CHAPTER XVII
THE SETTING FOR the ball held at Windsor Castle on 20 November 1997 was the rooms destroyed by fire five years earlier and now dazzlingly restored. The occasion was Elizabeth and Philip’s golden wedding anniversary. A gala concert at the Royal Festival Hall, a Guildhall lunch the day before, and a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey followed by a government-organized ‘people’s banquet’ also marked the milestone. Philip celebrated Elizabeth’s abundant tolerance, Blair acclaimed her as ‘the essence of dignity... unstuffy, unfussy, indeed unfazed by anything, with a keen sense of humour and a mean ability for mimicry’. Of her husband of half a century, Elizabeth told lunch guests he was her ‘strength and stay all these years’; on another occasion she would resort to racing imagery and equated a happy marriage with ‘the winner’s enclosure’. Philip had not faltered in what Michael Parker called ‘his constant job [of] looking after the Queen in first place, second and third’.1 Celebrations saw the largest gathering of European royalty in London since the coronation, including Philip’s sister Tiny, the Kings and Queens of Spain, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, Elizabeth’s fellow reigning queens Beatrix of the Netherlands and Margrethe of Denmark with their consorts, and the King and Queen of Jordan. In the months that followed all sat for portraitist Andrew Festing, for a conversation piece set in Windsor’s newly restored Green Drawing Room that also includes a full roster of Elizabeth’s royal cousins. Inspired by the populous royal tableaux commissioned by Queen Victoria from Danish painter Laurits Tuxen, the painting was the royal household’s wedding anniversary present to Elizabeth and Philip. It is displayed prominently in the entrance hall at Sandringham. Elizabeth sits centrally, like her great-great-grandmother, ‘the doyenne of sovereigns’. Beside her is her sister Margaret. Margaret’s is the largest of the seventeen female portraits in Festing’s painting. Hers is also the only figure Festing depicted in heavy shadow.
It proved a presentiment of sorts. Within months of the anniversary celebrations, sixty-seven year-old Margaret suffered a mild stroke. ‘Is it forty years of fags and whisky taking its toll?’ asked Roy Strong unsympathetically.2 Margaret’s health had been variable since the 1970s, in contrast to that of her sister, who was described as ‘strong as a yak’. Bar a degree of forgetfulness, she recovered sufficiently well to pick up where she left off, even returning to the Caribbean island of Mustique a year later. Her stroke, however, had happened shortly after the Queen Mother fell and broke her left hip visiting the stables at Sandringham. She, too, made a convincing and, under the circumstances, quick recovery, resuming public engagements at the end of March, but Elizabeth did not deceive herself that her ninety-eight-year-old mother could continue to hold time at bay, or that her troubled, often lonely sister desired to match their mother’s longevity. Given the strength of the bond between the women, for Elizabeth it was an unsettling start to the year.
The change in royal style demanded by the response to Diana’s death revealed itself in shifts of emphasis in Elizabeth’s diary. Engagements and events sought to bring the monarch closer to her subjects or, in the terminology of the Blair government, ‘the people’. On 27 March, Elizabeth visited a Devon pub, the Bridge Inn in Topsham, which was celebrating 101 years of ownership by the same family. A local newspaper had reported the anniversary. A telephone call from Buckingham Palace followed, and afterwards, to finetune details of the visit, ‘all manner of folks with shiny shoes and clipboards descended on sleepy Topsham’. Among the pub’s decorations were flags purchased for George VI’s coronation in 1937. Elizabeth talked about the flags and accepted a crate of commemorative ale for Philip. During her state visit to Malaysia in September, she signed a football for children. She travelled to Harrogate, where she met the cast of the Christmas pantomime, Aladdin; press coverage included photographs of Elizabeth and Margaret’s own wartime Aladdin. She remained clear that she would not be party to what she labelled ‘stunts’ – ‘I am not a politician’ – but a handful of instances suggested deliberate, post-Diana ‘rebranding’ by Elizabeth’s staff. On other occasions, Elizabeth achieved the desired level of connection without contrivance. Days before his death, she presented the poet laureate, Ted Hughes, with the Order of Merit at Buckingham Palace. Hughes gave her a copy of Birthday Letters, his poems addressed to his first wife, Sylvia Plath, ‘– and she was fascinated. I told her how I had come to write it, & even moreso how I had come to publish it. I felt to make contact with her as never before. She was extremely vivacious & happy-spirited – more so than ever before. I suppose, talking about those poems, I was able to open my heart more than ever before – and so she responded in kind.’3
