Elizabeth the Queen

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The Queen Mother was deeply upset by Thatcher’s departure, calling her “very patriotic” and expressing the hope that she would come to stay at Balmoral after she left office. “She said they [meaning the royal family] think it is desperately unfair and an appalling way to do things,” her friend Woodrow Wyatt recorded in his diary two days after Thatcher stepped down. “They admire her, they think she was wonderful, and she did so much for Britain, not only at home but in the world at large.” According to Wyatt, any stories about the Queen disliking Thatcher were “pure invention.”

  “Scrutiny … can be just as effective

  if it is made with a touch of gentleness,

  good humor and understanding.”

  Queen Elizabeth II making her “Annus Horribilis” speech about her family’s troubles, November 1992. Tim Graham/Getty Images

  SIXTEEN

  Annus Horribilis

  OF ALL ELIZABETH II’S PRIME MINISTERS, JOHN MAJOR HAD THE most unusual background, as exotic as it was humble. His father had sought his fortune in the United States, working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh before making a career as a circus trapeze artist and performer on the vaudeville circuit in America and Britain. After the death of his first wife, he married a young dancer and built a business selling novelty garden ornaments. John was their fourth child, born when his father was sixty-four and had suffered financial reversals.

  The family moved to the Brixton slums, and John had to leave school at sixteen to help support his parents. He worked in a variety of odd jobs until he took up banking, where he found success. Attracted to politics, he rose from his local council to Parliament and entered the Thatcher cabinet in 1987. He was known for his steady hand, mastery of policy detail, quiet determination, and shrewd judgment.

  When he became prime minister, Major focused on conciliating the bitterly divided factions of the Tory party. After five months in office, he scrapped the hated poll tax and replaced it with a newly crafted property tax based on the value of a residence as well as the number of its occupants. He built on the economic gains of the Thatcher years and successfully negotiated advantageous terms in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty that kept Britain in the strengthened European Union (formerly the European Economic Community) without ceding independence on issues such as workers’ wages, health and safety, or abolishing the pound for the continent’s proposed single currency.

  In the presence of her courtiers, the Queen treated the amiable Major just as she did his brisk predecessor. “I couldn’t pin down a difference between the two,” said one of her senior advisers. Major was “totally relaxed and cheerful” before his audiences. “Afterward when he was with the private secretaries, the conversation was almost always about cricket.”

  Shortly after assuming power, the new prime minister led Britain into a coalition with the United States and thirty other nations to free Kuwait from Iraqi forces that had invaded the previous August. Britain was a key player in the successful air bombardment of Iraq that began on January 17, 1991, followed by a ground campaign that swept to victory on February 28. Major gave the Queen regular briefings, and as the ground assault began on Sunday the 24th, she made the first wartime broadcast of her reign, reassuring the nation that she was praying for victory.

  A cease-fire ended the occupation of Kuwait, although it did not remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Still, the war was hailed as a significant success for Major as well as for Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush. The two leaders bonded tightly as allies and “had a lot in common,” wrote Ray Seitz, Bush’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

  Three months later, Bush welcomed the Queen to Washington for her third state visit. The patrician Bushes and royal Windsors established an easy camaraderie from the start. As near contemporaries, the forty-first president and the Duke of Edinburgh had both seen action in the Pacific during World War II. The two families shared similar Anglo-Saxon traditions and values, and they counted the Queen’s hosts in Kentucky, Will and Sarah Farish, as good friends. “The Queen is rather formal,” Bush recalled. “But I never found her reserve stand-offish. It’s hard to explain really, but she is very, very easy to be with. Conversation comes easily.”

