Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Despite her sharp intelligence, Anne had scant interest in academics, and her examination results weren’t strong enough for admission to a university. She enjoyed pushing the envelope physically, another trait inherited from her father, who taught her to sail in the rough waters off the Scottish coast and competed with her in the Cowes regatta. Anne wrote that sailing gave her “an utterly detached sensation that I have only otherwise experienced on a galloping horse … testing your skill against Nature, your ideals and the person you would like to be.” Having ridden since the age of two when she first sat on a white pony named Fum, horses became Anne’s passion. After graduating from Benenden in 1968 at age eighteen, she focused on competing in the arduous equestrian sport of three-day eventing.

  When Charles was approaching his final year at Gordonstoun, his parents convened a meeting over dinner in December 1965 to map out the appropriate future for the heir to the throne, who was not included in the discussion. Three previous kings—Edward VII, Edward VIII, and George VI—had taken courses at Oxford and Cambridge but had never earned degrees. Since neither Philip nor Elizabeth II had university experience, they relied on the counsel of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey; Prime Minister Harold Wilson; Dickie Mountbatten, then chief of the Defence Staff; Robin Woods, the dean of Windsor; and Sir Charles Wilson, principal and vice-chairman of Glasgow University and chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors.

  For several hours, they discussed various alternatives as the Queen listened. Harold Wilson advocated Oxford, but Dickie preferred Trinity College at Cambridge and the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, followed by the Royal Navy, a plan the family eventually adopted a year later. Charles was pleased to be attending Cambridge, if only because it was so near the shooting at Sandringham, with its “crème de la crème of wild birds.” When he enrolled in the autumn of 1967, he was the first royal student to live in rooms at the college. Former conservative politician Rab Butler, then the master of Trinity, was his mentor.

  As a general principle, the Queen sought to expose Charles and Anne to challenging situations and preferred to talk to them “on level grown-up terms,” one writer observed in 1968. “I remember the patience Prince Charles showed when he was around all those adults,” said Mary Wilson. At one Buckingham Palace luncheon in honor of a delegation from Nigeria, Cynthia Gladwyn found him “charming … with his desire to please, his tentative interest in everybody, his wild-rose coloring … his sensitivity contrasting with his father’s lack of it.” Within the requirements of their royal existence, Elizabeth II encouraged her older children to work their way through difficulties, learning to think for themselves—an approach some intimates criticized as too lax.

  “Right from the beginning, they were given a tremendously free rein,” a lady-in-waiting told journalist Graham Turner, who wrote a damning account of the Queen’s mothering skills. “Because of that early independence, it became more like a club than a family,” the lady-in-waiting continued. “Charles and Anne, in particular, would also have thought, ‘Don’t let’s bother Mummy, she’s got enough on her plate already.’ And she wouldn’t have expected anything else.… The Queen and Prince Philip brought up the children very toughly.”

  Princess Anne countered that “it just beggars belief” to suggest that her mother was aloof and uncaring. “We as children may have not been too demanding, in the sense that we understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make,” said Anne, “but I don’t believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any mother did.… We’ve all been allowed to find our own way and we were always encouraged to discuss problems, to talk them through. People have to make their own mistakes and I think she’s always accepted that.”

  Of all the Queen’s children, Anne was the most secure and self-sufficient. The mother-daughter relationship ran smoothly, largely because they shared such a strong bond through horses. And since Anne was cut from Prince Philip’s cloth—feisty, confident, and straightforward—she could deal with his tough love.

  Charles, however, struggled with his father’s demands and expectations. He had shown his mettle in taking on physical challenges, notably during two terms in the Australian outback at the Timbertop school. On returning to Gordonstoun he achieved the same “Guardian” leadership position his father had held. He even mimicked some of his father’s mannerisms—walking with one arm behind his back, making light jokes to put others at ease, tugging at his jacket sleeve, clasping his hands, or jabbing his right forefinger for emphasis.

  But Philip continued to offer more criticism than praise to his son, deepening Charles’s insecurity. Philip couldn’t reconcile their “great difference,” as he once put it. “He’s a romantic, and I’m a pragmatist.” Although Charles “was too proud to admit it,” wrote Jonathan Dimbleby, “the Prince still craved the affection and appreciation that his father—and his mother—seemed unable or unwilling to proffer.… In self protection, he retreated more and more into formality with his parents.” When it came to guidance about Charles’s future, father and son minimized conflict by communicating through crisply composed letters.

  It was at Sandringham and Balmoral that the children found common ground with their parents. To the Queen, Sandringham represents “an escape place, but it is also a commercially viable bit of England. I like farming … I like animals. I wouldn’t be happy if I just had arable farming.” The Queen and Prince Philip deeply imprinted their four children with knowledge of flora and fauna, and they all came to appreciate, as Anne wrote, the “pure luxury” of hours on horseback across the “miles of stubble fields around Sandringham,” as well as “the autumn colours of the rowans and silver birches, the majesties of the old Scots pines” of Deeside. Charles was so inspired that at age twenty he wrote a book for his younger brothers about the mythical “Old Man of Lochnagar” who lived in a cave on the mountain above Balmoral, tried to travel to London but returned to the solitude of his “special” home.

