Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The Queen’s prize horse in 1974 was a “long-striding filly” born to Highlight, a direct descendant of Feola—the great royal broodmare who had not only run well in the 1930s but had bred a string of winners in the following decades—and sired by Queen’s Hussar, a stallion owned by Porchester’s father, the 6th Earl of Carnarvon. The Queen named the filly Highclere, after the Carnarvon stud farm. Having captured the first classic title for the Queen in eighteen years by winning the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket, Highclere was shipped to Chantilly in June to run in the prestigious Prix de Diane, also known as the French Oaks.

  Accompanied by Henry Porchester, his wife, Jean, Michael Oswald, and Martin Charteris, the Queen flew from Windsor Castle to France on the 16th for lunch before the big race. France’s newly elected president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, sent a big bowl of red roses, and Elizabeth II and her party drove down the racecourse in an open car against the backdrop of the Prince of Condé’s château. The Queen knew from talking to the stable girl in the paddock that Highclere was in a “fiery mood,” but as she watched the final furlongs from the royal box, she sat smiling, hands in prayerful position, while Porchester and Oswald jumped and shouted the filly home. “I’m very excitable on the race course,” Porchester recalled, “too enthusiastic, not very British. I remember going mad and slapping the Queen on the back when Highclere won the Prix de Diane.” It was the first victory for a British monarch in a French classic race.

  The swarm of racegoers shouted “Vive la Reine,” and when the Queen went to see Highclere, she was nearly mobbed by the crowds, protected only by Porchester, Oswald, and some gendarmes. That evening she invited the royal party, including her trainer Dick Hern and the winning jockey, Joe Mercer, to dinner at Windsor Castle with the Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Princess Anne, and Dickie Mountbatten. In the place of honor at the table’s center was the Queen’s new gold trophy. Highclere went on to win the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at Ascot, and contributed to most of the Queen’s £140,000 in winnings that year.

  The Queen’s triumph in France came on the eve of Royal Ascot, which in those days involved more elaborate entertainment than in later years. As many as sixty guests would be invited for the entire week at the castle. “I was assigned a valet, and every day we would be given a program with several options for activities,” recalled a man who attended when he was in his early twenties. “I had to have morning dress for lunch and Ascot, and white tie for dinner every night. No one could ever be late, and the valets ensured that we were dressed correctly and showed up on time.”

  The Queen typically did her boxes in the morning while her friends opted for more vigorous pursuits such as riding, tennis, swimming, and swatting balls into nets from Philip’s wooden polo pony (set up in a cage near the castle’s indoor swimming pool). Others stayed indoors to read, do jigsaw puzzles, or play scrabble. Sometimes she would invite several young male guests to ride with her for an hour before the luncheon, where she would appear looking thoroughly refreshed and pulled together after only a half hour in which to change. Every afternoon was devoted to the races. On Wednesday night there was a big formal dinner for 150 in the Waterloo Chamber, and on another night guests would be taken to a nearby theater followed by dinner. As with her dine-and-sleeps, the Queen devoted one evening to tours of the library and the royal art collection. Patrick Plunket organized everything to the minute.

  Early in 1975, the Queen’s great friend and consummate impresario was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. Plunket was admitted to King Edward VII hospital in mid-March, but after several days he insisted on leaving to attend an important reception at Buckingham Palace, saying, “I have to put on my white tie and medals.” His pain dulled by morphine, he was driven to the Palace, where he retrieved his evening clothes from his room and announced all the guests. He finally returned to the hospital at 2 A.M. Hours later he found a letter on his breakfast tray from the Queen saying, “Patrick, I’m deeply grateful for what you did last night, Yours sincerely, Elizabeth R.”

  Patrick Plunket died ten days later on Easter Sunday at age fifty-one. The Queen honored him with a funeral in the Chapel Royal inside St. James’s Palace, with plangent music sung by boy choristers. It was a small group—just members of the Plunket family along with the Queen and Philip. The royal couple also attended the standing-room-only memorial service in the Guards’ Chapel across St. James’s Park, where Philip read the lesson. At the funeral, Annabel Goldsmith glanced at the Queen and “caught a look of deep sadness.”