Hughes found Elizabeth ‘extremely easy to speak to quite intimately’. In this he likened her to the Queen Mother and Charles. To the sadness of both, neither Elizabeth nor Charles found it easy to speak intimately to one another. Diana’s death had not effected a rapprochement. Events suggest mistrust, unsurprising following the Dimbleby accusations and the questionable role of Mark Bolland, appointed Charles’s deputy private secretary in the autumn of 1996, in promoting Charles at the expense of Buckingham Palace and, by implication, Elizabeth: in the week after Diana’s death, Bolland leaked to press contacts details of emerging funeral plans, crediting Charles, not Elizabeth’s advisers, with the touchy-feely developments likely to win acclaim. Elizabeth’s bridge-building included the visit she and Philip made in May 1998 to the new model town of Poundbury, built by Charles in Dorset. Elizabeth’s enthusiastic response did not satisfy Charles, for whom his parents’ twenty-minute visit was an insufficient acknowledgement of ‘the project of my lifetime’.4 Further setbacks emerged from commemorations of Charles’s fiftieth birthday in November. The makers of a documentary, Charles at Fifty, claimed, ‘We have been told by a senior aide that Charles believes the monarchy needs radical modernization. He is impatient to get on with the job. And that’s why, the aide said, the prince would be “privately delighted” if the Queen were to abdicate.’ Hastily Buckingham Palace and St James’s Palace issued a joint statement explaining that Charles had telephoned Elizabeth to express his distress; in fact a furious Elizabeth had tracked him down on an overseas visit to discover that he knew nothing of the allegations. A dutiful Charles responded by describing the suggestion publicly as ‘deeply offensive’, ‘hurtful’ and ‘completely wrong’. Elizabeth was indeed hurt: rumours inside the palace suggested that the subject of her abdication had arisen at private dinner parties. Days later, her composure was unruffled at the birthday party she gave for Charles in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace, attended by the Queen Mother with the Gloucesters and Kents, alongside representatives of his many charities; she praised his ‘vision, compassion and leadership’. Charles’s reply – that he ‘enormously appreciated’ his parents’ tolerance over fifty years – had acquired added piquancy over the preceding week. The following night, neither Elizabeth nor Philip accompanied Margaret to a party at Highgrove,5 attended by European royals and members of Elizabeth’s own inner circle, including Susan Hussey, the Airlies and the Brabournes. Charles had expected as much, and delivered his invitation to his mother via an intermediary.6 The party’s hostess was Camilla Parker Bowles, divorced since 1995 and now ‘non-negotiable’ in Charles’s life. She had been excluded from Elizabeth’s guest list for twenty years. Elizabeth would not agree to meet her for another eighteen months.
At the State Opening of Parliament two weeks later, Elizabeth delivered the royal address, as always written on her behalf by the government. For the first time in living memory, her speech was not received in respectful silence. Labour MPs greeted with ‘Hear, hears’ her announcement of ‘the first stage in a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative’: for the majority of hereditary peers the loss of an inherited right to sit in parliament’s upper chamber. Elizabeth was not deflected by the interruption. Nothing in her manner indicated her view of this assault on the hereditary principle, to which she owed her throne; few if any who were present remembered her determined behind-the-scenes response to Emrys Hughes’s Abolition of Titles Bill in 1967. In the year ahead she would open a new Welsh assembly in Cardiff and a Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, both invested with devolved powers. Her own position remained constitutionally inviolate.
A striking new portrait of Elizabeth by twenty-seven-year-old painter Justin Mortimer, unveiled in January 1998, provoked strongly negative responses across middle England. Mortimer’s accomplished painting separated Elizabeth’s head from her body. His ‘guillotined’ queen was widely regarded with incomprehension and distaste.
More than the populism of Elizabeth’s pub visit or her football autograph, or the spin doctoring of Charles’s aides at St James’s Palace, Edward’s wedding to Sophie Rhys-Jones at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in June 1999 appeared to represent the post-Diana monarchy embracing a simpler way forward. Sophie was Edward’s girlfriend of seven years. Of unremarkable background, she had none of Diana’s or Sarah’s connections to Elizabeth’s court. She met Edward in 1993; for part of their long relationship, she had lived in apartments of her own in Buckingham Palace. The Sun greeted their engagement with an eight-page ‘Sophie’ supplement and warning noises that it was preparing to welcome Edward’s fiancée as a new Diana, to whom she bore a passing resemblance. It was an impulse Sophie, Edward and the palace united in resisting. Edward told reporters, ‘We are the very best of friends and that’s essential, and it also helps that we happen to love each other as well very much.’ Commentators noted that the couple’s relationship had already lasted longer than the marriage of Andrew and Sarah or ‘the brief happy period enjoyed by Charles and Diana’.7 The couple outlined plans to continue after marriage with their non-royal working lives, Edward as a television producer, Sophie in public relations, a decision that, in the face of poor professional judgement, they were subsequently forced to rescind.
