however slender, the ruling party has virtually untrammeled power, with no prospect of compromise with the opposition. The postwar Conservative governments had done little to reduce the welfare state constructed by the Attlee government, and Wilson significantly broadened the reach of those programs.

  Starting in 1965, his Labour majority pushed through laws abolishing capital punishment, ending government censorship, liberalizing abortion, lowering the voting age to eighteen, reforming divorce, and decriminalizing homosexuality. Wilson’s government nearly doubled the number of universities, significantly expanding free higher education (a practice that would end thirty-three years later with the introduction of means-tested tuition fees). At the same time, he eroded the quality of secondary education by eliminating the publicly funded selective grammar schools that had educated not only Wilson but other prominent British leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath. Those academically rigorous schools were replaced by egalitarian comprehensive schools with lower scholastic standards. To pay for the expanded government programs, the Labour Party binged on borrowing and raised taxes.

  The prime minister shared his plans in the Tuesday evening audiences at Buckingham Palace. Wilson felt the Queen “had very good views on everything,” Marcia Falkender recalled. “She didn’t tender it in a way of saying, ‘This is my advice and you should take it.’ She knew she was not there to give advice, but she was there, if possible, to discuss it in a decent way.” Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines said that the Queen’s Socratic approach forced the prime minister to “justify any proposals to her, which was good discipline. It meant he had to have his arguments very clear in his own mind.” In the larger sense, however, she doesn’t appear to have slowed the march of socialist policies, although Harold Macmillan, for one, believed she had a “restraining influence.”

  Like Macmillan, Wilson catered to the Queen’s fascination with political gossip. Among other things, he told her about French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s alleged penchant for trolling the streets of Paris for women. “The fact that she was Queen, she could take it all in, and nothing would shock her,” said Marcia Falkender. “She has a very good understanding of people and reading them.… She is a highly intelligent raconteur of the political scene.” Wilson also relied on the Queen’s confidentiality. When he was worried about fellow cabinet members undercutting him, she gave him a shoulder to weep on.

  While her relationship with Wilson was warm from the outset, Elizabeth II knew that most of his class-conscious colleagues took a dim view of the monarchy and the Queen. Yet she managed over time to win over some of the hardest cases, among them Barbara Castle, the flame-haired firebrand known as Labour’s Red Queen, and Richard Crossman, described by historian A. N. Wilson as a “large, shambolic bisexual.” When Harold Wilson’s cabinet first met with Elizabeth II to be sworn in as members of the Privy Council, they grudgingly went along with what Wedgwood Benn, an outspoken socialist, called a “terribly degrading” ritual of kneeling, swearing on the Bible, taking the Queen’s hand, and walking backward. He petulantly offered “the most miniature bow ever seen.”

  Crossman, like so many others, appreciated how the Queen put him at ease, noting that she had a “lovely laugh” and was “a really very spontaneous person.” The Queen felt relaxed enough with Crossman to unburden herself on a variety of topics in their audiences, and he came to pride himself on being an astute observer of her nuances. When Crossman mentioned Dame Evelyn Sharp, an intimidating civil servant in charge of urban renewal, the Queen snapped, “Oh that woman. I can tell you I don’t like her.” As for her Privy Council ritual, she said, “Philip always said it was a waste of time.” Unbeknownst to Elizabeth II, her interlocutor was busily recording her comments in his copious diaries. When after his death in 1974 his literary executors planned to publish his observations, Martin Charteris dissuaded them from including the “most objectionable passages” involving the Queen’s comments.

  Barbara Castle, who had a spiky sense of humor and a vivacious personality, was taken with the Queen’s wit and “natural charm” and established an easy camaraderie with the Queen. After a state banquet in 1965, Castle was standing with Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret as they chatted about Prince Charles’s anxiety over taking his university admission examination. “You and I would never have got into university,” the Queen suddenly said to her sister, as the Labour politician hastened to reassure the monarch that it “wasn’t as formidable as it seemed.” Castle w
as impressed that Elizabeth II could shift quickly between politicians of opposing viewpoints by remembering as many biographical details as possible, “which kept the conversation going in a perfectly safe, politically neutral way.”

