Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  In one of the most discussed sequences in the film, editing was used to distort reality and compound an unfortunate impression. U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Walter Annenberg presented his credentials to the Queen on April 29, 1969, in one of the most formal and time-honored of her ceremonies. “Court Dress” is white tie, tailcoat, and top hat, and the ambassador is driven to the late-morning audience at Buckingham Palace in one of the Queen’s gilded carriages with a coachman and footman in long red coats and silk hats. By that gesture, the Queen signals her personal responsibility for the diplomat, and she has been known to chastise Palace officials who don’t send out the carriage in bad weather. “She never underplays the importance of ceremony,” said a diplomat who assisted at many of the credentials presentations. “But part of the Queen’s process and style is to put the other person at ease as soon as she can after the formal bit. She does combine formality and informality in a remarkable way.”

  Walter Annenberg had rehearsed his lines repeatedly, and he and his wife, Lee, had practiced their bows and curtsys. On the appointed morning, after he had perfectly executed his steps, bows, and presentation of “the letter of recall of my predecessor and my own letters of credence,” the Queen tried to lighten the mood in her usual manner by asking where he and his wife were living. “We’re in the embassy residence,” he replied, “subject, of course, to some of the discomfiture as a result of a need for, uh, elements of refurbishment and rehabilitation.” Her expression momentarily puzzled, she swiftly moved to the next step of receiving embassy staff and Lee Annenberg.

  As if to emphasize the ambassador’s apparent buffoonery, the next scene in the film showed the Queen entering a Buckingham Palace party for diplomats. “He’s not here,” she murmured to her husband. “Who’s not here?” Philip asked. “The American ambassador,” she replied with an amused smile—implying she meant the hapless Annenberg, while in fact she was referring to his predecessor, David Bruce, and the reception had actually taken place the previous November.

  Annenberg had reported to Richard Nixon that his credentials presentation had been “infinitely rewarding and impressive.” But when Royal Family aired on the BBC on June 21, 1969, the American ambassador’s “elements of refurbishment” remark produced howls of laughter and widespread ridicule in Britain. Newspapers challenged readers to produce even more egregious phrases; The Sunday Times called Annenberg the “flustered envoy”; and one magazine said he had the “verbal felicity of W. C. Fields.” What the press did not know was that the sixty-one-year-old ambassador, like the Queen’s own father, had suffered from a lifetime of stuttering. Through speech therapy, he had learned the somewhat paradoxical strategy of framing complex sentences with ornate words to prevent verbal stumbling. Annenberg was so mortified by the outcry that he told Secretary of State William Rogers he would resign if Nixon thought he couldn’t be effective in his job. Nixon reassured his ambassador that he should stay in place.

  “When we reviewed the film before it was finished, the great refurbishment thing was rather laughable and we debated whether to include it,” Martin Charteris later admitted. “We allowed it to remain, but we should not have. As a result, I think the royal family felt a certain sense of guilt about Walter because they allowed a joke to be made about him. In fact, he was honorable and straightforward.”

  For all its appearance of spontaneity, the film was in fact a tightly controlled rebranding of the royal family as accessible and folksy, engaging in activities ordinary people could relate to. Most critics applauded the film’s humanizing effect. Cecil Beaton, who had observed the Queen closely for more than two decades, thought she “came through as a great character, quite severe, very self-assured, a bit bossy, serious, frowning a bit (and very lined). Her sentences are halting. She hesitates mid-way, you think she has dried up … but she goes on doggedly. She came out on top as the nice person she is.”

  There was some inevitable mockery of the family’s old-fashioned traditions and stodgy costumes. One wag called the film “Corgi and Beth,” and Private Eye came up with working-class nicknames: the Queen was Brenda, Prince Philip was Keith, Princess Margaret was Yvonne, and Prince Charles was Brian.

