Her Majesty Read online

  HER MAJESTY

  QUEEN ELIZABETH II

  AND HER COURT

  ROBERT HARDMAN

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  FOR MY WIFE, DIANA

  ‘Simply magnificent. This gripping, fascinating and authoritative tour de force – covering the Queen herself, the power and the celebrity of Britain’s royalty with equal panache – gleams with a unique combination of insider anecdotes, deep knowledge, personal experience and superb storytelling by Britain’s outstanding royal observer.’

  – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem

  ‘At long last we have the definitive portrait of Queen Elizabeth II’s world today. Robert Hardman knows the true story and tells it superbly.’

  – Andrew Roberts, author of The Royal House of Windsor

  Introduction

  ‘It’s amazing that she didn’t crack’

  When the world comes to look back on the early twenty-first century, two events in Britain – just weeks apart – will be lodged in the collective memory. One will be the 2012 London Olympics, a spectacular fortnight of international sporting endeavour. The other will be a celebration of a woman who has become so firmly established on the world stage that, in the words of one Commonwealth leader, she is no longer seen as merely British or, indeed, as merely human. She is the living incarnation of a set of values and a period of history. In Britain, she is Tower Bridge and a red double-decker bus on two legs, not to mention Big Ben, afternoon tea, village fêtes and sheep-flecked hills in the pouring rain. In the wider world, she is the newsreel figure who just has carried on going into digital high definition. More than one hundred nations – that’s more than half the countries on earth – did not even exist in their present form when she was crowned. While her presence is taken entirely for granted at home, to millions of people around the planet she represents continuity on a scale bordering on the incomprehensible.

  ‘She’s incredible,’ says Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, during a poignant and thoughtful first interview on someone he describes as ‘my grandmother first – and then she’s the Queen’. No one, surely, is better placed to imagine what it must have been like to succeed to the throne, as the Queen did, at twenty-five. Sitting in his office in St James’s Palace a few days before his own twenty-ninth birthday, the Prince ponders the enormity of her task: ‘Back then, there was a very different attitude to women. Being a young lady at twenty-five – and stepping in to a job which many men thought they could probably do better – it must have been very daunting. And I think there was extra pressure for her to perform.’ He remains in awe of the way she managed it: ‘You see the pictures of her and she looks so incredibly natural in the role. She’s calm, she’s poised, she’s elegant, she’s graceful and she’s all the things she needs to be at twenty-five. And you think how loads of twenty-five-year-olds – myself, my brother and lots of people included – didn’t have anything like that. And we didn’t have that extra pressure put on us at that age. It’s amazing that she didn’t crack. She just carried on and kept going. And that’s the thing about her. You present a challenge in front of her and she’ll climb it. And I think that to be doing that for sixty years – it’s incredible.’

  Only one other monarch has marked sixty years on the throne. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, however, was a celebration of imperial might featuring a rare and somewhat valedictory appearance by a reclusive Britannia figure. The Queen Empress was too lame to make it up the steps into St Paul’s Cathedral for her own service of thanksgiving. The clergy processed outside to her carriage instead. After sixty years of Queen Elizabeth II, the mood is entirely different. There is no triumphalism. Instead, the dominant emotion is one of pride in those quiet virtues of service, duty, stability. And the Monarch herself has no trouble with steps of any sort, whether they lead up to cathedrals or aircraft. In 2010, her list of engagements actually rose by almost 20 per cent. The schedule for 2011 – including the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, the momentous inaugural state visit to the Republic of Ireland and the state visit by President Barack Obama of the United States all within days of each other – would prove busier still.

  A jubilee, by definition, is a retrospective occasion. It is an invitation for everyone to view today’s world through a sepia-tinted lens. ‘If you compare life now, everything is incomparably better today than when the Queen came to the throne,’ says former Prime Minister Sir John Major. ‘I hope that will be a theme throughout the celebrations.’

