Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The royal couple hosted a small dinner for three dozen guests on Britannia, which The New York Times likened to the “homey patched-elbow chic of an English country house, with flowered chintz slipcovers, family photographs, and rattan settees, interspersed with the occasional relic of Empire—shark’s teeth from the Solomon Islands here, a golden urn commemorating Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar there.” An indiscreet crew member confessed to the Times reporter, “We have fabulous parties when the Queen’s away and the Duke’s on board.” In fact, the evenings were often exuberant when Elizabeth II was there as well, with witty skits written by Martin Charteris and starring members of the family and household dressed in costume, singing and dancing to tunes played on the bolted-down piano.

  Following the dinner, there was a reception for two hundred more guests, one of whom was Canon John Andrew. He was escorting Sharman Douglas, who had been a friend of the Queen since the late 1940s when Sharman’s father, Lewis Douglas, served as U.S. ambassador to Britain. As soon as Elizabeth II saw Andrew, she threw back her head and laughed: “You looked so funny standing all alone on the corner of the street!” After she and Sharman Douglas had kissed hello, Philip came over, the lapel of his dinner jacket sporting one of the “Big Apple” cloth stickers featured in a popular promotional campaign for New York City. “What the hell is that?” asked John Andrew. The duke removed it and stuck it on the cleric’s forehead. “There!” he said, which started the Queen laughing again.

  Over the next two days, Elizabeth II traveled up and down the East Coast, first to visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia, then to Newport, Rhode Island, where she entertained the Fords at a dinner on Britannia. She wrapped up her journey in Boston, “moving from one reminder of 1776 to another.” In a speech at the old State House, she remarked that she was in the city where “it all began.” Sailing out of Boston harbor on Britannia, for Halifax, Nova Scotia, the ship’s band played “Auld Lang Syne.” “I was reminded of the good that can flow from a friendship that is mended,” Elizabeth II later reflected. “Who would have thought 200 years ago that a descendant of King George III could have taken part in these celebrations?”

  The Queen continued at the same pace for another two weeks in Canada, where she opened the Olympic Games in Montreal and watched her daughter compete as a member of the British equestrian team. During the cross-country event, Anne’s horse hit a fence and threw her to the ground as the Queen stared intently, biting her nails and squinting with anxiety. Very much her mother’s daughter, Anne climbed back on and continued the race, even after suffering bruises and a mild concussion that erased her memory of the competition.

  The Queen’s endurance, as always, was striking. Some years earlier, while she was touring Saskatchewan, Alvin Hamilton, then Canada’s minister of northern affairs and national resources, had said to the Queen’s private secretary, “I noticed, we’ve been going all day, and Her Majesty never requested even a health break.” “You need not worry,” the private secretary replied. “Her Majesty is trained for eight hours.”

  Whatever the setting, Elizabeth II appeared relaxed while carrying out her public duties. Onlookers were taken aback a few months later after a dinner during a royal tour in Luxembourg when the high-spirited Queen took to playing the drums, “keeping the rhythm and shaking her head.” During a benefit for the Venice in Peril Fund featuring a screening of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, the evening’s host, John Julius Norwich (the 2nd Viscount), was seated between the Queen and Princess Anne. He heard the monarch begin to sigh only a few minutes into the more than two-hour film. “I heard her sigh again,” recalled Norwich. “It was a long sigh. I was in agony as the sighs continued throughout the film and I wondered what to say when the lights came up.” But as the movie ended, she simply turned, flashed a bright smile, and said, “Well, that was a bit gloomy, wasn’t it?” “She was trying to put me at ease,” Norwich explained. “She could sense my discomfort.”

  IN HER 1976 Christmas message, the Queen spoke for the first time about her coming Silver Jubilee marking twenty-five years on the throne. “Next year is a rather special one for me,” she said. “The gift I would most value … is that reconciliation should be found wherever it is needed.” The Callaghan government initially opposed a Silver Jubilee celebration because of Britain’s economic woes, but Charteris and his Palace colleagues successfully argued that it would provide a morale boost, and that the Queen should not only tour the country, but all her Commonwealth realms. She emphasized, however, her “express wish” that there should be “no undue expenditure.” The press was predictably skeptical, with the pro-republican Guardian proclaiming on Sunday, February 6, that “apathy hits plans for Jubilee.”

  Although the Queen reached her landmark that Accession Day, she did not want to celebrate the moment her father died, so she spent the weekend quietly at Windsor Castle with her family. Four days later she embarked on the first of her two overseas jubilee tours, spending seven weeks traveling on Britannia to Western Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Australia. Her reception gave the lie to The Guardian’s grim prediction. “Harbour entrances would be just packed with people everywhere,” recalled Commodore Anthony Morrow. In Fiji a roof collapsed during a demonstration of native dances, although nobody was injured. One reporter noted that as the crowds headed to the scene, the Queen “seized the moment to whip out a lipstick and add another streak of red.” On her return to England, Elizabeth II watched the three-year-old filly Dunfermline, her second great runner of the 1970s, win two of Britain’s classic races, first the Oaks at Epsom and later in the summer the St. Leger at Doncaster.

