CHAPTER XVI
ELIZABETH’S DECISION, ANNOUNCED in the last week of November 1987, to overturn a historic restriction against women’s membership of the Orders of the Garter and the Thistle was part of an evolving process of modernization. The less frivolous press applauded it as a removal of sex discrimination, albeit one unlikely to affect many of its readers; the tabloids stuck to their pursuit of Elizabeth’s daughters-in-law. At a private lunch, Martin Charteris described himself as ‘worried about the younger ones’. Roy Strong reported him ‘stress[ing] the need to put the mystery back as they had been virtually “stripped naked”’.1 But the time was out of joint for royal mystique: at odds with Diana’s growing embitterment, which would lead her into a damaging alliance with the press against her husband; beyond Sarah’s careless bunglings.
Elizabeth, however, had been encouraged to recognize an equally pressing need to rationalize the mysterious workings of her own household. More than thirty years earlier, Philip had wrestled with the stubborn inertia of palace and court machinery; loyal to her father’s memory and concerned not to upset her mother, Elizabeth had sanctioned only piecemeal change. The architect of more sweeping updates in the mid-1980s was a childhood friend of impeccable court credentials, David Ogilvy, 13th Earl of Airlie. Lord Airlie was the eldest grandson of Queen Mary’s devoted lady-in-waiting, his father the Queen Mother’s former lord chamberlain; his wife was Elizabeth’s only American lady-in-waiting, and his younger brother, Angus, had married Elizabeth’s cousin Alexandra. The retiring chairman of merchant bank Schroders, described as ‘part Wall Street executive, part Highland chieftain’, Airlie was invited to succeed Chips Maclean as Elizabeth’s lord chamberlain while shooting at Sandringham.2
Her private secretaries had noticed a meticulous orderliness to Elizabeth’s working life from her accession: the girl who neatly lined up her toy horses on the landing at 145 Piccadilly and followed to the letter government instructions on the daily use and cleaning of her gas mask grew into a monarch diligent in her turnaround of state papers. Elizabeth was practical and, if need be, pragmatic, as David Airlie discovered quickly; as he knew already, she was a careful innovator. He observed the mechanics of Elizabeth’s household, noting the smooth working of the private secretaries’ office and the assurance of ceremonial aspects of royal life. Elsewhere, Airlie discerned grounds for full-scale internal review in line with the sort of restructuring processes sweeping through so many organizations; he noticed the dependence on government and the Civil Service in areas including maintenance and transport. Elizabeth accepted his suggestion of an efficiency review by an outside consultant: the ‘outsider’ in question, Etonian Michael Peat, had ‘inside’ form as a partner in accounting firm Peat Marwick McLintock, the royal auditors. Peat’s 1,393-page report was a year in the making; it included almost 200 suggestions for change, all of which Elizabeth accepted, the majority implemented over the next three years. Airlie involved Elizabeth as much as he felt necessary. It is unlikely that she relished the process, which caused consternation among old hands and considerable unhappiness. Peat’s reforms overturned assumptions and working practices that had survived since the nineteenth century unchallenged by Elizabeth’s father, grandfather and, until now, Elizabeth herself. That they pointed the way to greater cost efficiency, a necessary bulwark against the monarchy’s detractors, was their principal recommendation: the 1971 Select Committee had revealed the contentiousness of royal finances. Through the remainder of the decade the engagement of monarchy and media grew increasingly torrid, inflamed by behaviour interpreted as extravagant, self-indulgent or outspoken on the part of Elizabeth’s children and their spouses, as well as escalating rumours of marital discord; attempts to curb expenses held out a promise of protection against mounting criticism; they also offered leverage with the Treasury. Evidence of the palace’s ability to manage its finances, including addressing the £92,000 annual cost of changing light bulbs identified by Peat, contributed to government willingness to negotiate a new long-term funding plan for the monarchy.3 The result, in 1990, was an increase in Elizabeth’s annual Civil List allowance to £7.9 million, this figure fixed for ten years. Although she could not have known it at the time, as a result Elizabeth would be spared embarrassing and controversial annual requests for additional funding during the most difficult and dangerous decade of her reign.
It was Thatcher’s last significant tribute to the institution she revered and a sovereign she admired. In November, a leadership challenge from within the Conservative Party forced her resignation eleven and a half years after she became the country’s first female prime minister; John Major replaced her. Thatcher’s public humiliation at the hands of her own party distressed Elizabeth, who, in a show of sympathy, invited the ousted premier to the races, as she had once invited a struggling Winston Churchill. Thatcher declined but was touched nevertheless. Part of her pleasure in Elizabeth’s award to her of the Order of the Garter and the Order of Merit – both nominations within Elizabeth’s own giving – was the gifts’ implied rebuttal of the rumoured rift between the women four years earlier. Since there was no established tradition of departing prime ministers automatically joining the exclusive Order of Merit, the decision could be interpreted flatteringly.
At a children’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall in December 1989, Elizabeth described the crown, in answer to a child’s question, as ‘quite heavy: you don’t really want to walk about very long in it’. She paused. ‘It’s meant to be heavy, I think,’ she added.
She had never regarded sovereignty as less than a weighty burden, but for much of her four decades on the throne her behaviour had suggested an overwhelming enjoyment of its exactions. A chapter that had begun with such promise, in the carnival whoopee of Charles’s marriage to Diana, gave way to years of unprecedented strain that included press attacks on Elizabeth herself, as well as a brutal dismantling of the Victorian ideal of a family on the throne. Sections of the media and public explained the collapse of Anne, Charles and Andrew’s marriages in the early 1990s as a direct consequence of Elizabeth’s distant parenting, and Elizabeth’s suffering was not lessened by the irony that those who condemned her self-restraint as coldness were those who, with equal vehemence, criticized her children and their spouses for lack of self-control. When the going was good, Elizabeth had sensibly put one of her houses in order, greenlighting the Airlie/Peat reforms that between 1991 and 2000 would shave nearly £30 million from the monarchy’s annual running costs.4 The behaviour of younger members of her family was less easily resolved, particularly by a woman who had inherited her mother’s aversion to confrontation. An increasingly hardline approach to a mischievous press pointed to Elizabeth and her advisers’ understanding of the maelstrom that threatened her: in January 1987, Philip brought legal proceedings for breach of copyright against the Sun, after the paper published a leaked letter he had written to Edward’s commanding officer in the Royal Marines. Royal retaliation of this sort was sporadic, and tabloids were undaunted. The fierce, often cruel, frequently invasive spotlight of an irreverent, contemptuous Fleet Street was not easily deflected. Criticism of Elizabeth herself was desultory at first, though the puzzled observation that ‘the Queen never, ever, visits the scenes of disasters’, citing her failure to rearrange her schedule after the Lockerbie air crash in December 1988, the earlier Piper Alpha disaster and the Zeebrugge ferry sinking, suggested disappointment that little had changed since Aberfan.5 In the short term, in a survey conducted by the Barbican’s Royal Britain tourist attraction, Elizabeth and her mother emerged as the royal family’s most popular members. Her three-day visit with Philip to the Channel Islands in May was notable for large crowds throughout. Walkabouts remained good-naturedly stilted, provoking in those singled out what Alan Bennett categorized as ‘fatuous smile[s], any social awkwardness veiled in nervous laughter so that the Queen moves among her people buoyed up on waves of obliging hilarity’.6 Despite his reputation for tactless gaffes – in his own terminology ‘dontopedalogy…the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it’ – Philip was skilful in noticing those Elizabeth overlooked; on occasions he lifted disappointed children over the safety barrier to deliver their wilting posies.
