Elizabeth the Queen

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Elizabeth II ultimately embraced a compromise to admit the public to the Palace during the months when she was in residence at Balmoral. The Queen Mother accepted the new policies, although she insisted to Woodrow Wyatt that her daughter “let Major persuade her” to pay taxes, adding that Margaret Thatcher “never would have suggested that or allowed it.” Major had actually been reluctant at first, and he was indignant about the uproar in the press over financing Windsor Castle, which he called a “very miserable and mealy-mouthed response. It just seemed so mean spirited and out of character for the British nation.”

  Yet opening the Palace became “one of the central features of innovation of the Queen’s reign,” said one of her senior advisers. It also proved a revenue bonanza, not only financing three quarters of the £37 million tab for the castle restoration (with the rest from cost savings measures at all the palaces) but helping to cover the ongoing costs of upkeep.

  Four days after the fire, the Queen appeared at the Guildhall in the City of London for a luncheon hosted by the Lord Mayor to honor her forty years on the throne. She was suffering from a severe cold, with a temperature of 101 and a raw throat from the smoke she had inhaled. Wearing a dark green dress and matching hat with an upturned brim, she looked drawn, and her voice was raspy and thin as she began her remarks. Robert Fellowes had drafted the speech, but it bore the Queen’s touchingly personal imprint. “Nineteen ninety-two is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure,” she said. “In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis.’ ”

  She went on to mildly rebuke “some contemporary commentators” by saying that the judgment of history offered an opportunity for “moderation and compassion—even of wisdom—that is sometimes lacking in the reactions of those whose task it is in life to offer instant opinions on all things great and small.” She acknowledged the value of criticism, noting that “no institution … should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t”—an oblique but unmistakable reference to her republican critics. “Scrutiny … can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humor and understanding,” she added. “This sort of questioning can also act, and it should do so, as an effective engine for change.”

  The audience of dignitaries gave her a standing ovation. Even the Daily Mail praised her “intense and complex” remarks as an indication that she was open to some necessary reforms in the monarchy’s conduct. “Annus horribilis” became one of the memorable catch-phrases of the Queen’s long reign, although its author, former assistant private secretary Sir Edward Ford, admitted that as a classical scholar he should have more precisely said “annus horrendus,” meaning a horrid year. “Horribilis,” he later explained, meant “a year capable of scaring you.” In many respects that description was equally apt.

  * * *

  AT THE TIME of her Guildhall speech, the Queen knew that more bad news would soon be emerging about Charles and Diana. During their trip to Korea in early November, Diana had privately been “in a state of desperation, overcome by nausea and tears.” She seemed to be sleepwalking through her public appearances, her expression either bored or anguished, and Charles looked intensely uncomfortable. The tabloids pounced on the visible signs of strain, calling the royal couple “The Glums.”

  Shortly after their return to England, Diana pushed Charles to the breaking point when she informed him at the last minute that she and their sons would not be attending his annual shooting party at Sandringham. At that moment, Charles decided that “he had no choice but to ask his wife for a legal separation.” The day after his mother’s “annus horribilis” speech, he met with Diana at Kensington Palace and told her of his decision.

  On Wednesday, December 9, John Major stood before the House of Commons to announce that the heir to the throne and his wife would be separating. He hastened to add that they had “no plans to divorce and their constitutional positions are unaffected.… The succession to the Throne is unaffected by it … there is no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned Queen in due course.” Major’s case was less than persuasive, since the notion of a bitterly estranged but still married royal couple going through a coronation together took the monarchy into hazardous territory. “With hindsight it was a mistake to have said that,” said cabinet secretary Robin Butler. “It was seen as softening the blow, showing that she was not being thrown into outer darkness.”

  Some relief from the turmoil came the following Saturday when Princess Anne married Commander Timothy Laurence in Crathie Church at Balmoral on an overcast and frigid day. Anne wanted a religious wedding, but as a divorcée she could not be married in the Church of England, so she chose the more forgiving Church of Scotland. The arrangements were so hastily made that the Queen Mother had to leave her weekend house party at Royal Lodge in the morning and fly back to London to rejoin her guests for dinner.

  The forty-two-year-old bride and her thirty-seven-year-old groom exchanged vows in a private half hour ceremony before a congregation of thirty guests that included her two children, three brothers, and her aunt as well as her parents and grandmother. Laurence wore his Royal Navy uniform, and Anne was dressed in a knee-length white suit. Instead of wearing a veil, she tucked a small bunch of white flowers in her hair. Her only attendant was her eleven-year-old daughter, Zara. Since Balmoral Castle was shuttered for the winter, the group repaired to Craigowan Lodge for a short reception after the ceremony. It was a far cry from the pageantry of Anne’s first wedding two decades earlier.