Elizabeth bestowed on Edward the title Earl of Wessex; on his wedding day she announced that, in due course, he would inherit Philip’s title of Duke of Edinburgh, a reflection of the closeness between Philip and his youngest son. She had agreed to Bagshot Park as the couple’s married home, a fifty-six-room ‘Tudor Gothic’ mansion eleven miles from Windsor Castle, tactfully described by the royal editor of The Times as ‘a much more modest home than Buckingham Palace’.8 Built for Queen Victoria’s third and favourite son, Elizabeth’s godfather Arthur, Duke of Connaught, Bagshot was considered by Elizabeth’s advisers too large, and too expensive to run, for the monarch’s youngest child. Elizabeth had bought costly Gatcombe Park9 for Anne, she had met the considerable costs of building Sunninghill Park for Andrew and Sarah. To Edward fell Bagshot. He contributed significantly to renovation costs and later extended his lease, at a cost of £5 million, to 150 years.
Edward’s wedding was an interval of celebration for Elizabeth; from the outset her relationship with her newest daughter-in-law was more straightforward than those with Diana or Sarah. She took pleasure, too, in the presence at the service of her ninety-eight-year-old mother and her sister. In February, in her house on Mustique, Margaret had so badly scalded her feet that, four months later, and despite more than a month’s medical treatment after Elizabeth organized her emergency return to Britain, the burns had still not healed. Margaret was a reluctant convalescent: to her family’s distress she betrayed little desire to get better. Weeks before Edward’s wedding, it was unclear whether or not she would be well enough to attend. Impatient of illness but devoted to her sister, Elizabeth was partly comforted by Margaret’s return to a sort of normality and, in the autumn, her resumption of a limited programme of public engagements.
For Elizabeth, phlegmatically accustomed to the pressures of her position, there were more grounds for apprehension than there had once been. Tony Blair was the first of her prime ministers to be born after her accession and her first middle-class Labour premier, with none of the instinctive deference of Wilson or Callaghan. His government was impatient of inherited formalities, including the constitutional courtesies owed to the monarch, like the failure to request from Elizabeth a dissolution of parliament in order to call a general election in 2001. In time, Blair learned to value his relationship with Elizabeth to the extent that his aides teased him about a suspected tendresse. Within a year of taking office, their audiences lasted longer than Elizabeth’s audiences with Margaret Thatcher or John Major, although, unlike John Major, he was not invited to stay for drinks afterwards. But their outlook significantly differed. Like Heath and Thatcher, Blair had little interest in the Commonwealth. The hundreds of hours of parliamentary time devoted to banning hunting suggested a lack of sympathy with the country and country life; Elizabeth’s explanation of the broad demographic of those involved in hunting surprised him. The Blair government’s pursuit of the new and the smoke and mirrors of ‘Cool Britannia’ threatened to marginalize the woman who represented old Britannia. Even to her apologists Elizabeth appeared against the backdrop of Blairite novelty ‘increasingly to be a relic from another era’.10 Regional devolution threatened to loosen the bonds of the united kingdom that, in 1977, Elizabeth had asserted as her inheritance. Reform of the House of Lords, with its explicit overturning of the hereditary principle, unnerved the head of a family whose right to reign rested on inheritance. A civil servant characterized the Blair government’s attitude to the monarchy as cheerfully arrogant. Within the palace were suspicions of presidential aspirations on Blair’s part and his desire for a monarchy modernized in line with reactions to Diana’s death. Elizabeth is too cautious for knee-jerk responses of this sort; her knowledge of Diana did not encourage her to believe that her former daughter-in-law’s record offered all the answers. Blair was in a hurry to make changes, but Elizabeth’s outlook is long-term. It was the story of Kwame Nkrumah all over again. Philip described Blairite modernizing as ‘buggering about with things’.11 Encounters between the Blairs and the world of the Windsors had an uncomfortable quality. ‘I found the experience of visiting and spending the weekend [at Balmoral] a vivid combination of the intriguing, the surreal and the utterly freaky,’ Blair wrote, in a statement stripped of the respect that usually colours prime ministers’ memories of Elizabeth and her family.12 For Anne Glenconner, detailed to look after the prime minister’s wife in the Highlands, Cherie Blair ‘didn’t give the impression she was overly pleased to be there’.13 Elizabeth evidently found her guests equally disconcerting: biographer William Shawcross explained his invitation to Balmoral in September 2003 as ‘to help create a more informal atmosphere, where people can help to talk to the Blairs’.14 And it was impossible to pretend that New Year’s Eve 1999, when Elizabeth opened the unsuccessful Millennium Dome and welcomed the new century and a new millennium with a notably joyless rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, holding her prime minister’s hand, her lips unmoving, was anything but miserable. It was a rare instance of Elizabeth’s public mask slipping. Embedded in her Christmas message had been a plea not to discard the past, of which she was the living representative. She enlisted Churchill to strengthen her cause, telling viewers, ‘Winston Churchill, my first prime minister, said that “the further backward you look, the further forward you can see”.’ It was not a Blairite sentiment.