In the same survey, Anne had polled more votes than either Diana or Sarah, despite the announcement that year of her separation from Mark Phillips, following tabloids’ revelation that one of Elizabeth’s equerries, Commander Timothy Laurence, had written love letters over a period of eighteen months to the married princess. In a sketch of the time in satirical television puppet show Spitting Image, Diana asks Edward, ‘What do you do?’ After the disillusionment of It’s a Royal Knockout, Edward’s response of ‘Nothing. No one does. Everything is provided’ encapsulated a growing view of the younger royals. It was easy to accuse fashion-conscious Diana of extravagance. Sarah was too guileless to disguise her enjoyment of living high on the hog, with frequent holidays abroad. She and Andrew had built a new house, Sunninghill Park. Astonishing in its ugliness, it nevertheless gobbled up £3.5 million, provided, apparently uncomplainingly, by Elizabeth. So entrenched was the idea of Sarah’s financial fecklessness by 1991 that the Guardian could claim the Yorks’ new house had in fact cost £5 million.7 And despite the births of William and, two years later, Harry, and Andrew and Sarah’s daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, in 1988 and 1990, both marriages had come adrift.
Repeatedly in Elizabeth’s life, economic downturn had prompted an embattled public to look to the monarchy for uplift; this had been the case at the time of Elizabeth’s wedding and again at her Silver Jubilee. In the second half of 1990, unemployment rose, and the economy contracted; in January 1991, John Major’s government officially declared a recession. The Queen Mother’s ninetieth birthday in August had provided an opportunity for affectionate tributes, but there would be no comparable public rallying behind the royal family in the year ahead. Newspapermen continued to luxuriate in the anguished private lives of Elizabeth’s three elder children; most sensational was the bitter collapse of Charles’s marriage to Diana. Domestic squabbling did not dignify the monarchy. Elizabeth and Philip understood its potential to undermine their own record of forty years’ making, Philip commenting in private ‘Everything I have worked for for forty years has been in vain.’8 The death of her retired mare Burmese, to whom she was deeply attached, added to Elizabeth’s unhappiness. On 2 August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait; Allied forces responded five months later. Britain played a much smaller part in the liberation of Kuwait than in the Falklands War, and Andrew, though still a serving naval officer, did not see active service in the conflict. The dangers faced by British troops offered newspapers a stick with which to beat Elizabeth’s apparently self-absorbed family, several of whom were on holiday. Columnists berated the ‘apathetic behaviour of the Royal Family’; a television poll found eighty-three per cent of respondents ‘disgusted by their behaviour’.9 On 7 February, a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street by the Provisional IRA prompted a last-minute forceful rewriting of the speech Elizabeth delivered at the Royal Brompton National Heart and Lung Hospital later in the day: ‘This morning we have had a reminder at home that there are those who seek to undermine our democratic system and way of life. I would like to take this opportunity to remind them that they will not succeed.’ A fortnight later, Elizabeth made a televised address to the nation, her first of its kind. It was a moderate, prayer-like hope for swift success with minimum loss of life and, given the war was not a British initiative, it lacked any sort of rallying note. Under the circumstances, there was an effete quality to its blandness that contrasted poorly with the less publicized vigour of her speech at the Royal Brompton. Two days later, in something surprisingly close to self-justification, Elizabeth’s private secretary announced the monarch’s close consultation with senior government ministers about the war’s prosecution.10
Elizabeth could have been justified in a sense of grievance. As she had since her accession, she, like Philip, maintained a full and busy schedule of engagements, almost 600 over the previous year; on the evidence of media reports, the nation was indifferent to the couple’s efforts. In the querulous spirit of the times, it was the old bugbears of Elizabeth’s personal fortune and her tax exemption that attracted public comment. Mountbatten had warned Elizabeth and Philip twenty years before that concealment would prove inflammatory, and so it turned out. Glossy magazine Harpers & Queen claimed that Elizabeth was the richest woman in the world, with private assets valued at a colossal £6 billion. A recession-hit public read that Elizabeth’s wealth had increased by a quarter in the previous year and that, even through 1991, a huge portfolio of blue-chip investments would earn her interest of £1 million a day. Other sources computed markedly lower figures. In every case, they suggested that Elizabeth was well able to pay the income tax on her private fortune that she had been spared since 1952. A clamorous campaign to this end offered distraction of sorts from forensic unpicking of Charles and Diana’s frigidly separate lives, including rumours of Charles’s rekindled relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
In the summer of 1976, Elizabeth had visited the United States as part of the country’s bicentenary celebrations. In a speech in Philadelphia, she had told her American audience that Britain ‘lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep’. Yet media carping did not immediately have the effect of convincing Elizabeth that the right moment to yield her tax exemption was at hand. Not until February 1992 did the palace approach the Treasury over the issue. Even then, nothing was made public. Secrecy about Elizabeth’s wealth was a habit long ingrained. In this instance, silence makes possible a parallel with the royal response to Altrincham’s criticisms in 1957, when Elizabeth withheld cancelling debutantes’ presentations for one more year to quell suggestions of royal kowtowing. If so, the approach proved counterproductive.
Margaret Rhodes suggested that Elizabeth had inherited her mother’s ability to set aside the unwelcome and the unpalatable. ‘She is very lucky in having a sort of compartmentalised brain, which means that she can switch off from a particular worry, shut the door and carry on in a light-hearted and happy way.’11 Beginning in October 1990, with a particular end in view, Elizabeth took time to switch off from murmurous discontent and worries about her children’s private lives. In this she was helped by the patchiness of her knowledge of Charles and Diana’s marriage, although details of the couple’s squabble over Diana’s thirtieth birthday party in July 1991, leaked by Diana to the Daily Mail, were readily available. Elizabeth, of course, could have approached either or both of them, but that was not her way. She remained closer to her mother and her sister than any of her children, and Diana’s tearful private visits to her left Elizabeth drained but incapable of answers. Charles still resisted any approach to his parents. ‘Trouble lies in fact that the Queen, Prince Philip and P of W [Prince of Wales] all find it very difficult to talk to each other,’ explained Charles’s friend the Duchess of Devonshire to guests at Chatsworth.12 Like Charles, Elizabeth was unaware that Diana was about to shatter every code of her polite, decorous world: in audio recordings entrusted via an intermediary to a tabloid journalist in the summer of 1991, Elizabeth’s daughter-in-law had embarked on a secret unburdening of her private woes that would claim Elizabeth among its victims – her self-restraint and good behaviour, which Diana characterized as unfeeling. Instead, while she and Philip maintained the routines of a lifetime, Elizabeth also looked ahead to 1992 and the fortieth anniversary of her accession. The milestone would be marked, inter alia, by a documentary chronicling a year in her life. Its title, Elizabeth R, made clear its focus and its purpose. The programme’s makers were granted closer access to their subject than at any point since Royal Family. In a sombre mood of public disapproval, the camera lens tracked only Elizabeth.
Of the twelve possible producers sent by the BBC to Buckingham Palace in the second half of 1990, Elizabeth’s near-contemporary Edward Mirzoeff won the commission. Mirzoeff had made a trio of films with the former poet laureate John Betjeman and, a decade earlier, a documentary after Elizabeth’s own heart, The Englishwoman and the Horse: A Kind of Love Story. On this occasion, the filmmaker would discover that his task involved more than documentary-making. In 1969, Elizabeth had found that she enjoyed the experience of Royal Family. More than twenty years later, journalistic deference had all but vanished, and Elizabeth had her own views on the perils of media access. ‘My impression’, Mirzoeff remembered, ‘was that she needed to be convinced that it was a good idea.’ From the outset he did not make his task easier: Mirzoeff wanted to accompany his behind-the-scenes footage with voice-over commentary provided by Elizabeth. Negotiations over the commentary lasted six months. ‘The Queen just doesn’t do that sort of thing, which is why it took so much [persuasion]. And she was nervous about it.’ Elizabeth is not introspective, she does not talk about herself and has never felt comfortable speaking publicly without a script. In 1957, James Pope-Hennessy had categorized her conversation as not ‘memorable, interesting, or worth the paper it could be typed upon’.13 For the majority of viewers, her voice-over proved the film’s highlight, described by diarist James Lees-Milne as ‘her little understated asides of wit... humorous, sensible, wise, wise’.14
As with Royal Family, Elizabeth agreed to filming in a number of locations over twelve months: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, Holyrood and Balmoral, her private box at Epsom races, the royal train. She was filmed on and off duty, though Mirzoeff would conclude that her attitude to sovereignty meant she was never in fact off duty. His assessment that ‘there isn’t a moment where she can say, “Well, that’s it. I can stop being the Queen now and start having fun”’ matched that of friends and family; Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary, had reached a similar conclusion. In a poem called ‘The Opening of Parliament’, Mary Wilson recalled Elizabeth at Balmoral, ‘walking free upon her own estate’. ‘Still in her solitude she is the Queen,’ she wrote.15 Though Mirzoeff permitted none of Elizabeth’s family to obtrude more than fleetingly on the viewer’s consciousness, his Elizabeth is family focused; a junto of officials, ladies-in-waiting, private and press secretaries invariably more poker-faced than the monarch herself surrounds her. Family troubles do not ruffle the seamless narrative. Mirzoeff captured Elizabeth’s conscientiousness, the effort behind each public encounter, her enthusiasms, a serene indomitability. His Elizabeth ‘has a great sense of fun and enjoyment... It’s almost girlish – terribly attractive.’16 Overwhelmingly, viewers agreed.
