CHAPTER XV
PRAISE OF ELIZABETH was not the primary aim of the Zambia Daily Mail when, in August 1979, the newspaper described ‘the extraordinary loving heart of the Queen’.1 Its purpose was criticism of Elizabeth’s latest prime minister, whom African statesmen agreed conspicuously lacked the monarch’s affection for their continent and its causes.
In the aftermath of the Silver Jubilee, the secretary of state for the environment, Peter Shore, discerned at home ‘a genuine English nationalist feeling, a deep feeling about the English and how they see themselves in terms of their own history’. He suggested that the politician who reflected this feeling was the leader of the opposition.2 Fifteen months after Shore’s warning, Callaghan’s Labour Party was defeated in an election, following a vote of no confidence, by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, ‘the most right-wing Conservative Government and Leader for fifty years’, as Tony Benn noted in his diary.3
In her third decade on the throne, Elizabeth was at ease in her position. A television producer on assignment at Buckingham Palace in November 1976 had witnessed her return after the State Opening of Parliament. Elizabeth was bright and animated; the rigours of the ceremony and longueurs of the speech written for her by the government had left no trace. Her mind was full of horses. ‘Did you see that horse?’ she asked. ‘He came to a full stop a dozen yards before he should. Gave the coach a frightful jerk. The coachman was trying to make him go, but he wouldn’t budge. The other horses had to drag him with them. He just slid along, all four feet down.’4 Over the coming decade, Elizabeth would find she had more to think about than horses. Her experience of the 1980s was shaped by the proximity of two women with whom, in character and outlook, she was repeatedly at odds. One was her prime minister. The other was the pretty, blushing teenager chosen for Charles’s wife.
‘Friendliness without friendship’ had been James Callaghan’s verdict on his dealings with Elizabeth. It would be doubly true in the case of Elizabeth’s association with Margaret Thatcher. At the time and since, their relationship inspired widespread speculation. Within a year of Thatcher taking office, her manner provoked a pithy riposte from one tabloid: ‘There is still only one woman who wears the Crown in this country, whatever the other woman may think.’5 Despite long association, neither reached an understanding of the other. Like her relationship with Edward Heath, Elizabeth’s dealings with Margaret Thatcher lacked intimacy: Heath betrayed limited interest in Elizabeth beyond her role in the machinery of government, while the depth of Thatcher’s reverence for monarchy prevented any near approach to Elizabeth on a personal level. Instead, ‘[holding] royalty in almost God-like awe’, according to her press secretary, exaggeratedly but sincerely deferential, performing floor-skimming curtsies, Thatcher treated Elizabeth as the embodiment of an inherited ideal.6 Six of her seven prime ministers to date had leavened respect for Elizabeth as sovereign with protective gallantry or flashes of humour. In her own words a ‘plain, straightforward provincial’, Thatcher lacked Elizabeth’s dry wit and there was no room in the relationship of woman-to-woman for gallantry. Suggestions that Elizabeth disliked Thatcher’s tendency to lecture her may well be true; it seems less likely that she was troubled, as sometimes claimed, by her premier sitting on the edge of her chair during their meetings or her habit of running one sentence into another, limiting any possibility of interjection, since Elizabeth was more inclined to listen than to speak – as she explained later, ‘One’s a sort of sponge.’7 In the summer of 1985, Baroness-in-Waiting Lady Trumpington reported Elizabeth commenting on her audiences with Mrs Thatcher, ‘She stays too long and talks too much. She has lived too long among men.’8 Recorded at second hand, Elizabeth’s comment has become detached from the intonation that would have made clear its prompt: wryness, exasperation or puzzlement. Given the strength of her prime minister’s conviction of their relative positions, only Elizabeth could have bridged the gulf between them, but mostly failed to do so. At one level, it was a rerun of the story of the teenage princess and the Glasgow evacuees at Craigowan. Elizabeth is all but absent from Thatcher’s autobiography. The women’s behaviour to one another was consistently correct. Thatcher respected Elizabeth as her sovereign but evidently did not always give ground to her in the private recesses of her imagination.
Patriotism united monarch and premier: both longed for revived British fortunes at home and prestige abroad, and Thatcher’s particular brand of patriotism, the ‘English nationalism’ Peter Shore had discerned, would contribute to the royal family’s prominence throughout her premiership. The lives of both women were in thrall to vocations that overrode conventional domestic ties, played out in male-dominated arenas, but they differed in manner. Apolitical, centrist and studiedly uncontroversial, Elizabeth regarded the throne as a unifying force; her outlook was pragmatic, her manner emollient. Thatcher meant to wrest a floundering Britain from trade unions’ clutches and the wastefulness of state funding. Although her own behaviour would become increasingly regal over time, she mistrusted the old-fashioned Establishment, of which Elizabeth was the apex, as much as she disliked socialist collectivism; she admired thrusting vigour like her own. Private enterprise and hard work lay at the heart of her philosophy, and she thrived on the abrasiveness of confrontation that was anathema to Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s focus was a country united, neighbourly and civic-minded, her view conservative, with an understandable attachment to the status quo. ‘What she’s interested in’, reflected a prime ministerial aide, ‘are things going on as they are, tolerance, good manners, Christian behaviour, doing the right thing.’9 Thatcher’s radicalism and apparent intractability would exacerbate fissures in an already divided nation. The first years of her premiership were marked by riots in Bristol, Brixton and Toxteth, hunger strikes in Belfast and sharp rises in unemployment and homelessness. Elizabeth, observed Alvilde Lees-Milne to the Duchess of Beaufort, frequently looked sad. She was sad, ‘it was the times,’ explained the duchess, the former Lady Mary Cambridge, Elizabeth’s cousin and occasional hostess.10 But Elizabeth continued to relish her twofold role as British sovereign and head of the Commonwealth; Commonwealth affairs played a significant part in her working life. By contrast Thatcher inclined to discount the Commonwealth, doubting its economic benefits to Britain, and regarded its leaders with disdain; her brief was specifically British and did not encompass an equivalent of Elizabeth’s international remit. From starchy beginnings, observers agree, the women’s relationship became one marked by fondness on Elizabeth’s side and admiration on Thatcher’s, but it was a journey that included bumps along the way.
Events within months of Margaret Thatcher taking office indicated which of the women was the more sure-footed international statesman. The palace’s ‘unusual step’, at the beginning of July 1979, of announcing Elizabeth’s ‘firm intention’ of attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in Lusaka, heralded what would become one of her key interventions. The announcement’s purpose was to circumvent repetition of the previous Conservative government’s veto of Elizabeth’s attendance, given the prime minister’s own lack of appetite for the conference and the excuse of escalating guerrilla violence in the region jeopardizing Elizabeth’s safety. Newspapers responded as the palace intended: ‘The Queen now seems certain to carry out her “danger mission” – the opening of next month’s Commonwealth conference in Zambia,’ stated the Daily Mirror.11 Elizabeth was determined to exert her influence on those African leaders whose angry outspokenness at Thatcher’s reluctance to impose sanctions on Rhodesia threatened to overwhelm the conference. She fully intended to foster cooperation between Rhodesia’s neighbours and Britain’s new prime minister over the issue of Rhodesian independence and its future government and, in doing so, to prevent any splintering of the organization itself.