  Elizabeth II’s arrival in Washington on Tuesday, May 14, came when gratitude for Britain’s assistance in the Gulf War was running high. Bush rolled out an imposing welcome on the South Lawn with military bands, fife and drum corps, and twenty-one-gun salute fired by howitzers on the Ellipse. But after his effusive remarks welcoming her as “freedom’s friend,” neither he nor his aides remembered to pull out a step for the five-foot-four-inch Queen to use behind the podium intended for the six-foot-two-inch president. As she made her reply, the cluster of microphones covered most of her face, and television viewers could glimpse only her eyeglasses beneath a broad-brimmed purple and white striped hat.

  At a small luncheon in the private quarters of the White House with Bush family members, the British and American ambassadors, and the Farishes, “we had a good laugh” about the hat incident, recalled Bush. “Her humor made it all seem fine.” It was also the first time the sixty-five-year-old Queen met the president’s eldest son, forty-four-year-old George W. Bush, the future forty-third president, who was then running the Texas Rangers baseball team. “The first thing I noticed was the twinkle in her eye, which I took as a sign of an easy spirit,” he recalled. “Much to my delight, she certainly didn’t give off the vibe that ‘I’m better than you.’ ”

  He told Elizabeth II that his cowboy boots were custom-made and usually were printed with “Texas Rangers.” “Is that on those boots?” she inquired. “No, Ma’am,” young Bush joked. “God Save the Queen.” She was most amused and impishly asked, “Are you the black sheep in the family?” “I guess so,” he said. “All families have them,” the Queen replied helpfully. “Who’s yours?” asked Bush. “Don’t answer that!” interjected his mother. The Queen took the first lady’s cue and escaped the conversation gracefully.

  After lunch the president escorted the Queen onto the Truman Balcony to show her the view of the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial. The White House was being repainted, and twenty layers had been stripped off the facade, laying bare pale stone and raw wood. Visible on a nearby pilaster were scorch marks dating from 1814 when British troops had set fire to the presidential mansion. “I teased her that it was her folks who had done this,” the president recalled. “We talked about the fact that the burn marks were ‘enshrined.’ ”

  That night at a state dinner for 130 the president kept up the jocular tone by complimenting the Queen on her intrepid walking, which “left even the Secret Service panting.… I’m glad my fibrillating heart was not taxed by a competitive walk.” The essence of their toasts reaffirmed the Anglo-American friendship recently strengthened by a wartime alliance. “No wonder I cannot feel a stranger here,” said the Queen. “The British have never felt America to be a foreign land.” She praised Bush for his conduct of the Gulf War “not with bombast and rhetoric but thoroughness and courage.”

  The Queen jammed eighteen engagements into her three days in the nation’s capital, including the first address by a British monarch to a joint session of Congress. She opened her remarks by saying, “I do hope you can see me today from where you are,” prompting a burst of laughter and standing ovation. She also watched her first Major League Baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland Athletics. As with her other events, she had studied briefing papers on America’s national pastime. After greeting gum-chewing players lined up in the dugout, she received a full tutorial from Bush, a former varsity first baseman at Yale, as they sat together in the owner’s box.

  The most diverting moment of her visit occurred in one of the city’s downtrodden neighborhoods, where Elizabeth II visited a 210-pound African American great-grandmother, sixty-seven-year-old Alice Frazier. The purpose was to see Frazier’s newly built home, which she had purchased under a private-public program for low-income first-tim
e owners. As the Queen entered the house, Frazier vigorously shook her hand, said, “How are you doin’?,” then wrapped her arms around her guest and gave her an exuberant bear hug. Elizabeth II smiled gamely over Frazier’s shoulder as she stiffly leaned forward, arms held tightly at her waist until she was released. “It’s the American way,” Frazier said afterward. “I couldn’t stop myself.”

  For their brief moments of respite, Elizabeth II and Philip retired to their five-room, two-bath suite in Blair House. They took their breakfast in the upstairs library, served by their page, but otherwise the Queen remained in her quarters while Philip busied himself by turning off lights, muttering, “What a waste, what a waste.” One morning Benedicte Valentiner, the Blair House general manager, was standing in the front hallway when the Queen came downstairs before her first engagement. “She was standing stock still,” Valentiner recalled. “It was as if she were looking inward, getting set. I admired that enormously. This was how she wound up her batteries. There was no chit chat, but standing absolutely still and waiting, resting in herself. It was a remarkable coping mechanism.”

