CHAPTER XIV
MIDDLE AGE AND economic collapse are a surprising recipe for apotheosis. In the celebrations surrounding her Silver Jubilee in the summer of 1977, a mostly grateful nation repaid Elizabeth’s twenty-five years on the throne with an enthusiastic demonstration of affection and admiration. In an echo of her grandfather’s response four decades earlier, Elizabeth was both astonished and moved. To a courtier she repeated over and over again, ‘I am simply amazed, I had no idea.’ ‘Why me?’ she asked a friend, without disingenuousness. ‘I’m just an ordinary person.’1
Without disappearing, the iconoclasm of the previous decade had dwindled. In 1975, a correspondent in the north of England had written to royal scourge William Hamilton, ‘I think that our dear Queen does a wonderful job and cannot be praised too highly.’2 Three years earlier, in November 1972, commentary accompanying television footage of Elizabeth and Philip’s silver wedding anniversary procession to Westminster Abbey had acclaimed Elizabeth as both loved and esteemed. In contrast to the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, which castigated Elizabeth as out of date and ‘square’, it identified as praiseworthy her very unchangingness: ‘In an age of rapid change in which many ancient institutions, including marriage, have been questioned,’ viewers learned, ‘the Royal Family has set an example of stability and respect for the basic simple values of human relations that has inspired even the sceptics.’3 It was a sentiment championed by rearguard comment in the Daily Telegraph as early as 1969, when the paper insisted ‘there is really no need for continuous change in all things... what ordinary people desperately need in this age of swirling dissolution and transformation is something constant and durable to hang on to. Is it not part of the Monarch’s high function to supply this?’.4 Slogans on banners confronting Elizabeth on a visit to the University of East Anglia the year before had included ‘No to Anarchy, Yes to Monarchy’. Both might have served as mission statements for Elizabeth, and the Telegraph’s plea for constancy did indeed later become one. For the moment neither William Heseltine nor Martin Charteris, appointed Elizabeth’s private secretary on Adeane’s retirement in April 1972, intended to forfeit the hard-won claim to being in touch that was among outcomes of Royal Family. And so a forward-thinking Elizabeth, describing herself and Philip, had told guests at the Guildhall lunch for her silver wedding anniversary, ‘Neither of us are much given to looking back.’ It was not true of her attitude to monarchy; it accurately expressed her pragmatic acceptance of a life of restricted freedoms and tyrannous diary planning. To her ladies-in-waiting was entrusted the task of acknowledging anniversary presents: red rose bushes from Lancashire County Council, a baby elephant from the president of Cameroon.
Elizabeth’s Guildhall speech included a statement that ought to have surprised her husband: ‘We had the good fortune to grow up in happy and united families.’ This had been her own experience of the life of ‘us four’; it was misleading as a description of Philip’s fractured growing-up. Throughout the 1970s, Elizabeth continued to promote a vision of Britain’s monarchy as a happy, unified family, an example of domestic probity to encourage and inspire. ‘If I am asked today what I think about family life after twenty-five years,’ she told Guildhall guests, ‘I can answer with… simplicity and conviction. I am for it.’ On Boxing Day, with nineteen family members, including all four of her children, her mother, sister, Kent cousins and their children, she and Philip had posed for official silver wedding photographs by Patrick Lichfield, himself a cousin through her mother’s family. Several are strangely messy images. Elizabeth is seated centrally, her family sitting or standing round her heavy giltwood chair, would-be informality at odds with a backdrop of painted and gilded panelling and towering portraits of George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The photographs’ message was apparently simple, grounding a smiling Elizabeth within the family circle; the portraits recalled an earlier happy royal marriage, George and Charlotte parents to fifteen children. But Lichfield’s photographs had a wishful as well as a celebratory quality. Both Margaret and Tony Armstrong-Jones had already embarked on the series of affairs that spelled out for each of them their long-term incompatibility. Elizabeth disliked gossip and inclined to ignore family difficulties, but the Snowdons’ differences had ceased to be palace secrets. A book published in 1970 had informed readers that ‘endless rumours circulate about Tony and Meg... When is Tony going to leave? Or vice versa’; among the author’s interviewees were Margaret and Tony.5 That children emulate their parents, faithful to family models, was a cornerstone of Elizabeth’s beliefs and true in her own case. In her Christmas broadcast in 1971, she expressed her view of parents’ responsibility towards their children: ‘We... leave them with a set of values which they take from our lives and from our example.’ It would hardly be true of her own children, and only a determinedly optimistic Elizabeth could have hoped that loyalty to their parents’ ideals and the memory of ‘us four’ would continue to bolster Margaret in her increasingly acrimonious marriage.
In the spring of 1972, during a tour of France, Elizabeth visited the Duke of Windsor. Their meeting moved her to tears. Ten days from death, wasted by cancer and racked with pain, the duke had passed beyond high emotion. Interest in the family he had cast aside, who had punished his defection with private recrimination and icy public indifference, was consigned to memory. Elizabeth had already agreed to his request that he and the duchess be buried at Frogmore; their meeting so close to the end was for Elizabeth’s benefit not his, a closing of a rupture of four decades’ standing, at a point at which all that remained for the duke were his concerns for the wife he left behind. Despite being attached to a drip, he was dressed; he left his bedroom for an upstairs sitting room, his doctor close by. Somehow he summoned the energy at Elizabeth’s entry not only to stand but to bow. In his gaunt, lined face were reminders of her father that shook Elizabeth deeply. To those who chose to interpret it as such, her visit was a sign of the family unity for which commentators like historian Sir Charles Petrie had been calling for a number of years. Following the duke’s death ten days later, his coffin was placed on display in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. At the funeral Elizabeth’s behaviour towards the duchess was solicitous, even, in one account, touchingly maternal; the day after, she instructed her lord chamberlain, Lord Maclean, to accompany the duchess to Heathrow Airport for her return flight to Paris. None of the royal family joined Maclean, an absence noted by newspapers. It was an arid sort of reconciliation, evidence that, in some ways, Elizabeth did indeed, as she had told Guildhall guests, lack the appetite for looking back.
