Her Majesty

by Robert Hardman

  Bizarrely, the Sultan had wanted to restrict the entire event to the Queen, the Duke and himself. Palace officials explained that the Queen likes to share these things so a few hundred expats have been invited to create a semblance of an audience. It’s a slightly strange way to mark a jubilee. Apparently, there will be more public events in the days ahead. For now, the Sultan is keen to give his undivided attention to the Queen. Again, there are the mandatory elements of every state visit including a garden party at the British ambassador’s clifftop residence. It is the hottest ticket in Oman.

  There is also the customary state banquet but the Sultan dispenses with speeches or television cameras – because he can. He has commissioned a gold vase and a Fabergé-style musical egg with dancing horses as a gift for the Queen. She has spent a lifetime being given great treasures but is evidently thrilled. Her gifts to the Sultan are less spectacular but equally appreciated – an eighteenth-century book on clocks, one of the Sultan’s great passions, and the Royal Victorian Chain, an exalted honour reserved for selected monarchs and very special courtiers. It goes with the GCB she gave him back in 1979. Every detail is being watched by hawk-like officials on both sides, every note of diplomatic mood music being absorbed and savoured. And there is much to savour. Instead of flying home at the end of her visit, the Queen and the Duke stay an extra night for an extra private dinner with the Sultan – just as Prince William recently dropped in here for a private dinner while returning from Afghanistan. The Sultan does not bid farewell at his palace, as he does with most visitors, but accompanies the Queen to the steps of her plane and waves her off from the runway. It is particularly gratifying for the man a little further back down the plane, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. The British Government’s Gulf charm offensive is coming along nicely. The Palace team are pleased, too, that two back-to-back state visits have passed off successfully without any discernible strain on the oldest state visitors on the international circuit.

  As well as having travelled further than any monarch in history geographically, the Queen has crossed more boundaries than all her predecessors in other ways. She has been the first reigning monarch to visit a mosque or a Hindu temple. She has been the first to meet a pope, the first to visit the Vatican and the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. It is worth noting that, in the first year of the Coalition Government alone, she visited or entertained four fellow heads of state – three of them from Islamic countries plus one pope. Just as the story of the Commonwealth is almost entirely contiguous with her reign, so too is the story of multicultural Britain.

  Britain had seen little immigration beyond the arrival of 50,000 French Huguenots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and 300,000 Jewish refugees during the nineteenth and early twentieth. The first Commonwealth migrants to Britain arrived from Jamaica aboard the MV Empire Windrush less than four years before the Queen came to the throne. Five years into her reign, Commonwealth immigration still amounted to just 36,000. Since 1963, however, some 2.5 million people have arrived from the Commonwealth, not to mention those from the European Union and other parts of the world.

  It is by far the greatest demographic change in the country’s history and the importance of the Queen as a force for unity throughout cannot be overstated. ‘I think she’s had perfect pitch really,’ says the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. ‘It’s partly the Commonwealth experience. The fact that she is head of a multicultural, diverse, worldwide association means that she’s never felt any instinct to panic about multiculturalism. That’s part of the message her Christmas broadcasts have given almost subliminally over the years: “Britain is changing. It’s OK. We can cope. Faith is a good and constructive element in this. You know where I’m coming from. I’m a Christian. But there’s room for others.” And that’s been a steady message.’ The former Home and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says that affection for the Queen runs deep among the large numbers of his Blackburn constituents from Asian backgrounds. He also sits on the board of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, of which the Prince of Wales is patron. ‘It’s very much Prince Charles’s baby and he’s been absolutely fantastic on this,’ says Straw. ‘He’s got a much better understanding of Islam in society than a lot of politicians I can think of.’

  ‘People who come to live here have seen symbols of Britishness and they want to feel part of that,’ says David Cameron. ‘What the Royal Family have done, especially with people from the Commonwealth, is give them a shared bond.’ Growing up in the sixties and seventies as the London-born child of Jamaican parents, Wesley Kerr came to regard the Queen as something of a hero figure. ‘The Queen has been a revolutionary monarch,’ says the writer and broadcaster. ‘As a child, she was the only public figure whom I regularly saw in the news with black people. And they were never deferential to her but equals, people like Nyrere [Julius Nyrere, father of Tanzanian independence] and Kenneth Kaunda [former President of Zambia].’