In November 1999, an Australian referendum had voted to retain Elizabeth as head of state. Monarchist prime minister John Howard offered the electorate in Elizabeth’s place a non-elected, non-royal head of state chosen by the Australian parliament. Primarily a rejection of Howard’s alternative (as he had intended), the vote changed the complexion of Elizabeth and Philip’s visit to Australia in March 2000, which many had anticipated as a farewell tour. Elizabeth did not exult in the referendum’s outcome. In a carefully moderate speech at Sydney Opera House, she described her continuing commitment as Australia’s queen, taking as always the long view. She restated her conviction that ‘the future of the monarchy in Australia is an issue for... the Australian people’. She looked back over her long association with her distant realm. ‘Since I first stepped ashore here in Sydney in February 1954, I have felt part of this rugged, honest, creative land. I have shared in the joys and the sorrows, the challenges and the changes that have shaped this country’s history over these past fifty years.’ And she remembered her father: ‘I cannot forget that I was on my way to Australia when my father died.’
Elizabeth had reached a moment for retrospection. The vituperation of the summer of 1997 had receded, redressed were toxins of the annus horribilis, like Elizabeth’s tax exemption; Windsor Castle was rebuilt, Sarah excluded from the royal fold, Diana’s memory less raw with the lapse of time. In Charles’s office in St James’s Palace, a campaign to rebuild his tattered reputation was making gains; so, too, an effort to win public acceptance of Camilla Parker Bowles. Rightly Elizabeth’s own standing benefited from comparison with the short-term goals and, in some instances, self-seeking of politicians. ‘No Head of State in the world embodies the notion of incorruptible public decency better than Queen Elizabeth II,’ the Tablet told readers in October 2000.15 Plans progressed for a costly memorial to Diana in Kensington Gardens; at its opening, Elizabeth would be able to tell those present, ‘Of course there were difficult times, but memories mellow with the passing of the years.’ Elizabeth was seventy-four, but seemed younger, active and spry, forced into the illusion of protracted middle age by the survival of her centenarian mother. In a year of anniversaries – the eighteenth, fortieth, fiftieth and seventieth birthdays respectively of William, Andrew, Anne and Margaret – her mother’s hundredth birthday in August overshadowed other celebrations; again Elizabeth and Margaret joined her on the palace balcony. In two years’ time, Elizabeth would have reigned for half a century. That summer planning began for celebrations of her Golden Jubilee, overseen by Robin Janvrin, her private secretary since Robert Fellowes’s retirement a year before. At the same time, Elizabeth also gave her first sitting to Lucian Freud for a portrait that would become among the best-known images of the ageing monarch. Artist and subject shared a passion for racing, but Elizabeth’s schedule limited the number of their sittings. In December 2001, Freud presented the painting to the Royal Collection – a gift in honour of the Golden Jubilee, though not one that flattered its subject, whose gaze is empty, the firm snap of her lips misleadingly without benignity, lower portions of her face blue-shadowed.
Shortly before Freud’s gift was a family celebration of a bittersweet nature for Elizabeth: the hundredth birthday of her aunt by marriage, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester. At Kensington Palace, Elizabeth and Margaret joined their Scottish aunt to watch a short military parade, with pipers and a specially composed birthday march. Seven decades earlier, the sisters had been Alice’s bridesmaids at her wedding in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, dressed in the pale-pink satin and tulle frocks that an irritated Norman Hartnell had been forced to shorten to show off their knees. Now Margaret was wheelchair bound, black glasses partly concealing a face that was puffy with medication, only her hair stubbornly resisting time’s depredations, still richly coloured. On the site of the bombed chapel stood a public gallery. For Elizabeth, remembering was poignant.
There was worse to come. Elizabeth was on her own at Sandringham the following week when, from the helicopter that landed in a blizzard of snow, emerged her mother and sister, both in wheelchairs, both to spend much of Christmas in their rooms. Margaret could eat little and was all but blind; she hardly spoke, distraction in listless, painful, reluctant days provided by Charles or a lady-in-waiting reading aloud, or falteringly attentive to the television. The Queen Mother’s condition was less melancholy, but a virus and weariness of spirits kept her at Sandringham after Margaret’s departure for London, followed by Elizabeth’s. It was a sombre Christmas, its uncertainty not yet dispelled by the time of Elizabeth’s Accession Day, which was also the anniversary of her father’s death. Three days later, Margaret died. Heart problems had followed another stroke. At half past two in the morning on 9 February, she was taken from Kensington Palace to hospital. Elizabeth was notified. Through a sleepless night she was informed of developments – and of Margaret’s death, her children at her bedside, four hours later.