Divisions within Elizabeth’s wider ‘family’ of the Commonwealth proved similarly challenging. In 1947, Elizabeth had dedicated herself for life to Britain’s ‘imperial family’; she had used her Christmas broadcasts to promote an ideal of Commonwealth unity. The Commonwealth was integral to her royal identity. She regarded it as a cornerstone of her inheritance. As late as 1970, in a speech in Hobart, she referred – either proprietorially or with old-fashioned paternalism – to ‘my Tasmanian people’ (author’s italics). She was Queen of the United Kingdom and former imperial territories large and small; on 16 September 1975, she had acquired an additional realm when the newly independent Papua New Guinea invited her to become its queen. In Britain, the passage of time had eroded popular imperialism, leaving a void that, for most of Elizabeth’s subjects at home, the Commonwealth did not fill. In April 1962, cabinet secretary Norman Brook had asked ‘What is the significance and purpose of the Commonwealth in the years ahead? What function and value will this new Commonwealth have in the modern world?’; writing in The Times in 1964, Conservative MP Enoch Powell described the grouping unambiguously as ‘a gigantic farce’.6 Wilson’s replacement in the summer of 1970 by Conservative prime minister Edward Heath made clear to Elizabeth the peripheral status of her cherished family of nations for many of her countrymen. Heath was an ardent Europhile, committed to British entry to the Common Market; he accorded a much lower priority to the Commonwealth. Martin Charteris claimed that Elizabeth found him heavy going. His lack of concern for the Commonwealth, absence of small talk or perceptible humour and any chivalrous impulse towards Elizabeth personally, and his interests in sailing and classical music, which she did not share, made theirs a more socially sterile relationship than Elizabeth had enjoyed with Heath’s predecessors. Heath subsequently described his punctilio in his dealings with Elizabeth, the agenda for their weekly audiences drawn up in advance and shared with Elizabeth’s private secretary, much as Wilson had done, his determination to conceal nothing from her. Theirs were not, however, the easy, discursive exchanges Elizabeth had enjoyed with Wilson or Churchill, or Macmillan’s wide-ranging disquisitions, though a practised Elizabeth quickly established trust between them, and Heath, who was unmarried, valued the possibility of unburdening himself in meetings that were reliably confidential. He discovered the full extent of Elizabeth’s impartiality, noting that she never voiced opposition to government policy: her method was to probe him about the merits of a decision while withholding any indication of her own views. He did not treat Elizabeth with discourtesy, nor did he fail to support her. The Civil List settlement of 1970 was as favourable as Wilson or the palace could have wished. A letter leaked in December 1973 revealed that, like Elizabeth, Heath attached ‘great importance to arrangements which protect the Queen’s private share holdings from disclosure’.7
More than any previous prime minister, however, Heath made clear his distinction between the government’s priorities and Elizabeth’s. Each might have argued that their concern represented the nation’s best interests, but it was Heath not Elizabeth who wielded ultimate power. His decision to resume selling arms to South Africa, overturning Wilson’s embargo in protest at South African apartheid, angered black Africa: among those who threatened to leave the Commonwealth were Tanzania and Zambia. Elizabeth could not make public her sympathies any more than she could have ignored Heath’s advice, amounting to an instruction, that she not attend the first Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Singapore in January 1971, at which opposition to his policy was expected to be vocal and energetic. Elizabeth communicated to Heath’s advisers her deep unhappiness and her feelings about his ‘undisguised disrespect’ for Commonwealth sensibilities and its leaders; she was more cautious about her views on his setting aside any role for her at the gathering.8 That Heath’s administration did not resolve the question of Rhodesia, which, in 1965, had declared itself independent under white rule, while attempting to retain Elizabeth as head of state, was unsurprising. The prime minister was simply not interested enough. Elizabeth’s anxiety that the continuing political exclusion of Rhodesia’s black majority anger other African nations to the extent of fragmenting the Commonwealth was one her premier apparently failed to share. Economic crises at home were more pressing; more immediate redress was demanded by escalating violence in Northern Ireland. In January 1972, the Bloody Sunday killing of thirteen unarmed civilian demonstrators by British paratroopers in Londonderry ushered in a year of frightful sectarian violence in which as many as 479 people would be killed and 4,876 injured. In the first instance, its likely effect on the Commonwealth, more than threats to national sovereignty, which did not emerge immediately, coloured Elizabeth’s attitude to Britain’s joining the EEC, which came into effect on 1 January 1973. This was the rationale behind her Christmas broadcast of the preceding week: carefully emollient, mindful of Commonwealth reactions to Macmillan’s entry bid in 1960. Elizabeth suggested that ‘new links with Europe will not replace those with the Commonwealth’; she prayed for peace in Northern Ireland. In both aspirations she would be thwarted. In December, she had accepted an invitation from Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to attend the 1973 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Ottawa. She had responded to the invitation as Queen of Canada, without consulting Heath, sidestepping the possibility of a second veto. Plans were made for goodwill visits to Australia in October and, early in 1974, to New Zealand. On 3 January, Elizabeth and Philip joined Edward Heath at the Royal Opera House for a gala celebration, ‘Fanfare for Europe’. The prime minister described his heart as ‘full of joy... at the recognition which Her Majesty had given to our country’s great achievement’, but a Gallup poll had found only thirty-eight per cent of respondents in favour of joining the EEC and angry protesters heckled the royal arrival.9 Three months before, at Stirling University in October, Elizabeth had experienced similar jeering, ‘obscenities... and ribald songs’ by students protesting at the cost of her visit there.10 At Covent Garden, phlegmatic and tactful, she was well served by what she had once lamented as her ‘rather too mundane’ way of looking at things. Her tiara broke en route to the gala. Patrick Plunket came to her rescue and, in place of the broken jewel, Elizabeth wore Plunket’s own family tiara, which he had hurriedly retrieved from his London home nearby. Anyone more fanciful might have been tempted to interpret it as an omen.
