Elizabeth the Queen

by Sally Bedell Smith

  She revisits her horses in their boxes during “evening stables,” when she takes the time to inspect them one by one, offering each a carrot or a bunch of clover with an affectionate pat, and chatting with its groom. She knows all the stable hands and grooms, and she respects their expertise. Their world is one of the very few places where the barriers of protocol disappear, where she can talk to people on the same level. She knows about their problems and concerns just as much as those of their four-legged charges.

  While touring Balding’s stables at Kingsclere, she inquired about the ventilation system, knowing that since horses can breathe only through their noses, they are susceptible to respiratory infections. Back at the house for a drink, she blew her nose and startled her trainer by handing him her handkerchief so he could see the dark mucus. “I had a feeling that it was incredibly dusty in there, and there was no air,” she said. It was her dramatic and no-nonsense way of showing that his horses were suffering. Balding knocked some holes in the rear of the stalls, covered them with screens, and added a vent in the roof to increase the air circulation.

  While staying at one of her country residences, the Queen finds time to ride nearly every day, even in the rain, both as an escape and a physical fitness regimen. Since childhood she has ridden well, with a fine seat, light rein, and confident control. Although she is always accompanied by a groom and detective, when she hacks out across the countryside she is as alone as she can possibly be—a rarity for a queen.

  She was never interested in jumping, and she knew how to avoid danger. But her prudence has always excluded wearing a hard hat while riding, even in her younger days when tearing down the racecourse with her sister and her daughter, her head scarf flying in the wind during the family’s private morning race each year on Gold Cup Day during Royal Ascot. Jean Carnarvon recalled that her husband “used to be bananas about it. He would talk to her about it. She wasn’t going to do it.” Once when Ian Balding was hacking with her in Windsor Home Park, he took her to task. “I really think it is ridiculous that you above all others do not wear a crash helmet,” he said. Replied the Queen, “I never have, and you don’t have to have your hair done like I do”—an expression less of vanity than the practical need to be ready for her appointments.

  Unlike his wife, Philip was not brought up on horseback. He took up polo in 1950 while living on Malta because he enjoyed the sport’s vigorous physical challenge. From the start he rode aggressively, “keen to win at all costs,” said Major Ronald Ferguson, who played frequently with Philip. Ferguson believed that Philip “needed to play polo to get rid of all his pent-up frustrations. He would arrive … with steam coming out of his ears and after a few games he would be a different man—the frustration gone.”

  To the duke, a polo pony is like a dirt bike. “He drives it, and he wants a machine out in front of him so when he steps on the throttle it goes, when he brakes, it stops, and it goes fast left or right,” said Monty Roberts. “He is not interested in the why, but how to get it done.” Horses are incomprehensible to Philip, who cares little how one differs from another.

  Elizabeth II takes a more intuitive and inquisitive view, and appreciates how horses react. “She has an ability to get horses psychologically attuned to what she wants and then to persuade them to enjoy it,” observed Sir John Miller, for many years the Crown Equerry and Horsemaster to the Queen. “She gets into it and investigates the innate tendencies,” said Roberts.

  Although no fan of the turf, Prince Philip dutifully accompanies his wife to Royal Ascot, the centerpiece of her racing life and one of the royal family’s popular rituals going back to Queen Anne, who began it in 1711. For four days in June, starting the Tuesday after Garter Day (called by some “the Ascot Vigil,” in which the knights “kneel in prayer for a winner later in the week”), the Queen entertains friends, mainly from the racing world, at Windsor Castle with a combination of graciousness and military precision. Everyone dresses to the teeth, the men in morning coats and top hats, the women in “formal day wear” and their best hats—required attire for the Royal Enclosure at the racecourse.

  Elizabeth II hosts a sumptuous luncheon, and at the appointed hour she rises, usually followed by her platoon of corgis and dorgis who have been resting under the table. The royal party is driven in cars through Windsor Great Park to the Ascot Gate, where they climb into landaus, each drawn by a team of four horses ridden by two scarlet-coated postillions, with footmen in red livery and black top hats seated at the back. After a drive along two miles of country lanes, the Royal Procession, which had its origins in the 1820s during the reign of King George IV, enters the racecourse’s Golden Gates at 2 P.M. for the traditional ride up the grassy straight mile.

