Elizabeth the Queen

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Her spending sprees were fueled in part by her competition with Diana, who had access to her husband’s Duchy of Cornwall annual income of around £1 million ($1.5 million). The sisters-in-law vacillated between rivalrous sniping and juvenile behavior—capering like schoolgirls on the ski slopes and poking rolled umbrellas into the backside of a friend at Ascot. Tabloid reporters who had previously hailed Fergie for being refreshingly approachable declared her to be the “bad royal … crass, rude, raucous, and bereft of all dignity.” Even her father fit the new stereotype when he was discovered frequenting a London massage and sex parlor.

  For a number of years there had been rumblings around dinner tables in London and at house parties in the country that Anne and her husband, Mark Phillips, had both been having affairs and were leading separate lives. She was linked to Peter Cross, one of her security officers, as well as Camilla’s husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, whom Anne had dated before meeting Phillips. The definitive story emerged in April 1989 when the tabloids revealed four purloined love letters to the thirty-eight-year-old princess from Commander Timothy Laurence, the Queen’s thirty-four-year-old equerry.

  In an echo of Princess Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsend, Anne had grown close to Laurence after he joined the royal household in 1986. The letters, written over eighteen months, called her “darling” and were written in “affectionate terms” without specifically suggesting intimacy. The Palace confirmed the authenticity of the letters, which The Sun turned over to Scotland Yard. Soon afterward, Anne and her husband announced their separation, while in a tacit show of support for her popular equerry the Queen kept Laurence on her staff. The public responded sympathetically but witnessing her daughter’s marital unhappiness was a blow to the Queen.

  ELIZABETH II FOUND escape from her family travails in her equine pursuits. At the end of 1988 she had been reading in two American magazines, Blood Horse and Florida Horse, about a new technique for “starting” horses developed by a fifty-three-year-old California cowboy named Monty Roberts. Rather than “breaking” yearlings to accept human riders by tying their legs and heads with ropes, Roberts had devised a method based on “advance-and-retreat” body language, eye contact, and subtle signals that appeal to a horse’s herd instinct. He had grown up observing wild mustangs discipline their difficult colts, and after receiving a degree in psychology and animal science from California Polytechnic State University in 1955, he began his career training thoroughbreds, determined to avoid the violent tactics that his father had used.

  The Queen sent Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, who had recently retired after twenty-six years as her Crown Equerry—the man in charge of all her horses except racehorses—to Roberts’s ranch north of Santa Barbara for a demonstration. After Miller reported that he found the new approach compelling, the Queen invited Roberts to Windsor Castle so she could judge for herself. He agreed to conduct demonstrations over five days starting on April 10, 1989. She invited some two hundred guests to watch him start sixteen horses, although she said she would be present only for an hour on the first day. If she found his technique useful, she promised to send him on a twenty-one-city tour throughout the United Kingdom to educate others in the horse world.

  On the Saturday before the trials, Roberts went with Miller to the indoor riding school at the castle to inspect the newly installed fifty-foot round pen where he would work with the horses. Into the riding hall strode the Queen, dressed in jodhpurs and a handsome hacking jacket, moving quickly to speak to Miller. She was “confident, in a hurry, with things to do,” recalled Roberts. Her presence was at odds with the “indelibly engraved image” he had from sightings at Ascot, Epsom, and Newmarket—“always in a dress, a strolling lady, purse over her arm, a smile for everyone, a tranquil lady, never in a hurry in public, everything lined up for her.”

  A suddenly attentive Miller made the introduction as Elizabeth II extended her hand to the stocky horseman with a deep tan and alert blue eyes. “Come show me this lions’ cage of yours,” she said. “Do I need a whip and a chair?” “She said it not only with a twinkle, but her method of addressing me—clearly her talent—was to put me at ease,” Roberts recalled.

