Like Balmoral, Sandringham House in Norfolk has been a private property of the Royal Family since the middle of the nineteenth century, when Queen Victoria bought it for her son the Prince of Wales. A neo-Jacobean mansion of red brick, it too boasts excellent shooting and riding opportunities. (Edward VII and George V kept the clocks at Sandringham half an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, to allow more daylight hours for sport.) The estate also boasts 16,000 acres of farmland, producing apples and other crops for sale, besides being home to the Royal Stud, and the loft for the Queen’s racing pigeons.
One beloved ‘home’ – for that is how they saw it – has been gained and lost by the Royal Family within the Queen’s reign. The Royal Yacht Britannia, commissioned by her father and launched in 1953, was decommissioned in 1997 and is now moored in Edinburgh’s port of Leith as a tourist attraction. But over more than forty years Britannia took the Queen on almost seven hundred trips abroad, notching up more than a million nautical miles. At once a ‘country house at sea’ and a floating palace, the ship could accommodate foreign receptions in a helpfully cosy and British atmosphere, besides providing a honeymoon retreat for the Queen’s sister and three of her children.
The Queen’s life often requires formal dress, but boots, tartan skirt, waterproofs and headscarf are her preferred ‘uniform’ for holidays at Balmoral.
In an age of helicopters, and of a cost-cutting monarchy, the future of the Royal Train (a set of specially fitted carriages which can be pulled by either of two locomotives) must also be in doubt. But perhaps in any case its comparatively spartan 1970s fittings would not appeal to a younger generation. It comes as a surprise that in their private rooms, the taste of the elder royals in many ways reflects the unfashionable decor of their youth, which often looks dowdy today. But they can certainly turn on the grandeur when need be. Magnificence is, of course, an important weapon in their nation’s diplomatic armoury.
The royal yacht Britannia, decommissioned in 1997, was a much-loved retreat for the Royal Family, and particularly for the Queen. It also served as something of a floating embassy, carrying the Queen on tours and acting as a base in which she could receive foreign dignitaries.
The Queen has hosted more than a hundred State Banquets in the course of her reign. Preparation is meticulous, beginning as much as six months ahead, and the Queen herself checks all details of what is in every sense a polished production. For a banquet at Windsor, the table is so wide that footmen have to walk down the middle with dusters on their feet to place flowers and candelabra.
The dress code for state dinners requires white tie – or national dress – as worn by Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufuor in 2007, when the Queen formally welcomed him to a banquet marking the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian independence.
Dress is white tie – or national dress, which can provide some colourful alternatives, as when the President of Ghana visited Buckingham Palace in 2007. In May 2011, President and Michelle Obama were served sole in crayfish sauce, Windsor lamb, sauteed courgettes and radishes, green beans, potatoes and salad, followed by a vanilla and cherry charlotte. Before the meal the Queen proposes a toast to her visitor, who reciprocates. A military orchestra dispenses music until the swirl of pipers signals the end of the meal.
A State Banquet is the centrepiece of a full State Visit, lasting three or five days and beginning with a ceremonial welcome complete with military guard of honour and marching bands. Not all official visits are state visits – of all the US Presidents who have held office during the Queen’s reign, only two, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have made full State Visits. But other American visitors have enjoyed other pleasures.
On 15 June 1961, the Queen and Prince Philip hosted a banquet in honour of US President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie.
In 1982, for example, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, staying at Windsor as personal guests, found their seven-room suite had been equipped with a dedicated White House telephone line and Windsor Castle’s first ever shower. The centrepiece of this visit was the ride the Queen and President took together in Windsor Great Park, while Prince Philip drove Nancy Reagan in a four-in-hand carriage.
The Queen and the cowboy – Elizabeth and US President Ronald Reagan riding out together in the grounds of Windsor Castle in 1982. The Queen’s horse Burmese (who carried her many times at Trooping the Colour) was, like the President’s mount Centennial, a gift from the Canadian Mounted Police.
Visitors who come to Windsor for a ‘dine and sleep’ find a footman or housemaid assigned to help them prepare for drinks in one of the huge drawing rooms. Then comes a change into formal dress before assembling at 8.15 for dinner in the State Dining Room. Their royal hosts join the party a quarter of an hour later, and at dinner the Queen maintains the old protocol of talking to her partner on one side through the first course, and then changing to the other. In the castle library, carefully selected objects of interest are laid out to admire, before the Queen herself leads a tour through the castle’s staggering art collection. After goodbyes are said at night the guests do not see their hosts again.
But in a private setting, the Queen could in her younger days be something of a party animal, declaring – as at 1.30 a.m. she left the wedding ‘breakfast’ she hosted after Charles and Diana’s wedding – that she’d have loved to stay and dance all night. A month earlier, throwing Prince Andrew a twenty-first birthday disco party at Windsor, she gave Elton John ‘one of the most surreal moments of my life’ when she joined the younger guests dancing in a circle to ‘Rock Around the Clock’.
