Mrs. Queen Takes the Train

by William Kuhn

  No, the success of her marriage, if you could call it that, was based on having gone through the Second World War, taken tepid baths, sat down to dry teacakes that hadn’t enough butter or sugar, interrupted her riding life to try her hand at being a truck mechanic in a regiment for women. She didn’t do all these things willingly. She put up with them because it was the war. Her children hadn’t that spirit-of-the-war endurance or sense of self-sacrifice or ability to resign themselves to a less-than-ideal daily life. They wanted to be happy. All their generation did. Of course she loved the Duke. Loved him very much in fact. They’d been through so much together. He knew her better than anyone, wasn’t afraid of her as so many others were. But it wasn’t a sentimental romance. It was more like a battered estate wagon in which they bounced along together, sometimes cheerfully amused by the same joke, other times grimly tolerating one another and determined to get where they were going.

  She had a formula when any critical decision was in contemplation. Give it a trial of six months. Don’t do anything hasty. Whenever she brought on a new private secretary, she’d say, “Shall we give it six months? Let’s have a trial period.” Or if any minister complained to her in an audience that he couldn’t decide about an important policy, her advice was always, “Can you give it six months? Mull it over and decide then?” So in June of 1992, when the Morton book had come out, and there was pretty authentic information all over the press, the broadsheets as well as the tabloids, that the marriage had come unstuck, she knew what she was going to say. The Prince and Princess of Wales happened to be on the spot, staying in Windsor for the annual house party that accompanied the races at Ascot. It was the Duke of Edinburgh’s idea to shanghai them into a surprise audience, confront them with the Morton book, and get them to make up or break up. She wasn’t so sure this was a good idea, but in family matters the Duke was King and all she could do was try to be helpful.

  All four of them were in the sitting room overlooking the Long Walk. It was before luncheon, and soon they’d have to go down and join the others, for the hour they were to be off to the races was two pm sharp and they mustn’t miss that. The Queen checked her wristwatch. Charles stood at one end of the room and hung his head miserably. Diana stood at the other end and hung her head too, not in misery but in disguised defiance. The Duke paced back and forth, giving a naval rant as if to his most junior ratings. “What in the devil’s name do you two think you’re doing? Everyone in this damnable country just wants you to be happy. Why can’t you put on a good show and then go off and have your own things on the side?”

  The Queen wasn’t sure she liked this. Was that what he’d done with her? Put on a good show? Was that all? The Prince and Princess of Wales said nothing.

  “If you won’t bloody listen to me, then think of The Queen. What are you putting her through? Her father shoved into the job in 1936 when he wasn’t ready for it and then came all through the war. Died a young man. It killed him. Now The Queen’s been doing it since she was in her twenties. You’d think she’d be entitled to a little rest after, what? Nearly sixty years! Instead of which you bloody fools are going to bring the whole ceiling crashing down on all of us.” The Duke then turned to The Queen and roared at her, “Talk to them! They’re not having it from me.”

  For the first time both Charles and Diana looked up. They both wanted to obey her, she could see that. Even for them, at war as they were, she personified something bigger than themselves, something to which they both hoped to remain loyal. They were both willing to listen to her if she could put it eloquently and reasonably, if she could say it the right way.

  “What if you were to jog along together for six months? Give it one last try and then decide?” said The Queen weakly. She could see as soon as she said it that it wasn’t enough. Charles was tongue-tied in the face of his two parents. Diana looked down again and fiddled with the blue sash of her Ascot frock.

  They’d both agreed to try to repair their marriage, but then it emerged that Diana had given her full cooperation to the Morton book, which they hadn’t known before. Secret tapes of their conversations with lovers were broadcast and transcripts published. Windsor burned. The Government refused to pay for its repair after a media storm of abuse, which blamed her. Questions about royal payment of income tax had made things worse. The Prime Minister announced the official separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales in Parliament. On the night she’d watched the Castle go up in flames, on the verge of public tears for the first time in her life, The Queen had told her mother that she was so distraught that she feared for her sanity. All that happened that year was the beginning of where she was now, the dull, aching sadness that wouldn’t go away.

