Elizabeth- the Queen and the Crown Read online

  The single most important moments of the Queen’s working day take place away from the public gaze. The battered red or blue leather dispatch boxes of state papers are delivered to her daily, wherever she may be, and ‘Reader No. I’ studies them religiously. The 1969 documentary film Royal Family even showed them being lowered from a helicopter on to the deck of Britannia. Lead-lined and bombproof, these are boxes to which only she and her private secretaries have a key.

  The formidable amount of information they contain is supplemented by that gleaned from audiences given to ministers, officers, senior clergy, and by meetings with foreign envoys. (Ambassadors newly appointed to the UK have still to present their credentials to the Queen.) That is why successive British Prime Ministers – and Theresa May is the Queen’s thirteenth – have found their weekly meetings with her so useful, and why Commonwealth Prime Ministers express the same feelings. By now, there is quite literally no one who can offer a broader panorama of experience, particularly when it comes to foreign affairs, no one who has met more leading figures of the past century.

  Not that she would use her experience or her position to impose her views. On the tiny handful of occasions when the Queen has even hinted at an opinion on a political matter, it has been headline news. She has the constitutional right to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn. But this Queen (or so we believe, for her conversations with the Prime Minister are wholly private) draws back from offering advice. Her way of asking a telling question, however, can cause a minister to think twice.

  Alongside the state-level communications, the Queen has always tried to read as many as possible of the letters she receives from the public, which she sees as being ‘rather personal to oneself’ – and also a good clue as to what people are thinking. She also, of course, engages more directly with the public on her huge tally of royal engagements – though interestingly, the ‘walkabouts’ we now think of as an integral part of those duties began only in 1970. Her engagements today are fewer (and shorter) than they once were, but in 2015, the year before her ninetieth birthday, she still carried out 306 engagements in the UK, and 35 abroad.

  Openings and inspections; anniversaries of organizations of which she is patron; hospitals, exhibitions and factories. Some events are glamorous – in 1956 she famously met Marilyn Monroe at a film premiere – others better described as worthy. But it is part of her job to take all her engagements seriously. That very seriousness was itself something of an issue in early days. Both her husband and her ministers wished that she would learn to smile more readily, but in the early part of her reign, at least, she believed what people wanted from her was solemnity.

  British royalty and Hollywood royalty often meet. In 1956 the Queen shook hands with Marilyn Monroe at a premiere of The Battle of the River Plate.

  Many of the Queen’s speeches are written by her private secretaries, though she then reviews and edits the draft, in consultation with Prince Philip. Most personal to her are the Christmas broadcasts she makes every year. Her delivery has changed over the years, and her accent is less formidably aristocratic than it used to be. However, her public speaking is something for which she was once criticized. In 1957, the rebellious peer and magazine editor John Grigg, Baron Altrincham, wrote an article in which he complained that the Queen’s speeches reflected her own lack of proper training and the stick-in-the-muds around her.

  Some six years into her reign, the Queen is pictured as a working woman, at her desk in Buckingham Palace with the red box of state papers she receives every day.

  ‘The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl,’ Altrincham wrote. Altrincham was perceptive in his suggestion that the Queen was faced with the ‘seemingly impossible task of being at once ordinary and extraordinary’. But he was hit with a storm of criticism – he even had his faced slapped in the street. Such was the atmosphere of the 1950s.

  His was not the only critical voice. In the same year, the journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that the monarchy needed some new advisers if they wanted to prevent themselves and their lives from becoming ‘a sort of royal soap opera’. The Queen had to cease being merely ‘a generator of snobbishness and a focus of sycophancy’.

  Coincidentally or otherwise, the last of the ‘presentation parties’ by which aristocratic debutantes were presented at court took place the following year. But the Queen’s life was and is still marked out by other, more significant ceremonies.

  Some annual fixtures are comparatively modern. Others bear the weight of history. Among the former are the annual garden parties, each for some eight thousand guests, selected for their public service, and drinking some twenty-seven thousand cups of tea in the grounds of Buckingham Palace or Holyroodhouse. The Queen and other members of the Royal Family pass through lanes between the guests, a few of whom are singled out for presentation by the top-hatted Gentleman Ushers. Another nineteenth-century institution was the Royal Command Performance – the most famous of them today is the annual all-star charity event, now known as the Royal Variety Performance. Over the years the Queen has witnessed and met performers from George Formby to Noël Coward, and Count Basie to Lady Gaga.

  The Queen learned to ride sidesaddle especially for the annual ceremony of Trooping the Colour. It is one of the most impressive fixtures in her calendar – even in the pouring rain!

  Trooping the Colour – or the Sovereign’s Birthday Parade – takes place in June, the month of the Queen’s official birthday. The Household Cavalry and the five regiments of the Guards Division salute the sovereign and troop their ‘colour’ or regimental standard. For many years now the ceremony has been followed by a flypast of RAF planes over Buckingham Palace.

