Inside Derby Cathedral, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Ford, the Comptroller, maps out every inch of the Queen’s progress. She needs a seat for the signing of the visitors’ book so he earmarks a rather finelooking chair. There is a flap. A cathedral official rushes to intervene. ‘Not that one,’ says the official. ‘The Bishop says Queen Victoria sat on it.’ Quite why Queen Elizabeth II shouldn’t sit on it, too, is a mystery. But Ford relents. ‘I have learned it’s never worth arguing with a Bishop at the Royal Maundy.’ These are nervous moments for the Crown Jeweller, Harry Collins. He spends most of his life running the family jewellery shop in Tunbridge Wells but, since being appointed Crown Jeweller in 2007, he now attends all events where the Crown Jewels are in use. Unlike, say, the State Opening of Parliament, there are no crowns or sceptres at this event but Royal Maundy still involves some of the ‘Regalia’, including priceless gold platters like the Maundy Dish. Collins has just made an unpopular decision. For centuries, the Yeomen of the Guard have processed with the Maundy money on their heads, but the dishes get heavier each year because the number of recipients increases to match the Monarch’s age. Each recipient is given £5.50 in commemorative coins in a red purse for ‘provisions’ plus a white purse containing Maundy coins equivalent to the Monarch’s years. Collins has decided that the weight of it all has now reached a tipping point. The old soldiers of the Yeomen of the Guard, he has reluctantly concluded, must stop carrying the dishes on their heads and hold them in their hands before someone has an accident. ‘It’s too much strain for the dishes, for the Yeomen and for their hats,’ he says. Some traditionalists will be cross. What is the world coming to if a Yeoman cannot put a gold platter of Maundy money on his head?
A large crowd has gathered outside the cathedral several hours before the Queen’s arrival. Margaret Kittle, seventy-five, has flown from Ontario, Canada, to watch. Inside, there are eighty-four men and eighty-four women – all over the age of seventy – waiting to receive alms from the Queen. May Brindley, eighty-seven, a lay Methodist preacher, says she thought it was an early April Fool when she received a letter. ‘I’m not a raving royalist but it’s such an honour that I can’t explain it,’ she says. Jennifer Haynes, seventy-five, a stalwart of her parish council, has no idea why she has been chosen. But she has already been invited to address both the local Mothers’ Union and the Pensioners’ Club about her experiences. By such means do royal ripples spread across a county. And the Derby Evening Telegraph is already preparing a sumptuous souvenir issue.
The Queen, in a powder-blue Karl Ludwig coat, is thrilled to receive her nosegay at the West Door, the Duke of Edinburgh less so. This is the one event of the year where he has to walk around holding a bunch of flowers. He grasps his bouquet manfully, as if holding a torch. He reads a lesson, as he always does. The music is much the same, too, from one year to the next. The Queen barely looks at her order of service. As with the Commonwealth Observance, she knows it all backwards. She knows that she will be distributing alms to the sound of Handel’s Zadok the Priest. Her face lights up as she moves down the lines of recipients, reconnecting with monarchs from eight hundred years ago. Some people are too infirm to stand. No one is obliged to bow or curtsey but most have a go. There are brief chats but the purpose is largely symbolic and religious, the gesture as important to the giver as to the receiver. ‘For all its pageantry, Royal Maundy has never failed to come over as an act of worship,’ says the Lord High Almoner. ‘It’s often said that, for the Queen, it’s one of the highlights of her year and I believe it is. It’s unique because it’s an occasion when she goes to the people to give honours. Usually people go to her to receive an honour.’
Another way to glimpse the Queen’s true values, Christian and otherwise, is through her own philanthropy. Her patronage of charities and organisations extends to more than six hundred different institutions and her reign has seen a marked renaissance in the charitable sector. Inevitably, as the Sovereign, she must be less hands-on than other members of the Royal Family. But she can still donate. Most of her own giving is done discreetly through two vehicles, the Privy Purse Charitable Trust and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust. Both are run by her most senior officials, with close personal input from the Queen herself. With £35 million in the pot, the Silver Jubilee Trust is much the largest and was formed with a mandate to help young people. As such, it gives most of its annual grants – which currently run at around £1.3 million – straight to the Prince’s Trust.