  Some worried about the consequences of violating the precept set out in the nineteenth century by economist and constitutional expert Walter Bagehot that a sovereign should maintain a measure of mystery: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Milton Shulman, the television critic for the Evening Standard, questioned the authenticity of the Queen and her family behaving “like a middle-class family in Surbiton or Croydon,” and wondered about the precedent of using television “to act as an image-making apparatus for the monarchy,” noting that “every institution that has so far attempted to use TV to popularize or aggrandize itself has been trivialized by it.” Even the BBC’s David Attenborough, one of the producers of Royal Family, declared that the film could kill the monarchy, an institution that “depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut. If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates.”

  Neither the Queen nor the Palace hierarchy expressed second thoughts, although she never again permitted that kind of intimate entrée. Princess Anne later said that the film had been a “rotten idea” that she “never liked.… The attention that had been brought on one since one was a child, you just didn’t want any more. The last thing you needed was great access.” But the reaction of the public was overwhelmingly positive. Royal Family was repeated five times and was seen by forty million viewers in the United Kingdom and an estimated 400 million in 130 countries. Viewers were captivated by the informality of the Queen and her family and surprised to hear her conversational voice as well as her infectious laugh.

  THE GLOW OF good feeling created by the film carried over to the investiture of Prince Charles on July 1, which was televised from the grassy courtyard of ancient Caernarvon Castle in Wales. Only one previous Prince of Wales, Charles’s great-uncle, the Duke of Windsor, had been officially inducted in the role, in a ceremony at the castle in 1911. To help create a stronger bond with Wales, overcome historic resentments dating from the country’s conquest by English kings in the thirteenth century, and restrain incipient nationalistic feelings, his mother had arranged for Charles to leave Cambridge the previous spring for eight weeks at University College, Aberystwyth. There he picked up some rudimentary Welsh, and was tutored in the history of the country’s nationalism—valuable lessons, he said afterward, that helped him understand that the “language and culture” were “very unique and special to Wales” and “well worth preserving.”

  The actual investiture ceremony was a twentieth-century invention evoking medieval traditions, orchestrated by the Duke of Norfolk on a contemporary stage set created by Welshman Lord Snowdon, who was a designer as well as a photographer. With TV cameras in mind, Snowdon designed a low round slate dais underneath a minimalist Plexiglas canopy supported by steel poles resembling pikestaffs. On the dais were three austere thrones of slate with scarlet cushions. Snowdon intended to project a “grand and simple” image of a modern monarchy. “I didn’t want red carpets,” Snowdon said. “I wanted him to walk across simple green grass.”

  The Queen was surprisingly on edge while she prepared for the procession into the courtyard. With noticeable agitation, she wondered aloud if the text of what she had to say would be on her seat. Philip snapped that he had no idea, “that it was her show not his.” After exchanging more cross words, they moved off, their faces suitably arranged.

  As she waited on the dais for the arrival of her son, Elizabeth II tucked her white handbag under one arm and held a furled umbrella in the other—an unnecessary precaution, since there was only a brief light drizzle. With four thousand invited guests looking on, Charles emerged from the Chamberlain Tower in his dark blue dress uniform of Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Regiment of Wales, decorated with his gleaming Garter collar. />
  The climax of the ceremony came when he kneeled before his mother, who invested him with the insignia of his office in a solemn ritual punctuated with his periodic shy smiles. She first presented him with a sword inscribed with his motto “Ich Dien” (I serve), hanging it gently around his neck before adjusting the strap attached to its scabbard. She then crowned him with a coronet of 24-karat Welsh gold set sparingly with diamonds and emeralds over a purple velvet cap trimmed in ermine. Unlike other royal crowns, Charles’s was strikingly stylized, with a single arch topped by an engraved orb, and crosses like stickpins interspersed with plainly wrought versions of the three-feathers emblem of the Prince of Wales.

  As Elizabeth II put the coronet on his head, it settled just above his eyes, and he helped her by nudging it into place with his fingertips. She slipped onto his left hand a cabochon amethyst ring, symbolizing his unity with Wales, gave him his golden rod (for temporal rule), and draped a purple silk mantle with wide ermine collar on his shoulders, smoothing it into place in a practiced maternal gesture before fastening the gold clasp. After he had paid her homage, she raised him up and they exchanged the kiss of fealty on their left cheeks, signifying her pledge to protect the prince in his duties.