Public reaction in May 1973 to Anne’s engagement to Mark Phillips, an officer in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards and, like Anne, an international equestrian, focused on Phillips’s lack of a title, like Tony Armstrong-Jones. More than Margaret’s marriage, however, Anne’s husband-to-be appeared on the surface a man of the sort Elizabeth herself might have chosen had she realized the childhood ambition she confessed to Horace Smith of living in the country with lots of dogs and horses. Phillips’s father and grandfather had served as officers in the same Guards regiment. From 1947 to 1950, his maternal grandfather, Colonel John Tiarks of the Royal Armoured Corps, had served as aide-de-camp to George VI. At a photocall in the garden at Buckingham Palace, the newly engaged couple were joined by their black labradors. Debrett calculated that Anne and Mark were thirteenth cousins three times removed through a shared forebear in the early sixteenth century, a detail more likely to have amused than impressed unsnobbish Elizabeth. Colonel Tiarks’s royal service overlapped with the first years of Elizabeth’s marriage and the move to Clarence House, and the personal connection between the families was slender. Elizabeth was sceptical about the match, despite Mark Phillips’s prowess as a rider and interests confined to horses and the army. Her family, including Charles, shared her reservations, but Elizabeth did not intervene. She had never offered family leadership save by her own uncomplicated example in which dedication to her non-family role as sovereign overrode conventional maternal impulses. Anne was strong-willed; she expected to get her own way. Time would suggest with devastating clarity that Elizabeth’s inclination to endorse her children’s wilful autonomy was a lapse in the good sense and wisdom that Charles had praised at the time of his investiture.
Despite the clear unsuitedness for such a role of blunt, brusque Anne – the first British princess to command a Centurion tank – journalists determined to transform her into the heroine of a fairy-tale romance. Only a year before, Cecil Beaton had described Elizabeth at forty-six as ‘positively dazzling... her eyes flashed like crystal, her teeth dazzling, her smile radiant... at the peak of her looks,... a work of art’; in the summer of 1971, the Earl of Longford had insisted she was ‘wonderful, beautiful’.11 With Anne’s engagement, the Elizabeth of writers’ and journalists’ imaginations at last ceased to play the part of fairy-tale princess they had forced upon her for so long; the baton passed to a younger generation. The palace conspired in the improbable illusion. Norman Parkinson had photographed Anne for Vogue to mark her twenty-first birthday in 1971. In 1973, he was summoned again. He successfully created a rosy backlit vision of a jewelled and frilly-frocked princess, with her loving Guardsman, that helped stoke considerable public interest in their November wedding, on Charles’s birthday, at Westminster Abbey. The ceremony was attended by a clutch of European royals, all of them bar Beatrix and Claus of the Netherlands and the Prince and Princess of Monaco relatives of the bride’s. But attitudes had changed over Elizabeth’s twenty-year reign. A film released after the ceremony, Princess Anne – A Royal Romance, informed viewers, as it might have done at the time of Elizabeth’s own wedding, ‘In all the best fairy stories the princess marries the man she loves.’ On this occasion a note of equivocation unbalanced glib certainties: ‘Let us hope that in this story too they all live happily ever afterwards.’ It was also Elizabeth’s hope. In a pattern that would characterize her dealings with her grown-up children, the hope proved sterile.
Gossip at court suggested that Elizabeth’s hopes for Margaret’s marriage were running thin. At the ball at Buckingham Palace on the eve of Anne’s wedding, Cecil Beaton failed to see Margaret’s husband. In his diary, Beaton, who disliked Tony Armstrong-Jones, reflected with some pleasure, ‘It is said that the Queen would be willing to let P[rince]ss M[argaret] get rid of him but Tony won’t go’; as always, Elizabeth’s feelings towards her sister included an element of protectiveness.12 The couple lived separate lives. Earlier that year, Margaret had been introduced to Roddy Llewellyn, a willowy young man seventeen years her junior; their relationship would ultimately test Elizabeth’s tolerance and precipitate the end of Margaret’s marriage. Margaret’s susceptibility contrasted with the settled quality of Elizabeth’s own domestic life, as Elizabeth was surely aware. Rumours of Philip’s roving eye, gossip-writers’ preoccupation in the 1950s, never entirely disappeared. He was flirtatious and energetic in his attentions to a handful of attractive, well-born women, but Elizabeth’s public reaction was serene. Philip contributed a dash of mustard to the couple’s family life; the strength of their shared affection was acknowledged by their closest friends. In the case of Margaret and Tony, love had ceased to season antagonism. Anne’s brief transformation into the family’s fairy-tale princess and Margaret’s midlife waywardness seemed to legitimize Elizabeth’s headscarf-wearing middle age: with the spotlight elsewhere, Elizabeth no longer needed to concern herself with Altrincham-style criticism of her tweediness, if indeed she ever had. After a performance at Windsor Castle by Joyce Grenfell the summer of Anne’s engagement, Elizabeth, who had chosen Grenfell’s programme – ‘All the numbers were comedy; that is what the Queen specifically wanted the programme to be’13 – wrote to thank her. Elizabeth ‘hoped they had not been a very “stuffed shirt” audience’.14 Significantly, it was neither an apology nor a justification.