  Then Diana had died in Paris and the little boys had been pulled, against The Queen’s will, by public demand, into the midst of a media circus. The orgy of public grief was, in The Queen’s eyes, not Britain’s finest hour. If she’d only wept then, perhaps everything would have been all right. But The Queen’s tears were internal. The great mountains of flowers reminded her of the plastic bouquets and wooden crosses sometimes found on Italian roadsides to mark automobile smashes and in perpetual memory of someone who died. When had Britain become so Mediterranean?

  No, Britain had changed, and against her will the monarchy changed too, under the influence of marketing experts at Number 10. She was sent out more rarely to lunch with the Grenadier Guards, and made to go instead to visit a new McDonald’s. She wanted to face the cameras less often than before, but now every time she looked at a briefing paper from the private secretary it seemed that a new television crew was inside the palace walls, filming something. She didn’t mind the old school of photographers, Tony Snowdon and Cecil Beaton, but now they wanted to invite in the Americans and Vanity Fair. Miss Annie Leibovitz had been telephoned for, and she was flying over from the States, bringing eleven people, and her daughter, to do a snapshot, as if it might save the day and repair the soundness of something she’d worked all her life to keep running smoothly. It made The Queen angry, but she felt there was nothing she could do. She’d been taught by her father that she had to accept the advice of Number 10, and nowadays her own private office and Number 10 appeared to be in cahoots to humiliate her in one way or another.

  Leibovitz’s crew had been in touch in advance of their arrival. They wanted to photograph The Queen in the saddle, mounted on a horse—in the sitting room, of all places! She put her foot down at that. “Absolutely not,” she told Shirley, who’d been deputized by the private secretary to tell The Queen, as he was afraid of her reaction if he told her himself. Shirley had dutifully returned to the private secretary and told him The Queen didn’t think it was a good idea.

  [Fred W. McDarrah/Premium Archive/Getty Images]

  Next they’d heard from the Americans that they thought of recreating a famous Cecil Beaton photo in which she’d stood wearing a naval cloak for him. Cecil was charming. She’d been younger then. No grey in her hair. She remembered the session vividly, “You won’t need your crown for this session, Ma’am,” he’d said, “but I shall need mine. I’ve grown so bald that I need something to cover it up.” She’d given her laughing assent to his wearing his hat indoors. But why try to imitate what he’d already done so perfectly? Hadn’t Miss Leibovitz any ideas of her own? Still, she was conscious of having turned down one request, so she agreed to the naval cloak. She and Shirley were upstairs, arranging the cloak, when they got word from the photographer’s crew downstairs. Could she put on the Garter robes first? They’d do the naval cloak later? The Queen was indignant. Putting on the Garter robes was serious work. It meant a different floor-length gown underneath and being strapped by several dozen internal ties into the long velvet cape that went on top. And a tiara too, which meant a special arrangement of hair.

  “Really! This is the last straw,” said The Queen to Shirley, who thought it better to remain silent as the sovereign vented. As Shirley worked on the t
ies inside the mantle, The Queen checked the clock on the chimneypiece. “This will make us late!” She was aware that the photography session would now delay her engagements for the rest of the day. The ambassadors would have to wait, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer too. She might not even be free at the dogs’ teatime to feed them herself, the one part of the day that always cheered her up.

