Prime Minister James Callaghan was dubious as to how much attention should be paid in view of the appalling economic climate, the Queen herself was anxious no one should be forced into spending money. But (just as when her wedding had been discussed, thirty years before) an alternative school of thought held that this would be a welcome spot of colour – and that the cheer should be spread not only through the country, but the Commonwealth.
The Queen and Prince Philip were aboard the royal yacht Britannia when, in 1977, they were entertained by Fijian folk musicians and dancers.
In the second week of February, the Queen and Prince Philip set off aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia to the Pacific Islands, New Zealand and Australia. It was the first of two great tours that year; the second, in the autumn took her to the Caribbean and to Canada. The royal couple would travel some 56,000 miles that year, greeted everywhere by crowds the size and enthusiasm of which defied gloomy predictions.
In New Zealand, she was photographed beaming broadly and dressed in a Maori fur cloak. In the Bahamas, she was seen sampling fruit off a market stall. In Fiji, she was spotted snatching the chance to repair her lipstick while crowds were distracted when a roof collapsed during a demonstration of native dance.
She has over the years been photographed aboard a stunningly caparisoned elephant; borne high on the shoulders of Tuvalu islanders in a native canoe; addressing a gathering of more than a quarter of a million in India; on the Great Wall of China; in floor-length black lace with a mantilla and pearls for a meeting with Pope John XXIII; in socks exiting the Golden Temple of Amritsar. The meticulous planning of a tour is printed in a pocket-sized booklet called The Blue Book (or, jokingly, ‘The Bible’) carried by each member of her entourage.
One of the more unusual welcomes to the Queen received came in Tuvalu, in 1982, when she was carried ashore in a canoe by islanders.
Greeting King Khalid on a visit to Saudi Arabia in 1979, the Queen’s long dress is a gesture to the customs of the country.
The Queen’s visits to the Americas alone have provided some notable memories. It has been for her a land of opportunity. During her first visit as Queen in 1957, she had made her first live television broadcast (‘shy, a bit bashful, and sometimes awkward’ – but all the more endearing for it, said the New York Times), her first game of American football – and her first visit to a supermarket, an invention which had not yet reached Britain. (The royal pair were amazed at the choice of goods available, as they peered into shopping trolleys and chatted with customers.) The Queen had asked to approach New York from the water, and as she saw the Manhattan skyline, she said ‘Wheeeee!’ Touring the UN headquarters, she asked how the glass skyscrapers ‘kept standing up’.
The Queen has always been drawn to the freedom and adventure of North America. She was fascinated when, on the royal tour of 1957, she was taken to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building.
On that trip, a much-desired visit to the West Coast had been cut from her schedule. A quarter of a century later, a Californian president, Ronald Reagan, would give her the opportunity. Unseasonal rain meant the royal couple had to be transported in a Navy bus – another first – but she got to dine on the soundstage at 20th Century Fox and to fly low over the Golden Gate Bridge.
More seriously, ever since her visit to South Africa as a young woman, ever since that first Commonwealth tour, foreign trips have continued to be a vital part of her queenship. Elizabeth II’s foreign tours have made her the most travelled monarch in history, something the rise of air travel has made a possibility.
Taking an elephant ride while touring India in 1961.
They are a way to bind together the Commonwealth countries, a way to repair diplomatic damage, or to celebrate an alliance. Like the official visits she hosts for foreign visitors, the Queen’s foreign tours represent an important stake in Britain’s bid for a continuing place at the top table of international diplomacy. Her realm may loom less large than it used to on the international stage, but perhaps no other visitor in the world can give so much cachet.
Not all tours are foreign ones: the Queen is pictured during a London walkabout on the occasion of her 1977 Silver Jubilee.
The schedules can be punishing. When Jackie Kennedy once complained to her of how tiring she had found a tour, the Queen remarked that, ‘One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.’ She travelled by Concorde on the last leg of the 1977 Commonwealth tours – a gesture to the future and to innovation, but also a speedy way home.
Not all tours, however, are foreign ones, by any means. In her 1977 Jubilee year, the Queen was determined to see as much of Britain as possible, and that Britain would see her. ‘I have to be seen to be believed,’ she said once. The Queen and Prince Philip toured thirty-six UK counties over three months and (in defiance of the early fears the Jubilee celebrations might meet with a lacklustre response) a million people came out on one day in Lancashire alone. Trestle tables were being set up, food being baked, for more than twelve thousand street parties across Britain.
On 4 May, the Queen travelled to Parliament for ‘Loyal Addresses’ from both Houses. There, in response to recent calls for more devolved powers to the other nations of her realm, she made an unusually direct political comment. ‘I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this Jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred . . .’ Perhaps it was in that spirit that the last stop on her UK tour was Northern Ireland, a territory she hadn’t visited in eleven years, and a visit that was considered deeply risky in the context of the Troubles.
The Queen and other members of the Royal Family celebrated 25 years of her reign with a service at St Paul’s Cathedral.