  But in looking backwards, we run the risk of ignoring the most remarkable aspect of this reign – namely the monarchy today. Historians and psychiatrists talk about ‘Queen Victoria syndrome’, a capacity to shield oneself away from reality and live in the past. Queen Elizabeth II syndrome is the exact opposite.

  The more I have followed the monarchy professionally over two decades, the more I have seen it running counter to all conventional wisdom about family businesses and ancient institutions. This operation has emphatically not become more set in its ways as the management grows older. It has actually changed more in the last twenty-five years than in the previous one hundred and twenty-five. At times through necessity, at times through choice, it has adapted and repositioned itself again and again while the rest of us have barely noticed. ‘The great challenge of this organisation is management of change,’ says the Duke of York. ‘And that’s where the Queen has been so successful. This institution, under her leadership and guidance, has been able to change in a way and at a pace which reflects what is required by society’ The Queen herself is an extraordinary double act – the never changing, ever changing Monarch who happens to be the oldest in history, entering her jubilee year at the age of eighty-five. Yet no one thinks of her as a little old lady in a black dress harrumphing that she is not amused.

  We see Queen Victoria in Highland seclusion and set in aspic. We see Queen Elizabeth II walking dogs or watching a dancing display somewhere in the South Seas. She is a ‘now’ person, not a ‘then’ person.

  That is why this book is not a life story but, instead, a portrait of our Queen today. It is not a chronology but a study of a thoroughly modern monarch. There have been many excellent biographies of the Queen, notably those by Sarah Bradford, Robert Lacey, Elizabeth Longford and Ben Pimlott. In recent years, the picture has also been enhanced by superb biographies of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother by William Shawcross and Hugo Vickers. Equally, Jonathan Dimbleby has produced the definitive work on the Prince of Wales while Basil Boothroyd and Tim Heald have both captured the oceanic contribution of the Duke of Edinburgh to both royal and public life. The volume of work devoted to the tragically short life and times of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a library in itself.

  Naturally, I have explored the past to put the present in context and have unearthed old files and fresh material from throughout the Queen’s six decades on the throne. But what follows is a contemporary inside view of one of the most respected public figures in the modern world. The Queen has never granted an interview and, I dare say, never will. At some point, many years from now and in another reign, an official biographer will be granted access to the diary she writes dutifully every night. Until then, her thoughts will remain, for the most part, off-limits.

  But I have been granted special access to those who really know her and those who work – and have worked – with her. I have spoken to members of the Royal Family, prime ministers, private secretaries, prelates, pages, footmen and friends. I have been able to follow her around the world, around the country and around her own palace at close quarters. The jubilee may be an occasion for all of us to look back over the last sixty years but the star turn will prefer to keep looking ahead. She accepts that her anniversary is a big d
eal for some. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office has already declared an amnesty on tat. ‘Normally, we don’t allow people to stick the Queen’s arms on things like mugs,’ says Deputy Comptroller Jonathan Spencer. ‘But for the jubilee, we are giving them a free-for-all and saying, “Go for it.”’ Even so, she will be mildly bemused and faintly embarrassed by all the fuss. History is important to her but the present is rather more important.

  One day, in the midst of my research, I followed the Queen to a service in Westminster Abbey, the royal holy of holies – crowning place, marrying place, funeral place of sovereigns for almost a millennium. Several months later, billions would tune in to watch Prince William marry Catherine Middleton here inside Edward the Confessor’s mighty foundation. At the end of this particular service, the Queen was taken to a side chapel to meet a team of experts beginning a £200,000 renovation of the most sacred royal relic of the lot, St Edward’s Chair. It is also called the Coronation Chair although it is otherwise known, simply, as The Throne. It has sat in the Abbey for seven hundred years and has been used at every coronation since the fourteenth century. Scotland’s sacred Stone of Scone slots in beneath it. The Queen was sitting on this battered oak seat, six feet tall and etched with centuries-old graffiti, when she was crowned Monarch herself. What was striking about this moment, though, was the Queen’s reaction. She might have been viewing a moderately interesting new traffic control centre in the West Midlands. She listened politely to a short explanation about the restoration work. Then she admitted that, despite visiting the Abbey countless times throughout her reign, she had not actually seen the chair since 1953. It was nice to see it in one piece, she said, but time was pressing. And, with that, she was off. She then moved next door to the Abbey’s education centre where she spent twice as long watching children from a local primary school learning how to draw a Tudor rose.