  The following Monday morning at nine, he faced not only the Queen, but Prince Philip and the Queen Mother, whose filly was first into the pen. The royal group, along with Miller, Michael Clayton, the editor of Horse and Hound magazine—the only journalist Elizabeth II ever befriended—and Lieutenant Colonel Seymour Gilbart-Denham, the new Crown Equerry, sat in a glass-enclosed viewing platform at one end of the high-ceilinged hall with arched Gothicstyle windows. The grooms stood along the walls, gazing suspiciously.

  Roberts went through his paces, tossing a light cotton line toward the horse, who responded by trotting around the perimeter of the pen. Over the next fifteen minutes the filly shifted from fear to trust, encouraged by Roberts’s glances and gestures, including turning his back on the horse, until she began following him. After ten more minutes, she first accepted his touch—“joining up” in his nomenclature—then a bridle and saddle. Moments later Roberts’s assistant was riding the filly around the pen. “That was beautiful,” the Queen said to Roberts, impressed by his gentle but effective approach. Philip gave him a hard handshake and asked if Roberts could work with his carriage ponies. With tears in her eyes, the Queen Mother said, “That was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Roberts watched in amazement as the Queen began issuing orders. “That surprised me,” he said. “You don’t see the Queen doing that in real life.” Several of the girl grooms had told her they suspected Roberts of tranquilizing the filly by throwing powder into her nose. In response, Elizabeth II asked for a more rigorous test in the afternoon with two raw three-year-old stallions to be transported from the stables at Hampton Court. She had changed her plans and would be returning after lunch.

  That afternoon, nearly a hundred guests were on hand. The Queen stood directly by the pen, arms folded, watching intently with her girl grooms nearby. Both of the stallions were “riled up, big, moving and sweating,” but Roberts started each of them after a half hour of training. To his surprise, the Queen’s schedule miraculously cleared and she came to the morning and afternoon demonstrations every day that week to watch him work with twenty-two horses. She called the top trainers around the country to encourage them to attend the demonstrations she had set up, and she arranged for Michael Clayton to chronicle the tour for his magazine. She even supplied a bulletproof Ford Scorpio for Roberts to drive.

  The sovereign and the cowboy struck up a fast friendship, connected by their compatible view of equine psychology and their prodigious memories for racehorse pedigrees. Speaking precisely and slowly, his voice gentle but strong, Roberts answered her numerous questions over lunch in the castle gardens. “I saw a mind open up that through decades of training and interest had been encapsulated in the traditional approach,” recalled Roberts. “She saw it was a better way.”

  He was struck that she “knew every move, knew why it was there and why it was executed.” When he told her something she didn’t know, she sat on the edge of her chair “with a humility like a first grader.” He was equally surprised that she offered him ideas on how to present his concepts to an English audience. “You need to ease up,” she said, “so you don’t appear to be too competitive.” Her advice showed “an incredible ability to read intention, just like a horse does.”

  His friendship with the Queen changed Monty Roberts’s life. Not only did she adopt his approach for many of her own horses, she encouraged him to write an autobiography that would incorporate his training techniques. She critiqued his drafts, urged him to make major revisions, and introduced him to publishers. When The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer was published in 1997, it sold more than two million copies. The Queen praised him not only for producing the book but for “getting it right.” He has gone on to establish training centers around the worl
d, teaching his methods to some 1,500 students a year. All along the way, the Queen has tracked his progress and received updates during his visits to Windsor twice a year. In 2011 she rewarded Roberts by making him an honorary Member of the Royal Victorian Order.

  * * *

  HORSE RACING HAD always been a source of unalloyed joy for the Queen, but in 1989 the pleasure of making a new friendship with Monty Roberts and discovering the possibilities of his teachings was marred by controversy and disappointment, both on and off the track. A central character was a long-striding colt called Nashwan, the offspring of Height of Fashion, a prize mare the Queen had bred a decade earlier.

  As a filly, Height of Fashion had won five of her seven races in 1981 and 1982, catching the eye of Sheikh Hamdan al Maktoum of the Dubai royal family. He offered to buy the horse for more than £1 million—at the time an extravagant amount for an untested “maiden” broodmare. Acting on Henry Porchester’s advice, Elizabeth II decided to sell, using the proceeds to buy the West Ilsley stables in Berkshire. Her highly regarded trainer, Major Dick Hern, who was living in a nearby rectory, also purchased by the Queen, then signed a seven-year lease on the stable.