The surge reported by electricity and water companies following the film’s screening on 6 February 1992, the fortieth anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession, proved the size of its audience – at the time, the largest recorded for a documentary – and Elizabeth’s enduring hold on the public imagination. Afterwards it became the nation’s fastest-selling video. As such it represented a high point in a year the Queen Mother subsequently described to Elizabeth without exaggeration as one of ‘ghastly happenings’:17 Diana’s carefully staged solo photograph in front of the Taj Mahal and, as she intended, predictable brouhaha in its wake; announcement of Andrew and Sarah’s separation in March, giving the lie to Elizabeth’s statement in Elizabeth R that naval wives ‘are given some extra sort of strength to be able to cope’; Anne’s divorce in April. In her Christmas broadcast, Elizabeth had drawn attention to the anniversary in characteristic terms, explaining that, for forty years, she had tried ‘to follow my father’s example and to serve you as best I can’. In the sullied atmosphere of 1992, hers would echo as a voice from another world. Save in her own doggedness and her mother’s iron-willed continuance, the King’s record of steadfastness and service was all but obliterated. Elizabeth’s statement of family piety seemed to underline her helplessness in the face of her children’s fragmenting lives. Perhaps listeners were surprised that, after the longest reign of the century, she continued to draw inspiration from her father. Was it the security of ‘us four’ she craved, or the reassurance that her father, unprepared for the challenges he faced, had succeeded through fixed purpose? At its simplest it was a statement of straightforward truthfulness, proof of Elizabeth’s modesty and a reminder at a difficult moment of the monarchy’s historic roots. At the same time planning for Elizabeth R began, Elizabeth invited Cyril Woods, who had taken part with the princesses in the Windsor pantomimes, to make a written record of his memories of the wartime productions. It was in Elizabeth’s nature to ensure that such personal records were not lost, attentive to the historic value of royal lives; there was comfort, too, in recalling past happiness. Woods sent copies of his eighteen-page ‘Memories of The Royal Pantomimes’ to Elizabeth and Margaret in January 1991.
Elizabeth had begun 1992, as always, at Sandringham. The family party included her mother. Together they walked in the garden; they picked branches of flowering witch hazel, which the Queen Mother took with her to Clarence House. She did not remain with her daughter for the anniversary of the King’s death and Elizabeth’s accession; without her, Elizabeth went to church early in the morning and afterwards visited cancer patients in a local hospital. The Queen Mother described her long stay in Norfolk as ‘better than ten bottles of tonic or twenty bottles of Arnica’.18 For both women this feeling would vanish as the year unfurled its inventory of wretchedness, beginning with a rash of spiky anniversary articles at odds with fulsome responses to the silver jubilee or Elizabeth’s thirtieth anniversary ten years before. The Daily Telegraph published poet laureate Ted Hughes’s official anniversary offering, a five-part poem called ‘The Unicorn’ that included in its survey ‘the tabloid howl that tops the charts’. A plan to erect a commemorative twenty-five-foot bronze unicorn fountain in Parliament Square had been postponed indefinitely. ‘I thought of filling the gap, provisionally, with a Unicorn in verse,’ commented Hughes.19
Diana’s revenge on Charles was public and deeply damaging. First extracts of Diana: Her True Story appeared in the Sunday Times on 7 June; a further instalment followed a week later. Philip was not alone in suspecting Diana’s own part in Andrew Morton’s book; to her brother-in-law Robert Fellowes, Elizabeth’s private secretary, Diana denied collusion. For Elizabeth, Morton’s revelations were unprecedented, and her response was more complex than the fury Crawfie’s tale-telling had inspired a lifetime earlier. She worried for her grandchildren; she worried for the awful toll on the monarchy. Her concern and Philip’s insistence prompted a meeting between Charles and his parents, at which Elizabeth, always cautious, advised her son to wait before committing himself to separation. After the paper’s second extract, Elizabeth and Philip met both partners in Elizabeth’s private sitting room at Windsor Castle. Courtiers have suggested that a passive quality in Elizabeth exasperates her husband: ‘she’s much better at knowing when it’s right to say no, than at taking the initiative and saying yes. So he’ll say, “Come on, Lilibet. Come on. Just do it!”’20 On this occasion, Philip spared his wife by firmly advising both Charles and Diana to consider their children and the monarchy in place of personal unhappiness. Self-abnegation in the interests of duty had been a central tenet of Elizabeth and Philip’s married lives: of their son and daughter-in-law they asked only the compromise they themselves had embraced. Although Diana did not attend an agreed second meeting, Elizabeth chose to believe that both she and Charles intended to follow advice to take stock before moving forwards. Philip wrote to his daughter-in-law, a correspondence they maintained for four months, the prince, as he explained, like Diana, a Windsor outsider who had married the heir to the throne and been forced to make adjustments. Sometimes his sentiments were evidently Elizabeth’s, too, indicated by plural pronouns; Diana understood as much, replying with ‘much love to you both’. Philip’s warning that she could not content herself with ‘simply being a hero to the British people’ fell on deaf ears: she had no appetite for paternal advice of this sort and did not wish to be reminded of her duty to the royal family or her ‘proper’ role towards the country at large. Diana’s attitude towards her father-in-law hardened, which distanced her from Elizabeth. The revelation that Diana had indeed collaborated with Morton and lied about involvement with Diana: Her True Story ranged Elizabeth’s family against her. Margaret’s reaction was especially clear cut, as her sister soon understood. With no alternative and something like relief, Elizabeth maintained her summer programme of engagements: she opened Manchester’s £130 million Metrolink ‘super tram’ system; in North Wales she planted a yew tree to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the granting of a royal charter to Overton-on-Dee. She was outwardly untroubled, giving credence to the view of her lately retired Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, that ‘she is in a league by herself in terms of rising above calamity or changing fortune. She’s very much in control of her emotions about these things, just as she is about almost everything. With her, duty comes first, even above family problems.’21 On a three-day visit to Canada, the prime minister, Brian Mulroney, assured her that Canadians ‘regard you with loyalty and affection, and they stand by you and the Crown’, comfort in a comfortless season.
‘I think as a human being one always has hope,’ Elizabeth had offered in Elizabeth R, but she had little reason for optimism as the summer pursued its bloody course. Martin Charteris’s fears of the younger members of the royal family being ‘stripped naked’ by folly and a caustic press were fully realized in August when photographs of a topless Sarah lying beside a swimming pool in the South of France splashed front pages. Licking her toes was a Texan millionaire the hapless duchess insisted was her financial adviser.