‘When she arrived, she found it a very tense situation,’ remembered Zambia’s president, Kenneth Kaunda. ‘But, mainly because of her own personal involvement, tempers cooled.’12 Elizabeth carried out her task in the back of a presidential limousine and, reported newspapers, from the unlikely base of ‘a small suburban villa’, 3 Mulungushi Village, outside Lusaka. In the first, she travelled from the airport with her host, Kaunda. Over the course of their journey she persuaded him to amend his proposed speech for the evening’s state banquet, removing passages antagonistic to Mrs Thatcher and Rhodesia’s white minority as an essential preliminary to constructive discussion later. In the second, she held informal meetings with heads of government. ‘As the hectic world of Commonwealth politics buzzed about her, the Queen was working quietly behind the scenes, seeing... heads of delegations... She acted as umpire between warring factions… encouraging positive thinking.’13 It was a definition of a role within the Commonwealth that was both proactive and discreet. Elizabeth did not attend the meeting’s discussions and played no part in the formal debates that led to the agreement of unanimous commitment ‘to genuine black majority rule’ for Rhodesia. She did not advise, nor did she directly offer suggestions. Her contribution, during the reception and banquet she hosted for heads of government and through her meetings with each of them over a space of three days, was to create a climate of willingness. She set greatest store, as did the leaders themselves, by the one-to-one meetings in her suburban villa, ‘just them and me, with nobody else listening, which is very useful,’14 as she described similar meetings in 1985. Unanimity led to the emergence of an independent Zimbabwe within less than a year, its baleful future then unsuspected. The significance of Elizabeth’s behind-the-scenes diplomacy, including her intervention with Kenneth Kaunda, was not only in the outcome to which it contributed, but a conviction among key players that, without her, agreement would not have been reached. ‘The very act of living a decent and upright life is in itself a positive factor in maintaining civilised standards,’ Elizabeth claimed the following year.15 Guilelessness and decency were among the gifts she took to Lusaka; unlike other members of her family, her support for black majority rule had never wavered. On the eve of her arrival, Botswana’s president, Sir Seretse Khama, praised her ‘great personal courage and commitment’.16 Kenneth Kaunda acclaimed her afterwards as ‘a great person... a leader among leaders... Because we all realise her commitment to the Commonwealth, we all respond to her message of conciliation.’17
From Zambia Elizabeth retreated to the familiar routines of Balmoral: grouse shooting, stalking, riding; picnics and barbecues eaten outside or in wooden cabins across the estate; ‘the beauty of the hills, and the peace of mind that comes when one walks on them, no screaming police sirens & no hurry hurry’; time to read, like the autumn she told Ted Hughes she had read his poem ‘An Otter’.18 Her private secretary Philip Moore wrote a firm letter to the Foreign Office pointing out the nature of her contribution to the Lusaka Accord.19 If it was proof of royal pride, it was unusual on Elizabeth’s part and illustrates the significance she attaches to her Commonwealth role and, in this instance, her pleasure in the achievement of her preferred outcome. More typical was her attitude towards celebration of her mother’s eightieth birthday the following summer. Together Elizabeth and Margaret had involved themselves in planning a programme that culminated in a gala at the Royal Opera House. The three women sat for Norman Parkinson at Royal Lodge, in one image identically dressed, the Queen Mother flanked by her daughters, an updating of Marcus Adams’s pre-war photographs. On each celebratory occasion, Elizabeth happily ceded place of honour to the Queen Mother. At Covent Garden, Roy Strong noted ‘flashes of pleasure’ from Elizabeth throughout the evening. ‘Tough to have the competition of her mother but she was a genius at stepping back on this occasion.’20 The sisters bought their mother a fur coat, ‘the biggest & most exciting surprise of my life’, as she described it in her thank you letter to Margaret.21 Her thank you letter to Elizabeth prompted a characteristic response. The whole family, Elizabeth replied, had ‘rejoiced in the huge and loving feeling of thanksgiving for all that your life represents which has come from all walks of the people who make up this country and Commonwealth, and especially your own family. I hope you have been buoyed up by knowing what people feel.’22 None rejoiced more wholeheartedly than Elizabeth, a devoted and indulgent daughter, who undoubtedly shared the loving feeling of thanksgiving.
It was to be a decade of ceding the limelight. The 1980s saw the thirtieth anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession, her sixtieth birthday and her fortieth wedding anniversary. For a public distracted by tabloid sensationalism and increasingly garish royal coverage, only her bravery in reacting to a gunman’s attack during Trooping the Colour in 1981, and a palace break-in the year after, rivalled the romantic, and unromantic, antics of her grown-up children and a prime minister apparently determined to bestride the political world like a Colossus.
The role of fairy-tale princess had never suited Anne, who, since her wedding, had become established as one of the family’s least popular members with the public (this would later change). In the autumn of 1980, journalists were pleased and relieved to discover more promising material in the form of an aristocratic ingénue, Lady Diana Spencer. Sarah Spencer’s youngest sister, a nineteen-year-old of whom her stepmother claimed ‘She’s got nothing to say! Once you’ve finished talking about Duran Duran, that’s it,’ Diana was the unlikely new girlfriend of the heir to the throne. Charles was twelve years her senior, an introspective, thoughtful man of old-fashioned upbringing, quick-tempered and emotionally rudderless. Wounded by her parents’ divorce during her childhood, Diana had dreamed of escaping into marriage with a duke; her step-grandmother, romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, told Mountbatten’s private secretary that ‘she had set her heart on Charles from an early age’.23 Her prettiness belied a streak of selfishness; she was strong-willed but emotionally fragile. Charles appeared overwhelmed by his duty to marry; Diana was well-born, with no romantic past to cast a shadow. Charles was in love with Camilla Parker Bowles, and Mountbatten, who might have counselled him, was dead. Neither he nor his parents discussed his particular challenge in finding a wife who was also a suitable future queen. Culpability was shared. ‘One must long... to have been able to talk freely about the things that matter deeply, but one was too inhibited to discuss,’ Charles reflected in 1987, and he consigned even relatively neutral topics, like his views of Australia, to letters to his grandmother rather than his mother.24 In her previous Christmas broadcast, Elizabeth had suggested, ‘Let us... stop to think whether we are making enough effort to pass on our experience of life to our children.’ Even at so critical a juncture, the woman who disliked articulating her feelings did not pass on to the child who was also her heir the experiences of her own emotional life or her marriage, which had successfully withstood extraordinary scrutiny and pressures of a sort to which his marriage would also be exposed. ‘He is encouraged to be self-reliant,’ Lisa Sheridan had written in 1962 of Elizabeth and Philip’s parenting of two-year-old Andrew. So it was with Charles two decades later, and the press, getting wind of the scent, through the simple expedient of column inches seemed to force Charles’s hand. By mid-November, leading royal journalist Audrey Whiting felt sufficiently sure of her ground to describe Diana unequivocally as ‘an identikit picture of everything [the Royal Family] want in a future Princess of Wales’.25
For Whiting, Diana’s suitability lay in her aristocratic background and the Spencers’ connections to Elizabeth’s family. Diana’s father, the 8th Earl Spencer, had served both Elizabeth and her father as equerry; both Diana’s grandmothers and four of her great-aunts were members of the Queen Mother’s household, while her middle sister Jane was married to Robert Fellowes, Elizabeth’s assistant private secretary since 1977, and her only brother, Charles, was Elizabeth’s godson. Diana had known Andrew and Edward as children; as a child she had lived at Park House on the Sandringham Estate. The marriage was championed by her surviving grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, who helped secure the Queen Mother’s approval, a weighty consideration for Elizabeth as well as Charles. To a friend, Elizabeth wrote, ‘She is one of us. I am very fond of all three of the Spencer girls.’26 As her grandmother and Jock Colville had observed forty years earlier, Elizabeth moved in a narrow aristocratic clique. It is unsurprising if, in her concern for Charles’s predicament, she took comfort from the familiarity of Diana’s background. In choosing Diana, Charles proposed exactly the kind of marriage many had suspected the Queen Mother had wanted for Elizabeth, in the days when members of ‘the body guard’ appeared more to her liking than energetic, free-thinking Philip. Diana’s background resembled the Queen Mother’s, and Elizabeth could testify to the success of the marriage of the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to another future king. Like all concerned, Elizabeth wanted Charles to make the right choice. Later, Diana suggested Elizabeth was exasperated by her son’s vacillations.