The centrepiece of the Jubilee celebrations was more conventional. On 7 June, a million people gathered in London to watch the carriage procession from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s. The Queen and Prince Philip rode in the Gold State Coach: 24 feet long, weighing 4 tons, and taking eight horses to pull it at a walk. Other members of the Royal Family rode in the Irish State Coach, Queen Alexandra’s State Coach and the Glass Coach – but, after all that pomp, came a royal walkabout, with stops to chat. Elizabeth had been genuinely touched and surprised by the welcome of the crowds. Though the punk rock group the Sex Pistols sailed down the Thames playing their ‘God Save the Queen’, in mocking counterpoise to the official barge procession, theirs was almost a lone voice of dissent.
‘When I was twenty-one I pledged my life to the service of our people,’ the Queen said in a Jubilee speech, ‘and I asked God’s help to make good that vow. Although that vow was made in my salad days, when I was green in judgement, I do not regret nor retract one word of it.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury, in St Paul’s, had praised her as an example ‘of service untiringly done, of duty faithfully fulfilled’.
This much was true – but the Archbishop also spoke ‘of a home life stable and wonderfully happy’. This would prove to be the difficulty in the years ahead. Though November of Jubilee year brought the birth of the Queen’s first grandchild, Peter Phillips, in the following year her sister Margaret’s divorce was finalized. As the monarchy entered the last quarter of the twentieth century, there were too many question marks over the years ahead.
The End of the Fairy Tale
On 4 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, following Labour’s James Callaghan. That summer the Royal Family suffered a devastating blow. On 27 August the IRA blew up the sailing boat belonging to Lord Louis Mountbatten, killing Mountbatten himself, several members of his family and a local boy, and seriously injuring others. The seventy-nine-year-old Mountbatten – Prince Phillip’s uncle and a former Viceroy of India – was a divisive figure whose closest royal relationship was probably with Prince Charles, who regarded him as a mentor. The impact on the heir to the throne was devastating . . . But Ireland was not the only difficult issue of the Thatcher years.
The two had a point of difference in the Commonwealth (which Mrs Thatcher, like Heath before her, was disinclined to take seriously) and its policy of sanctions against South Africa. A report in the Sunday Times, sourced from the Palace press secretary, even painted the Queen as an 'astute political infighter' quite prepared to tackle Downing Street over its uncaring attitudes to race and social diversity.
But Mrs Thatcher was wholly a monarchist – even if she did usurp some of the prerogatives of monarchy. With the Falklands War in 1982, it was Mrs Thatcher who took the official role in welcoming home the victorious troops . . . for all that the Royal Family have always had a particularly strong connection with the military. Indeed, during the Falklands War the Queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, saw active service with the Royal Navy, something the Queen is likely to have taken with the fortitude of a long-established Service family.
The Queen’s eldest son was also in the news – but for matters of love, not war. In 1980, the thirty-one-year-old Prince Charles encountered the nineteen-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, youngest daughter of Earl Spencer, at a weekend house party. Charles was still feeling the effects of Mountbatten’s death; and it had been Mountbatten who had urged him to marry – and urged that, while a young man should sow his wild oats, for his bride Charles should ‘choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for’.
The pair had met in earlier years when Charles had been involved with Diana’s elder sister Sarah, but then Diana had been a mere sixteen. Now Diana – unhappy at home, thanks to her parents’ bitter divorce and her father’s remarriage to romantic novelist Barbara Cartland’s daughter Raine – was looking for her path in life. Without a qualification to her name (‘thick’, she cheerfully called herself), she saw marriage as the obvious option.
That autumn the press spotted Diana sitting beside Charles as he fished the river Dee and immediately took up the tale of ‘Shy Di’; the aristocratic English rose, working as a kindergarten assistant in her frilly blouses and her Laura Ashley skirts. Her uncle Lord Fermoy assured the press she was a virgin; her biographer Andrew Morton would describe her telling him she knew she had to ‘keep myself tidy’.
Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer announced their engagement on 24 February 1981, Charles telling a friend he wanted to do ‘the right thing for this Country’. Yes, of course the pair were in love ‘whatever “in love” means . . .’ he told reporters. With hindsight, there were too many indications that this would end badly. But at the time – ‘It was a fairy story and everyone wanted it to work,’ said Diana later, ruefully.
The couple were married on 29 July 1981 – and in St Paul’s, since Westminster Abbey could not hold the long list of foreign notables invited to the huge public ceremony. The Queen was only one of those who felt that at a time of unemployment, IRA violence and rioting, it would cheer the country – just as her own wedding had done, in the aftermath of war. And if the enormous meringue of a wedding dress the Emmanuels designed for Diana was distinctly crumpled as she emerged from the car on to the steps of St Paul’s – if she did slightly fumble Charles’s names at the altar – those were the only things wrong with the day.
But Prince Charles later told Jonathan Dimbleby it was on honeymoon on board Britannia that he first learned Diana suffered from the eating disorder bulimia. This was, however, not shared with press and public, who saw a very different story.