That morning Sarah was at Balmoral with her husband’s family. Already despondent about Charles and Diana, Elizabeth reacted with a fury that was all the more powerful for its quiet control. Days later the Sun published a transcript of a telephone conversation between Diana and a lover, James Gilbey. It was not enough that Elizabeth’s children’s marriages should fail. A ravening press and its equally hungry readers revelled in lewd and petty details, and the family who, in It’s a Royal Knockout, had assumed the status of television celebrities, was treated with the scurrilous disrespect that Robert Runcie had warned ‘befalls the fashionable personality who is played out after ten years or so in the public eye’.22 Like discarded toys, the comfortable promises of Cynthia Asquith and Lisa Sheridan and the doll’s house domesticity of Y Bwthyn Bach were consigned to history. A. N. Wilson labelled them ‘strange times... with their ineluctable tendency to turn their events into farce and... [their] dramatis personae... into clowns’, the fate that summer of Andrew, Sarah and Charles.23 Not so Diana, who worked hard to lodge herself in the public mind as a victim. Nor Elizabeth, unassailable in the straightforwardness of her own private life. Those closest to her saw and admired her steadiness in the face of her family’s relentless public baiting, much of it, as she knew, the family’s own doing ; they regretted her suffering. ‘The Queen was grey and ashen and completely flat,’ remembered one senior courtier. ‘She looked so awful, I felt like crying.’24 Evanescent as summer rain was the short-term impact of Elizabeth R. James Lees-Milne recorded the Earl of Westmorland talking as early as April ‘of the perilous state of the monarchy. If a referendum took place now, it would just scrape through; doubtful a generation hence.’25 Again, Elizabeth’s exemption from taxation raised its head. In fact, plans for Elizabeth to pay tax voluntarily on her private income were almost complete. At the same time, in discussions with the prime minister during the summer break at Balmoral, the palace evolved a sop to public hostility: amendments to the Civil List, so that Elizabeth personally would fund the public activities of all her family bar her husband and her mother. Sections of the media scoffed at news of Elizabeth’s likely tax payments, intransigent in their cynicism. The palace did not mention the Civil List.
Equably, matter-of-factly, Elizabeth replied to a letter of sympathy about the fire that, on 20 November, spread through more than a hundred rooms of Windsor Castle, destroying St George’s Hall and a sequence of state rooms, and filling the dank, late-autumn sky for miles around with an angry orange glow that seemed to most who witnessed it a powerful symbol of the House of Windsor’s year of disasters. Elizabeth’s correspondents were Cyril Woods and his sister Iris. Elizabeth’s letter was friendly; it lacked self-pity. ‘In some respects we were very lucky as in spite of the serious structural damage, the part that was burned was virtually empty of furniture and pictures due to the re-wiring programme,’ she explained. She thanked the Woods for their part in the hasty, improvised removal operation organized by helpers including Andrew that filled the quadrangle with paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck and Gainsborough, eighteenth-century furniture and Sèvres porcelain. ‘I hope that memories of rooms in the past will be translated into reality before too long,’ Elizabeth wrote; she expressed a hope that the restoration ‘will make this very special place better than before’.26 To her sister Margaret, she expressed her view that there had been three ‘miracles’ about the fire: no lives were lost; there was no wind; and many of the rooms’ contents had already been removed as part of the rewiring process.27
Almost a month had passed before Elizabeth wrote to the Woods. Her restored composure was remarkable nevertheless. Her belief in the possibility of phoenix-like renewal was sincere: it shaped her thoughts about the home she loved and surely her prayers for the wounded dynasty that bore its name. Reaction to the fire had revealed continuing affection for Elizabeth as well as the bitterness of current disillusion. And for once setting aside the passivity that Philip deplored, Elizabeth had acted decisively to tip the balance favourably.
She was a forlorn, apparently lonely figure in news footage, surveying the fifteen-hour-long conflagration, dressed in a hooded mackintosh, her expression of overwhelming tiredness, Philip overseas on this most dramatic of forty-fifth wedding anniversaries. On television, Andrew described her as ‘shocked and devastated’. Later, those at Windsor that day wished they had told her how sorry they were, engulfed by smoking apocalypse, but no one did, the barrier of sovereignty as unbreachable then as on happier occasions. The length of her telephone calls to Philip, as the fire burned through the night, was a measure of Elizabeth’s distress. Britons had watched in horror and disbelief, but a hasty misjudgement by an unpopular government to meet the enormous cost of restoration from the public purse transformed sympathy into outrage, and the tom-tom drums sounded again, again angry at Elizabeth’s tax position. Elizabeth caught a cold, worsened by inhaling smoke. By the time of a lunch at the Guildhall four days later, with a temperature of 101°F, she could hardly speak. ‘The Queen broke with tradition yesterday by publicly admitting the human frailties of members of the Royal Family and requesting moderation from their critics,’ reported the Daily Telegraph, beside a photograph of an inexpressibly sad Elizabeth.28 Two days later, John Major announced her decision to pay tax, first considered in happier days – in the estimate of The Times ‘a response to a chasm of distrust that has been dug between people and palace by junior royalty and competitive newspapers’29 – and the ending of separate Civil List allowances for Margaret and all four of her children. Both appeared concessions forced by panic. But Elizabeth’s words at the Guildhall would resonate longer than the smallness of press reporting. In the fire’s aftermath, her former assistant private secretary Sir Edward Ford had written to her commiserating that, deserving an annus mirabilis, she found herself mired in an annus horribilis. The sentiment struck a chord and would make its way into Elizabeth’s speech, alongside a plea for kindlier consideration. Elizabeth acknowledged the monarchy’s accountability, with a caveat: ‘we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and... scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding.’ Among lunch guests Conservative MP Gyles Brandreth described it as ‘the most wonderful speech – wry, personal and very moving’, a response that was widespread.30 Elizabeth’s authority is inherited; her moral authority is of her own shaping. ‘I do think that you have been marvellous,’ her mother wrote to her months later, reflecting on a tumultuous year.31 Among the voiceless majority were many who shared this view. A republican novelist imagined the creation of a British republic, with the royal family consigned to semi-detached council houses in Hellebore Close, but the portrait of Elizabeth at the centre of Sue Townsend’s comic The Queen and I was an affectionate one, a woman who ‘talked of homeopathic medicine and dogs and the problems of adolescent children’, preferred jam sandwiches to broth and kept faith with Crawfie’s maxims.
On 9 December, Elizabeth was out of London, at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate, the five-bedroom cottage with views of the sea that family members had used since the late-1960s for informal visits and entertaining. To a sombre House of Commons the prime minister announced Charles and Diana’s separation. Reflecting royal concern about the constitutional implications of their failed marriage, he added puzzlingly, ‘There is no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned queen in due course.’ With old-fashioned royal understatement, which had been lacking over the last twelve months, Elizabeth and Philip were described as ‘saddened’. Elizabeth’s feelings encompassed much more than sadness, and she did not watch the announcement on television; she took the dogs for a walk, a sign of her unsettlement. Bookmakers William Hill changed their odds on Charles renouncing the throne from 10-1 to 6-1. ‘I can’t see Prince Charles becoming King Charles,’ a Labour backbencher told American journalists.32 Others came to share this opinion after publication six weeks later of transcripts of a compromising and undignified telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla, recorded in 1989. According to one account, Elizabeth’s response, when told of tabloids’ decision to publish, was ‘Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse.’33 She was worried about her mother, who had comforted her after the fire at Windsor, the Queen Mother and Margaret anxious that Elizabeth, and later Philip, join them at Royal Lodge; friends would trace the slow decline in the Queen Mother’s health to the summer of Morton’s Diana book.34 With mixed success both Elizabeth and Margaret pressed their mother to use a walking stick they gave her: ‘It has a magic handle which fits one’s hand like a glove and therefore gives one confidence in movement, especially when feeling dizzy! Just at this moment, it would make... me very happy and relieved if you would rely on its support!’ Elizabeth wrote in the summer of 1993, with concern and good-humoured exasperation.35 Her present of a golf buggy the following year proved more welcome. At the same time, in her rooms above Elizabeth’s in Buckingham Palace, relieved of her duties for several years and tended now by nurses, Bobo MacDonald was fading. She died on 23 September 1993, at the age of eighty-nine. As if for a family member, Elizabeth broke her holiday at Balmoral to attend Bobo’s funeral at The Queen’s Chapel, St James’s Palace. Her death spelled the loss of Elizabeth’s earliest confidante and one of her staunchest defenders, Bobo’s unswerving loyalty matched only by Philip’s and her mother’s.