  Benn, however, remained unrepentantly opposed to the Queen and all she stood for—an attitude unsoftened by his marriage to a wealthy American with a large house in fashionable Holland Park. As postmaster general in the Wilson cabinet, he even launched a quixotic campaign to remove the image of Elizabeth II from postage stamps. She patiently listened to his proposal and examined sketches of his suggested alternatives. He left his forty-minute audience convinced she had agreed to the scheme. “She took him for a mug,” said historian Kenneth Rose. “He thought he had wrapped her round his finger.” Privately, she let Wilson know her displeasure, and the prime minister squelched the matter. When Benn later came to the Palace to be sworn in after Wilson had switched him to minister of technology, the Queen couldn’t resist saying, “I’m sure you’ll miss your stamps.” He thanked her for her “kindness and encouragement in helping me to tackle them,” before obediently bowing and walking backward from the audience room.

  One of her other detractors was Labour Party foreign secretary Michael Stewart. During a dine-and-sleep visit to Windsor Castle in 1968, he announced to Lydia Katzenbach, wife of the U.S. attorney general, that “except in knowledge of horse flesh,” the Queen was “a stupid woman.” When Katzenbach recounted the criticism afterward, David Bruce expressed his surprise, “in view of the common understanding that the Prime Minister finds the Queen remarkably well informed on international problems. That she prefers, if given a choice—which she is not—horses to affairs of state, may well be the case, but no one can accuse her of neglecting her interminable and I should imagine often boring duties of an official character.”

  AS ELIZABETH II entered middle age, horses were indeed both her passion and her refuge. Over the years she has seldom purchased horses, preferring them to be “home-bred,” a tradition stretching back to Queen Elizabeth I. By the 1960s, she had been supervising the royal equine enterprise for more than a decade, with breeding operations located at Sandringham and nearby Wolferton as well as Hampton Court, along with Polhampton Lodge Stud in Berkshire, which she began leasing in 1962. Ten years later she bought Polhampton to use as a bucolic camp for recently weaned yearlings and runners needing a rest—what her veteran stud manager Michael Oswald calls the “walking wounded.”

  In her private as well as public life, the Queen is a woman of predictable routines, which, in the case of her racehorses, are timed to their rhythms of mating, birth, weaning, training, and racing. She typically visits the mares and stallions at the Sandringham stud farm twice in the first six weeks of each year when the breeding season begins, and again in April and July to see the foals resulting from the previous season’s mating. With her trusty old-fashioned camera, she methodically photographs the mares and their offspring.

  In the early spring as well as the fall she inspects her yearlings at Polhampton, and whenever possible in the spring and summer she observes more than a score of her young thoroughbreds in training at stables in Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Berkshire. She follows their progress at races throughout the year, only a small number of which she sees in person because of the demands of her job. The Derby in early June and Royal Ascot later that month are indelible dates in her calendar, and she attends other major race meetings when she can.

  The Royal Stud at Sandringham is a picturesque late-nineteenth-century complex of red-brick and native brown carrstone stables topped by chimneys and cupolas. The mares inhabit roomy boxes that can easily accommodate newborn foals, but each stallion lives like a king in his considerably larger box with tiled walls, ten inches of wood chips on the floor, high windows, a pitched roof of wood and Norfolk reed, and infrared lights for drying off. There are four paddocks of two acres apiece for the stallions, enclosed by brick walls and hedges, with nearby gardens and fountains.

  The main business of the stud takes place in the covering shed, a cavernous structure with a sandy floor. The Queen’s breeding and racing advisers make suggestions about mating, but unlike her role as sovereign, where she follows the guidance of others, she often takes the initiative, based on her observations as well as her extensive knowledge of bloodlines. She knows which horses are good for stamina, which for speed, and which possess the ineffable trait of courage. She is an astute judge of conformation—whether, as Henry Porchester observed, “a horse had a good shoulder, short cannon bones, good feet, flat feet, bent or straight hocks, good quarters, a nice eye or quality head.” She famously discovered that a stable had mixed up two of her yearlings, Doutelle and Agreement, that she had only previously seen once as foals. “She reads a lot, and she knows a lot,” said Michael Oswald. “If you want to discuss a sales catalogue you should do your homework, because she’ll know who a horse’s great-great-grandmother was.” The final decision “rests always with the Queen,” wrote Arthur FitzGerald in his official history of the Royal studs.