  Once in the royal box, the Queen’s guests are free to entertain themselves while she focuses on the afternoon races, finding welcome relief even with the tension of having a runner. “The great thing about racing is she can get deeply immersed for two or three hours at a stretch, and it is completely different from her everyday work, a switch out from what is going on in the world that is worrying or unhappy,” said Michael Oswald. “One of her private secretaries told me it has a very good therapeutic effect.”

  When she has a winner, she jumps up and down like a little girl, whooping and grinning, throwing off the inhibitions that usually restrain her in public. She does not, however, place bets. She is acknowledged to be unusually observant at reading a race, as she leans forward in her chair, her eyes transfixed. “Look, it’s on the wrong leg,” she would say. “No wonder it can’t go round the corner.… I don’t think that horse stayed.… Did you see it swerve? I didn’t like the way its ears went back. I like the way it accelerated.… I think it will be better on a left-handed than a right-handed course.”

  With a television in the back and a line of big chairs behind a curving glass window at the front, her generously appointed box was designed to provide the best view of the course. After the fourth race, the Queen invites her guests, including various dignitaries summoned from the Royal Enclosure, for tea in her private room at the back of the box as footmen circulate and serve sandwiches, scones, strawberries and cream, and pastries. She sits for a while, making conversation, but leaps up at the start of the next race, lest she miss a moment. “As a human being one always has hope,” the Queen once said when asked about her fascination with the turf, “and one always has perhaps the gambling instinct, that one’s horse is going to be better than the next man’s horse, and that’s why one goes on doing it.”

  The Queen pays for her breeding and racing out of her private funds, offsetting some of the expenditure with prize money, stud fees for her stallions, and sales of selected winners to other breeders, with a net cost, by one estimate, of a half million pounds a year. The 1950s brought her a string of winners led by Aureole, her sentimental favorite who after losing the Derby won other top races including the prestigious King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot. In 1954 and 1957 the Queen was the top money winner in Britain.

  MORE THAN ANYONE, Elizabeth II shared the ups and downs of breeding and racing with her mother. They first owned a horse together in 1949, a steeplechaser named Monaveen. But after he broke a leg on a jump during a race at Hurst Park and had to be put down, the Queen decided to concentrate on flat racing, while her mother devoted herself to jumpers. Because she had so much more free time, the Queen Mother attended many more races than the Queen and could more frequently feel the thrill of watching her own horses run.

  The Queen Mother took a keen interest in her daughter’s thoroughbred enterprise, and Elizabeth II transferred horses to her mother if they seemed better suited for going over jumps than running on a flat track. The two women found much in common based on their extensive knowledge of horseflesh. During daily phone calls, their chat about the turf ran the gamut from gossip about jockeys, trainers, winners, and losers to the latest news on injuries, breeding, foaling, and naming. When either was traveling they exchanged long letters shar
ing their experiences and offering advice. “Racing is incredible out here,” the Queen wrote from New Zealand. “They all bet like mad and like their marathons of eight races at a dose.”

  Elizabeth II happily subsidized her mother’s passion for racing, which she knew gave her great pleasure. One year when the jumpers had done badly, the Queen proposed paying the trainer’s bill. “The Queen Mother accepted gratefully,” wrote her biographer William Shawcross, “signed the bill and wrote underneath the total, ‘Oh dear.’ ”

  In her sixties and very much a blithe spirit, the “Queen Mum,” an affectionate term coined by the tabloid press, was easy to indulge. She had become pleasingly plump, and was regarded as a “great gastronome,” although her family teased her about her large appetite for food and drink. She had one serious health scare, a diagnosis of colon cancer in December 1966 that the family kept secret. Surgeons removed the tumor, no further treatment was needed, and the Queen Mother never had a recurrence of the malignancy. After a quiet recuperation at Sandringham, all her vitality returned.

