The Queen’s own hard work continued. In 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she had been photographed going through the Brandenburg Gate. Now came a historic visit to the Soviet Union, the first by a British monarch since the 1917 Revolution, then an equally triumphant return after almost fifty years to a South Africa now free of apartheid.
But an ever more gravely wounded monarchy was now being described by the Economist as ‘an idea whose time has passed’. It seems telling that in May 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, the Queen gave way to doubt as to whether people would really come to the balcony appearance she, her mother and sister – three of ‘we four’ who had stood there fifty years ago – were to make. In the event, of course, the wide expanse in front of Buckingham Palace was packed – and the Queen, as a member of her staff noted, was close to tears as she stepped back inside, downing a gin to help her mask her emotion.
And then Diana struck back. The Panorama interview with Martin Bashir aired on 20 November 1995 is still shocking today. During the hour-long interview she confessed to adultery with James Hewitt, described her bulimia and self-harming, and made the famous declaration that there had been ‘three people’ in her marriage – a clear reference to Camilla Parker Bowles.
She claimed that she hoped only to be queen of people’s hearts, but also asserted that Prince Charles was by temperament unsuited to ‘the top job’. Some three weeks after the interview aired, the Queen wrote separately to Charles and to Diana asking them to arrange an early divorce ‘in the best interests of the country’. And this from the woman who almost half a century before had told a Mother’s Union rally: ‘We can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in our society today.’
Towards Diana herself the Queen had never failed to demonstrate a degree of sympathy. In discussions over, among other things, the title of a divorced princess, Diana told Paul Burrell that the Queen continued to behave with ‘sensitivity and kindness’. But she must have felt the deepest concern.
The divorce of the Waleses became final on 28 August 1996, just three months after the far more amicable divorce of the Yorks. But as an exercise in damage limitation it came too late.
Diana remained a thorn in the royal flesh, drawing headlines when she announced her retirement from public life. Charles was booed on public engagements; surveys indicated that only one person in three thought him fit to be king; and the Commonwealth countries also reacted to the decline in his credibility.
An academic had declared that ‘something has died – the enchantment of the British people with the monarchy.’ The events of the last years had seen the left-wing MP Dennis Skinner declare that ‘the Royal Family has just pressed the self-destruct button.’ Another poll claimed that three out of four Britons believed the monarchy was crumbling.
On the positive side, the Queen’s own approval rating in 1996 was still running at an enviable 73 per cent. Her Christmas message that year could reflect on a genuine new friendship with Nelson Mandela – ‘the most gracious of men’, as she described him (and one of the very few to call her Elizabeth).
All the same, bookies’ odds on whether the Royal Family would survive into the twenty-first century were swinging between 100 to 1 and 5 to 1. The reputation of the British monarchy seemed to be enduring death by a thousand cuts – even headlines, in 1996, about the Queen Mother’s embarrassingly large overdraft . . . But the real cataclysm had yet to strike.
South African President Nelson Mandela, making a state visit to London in 1996, after the ending of apartheid, was one world figure with whom the Queen struck up a particular rapport.
Fall and Rise
As 1997 dawned, it was clear that the problem of Diana would not simply fade away. During her eighteen months as a divorced woman she launched the anti-landmines campaign which stands as her lasting memorial. But she also conducted a largely private relationship with surgeon Hasnat Khan and a very public one with Dodi Fayed. And as she became ever more alienated from the Royal Family, Diana’s increasingly eccentric behaviour (nuisance calls, rumoured affairs and New Age therapies) was discussed widely and crudely.
Sunday 31 August 1997 changed the royal world. If a divorced Princess of Wales had been a loose cannon, then her shocking death – in a Paris underpass, in a speeding car pursued by paparazzi – looked like being infinitely more damaging for the monarchy.
When the news came – first of Diana’s accident, and then of her death from her injuries – the Royal Family were at Balmoral, on their annual holiday. It was the small hours of the morning, and the decision was taken not to wake Diana’s sons to tell them of their terrible loss. From the start, William and Harry were the focus of the family’s concern.
The decision to keep them at Balmoral – in comparative privacy, in the fresh air, away from the pressure of the media – is in itself hard to fault. And yet something went wrong. As national shock turned to anger it was as if Diana’s death (so unexpected it seemed as though there must be some dark explanation behind it) provided a focus for all the mounting doubts about the Royal Family.
It was new Prime Minister Tony Blair who found the popular tribute. Diana had been, he said, ‘the People’s Princess’. The people’s – not the monarchy’s. The extraordinary outpouring of public grief was matched by an anger towards the only people who appeared not to care – the Royal Family.
The family’s initial refusal to join in the public mourning was seen as evidence of hostility towards Diana. ‘Speak to us, Ma’am,’ demanded a Mirror newspaper headline. As the front page of the Sun put it: ‘Every hour the palace remains empty adds to the public anger at what they perceive to be a snub to the People’s Princess.’ The Daily Mail published a front page asking whether it was ‘time for the Queen to go’. Even The Times was dismayed that the church service at Balmoral immediately after Diana’s death had special prayers for Charles and his sons, but no mention of their mother.