  The Queen is what is known as the Fountain of Honour in the United Kingdom – the only one with the right to confer honours on her subjects. Some twenty-four investiture ceremonies are held each year at Buckingham Palace and every five years, one at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where the Queen herself or a senior member of the Royal Family pins the decoration on each person mentioned in the New Year’s and Birthday Honours Lists. Or, in the case of those receiving a knighthood, ‘dubs’ him on the shoulder with her father’s sword.

  Each year Windsor sees the procession of the Knights and Ladies of the Order of the Garter. Admission to this ancient and exclusive order is the Queen’s personal gift.

  The greatest honour of all is to become a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, founded in 1348, membership of which (apart from the sovereign and the heir to the throne) is restricted to twenty-four knights or ladies at any one time. Each June sees a procession of the Garter Knights at Windsor, led by the Queen and Prince Philip in the Order’s dark blue mantle – lined with white taffeta, and with a flash of red hood on the right shoulder – and Tudor bonnet with huge white plume. The blue Garter itself, worn by men on the left knee and women on the left arm, bears the famous legend ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. Shame on he who evil thinks.

  Also dating back to medieval times (though it had lapsed, and was revived only in the 1930s) is a rite that takes place on Maundy Thursday, three days before Easter, and recalls Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Until the seventeenth century, in a ritual gesture of humility monarchs actually washed the feet of a number of poor people, one for every year of the sovereign’s own age. Today’s Queen merely distributes ‘Maundy money’ – specially minted coins borne on trays by the beruffed Yeomen of the Guard – to elderly persons notable for work in their community. On Remembrance Sunday, the second Sunday in November, the Queen appears in mourning black, a colour she would not normally wear, at the Cenotaph in Whitehall to honour the war dead of all the Commonwealth nations.

  Each autumn, and the aftermath of a general election, sees the State Opening of Parliament. The Queen, with the Imperial State Crown travelling in a separate carriage before her, drives to the Palace of Westminster. There, preceded by the Sword of St
ate and the Cap of Maintenance, she progresses through to the House of Lords wearing her crown and long-trained crimson Parliamentary Robe.

  An arcane piece of ritual sees the official known as Black Rod go to summon the Commons, only to have the door slammed in his face, in token of the House of Commons’s independence. The Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition are then led into the Lords to hear the annual Queen’s Speech (which in fact is written for her by her government), setting out plans for the coming Session. Since there have been moments in the nation’s history at which the Crown might well have regarded Parliament as enemy territory, a ‘hostage’ MP spends the duration of the royal visit at Buckingham Palace as guarantee of the monarch’s safe return.

  Prince Philip has always accompanied the Queen to the State Opening and they walk together through the Houses of Parliament, her hand resting on his, both their hands held aloft. But his seat on the dais, to the left of her throne, is a little lower than hers. He has no official ceremonial role, nor has he access to those red boxes of state papers. It has always been an exceptionally difficult position for a man who – by background, temperament and generation – would in other circumstances have expected not only to have his own successful career, but to be the unquestioned head of his family.

  The State Opening of Parliament has always seen the Queen enthroned in the House of Lords wearing the Imperial State Crown in full ceremonial regalia. It was announced that 2017’s State Opening would break with tradition and be a ‘dressed down’ ceremony.

  Just as the first adjustments of the new reign were over and everyone was settling in for the long haul, there had been rumours of trouble between the Queen and her husband. In the autumn of 1956 Prince Philip, with his wife’s blessing, set out on a four-month solo tour of the Commonwealth – time back at sea, aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, but perhaps also time away from the constraints of his new life.

  But the trip took a sour turn when one of his travelling companions, Mike Parker, was summoned home to answer charges of adultery in the divorce courts. Gleeful press speculation inevitably turned to Philip himself, and particularly his regular attendance at an all-male luncheon club, the Thursday Club. It was a raffish group, beset with rumours of ribaldry and ‘party girls’. The Queen’s press secretary, most unusually, issued a statement: ‘It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke.’

  Philip’s solo journey ended in February 1957 when his wife joined him in Portugal. In her Christmas message the Queen had told the world that of all the voices she had heard that day, none had given her greater pleasure than her husband’s. She had just created him a Prince of the United Kingdom – a higher rank than the dukedom he had held since their marriage.

  Though his position continued to chafe him, as he walked two paces behind his wife, he found a productive way to accommodate himself to the situation. Patronage of some 850 organizations (more even than are sponsored by the Queen); a particular interest in science and technology; an early sponsorship of the Outward Bound scheme; and, from 1956, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award to recognize young people’s achievement in pursuing the ideals he himself learned at Gordonstoun, of a healthy mind in a healthy body. The scheme – now expanded around the globe – has helped some eight million young people since its foundation. He also took over management of the family’s estates.

  Prince Philip has always displayed a concern for bringing the monarchy more in tune with the modern era. He has often been a force for change, insisting on the reform of some of the more arcane practices of the Royal Household, like the powdering of footman’s wigs.

  This picture from 1951 shows the Queen (then Princess Elizabeth) with her husband and two eldest children as a new family group of ‘we four’.

