CHAPTER XVIII
‘OVER THE YEARS those who have seemed to me to be the most happy, contented and fulfilled have always been the people who have lived the most outgoing and unselfish lives,’ Elizabeth told viewers of her Christmas broadcast in 2008. It was the end of a year in which, at the age of eighty-two, she had carried out more than 400 British and overseas engagements. More relentless than that of any of her predecessors, her public life satisfied her sense of duty. In old age, as throughout her reign, it included longueurs. To French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s unguarded question of whether she ever got bored, at a state banquet in his honour in March, Elizabeth had replied ‘Yes, but I don’t say so.’1
For twenty years, the strength of her self-discipline had distinguished Elizabeth from younger members of her family. American photographer Annie Leibovitz left a sitting with the monarch in April 2007 impressed by Elizabeth’s ‘resolve, her devotion to duty’. ‘There’s absolutely and precisely no training scheme whatsoever,’ Edward told documentary makers in 2007, discussing the royal ‘job’.2 With mixed results, Elizabeth and Philip had consistently sought to lead by example: observation of their parents’ unflagging appetite for public service and, in Elizabeth’s case, her public humility, provided their children’s ‘training scheme’. Elizabeth’s speech at a sixtieth birthday party for Charles in November 2008 praised his fidelity to the royal couple’s ‘guiding principles of public service and duty to others’. In her ninth decade Elizabeth continued to dedicate herself to the same principles. She did not contemplate abdication, she told her cousin Margaret Rhodes, ‘unless I get Alzheimer’s or have a stroke’; on his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003, she explained to George Carey ‘that’s something I can’t do. I’m going to carry on to the end.’ ‘I sometimes think her advisers don’t realise she is eighty-three years old. Maybe she doesn’t want them to slow her down,’ Margaret Rhodes reflected after Elizabeth’s return from a Caribbean tour in November 2009.3 It was indeed the view shared by her advisers. Long ago, Elizabeth had learned to pace herself; she did not squander her energies. In 2007 she gave two sittings to Chris Levine for her first three-dimensional holographic portrait, commissioned to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Jersey’s allegiance to the crown. Levine produced a second photographic portrait, which he entitled Lightness of Being. It captured the inevitable fatigue of age. Resting between shots, Elizabeth had momentarily closed her eyes.
Slowing down happened gradually – not until 2016 did Elizabeth hand over a number of her patronages to her children and grandchildren; it did not affect her role within her family. ‘Friendly, authoritative control over each and every one’ was how, in 2016, animal psychologist Dr Roger Mugford characterized Elizabeth’s relationship with her dogs. Friendly and authoritative would – mostly – be her watchwords in her dealings with her family, with Philip’s firm, sometimes combative support. Elizabeth did not try to control them, and they did not always heed wise counsel. In the first years of the new century, however, emerged a sense of the royal family’s smooth running as an organization. The Queen Mother’s death had elevated Elizabeth at last to the position of matriarch. Although she missed her mother’s advice, and the easy companionship of gatherings at Royal Lodge after church on Sunday and their morning telephone calls, she benefited from release from the habit of deferring to the strong-minded former consort. In the Golden Jubilee’s aftermath, royal aides revealed that thoughts within the palace were already turning to 2012 and a diamond jubilee, for which planning began as early as 2009. Events of 2002 would not prove Elizabeth’s swansong. Given the robustness of her health and high levels of public support – in 2006, a MORI poll found eighty-five per cent of respondents satisfied ‘with the way the Queen is doing her job as Monarch’ – there was little that was valedictory about the next ten years. Both Elizabeth and Philip maintained a schedule of engagements heavier than those of any of their family save Charles and Anne. This included overseas visits – to Norway, France, Germany, the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and the Baltic states – and incoming visits, like that in 2009 of new American president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, with whom Elizabeth swiftly struck up a relationship that was notably warm and informal. Elizabeth continued to attend biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings: in Australia, Nigeria, Malta, Uganda and Trinidad and Tobago. Her affection and concern for the Commonwealth had not dimmed: in 2008, in protest at the corruption and brutality of his regime, she agreed to the removal of the honorary knighthood that, in 1994, she had bestowed on Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe.
Conscientious Elizabeth, imbued with her grandmother’s sense of dynasty, looked to the future. In the summer of 2008, she appointed William to the Order of the Garter, the thousandth knight in the order’s nearly 700-year history. His early appointment mirrored her own in 1947, when she was twenty-one; four years later she invested him with the Order of the Thistle. As she had with Charles and Camilla, she also sanctioned a key relationship in William’s life. Walking beside his father in the traditional Garter procession from Castle Hill, William was watched by his girlfriend of six years, Catherine Middleton. She had been invited to join the royal fold for the day and, on her first appearance at an official royal public event, stood beside Camilla and Sophie Wessex, whose unshowy public work Elizabeth would shortly reward with her highest seal of approval, the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. The following year, William and Harry set up a shared household independent of Charles’s. Elizabeth took a careful interest. The part-time, unpaid appointment of ‘wise man’ and former diplomat Sir David Manning was made at her suggestion. A royal official made clear the source of Manning’s authority: ‘Sir David meets the Princes from time to time. He also meets the royal household more frequently.’4 In January 2010, he accompanied William to New Zealand and Australia, William’s first foreign tour representing his grandmother. Manning’s role was to guide the future king, the nature of this guidance shaped by his understanding of Elizabeth’s wishes. Also present at William’s opening of Wellington’s new Supreme Court building, although he insisted his presence was unofficial, was Elizabeth’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt. In the case of Elizabeth’s senior grandson, she appeared at pains to provide the ‘training scheme’ that Edward had denied existed.
