Ahead of the visit, the Ambassador and his chef had carefully plotted how the Queen’s return banquet might outdo anything the French could produce. Consommé Madrilène was followed by poached salmon with mousseline sauce, fillet of beef with ‘pearls of Périgord’ and Sherbet Pauline Borghese. Even the greatest French wine snobs could not fault a selection that included Château Laville Haut-Brion 1962, Château Latour 1949 and Pol Roger 1955 champagne. The Queen had assisted in all this gastronomic one-upmanship by despatching boxes of her finest tableware from home. ‘The Palace sent the accoutrements. I remember the unpacking and out came this enormous golden candelabra,’ says du Boulay. ‘There was a footman who had this wonderful title – Yeoman of the something or other – and I said to him: “I bet there isn’t another one like that anywhere in the world”. And he said: “There are fifty more like that at home”.’
Du Boulay remembers that the Ambassador took such pride in the occasion that he insisted on decanting all the claret himself, including the bottles that would be served at the ‘reserve’ banquet in another part of the embassy for middle-ranking officials. Since Sir Christopher had enough on his mind, du Boulay did not trouble him with an extra drama. As the Queen, in her silk silver-lamé dress embroidered in gold and silver and overlaid with the sash of the Légion d’honneur, awaited the arrival of the President, du Boulay received a telephone call. An Irish voice on the other end of the phone informed him that a bomb was due to explode inside the Embassy in five minutes. ‘I was lucky enough to have Perkins† at my side at the time,’ du Boulay wrote in his memoir of the period. ‘We almost agreed without speaking that there was no time to do anything effective. It was quite a long five minutes. The ambassador never knew.’
The next morning, the presidential Caravelle was waiting to fly the royal party south to the sunshine of Provence. A flight that had threatened to become such a disastrous diplomatic bone of contention passed almost without comment in the media. The press had much more fun when the radiator hose of the royal car exploded in a cloud of steam in the heat of Avignon. According to Sir Christopher Soames, this was the day when ‘the psychology of the visit changed’. As he wrote later: ‘The sun shone and people shouted. It was rediscovered with delight that, in the British monarchy, majesty can subsist with human warmth and simplicity, as it has never done in France, whether under the flummery of the Bourbons or the Olympian austerity of General de Gaulle.’ Even the cantankerous communist Mayor of Arles, it was noted, was charmed. While the Queen inspected the papal palaces and the famous Pont d’Avignon, the Duke of Edinburgh took a helicopter to enjoy a few hours of bird-watching with conservationists in the Camargue. ‘The Duke astonished his hosts in the Camargue by successfully identifying a Little Stint, the smallest of the British waders,’ the Ambassador noted proudly.
Though all eyes had been on the Queen, the Duke was attracting quite a following of his own among the French public. After yet another chorus of ‘Vive la reine!’, an Avignon man caused cheers when he shouted, ‘Vive le duc!’ The Duke ignored him. ‘Vive le prince!’ he shouted. Still no response. Undeterred, the man yelled: ‘Vive le roi!’ At which point, the Duke burst out laughing and threw up his hands.
It had been arranged that the Prince of Wales, then serving as a junior officer in the Royal Navy, should land in nearby Toulon and join his parents. Together, they spent the evening privately at the celebrated Hotel Baumanière near Les Baux-de-Provence, ahead of one of the most unusual days of any state visit before or since – one that covered hundreds of miles, a factory floor, a day’s racing, the Duke of Windsor and a very grand disco.
The morning started with a royal tour of Les Baux, during which the mayor, Raymond Thuillier, placed a firm hand on the Queen’s shoulder to stop her straying too close to the edge of a 700-foot precipice. Throughout her reign, dignitaries and VIPs have been scolded in the media for that faux pas of ‘touching’ the monarch. On this occasion, though, the media did not castigate M. Thuillier for his over-protective impulse. It was a long drop.
Prince Charles, meanwhile, made mildly flirtatious small talk – in French – to a group of local girls dressed in traditional and voluminous Provençal dresses. ‘A miniskirt would be more practical,’ he said, much to their delight. After inspecting the Aérospatiale factory in Marseilles, the royal party were then ushered back on board the Caravelle and left the South of France for a chilly Paris, just in time for the racing at Longchamp. The fifth race had been billed as the Queen Elizabeth II Cup, after which the Queen departed quietly for what would be her last encounter with the former King Edward VIII.
Though the Duke had nobly declined to die during one of the most important visits of his niece’s reign, he was, by now, bedridden and fading fast. Yet he was adamant that he was not going to receive the Queen in either his bedclothes or his bed. Having asked Dr Thin to hide the intravenous drip beneath his shirt, the Duke put on a blue blazer and moved to an armchair in an adjacent sitting room.