  Shirley and a page gathered up The Queen’s Garter robes as she streamed down the corridor toward the elevator, still grumbling. When they arrived in the Bow Room of Buckingham Palace, where Miss Leibovitz had set up her equipment, The Queen had recovered a modicum of civility. The press secretary knew the sovereign was angry and gave her an especially low curtsey, the young woman’s gym-toned left leg shooting out from her short skirt and bending around behind her for support as she bent the right knee deeply. She then introduced The Queen to Annie Leibovitz, who introduced her to members of the camera crew and to her daughter. The little girl gave The Queen a large chrysanthemum. The Queen passed this to Lady Anne, who stood unobtrusively behind her, and sat down on the seat which Miss Leibovitz had indicated in front of the window. Shirley expertly arranged the Garter robes behind her so as not to pull The Queen over. Leibovitz began clicking her camera shutter. After a dozen clicks, she turned around to her assistant and said, “Could we try something a little less dressy? What about taking off the tiara?”

  The Queen heard her distinctly. “Too dressy!” she said irritably. “What do you think this is?” If she hadn’t been firmly moored in place by the heavy train of the Garter robes, she would have stood up and walked out. The Order of the Garter went back to 1348. It was the oldest and most valuable honor in her gift. It coincided with the birth of the medieval monarchy itself. It was not a costume for charades.

  Leibovitz looked at The Queen. She was used to catering to the whims of Hollywood celebrities, but she wasn’t quite sure how to handle an angry monarch. Was she being ironic? Was she joking? An instant’s examination of The Queen’s face, with Shirley speeding in to try and make things better, and Lady Anne hovering in the background with a worried expression, suggested to her that The Queen was not joking. She began trying to explain what she meant, using the tone of voice she used with her daughter during a tantrum.

  The Queen, for her part, boiling hot from the robes to begin with, upset about the timing, feeling as if Miss Annie Leibovitz was just abusing her as everyone else had started to do in the wake of 1992, suddenly remembered something. Her yoga instructor had spent several whole sessions just breathing with her. “The breath, Your Majesty, the breath! Pranayama.” It was the key to what she called “mindfulness,” to calming down. Breathing did help. So, ignoring the pleas of photographer and photographer’s assistants and press secretary and dresser and lady-in-waiting, all of whom were buzzing and clucking their tongues encouragingly around her, she began breathing deeply and clearing her mind.

  At Eton, teachers were “masters,” and for English literature Rajiv had a teacher who was a master. The boys thought of him as ancient and decrepit. They liked to make fun of the dandruff that covered his shoulders like a fall of snow. This English master had no use for impertinent boys. He ignored them. To bright boys, though, he gave all his energy and attention. He beamed upon them, chivvied them, chastised them, encouraged them, and praised them inordinately. Like small seedlings in a pot, they warmed to the glow of his sunshine. Their leaves increased and they grew. As he observed them growing, his own soul, deep in his withering body, also prospered and grew.

  Rajiv was one of these boys. The English master had noticed him right away because his eyes were always wide open, while most of the others always looked half asleep. The text which especially stirred Rajiv was Shakespeare’s Henry V. A young English king takes an English army to France, where, though badly outnumbered, he wins a great victory and takes away a French wife as his prize. Why should a teenaged boy be interested in that? The English master sat at night by himself in his study wondering what he could do with the boys that would appeal to them, shatter the hard carapace of their indifference, persuade them to love what he loved.

  The next morning, he showed the boys the cover of the famous “bad quarto” of the play, reconstructed from an early performance and only a fraction of the length of the standard edition. He pointed to “The Cronicle History of Henry fift” and remarked dryly, “The publisher spelled as well as you lot do.” He then turned to video games. As he suspected, their favorites were those that involved killing opponents with instruments of medieval torture. They enjoyed any gothic fantasy that included a frightening beast, a haunted castle, or a zombie returned from the dead. The boys also relished heroic feats required to destroy any of these three. This was his start. One group of boys he assigned to assemble all the ghost stories associated with Windsor Castle they could find. Another group he asked to design a video game involving armies assailing one another with longbows, the instruments Henry V had used at the Battle of Agincourt. A third he asked to find the most gruesome images they could discover online of injuries sustained during medieval warfare. The boys, even the sleepiest ones, all woke up and began to enjoy themselves.