The honours list issued to mark Elizabeth’s eightieth birthday had included membership of the Royal Victorian Order for Angela Kelly, a chirpy, quick-tempered Liverpudlian divorcee born the year of Elizabeth’s accession. The order recognizes personal service to the monarch or the monarch’s family; a year later, at her own suggestion, Kelly was awarded the panjandrum-like title Personal Assistant, Adviser and Curator to Her Majesty the Queen (Jewellery, Insignias and Wardrobe). For more than a decade, she had been Elizabeth’s senior dresser, following the retirement after more than thirty-five years (and only two years after Bobo’s death) of Peggy Hoath. The two women developed an affectionate bond. Footage of Kelly helping Elizabeth with her Garter robes during a photographic sitting for Annie Leibovitz showed her gently patting Elizabeth on the shoulder; Kelly cheerfully admitted being regularly moved to tears by the sight of Elizabeth wearing the Imperial State Crown for the State Opening of Parliament. Although she lacked the long history Bobo shared with Elizabeth, Kelly had come to occupy a position of trust and intimacy nearer to Bobo’s than that of other servants, an occasional source of jealousy within the household. She denied that her relationship with Elizabeth became closer following the deaths of Margaret and the Queen Mother in 2002, insisting ‘I am not there to replace her mother and her sister. If she wants to talk about matters of the heart, she speaks to her family. It’s just a working relationship – but a close one.’5
Elizabeth placed the same degree of trust in her longest-serving ladies-in-waiting: in 2010, she acknowledged the fiftieth anniversaries of the appointment of Mary Morrison and Susan Hussey with a reception at Buckingham Palace called ‘A Century of Waiting’. Christopher Geidt, who, in 2007, replaced Robin Janvrin as her private secretary, quickly won Elizabeth’s confidence. Geidt had worked for Elizabeth since 2002. By the end of his ten years as private secretary, she was ninety-one. Adroitly, Geidt addressed the delicate issue of her increasing age and the monarchy’s future prospects. From 2008, he also worked with Charles. This liaison between mother and son to implement a combination of closer collaboration and greater task-sharing between monarch and heir, aimed at smoothing the transition from one reign to the next, although Elizabeth did not step back from her public duties. That Elizabeth authorized this process herself, party to its decision-making, was further proof of her practical nature. It indicated her recognition of her duty as twofold: to the nation and the Commonwealth, and to the monarchy of which she was custodian. Elizabeth’s working relationship with Geidt was close: ‘When Christopher speaks, you know that that’s how Her Majesty thinks,’ commented the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell; a member of Elizabeth’s staff claimed Geidt had the measure of Elizabeth, an instinctive understanding.6 Geidt’s modesty matched her own: he took pleasure, Charles’s private secretary Elizabeth Buchanan claimed, chiefly in public recognition of Elizabeth’s ‘extraordinary’ work. For her part Elizabeth appreciated his clear-sightedness, ‘almost a sort of surgical capacity of cutting through the mist of details and going to what is the essence of a problem’ in one assessment; his friend William Shawcross attributed his skills to ‘his honesty, his modesty, his intellect, his courtesy and his persistence’.7 Geidt had a reputation for carefully formulated answers to problems expressed in a ‘very short, concise format’, a style that suited Elizabeth’s own business-like approach.8 His persistence was necessary in strengthening links between Buckingham Palace and Charles’s office at Clarence House. Like that of Elizabeth and her son, the relationship between the two royal offices was not always cosy.
The outcome of a general election on 6 May 2010 deprived Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, of his majority, without giving his Conservative opponents the number of seats they required to govern alone. Brown was obliged to remain in office until a workable solution could be reached. In the Cabinet Office, Geidt advised on constitutional aspects of the dilemma. His presence in Downing Street was a reminder that any administration required Elizabeth’s imprimatur, although Elizabeth’s decision to remain at Windsor throughout the five-day negotiating period was a clear signal that she herself took no part in discussions and had no hand in the outcome. Brown resigned on 10 May to be replaced by a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats under David Cameron, at forty-three Elizabeth’s youngest prime minister; she had first seen him as a rabbit in a prep school play. The palace greeted this resolution with relief. By eliminating any need for Elizabeth’s involvement, it lessened potential controversy of the sort that had followed her ‘choosing’ prime ministers in 1957 and 1963.
Among early concerns of the new government were royal finances. After the expiry of Thatcher’s ten-year deal in 2000, Blair had maintained the same arrangement for the next decade. By 2010, at a time of government-imposed austerity measures, the annual Civil List payment of £7.9 million fell £6 million short of running costs, with essential repairs to the fabric and structure of Buckingham Palace long overdue. The Sovereign Grant Bill of December 2011 discarded the model of royal funding introduced in 1760 at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, George III. In place of Civil List funds from the Treasury, a travel costs grant from the Department of Transport and a communications grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the Bill entitled Elizabeth to a single annual payment of fifteen per cent of the profits of the Crown Estates. The new arrangement would take effect from 2013, with a review after seven years and, in a development Elizabeth’s father would certainly have resented, scrutiny of the Sovereign Grant accounts by the National Audit Office. Tactfully, a Buckingham Palace statement, authorized by a monarch who knew too well the perils of financial evasiveness, described developments as ‘a modern, transparent and simpler way of funding the head of state’.
