Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Each day the Queen moved in a caravan of cars from one storied farm to the next. At every stop, stable boys would lead out the stallions as trainers and breeders briefed the Queen and her advisers, who commented on the fine points of conformation and discussed bloodlines. The parade of champion horseflesh included Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew, Affirmed, and Secretariat, whose spirited antics delighted the Queen. At John Galbreath’s Darby Dan Farm she visited Round Tower, her only broodmare then boarding in Kentucky. Having recently produced a foal, the mare was already expecting another.

  Several owners entertained Elizabeth II at lunch and tea, but the pace allowed for little downtime. She attended the races at Keeneland, where she presented the winner of the Queen Elizabeth II Challenge cup for three-year-old fillies with a Georgian-style silver trophy that she had commissioned from a London jeweler. At Bloodstock Research Information Services, Henry Porchester’s twenty-five-year-old son, Harry Herbert, showed her how to search for mating combinations within ten seconds on state-of-the-art computers, a program she intended to use on her recently installed computer system at Buckingham Palace. The directors of Keeneland also staged a mock auction in the large wood-paneled pavilion, re-creating the record-breaking sales of recent years as an equine quiz show in which the spectators had to guess the identity of the yearlings based on the description of their pedigrees.

  Each night the Farishes had dinner parties for ten, where Elizabeth II unwound to an extent her advisers had not seen before. The guests were all from the horse world, many of whom the Queen already knew, and the conversation rarely strayed from thoroughbred topics. “She felt very much at home in Kentucky,” said a courtier. “I saw an atmosphere of informality and gaiety that I never saw in England. No one was calling her Ma’am or Your Majesty. She was laughing and joking and having fun. She has a great soft spot for the United States.”

  SHORTLY BEFORE HER departure on Friday, October 12, the Queen learned that a powerful IRA bomb had exploded during the Conservative Party conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Margaret Thatcher, the prime target of the terror attack, had escaped injury, but five died and thirty-four were injured, including two of the prime minister’s valued colleagues, Norman Tebbit and government chief whip John Wakeham. Thatcher had taken a hard line against prison hunger strikes in Northern Ireland four years earlier, and after the Conservatives increased their majority in the June 1983 general election, she had redoubled her resistance to the political demands of the IRA. The morning after the attack, she convened the conference at 9:30 A.M. as scheduled and gave a defiant speech announcing that “all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”

  Elizabeth II immediately sent a message of “sympathy and deep concern” to the prime minister, and Palace press secretary Michael Shea denounced the bombing as a “dreadful outrage.” When she arrived in Wyoming, she called Thatcher, whose first words were, “Are you having a lovely time?” Elizabeth II’s support “boosted one’s morale,” Thatcher recalled. The Queen then called Ronald Reagan, who shared his “deep regret,” a sentiment underlined by the earlier attempt on his own life.

  Despite the shadow of events in England, her weekend in Wyoming gave the Queen her first total relaxation in nearly a month as she settled into the Porchesters’ two-story stone-and-clapboard house with dramatic views of the aspenglow, the golden foliage of autumn aspens on the slopes of the Big Horn Mountains. Her only annoyance was the proliferation of Secret Service agents, who scared off the elk and deer. But she took five-mile walks on the four-thousand-acre property, had several picnics along Little Goose Creek, and joined a morning shooting party, watching with the dogs as the guns brought down pheasants, partridges, and grouse. Meals were simple American fare such as rainbow trout, chicken pot pie, apple pie, ice cream, and cookies.

  She made a couple of public forays to the Bradford Brinton Museum of Western and Indian Art in Big Horn, and Main Street in the town of Sheridan, where she did a walkabout against the advice of the Secret Service but to the delight of the one thousand local residents who had gathered to see her.

  The Queen hosted a dinner on Saturday night for her staff and a dozen friends of the Porchesters at the Maverick Supper Club. It was the second time she was called upon to order from a restaurant menu in two years, and she seemed no more at ease with the process. She focused on the filet mignon, but puzzled over the king-sized and queen-sized cuts. “Queen sized-fillette cut, that’s what I’ll be having,” she said, adding hash-brown potatoes with onions “because I have never tasted them.” “What kind of salad dressing would you like?” asked the waitress. “Ya got French. Ya got Italian, ranch, honey mustard, or house.” Genuinely perplexed, Elizabeth II diplomatically asked for a recommendation and chose the house dressing.

  Before leaving on Monday, she handed out gifts to those who had helped her stateside—signed and dated photographs for all, and for the women, Halcyon Days enamel boxes monogrammed with her cypher. She also wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan to describe the time she had spent doing what she liked best—“looking at beautiful thoroughbreds” and “walking in the wide open spaces by the mountains.”