For Grenfell it was a golden evening, ‘gloriously grand’. She was dazzled by the beauty of her surrounds, like poet Ted Hughes visiting Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace a year later, finding it ‘more palatial than anything I had imagined possible... Everything gleaming & glittering under the chandeliers.’15 Grenfell described it as ‘managed with the superb order that only the British now seem capable of achieving... [an occasion] of real style to lift the heart, gladden the eye, and nourish the spirit’.16 The superb order of Elizabeth’s formal entertaining was mostly Patrick Plunket’s doing. Grenfell marvelled at ‘visual pleasures’ she termed ‘endless’: ‘eight-foot-tall standard fuchsias... all at their exact point of perfection’, ‘an exuberant flower arrangement, on a scale that made me gasp’, the ballet-like procession into dinner. She did not see Plunket’s imprint on the mix of Elizabeth’s guests, his inclusion of those outside the tight-knit circle of traditional court aristocrats, or his solicitude for Elizabeth’s own enjoyment; she did not know that it was Plunket, more than Queen Mary, who had engaged Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for the dazzling art treasures by which she was surrounded. Unmarried and of easy charm, imaginative and deft, Plunket contributed harmony as well as style to Elizabeth’s court. His combination of intense admiration for the woman he had known since childhood, adroit administrative skills in overseeing a wide-ranging remit and his readiness to have with her the difficult conversations others avoided made him invaluable and irreplaceable, as Elizabeth knew. The Daily Mirror suggested that Plunket would emerge from Elizabeth’s official biography as ‘her eyes and ears on a world that is often denied to her’; it described their low-key visits to the ABC Cinema on London’s Fulham Road, followed by supper nearby at San Frediano or Spot 3, and cosy TV dinners in Philip’s absence watching Mastermind or Till Death Us Do Part.17 Plunket rode with Elizabeth, shot with Philip, fished with the Queen Mother and Charles, played the piano with Margaret. His diagnosis of inoperable cancer of the liver, followed by his death on Easter Sunday 1975, shook Elizabeth; an unnamed ‘close friend’ described her two months later as still ‘very miserable’.18 His death robbed her court of a senior official whose respect for tradition was neither pompous nor inflexible; he had leavened the staidness that was inevitable in an environment shaped by caution and precedent. Unusually Elizabeth attended both his funeral and memorial service. His family believed she had a hand in his obituary in The Times; she agreed to his burial at Frogmore, where she also contributed to a memorial in the form of a pavilion. A lady of the bedchamber described Patrick Plunket as ‘the one person who could talk to [Elizabeth] on equal terms’.19 It has become a biographical commonplace to liken the relationship of monarch and courtier to that of siblings, but even in one of Elizabeth’s last letters to him she maintained her distance, signing herself formally ‘Yours sincerely, Elizabeth R’.20 On this occasion she accompanied the note, delivered on Plunket’s breakfast tray, with a posy of miniature spring flowers.
Plunket’s bequest to Elizabeth of the small seascape by early-nineteenth-century landscapist Richard Parkes Bonington that had previously hung above the chimneypiece in his drawing room in the country testified to his affection. An image of English coast and sky, it was a reminder too of the solace of wide-open spaces away from the hurly burly.
The plan conceived by London Transport in the summer of 1976 to mark Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee a year later with twenty-five silver-painted buses included a hope that advertisers would be found to sponsor the buses’ new livery. The country’s economic condition remained parlous. A month after Anne’s wedding, in the face of dwindling fuel supplies, union militancy and steeply rising costs of living, including a seventy per cent increase in oil prices, Edward Heath had imposed a three-day week and power cuts. A second Wilson premiership, following two elections in 1974, failed to redirect the tide. Within a year, inflation hit twenty-five per cent. Strikes multiplied, dividing popular sympathies. There were, wrote Philip, ‘many worms in the fruit’.21 Elizabeth’s engagements accommodated pressing concerns. Among iconic images of the mid-1970s were photographs of the royal visit to Silverwood Colliery in South Yorkshire: in snowy white overalls and wearing a hard hat over her headscarf, Elizabeth smiles dazzlingly as she talks to miners. In 1976, Britain applied to the International Monetary Fund for a £2.3 billion bail-out. Two years earlier, Elizabeth herself had been forced to request a similar bail-out: a second increase in the Civil List, to an annual £1.4 million. Agreed by a disgruntled parliament, the request at such a pass was not guaranteed to bolster popular support either for Elizabeth or the monarchy more generally. In an atmosphere of grumbling discontent, William Hamilton’s republican philippic, My Queen and I, was widely publicized; his targets included Margaret, wintering on Mustique, derided for ‘her expensive, extravagant irrelevance’.22 Elizabeth’s personal economies were less widely circulated, though her decision in 1975, explained to dressmaker Hardy Amies, that her wardrobe for tours to Mexico and Japan would need to include ‘my last year’s dresses’ in order to cut costs, could not have gone far to counter Hamilton’s criticisms, well-informed as they were given his place on the 1971 Select Committee.23 1974 had been a successful year for Elizabeth as a racehorse owner. Her filly Highclere won the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket, the Prix de Diane at Chantilly and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at Ascot. It was the first time in nearly two decades that one of Elizabeth’s horses had won a classic title, and her winnings, in the year of her second requested Civil List increase, amounted to £140,000.24 Two years later, to her considerable pleasure, it was another of Elizabeth’s horses, Goodwill, that Anne rode in the Montreal Olympics as a member of the British equestrian team.
Plans for local celebrations of Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, only the second in British history, occupied communities across Britain throughout a year’s lead-up. As expected there were dissenters: Labour councillors in Knowsley, for example, pressed instead for celebration of May Day as Labour Day. ‘No matter how much the children would enjoy the celebrations for the Queen, I think it would be more appropriate to have them on May Day. It would be better than celebrating this outmoded institution,’ insisted Councillor George Howarth in December.25 The same month Charles gave up his command of minesweeper HMS Bronington, leaving the navy to head the committee organizing official jubilee celebrations. He gave his navy severance pay to the new Prince’s Trust, which he had launched in June. Elizabeth requested that a proposed jubilee scheme ‘help young people help others’ by encouraging voluntary service by the young within their own communities.