  According to Plunket’s brother Shaun, the Queen had a hand in the Times obituary. “She certainly helped,” he said. “It was quite light. There was a quotation that referred very much to his service.” But she sent no condolence note, as is her custom. “I don’t think we would have expected her to write,” said Shaun Plunket. “We knew she missed him and that we missed him. She didn’t have to put it on paper.” His will designated that one of his favorite possessions, a seascape by the nineteenth-century English artist Richard Parkes Bonington, be given to the Queen. After his brothers presented it to her in her study at Buckingham Palace, she wrote them a gracious note of thanks.

  She further expressed her gratitude by approving a distinctive memorial, a white pavilion atop a hill above the Valley Gardens in Windsor Great Park, with an engraved plaque saying, “In memory of Patrick Plunket for his service to the Royal Family.” It was built with funds from his relatives and friends, including the Queen, Philip, and the Queen Mother. Elizabeth II took an interest in the design as well as the landscaping. “I’m sure I told the gardener I don’t care for variegated hostas,” she told Shaun Plunket on one inspection tour. “I can’t think of why he put those there.” Since the memorial is only minutes away from Smith’s Lawn, where the Queen often comes to watch polo, she has walked over occasionally to sit on the bench and reflect.

  With Plunket’s death, the Queen lost not only a confidant but the sprightly tone he brought to court life. Her entertainments seemed more conventional, her guest lists less venturesome. Some even believe that if he had lived, he could have managed Diana, Princess of Wales, more effectively than anyone else in the royal household. A year after his death, someone asked the Queen, “Have you given some thought to who will replace Patrick Plunket?” Replied the Queen, “No one will ever replace him.”

  She restated the pledge of lifelong

  service that she had made

  on her twenty-first birthday

  “in my salad days when I was

  green in judgment. I do not

  regret or retract a word of it.”

  The Queen wearing a hat trimmed with twenty-five small fabric bells, greeting the crowds celebrating her Silver Jubilee, June 1977. Getty Images

  TWELVE

  Feeling the Love

  PATRICK PLUNKET’S PASSING WAS THE QUEEN’S FIRST MAJOR LOSS since the death of her father twenty-three years earlier, and she dealt with it by drawing on what one of her longtime friends calls her “profound religious existence,” dating to her childhood, and reinforced by her consecration in 1953.

  As the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the monarch is the defender of the faith—the official religion of the country, established by law and respected by sentiment. Yet when the Queen travels to Scotland, she becomes a member of the Church of Scotland, which governs itself and tolerates no supervision by the state. She doesn’t abandon the Anglican faith when she crosses the border, but rather doubles up, although no Anglican bishop ever comes to preach at Balmoral.

  Elizabeth II has always embraced what former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey called the “sacramental manner in which she views her own office.” She regards her faith as a duty, “not in the sense of a burden, but of glad service” to her subjects. Her faith is also part of the rhythm of her daily life. “She has a comfortable relationship with God,” said Carey. “She’s got a capacity because of her faith to take anything the world throws at her. Her faith c
omes from a theology of life that everything is ordered.”

  She worships unfailingly each Sunday, whether in a tiny chapel in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec or a wooden hut on Essequibo in Guyana after a two-hour boat ride. But “she doesn’t parade her faith,” said Canon John Andrew, who saw her frequently during the 1960s when he worked for Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey. On holidays she attends services at the parish church in Sandringham, and at Crathie outside the Balmoral gates.

  Her habit is to take Communion three or four times a year—at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and the occasional special service—“an old-fashioned way of being an Anglican, something she was brought up to do,” said John Andrew. She enjoys plain, traditional hymns and short, straightforward sermons. George Carey regards her as “middle of the road. She treasures Anglicanism. She loves the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is always used at Sandringham. She would disapprove of modern services, but wouldn’t make that view known. The Bible she prefers is the old King James version. She has a great love of the English language and enjoys the beauty of words. The scriptures are soaked into her.” The Queen has called the King James Bible “a masterpiece of English prose.”