William married Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011, days after Elizabeth’s eighty-fifth birthday. The service at Westminster Abbey was watched by a global television audience estimated at 3 billion. Elizabeth conferred on her grandson the title Duke of Cambridge and colonelcy of the Irish Guards; in the sort of intervention typical of her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, she insisted he wore the regiment’s ceremonial uniform for his wedding. In essentials, commentary on this marriage of a prince to a member of the middle classes, after a lengthy courtship, scarcely differed from that at the time of Elizabeth’s own wedding despite marked differences in circumstances. ‘They will carry with them the hopes of a nation,’ declared Country Life; the same claims had been made of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten in 1947, a marriage, the magazine suggested, that after sixty-four years had ‘endured so firmly and for so long that, for their subjects, it has come to seem part of the unchanging foundation of the universe’.9
Two years earlier Philip had become the longest-serving consort in the monarchy’s history, passing the record of fifty-seven years and seventy days that previously belonged to George III’s wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Days before William’s wedding, his father also set a record. On 20 April, Charles’s wait to succeed his mother passed that of his great-great-grandfather, Edward VII. It was not the sort of arithmetic by which Elizabeth sets store, as she demonstrated on 9 September 2015, when she herself set a similar record, becoming Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. On that day, accompanied by Philip, Elizabeth opened the Scottish Borders Railway. In a short speech, she described the record as ‘not one to which I have ever aspired’, and she played down its significance, despite congratulatory messages from parliament, adding that ‘inevitably, a long life can pass by many milestones. My own is no exception.’ But she would increasingly acknowledge the discomforts and challenges, real or imagined, of Charles’s position, paying public tribute to his wide-ranging charitable achievements, delegating aspects of her own workload to her son, including, after 2013, long-haul tours, and, through Christopher Geidt, facilitating his greater familiarity with the administrative business of sovereignty, government documents delivered to Charles in green boxes in place of Elizabeth’s red ones. Philip’s frustrations were equally difficult to assuage. At the time of his ninetieth birthday in 2011, he suggested he was ready to retire. ‘I reckon I’ve done my bit,’ he said. ‘I want to enjoy myself a bit now, with less responsibility, less frantic rushing about, less preparation, less trying to think of something to say... It’s better to get out before you reach your sell-by date.’10 Fair and honest Elizabeth recognized that Philip was not, as she was, compelled by coronation oaths to lifelong service. Among her ninetieth birthday presents to her husband was a surprise final accolade: the position of Lord High Admiral, the titular head of the Royal Navy, a special compliment that she saved for their birthday lunch alone. Philip was touched by the gesture; he would not in fact retire for another six years. For her official Diamond Jubilee portrait, taken in the Centre Room at Buckingham Palace in December, Elizabeth wore Philip’s wedding present, the large diamond bracelet that jeweller Philip Antrobus had made to his design using stones from Princess Andrew’s tiara. A photographic portrait commissioned from Thomas Struth by the National Portrait Gallery placed husband and wife side by side on a gilded sofa, in shadowy splendour at Windsor Castle, a wintry image of stoical old age.
Struth’s image was not wholly misleading in suggesting that Elizabeth was both part of, and separate from, the workaday world. As it had for Queen Victoria, Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee became a moment of apotheosis, marked by extensive tributes. This feeling emerged before the jubilee itself, boosted by the success of William’s wedding and anticipation of the Olympic Games to be hosted in London in its wake. In July 2011, the Daily Mail had identified public feelings for Elizabeth as reverent; affectionate veneration would characterize many Commonwealth-wide celebrations.11 Kenneth Rose attributed her success over six decades to ‘her own remarkable strength and character’; the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, described Elizabeth as ‘marvellous and a true role model’; the composer claimed she had converted him from republicanism by her ‘selfless dedication and example’.12 Hagiography was not simply a response to Elizabeth’s stamina and longevity, though both played their part. A state visit to the Republic of Ireland in May 2011 won near-universal praise. Extended at Elizabeth’s request from an anticipated day and a half to four days, its success derived in large part from her own diplomatic skills and her clear determination that her presence consolidate Anglo-Irish amity in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Elizabeth toured sites of key importance to Irish nationalists. At a state banquet in Dublin Castle, wearing a dress embroidered with more than 2,000 hand-stitched shamrocks and her grandmother’s Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara, she gave a speech that, without apologizing for British rule in Ireland, appeared to offer catharsis and healing and a compliment, too, in its opening address in Gaelic: ‘President and friends’; obliquely she referred to Mountbatten’s murder. A speech intended to inaugurate a new chapter in relations between Britain and her closest neighbour was received as such by the majority of her listeners. By contrast, Elizabeth’s speech to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, on a ten-day tour of Australia in October, sounded valedictory notes. At eighty-five and ninety-one, both Elizabeth and Philip found their short trips to Australia and New Zealand too tiring; they would not return. At Philip’s suggestion, Elizabeth quoted an Aboriginal proverb: ‘We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home.’ Republican prime minister Julia Gillard assured Elizabeth of the country’s ‘lasting affection and our very deep respect’. Since the referendum of 1999, pressure had declined for an elected head of state as Elizabeth’s replacement.