Christmases at Sandringham are a riot of joke presents, charades (the Queen is a good mimic) and party games of the old-fashioned physical sort. At Balmoral, visitors find the Queen acting as an attentive hostess, herself checking their bedrooms. After the day’s sport it is she who makes tea, with water from a silver urn; playing a game of patience as the company assemble for drinks before dinner.
Tony Blair was struck by the strength of the drinks – ‘true rocket fuel’, he said. But then successive Prime Ministers have been taken aback by life at Balmoral. John Major once found his phone call to a European leader during a political crisis drowned out by the sound of the bagpipes which play at regular intervals. Mrs Thatcher, after one of the picnics which famously see Prince Philip at the barbecue and the Queen washing up, sent a present of a pair of rubber gloves. It seems a world away from a State Banquet – but perhaps that very combination is the secret of the Queen’s hospitality.
(Clockwise from top right) The Queen after the blessing of her son Charles’ marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles; walking behind the coffin at the funeral of her mother; and pictured on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with her son, grandson and great-grandson.
Anni Horribiles
In 1987 the Queen honoured her daughter with the title of Princess Royal, which since the seventeenth century could be bestowed on (and only on) the eldest daughter of a sovereign. Anne’s stalwart dignity and formidable record of public works had done much to change earlier perceptions of her as brusque and unsympathetic.
However, a decade on from the Silver Jubilee, time was about to prove less kind to the Royal Family as a whole. Courtiers soon begun to talk about QVS or the Queen Victoria Syndrome, whereby a nation could become tired of an ageing monarch and an extensive and expensive Royal Family.
The administration and financing of Buckingham Palace were under review; and adverse publicity came when Prince Edward’s decision in January 1987 to drop out of the Marines training course was followed by his first venture into television. The Queen (reluctant to disappoint her son) gave dubious consent to what was meant to be a light-hearted romp in aid of charity. But It’s a Royal Knockout made those younger members of the family who gamely took part in it look like pantomime figures.
The Queen herself was not immune from the general disatissfaction. Her predecessor Queen Victoria had done far more to deserve the hostility that came her way. After Prince Albert’s death in
1861, she withdrew into seclusion. Her refusal to meet her ministers alone, to attend every event of importance, from the Privy Council meeting and the State Opening of Parliament to her own son’s wedding party gave – in the words of her minister Lord Halifax – ‘some evidence of insanity’.
By contrast, Elizabeth II has always been distinguished by her sense of duty. Nonetheless, a poll at the beginning of 1990 had nearly half the population supporting the idea of an ‘eventual’ abdication.
But the next generation, too, were experiencing difficulties. By the end of the 1980s, all the marriages of the Queen’s children were in trouble to a greater or lesser degree.
In the spring of 1989, the Sun published love letters exchanged some time earlier between Princess Anne and Commander Timothy Laurence. That year, she and her husband Mark Phillips announced their separation.
The Duke and Duchess of York produced two daughters, the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, in 1988 and 1990 respectively. But the Duchess was beginning to chafe at the restrictions of life of a secondary royal. At the end of 1991, Andrew and ‘Fergie’ told the Queen they were considering a separation.
And beyond all the rest, by now, of course, everyone was aware of the ‘War of the Waleses’ – the very public breakdown of the heir to the throne’s marriage. The time for discretion was past. Back in the autumn of 1987, the Queen had summoned the pair to Buckingham Palace and privately urged them, effectively, to do what her generation would have done – to put a brave face on things, and sort themselves out behind the scenes. And, up to a point, they had tried.
Charles based himself at Highgrove and Diana at Kensington Palace, while they concentrated on their respective charitable endeavours. But it cannot have helped that Diana – visiting hospices and orphanages, embracing lepers and AIDS victims – was getting literally ten times the press coverage that was given to Charles’s work. She was winning the public relations war.
Before the time came to trumpet the tenth anniversary of the royal couple’s wedding, the game was up. Diana was already secretly collaborating with the biographer Andrew Morton.
That was even before 1992 got underway – what the Queen called her annus horribilis. And arguably the fact that she did so in Latin displayed all too clearly the problem of the Royal Family.
January brought revelations about Fergie and the millionaire Steve Wyatt. In February, what was meant to be a journey of reconciliation for the Waleses saw Diana photographed ostentatiously alone, in what the Daily Mail called ‘wistful solitude’, in front of the Taj Mahal. In March it was announced the Yorks would separate; in April, Princess Anne’s divorce from Captain Mark Phillips became final; in June Prince Edward was forced to deny rumours of homosexuality.
The photograph of Diana, ostentatiously alone in front of the Taj Mahal, came to symbolize the disarray which, by the early 1990s, had overtaken the marital affairs of the next generation of the Royal Family.
Also in June came Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, written (though she denied it at the time) with the cooperation of the Princess. Its indictment of Charles as an unfeeling husband seemed to represent a problem at the heart of the monarchy. Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, later described how the possibility of a split was mooted, but the Queen and Prince Philip, holding a crisis meeting with the younger couple at Windsor, urged greater efforts. That they should be ‘less selfish’ – should think of the monarchy, their children, their country.