The Queen and Prince Philip viewing the flowers left in tribute to Princess Diana outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. Their decision to leave Balmoral and return to London marked a turning point in the public mood.
Some of the howls of complaint reflected a failure to understand royal protocol. It was taken as a sign of disrespect that there was no flag at half mast over Buckingham Palace – but in fact, traditionally the only flag ever flown there is the sovereign’s own standard, and that only when the sovereign is in residence.
But the Royal Family, too, had failed in understanding. Even its own press office was dismayed by the family’s apparent inability to appreciate the depth of public feeling. It was four days after Diana’s death, Thursday 4 September, before wiser counsels prevailed. In the course of a forty-five-minute phone call with advisers, the Queen was persuaded to change her views. She has, as one of her private secretaries put it, ‘ruthless common sense. She has the ability to move on.’
Once persuaded, she did the thing handsomely. The next day, after attending another church service at which prayers were asked for Diana, the Royal Family inspected the flowers which had been laid at Balmoral gates. Later that day the whole family would fly south to walk among the flowers left in London, talking to the crowds. And – from almost the moment of their return to London – royal popularity began once more to climb.
As the Union Jack – in defiance of all tradition – did fly at half mast over Buckingham Palace, the Queen prepared to broadcast live to the nation: ‘What I say to you now as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.’ The words ‘as a grandmother’ may have been suggested by the Prime Minister’s office, but when the Queen had been asked whether this speech was one she could deliver with conviction, she answered, yes, certainly – ‘I believe every word.’
Diana ‘was an exceptional and gifted human being’, the Queen said in her speech. ‘In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.
I admired and respected her . . . I for one believe there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death. I share in your determination to cherish her memory.‘
The next day, as Diana’s cortège passed slowly through the streets on the way to her funeral at Westminster Abbey, to the heartbreaking tolling of a bell, the Queen spontaneously bowed her head as the coffin passed by.
The events of August and September might easily have set a tragic seal on 1997 (if not, indeed, on the monarchy). But in the longer run, Diana’s death would prove to have lanced a boil, ending the divisive taking of sides and allowing the Royal Family to appear once more as a united entity. And the last few months of that very year would prove to have some surprises in store.
Less than three months after Diana’s death the Queen and Prince Philip were due to celebrate their Golden Wedding anniversary. It was five years to the day since the fire that had ripped through Windsor Castle, and now the state rooms had been restored (the work, under Prince Philip’s overall supervision, completed under budget and six months ahead of schedule) in time to be reopened for the occasion.
The day before the Golden Wedding, Prince Philip told guests at a Guildhall lunch hosted by the Lord Mayor that: ‘tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage . . . absolutely vital when the going gets difficult’ – and that the wife seated beside him ‘has the quality of tolerance in abundance’.
The next day the couple attended a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey where they had married fifty years before. Elizabeth and Philip were surrounded not only by their children and grandchildren and a host of other foreign and homegrown royalty but, in a gesture of inclusiveness, by fifty other couples who had married in the same year as they.
The Golden Wedding anniversary of the Queen and Prince Philip, on 20 November 1997, found the Royal Family back on an upward path.
In the ensuing ‘people’s banquet’ organized by Tony Blair, the royal couple sat without distinction of rank among the 350 guests. When, in a speech afterwards, Blair hailed the Queen’s timeless ‘values of duty and service’, it proved indeed to herald a new appreciation of those qualities. Blair praised her as ‘a symbol of unity in a world of insecurity where nothing stays the same’. The Queen herself returned to the ‘lessons to be drawn’ theme on which she had touched three months before.
Both elected government and constitutional monarchy, she said, depended on the consent of the people. ‘That consent, or lack of it, is expressed for you, Prime Minister, through the ballot box’ – brutally, perhaps, but at least unmistakably. For the monarchy, by contrast ‘the message is often harder to read, obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion. But read it we must.’ (Prince Philip, presciently, many years before, had declared that the Royal Family was fighting an election every day.)
The Queen was alluding to Diana’s death, but she also coupled herself with Philip, who had ‘quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years’. ‘I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.’ But, she added, ‘It is you, if I may now speak to all of you directly, who have seen us through, and helped us to make our duty fun.’
When, some three weeks later, she and Philip stood on the quay of Portsmouth docks to say goodbye to Britannia, which had played such a huge part in the couple’s ‘fun’, the Queen was seen to wipe away a tear. The yacht had been ‘their floating home’ as a lady-in-waiting said – their ‘freedom’, as a relative put it – and beyond that, it had meant a great deal to the Queen’s father. In fact the decision to decommission and not replace the yacht which had served as something of a floating embassy, was already beginning to seem churlish.