  Philip taught all four children to shoot, as well as to cast into the pools of the River Dee and catch salmon with a well-tied fly. Anne stalked with her mother, and was often the only other woman on the hills tracking deer. Parents and children were bound by an appreciation of country traditions and rituals, including being smeared with blood on their cheeks after killing their first stag.

  The family frequently took the Royal Train to the Highlands, and occasionally began their holiday with a cruise on Britannia through the Western Isles of Scotland. Starting in the late 1960s, the sea voyage became a regular tradition. It was one of the few times when the Queen wore trousers other than on horseback or while participating in field sports, mainly so she could easily (and modestly) go up and down the ladders onto launches when they went ashore on deserted beaches for picnics. The culmination of the cruise was “Britannia Day,” when they stopped in Caithness on the northern coast. They would disembark at the port of Scrabster and travel in a caravan of cars to the Castle of Mey, where the Queen Mother had been preparing for weeks, assisted by her lady-in-waiting Ruth Fermoy, giving instructions to her chef, and checking on the ripeness of the fruits and vegetables in her garden. One year the Queen Mother sent an urgent message to her daughter on Britannia: “There is a grave shortage of lemons. Could you please bring a couple with you? M.” The Queen obligingly emerged from the royal yacht clutching a plastic bag filled with lemons.

  The royal party strolled through the walled gardens before sitting down in the dining room at Mey for a luncheon of oeufs Drumkilbo (a mousse of eggs, prawns, and lobster, a favorite of the Queen Mother), salmon, chicken, lamb, and summer pudding. In the afternoon they visited the adjacent farm or walked toward the sea, and headed back to Scrabster after tea. By tradition, the Queen and her mother sent each other farewell poems through the Coast Guard (“A meal of such splendour, repast of such zest. It will take us to Sunday j
ust to digest. To leafy Balmoral we are now on our way, but our hearts will remain at the Castle of Mey”). When Britannia steamed along the coast, flares were launched from both ship and shore as the Queen Mother, her friends, and staff lined up behind the castle, waving tea towels and tablecloths. In the distance through binoculars, they could see the tiny figure of the Queen on deck, waving her own white cloth while Britannia blew its horn.

  THE ROYAL FAMILY acquired an unusual addition in the spring of 1967 when Philip’s mother came to live at Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s invitation. Impoverished and frail, eighty-two-year-old Princess Alice had been living in Athens, where she had finally been forced to close her nursing sisterhood due to financial problems. Although she was not a real nun, she continued to wear her gray habit as a practical matter. “She did not have to worry about clothes or getting her hair done,” Philip explained to Hugo Vickers, his mother’s biographer.

  Unlike the Queen Mother, who was an integral part of nearly every important gathering, Alice had always been a family satellite, orbiting in and out on visits to London, Windsor, Sandringham, and Balmoral. She disconcertingly referred to Philip by his nursery name, “Bubby-kins,” and all the grandchildren called her “Yaya,” the Greek name for grandmother. They were both fascinated and terrified by her eccentricities and her deep voice. A cigarette always in hand, she announced her rather spectral presence with a plume of smoke and hacking cough.

  Alice had her son’s direct manner, which her deafness made even more formidable. “Oh, I thought you were saying something interesting,” she said to the Queen’s assistant private secretary Edward Ford after he had repeated an admittedly banal question about the circus several times during dinner. Anne acknowledged that Alice was not a “cuddly granny,” and Charles admitted being intimidated at first. But they were soon enraptured by her childhood tales of Queen Victoria, and her intriguing theories, such as the need to “compartmentalize” the brain.

  When she moved into her suite—two rooms on the first floor just to the right of the balcony in the front of Buckingham Palace—Andrew and Edward often came to play halma, a form of Chinese checkers. The Queen was also a frequent visitor, and communicated well with her mother-in-law, even joining the elderly princess to watch the Changing of the Guard outside her window. Philip, while devoted to his mother, had a prickly relationship with her—“not arguments, but let’s say slight differences of agreement,” Anne explained to Hugo Vickers. “My father would then go off down the corridor muttering, and she would be in her room muttering too.”

  Alice suffered from chronic bronchitis, and after her eighty-fourth birthday in February 1969 her health went into a steep decline. She died in her sleep on December 5, and she was buried at Windsor, where she had been born. Her worldly goods were even more meager than those of her late husband—just three dressing gowns that were immediately distributed to her nurses.

  ALICE HAD REMAINED out of the public eye during her final years at the Palace, and she didn’t make even a cameo appearance in the most consequential media project ever to involve the royal family, a unique documentary film offering a fly-on-the-wall view of them at work and at play. It was the collective brainchild of Prince Philip; John Brabourne, who was a successful filmmaker; Dickie Mountbatten; and the Queen’s new press secretary, William Heseltine, who took over in 1968 after the retirement of Commander Sir Richard Colville, the man in charge of dealing with the press since King George VI appointed him in 1947. To recognize his long service, the Queen had knighted Colville in 1965.