  On Friday the Queen and her nearly fifty-strong entourage plus four and a half tons of luggage—hers always marked with yellow labels imprinted “The Queen”—left on a chartered British Airways Concorde for official visits to six U.S. cities and another three-day vacation in Kentucky. They landed in Miami and spent ten hours touring the city before boarding Britannia to host a black-tie dinner for fifty dignitaries including the Reagans and the Fords.

  It was a particularly welcome reunion with the Reagans, who remained affectionate friends of Elizabeth II and Philip. Just a year earlier, Ronald Reagan had heard about the death of Burmese and had written the Queen a letter of condolence. Her grateful two-page reply reported that while walking her dogs she had last seen the twenty-eight-year-old mare “grazing happily” in her field at Windsor. The next morning, Burmese had died of a heart attack after “a long life for a horse.”

  Elizabeth II was in high spirits on Britannia as she caught up with the fortieth American president, who was complaining about the onerous costs of big government. “If you’ve got two-thirds of the fund paying for the bureaucrats,” Reagan said, “and you give only one-third to the needy people, something’s wrong there.” “Well you see all the democracies are bankrupt now,” the Queen replied emphatically, “because of the way that the services are being planned for people to grab.” As he decried the incentives for bureaucrats to spend rather than cut costs, she agreed: “Obviously, yes … I think the next generation are going to have a very difficult time.” Her spontaneous—and prescient—remarks not only reflected an affinity with the Reagan-Thatcher political philosophy, but she made them while a BBC crew was capturing their private conversation for a documentary about her.

  After a quiet weekend on Britannia sailing through the Dry Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico, the royal party disembarked for a three-hour visit to Tampa where the Queen conferred an honorary knighthood on General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of coalition forces in the Gulf War. They flew by Concorde to Austin for a sweep through the Lone Star State—an overnight stop in Austin, two hours in San Antonio, seven hours in Dallas, and two nights and a day in Houston. “I am an amazing woman!” she exclaimed during a black-tie dinner in her honor at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. “Yesterday I made four major Texas cities! I woke up in one, went to bed in another, and visited two cities in between!” One of the highlights of her time in Houston was a guided tour of Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center. Once again she could indulge her fascination with astronauts, asking how they could see through the gold visors of their space suits and why food adhered to the plate rather than drifting away during space travel.

  For the fourth time, Philip declined the offer to see the legendary Kentucky bluegrass and instead flew home at the end of their nine-day working marathon. When Elizabeth II landed in Lexington for the weekend, Sarah Farish greeted her with a kiss on the cheek—a display of affection seen frequently in private among friends but rarely in public.

  HER HECTIC DAYS in the United States were halcyon compared to what awaited her in London. The tabloids were working themselves into a speculative frenzy over the state of the Wales marriage as Charles and Diana approached their tenth wedding anniversary. Tabloid reporters knew that Charles had gone back to Camilla, and they were on the scent of Diana’s affair with James Hewitt as well. Andrew Morton of The Sun was the most brazen, writing that Diana felt “humiliated that her husband prefers to spend so much time with Camilla rather than with her.” Several weeks before the July 29 anniversary, the princess began secretly collaborating with Morton on a tell-all book through a series of interviews conducted by Dr. James Colthurst, a mutual friend who acted as an intermediary to give author and subject deniability.

  Andrew and Fergie were misbehaving in their own way, living lavishly in a new fifty-room home called Sunninghill Park that the Queen had financed at an estimated cost of more than £3.5 million. Their second daughter, Princess Eugenie, was born in 1990. But motherhood couldn’t match the allure of nightclub hopping in London and expensive vacations in Morocco, the Swiss Alps, and the south of France while Andrew was at sea. The tabloids took particular note of her getaways with thirty-five-year-old Texas millionaire Steve Wyattt.