Lessons were being learned on all sides. Within six months of Diana’s death, the Palace had begun discreetly commissioning polls, the better to keep in tune with public opinion. Quietly, imperceptibly, they were taking on some of Diana’s style – less formality, more visible inclusiveness. Tweaking engagements to allow the Queen to be more closely involved with those she met on visits, allowing her to appear as part of her people’s lives, rather than simply as a spectacle or a spectator.
The polls now showed a mere 19 per cent of the population in favour of a republic, down from the higher figure reported in the days immediately after Diana’s death. Life was back to normal. But everyone had seen how easily the tide could turn.
Saying goodbye to Britannia, as the royal yacht was decommissioned at Portsmouth in December 1997, the Queen was seen to wipe away a tear.
A royal wedding always helps bring people together. In fact the wedding of Prince Edward to Sophie Rhys-Jones on 19 June 1999 was a comparatively low-key affair, held in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, rather than in St Paul’s like the Waleses, or Westminster Abbey like the Yorks and the Phillips. But that, perhaps, was recognition of the fact that no one wanted a huge fantasia just after seeing the sorry end of all those apparent fairy stories. Indeed, this marriage would outlast those of Edward’s siblings, with the couple’s children, Louise and James, born in 2003 and 2007.
The inner circle of the Royal Family had still to confront fresh difficulties. The Queen Mother was now in her late nineties, though in remarkably good health for her years and still even fulfilling a number of public engagements. Princess Margaret’s health was a matter of more acute concern. The sight of the former royal glamour girl and partygoer in a wheelchair was a poignant reminder of just how many years had passed.
The constraints of life as the Queen’s sister had not made for happiness. Margaret had suffered a good deal of illness over the years, much of it inevitably connected with her smoking habit. In the early months of 1998 she suffered a mild stroke, though made a good recovery. Just a year later she scalded her feet, at her house in Mustique, badly enough to leave her with enduring difficulty in walking.
There was a loosening of political ties, too, within the nation’s ‘family’, over which the Queen, whatever her thoughts, perforce presided. The Scottish Parliament was convened in 1998, the Welsh National Assembly established the same year. The reform of the House of Lords, which entailed the abolition of most hereditary peers, was a worrying precedent for a hereditary monarchy. But in November 1999, Australia – so often touted as by nature republican – voted by 55 per cent to 45 per cent to keep the Queen as its head of state.
True, as a new millennium dawned, at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999, the Queen looked glum as she clasped fingers with Prince Philip and Tony Blair for the singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Then again, the dissatisfaction with the Millennium Dome that her face seemed to display was shared by the rest of the country – a way in which she actually seemed more in touch than her government.
The monarchy was set on a determined path of reconciling past and present, and that was a theme the Queen herself readily understood. In her Christmas broadcast of 1999 she said: ‘We can make sense of the future – if we understand the lessons of the past. Winston Churchill, my first Prime Minister, said that “the further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”‘
As we moved not only from one century, but from one millennium, to another, ‘More than ever we are aware of being a tiny part of the infinite sweep of time.’ And what better symbol of that sweep than an institution that had endured for centuries?
It seemed, as the veil of tears lifted, that Diana’s legacy had been to jolt the royal establishment out of a decades-old complacency while giving its subjects a catharsis. The nation had vented its dissatisfaction and the Royal Family took it meekly. Promised to do better, effectively.
It helps that there have been (and the Palace, with its newly sharpened sensibilities, has taken full advantage) a huge number of events shared by the nation and their monarchy in the twenty years since Diana’s death. The first year of the new millennium saw not only a milestone passed, and a visit to Austr
alia after victory in the republican referendum, but the Queen Mother’s one hundredth birthday.
A stream of celebrations ran through spring and summer, heading towards the great pageant in her honour on 19 July, on Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall. A march-past of the regiments with which she was particularly associated, the release of a hundred homing doves. A ‘cavalcade of the century’ – the Queen Mother’s century – including everything from Pearly Kings and Queens to Enid Blyton’s Noddy. Camels and racehorses, the Girls’ Brigade and the Chelsea Pensioners, a page leading two of her own corgis while planes new and old flew overhead.
On the birthday itself, 4 August, after the royal postman had delivered the Queen’s handwritten card to her mother (and its recipient, relishing the spectacle, had instructed her equerry to open it with his sword), the Queen Mother rode to Buckingham Palace through cheering crowds. It had been a great excuse for colourful ceremony. However, the next great royal events would be a trigger for a deeper emotion: sympathy.
Millennial Monarchy
The year 2002 – just a decade after the annus horribilis – was always going to be marked out as the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession. In the event, it was also notable for two great losses in her life.
On 9 February, Princess Margaret died of cardiac problems following a stroke, her death by then a release from crippling ill health. It was obvious that the Queen Mother would not long survive her younger daughter. On 30 March she, too, died, with the Queen – summoned hastily from riding in Windsor Park – at her side.
Operation Tay Bridge (as the Queen Mother’s funeral had been dubbed) had long been arranged, with her own active cooperation. Now the full state machinery swung into place.
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