In 1977, Martin Charteris had expressed concern that Elizabeth would be so tired by her jubilee travels that she would not be ‘hale and hearty’ for the main celebrations in the capital. In 2012, Elizabeth and Philip confined their travels to the United Kingdom. Within weeks of their return from Australia, Philip had been flown by helicopter to Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire for treatment for a blocked coronary artery. Formal statements issued by the palace downplayed this healthscare that nevertheless frightened Elizabeth, casting a shadow over Christmas and beyond. On their behalf, the couple’s children and grandchildren toured the Commonwealth. Instead, the world came to Elizabeth and her apparently revitalized spouse in the form of a ‘sovereigns’ lunch at Windsor in mid-May, involving 550 horses and twice as many riders, did its best to entertain Elizabeth. The temporary renaming in her honour of each of the seventeen pubs in the small town of Otley ‘The Queen Elizabeth’ and sales of 30,000 cucumbers recorded by Morrisons in Bradford for cucumber sandwiches for royal-themed tea parties were also details to amuse her. Her experience of the river pageant, on a Thames spattered by the rain that dogged the whole jubilee weekend, may not have been as straightforwardly enjoyable, particularly for Philip, who was hospitalized afterwards with a bladder infection; Margaret Rhodes said Elizabeth had dreaded the idea of it. Elizabeth was moved nevertheless by the doughtiness and size of the crowds, whom she described ‘on the barges and the bridges and the banks of the river... undaunted by the rain’; at intervals her happiness was plain, in smiling exchanges with Philip.13 Philip’s subsequent absence from an outdoor concert and the service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral, to which Elizabeth was accompanied by her lady-in-waiting, Lady Farnham, focused attention on the solitariness of Elizabeth’s position. But photographs taken at the Guildhall reception after the service show her happy and relaxed. Appropriately for a diamond jubilee she wore the enormous Cullinan III and IV diamond brooch she had inherited from Queen Mary, which she called ‘Granny’s Chips’. And with customary modesty, she was astonished by the crowds who filled the Mall, stretching as far as Admiralty Arch, for her final balcony appearance. It was William who told his grandmother, ‘Those crowds are for you,’ in response to her stuttering ‘Oh, my goodness. How extraordinary... I didn’t think it was going to be…’14 In a broadcast of thanks issued the same evening, Elizabeth truthfully described her view of events of the jubilee as ‘a humbling experience’.
‘She has made her public happy and all the signs are that she is herself happy, fulfilled and at home at these encounters,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury had claimed of Elizabeth’s public life in the service of thanksgiving. So it would continue. Sustained by her love for her family and, recent healthscares notwithstanding, a deeply supportive marriage of sixty-five years, her own daily prayers and deep-rooted faith, attentive, affectionate staff and the pleasure she continued to draw from the knowledge of duty undertaken willingly and to the best of her ability, Elizabeth approached the future with equanimity. In a message issued on Accession Day she had dedicated herself anew to the service of kingdom and Commonwealth; responses to the jubilee strengthened her resolve. She did not rest on her laurels. Only weeks later, she again ‘made her public happy’ with a highly unusual appearance at the opening of the Olympic Games. It had been filmed in the spring under circumstances of some secrecy, a short James Bond sketch in which Daniel Craig visited Buckingham Palace to collect Elizabeth for a helicopter flight to the Olympic stadium. Angela Kelly acted as intermediary for film-maker Danny Boyle; Elizabeth requested she be given the line ‘Good evening, Mr Bond.’ A wigged stuntman parachuted from the helicopter into the opening ceremony: ‘a gap in the clouds / And The Queen jumped from the sky / To the cheering crowds,’ as the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, remembered it. Elizabeth took her place in the royal box dressed in the clothes she had worn for filming. The brief sequence suggests she enjoyed herself. The Daily Express published a cartoon by Paul Thomas: Elizabeth instructs a footman with a teapot, ‘One lump – shaken not stirred’. Her refusal to ‘perform’ for the cameras, a lifetime’s habit, safeguarded her dignity; it suggested, too, as Mary Wilson had written twenty-five years before, that she is always ‘the Queen’. This was how Duffy pictured Elizabeth the following summer, in a poem to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the coronation. In Duffy’s ‘The Crown’, the sovereign carries with her at all times the memory of the crown’s weight, actual and metaphorical: ‘feel[s] it still, in private space, when it’s lifted’. Monarchy, the non-royalist Duffy concluded after time spent in Elizabeth’s company, resembled poetry in possessing ‘the ability to transform the ordinary into the magical’.15 Elizabeth recalled her coronation, alongside the christening of William and Catherine’s first child, George, in her 2013 Christmas broadcast. She described both in terms of duty: ‘my own pledge of service made in that great church on Coronation Day sixty years earlier’ and the baby prince’s baptism ‘into a joyful faith of Christian duty and service’. It was an uncompromising vision that emerged from her most strongly held beliefs about royalty and its purpose. To the future George VII she bequeathed the doctrine of (joyful) service to which she had devoted her life, and drew attention to the value of what, in her Diamond Jubilee address to the houses of parliament, she had called ‘the regular worthy rhythm of life’.