  “By far the most moving and meaningful moment,” he later wrote, “came when I put my hands between Mummy’s and swore to be her liege man of life and limb and to live and die against all manner of folks.” Those were the precise words his father had used during the Queen’s coronation, and to Charles they were “magnificent, medieval, appropriate.” The Queen looked suitably somber as well, although later that month, over lunch at Royal Lodge, Noel Coward told her that he had found the investiture moving. “She gaily shattered my sentimental illusions,” Coward recorded, “by saying that they were both struggling not to giggle because at the dress rehearsal the crown was too big and extinguished him like a candle-snuffer!”

  An estimated worldwide television audience of 500 million had watched the heir to the throne’s official coming of age. For Charles, the investiture marked the start of his apprenticeship as king-in-waiting, the length of which he could never have imagined.

  He used to say to Elizabeth II,

  “Your job is to spread a carpet

  of happiness.”

  The Queen reviewing papers with her long-serving private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, late at night aboard the royal yacht Britannia, March 1972. Lichfield/Getty Images

  TEN

  Ring of Silence

  PIETRO ANNIGONI RETURNED TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE IN THE SPRING and fall of 1969 to paint the Queen’s portrait for the second time. After an interval of fifteen years, Annigoni could detect changes that eluded those who saw the forty-three-year-old Queen every day. “Everything about her seemed smaller,” he observed, “in some ways frailer and in some ways harder. As she posed her facial expression was mercurial—smiling, thoughtful, determined, uncertain, relaxed, taut, in rapid succession.… At every sitting the Queen chatted to me in the most natural way, and her disarming frankness never failed to surprise and fascinate me.”

  The diminutive artist forthrightly outlined to the Queen his vision for the portrait: “I see Your Majesty as being condemned to solitude because of your position,” he said. “As a wife and mother you are entirely different, but I see you really alone as a monarch and I want to represent you that way. If I succeed, the woman, the Queen and, for that matter, the solitude will emerge.” She nodded, examined the study he had painted during eight sittings and said, “One doesn’t know one’s self. After all, we have a biased view when we see ourselves in a mirror and, what’s more, the image is always in reverse.” She assented to his plan to portray her looking “thoughtful and severe, profoundly human,” queenly yet unembellished. “I feel that the inspiration is there,” she said.

  They resumed their sittings at the end of October after she returned from Balmoral. In the interval, the world had been riveted by the landing of the first men on the moon. The Queen had become fascinated by these twentieth-century explorers after David Bruce brought Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman—commander of the first crew to orbit the moon—his wife, and two young sons to Buckingham Palace the previous February.

  When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, he carried a microfilm message from the Queen to leave behind. She also sent her congratulations to the crew of Apollo 11 “and to the American people on this historic occasion.” She said the fortitude of astronauts Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins filled her with admiration, and that their exploits “add a new dimension to man’s knowledge of the universe.” The three American heroes came to London the following October as part of a world tour, and their first stop was Buckingham Palace, where they were greeted by Elizabeth II and her family. Somewhat sweetly, the men even bowed to little Andrew and Edward when they shook hands. The astronauts, all of whom were suffering from laryngitis and colds, remarked on how well informed the Queen was about their space voyage.

  Elizabeth II now had a rooting interest in the Apollo 12 crew when they blasted into space on November 14. She confessed to Annigoni that she had been waking up early to watch the television coverage of the second moon landing. During two of her sittings, she spent considerable time describing the mission’s progress in detail, although she concurred with the artist that while “it filled us with wonder and admiration, it did not move us emotionally.”