It was not in Elizabeth’s nature to anticipate the approaching celebrations as a personal endorsement, though for the most part her staff, led by Martin Charteris, were both determined and quietly confident. With the exception of silence on the part of the poet laureate, John Betjeman, who excused himself as lacking inspiration, responses to Elizabeth’s fiftieth birthday in April 1976 had offered grounds for optimism. ‘At a time when the country needs all the encouragement it can get,’ The Times had told readers, ‘it is a strength and reassurance that the central institution of the monarch is so sound.’26 With Britain close to bankruptcy and forced to cut public spending as a condition of IMF aid, government bodies were more apathetic than the palace or the provincial scout groups and Women’s Institute branches whose plans filled local papers. Unlike protracted anticipation of the coronation, interest in the Silver Jubilee was slow to gain momentum. In this instance, Charles forced Betjeman’s hand. The poet’s lacklustre offering provoked derision, though its reference to ‘That look of dedication / In her trusting eyes of blue’ came close to how Elizabeth may have wished to be commemorated, and suggests the open gaze of Michael Noakes’s enigmatic portrait of Elizabeth, painted at the time of her silver wedding anniversary, which Charles, who acquired it, later included in an exhibition of his favourite works of art.
In the prayers led by the Bishop of London in the service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral on 7 June 1977, at which Elizabeth appeared markedly happy, was the hope that she ‘always possess the hearts of her people’. Demonstrations of the extent and sincerity of popular affection dominated jubilee summer. Elizabeth’s visits to thirty-six counties of the United Kingdom were greeted by enormous crowds: in Bristol city centre, a quarter of a million people clustered to see her; some 40,000 children filled a stadium in Leeds. Tributes were fond and eccentric in equal measure, a distinctively British gallimaufry. In Cricklewood, firemen were required to assemble the twenty-five tiers of jubilee cake baked and iced over six months by a local electrician; half a million rose petals, collected from the city’s gardens, rained on Elizabeth’s drive through Bath; in still working-class Fulham, kerbstones were painted red, white and blue and house fronts extravagantly strung with bunting. A million people thronged the Mall to watch the royal procession that culminated in the golden state coach in which Elizabeth and Philip had last ridden in 1953; the size of the crowds equalled those of the coronation. The Archbishop of Canterbury celebrated ‘service untiringly done, duty faithfully fulfilled, and... a home life stable and wonderfully happy’. Elizabeth wore a dress and matching coat of bright pink, the same colour she had worn forty-two years earlier for her grandfather’s silver jubilee. Even its designer, Hardy Amies, admitted its costliness, the coat ‘lined with the same material as that of the dress. This was extravagant because the heavy silk crepe was very expensive.’27 In a nod to straitened times, it was not a new outfit: she had worn it a year earlier, to open the Olympic Games in Montreal.
Commentators acclaimed the ‘ecstatic ovation’ that accompanied the gold coach on its journey. Martin Charteris detected a similar response throughout Elizabeth’s extensive travels, which encompassed every part of Britain, despite the dangers in Northern Ireland, where over 30,000 police and troops were on alert throughout her two-day visit, and journeys of 56,000 miles around Commonwealth countries. ‘She had a love affair with the country,’ Charteris suggested; Philip Ziegler noted that, as she walked among the crowds, ‘their hands stretched out to her as if she were a medieval monarch whose touch would cure’.28 It was a very personal triumph at a low point in the nation’s fortunes, proof of a theory expounded thirty years earlier in John Masefield’s poem written to commemorate Elizabeth’s wedding: ‘A Crown shines,’ the poet had claimed, ‘when hope is dim and luck is out of joint… There a land’s spirit finds a rallying point.’29 Fervent, fleeting expressions of mass affection are typical of royal celebrations. In the summer of 1977, a continually smiling Elizabeth appeared to return the warmth of feeling she encountered in walkabouts the length and breadth of the country. Robert Lacey recorded a brief exchange in which a young woman told Elizabeth, ‘We’ve come here because we love you.’ It was not the sort of statement with which Elizabeth typically engages, but she responded in kind, revealingly: ‘I can feel it, and it means so much to me.’30 By the end of her reign, such statements had been overused by those in the public eye to the point of meaninglessness. This was not the case in 1977, and Elizabeth did not dissemble her feelings. That she allowed herself such candour suggests how moved she was. Throughout her life, lustily enthusiastic crowds had played their part: at her grandfather’s silver jubilee, her parents’ coronation and her own, on her visits overseas, both within and outside the Commonwealth. Elizabeth did not take for granted the feelings that drew people to the streets in jubilee summer; the most controlled of women, she was touched by a celebration that, as in her grandfather’s case, became a robust thanksgiving for her twenty-five years’ service. On its front page on 8 June, the Daily Mail quoted Elizabeth asking, ‘Is everybody happy? I am!’31 Her happiness both fed off and fed the warmth of public acclaim. Two days later, she took part in the final set piece of London celebrations, a river procession; she made her last appearance after midnight. In one diary account she was all but pushed on to the palace balcony by Margaret, who alone ‘grasp[ed] the fervour of the crowd’.32 Her cousin’s wife, the Duchess of Kent, described her as ‘totally bewildered and overwhelmed by this huge flood of affection directed towards her’.33 ‘The roar [of the crowd] was deafening. The Queen had only to lift her hand a little for a tide of fervour to ripple through the masses looking up.’34 As Elizabeth had always acknowledged, she did not possess her mother’s ability to respond with spontaneity to public displays. It was Margaret, less reserved, unconstrained by the experience of sovereignty, who understood instinctively what the public mood required and applied a firm sisterly push.