Whatever her feelings, in the summer of her Diamond Jubilee Elizabeth could not, as she had in 1977, overtly defend the Union. Regional devolution had further politicized Celtic nationalism. At her prime minister’s request, however, she made a significant if discreet intervention in the autumn of 2014. Elizabeth was at Balmoral as campaigning in a referendum on Scottish independence entered its final weeks. Polls appeared to show rising support for the nationalist cause. David Cameron panicked. In conversations between his private secretary and Elizabeth’s, between Elizabeth and himself, he asked for Elizabeth’s help. Later he insisted that he had not requested ‘anything that would be in any way improper or unconstitutional, but just a raising of the eyebrow, even you know, a quarter of an inch, we thought would make a difference’. Elizabeth came to her prime minister’s aid outside Crathie church, the Sunday before the vote. After a service that had included a prayer for safety ‘from false choices’, Elizabeth spoke to clusters of wellwishers. Her remarks were audible to journalists and photographers: unusually, they had been invited to observe the exchanges. To a joke about the approaching referendum, Elizabeth cautioned, ‘I hope people will think very carefully about the future.’ Afterwards, Cameron claimed that she had ‘helped to put a slightly different perception on things’ and her comment, widely reported, was interpreted as opposing Scottish separatism. It was a plausible interpretation given her opposition to Welsh and Scottish nationalism at the time of the Silver Jubilee. Those who knew her better understood her desire to preserve intact her inheritance from her father: a united kingdom, its constituent parts joined in loyalty to the crown. Elizabeth’s sense of kinship with Scotland ran deep. Here she had spent almost every summer of her life, many of them in the company of her Scottish mother, her Scottish governess and her Scottish dresser, Bobo. Her husband and all her sons were educated in Scotland, where her sister was born; in Scotland, Elizabeth had said, she could ‘hibernate’. Balmoral was the backdrop to so many happy memories: childhood summers with Margaret and Bowes-Lyon and Elphinstone cousins; Philip’s proposal; picnics and barbecues, shooting, stalking and riding with favoured friends, her children, grandchildren and close family. David Cameron said he had ‘never heard someone so happy’ as Elizabeth when he told her of voters’ choice to remain within the United Kingdom; she ‘purred down the line’. Quite rightly, she regarded his indiscretion balefully.
The 1990s criticism of royal dysfunction felt increasingly distant when William and Catherine’s second child, a daughter, Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, was born on 2 May 2015. The nuclear family of the Cambridges, and intense interest in it, mirrored Elizabeth’s own at the time of her accession. A month before the baby’s birth, Clarence House released a tenth wedding anniversary photograph of Charles and Camilla. Edward and Sophie’s marriage had proved equally successful. Bagshot’s proximity to Windsor meant that Elizabeth regularly saw her Wessex grandchildren, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. She helped teach both to ride. Louise’s decision to take up carriage riding pleased her grandfather, Philip, who continued to enjoy the esoteric sport into his nineties. Sophie shared Elizabeth’s interest in British military history. She did not displace Anne in Elizabeth’s affections but, given Anne’s exceptionally heavy workload, was more often at hand, Elizabeth’s nearest replacement for the female company of Margaret and the Queen Mother. ‘Satisfaction and contentment are created by the relationships between one individual and another,’ Philip had written in 1982.16 As often, Elizabeth’s thoughts mirrored her husband’s. She described family and friendship as ‘a constant… a source of personal comfort and reassurance’; she attributed the same sustenance to her faith.17
But the appearance of family tranquillity was misleading. Elizabeth’s uncomfortable meeting with her favourite son Andrew, in the second week of March 2011, had lasted an hour. In the ten years since his retirement from the navy in 2001, Andrew’s role as special representative for trade and investment had done ‘a lot of good for the UK’, claimed the foreign secretary, William Hague; it had also frequently raised questions about the costs of his extensive travel and the desirability of a number of his personal contacts. Andrew’s friendship with New York financier Jeffrey Epstein ought not to have survived Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution; in December 2010, Andrew and Epstein were photographed together in Central Park in New York. Release of these photographs consolidated an impression of a prince in murky waters: his friends and associates included the son of Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, and the son-in-law of a Kazakhstani dictator. Mud-slinging in the press appeared to attempt to hound Andrew from his special role. For Elizabeth, who had shown her customary reluctance to involve herself earlier, her loyalties were again in conflict. Too well she understood the danger of accusations that combined extravagance with impropriety. The campaign against Andrew threatened to engulf in scandal celebration of William’s wedding; it raised the spectre of the annus horribilis. Elizabeth’s affection for her boisterous, thick-skinned second son did not blind her to scandal’s potential to derail the revival of royal fortunes promised by William and his bride and worldwide fascination with the golden couple. Elizabeth understood this even without consulting Christopher Geidt. Geidt knew the extent of Andrew’s expenses and was prepared to take a firm line over his activities. He was also rumoured to oppose any public role for Andrew’s daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie. In the short term, government ministers rallied to Andrew’s cause. The business secretary, Vince Cable, repeated companies’ view of the prince as ‘supportive and helpful’. But in March 2011 BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt described as ‘inevitable’ Andrew’s surrender of his special representative role as a result of his friendship with Epstein. This followed in July.
Elizabeth’s closeness to her second son was reflected in her relationship with his daughters, which rumours of scandal did not dent. In the summer of the Diamond Jubilee, she updated the Order of Precedence at court. When William did not accompany his wife, Catherine would be required to curtsey to the blood princesses: her daughter Anne, her cousin Alexandra – and Andrew’s daughters, Elizabeth’s much-loved granddaughters, Beatrice and Eugenie. Like the elderly Queen Victoria, who had frequently been accompanied in public by an unmarried granddaughter, Elizabeth invited one or other of Andrew’s daughters to join her at a handful of engagements, including the distribution of the Royal Maundy and royal garden parties. She entrusted to Beatrice renovation of that symbol of her own happy childhood, Y Bwthyn Bach. Later, Beatrice borrowed one of Elizabeth’s dresses for her secret wedding. A mark of her favour, Elizabeth also loaned her the diamond fringe tiara that she had worn for her own wedding.