  The atmosphere of decadence and frivolity created by the Queen’s children led the editor of The Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, to write a sharply critical editorial that resonated throughout the media. The perception took hold that not only were public funds being wasted on unproductive members of the royal family, but that it was time for the Queen to pay taxes on her substantial private income.

  In fact, the wheels were already turning quietly, albeit slowly, inside Buckingham Palace for the monarch to contribute her fair share. A prime mover was Robert Fellowes, who succeeded William Heseltine as private secretary in 1990 at age forty-nine. An Old Etonian and former officer in the Scots Guards, Fellowes was the most uniquely connected of all the Queen’s private secretaries. Not only was he a cousin of Fergie and brother-in-law of Diana, his father, Major Sir William “Billy” Fellowes, had been the Queen’s Land Agent at Sandringham for twenty-eight years. “This is the first time I have got a private secretary I held in my arms as a baby,” Elizabeth II said on making the appointment.

  Fellowes was an eminently reliable counselor, having served the Queen in the private secretary’s office since 1977. He was scrupulously honest, abstemious in his habits (he rode a bicycle to work and carried his father’s battered leather briefcase), and completely loyal to the Queen. Yet behind his bespectacled reserve, he held surprisingly progressive views—to the extent that his friends in the men’s clubs in St. James’s regarded him as “a frightful pinko.” Even before the press began kicking up dust about taxes, Fellowes and his deputy, Robin Janvrin, had begun a discussion on the subject.

  The Queen balked at first. She was worried about “exposing too much of the inner workings of the monarchy to the public gaze,” said one courtier. Of equal concern was her father’s insistence that immunity from taxation was a principle worth defending. But both Queen Victoria and King Edward VII had paid taxes on their incomes, and only under the reign of George V had that obligation been reduced and eventually eliminated.

  After some study, Elizabeth II’s senior advisers concluded that an income tax would not be overly burdensome for the monarchy. When Fellowes presented their findings on her return to London from Sandringham early in 1992, he was prepared for stiff resistance, but she readily agreed to set up a working group of officials from the Palace and the government to prepare a detailed plan for her consideration. “She was not worried about how much she would pay,” recalled a courtier. The most persuasive argument was its symbolic importance—that “doing it could do the monarchy a lot of good.”

  THE QUEEN WAS set to mark her fortieth year on the throne in 1992, an occasion that normally would call for celebration. But she chose to commem
orate the anniversary in a subdued way, at least in part because the lives of her children were so unsettled. Andrew and Fergie had told the Queen at Christmas that they were considering a separation, and she asked them to postpone their decision for six months. Less than a month later the Daily Mail published photographs of Fergie and Steve Wyatt on vacation in Morocco. An infuriated Andrew called in the lawyers, and the Queen braced herself for the inevitable separation.

  In an effort to blunt the negative publicity and refocus attention on the purpose of the monarchy, Elizabeth II had allowed the BBC to follow her around in 1991 for a documentary intended to show how she went about her work. The resulting film, E II R, aired on her Accession Day, February 6, 1992. It turned out to be the high point of her worst year on the throne in the most tumultuous decade of her life.

  The admiring portrait included a voice-over of her own reflections that she had recorded at the conclusion of the filming—not an interview per se, but an unusual personal statement similar to little noticed remarks she had made in previous films about racing and the Commonwealth. “Most people have a job and then they go home, and in this existence the job and the life go on together, because you can’t really divide it up,” she mused. “You have to sort of work out in your own mind the hard work, and then what you enjoy in retrospect from it.” She said she was accustomed to living “very much by tradition and by continuity,” adding rather forlornly, “I think this is what the younger members find difficult, the regimented side of it.” Most pointedly, she observed that hers was a “job for life,” putting to rest rumors floated by friends of the Prince of Wales that she would abdicate on her Accession Day.