The ‘rather too mundane’ way of looking at things she had observed in herself forty years before bolstered Elizabeth in the tense, uncertain period between Charles and Diana’s separation and the princess’s death five years later. Elizabeth did not respond to Diana’s revelations made public by Morton, nor did she answer her own critics beyond commending moderation in her Guildhall speech. She simply carried on with the task of royalty: engagements, audiences and investitures, which she rated the most important aspect of her public life and for which she prepared with briefing lists of biographical information on recipients, committed to memory over diligent weekends at Windsor. ‘The Queen must have been desperately worried and unhappy,’ reflected Lady Kennard, a friend since childhood, who had shared Elizabeth’s swimming lessons at the Bath Club, ‘but you would never know it because she has this iron self-discipline.’36 Concern for other people’s troubles, and the example of philanthropist Leonard Cheshire, who had lately died, were at the heart of her 1992 Christmas message. Elizabeth’s reference to ‘some difficult days this year’ overshadowed another element of her broadcast. The recording had been made at Sandringham. It was the house, Elizabeth reminded viewers, bought by Edward VII more than a century ago; it was the place from which her father and her grandfather had made their Christmas broadcasts. As she had made clear a year earlier, Elizabeth considered herself a monarch forged in the image of her forebears. One year on, she reminded her audience of the monarchy’s deep roots, stretching back through generations beyond living memory. In the house in which she herself had been a granddaughter, building snowmen with Margaret during George V’s final illness, she now, she explained, entertained her own grandchildren. ‘To me, this continuity is a great source of comfort in a world of change, tension and violence.’ In the annual public statement that most closely reflects her own thoughts, Elizabeth set out a new personal rhetoric. It built on ideas of her constancy celebrated as long ago as her silver wedding anniversary, but went further in linking continuity with comfort as shields against change and violence. Elizabeth could not mend Charles and Diana’s marriage and she correctly feared the ability of both to damage her family’s standing, but she could, as she always had, embody living tradition, a dependable still point in a vortex that, with technological advances, would whirl ever more dizzyingly in the years ahead. In practice, this meant continuing in familiar fashion, an approach that suited her conservatism, but her dutiful round would have a low-key quality, and much of what she did went unrecorded outside local papers. Elizabeth’s unshowy doggedness was eclipsed by press excitement at Charles and Diana’s point-scoring and by bigger arguments about the monarchy both at home and abroad, notably in Australia, where a Labour government under prime minister Paul Keating planned to sever ties with the crown by 2001. In June 1993, the fortieth anniversary of her coronation offered no respite. Interviewed as part of a television news item, one middle-aged woman remembered the thrill of being taken to watch the coronation procession, at the age of nine, ‘because the Queen in those days was a very magical and revered figure’. The Mirror’s front page posed a stark question: ‘How long to reign over us?’ To the poet laureate, Ted Hughes, the Queen Mother expressed her family’s view of itself as ‘battered by tragic happenings’.37 The Queen Mother did not support Elizabeth’s decision to open Buckingham Palace to the public that summer, though the initiative was successful commercially and contributed significantly to restoration costs at Windsor. It worked on a symbolic level, too, suggesting accessibility on the royal family’s part. There were shreds of comfort for Elizabeth in buoyant visitor numbers, proof despite current doldrums of an interest in the monarchy that transcended tabloid prurience.
In May 1993, Elizabeth made her first state visit to the former Eastern bloc, when she and Philip spent four days in Hungary. It was a successful preliminary to a visit to Russia the following October, during which she told the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, that he and she had both ‘spent most of our lives believing such a visit could never happen’. With France’s President Mitterrand, Elizabeth opened the Channel Tunnel in May 1994; a month later she returned to France for the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day Landings. On the beach at Arromanches, she took the salute from more than 7,000 veterans. The warmth of Elizabeth’s reception by survivors of her own wartime generation, which moved both them and her, did not deceive her about the scale of the challenge confronting her family. Elizabeth had invited the American president, Bill Clinton, and his wife, Hillary, to spend the previous night on Britannia. Clinton was impressed by a diplomatic quality to Elizabeth’s charm, as well as her love of her country and its history. It was the same month in which, after lengthy discussions, Elizabeth reluctantly accepted government plans to decommission the royal yacht.
That Elizabeth’s family occupied so many of her thoughts was inevitable at a point of continuing crisis. Instinctively conciliatory, Elizabeth had overruled Philip’s objections to Diana joining the family party at Sandringham for Christmas 1992 and, to the fury of her mother, her sister and her daughter, she continued to allow Diana, at her own request, to take part in a handful of state occasions, like the banquet held in April 1993 in honour of President Soares of Portugal.38 But it was Charles, not Diana, who first dealt more unexpected blows. A documentary broadcast on 29 June 1994, days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales, showcased his wide-ranging charity work. The programme took the form of an extended interview with journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, whose father had provided commentary on royal ceremonial, including Elizabeth’s coronation, a generation earlier. For radio listeners and television viewers, Richard Dimbleby had invested Elizabeth and her family with an aura all but divine, born of his own romantic reverence for monarchy; his son facilitated Elizabeth’s heir’s admission of adultery in front of an audience of 14 million. He also probed Charles’s spiritual views, offering the prince the opportunity to alienate the Anglican establishment with a statement that his preference was to be ‘Defender of Faith, not the Faith’.
The programme was the fruit of a two-year collaboration, and Charles had informed his parents of its outline. Their response had been to caution discretion on the subject of his private life. Charles ignored them, anxious to rebut Diana/Morton suggestions that his relationship with a former lover had nullified his marriage from the outset. His parents’ warning proved astute. The Dimbleby documentary did remind viewers of Charles’s public service, but its most memorable takeaway was an unprecedented confession of infidelity on the part of the heir to the throne. Like his mother, Charles prizes honesty, but in Philip’s old antithesis of pragmatism and romance, the parents’ pragmatism, shaped by a pre-war code of silence, was better guaranteed to dampen the flames. Correctly Charles wrote to a retired royal servant, ‘I suspect it is what is called “living dangerously”.’39 Her son’s behaviour stunned Elizabeth. So did further shocks, delivered in the form of a biography of Charles, also by Dimbleby, that drew on sources including Charles’s diaries and private letters. Like so many brickbats hurled at Elizabeth’s family, it emerged first in the pages of the Sunday Times, in the middle of October, a day ahead of Elizabeth’s arrival in Moscow. The book explored Charles’s upbringing as well as his marriage. It described Elizabeth and Philip’s ‘deep if inarticulate love for their son’ and Philip’s ‘inexplicably harsh’ behaviour towards Charles growing up; Dimbleby’s Elizabeth is ‘not indifferent so much as detached’, and he notes, at key moments, the absence of a mother’s ‘protective word or gesture’.40 The book’s publishers boasted of a ‘uniquely authoritative account of the man born to be king’, and Charles’s acquiescence in his biographer’s cool portraits of his parents sensationalized every claim. Only in the aftermath of Philip’s death almost thirty years later would an alternative publicizing of the parent-child relationship emerge as a belated corrective.