It was not only Elizabeth’s private secretary who acknowledged her mortality. The Diamond Jubilee had stimulated an outpouring of affection for Elizabeth that was heightened by awareness of her age. A buoyant atmosphere in royal circles was the legacy of the Golden Jubilee; after 2012, as the decade gathered pace, an autumnal quality coloured perceptions of a reign that had entered an apparently serene twilight. Assisted by her nonagenarian husband, Elizabeth maintained business as usual, albeit the pace of engagements slowed; off duty she continued to ride regularly, still without a hat, although a dependable Fell pony called Emma had replaced earlier, more spirited mounts. In 2014, the eighty-eight-year-old monarch undertook almost 400 engagements. Her diary for the following year included her fifth state visit to Germany and, in November, a state visit to Malta, a republic since 1974, to coincide with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. In Germany, excitement was considerable. Writing in the tabloid Bild, Franz Josef Wagner revisited the journalese of Elizabeth’s youth, with a twist to reflect her advancing years: he acclaimed her as ‘the mother of fairy tales’ and suggested ‘everyone in Germany will be enchanted. We will forget our iPhones, iPads... We will be kids again.’ The Lego shop in Berlin stocked a commemorative limited-edition plastic figure of Elizabeth in a white state gown and the Garter ribbon. Elizabeth used her speech to Commonwealth heads of government in Valletta to praise her ninety-four-year-old husband, Charles and, above all, the Commonwealth itself, its sixty years of progress, growth and (relative) unity. Like her address in Perth four years before, it was in part a valediction, though Elizabeth’s delivery was typically neutral. She described her six decades as head of the Commonwealth as ‘a responsibility I have cherished’. An ITV reporter concluded, ‘There was an inescapable feeling here that she is saying goodbye.’ Her decision to restrict her travel increased the likelihood that this would be her final CHOGM. Only three years later, however, did Elizabeth herself describe a Commonwealth future without her. At the 2018 CHOGM in London, she explained her ‘sincere wish... that one day the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949’. Days later, to her considerable delight, leaders of the member states accepted her recommendation and named Charles as her successor as head of the Commonwealth. She had not only safeguarded and nurtured her inheritance through her own reign, she had made possible the inheritance of this non-hereditary role by her heir.
To the majority of her British subjects, Elizabeth’s scaling-down was imperceptible, exactly as she, Geidt and palace advisers intended; Margaret Rhodes referred to her ‘gradually and almost unnoticeably delegating more’ while showing ‘no signs of wilting in the job’. Considerable fanfare attended her ninetieth birthday, celebrated twice over. On 21 April, well-wishers gathered outside Windsor Castle as early as five o’clock in the morning: despite its short distance, Elizabeth’s walkabout from the castle to the Guildhall lasted half an hour, so dense were the crowds. In an open-top Range Rover, Elizabeth and Philip were driven through the town. Described as ‘terribly happy’, Elizabeth opened the new Queen’s Walkway. In the evening, before a private dinner in the castle’s Waterloo Chamber, she lit the first of a nationwide chain of more than 1,200 beacons. In a short speech, Charles told his mother that the beacons would represent ‘the love and affection in which you are held throughout this country and the Commonwealth’; by tea time, Twitter had registered more than quarter of a million tweets wishing Elizabeth a happy birthday. A trio of stylized new photographs by Annie Leibovitz marked the latest milestone: Elizabeth with her great-grandchildren and her youngest grandchildren, with her dogs and with Anne. A fourth photograph from the same sitting, of Elizabeth with Philip, was released in June in time for Elizabeth’s official birthday and ahead of Philip’s ninety-fifth birthday. As every year, celebrations in the summer included the birthday parade, Trooping the Colour. Many years had passed since Elizabeth rode side-saddle on Burmese; since 1987, she had attended the ceremony in a phaeton in civilian dress in place of ceremonial uniform. For her ninetieth birthday, she chose the brightest green coat, with a matching hat, designed by Stewart Parvin who, nine years earlier, had been invited to update her wardrobe. Elizabeth had never underestimated the importance of her clothes in her public life. In June 2016, her ‘neon’ choice electrified social media, inspiring hashtags #neonat90 and #highvishighness. It was not Elizabeth’s intention; it testified to her prominence in her tenth decade.
Yet it was to be a decade marked by losses and departures. In November 2016, Margaret Rhodes died at the age of ninety-one. After the deaths of her mother and sister, the loss of Elizabeth’s cousin and lifelong friend, who had lived close by in Windsor Great Park, was another unhappy break with her childhood. Elizabeth was not granted respite for grief. Days later, as planned, she hosted a reception in honour of her cousin Alexandra’s eightieth birthday and the princess’s work on behalf of almost a hundred charities. On 4 May 2017, Buckingham Palace announced Philip’s retirement from public life. A decision the couple reached together, it represented fulfilment of the wish he had expressed six years earlier. Consequences for Elizabeth were significant. From that autumn she carried out engagements on her own or supported by other family members, including Charles, William, Harry, Alexandra, Anne and Sophie. Beginning in the year of their seventieth wedding anniversary, the couple were frequently apart, Philip at Wood Farm at Sandringham, in the care of a small staff including his pages, valet and a housekeeper; Elizabeth joined him by train whenever possible; husband and wife spoke daily on the telephone. When she was in residence in Norfolk, he joined Elizabeth in the big house, but he could not carry out long-distance the role of paterfamilias and family disciplinarian that had previously relieved Elizabeth of the burden of controlling a large, strong-minded and, in the case of some of its members, status-conscious family. Philip suffered the physical inconveniences of extreme old age. He was less mobile than Elizabeth, even after a hip replacement operation in April 2018, and his hearing had deteriorated significantly. Nothing in Elizabeth’s demeanour suggested loneliness. Margaret Rhodes had identified as a characteristic of her cousin’s life as monarch ‘the conscious self-sacrifice of any form of private life’; habits of self-discipline were sturdily ingrained.