Patrick Lichfield captured this behind-the-scenes image of the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. The Queen looks on as Diana speaks to her young bridesmaids.
At the beginning of November, the Palace announced that the Princess of Wales was pregnant. Prince William was born on 21 June 1982, after less than a year of his parents’ marriage. Diana said later that she had ‘felt the whole country was in labour with me’. The couple’s second son, Prince Harry, followed on 15 September 1984.
Charles and Diana appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. At the time, it seemed as though this was a fairy-tale romance.
Diana’s approach to child-rearing would come to dramatize her differences from the Royal Family. Everyone remembers the 1980s photographs of Diana, flying to hug her sons after a separation – and contrasts them with the 1950s image of a young Prince Charles, exchanging a solemn handshake with his mother as the Queen returned from her first Commonwealth tour.
Diana’s transformation from shy Sloane into glamorous icon had begun, moreover. Blonde, blue-eyed and ever more stylish, she evoked the romantic image of the fairy-tale princess. By the US visit of 1985 – where Diana danced with John Travolta – she was, Reader’s Digest declared afterwards, ‘The World’s Number One Celebrity’.
Both partners in the marriage, however, were unhappy. And both had now begun to look for support elsewhere. It was probably in 1986 that Charles’s longstanding romance with Camilla Parker Bowles resumed its sexual aspect (causing Diana later to complain, famously, that there were three people in her marriage).
In the same year Diana’s personal bodyguard, Barry Mannakee, was transferred to other duties, amid hints that he had grown too close, and she met Life Guardsman James Hewitt. Also in 1986 the marriage of the Queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, to Sarah Ferguson provided a welcome distraction for the press, and gave Diana the support of another outsider within the Royal Family.
But it was to no avail. At the end of her eighteen-month affair with Hewitt – when Diana moved on to James Gilbey – the troubled marriage of the Waleses had effectively foundered.
Ask any child what a queen does, and they’ll say she wears a crown, and lives in a palace . . . Or, in the case of Queen Elizabeth II, a number of palaces, actually. Buckingham Palace is the name most of us first associate with royalty – with its nineteen state rooms, fifty-two principal bedrooms, plus 188 for the staff, post office, cinema, doctor’s surgery and 40 acres of enclosed garden carved out of the centre of London, an oasis of lakes and lawns.
The creation of Buckingham Palace from a far more modest house was begun under George IV, but Queen Victoria was the first monarch to live there. It has been the Royal Family’s official London residence since 1837, and the refusal of George VI and his wife to move out during the wartime Blitz was an important boost to morale. But when her father’s accession to the throne forced the family to move there from 145 Piccadilly, the young Princess Elizabeth and her sister were dismayed – and there is still a sense that the Palace is more the monarchy’s office than its true home.
If Buckingham Palace is the head of the monarchy, Windsor Castle is its heart. The original castle was built soon after the Norman Conquest, making it the longest-occupied palace in Europe. It bears the marks of all those years. In the fifteenth-century St George’s Chapel, the Queen’s parents and grandparents are buried – along with her sister, Princess Margaret – beside earlier monarchs including Edward IV and Henry VIII.
Windsor was remodelled after the Restoration of 1660 and again in the Georgian eras, and extensively rebuilt after the devastating fire of 1992 ripped through a hundred rooms. The distress felt then by the Queen shows the importance of a place which enshrines so much of her family’s history. Besides the castle itself, much of Windsor – the whole 655-acre Home Park – is essentially a family enclave, with smaller houses that can be apportioned at the Queen’s pleasure, the royal mausoleum at Frogmore, and the private golf course where Prince Andrew plays.
From her favourite position astride a horse, the Queen po
ints towards Balmoral – her favourite home.
The Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh is the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland, but the Queen usually spends only one week a year there, to carry out official duties. Far more time is pleasurably spent at Balmoral Castle, which (unlike Holyroodhouse, Buckingham Palace or Windsor) is not part of the nationally owned Crown Estate but a piece of private property.
Balmoral was purchased in 1852 by Queen Victoria who built the house as a Scots Baronial fantasy. Victoria’s love of the Highlands is shared by the present family, who often wear tartan while there, and dance reels with their gamekeepers at the twice-yearly Ghillies’ Ball. The Queen has always chosen to spend August, September and part of October here. No coincidence that this is the shooting season – life at Balmoral, and the 50,000 acre working estate which surrounds it, revolves around the pursuit of deer, grouse and salmon. Prince Philip has always been a keen fisherman, who himself taught his children to shoot, besides enjoying sailing in Scottish waters.
More surprisingly, the Queen, too, has since childhood been an expert stalker. It is now more than thirty years since she last shot a stag, but the messy business of gralloching the animal – gutting it, so the Balmoral ponies can more easily carry it home to the larder – holds no terrors for her. The Queen loves the interior of Balmoral, saying it is ‘rather fun’ to keep it as Queen Victoria left it, with thistle-patterned wallpaper, tartan rugs, and rows of antlers on the wall. But perhaps even more she loves riding and walking among the purple heather, the burns, and the firs.
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