As the Queen entered the room with Prince Philip and the Prince of Wales, the Duke summoned all his strength to rise to his feet and then bow, much to the consternation of his doctor. The Queen urged him to sit down and the two of them sat talking for around quarter of an hour, mainly, it was said, about her visit. One of those present informed the biographer Sarah Bradford that the Queen had tears in her eyes as she left the room. She had been moved not just by her uncle’s pained chivalry, but by the way in which the Duke had reminded her of her beloved father. Downstairs, the royal party were given tea by the Duchess of Windsor, who was almost overcome with nerves, her hands shaking so badly that she dropped a cup. Just nine days later the Duke was dead, his body flown home to Britain for burial.
DANCING QUEEN
At the British Embassy there were just a few hours to go before one of the grandest occasions in its history, an evening considerably more glamorous even than the Queen’s banquet for President Pompidou earlier in the week. To conclude the visit, Sir Christopher Soames and his team had decided to invite President and Madame Pompidou to a white-tie Embassy ball for 1,200, including both the older and younger generations. In addition to the great and good of France, at least 300 ‘young’ would also be included, with the Prince of Wales acting as host to the jeunesse dorée.
A giant marquee had been erected over much of the handsome embassy garden. Though the embassy already had its own ballroom, a substantial temporary dance floor was added for the festivities. There would need to be a proper band, of course, but also a disco for ‘the young’. Few British ambassadors would have had the confidence and clout to propose something on quite such a scale. The bill for the evening was estimated at £25,000, a sum equivalent to the annual salaries of two Cabinet ministers in 1972. Even the biggest event in the embassy calendar, the annual garden party for the Queen’s birthday, was run on a budget of £2,000. Little wonder that memos had been flying all over Whitehall, finally reaching ministerial level. Edward Youde, a future Governor of Hong Kong then running the Foreign Office’s personnel department, warned that the cost was ten times that of the dance to mark the Queen’s state visit to Brazil three years earlier. Soames would end up footing some of the bill from his own pocket.
Few of those present would forget the spectacle of that evening, or the moment when the Queen entered the ball. ‘She walked in to absolute silence and she looked amazing,’ says Sir Nicholas Soames. ‘It was the least vulgar occasion I’ve ever seen. Everyone was in their absolute finest.’ By now the Queen was on the home straight, but it would still be a long evening of introductions. ‘My father’s greatest problem was moving her down the line because everyone wanted to touch the hem,’ says Sir Nicholas.
While he has fond memories of strutting his stuff to disco hits in full military uniform, one guest who was less keen on dancing was President Pompidou. According to John Ellison of the Daily Express, shortly after midnight the Queen suggested that the two of them might lead the dancing. ‘It would have been the final defin
itive gesture of this triumphant visit,’ wrote Ellison, ‘and it is to be regretted that a man as cultured as M. Pompidou has this small chink in his social armour. He blushingly declined.’
In truth, by this stage no dancing was required to set the seal on a phenomenally successful visit. The Express was typical of all the British press when it observed that, despite the ‘undoubted friendship’ between the French President and the British Prime Minister, ‘it needed the Royal Family to clinch the new European deal’. It added: ‘Historians may find it amusing to note that in this Twentieth Century, such momentous issues can still turn around an evening of laughter and an invitation to dance in the home of the British Ambassador.’
The next day, the French Prime Minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, escorted the royal party to Rouen, where the Royal Yacht Britannia was waiting to carry the Queen home. Despite the passage of more than 500 years, the royal convoy sped straight past the spot where Joan of Arc had been burned to death by English troops in 1431. The authorities were adamant that the final focus should be a forward-looking one, not headlines about the Maid of Orléans.
As she entertained M. Chaban-Delmas to a valedictory cup of tea and a ham sandwich on board the Royal Yacht, the Queen despatched a farewell message to M. Pompidou and the French people. In it, she expressed a ‘sincere hope that my visit may have helped to affirm the new and hopeful chapter that is opening in the long history of the relationship between our two countries’.
Reflecting on the success of the visit, The Economist gave full marks to the visitor. ‘She remains a symbol in Europe, in a way Britons barely appreciate, of the good things Britain protected in a European war,’ it declared. ‘Britain has a particular part to play in the making of Europe and its French-speaking Queen has symbolised it well.’
MONSIEUR LE PRESIDENT
The Queen’s relationships with her subsequent French counterparts appear to have been a more mixed affair. She is said to have been fond of socialist President François Mitterrand, whom she met many times and with whom she would open the Channel Tunnel in 1994. There was an easy rapport, too, with the urbane Jacques Chirac. Both presidents would be hosts and guests of the Queen during reciprocal state visits. As London bureau chief for Le Monde, Marc Roche was attending the Queen’s Golden Jubilee media reception in the very week of the French presidential election in 2002. Chirac was about to take on the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the second round, and Roche raised the subject with the Queen. ‘We were three French journalists standing there and she came to us. I said: “The situation in France, Ma’am, is terrible”. And she said: “I hope the French will vote well”. So my headline in Le Monde was “La Reine Votes Chirac”!’