  The festivities began in earnest on May 4, 1977, with the Queen’s appearance in Westminster Hall for “Loyal Addresses” from the Houses of Commons and Lords, followed by her reply. Like the Christmas broadcast, her message was personal and therefore noteworthy. As would be expected, she spoke glowingly of the Commonwealth, but she also said that Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community was “one of the most significant decisions during my reign.” Even more surprisingly, she frankly responded to the growing pressure to devolve power to Scotland and Wales. “I can readily understand these aspirations,” she said, “but I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this Jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”

  “That was significant, because it was the only political thing she has said, and all the more powerful because it was unique,” said Simon Walker, who served as the Queen’s communication and press secretary from 2000 to 2002. Nationalists in Scotland recognized the primacy of the union as her bedrock principle, and duly protested. But the Queen had been determined to speak her mind.

  On Monday, June 6, Elizabeth II stood atop Snow Hill in Windsor Great Park, her hair shielded from the elements by her signature head scarf, poised to ignite a bonfire that would signal others around the country to light their own in celebration of their Queen. Unfortunately, a skittish soldier beat her to it, a glitch that amused rather than annoyed her. “Your Majesty, I’m afraid everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong,” said Major Sir Michael Parker, an impresario for royal events with an expertise in pyrotechnics. “Oh good, what fun!” she replied with a smile.

  The apex of the festivities came the following day, when the Queen and Prince Philip rode in the Gold State Coach, accompanied by Household Cavalry, Yeomen of the Guard, and Prince Charles on horseback in a bearskin and the red uniform of Colonel-in-Chief of the Welsh Guards. It was the first time since the coronation that she had ridden in the freshly gilded and dizzyingly ornate carriage. “I had forgotten how uncomfortable that ride could be,” the Queen later confided to a friend.

  The carriage procession—which also featured the Irish State Coach, Queen Alexandra’s State C
oach, and the Glass Coach carrying other members of the royal family—wended its way from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral, passing more than a million people, many of whom had camped out overnight in the rain. At the cathedral, a congregation of 2,700 guests included all of her six living prime ministers and an array of world leaders. Donald Coggan, the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury, praised the Queen as “an example of service untiringly done, of duty faithfully fulfilled, and of a home life stable and wonderfully happy,” as the television camera panned across a row of her relatives. Princess Margaret, separated from Tony Snowdon for more than a year and still grabbing headlines for her escapades with Roddy Llewellyn, sat with her two children.

  The Queen, wearing a bright pink shift dress, matching coat, and cloche hat trimmed with twenty-five small fabric bells, walked with her husband through the streets near the cathedral, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries along the crowded barriers. At a luncheon in the Guildhall, 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,” adding, “I do not regret or retract a word of it.”

  As the Queen and Philip rode in an open carriage to Buckingham Palace, the roar of the vast crowd was so loud that her coachman couldn’t even hear the horses’ hooves hitting the pavement. The royal family fanned out on the famous Palace balcony, the men in uniform, the women like a pastel rainbow: the Queen in pink, the Queen Mother in daffodil, Margaret in slightly darker pink, and Anne visibly pregnant in aquamarine. Elizabeth II looked jubilant—laughing, talking, and waving, taking in a mass of humanity she had seen on numerous occasions stretching back to her father’s coronation in 1937. But this time, more than any other, the crowds were genuinely cheering for her, for what she symbolized and what she had achieved. The Duchess of Kent, wife of the Queen’s first cousin Edward the Duke of Kent, got so carried away she threw her arms around Elizabeth II and kissed her, exclaiming, “They really love you.” Katharine Kent later explained that the Queen had been “totally bewildered and overwhelmed by this huge flood of affection directed towards her.” An estimated 500 million television viewers around the world watched the spectacle.

  Two days later the celebration topped itself with a barge procession down the Thames from Greenwich to Lambeth that was meant to evoke the majestic convoys of Tudor times. After dark, fireworks exploded across the sky, and another enormous crowd gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and along the Mall to catch the parade of illuminated carriages carrying the Queen and her family back to Buckingham Palace. Roy Strong, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was among the multitude—“basically middle class British. Educated voices could be heard,” he recalled. “Men in suits passed by with Union Jacks tied to the end of their umbrellas.” Clusters of onlookers spontaneously burst into “God Save the Queen” and “Rule Britannia.” When the coaches clattered by, Strong felt a communal “surge of emotion.” Elizabeth II and her family appeared on the Palace balcony, then reappeared after midnight, when Princess Margaret “more or less had to push them out as they failed to grasp the fervor of the crowd.”

  There were four thousand Silver Jubilee street parties in London alone, and an estimated twelve thousand in cities, towns, and villages around the country. The punk rock group Sex Pistols sounded one blatantly harsh note with their nihilistic take on “God Save the Queen,” calling her the fascist leader of a country with no future. Although the BBC loyally refused to play the song, it nevertheless raced to number two in the charts.