With speculation mounting – ‘as things get worse and worse the royalist cult accelerates,’ wrote Roy Strong, noting the link, played out repeatedly in Elizabeth’s life, of dire economic prospects and escapist fantasies centred on the royal family – Philip wrote to Charles, partly prompted by Elizabeth’s irritation at press intrusiveness. Philip’s intention was to make clear to his son the danger to Diana’s reputation of so public a relationship in the event that marriage was not his aim; Charles interpreted his father’s letter as an ultimatum. Unsuspected by journalists like Whiting, Charles and Diana were virtual strangers to one another. Charles was beset by misgivings, but Philip encouraged him to act decisively. Charles did not directly address his concerns in conversations with his mother, though a rumour recorded in Hugo Vickers’s diary that Charles had ‘told the Queen angrily: “My marriage and my sex life have nothing to do with each other…”’, if true, suggests an exchange, however oblique, about Camilla Parker Bowles.27 Charles spoke more candidly to friends. Their responses, including, in a minority of cases, opposition to the marriage, were equally candid. Charles proposed to Diana and was accepted. Their engagement was announced on 24 February 1981. Public reaction was for the most part ecstatic. By contrast, a laconic Margaret described the royal family as ‘all extremely relieved’; she also revealed to friends that Camilla ‘ha[d] no intention of giving him up’.28 She did not mention happiness, either the couple’s or the royal family’s. Charles and Diana were photographed with Elizabeth. They gave a televised interview remembered subsequently for Charles’s infelicitous response to a question about his feelings: ‘whatever “in love” means’. ‘There is something sad about a girl of 19 being led into royal captivity,’ observed historian and journalist Kenneth Rose.29 He did not comment on the interviewer quizzing Charles about the state of his emotions, a question that encapsulated new levels of intrusiveness unanticipated at the time of Elizabeth’s marriage in 1947. The Queen Mother hosted a dinner at which she presented Diana with a large sapphire brooch, which Diana subsequently had reset as the centre of a choker. At the considerable cost of £28,000, Elizabeth bought Diana’s engagement ring of an oval sapphire surrounded by diamonds. Publication weeks later of Jock Colville’s The Churchillians reminded readers that Elizabeth, too, had once been a romantic heroine. In an extract quoted in several newspapers, Colville wrote: ‘There was one lady by whom, from 1952 onwards, Churchill was dazzled. That was the new Queen... At a respectful distance, he fell in love with the Queen.’30 For the foreseeable future, it was Diana not Elizabeth who occupied readers of the more clamorous press.
Nothing in Elizabeth’s life since her accession had deflected her from the business of state: nor on the surface did Charles’s engagement to Diana Spencer. In May, as planned, she and Philip made a state visit to Norway, where they were greeted by placards protesting at Thatcher’s treatment of hunger strikers in Northern Ireland; they would visit Tunisia in the autumn, once wedding brouhaha subsided. Off duty, her family occupied Elizabeth. In March, she and Philip flew to Gordonstoun to watch Edward in a school production. As she had since childhood, she celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday in April with a family party at Windsor. Two days before the wedding, on 27 July, at the reception after the christening of Anne’s second child, Zara, it was Elizabeth who carried the baby; godparents on that occasion included Andrew Parker Bowles. The same year, Denys Rhodes was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Elizabeth offered Rhodes and his wife, the former Margaret Elphinstone, a house in Windsor Great Park where, frequently, she visited her after church on Sunday mornings, happy and relaxed in the company of the cousin she knew so well. Also close at hand at Windsor, at Adelaide Cottage, was Libby Hardinge, another link with Elizabeth’s childhood. A letter Elizabeth wrote to a friend after Diana moved into Buckingham Palace suggests she was aware of the younger woman’s belatedly mixed emotions: ‘I trust that Diana will find living here less of a burden than expected.’31 How sympathetic uncomplicated Elizabeth felt towards her soon-to-be daughter-in-law is unclear. If she shared Charles’s nervousness, she concealed it. Charles’s staff, surprised by Diana’s oscillating moods and her obsessive interest in Camilla Parker Bowles, which emerged soon after the engagement, kept their own counsel. Elizabeth attributed Diana’s unsettledness to pre-wedding nerves.
On the day of the wedding itself, in St Paul’s Cathedral, Elizabeth’s happiness appeared to match that of the global television audience of 750 million viewers. Diana included in her bouquet stems of a new bright-yellow rose named after Mountbatten, a symbolic gesture to appeal to the royal family. ‘Watching the Queen returning from the royal wedding... in an open landau to the cheers of a delighted throng’, writer Alan Bennett observed Elizabeth navigating an experience that was simultaneously private and public, a distinctive royal conundrum: ‘trying to manage the happy chatting of Earl Spencer on the one hand and acknowledging the frenzy of the crowd with the other’.32 Crowds delighted in the newlyweds’ kiss on the palace balcony, and both Elizabeth and Philip greatly enjoyed the party at Claridge’s that followed their departure for the first stage of their honeymoon. But in Patrick Lichfield’s behind-the-scenes photographs of Diana and her bridesmaids after the ceremony, Elizabeth appears tired and pale, excluded by age, even marginal, and Philip is nowhere to be seen. With devastating consequences, this would be the view taken by a handful of determined, abrasive, aggressive tabloid editors for the next decade and beyond. Their unrelenting focus on Diana and other younger family members, which became the dominant royal narrative, would reap a most unhappy harvest.