  The Queen at the wheel of a Daimler with Prince Charles and Princess Anne as passengers.

  The Queen has always been a keen photographer. At the Windsor Horse Show in 1982 she captured her husband Philip with a Leica camera.

  Four become six . . . By 1965, when the family celebrated the Queen’s 39th birthday at Windsor, Princes Andrew and Edward had made the family group complete.

  His list of engagements always rivalled his wife’s, and he has always cheered and encouraged the Queen into what she did not at first find easy – the social, crowd-pleasing aspect of her duties. He is, said his grandson Prince William, ‘always on her [the Queen’s] side, and he’s an unwavering companion.’ One who ‘totally put his personal career aside to support her, and he never takes the limelight, never oversteps the mark.’ But of course that is not the only side of the story.

  Perhaps the Duke’s famous gaffes, his brusqueness with the press and the impatience he has shown privately even to his wife are an essential escape valve – a letting off of steam. They may be just the natural expression of a man of his age and background – or even a cheerful playing to the gallery. (‘Often naughty, never nasty,’ wrote Kurt Hahn, the founder of Gordonstoun, about Philip, prophetically.). But Philip is a man not temperamentally attuned to life in his wife’s shadow, and claims that he sought consolation elsewhere have never gone away.

  The Queen’s own way of ameliorating the difficulties was to allow her husband to wear the trousers in their private life. But that decision in itself had consequences. It was at Philip’s urging that Prince Charles was sent to school, rather than being educated at home – later, more specifically, to Gordonstoun, whose bracing atmosphere had suited Philip himself but which his eldest son found desperately uncongenial.

  In the early days of their marriage, Elizabeth and Philip were able to relax with their baby son Charles at Windlesham Moor, the Victorian house they rented in Surrey.

  The questions surrounding Philip and his role were the same as had been raised about Prince Albert more than a century before. Then it was Victoria herself who sought to limit Albert’s actual role, as opposed to his ceremonial rank and precedence, to what she called ‘help with the blotting paper’. However, over the years his would prove a beneficial and a calming influence: one which, in his insistence that the Crown should be above party politics, and Victoria no longer indulge her personal prejudices and favourites, set the path for the modern monarchy.

  What gave Albert his opportunity to play a larger part in state affairs were Victoria’s pregnancies – her ‘plagues’ – as she called them. With his wife quite literally confined by five children in six years, with four more to follow, Albert became, as he hoped, not only ‘the natural head of the family’ but Victoria’s ‘sole confidential adviser in politics . . . her private secretary and her permanent Minister’. No one, of course, could foresee Albert’s early death and its effect on Victoria . . . Elizabeth was luckier in a notably long-lasting marriage which overcame any early difficulties. By the end of the 1950s Elizabeth was anxious to have more children. In the summer of 1959, after a long wait, she found she was pregnant at last. Prince Andrew was born on 19 February 1960, Prince Edward would follow on 10 March 1964. And before Andrew’s birth the Queen was able to make one concession at least to her husband’s feelings. As her Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary: ‘The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband – with whom she is desperately in love.’

  While the Royal Family as such would continue to be described as the House of Windsor, those descendants of the Queen who were not designated a royal highness would be Mountbatten-Windsors. It was, she said, when she announced the plan, ‘close to her heart’.

  Within hours of each birth, Queen Elizabeth – no Victoria – was asking to see official papers. All the same, her relationship with her second pair of children, so much younger than the first, was considerably more ‘hands-on’ – helped by her own increased confidence, her ability to fulfil her royal role without allowing it to consume her.

  The Queen here delightedly encourages her sons as Prince Charles treats his youngest brother Edward to a go-kart ride.

  She would often bathe and
put Andrew and Edward to bed, would allow them to race their bikes along the Windsor corridors, indulging them perhaps all the more for the fact that she had seen less of her elder children, now away at boarding school. The younger sons would feel less acutely than their elder siblings the fact that their mother was determined above all to do her public duty – was in effect the most notable career woman in her country.

  Changing Faces

  The 1960s had started on a bright note for the Royal Family, with the wedding of Princess Margaret – though her marriage to a commoner, Tony Armstrong-Jones, was controversial for the day. Macmillan remembered how, arriving at Windsor, he was greeted by the Queen’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester with the words: ‘Thank goodness you’ve come, Prime Minister. The Queen is in a terrible state. There’s a man called Jones in the library who says he wants to marry her sister.’ But in the end, of course, she gave her consent.

  It is possible that, after the Peter Townsend debacle, she simply could not bear once again to thwart her sister – whose flamboyant career as an unmarried woman in London’s smart set was itself becoming the subject of critical comment. In the event the marriage of the fairy-tale princess to the charming and glamorous photographer gave a welcome note of modernity to the Royal Family.

  On 6 May 1960, a hundred thousand people crowded the streets to watch the bride drive to Westminster Abbey, in a dress designed by Hartnell to the groom's instructions. Tony Armstrong-Jones initially refused the title offered to him by the Queen, but before the couple’s first child was born in November 1961, he consented to become the Earl of Snowdon.