No spasm of public grief followed the announcement that Elizabeth’s ‘beloved sister Princess Margaret died peacefully in her sleep this morning’. Coverage was mixed. The BBC reminded viewers that, in her youth, ‘Margaret’s royal status and considerable glamour made her a major star equal to anything in terms of public interest that was achieved a generation later by Diana, Princess of Wales’. ‘If she had died in the middle of the 1960s,’ noted one diarist, ‘the response would have been akin to that on the death of Diana.’16 Instead, reaction was subdued, and commentators underestimated the impact on Elizabeth of her sister’s death, focusing on Margaret’s high-handedness and hauteur, which Elizabeth, modest and conciliatory, had accepted and endured. Elizabeth carried out pre-arranged engagements before the private funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 15 February, the fiftieth anniversary of the King’s funeral. On the steps of the chapel, watching Margaret’s coffin lifted into the waiting hearse, she faltered; with a black-gloved hand she wiped away tears. In public, she kept pace with the business of the unfolding jubilee year; in private her thoughts were full of Margaret. A poem by the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, published on the day of Margaret’s funeral, drew attention to Margaret’s unhappiness; among Elizabeth’s memories were joy and enchantment and, at times, the closest companionship. Three days later, she and Philip left for Jamaica on the first of her Commonwealth Golden Jubilee visits. From Jamaica, New Zealand and Australia, Elizabeth telephoned her mother daily. Dreading more bad news, she found the sight of members of her household answering mobile phones consistently unnerving; it was harder than usual to compartmentalize public and private in the name of duty. The tour generated less interest than her visits fifty years earlier, with republican debate prominent in all three countries, though a Jamaican poll after her departure found that fifty-seven per cent of those questioned considered the royal visit important and news commentary in Australia concluded that ‘the people’s affection for the Queen… appears indelible’. Elizabeth’s behaviour was characteristic, with no evidence of personal strain. To Australia’s governor-general, mired in controversy over accusations of mishandling child sex offences in the church, Elizabeth spoke publicly about Wellington’s cathedral; she was predictably disconcerted by the little girl who gave her a bottle of grape juice on a walkabout; in Adelaide she relaxed meeting members of the Welsh Corgi Club of South Australia.
The Queen Mother died on Easter Saturday, a month after Elizabeth’s return and seven weeks after Margaret’s death. Doctors told Elizabeth of her mother’s worsening condition; in her riding clothes, she arrived at Royal Lodge. She spoke to her mother as long as she remained awake, left, changed her clothes, returned. She was at her side when the Queen Mother died at quarter past three in the afternoon. Elizabeth’s cousin, Margaret Rhodes, was also at Royal Lodge, and Margaret’s children, David Linley and Sarah Chatto. Elizabeth broke the news to Charles, skiing with his sons in Klosters; she invited Margaret Rhodes to spend the night at the castle. Later the Queen Mother’s chaplain, Canon John Ovenden, celebrated Evensong for Elizabeth and her family in the nearby Royal Chapel, where Elizabeth also attended Easter Matins the following morning and where the Queen Mother’s coffin remained for two more days. Few royal funerals had ever been planned more thoroughly: from the coffin’s removal to London, its ceremonial procession to Westminster Hall, the lying-in-state, state funeral in Westminster Abbey and final committal in St George’s Chapel, all was accomplished with flawless magnificence. A flag flew at half mast above the palace. On the eve of the funeral, Elizabeth made a televised address from Windsor. Significantly, she used the first-person pronoun throughout – ‘I’ in place of ‘one’. Her broadcast combined celebration of the Queen Mother’s long life with thanks for support and sympathy shown to Elizabeth in the nine days since her death. In the message’s simplicity lay its power to move: ‘I thank you... from my heart for the love you gave her during her life and the honour you now give her in death.’ For Elizabeth herself, still mourning Margaret, had been moved by the response to her mother’s death. In Westminster Hall, she and her family had gathered for prayers, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. She left with Philip for the short return journey by car to Buckingham Palace. The car turned from Parliament Square into Whitehall, in the full gaze of silent crowds; and then the crowds began to clap, and applause, spontaneous and heartfelt, accompanied Elizabeth for the remainder of her journey. It was, she said, one of the most touching things that had ever happened to her.17 It was proof that the affection Elizabeth inspired, like that felt for her mother and Diana, was personal. Crowds of mourners celebrated her stoicism and her endurance; they applauded her humanity, a daughter without her mother, a sisterless sister, sole survivor of that intensely loving quartet of ‘us four’. Their applause made good the inscription on a commemorative Golden Jubilee coin: ‘amor populi praesidium reginae’, ‘the love of the people is the Queen’s protection’. ‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ Elizabeth had told the people of New York seven months before, in a much-quoted message written for her by Robin Janvrin and read in her absence by the British ambassador at a memorial service for victims of the September 11 terrorist attack. On the same day, she had been devastated by the death of her racing manager and close friend since the 1940s, Henry Carnarvon. If the words were Janvrin’s, the sentiment was Elizabeth’s. It took her mother’s death for many of her subjects to acknowledge the reality of her suffering.