The next day Elizabeth spent several hours in fittings with her dressmaker Hardy Amies. Amies thanked her for making time to see him so soon after the busy mêlée of the wedding. Elizabeth’s reply was that of countless mothers after large-scale family celebrations: she told Amies ‘she was pleased to have something to do, as life seemed rather flat now that the wedding was over’.33 More surprisingly, she remarked on her amazement at the size of crowds in the Mall and in front of Buckingham Palace, proof, if it was more than a conversational commonplace, that she did not take for granted such demonstrations of public affection.34
Perhaps there was an idolatrous quality to the immoderate royal worship of the summer of 1981, when prelates and newspapermen vied to celebrate in loftiest encomia the virtues of Elizabeth’s family. If so, Elizabeth had contributed to the sentimental euphoria in a manner she would happily have forsworn. At 10.57 on the morning of Saturday, 13 April, her black mare, Burmese, bolted on the Mall. Within a handful of paces, Elizabeth regained control and calmed the frightened horse. Leaning forward, she patted Burmese’s neck. Possibly she spoke to her as well. Elizabeth’s face was very pale. She had survived six blank shots aimed directly at her as she rode to Horseguards for Trooping the Colour, mounted side saddle on the horse given to her by the Canadian Mounties. The culprit was seventeen-year-old Marcus Serjeant, known to ‘friends and neighbours... as a quiet loner who spends most of his time on his hobbies of fishing and butterfly collecting’.35 His shots disturbed Elizabeth’s horse, but apparently not the sovereign herself; their echo was heard in the crowd’s angry dismay. In one account, ‘there were cries of “Lynch the bastard” as the young man was hauled away to the ambulance tent in the Mall’. The Sunday Mirror reported that ‘the festive mood of the crowd turned to fury after the shots’.36 Elizabeth became a nation’s hero. Sentencing Serjeant to five years’ imprisonment under the Treason Act 1842, judge Lord Lane explained, ‘The public sense of outrage must be marked.’
Above all, praise targeted Elizabeth’s sangfroid. In the days that followed, she did not alter her planned engagements or the style of those engagements. As headlines acclaimed her, she was ‘resolute’. Observing her at close quarters at Windsor that week, Elizabeth Longford concluded that she was both mentally and morally tough; watching footage of the shooting many years later, Charles described his mother as ‘made of strong stuff’.37 Newspapers quoted a source identified variously as a palace or a police spokesman: ‘The Queen feels that if she is going to do an engagement, then the public must be able to see her.’38 It was her own version of the spirit attributed to her parents during the Blitz and supported her motto that she must be seen to be believed. Thames Valley Police asked racegoers at Royal Ascot the next week to be ‘on the alert for anything suspicious’ in order to ‘act as security guards – and help protect the Queen’.39
Although no one could have known it at the time, it was a summer when polarized outlooks converged. An innocent-looking but self-absorbed young woman became an international icon, while her doughty soon-to-be mother-in-law inspired universal praise for unselfconscious bravery and stoical endurance. Elizabeth had behaved instinctively. Afterwards she was at pains to exonerate Burmese’s skittishness. But her instinct for good behaviour, which she equated with self-control and absence of fuss, would not always win plaudits from a public whose heads had been turned.
On 5 November officials made a public announcement of Diana’s pregnancy. Inevitably it served to magnify interest in the new Princess of Wales, although she herself was struggling with the realities of her position, including loss of privacy; her grandmother, Ruth Fermoy, noted ‘how much [she] had yet to learn’.40 For Elizabeth, who had agreed the previous month to Diana receiving psychiatric counselling in London, the prospect of a child offered hope for Charles’s marriage and Diana’s happiness, as well as future guarantees for the dynasty. To smooth Diana’s transition to royal life, Elizabeth had requested the youngest of her ladies-in-waiting, Susan Hussey, to help her. In age Lady Susan was closer to Charles than Diana; Charles’s fondness for her was of two decades’ standing, and he had written to her during miserable years at Gordonstoun. Elizabeth’s good intentions suggest how far she was from understanding Diana’s condition. Reliable, scrupulous, loyal and witty, Susan Hussey was too ‘correct’ for the volatile, fragile Diana and, like many of Diana’s relationships within the palace, their association soured over time. At the beginning of December, Elizabeth held a drinks reception for newspaper, television and radio news editors, at which her press secretary, Michael Shea, indicated the corrosive effect on Diana of unrelenting scrutiny, a royal plea for abatement and clemency. Elizabeth suggested to Diana that she always feel free to see her. The possibility that she frightened her daughter-in-law did not occur to her. Those who observed the two women together argued that Diana’s view of Elizabeth resembled Roy Strong’s, expressed the following year after an encounter at Royal Lodge: ‘The Queen is always, I find, very formidable and frightening and it is impossible to drift up to her.’41 Elizabeth had taken steps to help Diana, but Diana’s particular needs lay beyond Elizabeth’s experience, and Elizabeth’s failure to discuss with Diana her unhappiness, though characteristic, was wrongly interpreted by Diana as proof of her indifference.
Sovereignty can be a dangerous calling. In October 1982 Elizabeth had again been the target of a gunman’s shots, in Dunedin in New Zealand. Frightened that news of an attempt on her life, albeit unsuccessful, would mean the end of royal visits, the New Zealand government colluded in a cover-up that lasted four decades; the seventeen-year-old gunman, Christopher Lewis, committed suicide in 1997 on a subsequent trial for murder. Elizabeth herself may not have known what happened: New Zealand officials explained the distant sound of gunshot as a falling council sign. In exploring the theme of bravery in her Christmas broadcast months later, Elizabeth’s focus was not herself but those living with disabilities, to mark the United Nations’ International Year of Disabled Persons.