August brought photographs of the Duchess of York having her toes sucked by her ‘financial adviser’ John Bryan. It also, and more seriously, saw the publication of the ‘Squidgygate’ tapes – conversations three years before between Diana (‘Squidgy’) and James Gilbey, in which Diana made clear her hostility to the Royal Family. The Queen, as she admitted to friends, was proving unlucky in her daughters-in-law. The War of the Waleses represented the clash of two cultures, with the old ideals of duty, of marriage for life – of a degree of pragmatism in personal affairs – at odds with a newer world. Perhaps that is why the Queen (widely seen as representing the former) was caught in the middle, and why public sympathy for Diana translated into a wider dissatisfaction with the monarchy. Discussions had begun several months earlier about the Queen’s paying taxes. But events were to overtake her advisers.
Not the least telling event of 1992 came on 20 November, the Queen and Prince Philip’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary, when fire seriously damaged Windsor Castle. When the Queen arrived to see the devastation, those close had never seen her more shaken. After the Queen turned to her mother for consolation, she wrote that the visit had made all the difference to her ‘sanity’. But the hurt was redoubled when a sullen nation, in the grip of a recession, rejected Prime Minister John Major’s instinctive declaration that the nation would be happy to pay for the repairs.
Joined to press calls for the Queen to pay repair bills on what was seen (not altogether accurately) as her own home, were demands that she should pay taxes. Within days came news that she and Prince Charles would pay tax on their incomes from the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall respectively; that she would take over responsibility for most of those family members who had formerly been getting a state subsidy; and that the state rooms of Buckingham Palace would open to the public to cover the Windsor repair costs.
The Queen surveying the devastation caused by the fire which ripped through her beloved Windsor Castle in November 1992.
It was only four days after the Windsor fire that the Queen appeared (hiding a heavy cold) at a Guildhall lunch to mark her forty years on the throne. She told her fellow guests that 1992 was ‘not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.’
In a speech at the Guildhall a few days later, the Queen famously described 1992 as an ‘Annus Horribilis’.
She came close to rebuking her critics when she said that though ‘no institution’ could or should expect to be free from oversight, ‘scrutiny . . . can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding. This sort of questioning can also act, and it should do so, as an effective agent for change.’ The last word – change – was one which would occur time and time again in her speeches ahead.
In December, Buckingham Palace announced that, ‘with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate.’ The announcement declared that ‘their constitutional positions are unaffected,’ but it was very difficult to see how a future with Charles and Diana as king and queen could be achieved.
The Queen took her corgis for a walk at Sandringham rather than watch the broadcast in which John Major relayed the news to Parliament. When she returned to the house a member of staff commiserated with her. ‘I think you’ll find it’s all for the best,’ the Queen said. It was an example of her stoicism, but also of a refusal to confront emotional problems. It was an attitude born of her age and class, and certainly inherited from her mother, whom members of her household called the ‘imperial ostrich’. But the brave face she had been raised to show in public would itself become a difficulty in the years ahead.
Only days later, on a happier note, Princess Anne married Commander Timothy Laurence at Crathie Church near Balmoral (the Church of Scotland, unlike the Church of England, recognizing remarriage after divorce). The ceremony was a notably restrained and private one, the Queen being one of only thirty guests. Her Christmas message declared that though, ‘like many other families, we have lived through some difficult days this year,’ she would meet the challenges of the new year with ‘fresh hope’.
However, any confidence that 1992 would prove to be a unique ‘annus horribilis’ was misplaced. The plural of ‘annus’ is ‘anni’, anni horribiles, and that is what the mid-1990s proved to be.
Only two weeks into 1993 came ‘Camillagate’, the published transcript of a deeply embarrassing telephone conversation between Charles and his mistress Camilla Pa
rker Bowles. But, despite a riding accident the Queen suffered as 1993 turned to 1994, business went on. A three-week tour of the Caribbean, commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, and time with the US president Bill Clinton, who later wrote of her as someone ‘who might under other circumstances have become a successful politician or diplomat. As it was, she had to be both, without quite seeming to be either.’
The Queen Mother’s health was becoming a concern. Now in her nineties, she suffered from failing eyesight, lameness and lesions on her legs, but was resistant to any attempt to make her acknowledge her ailments. A lovely letter from the Queen, sent with a special walking stick, bears witness to the family’s concern and belies her unemotional public persona: ‘Darling Mummy, Your daughters and your nieces would very much like you to TRY this walking stick! It has a magic handle which fits one’s hand like a glove and therefore gives one confidence in movement, especially when feeling dizzy!’
Despite the difficulties the Royal Family were facing, crowds gathered to watch the Red Arrows fly past Buckingham Palace on the 50th anniversary of VE Day.
Trouble of a more invidious sort came from the very heart of the family. On 29 June 1994, Prince Charles appeared in a lengthy televised interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, in which he admitted infidelity, though insisting it had not taken place until his marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’. Almost equally wounding, in a quieter way, was the portrayal that emerged from Dimbleby’s subsequent book of the Queen as a distant, and Prince Philip as a harsh, parent.
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