Yet the sight of Britannia’s Royal Barge carrying the Queen and Duke up the River Neva to the tombs of the tsars, bells ringing out along the shoreline and the sun bouncing off St Petersburg’s domes and spires, was a powerful reminder of old dynastic ties. Inside the cathedral-fortress – where the future Kings Edward VII and George V attended the funeral of Tsar Alexander III a century earlier – the Queen studiously avoided either comment or expression, beyond polite interest at being informed about some building work. She could have been viewing a moderately interesting library extension in the West Midlands.
The Mayor and his protégé, Vladimir Putin, had laid on a royal lunch at another former imperial palace. There was a minor drama when the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Dugdale, fell and broke her hip. The Master of the Household, Sir Simon Cooper, and Britannia’s captain, Robert Woodard, carried her in an oak chair to a waiting car and thence to the Royal Yacht, where she would remain in her cabin until being flown home from Helsinki three days later. Afterwards the Queen and President Yeltsin shifted the focus on to shared sacrifice at the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery, the resting place of many of the estimated 1.5 million Russians killed in the three-year siege of Leningrad, one of the most destructive in history.
Woodard was struck by the sight of the two leaders paying their respects in front of a group of Royal Navy veterans, survivors of the hellish Arctic convoys: ‘The Queen marched with Boris Yeltsin who was about seven feet tall – with these Russian guards who are taller than that. They marched together about 300 yards while the Funeral March from Saul was coming out of loudspeakers in the trees. And they were marching over a million dead bodies. Then they got up to the Memorial and there were some of our sailors in white berets. It was very moving.’
Britannia was about to provide the climax to the visit, though not before hosting a noisy pirate-themed children’s party for the residents of a local orphanage. In the kitchens, the royal chefs were already working on a Scottish-themed state-banquet menu of medallions of salmon Glamis, roast saddle of Balmoral venison and a chocolate marquise.
As night fell on the newly renamed English Embankment, President Yeltsin, his senior ministers and the speakers of both houses of parliament came aboard for a very convivial evening. Though it has always been the convention that there are no speeches at return state banquets, the Queen decided to make a rare exception (as would happen with Nelson Mandela two years later). She had clearly talked it through with the Duke of Edinburgh. ‘I could see Prince Philip looking at her very amused, holding his chin and with a twinkle in his eye,’ says Delmar Fall. ‘And she called for a gavel and she went “tap”, “tap”, “tap” – and she got up and she made a little speech. No notes!’
Sir Robert Woodard, at the far end of the table, remembers standing as the Queen raised a glass to the Russians, and then sitting down again. ‘Suddenly a stun grenade went off – or so I thought! There was this huge explosion from the top of the table. And it was Boris Yeltsin bringing his fist down.’ Lady Fall saw exactly what happened. ‘The Queen offered the gavel to Yeltsin, through an interpreter, and he said: “Russian men don’t need gavels!” And he took his fist and he thumped the table and all the glassware went everywhere. Suddenly there was this deadly silence when we all wondered “What the hell?” and then we laughed.’
It was not the drink talking. By all accounts, Yeltsin had once again been abstemious with the royal wine. He was just feeling very emotional and very Russian. With no interpreter, he proceeded to hold forth passionately (in Russian) for several minutes. Sir Robert Woodard says that the President was clearly speaking from the heart. ‘I certainly felt the drink reports were over-exaggerated. In the main, you were dealing with a really brilliant character, a man full of enthusiasm,’ he says. ‘Yeltsin admired Her Majesty hugely. There were tears in his eyes when he left.’
There was one final piece of theatre, the traditional quayside Beating Retreat by the Band of the Royal Marines. The Queen was going to wrap up in style against the cold. ‘She came downstairs and I was standing next to Prince Philip. And she was in the most gorgeous full-length fur cape,’ says Lady Fall. ‘I looked at him and said: “Oooh!” And he said: “Canadian!” ’
The Band of the Royal Marines did not disappoint. To the Ambassador’s delight, Yeltsin turned to the Queen and proclaimed: “That’s the way the Russian national anthem ought to be played!” As Fall observes: ‘It really was an enormous compliment.’