  The second lunar launch coincided with Prince Charles’s twenty-first birthday, which his mother marked with a grand ball at Windsor Castle for four hundred guests. It was a high-spirited celebration, and the Queen danced in her stocking feet past midnight. One party crasher, an Oxford undergraduate, scaled a garden wall and joined a group of guests. The Queen saw him and recalled that “he was so drunk that he couldn’t say anything apart from a few incivilities.” Yet after the police arrested the young man, who turned out to be an excellent student, she forgave his act of bravado. She said she hoped that he would not be expelled from college, and would only be “severely reprimanded and frightened.”

  The Windsor gala had been the handiwork of Patrick Plunket, 7th Baron Plunket, since 1954 the Queen’s Deputy Master of the Household, who was one of her closest advisers as well as a friend since childhood. Three years older than the Queen, Plunket was a lifelong bachelor, always immaculately turned out, with military bearing and an impish grin. As the coordinator of the Queen’s private social life, he had impeccable taste. He liked to fill Windsor Castle with imaginative floral arrangements incorporating zinnias, nicotiana, and alchemilla with peonies and tall white delphiniums, all dramatically spot-lit. “You must have emptied every greenhouse in Windsor Great Park,” Elizabeth II once said to him. “Very nearly,” he replied. “There’s a little bit left.”

  Under Plunket’s watch, Elizabeth II’s guest lists expanded to include names from the artistic world—“people who never in the past would have been there,” recalled a long-serving lady-in-waiting. He was a key adviser in creating a trendy mix for the Queen’s informal luncheons at Buckingham Palace, and he even injected some variety into her weekend shooting parties. “He knew everybody and things like who Princess Margaret didn’t like and who she shouldn’t sit next to at dinner,” said Margaret Rhodes.

  But Plunket had a less obvious role as well, of equal importance to the Queen, that was grounded in their deep friendship. Plunket’s parents, Teddy and Dorothé, who had been close to George VI and Elizabeth, had died in 1938 in an airplane crash. Plunket was just fifteen when he and his two younger brothers were orphaned, and the King and Queen took a strong interest in their upbringing. After Eton and Cambridge, Plunket served as an officer in the Irish Guards during World War II and was wounded in Belgium in 1944.

  On his return to London, the King made him his equerry, and when Princess Elizabeth became Queen, she immediately asked Plunket to stay on and serve her as well. “She realized quickly that Patrick was someone she could depend on,” recalled his brother Shaun Pl
unket. “He had a wonderful memory for names and faces, plus the knack of good judgment and an amazing instinct for the right and wrong thing to do, and she relied on that.” In a household where many aides avoided delivering uncomfortable truths, Plunket spoke frankly to the woman he called “my boss”—“often with a smile, and she would smile back,” said Shaun.

  A connoisseur with several Rubenses in his collection of paintings, Plunket also advised the Queen on art purchases. Along with Prince Philip, he was a driving force behind transforming the bombed-out private chapel at Buckingham Palace into the Queen’s Gallery, which exhibited royal artwork to the public for the first time in 1962. He shared his enthusiasm and knowledge with Elizabeth II, who came to appreciate her treasures with a zest evident in her after-dinner tours for guests at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

  It was often said he was the brother she never had. He was certainly a trusted confidant. The Queen knew she could talk to him, even about personal matters, and depend on his total discretion. His cousin Lady Annabel Goldsmith called him “a great protector.” If he thought the Queen looked tired, he would say, “Ma’am, do you feel I ought to close this down, or ask someone to close this down?” rather than, “I think you are looking tired.” He always called her “Ma’am,” and understood who she was and where she stood.

  Yet he had an irreverent sense of humor perfectly pitched to hers. At ritualized events, Plunket would wink at his friends or nod at them in mock solemnity, sometimes over the Queen’s shoulder. Afterward, he would regale her with stories, such as the time at a garden party when he found a sticky bun containing an entire set of dentures. He lightened the atmosphere and created a sense of fun, dancing with her when Philip was elsewhere, while never usurping her husband’s role. The consort and the courtier enjoyed each other, and Philip was relieved that his wife had someone so capable to consult on matters beyond his own sphere.