  Oswald jocularly refers to the Sandringham Stud as the “Maternity Help and Marriage Guidance Center for Horses.” But the act of live cover—breeding a multimillion-dollar prize-winning stallion with one of the Queen’s valuable mares—is not for the faint of heart. Rather, it is a serious exercise in controlled lust between two powerful and highly strung creatures, each weighing nearly a ton. As a measure of her earthy nature as a countrywoman, the Queen has witnessed the raw reality of thoroughbred matchmaking any number of times. The otherwise prim and proper Queen would stand in a corner of the covering shed with her stud manager and grooms, wearing a hard hat for protection before the health and safety authorities required her to build an elevated viewing stand. “She is very matter-of-fact,” said Michael Oswald. “She knows how it works.”

  The fast, furious, and potentially dangerous mating act begins when a mare in heat is brought into the covering shed. Her rear legs are encased in heavy leather boots to prevent her from kicking the stallion, and a thick leather “false mane” is strapped across her neck and withers so she is not bitten during the frenzy of coitus.

  The mare is first brought to one side of the shed, a padded wall with a large opening where she and a “teaser” stallion engage in equine foreplay, and if she is sufficiently aroused—an unmistakable reaction known as clitoral “winking”—the veterinarian will examine her by palpation and ultrasound to determine whether she is about to ovulate. If so, she returns to the covering shed, where she stands in a slight hollow in the middle. One groom holds her bridle and another has a “twitch,” a pole with a loop of rope that sedates the mare when twisted around the end of her nose. The highly excited stallion of choice is held by four men as he strains, snorts, whinnies, and rears before mounting the mare, his violent exertions guided by a stud groom standing near her tail.

  Once conception has been confirmed by ultrasound, the Queen tracks the eleven-month gestation, and occasionally she watches the mare foaling, which usually occurs at night. Typically she is sent a photograph of the foal, which she sometimes will name even before birth, and she follows its development until it is weaned and shipped out as a yearling to Polhampton.

  During one of the Queen’s visits to Polhampton, she accompanied Henry Porchester, her stud groom Sean Norris, her trainer Ian Balding and his wife, Emma, into a field to have a better look at six colts about to be broken in. Suddenly the colts started galloping around in a circle and “dive bombing,” rearing up and kicking out. Only Balding and the Queen stayed in place, while their three companions bolted for the gate. Elizabeth II and her trainer knew that if they remained motionless, the young horses would not attack them and would eventually settle down.

  “Oh, that was scary,” the Queen said afterward. “She was completely unruffled,” Balding recalled, having witnessed an unflinching physical courage that is one of her defining traits. “She has the ability to get calmer in the face of problems rather than allowi
ng herself to get her adrenaline up and to panic,” said Monty Roberts, the California horse trainer known as the “horse whisperer,” who was to become her close friend.

  Preparing her yearlings for the racetrack occupies nearly as much of the Queen’s attention as breeding. Her expertise is such that, as Henry Porchester said, “talking to her is almost like talking to a trainer.” “If she had been a normal person, she probably would have become a trainer,” observed Ian Balding. “She loves it so much.” She has always divided her horses among several trainers, mainly because she wants to see their different approaches. “Some trainers suit a particular horse better than others,” said Oswald. “It’s rather like deciding on schools for your children.” She can stand for hours in the early morning mist on the gallops, wearing a head scarf, tweed coat, and Wellington boots, binoculars fixed on the horses streaking across the rolling downs. “She would watch how her horses moved, how they would stretch out,” said Ian Balding. “She could see how they run.”