In each of her two key jubilee speeches, Elizabeth sounded an uncharacteristically personal note. Her response to parliament’s loyal addresses in Westminster Hall in May was notable for its opposition to devolution at a time of strident regional nationalism, especially in Scotland: ‘I cannot forget’, she asserted, ‘that I was crowned Queen of a United Kingdom.’ Only a diplomatic ‘perhaps’ softened the force of her words in the interests of diplomacy: ‘Perhaps this Jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred... on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.’ No one present doubted her seriousness. In her Christmas broadcast at the end of the year, she returned to the fray, opposed to any shrinking of her kingdom: she suggested that jubilee crowds had ‘revealed to the world that we can be a united people’. In her speech at the Guildhall, at lunch following the service of thanksgiving, Elizabeth recalled her act of dedication made in Cape Town in 1947. ‘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,’ she announced with absolute conviction. Those closest to her witnessed the effect on her of her own words. Her mouth was working as she sat down after speaking. She seemed to smile, but struggled to suppress the smile. Often, when most moved, she conceals the strength of her emotion behind a thunderous expression. On jubilee day, grim composure failed her. What moved her so greatly? The success of her speech? The success of her walkabout en route to the Guildhall? Memories, like magic lanterns slides, of the quarter century now consigned to history? Or the pleasure she took in her own words, with their reaffirmation of her strongest statement of belief, her fidelity to the promises of her crowning? Was she most moved by the force of her own conviction, this woman whose commitment to her lifelong calling outstripped lesser bonds?
Like the coronation and the Commonwealth tour that followed it, Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee represented a personal high-water mark. It was a tribute to Elizabeth herself: although Philip was continually at her side, it did not emerge as a celebration of their joint achievement. It represented a decisive moment in public perceptions of a monarch who, unlike her grandfather in 1935, was assumed (correctly) to have many years still to reign. Up and down the country, Elizabeth embodied the remit for queenship that Michael Adeane had tried to explain to the 1971 Select Committee: ‘Taking a lively interest in everything, saying a kind word here and asking a question there, always smiling’.35 The huge crowds who turned out for her applauded her resilience; in a grinning summer of street parties and children’s teas, they rejoiced in the survival of a vanishing Britain, the confident, decent, more neighbourly world of Elizabeth’s parents. They knew her better than her predecessors, thanks to television and Royal Family. For a season their enthusiasm elevated her to the focus of national life. Postcards, children’s scrapbooks, biscuit tins and mugs bore pixelated images of Elizabeth and Philip, as Victoria’s jubilees had been marketed a century earlier. The British knew that Elizabeth was not like them, with her formal manners, her formal style of speech and dress (the hats and gloves that had all but vanished from ordinary wardrobes). Despite walkabouts, ‘Liz rules OK’ on banners and T-shirts and graffiti in shabby 1970s city centres, her formality preserved the distance between sovereign and subjects. The scale and magnificence of her life was unimaginable to many. In the year of her silver wedding anniversary, she had bought Polhampton Lodge Stud in Berkshire to expand the breeding and training programme of her racehorses carried on at Sandringham and Hampton Court; she added to her collection of tiaras in 1973, with a new ruby and diamond diadem made by Garrard; to Hugh Casson in 1974 she wrote, ‘I hope Sandringham doesn’t break us’, as Casson’s colleague David Roberts proceeded with an ambitious remodelling of the ungainly Victorian mansion that included pulling down one wing, constructing new areas and updating the main house, at a cost to Elizabeth of £200,000.36 After the maelstrom of the 1960s, Elizabeth’s ‘square’ but sumptuous formality could be celebrated as dignity. Long forgotten were the embarrassing prognostications of new Elizabethanism, their only echo Benjamin Britten’s decision to base his jubilee commission, the Welcome Ode, around a handful of Elizabethan lyrics. In Silver Jubilee year, Elizabeth was praised instead for steadfastness, the quality that would come to define her reign, and an instinctive understanding of what her countrymen expected of her. ‘Since her reign began,’ a television commentator informed viewers, ‘the years between have known happiness and tragedy... and through it all she has kept the soul of Britain and the Commonwealth together with a modest but regal dignity.’ The BBC’s decision to ban from the airwaves the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’, which coupled Elizabeth with ‘a fascist regime’, suggested survival of earlier protective instincts towards her. Even the former Lord Altrincham, now John Grigg, was moved to praise. Grigg identified as Elizabeth’s most important quality her ‘exceptionally steady character’.37
A queen with little appetite for change was praised for not changing. ‘Through a period of fluctuating fashion and considerable moral disintegration, she has lived up to her own high standards and, in doing so, has set an example which has been grudgingly admired even by those who have not followed it,’ Grigg wrote.38 The poet Philip Larkin acclaimed similar qualities in Elizabeth. Conceived in retrospect, his was a shorter but more distinguished poem than Betjeman’s official offering: It praised ‘one constant good’: her unchangingness at a time when everything around her ‘worsened, or grew strange’.39
Twenty years had passed since Altrincham’s attack in the National and English Review. After the cataclysms of the 1960s, the Fourth Estate apparently accepted Elizabeth on her own terms. For the most part, this would remain their verdict. ‘While all else has changed, she has been unchanging,’ noted one paper on the thirtieth anniversary of her accession in 1982.40 Wilson’s successor, James Callaghan, attributed to Elizabeth’s deliberate efforts the monarchy’s continuing prestige.41
Elizabeth celebrated more quietly a second, less public anniversary: Bobo MacDonald’s fifty years of personal service. From Garrard she commissioned a flower-shaped brooch of twenty-five gold stamens set with twenty-five diamonds.42 The bond between the two women was among the closest in Elizabeth’s life, a relationship based on unwavering trust and a familiarity that Elizabeth shared only with her husband, her mother and her sister. In her early seventies, Bobo did not mean to leave her ‘little lady’ yet. Despite her high-handed behaviour towards other royal servants and members of the household, Elizabeth did not hasten her retirement, especially in the aftermath of Patrick Plunket’s death and Martin Charteris’s notice of his decision to retire in November. There had never been a time when Bobo had not been integral to the smooth running of Elizabeth’s life. Like her parents, Elizabeth valued the stability of attendants of long standing. As she told Labour politician Richard Crossman, in any context she disliked the business of getting to know quantities of new people.