  1

  Her Achievement

  ‘She’s really determined to finish everything she started.’

  Judging by the internal memos, it’s surprising that the Queen was able to see her audience – or indeed breathe. This was to be her finest hour, a gathering of the mightiest in the land to salute the all-conquering heroine of the seven seas. Less than a year after her Coronation, the dizzyingly glamorous young Sovereign and her consort were to be welcomed home from what, to this day, remains the greatest royal tour of all time.

  So there was to be no holding back on the vital ingredients as the Lord Mayor of London and his court started planning the grandest post-war feast the capital had seen. No less than £174 – more than 10 per cent of the entire food budget – was to be spent on tobacco. There were to be individual mixed boxes of cigars (two sizes) and cigarettes (both Turkish and Virginia) for each of the 401 Mansion House guests, plus red leather match cases and extra supplies of Punch cigars and Fribourg & Treyer cigarettes just in case anyone ran out. And why not? The Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, would expect nothing less.

  The bill for musical entertainment, on the other hand, was not to stretch beyond £50 (only £11 more than the budget for ‘white gloves’). Fortunately, the Band of the Royal Artillery was happy to oblige for £47. The well-nourished members of the food-tasting committee were eventually able to agree on a menu and the invitations were finally dispatched. And thus began an ill-concealed scramble for the hottest ticket since the Coronation itself.

  On 2 June 1953, Westminster Abbey had staged the first global television spectacular in history as the Queen was crowned. Five months later, she departed on a journey which would take her all the way around the world. Her purpose was to greet and be greeted by the newly rebranded ‘Commonwealth’, even if most people still insisted on calling it ‘the Empire’. To celebrate her return in May 1954, the City of London would stage this official state luncheon. As plans for the royal homecoming were being drawn up in the capital, the tour had reached its zenith in Australia. That country had never seen a sovereign in the flesh before. The adoration and adulation were astonishing, even by the standards of Coronation-era Britain. On one Sydney evening, more than a quarter of a million people turned out just to watch the Queen return from the theatre. When the Lord Mayor of Sydney held a banquet, there were two thousand casualties on the streets at what became known as ‘sardine corners’. The entire rail network was shut down when thousands spilled on to the tracks to wave at the royal train.

  According to Australia’s Dr Jane Connors, who has studied the social and cultural impact of the tour in depth, even the most remote parts of Australia experienced mayhem. The dairy town of Lismore saw the first traffic jam in its history. More than 30,000 people squeezed into the town of Casino (population: 8,000) to welcome the Queen, including the injured passengers from an overturned bus who refused to seek hospital treatment until the royal couple had left. Despite heavy flooding, remote communities tackled mudslides and swollen rivers to see their sovereign. Mr and Mrs Allingham of Southwick, both aged seventy-five, spent three days on horseback, swimming across several creeks en route, to cheer the Queen in Townsville. A million people lined the road into Melbourne from Essendon Aerodrome. More than five hundred were hurt, one critically, when a stand collapsed in Cairns. The Melbourne Age found a group of Aboriginal children who had collected enough dingo scalps to pay for a two-thousand-mile round trip by bus.

  The British press decided enough was enough. ‘GO EASY,’ demanded a Daily Mirror headline. ‘YOU MAY HARM THE QUEEN’. But as the Queen headed for home via the Indian Ocean and Malta, where she joined the stylish new Royal Yacht Britannia, the excitement in Britain was reaching similar levels. Documents in the City archives show that the Lord Mayor was batting off requests thick and fast. One City councilman lobbied the organising committee to find a seat for the American preacher Billy Graham (he was informed that there was already a surfeit of ‘Ecclesiastical representatives’).