  On that 1947 tour of southern Africa, George VI was horrified to be barred from decorating black servicemen in South Africa and made a point of doing so in British-controlled territories elsewhere. Princess Elizabeth and sixteen-year-old Princess Margaret became acutely aware of the privations of the black population of South Africa, ‘though [as Princess Margaret wrote home] one mustn’t say so too loudly’. One could say so more loudly once South Africa had become a republic. When the Queen danced with President Nkrumah of Ghana in 1961, she was denounced in the South African press for consorting with a ‘black pagan’ and saluted by Ghana’s Marxist media as ‘the world’s greatest Socialist Monarch’. On the 1954 tour of Australia, during which Aboriginal Australians had little more than a token role, she pointedly referred to ‘my peoples’ in the plural and there was grumbling when she was deemed to have spent too long talking to a group of Torres Strait Islanders. There were ringside seats, too, for many handicapped children who had never enjoyed any sort of public prominence before. The Queen has only ever been able to deal in gestures. But she has been consistent with them. ‘Of all the sovereigns since Queen Victoria,’ says a former Private Secretary, ‘the Queen has been the most clearly party-blind, colour-blind and race-blind.’

  She has proved to be one of the more conscientious Supreme Governors of the Church of England. Monarchs also take a separate oath to preserve the Church of Scotland and it is their duty to send a Lord High Commissioner to its annual General Assembly. The Queen has been the first to send herself. She is an assiduous Sunday churchgoer wherever she is in the world (in 1994, a Sunday visit to a Guyanese rainforest had to include a diversion to a mission church for morning service). Her Christmas broadcasts always contain unashamedly Christian messages. Indeed, the Archbishop of Canterbury has noticed the religious theme becoming more explicit in the last ten years. ‘The Queen has a very powerful sense that the Monarch is bound up with the religious heritage of the country,’ says Dr Williams. ‘That’s been thinning out quite a bit in the street in the last twenty years. My guess would be that she’s deliberately set out to redress the balance.’

  It is striking that a nation which can tie itself in knots over the tiniest religious symbolism in public life – even agonising over the appropriate use of the word ‘Christmas’ – is entirely comfortable with a national figurehead whose own approach to religion is clear and uncompromising. She does not preach. What she does do is give faith, of all kinds, a certain respectability or, as the Archbishop of Canterbury puts it, a ‘canopy’.

  ‘People feel that if the Christian faith is secure in this country, so are they,’ says Dr Williams. ‘It’s not competing for territory which is why some of those assumptions that “Oh, non-Christians will be offended by this” are so completely off-key.’

  ‘She is a person of faith and it matters a lot more to her than people understand,’ says Tony Blair, one of the more overtly religious occupants of Number Ten Downing Street in many years. As he discovered in office, the public can be uncomfortable with a Prim
e Minister who brings religion into his work. Not so with the head of state. Other nations are often struck by the way in which Britain can weave religion into a state occasion without blinking. Lord Hurd was talking to his French opposite number, Alain Juppe, as they accompanied the Queen at the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994. ‘We discussed the different ways we did these things and he said: “The difference is that you British bring religion into it and we don’t dare do that. We are a secular country but you have hymns and a blessing.” And he’s right. There’s always a bishop somewhere around.’

  ‘The Queen’s religious belief is very important in the way she does her job and sees her role,’ says Charles Anson. ‘She’s got that calmness you find in people who are quite naturally religious. There’s an official role but there’s a lot she falls back on.’ A senior aide was surprised to discover a deep well of Christian charity at a time when others might have been less than forgiving: ‘I detected it when I had to go to talk to her about the latest issues with the Princess of Wales. There were moments when she could have become exasperated but she didn’t. There was a Christian element, a belief that it’s wrong to make too many judgements.’

  The Archbishop of Canterbury senses that the Queen is someone with a ‘powerful, coherent set of values or ideals … a deep sense of vocation … a dogged confidence that there is a divinity that shapes our ends’. In short, he says: ‘It goes deep.’