Yet she was powerless to prevent the diaspora of the late 1970s, including changes in her working life and her family life, with three of her four children grown up. That she anticipated the loss of Martin Charteris personally as well as professionally explained Anne’s accompanying her to their farewell audience. Elizabeth presented Charteris with an engraved silver tray; she thanked him very simply ‘for a lifetime’. It was quickly over. Charteris cried, as he had known he would; from the outset he had admitted falling in love with the woman he had served for twenty-seven years. Anne’s unsentimental presence kept a check on her mother’s emotions. Charteris had been the architect of many of the jubilee’s successes, and his departure contributed to the inevitable sense of anti-climax that followed a strenuous year; Elizabeth comforted herself that ‘he was still around if I needed to ask anything difficult’.43 Like Patrick Plunket’s death, his going also diminished the levity of Elizabeth’s court and any sprightliness in her public speeches. His successor, Philip Moore, lacked both his puckishness and his romantic devotion to Elizabeth. It was left to William Heseltine, assistant private secretary since 1972, to continue to imbue Elizabeth’s public life with traces of humour. At Elizabeth’s instruction, Heseltine wrote to the mayor of Reading thanking him for a royal visit, ‘The amenities of the new Magistrates Courts may not be appreciated by all who use them, but these... are clearly a marvellous addition to the civic buildings of Reading.’44
In February 1976, newspapers’ exposure of Margaret’s affair with Roddy Llewellyn and, in its wake, a formal announcement of the Snowdons’ decision to separate had brought that ‘moral disintegration’ identified by John Grigg to the heart of Elizabeth’s family. On the day of the royal announcement, after less than two years in office, Harold Wilson had announced his resignation from his second term as prime minister, concerned by his worsening health, including a fear of the ‘premature senility’ from which he claimed his mother had suffered (he subsequently developed Alzheimer’s disease). Loyal Wilson may have hoped that his resignation would distract attention from Elizabeth’s troubled sister. It didn’t, and Margaret’s black sheep newsworthiness would never disappear entirely. ‘The hideous coverage really tarnishes,’ director of the National Portrait Gallery, Roy Strong, recorded in his diary.45 Elizabeth knew it and had feared something like it for some time. Happy in her own marriage, partly constrained by post-war sexual politics, which had expected her to combine the roles of queen and domestic paragon, like her parents she had promoted a vision of the post-abdication monarchy centred on family values; twenty years before, Margaret herself had chosen royal duty over her love for Peter Townsend. In April, the Queen Mother had written to Elizabeth that ‘the three months after Christmas had been very difficult, what with one thing & another’.46 Elizabeth’s own response was less understated: she described herself to Tony as devastated by the marriage’s breakdown. Again Elizabeth experienced divided loyalties as sister and sovereign, but she did not abandon Margaret. In June, at a state banquet for the new French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Elizabeth placed the statesman between herself and her sister. Margaret was with her for the opening of the new National Theatre in October, as well as jubilee celebrations the following summer. Historian Jack Plumb’s observation at a royal dinner at Brooks’s that ‘the way to the “Headmistress” is through her sister’ suggests an understanding among those on the fringes of the court of Elizabeth’s continuing closeness to Margaret.47 Elizabeth’s support, however, neither ameliorated Margaret’s difficult temper, which did not always spare her older sister, nor resolved the disorder of Margaret’s life, which tabloid newspapers served up salaciously as a helter-skelter of torrid self-indulgence. Margaret’s relationship with Llewellyn continued, despite Elizabeth’s disapproval. Both sisters were troubled by the spiritual implications of Margaret’s divorce, in May 1978, though Margaret did not regret Tony’s departure. Elizabeth’s anxiety was wide-ranging: for the sister she loved immoderately, for the damage inflicted on the monarchy and for Margaret’s children. ‘Nobody ever stops to consider what effect all this publicity about Princess Margaret Rose’s malarkey with “Roddy” Llewelyn might have on her young children, the Viscount Linley, aged 16, and the Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, who was 14 on May Day,’ Auberon Waugh wrote in his Private Eye diary.48 A Times editorial on 20 May 1978, stating that ‘divorce is now increasingly regarded as a matter for commiseration rather than for criticism, unless it is accompanied by a public parade of private bitterness’, offered crumbs of comfort to Elizabeth, as well as a prescient warning that not all her children would heed. Tony Snowdon remained on good terms with both his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law partly by avoiding any such parade of private bitterness. Instead he remarried within three months of his divorce and was invited by Elizabeth to take her photograph with her first grandchild, Peter Phillips, born on 15 November 1977. Snowdon’s comfortable pictures contrast with Beaton’s of Elizabeth with her own babies and, even more strikingly, with first images of baby Elizabeth with her grandmother, Queen Mary. Intimate and classless, they pointed to the extent of change within the monarchy and the nation at large. Public pleasure in Elizabeth’s untitled first grandson went some way to balancing adverse comment on the latest Civil List increase to £1,905,000, which had been announced in the House of Commons the week before the birth.49
Just as Elizabeth’s marriage to Philip had thrust Margaret’s romantic life onto the front pages, Anne’s apparently settled domesticity contrasted with the single status of her elder brother Charles. If Elizabeth delighted in becoming a grandmother, her pleasure did not lessen her concern at Charles’s continuing bachelorhood on the brink of his thirtieth birthday. Undoubtedly, Charles had felt a special closeness to his mother at the time of his investiture. This particular intimacy, of sovereign and heir, which Elizabeth herself had enjoyed with her father, had lessened over the course of the decade, with Charles’s emergence as a full-time working royal and the inevitable separations of the family’s working lives. Elizabeth remained affectionate but preoccupied and, if it ever crossed her mind that her father had died in his fifties, she did not take pains to prepare Charles for a similar contingency. ‘My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is,’ Charles told an audience of students in November 1978, a partly disingenuous statement.50 His parents, by contrast, had very clear ideas of his role.