There are also several other grants, some less predictable than others. The Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council usually gets several thousand pounds each year. But in 2010 there was suddenly £10,000 for a prison campaign against alcohol abuse. The royal sense of charity extends to the board of trustees. They include Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Pilloried by most of the world since the collapse of his bank in 2008, he had previously been a key supporter of several royal charities. He stepped down as chairman of the Prince’s Trust Council in 2009 but has remained on the board of the Silver Jubilee Trust (although, perhaps for reasons of diplomacy, it is omitted from his entry in Who’s Who). The Queen knew him, had received him as a guest and saw no reason why a man who had given long service to royal charities should not continue to do so. He remains on the board.
Quirkier and more personal is the Privy Purse Charitable Trust which receives a steady income from visitors to Queen Mary’s Dolls House at Windsor. It hands out around £300,000 a year across a very wide range. There might be a £50 cheque to Dersingham Cricket Club on the Sandringham Estate or the Friends of Orkney Boat Museum. On a typical morning in 2010, the Keeper of the Privy Purse received a personal memo from the Queen suggesting a donation to a nursing fund in memory of Florence Nightingale. ‘I think this is a very worthwhile cause,’ the Queen wrote. ‘I think we gave something ten years ago.’ Sure enough, she had. ‘She’s got a phenomenal memory which keeps us all on our toes,’ says Sir Alan Reid. Soon afterwards, the nurses received several hundred pounds.
A contribution from the Monarch is not measured solely in financial terms. A charity which can say that it has received a contribution from the Queen will often find it easier to elicit donations from others. As Frank Prochaska has pointed out, a £500 donation by Queen Victoria to the Indian Famine Fund in 1897 kick-started a campaign which yielded the stupendous sum of £2 million. Our Queen will often make one-off payments to urgent causes – a £10,000 donation, say, to victims of the London bombings in 2005. But the overwhelming slice of this particular pie – two-thirds in a normal year – is directed in just one direction. It goes to the maintenance of royal chapels, choirs and cathedrals.
No religious service, however, is as sacred to the Queen as the one which happens in the middle of the road in London on the second Sunday of November. The Queen’s involvement at the Cenotaph every Remembrance Sunday is brief, wordless and unchanging. This really is a piece of the monarchy which needs no tinkering or judicious adaptation whatsoever. As the years advance and the Queen stands out as the last head of state to wear uniform in the Second World War – the last to know the fear, the spirit, even the songs of that generation – her position at the head of the nation and the Commonwealth becomes ever more poignant at this event. Through wars and National Service, most families in Britain have some lineal connection with the Forces, quite possibly a name on a war grave, too. But Britain is a civilian land now. Yet the Windsors remain very much a Forces family. Of all her headships, the Head of the Armed Forces has a bond with her men and women which goes way beyond the constitutional to the deeply personal. From the moment the Queen became Colonel of the Grenadier Guards at sixteen, she has been fluent in the culture and mindset of the Services in a way which few politicians can ever hope to be. ‘We’ve managed to get a good balance in this country,’ says David Cameron. ‘There is political control of the military, and yet, as Prime Minister, you’re not Commander-in-Chief. You’re somewhere in between and that’s not a bad th
ing.’
Chester Racecourse, Britain’s oldest, has drawn a huge midweek crowd yet there isn’t a horse to be seen. The Royal Welsh Regiment is just back from Afghanistan and its Colonel-in-Chief is here to meet the troops and their loved ones at a homecoming parade. At times, the emotion spills over in the grandstands as the families watch their men and women receiving campaign medals and marching past the Queen. At the age of nineteen, Fusilier Shaun Stocker has only just made it here today. Two months earlier a hidden bomb cost him his legs and most of his sight as well as other injuries. It was so bad that he needed a special plane home. He is in a wheelchair and a little dazed, having only emerged from hospital two days earlier, his arms still peppered with plasters from all the intravenous drips. He had refused to miss this day of all days.