  She continued her rounds of official duties—one hundred or more events in most years—effectively and enthusiastically. Her enjoyment was infectious, notably when she threw up her hands in a theatrical outburst of delight. Deborah Devonshire nicknamed her “Cake” after observing her at a wedding reception. On hearing that the bride and groom were about to cut the cake, the Queen Mother exclaimed “Oh, the Cake!” as if seeing the ritual for the first time. “She really is superb at her own type of superbery,” the Duchess wrote to her sister Diana in 1965. At a dinner party given by John Profumo at his home in Regent’s Park a year before his fall from grace, the Queen Mother even joined Ted Heath, David Bruce, and several aristocrats in practicing the twist, the latest dance craze, late into the night.

  She loved to entertain her friends with extravagant black-tie dinners at her various homes, and al fresco luncheons served by a half dozen liveried footmen on tables set with white cloths and fine silver under a canopy of trees in the garden of Clarence House. The crowd was more eclectic than at the monarch’s table, since she could invite anybody she pleased, including dancers, artists, writers, and actors who amused her and could make bright conversation. The food was beautifully presented, and the claret flowed freely, along with her piquant opinions—outspoken criticisms of politicians, most of them Labour, her hatred of “the Japs,” and suspicious view of the Germans and the French (“so nice & so nasty.… How can one trust them?”). Recalling an encounter with Dinka tribesmen in the Sudan, she declared, “They were naked, but they were so black it didn’t matter!”

  The Edwardian world of the Queen Mother had a certain air of unreality. When her longtime friend Tortor Gilmour moved to a smaller house in her village, the Queen Mother came to tea and lamented the mundane view from the front windows. “Darling,” she said, “you must have them close the petrol station and move that school.” Surveying the scene during one of her elegant luncheons at Clarence House, the Queen Mother and former Queen said, “Look at us. We are just ordinary people—look at us around this table—having an ordinary lunch.”

  THE LIVES OF the real ordinary people were changing rapidly in the 1960s. In tandem with the far-reaching social reforms of the Labour Party, British culture underwent seismic shifts. Rock ’n’ roll music loosened inhibitions, the birth control pill gave women new sexual freedom, and depictions of sexuality in film and the theater became more explicit. In 1967 even seventeen-year-old Princess Anne attended a performance of the musical Hair, with its full-frontal nudity.

  At the apex of popular culture were the Beatles. Harold Wilson sought to signal his modernity by recommending that the Queen award each of the “Fab Four” with the MBE—Member of the Most Honourable Order of the British Empire—in October 1965. Only four years earlier the group had been playing in a Liverpool cellar, but their infectious tunes and mop-haired style had exploded into Beatlemania, with legions of screaming fans, and sales of their records in the millions. There was an outcry from the Establishment that the government had debased the award by giving it to pop stars, and some war heroes protested by returning their medals. Noel Coward called it a “major blunder on the part of the Prime Minister … I don’t think the Queen should have agreed.”

  The Beatles had first met her when they played at the Royal Variety Show in 1963. After they had bowed respectfully during their introductions, she asked when they were next performing. “Tomorrow night, Ma’am,” said Paul McCartney. “Oh, where is it?” she replied. “Slough, Ma’am,” he replied. “Oh,” she said brightly. “That’s near us!” “She meant of course Windsor Castle,” McCartney recalled. “It was funny and so unassuming.”

  Two years later she presented them with their honors at Buckingham Palace while police restrained crowds of shrieking girls trying to storm the gates. During their investiture in the opulent white and gold ballroom, the Queen was “lovely,” said McCartney. “She was like a mum to us.” But John Lennon’s delight with the honor soon soured, and he returned it in 1969 as a protest against the Vietnam War.

  He was not alone. The Wilson government supported the escalating U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, but the prime minister refused Lyndon Johnson’s request for troops—not even, the president complained, a “platoon of bagpipers.” An embittered Johnson dismissed Wilson as a “little creep” even as the war provoked large-scale protests and riots on university campuses and in the streets of both Britain and the United States.