  The Queen is very open about the existence of her faith but, like most people, very private about its nature. We know that she likes Matins, that she seldom takes Holy Communion in public and that, given the chance, she prefers to worship in a smaller church like All Saints in Windsor Great Park rather than sit above the ancestors in mighty St George’s Chapel. She does not like a great fuss. When aboard Britannia, she was happy to let the rear admiral take Sunday prayers rather than summon a clergyman. In many ways, she is a no-nonsense, traditional Anglican. She prefers the Book of Common Prayer on Sundays and made much of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in her 2010 Christmas broadcast. She follows Church politics closely. Jack Straw, who would join the Queen for the swearing-in of new Bishops in his capacity as both Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor, talks of the ‘granular details’ of her discussions afterwards. She sees her Archbishops several times each year for what Dr Williams calls ‘uncluttered time to talk’. He finds the Supreme Governor ‘refreshing, perceptive, warm and deeply supportive’. But she does not seek to mould her Church to her tastes.

  Her predecessors were bossier. Queen Victoria was an arch-meddler. ‘She was quite capable of writing to the Prime Minister and saying, “I want so and so as Bishop of Gloucester. He’s a good chap,”’ says Dr Williams. Edward VII instructed one Archbishop of York that his duty was ‘to keep the parties in the Church together and to prevent the clergy from wearing moustaches’. George V had similarly robust views. ‘Wonderful service,’ he remarked after his Silver Jubilee service at St Paul’s, ‘but too many damn parsons getting in the way.’ Prince Philip can be equally forthright when it comes to long sermons. As he once remarked: ‘The mind cannot absorb what the backside cannot endure.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury knows the form. ‘I’m always reminded when I preach in the presence that he prefers eight minutes,’ admits Dr Williams. ‘I don’t always obey. My natural length is twelve minutes for a sermon but, on state occasions, I do try and trim it a bit.’

  The Queen’s approach is different. She prefers to send out what the Archbishop of Canterbury calls ‘visible messages’, like inviting the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster to preach at Sandringham. Indeed, Dr Williams believes that a recurring message through this reign has been: ‘Roman Catholics are not foreign eccentrics.’ There has been much talk of amending the Act of Settlement on the grounds that it debars the Royal Family from marrying Roman Catholics – but leaves them free to marry members of any other faith. Understandably, this has led to charges that the institution is inherently sectarian. Labour’s Jack Straw, who has explored the possibility of amending the legislation, disagrees: ‘They won’t thank me for saying it but one of the difficulties is with the Church of Rome because they automatically excommunicate Anglicans. So it’s one in which we need the help of the Church of Rome.’

  Whatever the answer, it is emphatically one for Parliament, not the Supreme Governor, to resolve. The Queen’s clear view is that her own Church should be a broad and inclusive one. She studiously avoids overt opinions on schismatic issues like gay clergy. George V or George VI would probably have had robust views on such matters, but the Queen would appear to be more open-minded. ‘I don’t think there’s any hint of her, say, being uncomfortable with women priests,’ says the Archbishop. ‘The fact that there are female royal chaplains is not insignificant. I would guess her feeling is: “The world’s changing. Never mind what I might feel about this. It’s important that these things be affirmed as positive changes.”’

  It’s another example of the Queen leading by gesture rather than command.

  One of the most colourful, sacred rituals in the Queen’s calendar is one which, to a considerable extent, she has reinvented herself. Royal Maundy attracts less attention than it used to. The BBC gave up regular television and radio broadcasts years ago (although the event did return to the screen in 2011 as a royal wedding warm-up). For many of her staff, though, Royal Maundy remains the most enjoyable ritual of the entire royal year. It dates back at least as far as the thirteenth century when King John is known to have washed the feet of the poor and given them gifts of food and clothing on Maundy Thursday – the day before Good Friday. Through the centuries, sovereigns would take part in this homage to the story of Christ’s Last Supper. They gave up foot-washing post-James II and, by the mid-eighteenth century, they had stopped turning up altogether. The task of handing out charity – a token sum of money – was left to whichever bishop happened to hold the title of Lord High Almoner.