  Because visiting clergymen preach at Sandringham and Balmoral, she often has them as houseguests. “The royal family treat clergy differently,” said a minister in the Church of Scotland. “They tend to relax with us. It can get pretty perky. They say what they think in front of us.” Once while visiting Sandringham, George Carey heard the Queen say to Princess Margaret, “Oh you silly woman.” “It wasn’t offensive,” Carey recalled. “It was part of the family banter, but there was still deep affection.” Occasionally the Queen’s itinerant pastors have offered inadvertent comic relief. “For the delicious meal we are about to receive, and for the intercourse afterwards, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” said a minister from Aberdeen before one dinner at Balmoral, which the Queen later recounted with perfect Scottish inflections for her friends.

  In her role as head of state, Elizabeth II has known clergy high and low, from popes to parish priests. The American evangelist Billy Graham came several times to Windsor Castle to worship with her privately. She admired Graham, although when he asked her to sit in the royal box for his crusade at Wembley Stadium with a congregation of 100,000 people, she politely declined, drawing the line at such a public display.

  She sees the Archbishop of Canterbury in regular audiences a half dozen times a year, and as needed when important spiritual matters come up. She is friendly with the other top Anglican prelates as well, but is probably closest to the Dean of Windsor, who “takes the place of a family confessor,” said Margaret Rhodes. “He has contact with the Queen reasonably regularly because he is beside Windsor Castle. If she has things she would like to discuss, she can talk to him. She knows he can talk that kind of language.”

  Religion infuses Elizabeth II’s public duties, not only through her Christmas message, but her attendance at high-profile observances such as Remembrance Sunday (the only time she wears black during the year), the second weekend in November. Held at the Cenotaph in London, the commemoration honors the war dead of the nation and the Commonwealth.

  Three days before Easter, she also marks Maundy Thursday, a modern ritual signifying humility that is based on Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper. In past centuries monarchs actually cleansed the feet of the poor, a practice that ended in 1685 with James II. Instead, they distributed alms, and in the Queen’s reign, the recipients of “Maundy Money” have been elderly subjects chosen for their service to the community. At Philip’s suggestion, she changed the location of the service in 1957 to a cathedral outside London for the first time, and since then she has traveled around the country. The pageantry is intricately orchestrated, with her white-ruffed and scarlet-coated Yeomen of the Guard carrying silver trays holding purses filled with specially minted silver coins. The Queen moves along a line of men and women in equal number based on the monarch’s age, and hands each of them a purse, often adding a word of congratulations for their good work.

  The Queen’s primary role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England is appointing archbishops, bishops, and deans recommended by the prime minister. She can’t reject his advice, but she can, as in her dealings on secular matters, raise questions and ask for more information. “It’s a very clever subtle way of making the prime minister think again,” said historian Kenneth Rose. “If the next week he comes back and says ‘I still want that archbishop,’ that is the end of it. The Queen will not imperil the constitution over something like that.”

  HAROLD WILSON TOOK particular pleasure in making such appointments. “He found his ecclesiastical duties a peaceful oasis in the desert that most prime ministers inexorably make of their garden,” wrote biographer Elizabeth Longford. The problems plaguing Britain weighed more heavily on Wilson than during his first government, and his stamina seemed diminished. Sensing his difficulties, the Queen was solicitous when she entertained the Wilsons at Balmoral. “They used to fetch us by car from Aberdeen, wrapping us tenderly in rugs,” recalled Mary Wilson. “We went into the hall, and the Queen and Philip came to greet us. There were bowls on the floor, and corgis running around, and she put a vase of gentians in my room. The lady-in-waiting said the Queen thought I might like those. She gave a lot of thought to things like that.”