The year ahead tested Elizabeth’s courage nevertheless. The thirtieth anniversary of her accession generated praise for her personal qualities as well as the smooth working of monarchy as an institution. In a series of interviews, Harold Wilson attributed the monarchy’s success to ‘the nature and steadfastness of the Queen herself’. In the kind of statement that presages disaster in Greek tragedies, he claimed that, thanks to her exemplary record, Elizabeth was ‘in an invincible position’.42 For Elizabeth, the anniversary was also, as always, that of her father’s death, and she spent it quietly at Sandringham. It was not, however, to be a spring of quiet reflection. At the beginning of April, Tony Benn described the House of Commons as ‘in the grip of jingoism’.43 For seventy-four days, Britain waged war 8,000 miles from home, following Argentina’s occupation of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, a British crown colony since 1841. The decision to respond to Argentinian aggression was Margaret Thatcher’s; in her capacity as queen of the islands, head of the Commonwealth and head of the armed forces, Elizabeth described the conflict as ‘go[ing] to the rescue of the Falkland Islanders... in defence of basic freedoms’.44 Among the troops was her middle and favourite son, Andrew, then a twenty-two-year-old helicopter pilot on HMS Invincible. A palace statement that Elizabeth supported Andrew’s deployment in the conflict was her own equivalent of her parents’ well-publicized wartime residence in London and earned her sympathy as a mother. Thatcher seized the opportunity to present herself in the combined roles of Boudicca and Britannia, and an upsurge in patriotic feeling boosted her popularity. Her belligerence suggested Queen Victoria’s attitude at such moments. By contrast, Elizabeth was markedly less gung-ho, ‘perhaps... a little wary of the role that Mrs Thatcher was assuming’, according to Thatcher colleague and apologist Alan Clark.45 David Cannadine described Elizabeth throughout the conflict as ‘curiously low-key, an absentee’.46 It is hard to see what alternative her prime minister gave her, and Elizabeth visited casualties following troops’ return and afterwards led the nation’s tributes at the Falklands memorial services held annually at St Paul’s Cathedral. The conflict had momentarily sidelined questions of her possible abdication in Charles’s favour, aired only months earlier at the thirtieth anniversary of her accession. Then Harold Wilson had offered what became the accepted explanation: Elizabeth, he stated, was ‘conscious of her duty in a religious way’ and lifelong promises made before God.47
Weeks after Argentina’s surrender on 14 June, Elizabeth faced an invader of a different sort. It was an incident described in the Illustrated London News as a ‘saga, teetering on the edge of farce, [that] could well have turned to tragedy’.48 In a summer of terrorist violence, with two IRA attacks on troops in central London within a fortnight, it would raise protests that the state of royal security had become a national crisis. Michael Fagan was unemployed, footloose, miserable in the aftermath of his wife’s desertion, an old-fashioned ne’er-do-well, scruffy and feckless. He broke into Buckingham Palace, clambering over a garden wall, for no more compelling reason than that he knew he could, having done so undetected once before. His accounts of his actions early that July morning varied over time, as anniversaries of his daring renewed his fleeting newsworthiness. He said he had meant to find Elizabeth’s room; he said he found his way there by accident. Whatever the truth, he stood at Elizabeth’s bedside, despite her protests, one hand bloodied by a broken ashtray. In vain she summoned help, neither her alarm button nor the palace telephone eliciting any response, Philip absent, after leaving the palace early for an out-of-town engagement. The appearance of Elizabeth’s chambermaid, Elizabeth Andrew, with an unguarded ‘Bloody ’ell, Ma’am, what’s ’e doing ’ere?’, lessened tension. First a footman, then policemen came belatedly to Elizabeth’s rescue. Fagan does not appear to have intended her any harm. His descriptions of Elizabeth’s Liberty print nightdress and her ‘little’ bare feet suggest he was charmed by her. Elizabeth denied that she had been afraid; as planned, she went ahead with an investiture ceremony hours later. Undoubtedly she was shocked. Many years later, Fagan would claim that their encounter had lasted no longer than seconds; at the time accounts agreed that monarch and miscreant were alone for up to ten minutes. A level-headed Elizabeth valued her privacy but had not previously had grounds for suspecting her own vulnerability when alone. After Marcus Serjeant’s gunfire and Mountbatten’s murder, Fagan’s break-in was unsettling.
The incident shocked many across the country as well as Elizabeth. There were indications, however, of the continuing sea change in attitudes. Thirty years earlier, a similar breach would have been greeted by a storm of chivalrous protest. In 1982, even the respectful Illustrated London News appeared uncertain in its response, unsure whether to characterize events as farcical or tragic. Again Elizabeth’s bravery won praise, but the heat of early adulation had burned out, that torch passed now to Charles and, especially, Diana. Like praise for Elizabeth’s steadfastness, it was sincere, but more respectful than impassioned, although a survey conducted in the autumn by Market Research Enterprises confirmed Elizabeth’s place as ‘most liked’ member of the royal family, with thirty-seven per cent of votes polled.
On 21 July, the birth of Charles and Diana’s first child, a boy christened a fortnight later William Philip Arthur Louis, provided Elizabeth with her second grandson and, in her own words, ‘another heir’.49 As sovereign she could not discount the dynastic significance of the birth; her twofold pleasure as grandmother and monarch recalled her dismay twenty years before at the short-term empire-building of Kwame Nkrumah. Elizabeth did not deceive herself that William was the panacea required by Charles and Diana’s troubled marriage, even though she was unaware of the full extent of the couple’s difficulties only a year after their wedding, but his birth distracted her briefly from her unhappiness at the death, two days earlier, of Rupert Nevill. Nevill had served latterly as Philip’s private secretary; he was a godfather of Margaret’s son, David. Like Patrick Plunket, he was a friend of Elizabeth’s youth: trusted, discreet, like-minded. Nor were Charles and Diana her only source of anxiety within her family. The official release in the autumn of photographs of Anne and Mark Phillips, to coincide with Phillips’s thirty-fourth birthday, was interpreted as an attempt on the palace’s part to put paid to rumours about the state of their marriage; Elizabeth knew of Anne’s relationship with her protection officer Peter Cross.50 Meanwhile Andrew’s transformation, in his own assessment, from boy to man, as a result of the experience of the Falklands, did not add up to a constructive role for Elizabeth’s middle son. Andrew embarked on a series of widely reported short-term relationships that, despite public support – ‘nearly all those questioned think he should be allowed a “fling”’ – were at odds with ideas of a model royal family, lacking either romance or dignity.51 A light biography of the prince published the following year suggested that the initials HRH ‘stand for His Royal Heart-throb’.52 Elizabeth’s autumn Commonwealth tour, which included her first visit to far-flung islands of the South Pacific, was presented to newspaper readers as a ‘great adventure’.53 It offered Elizabeth welcome respite and an opportunity to set aside her concerns temporarily. Four years earlier, she had been created queen of the newly independent Tuvalu, which became her smallest realm. Her arrival on the tiny island was like no other in her reign, seated in a gold and turquoise canoe decorated with tropical foliage and flowers and carried by twenty-six ‘warriors’ dressed in grass skirts. Afterwards, at a traditional feast whose menu included barbecued bat, Elizabeth wore a mother-of-pearl necklace and a simple headdress of stephanotis flowers given to her by the islanders. Her appearance suggested a degree of unbending she seldom allowed herself at home and contrasted with signs of strain when, immediately after her return, she opened parliament at Westminster.