‘People thought, my goodness, she’s been on the throne for fifty years and I’ve not realised it’s been that long,’ remembered Elizabeth’s press secretary, Charles Anson, of the public response to the Golden Jubilee. A decade after the Mirror’s ‘How long to reign over us?’, the Daily Mail replaced a question with a prayer: ‘Long to reign over us’.18 In what Elizabeth called ‘about as full a year as I can remember’, she had criss-crossed her united kingdom, from the isles of Lewis and Skye to Anglesey, from Portsmouth on the south coast to Scunthorpe on the east, visiting seventy towns and cities. She had opened new museums, attended celebratory services in cathedrals in Glasgow, Belfast, Bangor and Manchester; she had hosted a garden party for guests born on Accession Day, and concerts of pop music and classical music in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. On the day of the National Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s, from a palace balcony draped with a special hanging, Elizabeth looked out over a crowd estimated at a million people. ‘Palace fears Jubilee flop,’ The Times had informed readers in January. London Transport revisited the Silver Jubilee, painting a clutch of double-decker buses gold, and members of the cabinet contributed £200 each towards the traditional piece of silver, in this case a signed silver-gilt platter. Across the country, twenty-eight couples included ‘Jubilee’ among the names given to their newborn babies.
At Windsor Castle, as at the time of her golden wedding anniversary, Elizabeth marked her jubilee with a party for her fellow reigning sovereigns in Europe: the rulers of Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Luxembourg. Five of them shared Elizabeth and Philip’s descent from Queen Victoria; it was a gathering to have thrilled Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary. At dinner in the Waterloo Chamber, her grandmother’s spirit hovered within reach: on the bodice of a gown embroidered with floral symbols of the Union, Elizabeth wore a large diamond stomacher, a wedding present from Queen Mary and too large to wear often. But the triumph of the jubilee was not its affirmation of Elizabeth’s place within the royal fraternity. Celebrations looked forwards as well as back, inwards as well as across the Commonwealth, now astonishingly expanded to fifty-four members. After the most difficult decade of Elizabeth’s reign, events across the country restated the bond of affection between crown and country that Philip’s uncle, Prince Christopher of Greece, had described at the time of George VI’s accession as ‘a personal love of the Sovereign... deeply ingrained in the hearts of the people’.19 In her speech at the Guildhall, Elizabeth had articulated her feelings for the country over which she had reigned for half a century: ‘Gratitude, respect and pride, these words sum up how I feel about the people of this country and the Commonwealth – and what this Golden Jubilee means to me.’ With zealous single-mindedness, she had followed her father’s example in embracing duty as her vocation: at the Guildhall she gave thanks for the opportunity to serve. Months before, Andrew Motion had described Margaret as ‘a woman in possession of the fact / That duty and love speak two languages’. Not in Elizabeth’s case. Her duty remained a defining passion. After the devastating grief of the spring, the warm glow of the jubilee acted as a tonic, reinvigorating Philip as well as Elizabeth. ‘The Jubilee has been a most interesting experience,’ Philip wrote to a friend; ‘it’s impossible not to be stimulated by the enthusiasm of the crowds.’20
Only at one point on 4 June 2002 did the deafening cheers beneath the palace balcony rise in a crescendo of screaming: at the appearance behind Elizabeth of her elder royal grandson, William. At twenty, William bore a gazelle-like resemblance to his beautiful mother. Media arrangements agreed in the aftermath of Diana’s death had shielded him far more than any of Elizabeth’s children, or Elizabeth herself as a child, from intrusion and excessive exposure. Famous across the globe, William was nevertheless little known, a focus of widespread fascination. Elizabeth did not react to the burst of shrieks that greeted him. In a more decorous age, she had inspired the same response as a young woman. She gave her attention to the crowds below, to the celebratory flypast, the coloured umbrellas twirling above the sea of faces and the Union Jacks that lined the Mall.