It was not the fanfare Elizabeth would have chosen for an important overseas visit and it offered stark testament to the worsening of her relationship with Charles in the quarter century since his investiture. Angrily, Anne, Andrew and Edward hastened to their parents’ defence. ‘We did our best’, was Philip’s terse rejoinder; as ever, Elizabeth kept her own counsel.41 She had no choice but to immerse herself in diplomatic niceties. She established a quick rapport with Yeltsin; in Moscow and St Petersburg, she and Philip were greeted by cheering crowds ‘less interested in the newest palace dust-up than in the glamour of having royalty here again’.42 At the state banquet in the Kremlin, Yeltsin praised Elizabeth for ‘bearing your mission with dignity’; he told her ‘you confirm an important idea: monarchy can be an integral part of a democratic system of government, an embodiment of the spiritual and historic unity of a nation’. Advised in advance that Russians would expect her to look the part, Elizabeth obliged by wearing quantities of jewellery for evening engagements, even when Philip and Yeltsin wore lounge suits. Left at home were jewels that Queen Mary had acquired from exiled Romanovs in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. Her only Russian jewel was a large sapphire and pearl brooch from the collection of Nicholas II’s mother, the Empress Marie Feodorovna; it had been a wedding present to the former Danish princess from Elizabeth’s great-grandfather, Edward VII. Yeltsin told his British visitors, ‘In Russia, the Queen is seen as the personification of state wisdom, continuity of history, greatness of the nation.’ Elizabeth’s appearance of thoughtfulness at intervals during the visit ought not to give grounds for surprise.
Among the decade’s inconsistencies was the success of significant overseas trips, which in turn played a part in reminding Elizabeth’s countrymen of the esteem and affection with which she was regarded internationally. At home her path remained thorny. In March 1995, six months after IRA and loyalist ceasefires, Elizabeth visited Northern Ireland. Security was tight for her first walkabout in Belfast. Newspapers published in London applauded ‘her courageous mission of faith in the Ulster peace progress’ as well as her doughtiness: ‘She has made it clear that she will not be intimidated by threats.’43 Republican opinion was less easily swayed. In a divided province, Elizabeth could not embody Yeltsin’s ‘spiritual and historic unity’, the history of British Ireland too often one of disunity. Describing her visit to Armagh, the Republican Sunday Tribune presented Elizabeth’s formality as coldness, the nervous silence of schoolchildren as indifference. The paper’s unlovely portrait of Elizabeth was of ‘a small compact woman, lightly painted with rouge, powder and lipstick [with] lines under her small dark eyes and a tracery of fine lines on her skin’.44 It was an accurate if dispassionate summing up of the sixty-nine-year-old monarch, and devoid of magic, mystique or warmth.
In South Africa two months later, Elizabeth appeared unconcerned by questions of security. Indeed, to a remarkable extent she appeared unconcerned by anything beyond her happiness in returning, and discounted security advisers who cautioned the royal party against visiting black townships. Exactly a year before, Nelson Mandela had been elected president of a new democratic South Africa; to Elizabeth’s considerable pleasure, the country rejoined the Commonwealth. Elizabeth described the new South Africa as ‘little short of a miracle’. Unusually she played a central part in initiating her visit. She explained to foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, ‘Mr Mandela is getting advice from lots of people but no one’s actually giving him any help. He needs physical assistance and he needs a show.’45 Her own visit would be the show the fledgling regime required. It was not a boastful rationale, simply a recognition based on experience that her presence in South Africa would serve as an endorsement internationally and a means of bolstering domestic support. Concerned by public opinion at home, she planned regretfully to travel to South Africa by plane, in order to prevent criticism of the expense of Britannia. In the event, her fears were overruled by the trip’s organizers, who arranged commercial events on Britannia to offset travel costs. Elizabeth and Philip flew to South Africa, then transferred to the royal yacht for their official arrival in Cape Town. With Nelson Mandela, Elizabeth established one of her strongest Commonwealth friendships; she bestowed on him the Order of Merit, afterwards she commended him as ‘the most gracious of men’. A courtier explained their fondness for one another as based on shared understanding: both had led lives of restricted freedoms – ‘You see, they’ve both spent a lot of time in prison.’46 It was too pat an explanation, and Elizabeth did not make light of Mandela’s incarceration on Robben Island or compare sovereignty to imprisonment. She admired Mandela’s hopefulness, his lack of bitterness towards past opponents. At a state banquet, she wore the diamond necklace that had been the dominion’s twenty-first birthday present on her previous visit. A Zulu king presented her with a stuffed lioness, and everywhere she went black and white South Africans thanked her for returning. The British high commissioner, Sir Antony Reeve, wrote to Douglas Hurd, ‘For most black people, the Queen must have been an unknown quantity, but they turned out with exuberance in their thousands. They were overjoyed, too, by the heavy and much-needed rain which led Deputy President Mbeki to bestow on Her Majesty the title “Motlalepula, she who brings the rain”.’47 Reeve described the visit as ‘a touch of forgotten splendour’. In speeches throughout, Elizabeth celebrated the country’s transformation, which many had doubted was possible. ‘The world has its share of cynics and pessimists,’ she told listeners on the eve of departure. As always her delivery was studiedly unemotional in its lack of inflection.
Foreign successes, of course, did not address the more pressing issue of Charles and Diana, for which neither Elizabeth nor Philip had solutions. Elizabeth understood only the probable toll on her grandsons and the continuing erosion of respect and affection for the monarchy. Her relationship with Charles was inevitably strained after the Dimbleby disclosures: Pamela Hicks repeated a conversation in which Alexandra claimed Charles ‘never consults the Queen. “There has been a complete break.”’48 Outsiders reached their own conclusions, Robert Runcie convinced by the end of May ‘that the Prince of Wales must divorce to avoid even more catastrophic consequences’.49 Elizabeth was supported by her mother and her sister. On 8 May, all three re-enacted their balcony appearance on VE Day, fifty years earlier. Elizabeth’s concern that the public would stay at home proved unfounded, and large crowds gathered outside the palace, partly on account of the Queen Mother’s enduring popularity, which current scandals had not diminished. One of her ladies-in-waiting recorded that Elizabeth’s eyes were brimming with tears as the three women re-entered the palace.50 In part a measure of her relief, it was proof of the extent of her concern, as well as her pride in her mother. Even within the relative privacy of a small gathering, she was quick to brush aside her feelings. On and off throughout the morning, Elizabeth had stared out of the window to see if crowds were mustering. How much her life had changed and how distant was the fleeting freedom of her escape into joy- and song-filled London streets fifty years before, dancing with uniformed strangers, running through the Ritz.
But in one matter she would make her feelings all too clear. Diana gave her mother-in-law’s advisers six days’ notice of her latest and, as it turned out, her last deliberate public act of revenge against her estranged husband. This was an hour-long interview for the BBC current affairs programme Panorama, shown to an audience of 23 million people on 20 November 1995, the night of Elizabeth’s forty-eighth wedding anniversary, while she and Philip dutifully endured the Royal Variety Performance. In different accounts, filming at Kensington Palace on 5 November, in utmost secrecy using a single cameraman, had taken anything from three to seventeen hours. ‘She did each bit again and again until she had achieved the right degree of spurious sincerity,’ noted Kenneth Rose tartly.51 Diana’s bravura performance carefully placed blame for her failed marriage on Charles and his mistress; she denounced the royal household and their perception of her ‘as a threat of some kind’; and, in criticizing the royal family’s engagement with the nation, she made her first implied attack on Elizabeth herself. ‘Someone’s got to go out there and love people, and show it,’ the renegade princess told viewers. She had accused Elizabeth’s family of coldness before. The would-be ‘queen of people’s hearts’ pitted the heart on her sleeve against Elizabeth’s ramrod back and white gloves.