There seems to have been less of a rapport with the quasi-aristocratic Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Among other things, there was what the French press referred to as ‘l’incident de la fenêtre’ at the return banquet during Giscard’s 1976 state visit to London. During dinner at the French Embassy, the Queen wanted a window opened to bring in some fresh air. Giscard ordered it shut again. In later life, his romantic novel, The President and the Princess, featured an affair between a French leader and a British princess, inviting much speculation (which he denied) that he had harboured a tendresse for the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Nonetheless, he would always remain inordinately proud of the Queen’s gift to him during his state visit – Sandringham Samba, a Labrador puppy from her own kennels.
The pattern of such visits, of course, is dictated entirely by the government, not the Palace. Soon after his election in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy received an invitation to pay a state visit to Britain. With weeks to go before his arrival, he had married the singer Carla Bruni, ensuring that he would not be coming on his own. The 2008 visit, held at Windsor Castle, was not quite the success that both sides had hoped for. Marc Roche, by now forgiven for divulging the Queen’s remarks about Le Pen six years earlier, was among the guests. ‘After the dinner, there were drinks and cigars,’ he recalls. ‘The Queen was there and I remember talking to Prince Charles. People were saying: “Where are Sarko and Madame?” They weren’t there.’ The president and his new wife, it transpired, had gone off to bed. ‘It was a real faux-pas,’ says Roche. ‘I don’t think he really appreciated it but then he was devoid of charm.’
Sarkozy had left office before any return fixture could be arranged. The Queen was, once again, back on French soil in 2014, for the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. In recognition of her personal connection with the war, President Hollande had not only chosen to hold his international ceremony in the former British sector, but had invited the Queen to pay a state visit afterwards. In blazing sunshine, the last head of state to wear uniform in the Second World War was greeted on the same Ouistreham sand where so many men – her father’s men – had stormed ashore on 6th June 1944 to liberate France and create a free Europe. As the band struck up ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, the VIP grandstand – filled with world leaders, including Presidents Putin and Obama – rose as one to applaud her arrival. So, too, did the adjacent grandstand, filled with the people of Normandy and with French veterans. Whereupon the familiar refrain could be heard once again: ‘Vive la reine!’
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Princess Elizabeth (centre) with Princess Margaret, sounding the whistle of the royal train, South Africa, 1947.
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Princess Elizabeth, aged 20, during that 1947 tour of southern Africa, her first experience of overseas travel.
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Princess Elizabeth during her first visit to Paris in 1948. Vast crowds turned out to welcome ‘Zizette’, who had yet to tell the world that she was expecting Prince Charles.
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Farewell to Empire. Buckingham Palace, April 1949. King George VI and the Prime Ministers of the eight founder members of the modern Commonwealth.
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Nairobi, Kenya 1952. Princess Elizabeth is greeted by Prince Selim, a three-year-old boy born the same day as Prince Charles and named after him. He was not easily parted from his bouquet.
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With Prince Philip in the grounds of Sagana Lodge, a wedding present from the Kenyan government. Within hours, she would be Queen.
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The round-the-world ‘Coronation’ tour of 1953–4 was the longest in royal history. An early destination was Tonga where the guests sat cross-legged at Queen Salote’s state banquet.
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In early 1954, the tour reached Australia. Most of the country turned out to see the first visit by a reigning monarch. The Queen and Prince Philip arrive in Hobart, Tasmania.
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The Queen returned via Africa and was finally reunited with her children on board Britannia in Libya. Before going aboard, she visited the Commonwealth Cemetery at Tobruk to honour the thousands of Allied troops killed there in 1941–2.
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The Queen with Germaine Coty, the wife of the French President, René Coty, during her first state visit to France in 1957. The Paris crowds grew so large that mounted police drew their swords at L’Opéra.
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The Queen visits her first supermarket – the Giant Food Shopping Center in Maryland – during the 1957 state visit to the USA. Prince Philip was particularly interested in the frozen food section.
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The Queen on Broadway. A ticker-tape welcome from New York City as the royal couple travel to City Hall, October 1957.
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President John F Kennedy and the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, dine at Buckingham Palace, June 1961.
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An elephant called Beauty carries the Queen in to Jaipur, alongside the Maharajah of Jaipur, early on in the six-week tour of India, Pakistan and Nepal in 1961. The government of Jawaharlal Nehru wanted the tour to focus on industry and progress in modern, independent India. The Maharajah had other ideas.
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Kathmandu, 1961. A visit to the palatial Hanuman Dhoka.
The Duke of Edinburgh has his ‘infected’ trigger finger wrapped in a bandage, conveniently ruling him out of the King of Nepal’s tiger hunt. Weeks later, he would be a co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund.
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There had been parliamentary calls for the Queen to abandon her 1961 tour of newly-independent Ghana following a spate of bombings in the capital, Accra. The Queen was having none of it, to the delight of President Kwame Nkrumah who drove her through Accra in an open Rolls-Royce.
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For the first banquet of her first state visit to West Germany in 1965, the Queen asked Hardy Amies to design an evening gown matching the rococo swirls of the Augustusburg Palace. Her host was President Heinrich Lübke.
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Children in Household Cavalry costumes welcome the Queen to Chile in 1968.
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Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 38