  For more than two decades, his mandate had been unabashedly protective. “We are not publicity agents for the royal family,” he said in 1949. “We are here to tell the press how far they cannot go.” His main job was to spoon-feed anodyne royal tidbits to the two court correspondents for the Press Association, the principal British news agency, who had their own office in Buckingham Palace, and to orchestrate silent newsreel footage of the Queen in her public appearances at home and abroad.

  But by the 1960s, the perception had taken hold that the Queen was losing touch with her subjects, who were beginning to think she and her family were dull, to wonder what exactly she did for a living, and more ominously, to question whether she was giving good value for government money spent on her and her family. Philip was the only family member who had seen television as an effective communications tool. Since his 1957 documentary on his Commonwealth tour, he had hosted a second program about the Galápagos Islands a decade later, and he had also been the first to sit for a television interview in 1961.

  Philip found a kindred spirit in William Heseltine, a forthright Australian—the very opposite of the buttoned-up aristocrats who traditionally served the monarch—with a modern point of view. “I was quite a different kind of person,” Heseltine recalled. “I did think the strategy of keeping the private and public lives far apart had perhaps gone a little too far” and that the Queen and her family had become “rather one-dimensional figures.” His idea, shared by Philip and the others, was to show the Queen hard at work in a variety of settings, to get across the “relentlessness” of her job, and to open the curtain on her private life as a wife and mother in places never before seen by the public. The film would be broadcast just before the investiture of Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales in July 1969, introducing him as the symbol of the monarchy’s new generation as he reached his twenty-first year.

  Above all, the architects of the film wanted to convey Elizabeth II’s humanity behind the lofty position of sovereign, and to exploit the wholesome image of her model family. “I think it is quite wrong that there should be a sense of remoteness or majesty,” said Philip. “If people see, whoever it happens to be, whatever head of state, as individuals, as people, I think it makes it much easier for them to accept the system or to feel part of the system.”

  The Queen was reluctant at first, discomfited by the intrusiveness of the cameras. But when her longtime friend John Brabourne presented the idea, she said, “You can do it, and then we’ll see what it looks like.” Brabourne brought in Richard Cawston of the BBC to direct, and Philip supervised an advisory committee drawn from both the BBC and rival ITV, coordinating everything with Heseltine and his team. Elizabeth II acquiesced, said Gay Charteris, because “the Queen goes with what she has to do.” The film would be called, simply, Royal Family.

  Shooting began on June 8, 1968, and continued for nearly a year. The Queen submitted to lights, cameras, and crews over seventy-five days in 172 locations around the world, resulting in forty-three hours of film that was eventually cut to 110 minutes. She was ill at ease initially, but Cawston managed to relax her, and she became less conscious of his presence, even when he was filming at close range. “She suddenly discovered it was something she could do,” said John Brabourne. She teasingly called the director “Cawston,” and invited him to meals so they could discuss camera angles and lighting. “Can’t we avoid a shadow here?” she would say, slipping into the filmmaker’s argot. “We can’t have a backlit ambassador.” When she asked to see the rushes, Cawston declined, saying she might feel self-conscious.

  The novelty of the film was the juxtaposition of public and private, reinforcing a new image of the Queen as a working mother at a desk littered with papers in an office at once formal and cozy. For the first time, viewers could see the plain interior of the Royal Train, the country house comfort of Britannia’s drawing rooms, and the private apartments at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

  The filmmakers covered the professional bases: the Queen dispensing honors; making her official rounds on state visits to Chile and Brazil; discussing her Brazil speech with private secretary Michael Adeane (“Not enough thanks … It seems a bit churlish not to thank them”); greeting Harold Wilson at his weekly audience; receiving ambassadors; making stilted conversation with President Richard Nixon before a Buckingham Palace luncheon; presiding over one of her garden parties; riding sidesaddle at her birthday parade; circulating through
receptions at Buckingham Palace. Charles was shown in action on water skis and a bicycle, and joking about writing a paper for his history course. Philip was filmed while piloting an airplane and a helicopter, working on his charities in his office (more sleek and modern than his wife’s), and painting a landscape. At crucial intervals the red boxes appeared—aboard the Royal Train, being lowered onto the deck of Britannia by helicopter, at Balmoral and Sandringham.

  Aside from emphasizing the Queen’s dedication, the film provided the first extended look at what she was like in her off-hours: in her riding habit feeding carrots to her horses and with Anne on the gallops in Berkshire; examining a necklace of enormous rubies with Bobo MacDonald; washing dishes; driving the children in a Land Rover to visit puppies at the Sandringham kennels; orchestrating a family barbecue at Loch Muick with Philip, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, and the corgis; laughing with her children at an American sitcom on television and trading stories around the table at lunch; decorating a Christmas tree with her extended family, including the Queen Mother, who reminisced about “the King.” Excluded were any scenes of stalking or shooting, for fear they would seem elitist or bloodthirsty.

  A previously unseen tenderness emerged as the Queen sat on a sofa with her two young sons, pointing out photographs in a family album, and during an excursion with Edward to a shop near Balmoral. Fishing some coins out of a change purse she said to the woman at the counter, “This is all I’ve got.” As Edward waited in the front seat of her car, she handed him some candy and said with a giggle, “Disgusting! This is going to be a gooey mess!”