William had been the focus of his grandmother’s attention for several years. With greater emotional insight than is usually accredited to either, Elizabeth and Philip had recognized the devastating impact on William of his parents’ acrimonious separation. Philip nudged Elizabeth to intervene; she initiated regular Sunday lunches on weekends when William did not see Charles or Diana, William walking the short distance across the river from Eton to the castle. Their lunches took place in the Oak Room, where Elizabeth had opened birthday presents as a child and, each year, celebrated with her royal uncles and aunts, the Lascelles boys and her grandparents, and pink-iced birthday cakes made for her by George V’s chef. In the same room, lunch over, she talked to William. Later he remembered her serenity. Perhaps he, too, derived comfort, as Elizabeth had suggested, from continuity, in the setting in which she in turn had imbibed ideas of royalty from her grandparents. For William was both grandchild and future sovereign. Elizabeth, he explained at the time of his twenty-first birthday, had shown him that the monarch’s role is ‘about helping people and dedication and loyalty’, focuses more insistent – and more enriching – than personal anxieties.21
He stood close to Elizabeth at the service held in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 2003 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of her coronation. Elizabeth had asked for a ‘quieter, more reflective’ celebration than the gorgeous jamboree of the previous summer. Dressed in one of the blue copes given by Elizabeth to Westminster Abbey in 1953, the Dean of Westminster led a service that invited its congregation to share the ideals to which Elizabeth had dedicated herself – as themes go, observed Roy Strong, who was present, ‘about as good as you could get’.22 ‘We shall not place on her renewed responsibility for all the duty and service to the nation,’ the dean informed a congregation that included more than 200 coronation veterans, former choristers, thirty-four ‘coronation babies’ and conqueror of Everest Sir Edmund Hillary, who, to Elizabeth’s delight, flew in specially from Kathmandu. ‘On this significant anniversary, with quiet but deep respect and affection, we stand with our sovereign and each and all of us commit ourselves anew to that duty and service which are both hers and ours.’ Afterwards Elizabeth unveiled a plaque to mark the Golden Jubilee extension of the Jubilee Walkway in the Mall. Nine-year-old Louisa Harrington presented her with a crown-shaped bouquet. Through a charity for children with life-threatening illnesses, Louisa, who suffered from restrictive cardiomyopathy, had written to Buckingham Palace, asking if she could meet Elizabeth and ‘be a princess for the day’. ‘I want to meet this little girl during the anniversary celebrations,’ Elizabeth told Robin Janvrin.23 It was not ‘Diana-speak’ or a politician’s stunt, nor the cold formality of which Diana had accused her husband’s family; not the rigid adherence to precedent that, five years before, stiffened Elizabeth’s resistance to a flag for Diana on the palace flagpole.
In the abbey’s quire stalls on that 2 June, separate from the royal family, was Camilla Parker Bowles. Three years had passed since Elizabeth had acknowledged her son’s mistress, at a sixtieth birthday party for former King Constantine of Greece, hosted by Charles at Highgrove. Their encounter was deliberate on Elizabeth’s part. Charles remained firm in his insistence that Camilla was an essential element of his life; a diligent Mark Bolland had devoted considerable energy to achieving public acceptance of their relationship, including careful press leaks and equally careful picture opportunities. In meeting Camilla, Elizabeth acknowledged the relationship; she was encouraged by members of her staff and her family, including her niece Sarah Chatto. She went no further. Palace staff described her policy as ‘acknowledging but not accepting’ Camilla. A courtier labelled their exchange at Highgrove ‘very brief, very formal’; one of Charles’s staff described it as ‘merely a cracking of the ice rather than a breaking of it’.24 As so often, Elizabeth’s motives balanced public and private concerns: she cared for Charles’s happiness, although she could not understand his decision to jeopardize the monarchy’s stability in pursuit of self-fulfilment. Her outlook bore the imprint of the abdication, especially while her mother was alive; the success of her own marriage gave fewer grounds for empathy. Deliberately uncontroversial herself, she recognized the extent to which Charles’s private life continued to polarize opinions. In the short term, the meeting between monarch and mistress at Highgrove made easier a more public role for Camilla in Charles’s life. Elizabeth, as so often, proceeded cautiously.
Loftily the palace dismissed as speculation claims in the Spectator in August 2001 that Elizabeth had agreed to Charles and Camilla’s marriage. The magazine quoted a ‘well-informed Palace observer’ saying that Elizabeth ‘accept[ed] that the last great thing she has to do in her reign is to sort out the relationship between Charles and Camilla, and in practice that means to smile on a marriage’.25 Of course, Elizabeth realized that the monarchy’s wellbeing demanded a solution for a relationship that had already caused so much damage; she would take time to agree to marriage. The appointment early in 2002 of Michael Peat as Charles’s private secretary, a move suggested to Elizabeth by David Airlie, and the departure the following month from Charles’s office of Mark Bolland, improved relations between Buckingham Palace and St James’s Palace. Elizabeth did not dislike Camilla, who, more than Diana, shared her own country interests and brisk, wry outlook. In June, she made possible Camilla’s first public appearance alongside the royal family, when Camilla was invited to both Golden Jubilee concerts; she also invited her to the family dinner she held at the Ritz following the jubilee’s success. Elizabeth was aware of opinions like those expressed in a Panorama documentary in October, that found only forty-two per