  Next the English master brought in a video of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. He asked them to watch the opening scene several times. Derek Jacobi, wearing a naval cloak and standing on an empty soundstage, recited Shakespeare’s lines. Jacobi plays “Chorus,” a single character, who tells members of the audience that they are going to have to use their imaginations if they are going to succeed in recreating a big battlefield inside a small theatre. The English master took the boys outside and made them look up at the high walls of the Castle dominating Eton and the river.

  He asked them to take turns reciting Chorus’s lines,

  Suppose within the girdle of these walls

  Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

  Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

  The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

  “What is ‘girdle of these walls’?” he asked one boy.

  “Um, not sure, sir.”

  Rajiv’s hand went up.

  “Laroia?”

  “The theatre, sir?”

  “Yes, boy,” the master said wearily, though he was secretly delighted. “And what are the ‘two mighty monarchies’?” he asked another.

  “Is one of them The Queen, sir?”

  “No!” thundered the English master.

  Rajiv’s hand was up again.

  “Well, isn’t it the English monarchy, sir, but in 1415, at the time of Agincourt? Then the other monarchy would be France, wouldn’t it?”

  The English master nodded his head yes while rolling his eyes in mock exhaustion. Some of the boys understood that he was playing with them, and tittered. “And so, Laroia. You seem to know everything.” He had saved his hardest question for last. “Will you tell us, please, what ‘high upreared and abutting fronts’ are?”

  “Well, um, that’s poetry, sir.”

  The English master couldn’t help smiling at that. Nothing better than being surprised by an intelligent boy. The other boys would have hated Rajiv for being a know-all, but he had such a reliable supply of sweets and snacks that they always had fun in his room, so they gave him a pass.

  For his part, Rajiv was absolutely bowled over by the play. He got his own copy of Branagh’s Henry V and played it over and over on his laptop. When he had his housemates in his room late in the evening he would also do burlesque send-ups of the play, modeled on the film, for their amusement. One of his favorite gags was to take the blanket off his bed, drape it over his shoulders as if it were a naval cloak, and pretend to be Derek Jacobi playing the part of Chorus. In the film, Jacobi suddenly raises his voice at the end of the prologue where he asks the patience of the audience, “Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.” Rajiv had memorized these lines and liked saying them with ascending loudness until he was shou
ting “OUR PLAY!” with a bullfighting flourish of his blanket. The boys thought this was hilarious. If he put the wicker wastebasket on his head at the same time, they wriggled as if they might wet the bed.

  He enjoyed the laughter and took it as his applause. It was a lot better than playing Lord Mountbatten in India, anyway. In fact, the history of Indian independence inspired him a good deal less than what he’d read of princely India, with its elaborate courts, where legend had it that maharajahs made love to beautiful maidens next to splashing fountains and were served sherbet afterwards. This was a great deal more attractive to Rajiv than modern India, with its cowboy capitalism. The counterpart of princely India, in his mind, was medieval England. He loved the legend of St George, who killed a dragon that was about to eat a princess. St George got the princess instead. This appealed to Rajiv’s deeply chivalric instincts. He also loved the part of Henry V where Henry, leading a charge of his men on the besieged town of Harfleur, cries out to them,

  For there is none of you so mean and base,

  That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.

  I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

  Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:

  Follow your spirit, and upon this charge

  Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

  He recalled the attitude of the boys in the alley, and of the senior courtier who’d said he wasn’t English. He knew that they all thought of him as “mean and base.” What he loved about King Henry was that he seemed always to manage to bring his men together despite what the English master had told them about vast social differences that separated different sorts of men in medieval England. Henry brought the men together, not by giving them chocolates, but by using his language, his poetry, his skills as an orator, his words, and it was in this discovery that Rajiv’s desire to be a poet was born. The English master had shown Rajiv Shelley’s Defense of Poetry from 1821 in which he said that poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This proposition was on the face of it so impossible, so absurd, that Rajiv devoted all his adolescent idealism to wondering how it might be made to come true.