A Russian guard of honour returned the compliment from the quayside as Britannia made a floodlit departure beneath a fireworks display. There could be no grander or more dramatic exit, though it could easily have ended in embarrassment, if not disaster. Woodard was having to guide Britannia out of a strange harbour in darkness using out-of-date charts for navigation and with a strong tide running against him. On board was a Russian pilot, hired for his local expertise, though not his language skills. ‘We went into the first corner,’ says Sir Robert. ‘I turned to the pilot and said: “Can I cut the corner to port?” and he said: “Da! Da!” We cut the corner. But as we did so, an officer came running up and said: “Sir, you do know that the pilot has come up to me and asked: “Which side is port?” It became a famous remark!’
Fortunately, earlier in the day, Woodard had been informed that the Russians could no longer afford to illuminate their navigation buoys at night. He had taken the precaution of sending his navigation officer down the river before to plot a route for just such an eventuality. ‘I had sent him off in my barge to take back-bearings on any lights that would help us navigate. And thank goodness he did because we were navigating our way out using bus shelters and Coca-Cola hoardings!’
‘We have played a card which only Britain can play,’ Sir Brian wrote in his official despatch to the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. The timing, he added, had proved ideal. ‘All of this happened at exactly the right time: when Russia was still in the throes of an incomplete revolution and the democrats and reformers much in need of encouragement.’ The visit would resonate particularly, he said, with those Russians who neither wanted a return to old-style communism nor were impressed by the ‘pushy young men in BMWs’. The winner had been Yeltsin. ‘The Queen’s visit gave him a rare opportunity to emphasise and celebrate the continuity of the new Russia and the old.’
Although Britain’s relations with Russia might enter a downward spiral a decade later, culminating in chemical assassinations and diplomatic expulsions, the course was set fair for the next few years. ‘It was enormously important. All sorts of things had gone wrong but it was very important in persuading senior Russian figures that the world had changed,’ says Sir Francis Richards. ‘They hadn’t yet worked out what it was like to be a proper country with proper politicians. It had a catalytic role.’
It had also made Britain the envy of the other diplomatic missions. ‘They just realised this was a league we played in and nobody else did,’ says Sir Brian. The Ambassador and his wife would certainly notice a change. ‘The Russians were very much warmer afterwards,’ says Lady Fall. ‘We’d go into the Kremlin and we’d always be hugged by Mrs Yeltsin.’
IRELAND, 2011
Whatever their period of office, all the officials and politicians who have worked with the Queen single out the 2011 state visit to Ireland as the work of a stateswoman. The former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Simon Fraser, remembers it as ‘the most interesting and dramatic visit’ of recent years. As far as the Queen was concerned, it was also one of the most enjoyable. ‘She was so excited about it and really looking forward to it. It was quite sweet,’ the Duke of Cambridge said afterwards.
Having visited more countries than all her predecessors put together, the Queen had to wait until after her eighty-fifth birthday before visiting the country closest to home. The United Kingdom has just one land border, and no British monarch had crossed it in the century since her grandfather’s visit in 1911. Indeed, when George V had last visited Dublin, there was no border to cross,
as the Republic of Ireland did not yet exist. Ireland had been as much a part of the United Kingdom as Surrey.
The subsequent hundred years had seen partition, separation, independence and a chaotic, tempestuous, often bloody love–hate relationship. It was one characterised by ancestral bitterness – stretching back past the Potato Famine and Oliver Cromwell to the Tudors – as well as sectarian conflict and profound political distrust. At the same time, at another level, there were deep, unbreakable human bonds between the two peoples: ties of marriage, literature, sport, horses, music and even saving lives at sea. When the Irish Free State was established in 1922, the volunteers manning all the Royal National Lifeboat Institution stations around the island of Ireland saw no need to change their organisation. They had a higher calling than politics. As a result, it is still the RNLI that rescues those in peril, from Cork in the South to Portrush in the North. Similarly, there is still just the one Irish rugby team.