Yet Elizabeth would have had good reason to consider herself less well supported than previously in the autumn of 2017. Not only Philip but Christopher Geidt was no longer at her side. Geidt’s departure in the summer was a decision Elizabeth had taken under pressure; among his gainsayers were Charles and Andrew. It was Geidt who announced Philip’s decision to a group of 500 royal staff gathered in the ballroom of Buckingham Palace. In what newspapers called ‘a rallying address’, Elizabeth’s private secretary asked staff across the royal palaces to work together in supporting the monarch. To this end, the following day William joined Elizabeth in welcoming to Buckingham Palace the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi; Charles hosted the visit’s formal meeting. This suggestion of concurrence, however, may have been misleading. Charles’s staff resented Geidt’s suggestion that Philip’s departure created opportunities for all of Elizabeth’s family: their preference was for an enhanced king-in-waiting role for Charles. Despite denials, Charles appeared to agree. Geidt’s resignation, initiated on Elizabeth’s behalf by her lord chamberlain, Earl Peel, was attributed to Charles’s intervention with his mother, supported by Andrew; roots of Andrew’s animosity lay in Geidt’s part in his loss of his special representative role. Public statements asserted that Geidt’s departure was amicable. Elizabeth may have taken the decision reluctantly; she would quickly have grounds to regret it. Newspapers reported that Geidt felt ‘bruised’ by her failure to support him.
For a woman living apart from the husband on whom she was accustomed to rely, with no surviving close contemporaries, ninety-one is a late age to muster the strength to resist concerted family pressure. Instinctively Elizabeth had always avoided confrontation, happier with conciliation than open disagreement, neutral in so many of her relationships as in her discharge of her royal role. Geidt had served her well and may have anticipated remaining en poste until her death. A commentator quoted by Robert Lacey blamed Charles and the staff at Clarence House for a ‘shameful... shabby’ decision.18 Former deputy private secretary Edward Young took Geidt’s place, genial, popular, kindly and committed to Elizabeth’s best interests; his was a less commanding, less imaginative presence than Geidt’s. As for Elizabeth, a book published in 2020 entitled 101 Reasons Why We Love the Queen offered, ‘she is able to weather storms, both personal and political, with quiet resilience and nerves of steel’.19 It was not the same as an ability to devise apt, workable solutions to crises. Anne and Edward voiced their unhappiness at what had happened.
‘Each day is a new beginning,’ Elizabeth had offered in her 2002 Christmas broadcast. ‘I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God.’ Elizabeth’s thoughts had run on similar lines even before her parents’ accession, eager as a child, a young woman and as queen ‘to do what is right’ and give of her best. Less than a fortnight after formal celebrations of her ninetieth birthday, a UK referendum on membership of the European Union yielded a slender majority in favour of leaving the organization that had consistently divided British opinion. It heralded a period of unusual political uncertainty and recrimination at odds with Elizabeth’s preference for consensus; she would remain, as always, impartial, though some sources suggested her surprise that the government had not managed the vote more successfully, and her position above politics was challenged by constitutional wrangling, notably in the autumn of 2019, when the Supreme Court declared unlawful her prorogation of parliament on the advice of the prime minister, Boris Johnson. In a climate of flux and, for many, anxiety following the referendum, a royal romance offered distraction and the possibility of uniting the country behind the royal couple: in this case, Elizabeth’s third grandson, Harry. On 27 November 2017, Harry announced his engagement to a divorced, mixed-race American actress called Meghan Markle. They were married at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 19 May 2018, and created Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Within less than two years both husband and wife had ceased to be working members of the royal family and were living with their baby son Archie in North America, in taut emotional exile.
It was an astonishing, swift and acrimonious turnaround, in which Harry’s long-term antipathy to the media, traceable to his mother’s death, worsening relations with his brother William and Meghan’s struggle to adapt happily or comfortably to the intense, sometimes malign scrutiny of British public life played their part. There were those who blamed Edward Young. Elizabeth’s new private secretary did not evolve a strategy for Harry and Meghan: assumptions were made that they would follow a predictable royal round. A month after their wedding, Elizabeth invited Meghan to accompany her on a day of engagements in Chester, but the success of a single day was not enough to reassure the new duchess, whose life had changed so dramatically. There were tensions at court and mutual dislike between Edward Young and Meghan. In the spring of 2019, plans emerged for an overseas role for the couple, masterminded by long-term adviser Sir David Manning and Christopher Geidt, whose return to court Elizabeth had facilitated by appointing him to the ceremonial position of permanent lord-in-waiting; Geidt was chairman of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, of which Harry was president and Meghan vice president. In the autumn, the couple did indeed visit South Africa, taking with them baby Archie; their unhappiness was clear in a television interview filmed late in the tour. By December, Harry had told Charles of their desire to step away from being senior royal figures. After some uncertainty, Elizabeth found to her surprise that the couple did not intend to spend Christmas at Sandringham.