  Still, that dubious success didn’t dim jubilee enthusiasm. Over the next several months, the Queen toured thirty-six counties in the United Kingdom. As the celebratory momentum grew, the crowds swelled to the point that over a million people came out on a single day in Lancashire. The Queen’s last stop on her domestic itinerary was Northern Ireland, which she visited for the first time in eleven years.

  Palace officials and government ministers had debated whether she should risk the trip. The conflict in Ulster since the beginning of the Troubles had been a continuing source of concern for the Queen. Following their deployment to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, the British troops originally intended to protect the Catholic minority had become the targets of IRA bombs and snipers amid escalating tensions. In August 1971, the authorities began imprisoning Catholic militants without trial in an effort to control the violence.

  “The Queen received me at one of my regular audiences after she had been watching the coverage of riots in Belfast on the television, and was obviously shaken by the ferocity of the events in a part of her Kingdom,” Edward Heath recalled. “In particular, she was horrified by the film of women’s faces contorted with hate as they clung to the high wired fences protecting British troops. Whenever the Queen is accused of remoteness or indifference towards the tribulations of her subjects, I think back to that moment.”

  To protest the new internment policy, some ten thousand Catholic demonstrators had defied a ban on large gatherings to march through the streets of Londonderry on January 30, 1972. A British paratrooper regiment was dispatched to the scene, and after being assaulted by rocks and other objects, the forces opened fire in the panicky melee, killing thirteen and injuring fourteen, one of whom died later. There were armed IRA operatives in the crowd, but all those killed were unarmed Catholics, many of them cut down as they were fleeing.

  The killings became known as Bloody Sunday, a turning point that rapidly escalated the IRA’s battle to force a unification of Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. In the immediate aftermath, mobs burned down the British embassy in Dublin. The IRA boosted its membership with radicalized young recruits and intensified its campaign of terror against the British army and English civilians, along with Protestants in Northern Ireland, leading to thousands of casualties.

  In several of her Christmas broadcasts after Bloody Sunday, the Queen had touched on what she called “our own particular sorrows in Northern Ireland,” extending prayers and sympathy to those who were suffering, and encouraging Protestants and Catholics working together for peace “to keep humanity and common sense alive.” She predictably bridled when officials had second thoughts in the summer of 1977 about her planned trip to Northern Ireland, just as she had resisted in 1961 when her trip to Ghana was nearly canceled. “Martin, we said we’re going to Ulster,” she told her private secretary. “It would be a great pity not to.”

  On August 10, she landed on the grounds of Hillsborough Castle outside Belfast by helicopter—judged by her security advisers to be “the safest way for the Queen to travel.” It was her first trip on a helicopter, a means of transportation that had long made her nervous, despite her usual physical courage.

  She was protected by extraordinary security during her two days in Ulster, with some 32,000 troops and police on alert. About seven thousand people were invited to her receptions, garden party, and investiture, all of which were broadcast on television. After visiting the New University of Ulster at Coleraine, she joined her family on Britannia for their annual Western Isles cruise and a two-month retreat at Balmoral. Her trip to Northern Ireland, she said in that year’s Christmas broadcast, reminded her that “nowhere is reconciliation more desperately needed.” Her ability to travel there allowed “people of goodwill” to be “greatly heartened by the chance they had to share the celebrations.”

  The second Commonwealth tour took her to Canada and the Caribbean for nearly three weeks. She returned from Barbados on November 2 by Concorde, the distinctive beak-nosed supersonic jetliner that had gone into service in January 1976. Her three-hour-and-forty-five-minute trip gave a futuristic flourish to the end of her 56,000 miles of jubilee travels.

  On November 15 at 10:46 A.M., she became a grandmother at age fifty-one with the arrival of Anne’s first child, Peter Phillips. He was the first baby in the royal family to be born a commoner in five hundred years, since Mark Phillips had declined to take a title when he married Anne. They intended to raise the
ir son—and his sister, Zara, born four years later—apart from the pressures of royal obligations, a decision that both children later welcomed.

  That month Martin Charteris retired at age sixty-four after twenty-seven years of serving the Queen. Aside from Bobo MacDonald, no one in the royal household knew her better, had worked more intimately with her, or had seen her through so many stages of her life, from her formative years as a working princess through her grief over her father’s early death to her evolution as a confident and capable sovereign. He had in every respect lightened her load, not only with his keen judgment but with the verve he brought to her speeches and his gentle prodding to open her mind to new approaches.

  They said farewell at a brief audience in Buckingham Palace. To help keep her emotions in check, Elizabeth II brought along her flinty daughter, who wouldn’t tolerate tears from her mother. “The Queen knew Martin would cry, and he did,” said Gay Charteris. “He was not inhibited by his emotions. She didn’t cry, and in her view, the least said, the better.” Some years later, Elizabeth II confided to her mother that when “my Martin” left, she missed him but she knew “he was still around if I needed to ask anything difficult.” All she said that morning at the Palace was, “Martin, thank you for a lifetime,” as she presented him with a silver tray inscribed with the same sentiment. When his tears abated, he mustered his customary levity. “The next time you see this,” he said. “It will have a gin and tonic on it.”