Elizabeth’s enjoyment of her Commonwealth tours had not dimmed. Her attachment to this key facet of her inheritance was unflagging, though the African independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s, sporadic republicanism in Canada and Australia and the pan-European initiatives of the 1970s had loosened the Commonwealth’s imaginative hold on many of her British subjects. In 1953, Elizabeth’s symbolic Commonwealth role as unifier was widely accepted in Britain; thirty years on, sceptics queried the value of her globe-trotting much as they queried the value of the Commonwealth itself. Of Elizabeth’s visit to Canada in March 1983, the BBC’s unconvinced court correspondent Kate Adie reflected ‘there was no evidence that a tour did harm; to the contrary, most of the events brought pleasure to those attending, satisfaction to small towns and thrills to those who shook hands, and confirmed that civilised behaviour supports a thousand causes and charities and enterprises’.54 Adie was dismissive of what she saw as Elizabeth’s dowdiness; she concluded that ‘worthiness and duty were on show’.55 It was a reiteration of the gulf that had opened between Elizabeth and sections of the popular mindset as long ago as the mid-1950s. Elizabeth was proud to embrace worthiness and duty and to celebrate those qualities in others, as she made clear in her Christmas broadcasts and her conversations with voluntary-sector workers recognized at palace investitures. Ideals of civic-mindedness held limited appeal for journalists in pursuit of a story at a moment when royal reporting was increasingly personality-focused and less and less concerned with monarchy’s daily round. Home-grown reaction to Elizabeth and Philip’s three-day visit to British Columbia was mostly more affectionate. Contra Adie, a report in Canada’s Maclean’s magazine acclaimed Elizabeth as ‘a real superstar’, with a ‘legendary power to dispel gloom’.56 Famous across the globe from birth, Elizabeth did not aspire to be a superstar; her eminence was of a different variety. She did expect her role to be taken seriously and accorded an appropriate level of respect. Among causes of her considerable fury at an American-led invasion of Grenada on 25 October 1983 was her own sidelining as Queen of Grenada by the US president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s government did not inform Elizabeth of its intentions, grounded in American fears of communism in the region, nor discuss them with her advisers. Elizabeth’s pointed reference two years later, in a speech on neighbouring Barbados, to ‘the vulnerability of small [Caribbean] states’, proved the strength of her indignation.
In 1985, a photograph by Peter Grugeon, taken at Windsor Castle ten years earlier and used as Elizabeth’s official Silver Jubilee portrait, was reworked by American artist Andy Warhol. Warhol was preoccupied by fame. ‘I want to be as famous as the Queen of England,’ he said. For the fame-loving Warhol, Elizabeth was synonymous with celebrity. Warhol’s four boldly coloured screenprints reduced Grudgeon’s portrait of her to a doll-like mask. They celebrated Elizabeth as a global brand, as instantly recognizable as Campbell’s Soup; they suggested the artifice of royal iconography.
Wittingly or otherwise, Warhol successfully captured Elizabeth’s understanding of the importance of what Charles had called ‘dressing up and Queening it’. Repeatedly since her accession, she had been painted and photographed in full royal fig, complete with orders and jewels. In doing so, she projected one version of royalty. She gave away nothing of herself, her own personality secondary to the signifiers of royal status, the public image a neutral mask. Novelist Anthony Powell was astonished by private snapshots of Elizabeth taken by portraitist Rodrigo Moynihan in November. Powell described them as ‘different from any photographs I have seen of her. Much more convincing in the way her character was suggested.’57 In Warhol’s images is nothing of the ‘real’ Elizabeth glimpsed by Moynihan and Powell: he reduces her to an empty template, like an actress posing for the camera.
Warhol’s view, however, was not Elizabeth’s. For Elizabeth monarchy was a sacred trust, its stock-in-trade public service. Stiffened by her mother, she had opposed Tony Benn’s plans for removing her portrait from postage stamps, aware that ubiquitous royal iconography was key to sustaining the idea of monarchy subliminally in the popular imagination. Warhol’s focus was Elizabeth’s fame: his vivid ‘portraits’, undertaken without sittings, presented her as a royal ‘star’ in an emerging celebrity culture that would overwhelm the second half of her reign. This happened by stages and posed challenges for Elizabeth and her family. A hereditary monarchy cannot exist as an aspect of celebrity culture, since its members are required to command public approval lifelong, while celebrity is too often temporary, based on public curiosity rather than respect. ‘Celebrity’ has never shaped Elizabeth’s view of her position: she absorbed from Queen Mary an understanding of royalty that was both sterner and more rarefied. Younger members of Elizabeth’s family colluded in blurring boundaries between royalty and celebrity, talking to journalists, interviewed on chat shows. A hungry press rewarded their efforts by cutting them down to size as players in what Malcolm Muggeridge had derided thirty years earlier as a royal ‘soap opera’. Inevitably, Elizabeth resisted intervening to direct her children’s behaviour. For the time being, remote as Warhol’s gaudy poster girl, she herself escaped the press’s downgrading.
Elizabeth’s reluctance to gainsay her family was an inherited weakness. Worldwide attention greeted the Queen Mother’s eighty-fifth birthday in August 1985. Coverage on television news programmes included an interview with biographer Christopher Warwick. Elliptically he referred to ‘problems in the lives of her daughters, problems within her family groups’, before stating, ‘she won’t accept problems, you can’t go to her with problems... she just pretends that problems don’t exist.’ Large crowds greeted the royal family outside church at Sandringham on the morning of the birthday itself. It began to rain, and Margaret arranged a raincoat around her mother’s shoulders. Attentive as always, Elizabeth helped her mother with the many posies of flowers offered by children. ‘For once the Queen played the role of floral assistant,’ noted a television journalist. A birthday concert on Radio 4 that evening took its title from Tennyson’s letters to Queen Victoria: ‘Dear and Honoured Lady’. At her own request it included a short exchange from Noël Coward’s Private Lives that appeared to encapsulate the Queen Mother’s problem avoidance: ‘Let’s be superficial and pity the poor Philosophers. Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can... Let’s savour the delights of the moment.’ Whether or not Elizabeth chose to reflect on her mother’s choice is impossible to say. Serious and dutiful from childhood, she had never allowed herself to enjoy the party at the expense of other calls on her attention.