For Elizabeth it was a disconcerting Christmas. On 20 December, Philip was flown by helicopter from Sandringham to hospital in London for ‘observation and treatment of a preexisting condition’, returning only on Christmas Eve.20 Even his return could not dispel a mood lowered by the Sussexes’ decision to celebrate the festivities in Canada, as well as continuing fallout from a disastrous television interview given by Andrew in November. For some time the prince had been dogged by his ill-judged friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, who had committed suicide earlier in the year, facing charges of sex offences. Makers of the Newsnight interview assumed Andrew would show remorse or regret; common sense seemed to dictate the manner of his response to questions about Epstein’s victims, one of whom had accused him of having sex with her when she was seventeen. But Andrew, who robustly denied the allegations, was neither overtly regretful nor empathetic, with predictable results. Furious reaction to the interview forced his withdrawal from public life, described as ‘temporary’. As the scandal intensified over the course of the year, Elizabeth had supported her son. In August, they were photographed together being driven to Crathie church; she continued the habit of Sunday-morning drinks at Royal Lodge, Andrew’s home since the Queen Mother’s death; days after the interview, they were seen riding together at Windsor. Although Elizabeth played a part in his retirement from public duties and cancelled plans for a sixtieth birthday party for Andrew in February 2020, she was criticized for her failure to prevent the interview from taking place. Twice before senior members of the royal family had resorted to television to offer the public their side of an argument. Neither Charles’s interview with Jonathan Dimbleby nor Diana’s with Martin Bashir ought to have encouraged Elizabeth to approve Andrew’s plans.
It was Harry and Meghan, however, whose actions suggested most forcefully that Elizabeth’s control over her family had faltered. On 8 January 2020, the couple announced their intention ‘to step back as “senior” members of the royal family’ and divide their time between Britain and North America while ‘continuing to honour our duty to the Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages’: an in/out arrangement of their own devising that offered the couple off-duty time as a family and intervals away from media intrusion. Told of the decision only minutes before the announcement was made, despite having requested that Harry not reveal any plans without discussion, Elizabeth was hurt and disappointed. She organized a meeting at Sandringham on 13 January; she allowed it to be known that she had insisted on a quick resolution. This emerged five days later. In the Sussexes’ new life would be no official royal duties and no public funding; under these circumstances, they would no longer use their HRH titles. Elizabeth’s official statement expressed loving finality: ‘It is my whole family’s hope that today’s agreement allows them to start building a happy and peaceful new life.’ It was an attempt to reassert control in the interests of damage limitation, and a decisive but dark beginning to a new decade. Elizabeth had never been a sentimental woman; she had acted in the only way she understood. As throughout a life in which she had consistently honoured her father’s belief that ‘the highest of distinctions is the service of others’, she had placed the monarchy first, safeguarding its mission of service and duty that could never, she was certain, be a part-time calling. In this instance her success was short-lived. Within a year the States-based couple also had recourse to a television interview, a very public means of further airing grievances they considered unresolved.
Elizabeth retreated to Windsor with the imposing of national lockdown in March 2020. There, in a reduced household of Covid-safe attendants labelled ‘HMS Bubble’, Philip joined her from Wood Farm. At last, husband and wife enjoyed something approaching the shared leisure taken for granted by other elderly couples. Together they walked in the castle’s private gardens; they dined together, spent time – as once before, on Malta – with fewer interruptions or obligations, a mostly peaceful final chapter in a marriage that had survived into its eighth decade. Only with Philip’s death on 9 April 2021 did the awful bleakness of what Elizabeth described as the ‘huge void’ of his loss threaten to engulf her. Her family praised her characteristic concern for others in the first days of her widowhood.
Throughout a troubled year for the nation, and nations across the globe, it was Elizabeth herself who had provided light. On 11 April 2020, for the first time in a reign spanning sixty-eight years, she had issued an Easter message. She reminded listeners of the hopefulness of Easter; she ended with the conviction that ‘dark as death can be... light and life are greater’. Viewers saw not Elizabeth but the symbol of a burning candle, silent witness of hope. Philip had issued a message of thanks to key workers.
Her Easter broadcast was one of three made by Elizabeth during that first spring of global pandemic. During the second week of April, the image that dominated an empty Piccadilly Circus was not, as typically, an advertisement for Coca-Cola or Samsung, but Elizabeth. Snowy-haired, she wore a green dress and Queen Mary’s Richmond brooch that, on account of its large size, she wore infrequently. The picture came from her coronavirus broadcast, filmed at Windsor by a single cameraman in protective clothing. Beside it, in rotation, were quotations from the broadcast, among them, ‘We should take comfort that while we may still have more to endure, better days will return.’ Like the Easter message that followed, Elizabeth’s coronavirus broadcast offered the certainty of hope. She spoke as head of the nation to a population whose diversity was unimagined in 1952, disparate in race, religion and culture. In the Sunday Times, in the summer of 1977, John Grigg had written of Elizabeth, ‘She looks a Queen and obviously believes in her right to be one. Her bearing is both simple and majestic – no actress could possibly match it. Wherever she may be in the world, in whatever company or climate, she never seems to lose her poise.’21 More than forty years later, with her customary polite authority – poised, majestic and unactressy, as Grigg would have her – Elizabeth spoke to an audience of 24 million of her subjects. She thanked frontline workers and viewers self-isolating at home. She praised those whose work exposed them to risk of infection and she praised the silent majority whose compliance with emergency restrictions circumscribed their daily lives, ‘the Britons of this generation... as strong as any’. To all she offered reassurance ‘that if we remain united and resolute we will overcome it’. None could be surprised by her message of hope, praise for the selfless and reassurance. For seven decades they had lain at the heart of her remarkable and continuing mission.