The grandstands burst into applause as the Queen presents all the wounded men with their medals. ‘We never thought we’d see this day. It’s made him determined to get better,’ says Stocker’s mother, Jenny, afterwards. She and the Queen are showing a good deal more composure than some here today. For hundreds of families, this is scene they feared they might never see. Some are still in tears as everyone meets up for a big regimental family lunch. Anne and Royston Williams are here to welcome two sons who have been serving in Afghanistan together. ‘I can honestly say this is one of the best days of my life,’ says Anne. Her mother, Myra, can’t say anything as her eyes well up and the tissues come out again.
The mood is upbeat but not triumphal. Everyone is conscious that a man is missing. Fusilier Jonathan Burgess never made it home, killed in a gun battle in April 2010. His parents are here, along with his fiancée. She has now given birth to the baby girl Burgess never saw, although they found a well-thumbed photograph of the hospital scan in his breast pocket. The family will be in the Queen’s marquee for lunch. Before that, there’s a big open-air reception where the Queen meets Fusilier Aaron Gray, twenty-two, who has postponed an operation on his injured shoulder until the following morning in order to meet his Colonel-in-Chief. Regimental Sergeant Major Wayne Roberts has even deferred promotion until after today. He should be Captain Roberts by now and doing something else but that would have meant missing the Queen. There’s an added bonus. His four-year-old daughter has been chosen to present a bouquet to the Queen. ‘I spent two and a half years as RSM and to miss out on this at the end – well, I wasn’t having that. I’ve spent twenty-four years in the army so when you actually meet her, it’s massive.’
Just the day before, the Queen had been presenting the George Cross to one fearless bomb disposal expert and a posthumous George Medal to the family of another. She is well aware of the situation on the front line and the stresses which Service life creates at home. The familial bond with the Forces permeates the entire Household culture. It’s not just a question of employing a few equerries and orderlies plucked from the Services. It’s the way in which Forces charities enjoy the run of the Palace Ballroom or the use of the garden party marquees when there are gaps in the diary. It’s the shrugging of shoulders when the Palace reception for the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association descends into cheerful chaos because several of them are stuck on a coach and delayed by a student demonstration. The Queen has other engagements and the time slot for the official photograph has long passed. If they were part of an official delegation, this lack of punctuality would go down very badly. It might even be a diplomatic incident. But not with these guests. The Queen is happy to be kept waiting by her old soldiers. ‘Usually, our events are masterpieces of choreography and fine-tuning,’ chuckles the Master of the Household, looking at his watch. ‘I prefer to call this one “jazz”.’
Prince William, like his father before him, has had spells with all three Services. He believes that his military training has given him invaluable coaching for the job which lies ahead: ‘It’s a very good way of understanding the position and what it takes. You know, these guys do the most incredible things the whole time. And what better place to realise pressure and stress than serving in the Forces and taking that experience with you?’
As with the monarchy, so he believes that the Forces are an innate part of the national character. ‘They link to the heart of what it is to be British. I think they are essential for any country to be proud of itself, for any country to have any identity,’ says a man who joined the army as a cavalry officer, went to sea in a Type 23 frigate and now flies a rescue helicopter with the Royal Air Force. ‘They are setting an example.’