So did his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten’s enjoyment of the part he had allotted himself of éminence grise to Elizabeth and her family made him more forthcoming in his dealings with Charles than the costive Elizabeth or vigorously decisive Philip. To his grandmother Charles looked for affection of the sort he believed Elizabeth withheld; Mountbatten offered him the guidance more usually provided by parents. He was a forceful but sensitive adviser and, by the time of Charles’s landmark birthday in 1978, as concerned as Elizabeth at Charles’s extended bachelorhood, haunted for the older man by the spectre of a previous unmarried, philandering Prince of Wales. Like Great-uncle David, Charles had discovered the easy sexual perquisites of his position. Mountbatten’s misgivings focused on the coarsening effects of Charles’s casual romantic life, which the older man dismissed as ‘popping in and out of bed with girls’, as well as the corrosiveness of high rank.51 He warned Charles of ‘the downward slope which wrecked your Uncle David’s life and led to his disgraceful Abdication and his futile life ever after’.52 Not quite accurately, Martin Charteris described the prince’s life as ‘hunting, shooting, polo and fornicating’.53
Charles himself was every bit as preoccupied by the need to find a wife as his parents and great-uncle. To a friend, he wrote, ‘I’m told that marriage is the only cure for me – and maybe it is!’, but did not, apparently, discuss his impasse with either Elizabeth or Philip.54 Mountbatten’s solution was characteristic: he championed the cause of his granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, who subsequently declined Charles’s proposal. Elizabeth reputedly favoured Lady Leonora Grosvenor, a daughter of the Duke of Westminster. Sections of the public preferred the romance of an old-fashioned royal marriage; newspapers informed readers that Elizabeth seconded their choice of Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, eldest daughter of the former Princess Josephine-Charlotte of Belgium, now Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, who, in the spring of 1937, had been rumoured as joining Elizabeth in the Buckingham Palace schoolroom. ‘Beautiful, poised, selfless, “liked” by the Queen – she seems the ideal daughter-in-law,’ suggested one, though the idea was a fanciful one.55 A handful of the young women with whom Charles’s name had been linked were invited to the thirtieth birthday ball hosted by Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in November 1978, among them Lady Jane Wellesley and Lady Sarah Spencer, a granddaughter of one of the Queen Mother’s former ladies of the bedchamber, Cynthia, Countess Spencer, and her lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy. Also present was Sarah Spencer’s younger sister, seventeen-year-old Diana. Excluded on Elizabeth’s instructions was the wife of a handsome Guards officer with whom, six years earlier, Charles had fallen in love. She had been unmarried then. Despite her marriage, Charles had lately resumed their relationship, as fellow officers had informed Elizabeth. The former Camilla Shand was now Mrs Andrew Parker Bowles. Elizabeth discussed neither his affair, nor her omission from the royal guestlist, with Charles.
In June 1972, Mountbatten had despatched to the lord chamberlain, Lord Maclean, his ‘great funeral letter’, including ‘suggestions’ for his funeral service that, if followed, would guarantee an event both magnificent and costly. He made his plans at Maclean’s invitation, though mostly confident that they would not be called upon for some time. In this he was correct. In the event the circumstances of Mountbatten’s funeral seven years later were unexpected and tragic in equal measure.
Mountbatten had questioned the Cabinet Office concerning the safety of his August visits, with his daughters and grandchildren, to Classiebawn Castle in County Sligo as early as 1972; each year he renewed his enquiries. Since 1961, plain-clothes policemen had discreetly guarded Elizabeth and Philip’s kinsman during his Irish holidays; by 1974, twenty-eight policemen were on duty around the castle. At the end of August 1979, they were not enough to prevent the planting of a bomb by the IRA in Mountbatten’s fishing boat, Shadow V. It exploded as the boat approached a lobster pot, killing Mountbatten, an Irish crew member and one of his grandsons immediately, injuring his elder daughter Patricia Brabourne, her husband, her mother-in-law and her son Timothy. The terrorists’ aim had been to ‘[bring] home emotionally to the English ruling-class... that their government’s war on us is going to cost them as well’.56 In this it succeeded.
None felt the shock more powerfully than Elizabeth, in the distant fastness of Balmoral, where a visit with her niece Sarah Armstrong-Jones to Crathie church’s sale of work, to which she had donated a set of Stuart Crystal whisky glasses, was an event among quiet days on the moors. For Elizabeth and her family, Mountbatten’s loss as exasperatingly meddlesome but wise, kindly and wholly committed would-be paterfamilias deprived them of a key adviser, Elizabeth of a living link with the family’s recent past, and Philip and Charles, in different ways, of a surrogate parent, a source, Charles claimed, of ‘the wisest of counsel and advice’.57 In October, while his mother, Patricia Brabourne, one of Elizabeth’s oldest friends, remained in hospital, Elizabeth invited fourteen-year-old Timothy Knatchbull, with his sister Amanda, to Balmoral to recover. Later he remembered her greeting, arriving at the castle in the middle of the night, ‘this sort of feeling of a mother duck gathering up her lost young... [her] default setting of love and care, of asking us about family, of plying us with soup and sandwiches and wrapping us up in a sort of motherliness’. He remembered ‘a strange warm glow that’s really never left me... the care, the loving tender care that the Queen [has] as a mum’.58 It was typical of the depth of concern and affection Elizabeth was capable of expressing towards those outside her immediate family circle, especially those with a connection to her own past. A similar spirit coloured her sporadic correspondence with the wife of Hubert Tanner, the Windsor schoolmaster instrumental in the princesses’ wartime pantomimes. ‘I do hope you are keeping quite well, and managing all right, as I know you had a horrid time last year. I trust you will always tell me... if you need anything,’ Elizabeth wrote to Mrs Tanner, thanking her for a birthday present.59
With Mountbatten’s murder, only the Queen Mother remained of the principal players of the royal inner circle in which Elizabeth had grown up. Her advice, rooted in tradition and a heartfelt attachment to royal dignity, lacked Mountbatten’s keenness and imagination. Plunket, Charteris and Mountbatten never exercised over Elizabeth an influence as powerful as her mother’s, but these trusted insiders had offered her a connection of sorts with worlds beyond the court and intermediaries in her dealings with her children. Elizabeth’s father had worried about republicanism. For Elizabeth, as the IRA’s message made clear, the threat was not chiefly to her throne but her personal safety.