  Hern had worked for Elizabeth II since 1966 and also trained for other prominent owners, including the Maktoum family. He had trained two of the Queen’s most successful horses, Highclere and Dunfermline, and had been part of the group that celebrated the Prix de Diane victory at Windsor Castle.

  In 1984, Hern broke his neck in a hunting accident. He was paralyzed below the waist but valiantly continued training from a wheelchair and turning out winners. Four years later he had another setback when he underwent major heart surgery. As Hern was recuperating in the hospital in August 1988, the Queen’s veteran racing manager—now known as the 7th Earl of Carnarvon after inheriting the title on his father’s death the previous year—informed the sixty-seven-year-old trainer that he would have to leave West Ilsley at the end of his lease the following year. Porchey’s insensitivity provoked an outcry in the racing world.

  Hern briefly resumed training for Elizabeth II, but she announced in March 1989 that he would be replaced by William Hastings-Bass, the future Earl of Huntington. The anger at Henry Carnarvon turned toward the Queen, not only for firing her trainer, but for evicting him from the rectory where he had lived since 1962. Ian Balding, a good friend of Hern, told Robert Fellowes, “If you don’t make some sort of arrangement for Dick Hern, it will be the most unpopular thing the Queen has ever done, and she risks having her horses booed in the winners’ enclosure.”

  That never happened, but something close occurred when Nashwan won at Newmarket in May, and the crowd greeted Hern, who had trained the horse for Maktoum, with “loud and sustained applause” as he “swept off his Panama” to welcome the horse into the winners’ enclosure. “The Queen has done something I thought was impossible,” Woodrow Wyatt told the 18th Earl of Derby’s wife, Isabel. “She is turning the Jockey Club and the racing world into republicans.”

  The worst, at least for a competitive owner like the Queen, was yet to come. On June 7, Elizabeth II attended the Epsom Derby, the race she most wanted to win. None other than Nashwan, the horse who could have been hers, galloped to a dramatic, five-length victory.

  By then, she had countermanded Carnarvon’s advice and arranged to let Hern remain at the West Ilsley stables through 1990, sharing the training with Hastings-Bass for a year. Even more significant, she allowed Hern to stay in his home for as long as he wanted. The Maktoum family bought and renovated a new stable for the veteran trainer, and he worked successfully for them until he retired in 1997. Elizabeth II was forgiven the biggest blunder of her career as a thoroughbred breeder, in large measure due to the magnanimity of Hern, who greeted her cordially after his Derby win and never spoke ill of her.

  THE NEW YEAR brought a welcome resolution of one of the most troubling problems of the Queen’s reign. South Africa’s newly elected white president, Frederik Willem de Klerk, made the stunning announcement on Feburary 2, 1990, that he would free Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, who had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years for resisting apartheid policies. Nine days later Mandela walked through the prison gates as a free man. De Klerk legalized the ANC and set in motion the dismantling of apartheid and establishment of universal democratic elections.

  Both leaders yielded to internal and external pressures, and their successful reconciliation earned them the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Mandela believed that the Commonwealth’s anti-apartheid stance had been vital, as was the Queen’s role in keeping the organization unified. “Sonny Ramphal [secretary-general of the Commonwealth] was sitting in London with [Thabo] Mbeki and [Oliver] Tambo from the ANC,” recalled Canada’s Brian Mulroney. “He would pass on everything that went on in the Commonwealth, and they would pass it on to Mandela. In the area of moral leadership, Mandela would say that the Commonwealth saved South Africa.”