It helps to explain why the Monarch always celebrates her birthday not with a cake but with a military parade. The Queen’s official birthday is Britain’s national day, marked as such in government and diplomatic missions around the world. Other nations might have fireworks or festivals. Holland, for example, has Queen’s Day, with parties, concerts and flowers. In the United Kingdom, people converge on the Mall and Horse Guards Parade to watch a drill display by the Household Division -Trooping the Colour. The crowds then gather around the Palace to watch the entire Royal Family observe an RAF flypast. But it’s not martial or nationalistic or remotely odd. A random survey of the crowd suggests that half are from overseas. Chuck Hatcher, a theatre engineer from Ohio, loves the pageantry and the uniforms – ‘best costumes in the world’. Sherri Whitehead, a political researcher from Vancouver, British Columbia, is here for the second time – ‘she’s our monarch, too’. This is simply how the world expects to see our Queen: dressed in hat and gloves and leading her family out on to the most famous balcony in the world while men in bearskins stand to attention below her. It is not merely for the benefit of the tourism industry. It is a statement that the monarchy is a team effort, not a solo performance. It is a reminder of the future.
And the future needs no reminding that the past will be quite an act to follow. Already the oldest and furthest travelled monarch in British history, the Queen overtook George III’s fifty-nine years on the throne in May 2011 and will surpass Queen Victoria’s sixty-three-year all-time reigning record in September 2015. The Queen will probably not even acknowledge the moment (she does not believe in being competitive with the ancestors), but the rest of the world will be more excited. In Britain, which will also be marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt and the 200th of Waterloo in the year 2015, the sense of occasion will be unstoppable.
Within royal circles, though, there is now a whispered concern that the more the Queen goes on crashing through the record books, the greater the perception that she is somehow irreplaceable. This, inevitably, grows harder on the man who will do the replacing. Asked if the Commonwealth would have survived in its current state without the Queen, a very senior former courtier replies: ‘Probably not. But one should not say that too often because it’s dangerous from the point of view of the next generation.’
The Queen is not the only record-breaker. Prince Charles is now the oldest Prince of Wales in history. And he has not wasted his years as heir apparent. In the same way that the Queen has quietly redefined the nature of her unconstitutional role, so the Prince has done the same. His wellknown interventions on almost anything relating to the human condition have earned him criticism. But no Prince of Wales has made an equivalent mark on national and international life, in every field from education to urban regeneration. There has never been a more accomplished king-in-waiting. Unlike his predecessors, his entire life has been a case of doing rather than waiting. At his investiture in 1969, no powers were bestowed on him. But after four decades of public duties, he believes that he has identified one. He calls it his ‘convening power’ – his capacity to get people round a table. ‘It’s a very interesting role he’s carved out. In my view it is the role,’ says Tony Blair. ‘It’s got two aspects. The first is he’s able to take an aerial global view of certain trends which, in his case, has marked him out as thinking ahead of his time.’ He cites the environment and interfaith dialogue as examples. ‘The second is that I found he was a transmitter of messages, particularly with, say, the
farming community and the Armed Forces. He picked up things in a different way from a politician. I never objected. I was not merely happy with it. I thought it was entirely within his entitlement to do so.’
Some of the Prince’s critics argue that he has a butterfly mind and flits from one cause to another. Others argue that he gets too involved, that he is a meddler who has veered into unconstitutional territory. They cite his opposition to genetically modified food, for example, or his personal involvement in the planning dispute over the redevelopment of London’s Chelsea Barracks. In his recently published diaries, Tony Blair’s former Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell, alleges that the Prince overstepped the mark on politically sensitive issues like hunting and the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001. He even writes that Blair had to have a ‘hard talk’ with the Prince to urge restraint. But were these episodes constitutionally questionable or were they, in fact, just the usual passionate princely interventions? After all, it was Blair who said in 2007: ‘All this stuff written about Charles interfering with government or getting political . I never found him the slightest bit like that at all.’ Certainly, any suggestion of inappropriate constitutional conduct infuriates another former Prime Minister. ‘I would see Prince Charles several times a year,’ says Sir John Major. ‘He’d express views, well-informed views, but he did not lobby, nor did he behave in any way that could be criticised. He has a good social conscience and I’d much rather have an heir to the throne who took an interest in the lives of others, than one who showed no interest at all. I actually think the criticism of him on that front is grotesque.’
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