  In her Christmas message, the Queen revisited her time of troubles, mainly to express her gratitude for the “prayers, understanding and sympathy” that had given her and her family “great support and encouragement.” Never one for self-pity, she sought to give her “sombre year” context by emphasizing those who put service to others above their difficult circumstances. She singled out Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, a former RAF pilot who had become an advocate for the disabled. His heroism and “supreme contempt for danger” during World War II had earned him the Victoria Cross, and the Queen had further honored him in 1981 with the Order of Merit.

  She had seen him earlier in the year at an Order of Merit gathering not long before he died from a “long drawn-out terminal illness.” The encounter “did as much as anything in 1992 to help me put my own worries into perspective,” she said. “He made no reference to his own illness, but only to his hopes and plans to make life better for others.” He had “put Christ’s teaching to practical effect,” and his “shining example” could “inspire in the rest of us a belief in our own capacity to help others.” Drawing from Cheshire’s inspiration, she pledged—yet again—her “commitment to your service in the coming years.” With her characteristic resilience, she put the year behind her, turning to meet the “new challenges” of 1993 “with fresh hope” in her heart.

  Uncertain how the people would

  react, the Queen betrayed a trace

  of anxiety in her expression.

  As she and Philip walked toward

  the floral display, the crowd

  began clapping.

  The Queen and Prince Philip surprise the crowds outside Buckingham Palace by walking among the thousands of floral tributes to Diana, Princess of Wales, September 1997. Camera Press London

  SEVENTEEN

  Tragedy and Tradition

  ANOTHER WAVE OF TABLOID HEADLINES IN MID-JANUARY ABRUPTLY dashed the Queen’s hopes for a dignified new year. Both the Daily Mirror and The Sun published compromising transcripts of a telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla that had been secretly recorded in mysterious circumstances during December 1989, the same month as Diana’s now infamous “Squidgy” tape. In much of the conversation, Camilla tried to boost Charles’s spirits (“You’re a clever old thing, an awfully good brain lurking there, isn’t there?”). But attention focused on their inane
sexual banter, especially Charles’s juvenile wish to be reincarnated as a tampon so he could “live inside your trousers.” The Palace declined comment, but the tapes were undeniably authentic and confirmed Diana’s allegations about her husband’s affair. In a poll published by the tabloid Today, 68 percent of the respondents thought Charles had tarnished his reputation, and 42 percent thought ten-year-old Prince William should be the next king.

  The Queen briefly managed to shift attention from the scandal when David Airlie held a press conference in February “to explain to the media exactly why the Queen had decided to pay tax and the way in which it was going to be done.” The Queen’s senior advisers did not speak for the record, on the principle that “courtiers should be neither seen nor heard.” But the Queen wanted her Lord Chamberlain to show her willingness not only to move with the times, but to answer all questions openly on her behalf.

  Airlie intentionally held the briefing in the historic Queen Anne Room at St. James’s Palace under the huge portraits of kings—a not so subtle reminder that he was representing centuries of tradition. He spelled out the details of taxes to be paid on Elizabeth II’s private income as well as capital gains, after various deductions, including stipends paid to Prince Philip and the Queen Mother for their official expenses. The press pounced on the most important exclusion, asking why inheritance tax would not be paid on assets such as Sandringham, Balmoral, and the Duchy of Lancaster that were passed on to her successor.

  “Is she not like us?” asked one reporter. “She isn’t like you!” Airlie bantered, explaining that the sovereign must have private resources that shouldn’t be dissipated through inheritance. Airlie’s presentation helped mollify complaints about royal finances, although questions remained about the magnitude of the Queen’s wealth and the level of expenses for luxuries such as Britannia.

  Later that year, while the Queen was at Balmoral, Bobo MacDonald, her beloved former nursemaid and longtime dresser, died in her suite at Buckingham Palace at age eighty-nine. She had been semiretired from her duties for a number of years, but remained close to Elizabeth II, who had hired two nurses to provide round-the-clock care after Bobo’s health began to fail. The Queen came down to London from Scotland to attend the funeral, which she arranged at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace. Joining her were other family members and staff, including Bobo’s sister Ruby, also a longtime employee in the royal household. Bobo had served her “little lady” for sixty-seven years, and the Queen marked her passing with typical restraint.

  None of the Queen’s children stirred up further problems in 1993, although Diana proved to be a continuing distraction. On the one hand, she devoted herself to a range of charitable causes such as drug and alcohol abuse, hospice care, debilitating illnesses such as AIDS, and services for mentally handicapped children. But behind the scenes she was feeding information on her whereabouts to Richard Kay, the royal reporter at the Daily Mail, in an effort to upstage Charles as well as other members of the royal family. She was also cooperating with Morton on yet another book.

  She had ended her affair with James Hewitt, her former riding instructor, in 1991 when he became the focus of press surveillance. “She simply stopped ringing and taking my calls,” he said years later. She then became involved with a married art dealer named Oliver Hoare. It was a tempestuous relationship, something of an obsession for the princess, who pestered the Hoare household with anonymous telephone calls that prompted a police inquiry. The press got wind of the romance and began reporting sightings toward the end of 1993.