  The South African denouement came as a relief to Margaret Thatcher as she began her eleventh year as prime minister after leading the Tory party to victory three times—in 1979, 1983, and 1987. Britain’s difficult years of stringent monetary policy, high unemployment, and union busting had been eclipsed by an economic boom in the late 1980s. Thatcher had broken the back of inflation, encouraged entrepreneurs, expanded the number of homeowners, privatized state industries, reduced the size of government, and opened London’s financial markets to foreign investment. Internationally, she had bolstered the country’s image with her strong anticommunist stance (in concert with Ronald Reagan), and her economic policies offered a model to the rising Eastern European countries that had elected noncommunist governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union that began in 1989.

  In July 1990, David Airlie presented the prime minister with a new proposal to fund the Civil List. Having instituted most of the Peat Report reforms, he was able to show the government that Palace officials could be “in charge of our own destiny.” His presentation called for returning to the ten-year funding set by the Civil List Act of 1972, a formula that the Labour government had superseded in 1975 with a law reverting to annual requests for increases. Thatcher agreed to raise the annual Civil List payment from £5.1 million to £7.9 million through 2000.

  Persuaded by the professionalism and efficiency of the Queen’s advisers, the prime minister also shifted the job of managing the finances of the occupied royal palaces—Buckingham, St. James’s, Kensington, Marlborough House, Clarence House, Windsor Castle, and assorted properties in Windsor Great Park and the Home Park—from the Department of the Environment to the royal household, with Michael Peat serving in the new position of director of finance and property services. Thatcher defended the Civil List plan by emphasizing that it would “give much more dignity and continuity to the Crown,” adding that “an overwhelming number of people in the nation regard the royal family as the greatest asset that the United Kingdom has and greatly admire everything that it does.”

  Despite Thatcher’s numerous successes, she faced growing opposition in the electorate as well as within the Conservative Party. To raise revenue for local services such as education and trash collection, she had abolished property taxes and created instead a poll tax. Every adult was required to pay the same amount, but local authorities used the new system to impose rates that caused many low-income people to pay considerably more than they had previously. The widespread unpopularity of the poll tax threatened the prospects for a Tory victory in the 1991 general election.

  Inside Tory ranks, liberal members objected to Thatcher’s increasingly “Euro-skeptic” position as the European Economic Community moved toward greater integration in the post–Cold War period. She emphatically opposed abandoning the pound sterling to join a single European currency, a policy advocated by several of her senior ministers. One of them, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, resigned in protest on November 1, 1990. Two weeks later, Michael Heseltine, who had left Thatcher’s cabinet in 1986, c
hallenged her leadership.

  Although she won a majority in the first ballot on Tuesday, November 20, she needed a wider margin under party rules to win decisively. She was in Paris at the time and returned to London Wednesday morning, determined to prevail in the second ballot. But after meeting with her principal supporters, she decided to consult each of her cabinet ministers individually. One by one, her erstwhile liege men told her she would lose the vote. By that evening, Thatcher decided to withdraw her name from the second ballot rather than face defeat. On Thursday morning she went to Buckingham Palace to inform the Queen she would be resigning. “She’s a very understanding person,” Thatcher said later. “She understood … the rightness of the decision I was taking.… It was very sad to know that was the last time I’d go to the Palace as prime minister after eleven-and-a-half years.”

  When the second ballot took place on the 27th, Thatcher’s nemesis, Michael Heseltine, was defeated by John Major, the chancellor of the exchequer and her preferred candidate. The next morning Margaret Thatcher submitted her resignation to the Queen, and forty-five minutes later Major arrived at the Palace to accept the sovereign’s invitation to form a government. At age forty-seven, he was the youngest prime minister in more than a century.

  The Queen showed her esteem for Thatcher by quickly awarding her the sovereign’s two most prestigious personal honors, the Order of the Garter and the Order of Merit. Founded in 1902 by King Edward VII for distinction in the military, arts, and sciences, the Order of Merit, like the Garter, only has twenty-four members at a time and has included just three previous prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Macmillan. “The Garter tends to go to all ex–prime ministers in time, but the Order of Merit is mostly scientists and academics. That really mattered to her,” said her longtime adviser Charles Powell.