  By Victorian times, the recipients were not ‘the poor’ so much as public-spirited members of the local community. It’s always been equal numbers of men and women, the numbers rising each year to match the Monarch’s age. In 1932, George V revived the practice of attending in person and royal appearances became semi-regular from then on. But it was the Queen who gave the ceremony a vigorous new impetus. Royal Maundy was her first public engagement after the death of her father. She’d cancelled everything else but this event seemed appropriate. Then she had the idea of moving the ceremony out of Westminster Abbey and taking it to the country, choosing a different cathedral every year (it returns to the Abbey every tenth year, as it did in 2011). There are now just a handful of cathedrals which have not had the pleasure. And the event grows larger with each passing year.

  ‘The thing I most enjoyed during my time was the Royal Maundy. It’s magical,’ says a retired Private Secretary. ‘It encapsulates what’s best about the monarchy. You are walking through a great cathedral as the choir and congregation are singing and the Queen is performing a ritual which goes back for ever and which is giving a huge amount of pleasure to vast numbers of people. It’s about as good an experience as you can get. If you had to sum up what the monarchy’s about, that’s it.’ Even by royal standards, there are few events so laden with symbolism. This is an event which brings out some of the most exotic specimens in the royal firmament, some of whom are only seen at this one occasion each year. They are all paid the unprincely sum of 10p in Maundy coins for their troubles.

  They are also expected to assemble a day ahead of the grand ceremony to rehearse. On this occasion, Derby Cathedral has been chosen. It’s a pretty sixteenth-century church which only became a cathedral in 1927 but has the oldest bells in the land. It is not large. There are so many officials involved in this ceremony that the procession is actually longer than the cathedral and will have to wind its way up the side aisles. The present Lord High Almoner is the Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester. His appointment was the usual blend of enigma
and lunch: ‘In 1997, I got a call from the Queen’s Private Secretary saying that the Queen would like to hear me preach. “Would any of these dates be suitable? If not, would some other time be better?” It was a case of “There’s no getting out of this one, mate.” So I went to preach at All Saints in Windsor Great Park and then we had lunch at Windsor Castle. Nothing was said whatsoever about Almonry. Then the next day I got a call from the Private Secretary saying the Queen would like me to be the next Lord High Almoner.’ As a result, he is in charge of the Royal Almonry, one of the most ancient and arcane backwaters of the Royal Household. Pulling it all together is Paul Leddington Wright, Secretary of the Royal Almonry, a conductor by profession but a man devoted to an honorary task which his father performed before him.

  The event makes a Gilbert & Sullivan opera look underdressed. Local school children will serve as the Children of the Royal Almonry, draped in ancient linen towels to symbolise the washing of feet. The Yeomen of the Guard will be in attendance carrying the Maundy money in little leather purses piled high on trays of gold. The Clerk of the Cheque and the Keeper of the Closet will be on parade. The Maundy Wands have to be removed from their cupboard at Buckingham Palace for the Wandsmen, half a dozen men in morning coats whose original job was to stop Maundy paupers being mugged for their money. Since this year’s Maundy money will be worth £6.34, there are unlikely to be muggings. The Wandsmen are led by Leddington Wright’s brother, Andrew, a human resources director. It’s a family affair. Paul’s wife, Sheila, is in the basement of a nearby hotel helping Rosemary Hughes produce a dozen nosegays, bunches of flowers and herbs traditionally used to ward off bad smells in medieval times. The Queen and the main players will each carry one. Hughes runs a floral design business in Leicester but, once a year, earns her Royal Warrant as ‘Her Majesty’s Supplier of Nosegays’. There will be no bad smells to offend the royal nostrils in Derby but, even so, each nosegay is a complex blend (Hughes calls it a ‘recipe’) of seasonal flowers and herbs including thyme, rosemary, hebe and purple statice. Each has a hand-sewn cotton sleeve attached to the base and Hughes is always up at 6 a.m. to add primroses. ‘Everything has to be fresh,’ she says, stifling a sneeze. It turns out that she is allergic to a key ingredient of her own recipe – daffodils.