  Around the same time, Diana tearfully announced that she was retiring from public life and needed “time and space” to get her bearings and focus on her sons, blaming the intolerable pressure of “overwhelming” media attention. Both the Queen and Prince Philip had urged her to proceed quietly if she wished to disengage from her royal obligations and her charities. Even though she opted for public melodrama, they still invited her to join the family at Sandringham for Christmas. In an atmosphere thick with tension, the Queen got particularly cross when a pack of tabloid “snappers” showed up to take pictures of the princess as she arrived.

  Elizabeth II was riding at Sandringham several weeks later when she suffered a rare accident as her horse tripped and fell. She had her hand on the horse’s neck, which allowed her to give him a push when he was rolling over on his side. But he landed on her nevertheless, severely injuring a ligament in her left wrist. Her mount was Centennial, the stallion famously ridden twelve years earlier by Ronald Reagan, who sent her a solicitous letter. “I wasn’t paying enough attention!” she wrote in her reply to the former president. She went on to describe the accident in detail and share her frustration at having her arm encased in plaster.

  Still in a cast, she embarked on a three-week tour of six Caribbean countries and Bermuda in February and March. Visiting that part of the world gave her special satisfaction. “She has no regard for color,” said longtime BBC correspondent Wesley Kerr, a native Jamaican raised by white foster parents in Britain. “Jamaica is her fourth-biggest realm. When she refers to herself as the Queen of Jamaica she says it with utter conviction. In the Caribbean there is a closeness.”

  The Queen knew Kerr had a large extended family in Jamaica that numbered nineteen half siblings on his father’s side. “Did you see your father, Mr. Kerr, and did he see me?” she asked during one gathering. On another day, Kerr marveled at her composure during a walkabout in Kingston. “A group of women were grabbing her and saying ‘Nice! Nice!’ ” said Kerr. “She didn’t flinch but her bodyguards almost grabbed her. She didn’t mind the contact. She didn’t want to be like a piece of china.”

  Three months later, Elizabeth II observed a meaningful event in her own life and that of her country when she marked the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day on June 6, 1994. She also had her first extended time with the forty-second American president, Bill Clinton, and his wife, Hillary. On the eve of the celebrations at the Normandy beaches, Elizabeth II and Philip hosted a banquet in Portsmouth and invited the Clintons to spend the night on Britannia.

  Seated next to the sixty-eight-year-old Queen at dinner, the forty-seven-year-old president was taken with “the clever manner in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information and insights without venturing too far into expressing her own political views.… Her Majesty impressed me as someone who but for the circumstance of her birth, might have become a successful politician or diplomat. As it was, she had to be both, without quite seeming to be either.” From her place between Prince Philip and John Major, Hillary watched as the Queen “nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories.” The next day on the beach at Arromanches, the Queen “was clearly happy as the veterans—her generation—marched past,” wrote William Shawcross. “There was a rare catch in her voice as she and the old men reveled in their pride in each other. Her heir, Prince Charles, also there, was equally moved.”

  THE EVIDENT HARMONY between mother and son was dispelled later that month when Charles shocked his parents by appearing in a television interview with journalist Jonathan Dimbleby. The prince had been cooperating with Dimbleby for two years on the TV program and a companion biography, ostensibly to highlight his charitable ventures on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his investiture as Prince of Wales. Of equal importance to Charles was the chance to counteract the negative portrait of his character that Diana had given to Morton and others in the press.

  After the project was well under way, Charles briefed his parents on its general contours, and they advised him to avoid any frank discussion of private matters. He had other ideas. The two-and-a-half-hour documentary on June 29, 1994, covered a wide range of anodyne topics, but all were eclipsed by a brief exchange addressing the “damaging charge” that Charles had been “persistently unfaithful” to Diana “from the beginning” of the marriage. Charles said he had been “faithful and honorable” to his wife until their marriage “became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.” He didn�
�t mention Camilla as other than “a friend for a very long time,” but it was clear she was his mistress, and that their affair had resumed five years after Charles and Diana were married.

  Charles genuinely believed his straightforward response would put to rest “the myth that he had never intended to make his marriage work.” He gained public sympathy largely because of his demeanor, which was tormented and remorseful rather than callous. Still, his public admission of adultery embarrassed his mother and violated her code of discretion. It also raised the ante with Diana, provoking her to consider her own retaliatory television appearance.

  Two months later the Queen had even greater cause for dismay when she learned that Charles had provided Dimbleby with diaries, letters, and official papers. John Major was concerned as well, telling Woodrow Wyatt that he might use the Official Secrets Act (a British law that shields state secrets) to prevent publication of anything from ministerial documents. Charles complied when the Queen asked for the return of the confidential papers, but their relationship was so strained that he didn’t visit his parents at Balmoral, staying instead with the Queen Mother at Birkhall.