Elizabeth let it be known that she never watched Panorama; her advisers took stock of public reaction. Although many viewers expressed their support for Diana, Elizabeth’s primary concern was no longer her son or the daughter-in-law to whom she, alone in her family, had remained sympathetic. ‘What game is the monarchy playing now, tit for tat, is that the sort of game they’re playing now?’ asked an audience member on a daytime chat show a day later; it was a moment when patience snapped.52 Tony Benn noted without pleasure that, in fifty-five minutes, Diana had done great damage to the monarchy.53 Indeed, Charles and Diana’s antipathy had become a campaign for the soul of the monarchy that Elizabeth could not safely countenance. Three weeks later, after discussions separately with Philip and the prime minister, and pressed by her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, Elizabeth wrote to both partners, requesting their agreement to an ‘early divorce... in the best interests of the country’.54 She also entrusted her Christmas broadcast for the first time to ITV. Members of Parliament had called for cancellation of the BBC’s Royal Charter; a former BBC governor, crime novelist P. D. James, argued that trust between the corporation and the palace had been deliberately broken. The view of Diana’s step-grandmother, romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, that Diana’s aim was ‘to bring back love’ was a picturesque sideshow.
Elizabeth had already met Diana on her own to discuss her requirements of a divorce settlement when, on 13 March 1996, a gunman entered a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and opened fire, killing sixteen children and their teacher. Elizabeth chose Mother’s Day for her visit, accompanied by Anne. Her walkabout included laying a wreath of flowers, she met grieving relatives in Dunblane Cathedral and, in Stirling Royal Infirmary, she visited children injured in the attack. Consultant paediatrician Dr Jack Beattie described Elizabeth’s encounter with the children in hospital as like a grandmother with her grandchildren; those in the cathedral congregation described her as visibly moved.55 It was Elizabeth’s nearest approach to Diana’s cherished role of ‘queen of hearts’, though she went about it unostentatiously, her purpose to acknowledge Dunblane’s suffering and express the nation’s sympathy. Elizabeth’s presence indicated that lessons had been learned. The primary lesson, belatedly, was that of Aberfan, rather than Diana’s charismatic public healing.
Five months later, on 28 August, Charles and Diana’s divorce was finalized. As in 1992, in the year of her seventieth birthday Elizabeth had again been denied an annus mirabilis. Even in the Daily Telegraph, loyalest of broadsheets, an apologetic quality coloured celebration of the royal milestone, which the paper described without gusto as presenting ‘a chance to put a long life of service into a wider context, to recall the happy times of the past’.56 In his diary, Alan Bennett described himself ‘sometimes feeling I am the last person in the country to believe in the monarchy’.57 Not quite the last. Royal determination to survive had inspired an ‘in-house’ focus group, the Way Ahead Group: Elizabeth, Philip, their four children and senior advisers. At meetings at Sandringham, Balmoral or Buckingham Palace two or three times a year the group discussed policy – from the geographical reach of the family’s engagements to the social inclusivity of royal garden parties. It discussed far-reaching changes like alterations in the laws of succession in favour of first-born royal women and the royal tax position; the former became law in the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act, which also permitted marriage with a Roman Catholic. The group’s aim was clear: according to Elizabeth’s press secretary, Charles Anson, to ‘make sure that the monarchy remained relevant in a modern society’. In this forum of opinionated men – Philip, Charles, Andrew, Edward – Elizabeth listened and took stock. She had formulated her own views, briefed in advance. Much of what was discussed, recalled Anson, ‘had probably been fairly precooked: the Queen would have been consulted way ahead of a Way Ahead Group meeting’.58 Her thoughts were of the future.
Elizabeth was at Balmoral on Sunday 31 August 1997, when Diana died in the early hours of the morning in a Paris hospital. She was killed in a car crash in an underpass below the Place d’Alma, fleeing paparazzi with her newest lover, Dodi Fayed, playboy son of Mohammed al-Fayed, owner of Harrods. Diana was thirty-six. Her fifteen- and thirteen-year-old sons William and Harry were also in Scotland with their father and grandparents. There all five would remain for six days, to the rising consternation of significant numbers of Elizabeth’s subjects, whom a noisy press goaded to ugly disaffection. It was a decision that brought Elizabeth’s monarchy to the brink of crisis.
Elizabeth owed her throne to divorce, her father’s accession determined by her uncle’s unsuitable choice of bride. The ramifications of Charles and Diana’s separation had threatened to split the nation into two camps and tar Elizabeth with Diana’s criticisms of Charles; Diana’s death did just this. Public reaction to Elizabeth and to her family’s response to the tragedy in Paris revealed the consensual nature of modern monarchy and how easily the throne’s security could be imperilled by a royal family at odds with the prevailing public mood. ‘Not since the abdication of Edward has such damage been done to the folks who live on the Mall,’ claimed one newspaper at the time of the Gulf War, criticizing apparent royal indifference to British troops’ suffering.59 An exaggeration in 1991 proved less so six years later. An outpouring of grief convulsed a once stoic nation. Closer to the Queen Mother in age than Diana, James Lees-Milne expressed the view of those who regarded the collective misery with bemusement: ‘The grieving over Princess Diana is beyond all belief.’60 Mourners gathered outside Kensington Palace; they clustered in front of the railings at Buckingham Palace. And swiftly they realized that they alone had come to grieve in London’s royal heartlands: Elizabeth and her family were absent.
In Dunblane the previous year, and in Aberfan before that, Elizabeth had embodied a nation’s response to tragedy. In the wake of her visits, those affected experienced comfort. Her recognition of their suffering – formally as queen and on a personal level as a mother and grandmother – was an act of sharing and, in its way, alleviating grief. In both instances, Elizabeth had participated in her subjects’ sorrow: her grief was on their behalf, an expression of sympathy. On 31 August 1997, the grief was her own and that of her family. She did not feel moved to share it with those who had not known Diana, any more than she had shared her reaction to any family bereavement. The palace’s statement that ‘The Queen and Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news’, issued on the morning of Diana’s death, was a truthful expression of Elizabeth and Charles’s reactions. It made no mention of their feelings towards Diana and it took no account of the reactions of the nameless millions who considered themselves equally shocked and distressed. Elizabeth’s focus was William and Harry. Although advisers claimed she and Philip did foresee public grief, since this was how they felt themselves, they did not anticipate the scale of the response to Diana’s death, which found its only parallel in public devastation at the death of George IV’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, almost two centuries earlier. Elizabeth compounded her misjudgement of the national mood by a failure to change tack once it became clear what was afoot. Through five decades, she had acknowledged the prior claims of country: queen-wife, queen-mother, queen-sister. On this occasion, she put family first. She approved plans for the return to Britain of Diana’s body and its removal with full royal honours to the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace. And she conceded the right of Diana’s family thereafter to organize the private family funeral that was the express wish of Earl Spencer and his mother, Mrs Shand Kydd. For William and Harry there was to be time outdoors, fresh air – and no prying cameras or newspapermen.
Elizabeth also agreed that morning to a public statement on the part of her new prime minister, Tony Blair. Blair’s short address hailed Diana as ‘the People’s Princess’, a label formerly applied to Elizabeth’s great-grandmother, Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck; he explained that ‘people everywhere... regarded her as one of the people’. At one level profoundly misleading, both statements caught the popular mood. More than this, Blair had pinpointed Diana’s view of herself. In the last years of her life, this aristocratic daughter of a family of court intimates had ranged herself against the royal family, whom she believed had rejected her. Now the prime minister divided the country into non-royals – ‘the people’, including Diana – and royals. It was a chivalrous send-off for Diana, whom the less temperate were already lamenting as a martyr and a saint. But Blair’s crowd-pleasing did not serve Elizabeth well. In this equation, royals were hopelessly outnumbered. Elizabeth and her family, all of whom had altered their plans to remain at Balmoral with William and Harry, went to Crathie church. There were no prayers for Diana, in order, the minister explained afterwards, to avoid further upsetting her sons, and no visible expressions of grief, just as there had been none on his family’s part following the King’s death or, more recently, Mountbatten’s. And so, unwittingly, the royal family conformed to the stereotype so disliked by Diana. By the end of the day, Elizabeth had agreed that the scale of mourning made it imperative to overrule Spencer wishes for a private family funeral. By nine o’clock on Monday morning, she had approved David Airlie’s plans for a full-scale funeral at Westminster Abbey.