In a culture more fixated with symbols than most, it was the Crown that had been the ultimate emblem of Irish misery, as far as the South was concerned, its wearer the personification of one nation’s injustice to another. Conversely, in the North, the Crown was not far below the Almighty, in the Unionist pantheon. Through the worst of ‘the Troubles’ – the thirty-year paramilitary conflict that left more than 3,500 dead (more than half of them civilians) – the Queen must have despaired of ever setting foot in a country that she had so often glimpsed from a distance. The conflict had been deeply personal at times. Prince Philip’s uncle, Earl Mountbatten, and members of his family had been killed by the IRA on holiday in Ireland in 1979. As Head of the Armed Forces and of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Queen was fully attuned to the risks and sacrifices made by those serving in her name. She had endured more bomb scares and threats on her own life than she cared to remember. On one occasion, she was advised to move out of Buckingham Palace because of credible threats of a mortar attack (she refused). In 1982, the IRA had blown up her Household Cavalry as they processed from their barracks in Hyde Park for their daily Guard Change. ‘It was a nice, sunny day and suddenly one heard this explosion one heard all the time in Northern Ireland,’ recalls the man who was in command that day, Brigadier (then Lt-Col) Andrew Parker Bowles.§§ ‘One of the barriers opened and someone said “They’ve blown up the Guard”. So we all set off – all the farriers were wearing their leather aprons, naked to the waist – and we all ran down to where the smoke was rising. The first horse I saw was Sefton. He had a bloody great hole in him and I made a mental note I’d never see Sefton again. But he managed to pull through.’ Later on that day, Parker Bowles spoke to the Queen who did not mince her words. She told him it was ‘the most ghastly day of my life’.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 would change all that. In bringing together the British and Irish governments and all the main political parties of Northern Ireland, it laid the foundations for a peaceful power-sharing future and secured an end to the worst of the violence. Yet it would still take a further decade before all sides felt confident that they could lead what might be termed a ‘normal’ life. If the island of Ireland really was going to draw a line under the past, however, nothing would say so with quite the same impact as a state visit by the Queen.
There had been a long series of stepping stones, starting all the way back in 1993, when the President of the Republic, Mary Robinson, had met the monarch during an official visit to London. There had been no issue whatsoever about the Irish head of state travelling to the UK. Yet the converse was still unthinkable. In 1998, the Queen and the new President, Mary McAleese, met near Ypres in Belgium for the unveiling of a memorial to the nearly 50,000 Irishmen who died in Flanders fighting for King and country in the First World War.
Other members of the family would make visits in connection with their various patronages and charities. For now, the Queen knew she was still at the back of the queue. But she had made it very clear indeed to her ministers that she was ready and willing. Unlike her first visit to Germany, there was no nervousness at the Palace about this idea. On being despatched to Dublin as Britain’s new ambassador in 2009, Julian King¶¶ was informed that the Palace and the British government were keen to push for a state visit. The timing was in the hands of the Irish. ‘There were one or two very outline ideas for a programme,’ says King, ‘but there was no guarantee it was going to happen.’
Britain was doing its best to be a good neighbour. At the end of 2010, as Ireland struggled to recover from the financial crash, Dublin was finding it increasingly hard to get a loan from the usual lenders, when the British Chancellor, George Osborne, offered to lend £3.2 billion. It was snapped up. Even so, the Irish government was still stalling on that invitation at the start of 2011. The crumbling Fianna Fáil government of Brian Cowen was voicing reservations about a royal visit until certain judicial reforms had been completed in the North. Fortunately for the monarch, she had an important ally in the Republic: President McAleese. The former university academic only had a matter of months to go before the end of her second term as President and she was not going to let her successor have the pleasure of welcoming the Queen if she could possibly help it. This did the trick. The invitation was eventually issued and accepted just days before a change of Irish government and the arrival of Enda Kenny as the new Prime Minister.