She marked her own sixtieth birthday, in April 1986, with the release of a new photograph, taken by Andrew at Sandringham: a kindly, strikingly relaxed image of a happy, smiling Elizabeth, arms crossed in a comfortable twinset, more mumsy than regal. Postage stamps and television documentaries commemorated the milestone; Elizabeth was photographed by the Bank of England’s in-house photographer for an updated portrait for banknotes to replace the image by Harry Ecclestone that had been in use since 1971. Commentary on the milestone was overwhelmingly favourable. The assessment of former arts minister Norman St John Stevas that Elizabeth’s achievement was a ‘stronger, more stable, more popular’ monarchy, ‘more appreciated than at any time in our history’, was widely shared.58 At Edward’s request, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote a new short musical, called Cricket; it included a part for Edward himself and was performed at Windsor Castle in June. Elizabeth’s enjoyment suggests she did not draw any parallels with the predicament of the hero and heroine, cricketer Donald and his girlfriend, earl’s daughter Emma, whose relationship threatens to unravel thanks to Emma’s belief that Donald is more attached to his cricket team than to her. The royal household’s birthday present of two paintings of the budgerigars in the Windsor aviary, descendants of the birds Elizabeth had been given as a child, connected past and present; Elizabeth described the pictures as ‘an inspired choice for a special birthday’.59 Among highlights of a Royal Opera House gala on 21 April was a performance of Elgar’s Nursery Suite, dedicated in 1930 to the then Duchess of York and her daughters. On this occasion, the suite was performed as an eight-minute-long ballet, choreographed by royal favourite Frederick Ashton. Ashton was inspired by a memory of 145 Piccadilly. Like scullery maid Mollie Moran, he had seen Elizabeth and her sister as children in their London garden and never forgotten the sight. ‘I was on the number 19 bus going home and we stopped and there they were, the two little girls playing.’60 Nursery Suite presented Elizabeth and Margaret dressed in the frilly frocks of the Marcus Adams years, tied with coloured sashes, playing together outdoors with balls and hoops and skipping ropes used as reins in one of Elizabeth’s favourite pony games. Ashton had discussed his idea with Margaret. She talked to him about the sort of games the sisters played together and gave him photographs; knowing her sister, she warned him not to make it ‘too whimsical’. The first movement captured the sisters’ absorption in one another in their self-contained world of Alah and Crawfie; in the last, the Elizabeth dancer puts on a cloak handed to her by Margaret, symbolically embracing her destiny, her childhood over. Afterwards, Margaret told Ashton she had worried about the commission. ‘I thought it would make both The Queen and my mother sick,’ she wrote, ‘but we all ended up in floods of tears.’61 She thanked him for his ‘miraculous re-enactment’ of her childhood, a feeling that the enthusiasm of her letter suggests Elizabeth had shared. ‘How you got that child to act the last bit in the cloak... It was wonderful and my mama was blubbing like anything.’ No one was more accustomed than Elizabeth to the fictionalization of her life story. From childhood she had provided copy for writers, hacks and panegyrists. Ashton had done something different. Fleetingly he rekindled the particular magic of Elizabeth’s very happy upbringing. That she should have been moved, seated in the royal box close to Margaret and her mother, is only a measure of her affection for the two women to whom, alongside Philip, she remained closest. Remembering ought to have been bittersweet – 145 Piccadilly had been destroyed by bombs; the world to which it belonged had succumbed to stealthier opponents, but was equally irretrievable – but there is no evidence that Elizabeth considered it so. At the time of her silver wedding anniversary, she had denied any impulse to dwell on the past. A decade on, in a private conversation, she suggested this was no longer strictly accurate. At a party hosted by booksellers Hatchard’s she admitted she had kept ‘a lot’ of the letters sent to her by family and friends and that she reread them. ‘I don’t find it sad,’ she said.62 She valued long-term relationships; the past was comprehensible, coherent in ways not true of the present, and her own past had included great happiness.
The Opera House had been garlanded for the evening with spring flowers, an evocation, after a cruelly cold winter, of Elizabeth’s role of long ago as harbinger of spring. Springtime was doubly represented in the royal box. At the furthest corner of the front row, a bouncy young woman, sparkling in diamonds, sat beside Andrew. Weeks before, she had joined the royal family for the Easter break at Windsor. ‘I thought Sarah fitted in very happily, didn’t you?’ the Queen Mother had written to Elizabeth on 10 April. ‘She is such a cheerful person, and seems to be so thankful & pleased to be part of a united family, & is truly devoted to darling Andrew. It seems most hopeful which is a comfort.’63 The palace had announced the engagement of Elizabeth’s roving-eyed second son to Sarah Ferguson on 17 March, almost a month after Andrew’s proposal. Elizabeth was pleased with his choice. Two years had passed since Princess Michael of Kent, married to Elizabeth’s youngest cousin, had described Elizabeth as ‘withdrawn’ from the troubles of Charles and Diana’s marriage; in Andrew’s case, Elizabeth shared her mother’s hopefulness.64 Like Diana Spencer, Sarah Ferguson was connected to the court: a cousin of Robert Fellowes, her father a polo associate of Philip’s and Charles’s; she shared Elizabeth’s fondness for country life. The couple were cheerfully rumbustious, and a chummy press nicknamed Sarah ‘Fergie’. Like Diana, her childhood had been marred by painful marital break-up; as in Diana’s case, her mother had abandoned her marriage and her children. It was not a point on which anyone chose to dwell. Elizabeth was both sufficiently humble and sufficiently serene to overlook implied criticism that, in her fourth decade on the throne, a Tigger-ish young woman, lacking dignity or any compelling sense of duty, was the ‘breath of fresh air’ the monarchy needed.
Elizabeth recharged her batteries in May with a private visit to the United States. For the second time, she stayed with William and Sarah Farish at Lane’s End Farm, near Versailles, Kentucky. At the time of her previous visit, an unnamed courtier quoted in the New York Times had explained her decision to stay with the Farishes in overtly snobbish terms: ‘They are “old money” not new, and they are not what you Americans would call “prominent socialites”.’65 The arrangement was suggested by Anglophile thoroughbred breeder Paul Mellon, whose stallion Mill Reef had featured in Elizabeth’s breeding programmes since 1974. William Farish was vice president of America’s Jockey Club; conversation revolved around horses and dogs. As on her previous visit, in October 1984, Elizabeth’s purpose was to visit Kentucky stud farms, where, a palace spokesman explained archly, she ‘ha[d] mares of her own visiting American stallions’; her goal was to breed and train a Derby winner.66 Despite careful planning, both visits were markedly informal. Sarah Farish had described her first experience of accommodating the world’s most high-profile monarch as ‘the most wonderful week either of us had ever had... it was almost beyond words’. The Farishes saw at first hand Elizabeth’s eagerness to enjoy herself, her passion for horses, which they shared, her lack of affectation. The winter after her first visit, Elizabeth had responded to a family member’s question about her Christmas present with a down-to-earth request for a dressing gown that was machine washable. It was duly made by the Emmanuels, designers of Diana’s wedding dress, with practical fabric-covered buttons.
Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were married at Westminster Abbey on 23 July 1986. Elizabeth bestowed on Andrew the title Duke of York, associated with second sons, which had belonged to both her father and her grandfather. She wore a blue coat and dress by Hartnell-trained Ian Thomas, who had begun making clothes for her in 1969. Thomas recorded a compliment from Philip, who came into Elizabeth’s dressing room during a fitting, that made her flush with pleasure. During the wedding itself, the fidgetiness of four-year-old William of Wales attracted his grandmother’s irritated attention, so different from her own earnest good behaviour as a bridesmaid to Lady May Cambridge in October 1931, when she was five. That it did not mar her enjoyment of an ebullient occasion was confirmed in her subsequent Christmas broadcast. With uncharacteristic whimsy, Elizabeth suggested that ‘even the horses in their stables’ had been aware ‘that something quite special [was] happening... on that happy day back in July when my son and daughter-in-law were married, and they drew the carriages through the cheerful crowds thronging the London streets’.67 Watching the wedding on television, veteran novelist Anthony Powell judged it more simply an ‘unusually good show’.68
Journalists outside the abbey combed the crowds for any shard of opinion to distinguish their gushing copy from other front pages. The Sunday Tribune found a trio of friends from Cheshire. Obligingly, Winifred Mould shared her opinion that ‘she personally never believed that the Queen and Mrs Thatcher has ever got on’.69 It was not a random statement on Mrs Mould’s part. Days before the wedding, quoting ‘sources close to the Queen’, the Sunday Times had informed readers of Elizabeth’s view of Thatcher’s style of government as ‘uncaring, confrontational and divisive’.70 Initial reactions of Elizabeth’s advisers, among whom the story’s source was at first unsuspected, were of horrified astonishment. From Windsor Castle, Elizabeth agreed to telephone an upset Thatcher; she commiserated with her, presumably over press perfidy, and reassured her that ‘the story bore no relation to the facts’.71 Within a week, the ‘sources close to the Queen’ were identified as Elizabeth’s press secretary Michael Shea, who denied making the offending statements in anything resembling the form in which they were published; he had responded to a telephone interview, he claimed, in anodyne fashion. Readers were sensibly sceptical that Elizabeth, after thirty-four years of oyster-like political discretion, should express herself so unguardedly, an argument expounded by William Heseltine in a letter to The Times, in which he also defended Elizabeth’s right to form opinions on government policy. Thatcher exonerated Elizabeth from blame; she worried that rumours of royal disapproval would undermine her own grass-roots support. The danger to Elizabeth was significant. Partiality was not permitted to a crown above politics. Differences of opinion between Elizabeth and her prime minister over Commonwealth affairs were already suspected. Three days earlier, the Commonwealth Games had opened in Edinburgh in disarray. Thirty-two black nations boycotted the competition, angry at Thatcher’s resistance to sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime. As at Lusaka, Elizabeth was anxious to facilitate compromise in the interest of the organization’s continuance. She understood the pitfalls of any suggestion that her roles of head of state and head of the Commonwealth conflicted. A consensus emerged that the opinions were Michael Shea’s own; months later he left royal employment. Nevertheless a view persisted that, in so serious a matter as Elizabeth’s relationship with her prime minister, there could be no press smoke without fire. Winifred Mould was not alone in her conclusion.