cent of people in favour of the couple’s marriage and fifty-two per cent opposed to Camilla becoming queen. Unnervingly for Elizabeth, the recently retired vicar of Tetbury, close to Highgrove, presented Charles’s predicament as a revisiting of Uncle David’s unhappy dilemma: ‘I think that Charles has got to make a decision on where his duty lies. Does it lie with the woman he undoubtedly loves? Does it lie with his position as future monarch?’26 As supreme governor of the Church of England, and a woman of deep faith who shared her parents’ belief in the sanctity of marriage, Elizabeth could not easily discount clerical opinion. She could, however, seek guidance. Both George Carey and his successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, supported Charles and Camilla’s marriage; Williams advised against a religious ceremony as divisive among Anglican clergy. At Sandringham at Christmas in 2004, Elizabeth agreed to Charles’s remarriage. Months before, a message tied to railings at Kensington Palace for the seventh anniversary of Diana’s death, had read ‘No to Queen Camilla’.27
Elizabeth did not attend the civil marriage ceremony in Windsor’s Guildhall on 9 April 2005. She and Philip were among the congregation of more than 700 in St George’s Chapel for the subsequent service of prayer and dedication. As on other occasions, her decision acknowledged the claims of traditional orthodoxies and her position not simply as mother but the established church’s supreme governor. Behind closed doors, in the castle’s state apartments, Elizabeth was notably cheerful at the reception she hosted for Charles and his new Duchess of Cornwall, and in June, she and Philip accompanied Charles and Camilla to William’s graduation ceremony in St Andrews, though she had not attended similar ceremonies for Charles or Edward. At last was an opportunity for respite from family troubles. Testaments to family harmony peppered extensive celebrations of Elizabeth’s eightieth birthday, beginning the following spring. Elizabeth’s updating of the Order of Precedence ‘on blood principles’ gave prominence to her closest relations: neither her daughter Anne nor her cousin Alexandra was required to curtsey to Camilla in Charles’s absence; in Alexandra’s case Elizabeth had already rewarded the ‘wonderful service to this country... of her beloved cousin’ with the Order of the Garter.28 At a Guildhall lunch, Elizabeth thanked Charles as well as Philip for ‘all the support they give me each and every day’, while a televised birthday tribute to his mother by Charles praised her for showing ‘the most remarkable steadfastness and fortitude, always remaining a figure of reassuring calm and dependability, an example to so many of service, duty and devotion in a world of sometimes bewildering change and disorientation’. Charles invested his mother at eighty with her father’s attributes of steadfastness and bravery; he celebrated as a strength her stasis in the face of change that forty years before had appeared a weakness. A birthday poem by Andrew Motion, discussed by Motion with Elizabeth and Charles, sounded a similar note. Each stanza ended with a refrain-like ‘The golden rule, your constancy, survives.’ For official birthday photographs, Elizabeth chose fellow octogenarian Jane Bown, whose career, like her own, had begun in the late 1940s: benign, comfortable, serene images with none of the malignancy of Freud’s portrait. Celebrations concluded with a belated birthday dinner at the Ritz in December, to which Elizabeth invited not only her own ladies-in-waiting, but those of the Queen Mother and Margaret, attentive to the claims of the past. Before then Elizabeth had hosted a lunch for ninety-nine people from across the country who shared her birthday: in a speech of welcome she addressed them as her ‘exact twins’. When identical twins Keith and Jack Hurst told her they hoped she would live as long as her mother, her reply was unexpected. ‘Do you really want to live that long?’ she asked.29
Elizabeth’s own death was apparently anticipated by the letters sent in October to privy councillors, reminding them that ‘on the death of the sovereign the Accession Council meets within twenty-four hours to proclaim the new sovereign’.30
In May 1977, Philip wrote sympathetically to Daphne du Maurier, widow of his former comptroller Boy Browning, lamenting Boy’s depiction in Richard Attenborough’s film A Bridge Too Far: ‘it really is monstrous the way film-makers re-write history for the sake of entertainment’.31
Elizabeth’s own history would be rewritten by a number of film-makers, as well as playwrights and producers of television drama. In 2006, a film called The Queen revisited dark days after Diana’s death. It would become, newspapers argued, a film that ‘changed public perceptions of the woman who has reigned for fifty-five years’.32 It starred Helen Mirren as Elizabeth. Elizabeth has small cinema rooms at Balmoral, Sandringham and Buckingham Palace, but is not, according to friends, ‘a great “film person”’. She told Tony Blair that she did not intend to watch the film. It was not a week on which she cared to dwell, even had she inclined to watch an actress playing her. Elizabeth is an accomplished mimic. In a life in which she is so often forced to suppress her responses to people or happenings, mimicry – of the silly, sycophantic or self-important – offers a release of tension after the event. But she had always denied being an actress, transforming the theatre of monarchy into more than empty spectacle through her sincerity and seriousness. The same gravity of purpose denied that her life was substance for fiction. A palace spokesman described her as pleased by Helen Mirren’s Oscar success nevertheless: in her Oscar acceptance speech Mirren had ‘salute[d] [Elizabeth’s] courage and her consistency’. Later Elizabeth invited Mirren for tea in her box at Ascot. The film’s impact was entirely positive. The Daily Telegraph’s claim that ‘the Queen has emerged from the movie of the same name as caring, calm and dignified’ was widely shared.33 In truth, Elizabeth had been caring, calm and dignified, courageous and consistent for the last fifty-four years.