Planning could begin in earnest, and it was clear that the Queen had her own ideas. ‘Up until that stage, outline ideas had focussed on a short visit of around one and a half days in Dublin,’ says Sir Julian King. That was certainly not what the Queen had in mind. For most of the time, Palace officials spend their days trying to protect the royal timetable and to limit demands on the Queen’s time. On this occasion, says the former Ambassador, the Queen was keen to extend the arrangements. ‘It became very clear to me very early on that the Palace were interested in a longer and bigger visit if the Irish were open to that. Not everybody on the Irish side had been thinking on that kind of scale!’
In the heated debate that followed the announcement, some commentators argued that a state visit was a case of going too far too soon. Surely, it was argued, the Queen should make a private visit first, to test the waters? At the Palace, however, there was a very clear desire to get on with it and to do this properly. That meant that one of the Queen’s first engagements would be a wreath-laying at the Garden of Remembrance, the memorial to all those who had perished in the heroic struggles against the British Crown. This was an integral part of the itinerary for any state visitor to Ireland. Some hardline nationalists were appalled at the idea of the old enemy paying respects, yet it would surely have offended republican sentiment very much more if the Queen did not go there. It would be like a state visitor to London boycotting the Grave of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey. Both sides agreed it was essential.
Then the discussions threw up a more original suggestion: a royal visit to Croke Park. The home of the Gaelic Athletic Association had been the scene of the original Bloody Sunday. In November 1920, the killing of fourteen British agents in Dublin had been swiftly followed by a savage revenge attack on the crowd at the Gaelic football match at Croke Park. British ‘Black and Tan’ auxiliaries opened fire on the crowd, killing fourteen civilians and injuring many more. There are few sites more sacred to Irish nationalism, and yet the Irish were keen for the Queen to go there.
More than a thousand international press had been accredited ahead of the Queen’s arrival on 17th May 2011. The monarchy, like much of Britain, was still on a high, following the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge a month before. Ahead of his marriage, the Duke had been mulling over what to wear, given his various military appointments. As a serving officer in the Royal Air Force, he would be expected to wear his RAF uniform. The Queen, however, had other ideas. She had just appointed him Colonel of the Irish Guards. ‘I was given a categorical: “No, you’ll wear this!” ’ as the Duke explained afterwards. Whether her upcoming visit to Ireland had influenced
the Queen is unclear, but it was an Irish Guards officer standing at the altar of Westminster Abbey on 29th April 2011.
Three weeks later, the bookmakers were offering bets on the Queen’s choice of clothes as the royal BAe 146 flew into Baldonnel’s Casement Aerodrome, named after Sir Roger Casement, the Irish republican hero executed for treason in the midst of the First World War. Even the most blasé old pros on the press grandstand could not resist a cheer as the cabin door opened. The Queen was wearing emerald-green (or ‘jade’ as a Palace official described it). Though it had understandably been the bookies’ favourite, it underlined the drama of the moment. As one reporter remarked, the monarch could almost have got back on the plane there and then: ‘Job done.’
Accompanied by the Presidential Motorcycle Squadron of the Irish Cavalry Corps, the Queen and Prince Philip were driven 10 miles to Áras an Uachtaráin, the presidential residence on the outskirts of Dublin. The Queen’s first glimpse of Ireland was a strange one. The route was lined with crowd barriers, behind which stood no crowds because it had been declared a sterile zone. The government had laid on the largest security operation in living memory, involving 10,000 troops and police (1,000 more than the total strength of the Irish Defence Forces). It had been decided that the best place for the public to catch a glimpse of the Queen was on television. At the front door of the former viceregal residence, it was hard to tell who was more elated as President McAleese (in fuchsia) welcomed her opposite number, inviting the Queen to plant an Irish oak, before a lunch of smoked chicken, turbot and buttermilk ice cream.
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