  During their September 1975 visit, Elizabeth II drove the Wilsons to a cabin, where she served them tea and cooked them dropped scones. Afterward, as she and Mary were washing the dishes, Wilson surprised the Queen by confiding that he intended to resign around his sixtieth birthday the following March. Since he later suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, there has been speculation that he had recognized signs of his slipping cognitive powers and decided to leave before his ability to govern was affected. But Marcia Falkender said that as early as March 1974, “when he first got to Number 10, he said it would not be for long.” In addition to his wife and Falkender, only Martin Charteris was informed, and he kept the prime minister’s secret along with the Queen.

  As the Wilsons were leaving Balmoral for the last time, Elizabeth II had some photographs taken. One shows her in a head scarf, smiling tentatively from under the hood of her macintosh, with Wilson at her side, dressed in a handsome tweed suit and holding a pipe in his hand, looking every inch the country gentleman. Wilson so treasured the image that he carried it in his wallet for years.

  Gough Whitlam, the Labour prime minister of Australia, posed a different sort of challenge for the Queen that November. As Queen of Australia, Elizabeth II had an abiding affection for the distant realm she had visited five times since her coronation. When Whitlam was first elected in 1972, she was eager to win over the man who spoke frankly about wanting to eliminate the monarchy in his country. She invited him to stay at Windsor Castle in April 1973 on the night of her forty-seventh birthday, along with his wife, the “too-tall” and “ungainly” (in her own words) Margaret, nicknamed “Big Marge” by the Queen’s courtiers. The royal household pulled out the stops to entertain the Whitlams, installing them in a suite overlooking the Long Walk that stretches two and a half miles through Windsor Great Park to the giant equestrian statue of George III on Snow Hill.

  After dinner, Whitlam gave the Queen a birthday present: a “deep-piled cream sheepskin rug,” which she and her sister flirtatiously sat upon after it had been spread on the floor of the drawing room. “That evening she was quite determined to catch her man,” Martin Charteris told author Graham Turner. “A lot of her sexuality has been suppressed, but that night, she used it like a weapon. She wrapped Gough Whitlam round her little finger, knocked him sideways. She sat on that rug in front of him, stroked it and said how lovely it was. It was an arrant use of sexuality. I was absolutely flabbergasted.” Whitlam later said to Charteris, “Well, if she’s like that, it’s all right by me!”

  The royal couple built on that rapport during two subsequent trips to Australia. When th
e Whitlams bade them goodbye after their visit in October 1973, Margaret wrote that it was “almost too much and too moving for us all.” But on November 11, 1975, good feelings counted for little when Whitlam was deadlocked with the Australian Senate over passage of his budget, raising the prospect of financial default by the government.

  In each of her fifteen realms outside Britain, the Queen is represented by a governor-general whom she appoints on the advice of the country’s prime minister and whose role and functions are comparable to those of the sovereign in the United Kingdom. Her governor-general in Australia at the time of the budget crisis was Sir John Kerr, a respected former judge. To break the legislative impasse, Kerr took the extraordinary step of exercising his “reserve power” to dismiss Whitlam and install Liberal Party leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister pending the election that Whitlam had refused to call. The Queen had been briefed on events as they were unfolding, but Kerr purposely did not inform her before he took action because he wished to keep her out of the imbroglio—and above a political dispute. Kerr had consulted with Australia’s chief justice, who confirmed that under the Australian constitution he had the right to use the reserve power to dismiss ministers.

  An infuriated Whitlam and the Labour Party tried to get the Queen to fire her governor-general for overreaching, to no avail. She could terminate her representative only on the advice of the sitting Australian prime minister. Kerr’s actions were legal. The new election swept in a coalition led by the Liberals; the government passed a budget and got down to business. Whitlam maintained a congenial relationship with the Queen, but he never forgave Kerr. The governor-general stepped down in 1977, when he was honored with the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, a personal gift of the Queen. In 1986 the Australian parliament passed a law withdrawing the power of the governor-general to intervene as Kerr had done, although two thirds of the population still wanted to keep Elizabeth II as their Queen.