  A different sort of violence exploded when “The Troubles” began in Northern Ireland where the Catholic minority—which suffered widespread discrimination—pressed for an independent union with the Republic of Ireland to the south. In the late 1960s the militant Irish Republican Army took the lead in the Catholic cause. As Protestants committed to the status quo clashed with Catholics, British troops were deployed to keep the peace. The IRA escalated the conflict with terrorist bombings and general mayhem, the beginning of three decades of bloodshed.

  The convulsions of the 1960s unleashed a wave of antiestablishment feeling in Britain, and the monarchy became a prime target. By the middle of the decade, Private Eye, the satirical magazine that helped take down Alec Douglas-Home, began aiming its barbs at the royal family for being out of touch, pompous, and bound by outdated traditions. Prince Philip became known as “Phil the Greek.” The magazine also lampooned the mainstream press for its sycophantic approach to the monarchy. Newspapers responded with more questioning and irreverent coverage of the Queen and her family, along with a steady drumbeat for greater access to information than the Palace had been accustomed to offering.

  The Queen kept track of events by reading the newspapers, watching television newscasts, and studying the confidential documents in her boxes. David Bruce was struck, when he sat with her in the royal box at the Goodwood race meeting in 1968—the year of widespread student rioting against university authorities as well as the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, and other activist causes—that “the Queen talked at some length about violence, especially amongst young people throughout the world.”

  Elizabeth II held to her familiar routines as she carried out her own duties throughout the social changes of the turbulent 1960s, appearing mostly as a figure waving from a carriage or a maroon Rolls-Royce topped by her royal shield. In addition to her regular tours to Commonwealth countries in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and North America, she made a dozen state visits around the globe. Her ten days in the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1965 marked the first time a member of the British royal family had been there officially since 1913. The planning had begun two years earlier during the Macmillan government, but the new political subtext was Labour’s expected reapplication for Common Market membership.

  It was a delicate journey of reconciliation as well, marking the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II. For the Queen it offered the prospect of exploring her German roots, and for Philip it marked a sentimental return to his fam
ily’s homeland, to show his wife places where he had spent happy times with his sisters before World War II. After being excluded from the wedding of Elizabeth II and Philip because of bitter postwar feelings, his surviving three sisters—Theodora, Sophie (nicknamed “Aunt Tiny”), and Margarita, all princesses who married into German royalty—had been given prominent places in the royal box at Westminster Abbey during the coronation. They had also been quietly entertained by the Queen and Philip, particularly each spring at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, an extravaganza of equestrian competitions, military displays, and fireworks.

  An emotional high point came in West Berlin, when cheering throngs packed John F. Kennedy Square and ecstatically chanted “Elizabeth!” Yet the Queen, who spoke of her German ancestry in her remarks, seemed discomfited by the passionate reaction. “I think she thought this was a bit too much of a good thing—too reminiscent of ritual Nazi shouting,” recalled Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart. “That was the only time I saw her perhaps at all put out.”

  The moment Elizabeth II seemed to savor most occurred in Hanover, where she scrutinized the letter that launched her family’s dynasty. Written in 1714 by British noblemen to George the Elector of Hanover—the future King George I—it said, “Queen Anne’s dying. Come quick, certain persons want a Jacobite heir and not you.”

  In the autumn of 1965 the Queen’s attention shifted to Africa, where she became embroiled in the British government’s struggle with its colony of Southern Rhodesia. Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain and set up a white minority government mirroring the apartheid policies of neighboring South Africa. Since Britain’s policy was to grant independence only to colonies that established majority rule, Harold Wilson responded by persuading the United Nations to impose economic sanctions. To attract support in Britain, Smith insisted that the Queen would remain as his country’s head of state. Wilson countered by enlisting Elizabeth II to tell Smith directly that she would not preside as sovereign over a regime that failed to provide for black majority participation. She even sent a handwritten letter to the Rhodesian leader urging him to compromise.