As long ago as December 1937, the Spectator had noted of the royal family, ‘with all that needs to be known about their private lives the public is quite adequately familiar. Tissues of trivialities about what Prince Someone’s chauffeur or Princess Somebody’s hairdresser said of them do small service to their reputation.’ The writer concluded that ‘the highest compliment’ the British public could pay its royals was ‘to treat them as they would obviously desire to be treated’.72
In the summer of 1987, quite how Elizabeth’s family desired to be treated became a moot point. In June, Elizabeth conferred on Anne the title Princess Royal. Twenty-two years had passed since the death of the last Princess Royal, Elizabeth’s aunt, Princess Mary. Although the title was reserved for the sovereign’s eldest daughter, the award to Anne was explained as a recognition of her public service, notably her work as president of Save the Children. It was an old-fashioned royal gesture that gave particular pleasure to both Elizabeth and Philip, glossed in terms acceptable to 1980s meritocrats. The same month, however, against the advice of all her senior staff, Elizabeth permitted a televised fundraising initiative that ultimately cocked a snook at notions of royal status. It was the brainchild of her youngest son, Edward, who earlier in the year had left the Royal Marines midway through training, to his mother’s disappointment. Edward’s aim was to raise £1 million to be divided between four charities, each charity the beneficiary of a team led by a member of his own family, in a royal version of a popular game show called It’s a Knockout. Anne, Andrew and Sarah would join him as team leaders; Charles had declined to take part and had vetoed Diana’s participation. In an interview ahead of the event, Edward offered, ‘I hope I didn’t twist anybody’s arm. It was completely up to them and luckily they all thought it was a good idea.’73 That it was not a good idea to combine royalty with a slapstick outdoor game show in a pastiche medieval setting, or to encourage television and sports personalities to indulge in a pantomime version of a courtly tournament, complete with exaggerated gestures of mock deference to the royal team leaders, ought to have been obvious. Deference is not a safe subject for royal-led public satire; boisterousness sits uneasily with inherited ideas of royal dignity. ‘Monarchy is the manipulation of illusion... Royals of old saw it as their duty to present an image of propriety,’ a provincial newspaper reminded its readers with a sniff of disapproval.74 It’s a Royal Knockout stripped its royal participants of the possibility of inspiring illusions. Only Anne, conspicuously uncomfortable, emerged mostly unscathed; her newest sister-in-law had abandoned propriety gleefully. An on-site press conference ended unhappily with Edward’s stormy departure, after journalists failed to praise the day’s events. As hoped, a significant sum had been raised for a quartet of charities, but this was overlooked in the subsequent fallout. A resoundingly negative response to the enterprise was a reminder, too late, that public expectations of the royal family were conservative: a well-respected novelist would suggest that ‘in return for privilege, wealth and adoration, [they] must... indicate from time to time that they are subject to burdensome duty’.75 On this occasion, Elizabeth’s children could not blame the media for a failure of judgement and ill-advised behaviour that were all their own. A royal official described the programme as ‘a step down the slippery slope. It brought ridicule on the organisation.’76 Elizabeth’s reluctance to halt Edward’s plans had enabled her headstrong brood unwittingly to inflict unnecessary damage on the institution to which she had dedicated her life. Only a year before, biographer John Pearson had claimed that Elizabeth had ‘surrendered nothing of the essence of the royal myth which she accepted as a sacred trust from that dedicated king, her father’, but the royal myth was fragile in the face of rapidly changing attitudes and her children’s folly.77 Elizabeth would describe herself as ‘like Queen Victoria... a believer in that old maxim “moderation in all things”’, a claim supported by her iron self-control and frugality: hotwater bottle covers used until threadbare, electric lights assiduously turned off; but neither she nor Philip, who Andrew identified as the instigator of duty and discipline in his own and his siblings’ upbringing, had enforced moderation on their children.78 In a book published five years earlier, Philip had set out his belief in the importance he attached to ‘the responsibility [the individual] takes for his own attitudes and his own actions’.79 In practice, it was a laissez-faire doctrine and, seconded by Elizabeth, afforded all four royal children considerable scope for error.
In the week of It’s a Royal Knockout, an embarrassment of royal-themed riches was available to television viewers. Without enthusiasm the Daily Mirror noted ‘thirteen major programmes on the BBC alone’.80 If it was a warning about over-exposure, it was one that both the paper itself and members of Elizabeth’s family ignored.
At Balmoral, on 30 August 1987, Elizabeth and Philip were photographed by Canadian-Armenian photographer Yousuf Karsh, for whom Elizabeth had first sat in 1943, surrounded by their grandchildren. Months later, the release of official photographs by Tim Graham marked their fortieth wedding anniversary. After the indignities of the summer, Elizabeth and Philip appeared at their most formal, in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle. From the same sitting were pictures of Elizabeth alone. She appears austere, stern-featured and formidable, armoured against the unpredictability of the present by accoutrements of the past: the Royal Family Orders of George V and George VI worn against the Garter ribbon and, appropriately for the occasion, the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara, a wedding present from her grandmother. The pictures bear out Lady Selina Hastings’s view of Elizabeth, expressed a year before: ‘The Queen has no desire to participate in ordinary life… There she is up on her cloud and on her cloud, she knows very well, it is essential she remain.’81 In her Christmas broadcast, Elizabeth referred to the hundreds of letters she received daily, including, she acknowledged, those ‘full of frank advice for me and my family’. ‘Some of them do not hesitate to be critical,’ she said truthfully.