Forty years before, Elizabeth had inspired adulation. Cards and messages amid the cellophane-wrapped sea of flowers outside Kensington Palace may have saluted Diana as a saint, but in 1954 Elizabeth’s arrival in New Zealand had been described in messianic terms as a second coming. Neither Elizabeth nor Philip had courted such responses, which they interpreted as adjuncts of their remarkable position rather than personal tributes. Of his sternly unboastful grandmother, William has said, ‘She cares not for celebrity, that’s for sure.’61 Reaction to Diana’s death, so different from the quiet grief usually associated with royal deaths, was beyond Elizabeth’s ready understanding, like semaphore from a distant planet: it did not lessen her certainty that her duty was her grandsons’ wellbeing. As her staff and the prime minister were forced to persuade her, this was not the view of crowds in the capital. Days passed, and their mood shifted between grief and a sullen anger at the monarch’s continuing absence. Charles Spencer had blamed the media for his sister’s death; the media found an easy scapegoat in its seventy-one-year-old queen. The empty flagpole at Buckingham Palace became an object of overriding concern. In Elizabeth’s absence from the palace no flag was flown; the flagpole had not flown the Royal Standard at half mast for her father, she would not expect it to fly at half mast for herself. Against her instincts, Elizabeth was forced to authorize a Union flag. ‘The world has lost the plot,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth. ‘The issue of the hour appears to be the Buckingham Palace flagpole... The tabloids... are baying for blood. [The Queen] has bowed to public opinion and the union flag is now flying over Buckingham Palace at half mast.’62 Elizabeth also agreed to leave Balmoral sooner than planned and, once in London, to make a special address to the nation. She had been bullied by the tabloid press, with emotive headlines demanding a statement of grief, and, on television news, hatchet-faced women plucked from the crowds by presenters, who disgracefully berated their monarch; more persuasive were the arguments of her own staff in London. She had stayed away too long. Tony Blair had defended her and, with Charles’s help, added his own voice to those who persuaded her to make concessions, but her decision, supported by Philip, to shield her grandsons, had prevented her from fulfilling a primary duty as a focus and conduit for the nation’s feelings. Her assistant private secretary Robin Janvrin judged her ‘composed but distressed by the way the nation assumed she did not care’.63 Another staff member described her in less stately terms as ‘like a stunned fish’.64 A MORI opinion poll commissioned by American television network ABC found almost one in four Britons persuaded that the country would be better off without the monarchy.
Yet Elizabeth’s return to Buckingham Palace on the afternoon of Friday 5 September proved that she, too, like Diana, inspires powerful emotions in her countrymen. The royal car stopped short of the palace gates. Her expression uncertain, Elizabeth stepped out of the car with Philip. In place of Alan Bennett’s ‘waves of obliging hilarity’, a ripple of applause greeted her, polite but modest in scale. She examined the banks of flowers in front of the black-painted railings, then made her way towards the crowds. They had not expected her car to stop and they had not expected Elizabeth to speak to them. Notable all afternoon had been the surprising quiet of those waiting and watching. This disconcerting silence, heavy with recrimination, was broken first by the clapping, then the conversations initiated by monarch and consort. It was a lessening of tension, and it found ultimate release following Elizabeth’s live broadcast from the palace’s Chinese Dining Room. Elizabeth spoke in front of an open window, the Victoria Memorial visible behind her and around it some of the same crowds she had encountered earlier. Perhaps her colour was fractionally heightened; she was not as still as usual when broadcasting, but her manner was assured, and she spoke with her customary authority, apparently unruffled despite her shaken state. She praised Diana as ‘an exceptional and gifted human being’; she expressed admiration and respect for her. She did not mention love. She suggested there were lessons to be learned. Some viewers interpreted this as a promise to copy Diana; Elizabeth may have had in mind her detractors of the preceding week or the media more generally. And she suggested that Diana’s funeral, held the following day, offered an opportunity for national unity. Reaction to the broadcast was overwhelmingly positive. Its masterstrokes included the suggestion of Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell that Elizabeth describe herself as both queen and grandmother. Elizabeth was praised for her sincerity. The morning after, she was equally sincere in a final public tribute to Diana. She led a family party to the palace gates to await the gun carriage’s passing. At the appearance of Diana’s coffin, draped in her personal standard and crowned with flowers, Elizabeth bowed her head.
After the funeral, in which neither Elizabeth nor Philip betrayed any response to the stinging criticisms of Earl Spencer’s eulogy, Elizabeth returned to Balmoral, pensive but relieved nonetheless. The experience of the Highlands was restorative. She had approved a standard typed acknowledgement to letters of condolence about Diana’s death. To one such, to lady-in-waiting Henriette Abel Smith, she made a brief addendum: ‘Emotions are still so mixed up but we have been through a very bad experience!’65 It was no less than the truth, but the exclamation mark was expressive – as far as she would allow herself in confiding the full horror of recent days and a sign, too, of her tentative hope that the worst of the crisis had passed. Received in audience, the prime minister, still finding his way with Elizabeth after only four months in office, noted ‘a certain hauteur’ in response to his suggestion that events offered lessons to be learned: he acknowledged later that Elizabeth had already begun the process of reflection and looking forwards. With time, he would discover, as others had before him, the seriousness with which Elizabeth approached her calling: impossible that she would not reflect on the most dangerous week of her reign. A letter from Margaret, expressing ‘my loving admiration for you’, was a fillip: ‘how you kindly arranged everybody’s lives after the accident and made life tolerable for the two poor boys… there, always in command, was you, listening to everyone and deciding on the issues… I just felt you were wonderful.’66 Margaret’s loyalty was important to Elizabeth. No one but Philip and her mother were as close to her, no one else so privy to Elizabeth’s feelings or able – when she chose to – to understand so well Elizabeth’s outlook that was embedded in the shared experience of their childhood. In her handbag, always with her, was a small gold box given to her by Margaret; it contained her sweeteners.
Margaret had refused to attend the decommissioning ceremony of the royal yacht Britannia in December. For Elizabeth, it was a moment of extraordinary sadness, on a bright but cold day, on South Railway Jetty in the Royal Navy’s base in Portsmouth Harbour. In accepting the government’s decision to retire Britannia, rather than approve costly refurbishment, this practical woman had accepted the limits of her choices. Her tears highlighted the understatement of her admission – characteristic in its crisp formality – that ‘it is with sadness that we must now say goodbye to Britannia’. For all her efforts, the tears rolled freely. She tried to distract herself with a bright aside to Charles, but succeeded only briefly. Courtiers believed she cried for the lost freedom of her seaborne hideaway, for the only home that had ever been truly hers, for memories that encompassed the forty-three years of Britannia’s service (most of her marriage and her children’s lives), for the ship’s overseas role in Elizabeth’s Commonwealth mission; for the cruises round the Western Isles that were part of Balmoral summers. Monarch’s and yacht’s had been a partnership, both emblems of the country Elizabeth had been brought up to love with a deep and abiding intensity. Now, both Britain and Elizabeth were diminished by the loss of this symbol of national pride.
Two years before, in a letter to the Cabinet Office, Elizabeth’s deputy private secretary, Sir Kenneth Scott, had made clear the importance to Elizabeth of a royal yacht: ‘I have deliberately taken a back seat in recent correspondence, since the question of whether there should be a replacement yacht is very much one for the Government and since the last thing I would like to see is a newspaper headline saying “Queen Demands New Yacht”. At the same time I hope it is clear to all concerned that this reticence on the part of the palace no way implies that Her Majesty is not deeply interested in the subject; on the contrary, the Queen would naturally very much welcome it if a way could be found of making available for the nation in the twenty-first century the kind of service which Britannia has provided for the last forty-three years.’67
Elizabeth’s ‘deep interest’ yielded no outcome. In so many ways it had been a decade without rewards.