  Churchill himself elected to join Britannia off the Isle of Wight on the eve of a triumphal journey up the Thames. When the Queen caught him nodding off during the after-dinner film, she urged him to go to bed. ‘Now we have you home,’ he replied, ‘I shall sleep very well.’ A day later, he was standing at the Queen’s side as the Royal Yacht sailed beneath Tower Bridge, to the cheers of a city en fête. To this day, she likes to recall his running commentary on the approach as he proclaimed the Thames not as ‘a muddy old river’ but as ‘the silver thread that runs through British history’.

  Ahead of the great luncheon, the Queen travelled in state through the capital. At Temple Bar, the historic gateway to the City itself, there was a formal welcome from the Lord Mayor and his panoply of fur-hooded, velvet-robed, cocked-hatted, sword-bearing sheriffs, aldermen and remembrancers – almost everyone, in fact, bar Dick Whittington and his cat. Shortly afterwards, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, the leaders of the Church, the judiciary, the Forces, the Civil Service, the City and ‘the Learned Institutions’ were assembled in morning dress at the Mansion House to welcome the Queen plus her husband, mother, sister and cousins to lunch. A suitably colourful menu (by the austere standards of the day) had been prepared in honour of such an exotic tour. ‘Avocado pear and shrimps’ was to be followed by ‘Scotch Salmon Hollandaise’, ‘Spring Chicken St George’ and ‘Strawberry Melba’, accompanied by Australian wines and a 1945 Krug champagne (plus ‘cold luncheon’ for staff and ‘beer and sandwiches in the Gaoler’s Room’ for the BBC).

  Through the plumes of post-prandial smoke, the Lord Mayor, Sir Noël Bowater Bt MC, summed up the tour as follows: ‘As an achievement of inspired conception and brilliant execution,’ he told the Queen, ‘it will ever remain a glittering jewel in the casket of a nation’s memory.’*

  The Queen’s equally colourful response captures the energy and sense of purpose of those early years of the reign. ‘Mount Cook soaring above the snows of the Southern Alps of New Zealand is but remotely related to the scorched rocks of Aden,’ she declared. ‘Yet, in these lands, their peoples hold strongly to certain common prin
ciples which all of them believe to be vital. In all of them, the idea of a parliamentary, democratic form of government is accepted and respected … part of the ultimate heritage of every one of my people.’ Even in the midst of all this euphoria, though, she readily acknowledged that there was no point in maintaining a monarchy simply for the sake of it. ‘The structure and framework of constitutional monarchy could easily stand as an archaic and meaningless survival,’ she went on. ‘But wherever we have been, we have received visible and audible proof that it is real and living in the hearts of the people.’

  Tens of thousands were waiting outside the Mansion House, demanding her appearance on the balcony. The same crowds which had cheered her carriage all the way through London to the luncheon cheered her all the way back to the Palace. Were there no bounds to the heart-soaring brilliance of this new Elizabethan age? Who could possibly dispute Cecil Rhodes’s axiom that to be English was to have ‘won first prize in the lottery of life’? The whole world, it seemed, was in love with the twenty-eight-year-old Gloriana. As Churchill put it: ‘Even Envy wore a friendly smile.’

  Nearly sixty years later, the Queen is on her way back to London’s ancient financial district. But today’s crowd is no more than a hundred-strong. Most are just passers-by who have noticed a small cluster of television cameras. A celebrity must be imminent. But which one? All are delighted to discover that it’s the Queen, yet a little surprised at the absence of fuss. But that is how the Queen likes it these days. And today she does not want to meet the great and the good. Just the good. As the capital’s financial district continues to recover from the self-inflicted wounds of economic meltdown, the Queen is coming to salute those who do not move money around but simply keep the Square Mile going – the Tube staff, the police, the caterers and so on. She will not meet a banker all day. And there will be no cocked hats and swords at Temple Bar, either. Her car will just drive straight past.