  BACK HOME SHE had a new grandchild to welcome her. Charles and Diana’s second son, Henry Charles Albert David, had been born on September 15 while the Queen was at Balmoral. She had seen Prince Harry (as he would be known) only once, on a visit to Highgrove, her son’s Gloucestershire estate, two days before her departure to Canada. Twenty-three-year-old Diana was in better spirits generally than she had been after the arrival of William, balancing motherhood, public engagements, and a fitness regimen. But by her own account, she had “closed off” from her husband and was disaffected with almost everything about him.

  In addition to overseeing his charities, notably the Prince’s Trust, which provided job training for youth in poor urban areas, Charles was attracting attention—and generating controversy—with his public stands on preserving the environment and resisting brutalist architecture. His speech in May 1984 denouncing a proposed new wing of the National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend” created an outcry in the architectural establishment but resulted in a far more congenial and traditional redesign.

  Although he tried not to show it, Charles resented the adulation Diana received when they went out together. He had also become fed up with her moodiness and fixation on Camilla despite his repeated denials that he had even talked to his former lover much less seen her. Princess Michael of Kent, the wife of Charles’s cousin Prince Michael, told Roy Strong that Diana was a “catastrophe” and a “time bomb,” and that Charles’s unhappiness had deepened since his wife had become a “media queen.”

  To help boost Diana’s confidence, Elizabeth II had earlier that year taken the extraordinary step of issuing an official statement of support through a Palace spokesman who said, “The Queen could not be more pleased with her daughter-in-law. She is very proud of the Princess’s activities around the world and at home.” By then Diana had become more conscientious about her royal duties and had signed on as a patron of seven new charities beyond the five she had previously adopted, organizations dedicated to the arts as well as education and medicine. In her public engagements, Diana could be exceptionally effective, connecting with people, particularly the ill and downtrodden, with a warmth and empathy that other members of the royal family did not project. Combined with her celebrated beauty and high style, her egalitarian manner gave her an aura that was powerful—and potentially dangerous when she turned it against her husband.

  When Charles and Diana visited Washington in the autumn of 1985, they showed no sign of their private discord. Diana was jealous of anyone close to her husband, including Nancy Reagan, whom he unabashedly adored. Only a year earlier, Diana had confided to Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times, that the president was a “Horlicks”—a boring old man—and that the first lady cared only about being photographed with members of the royal family.
Neil found the comments surprisingly “bitter.” But the princess was all smiles at the White House dinner in their honor, where she memorably danced with John Travolta, as well as Neil Diamond and Clint Eastwood.

  THREE DAYS AFTER Elizabeth II turned sixty the following spring, the Duchess of Windsor died at age eighty-nine. Led by the Queen, the royal family attended her funeral at St. George’s Chapel and burial at Frogmore next to her husband. Diana Mosley, a friend and fellow expatriate in France, wrote to her sister Debo Devonshire that the Queen “in her clever way gave the best seats to Georges and Ofelia”—the duchess’s French butler and his wife. Surprisingly, Elizabeth II was in tears at the graveside, “touched perhaps by the sadness of those wretched lives,” noted diarist James Lees-Milne.

  She was back in the United States less than a month later on her second “working holiday,” this time four days in Kentucky. Once again Will and Sarah Farish offered the Queen their hospitality as she appraised the results of the mating decisions she and Henry Porchester had made eighteen months earlier and inspected a new group of potential sires. Most of the bluegrass breeders who serviced her mares did so without charge, saving the Queen an estimated $800,000 in exchange for claiming a royal pedigree for the offspring of their stallions. By the mid-1980s her horses had won nearly three hundred races and some $2 million in prize money. But Britain’s most prestigious racing event, the Epsom Derby, continued to elude her.

  The Derby in early June marked the start of the annual “season” of sporting events, parties, and royal pageantry that on July 23, 1986, culminated with the wedding of the Queen’s second son at age twenty-six. Prince Andrew had chosen a fetching twenty-six-year-old named Sarah Ferguson (popularly known as “Fergie”), a redhead who compensated for her limited education—a second-rate boarding school and secretarial courses—with an open-hearted enthusiasm. Like Diana, she came from a troubled background, although she masked her insecurities more effectively behind her gregarious demeanor.

  Fergie’s parents were commoners, but they were respectable country gentry who boasted aristocratic forebears and relatives including the 6th Duke of Buccleuch and Princess Alice, the Duchess of Gloucester. Her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, had given up a career as a cavalry officer in the Life Guards to run his family’s farm in Hampshire, and her mother, the former Susan Wright, had been presented at court during the 1954 debutante season. Both parents were accomplished equestrians who moved easily in the upper echelons of English society.

  When Sarah was thirteen years old, her mother bolted to marry Argentine polo player Hector Barrantes and moved to South America, leaving her former husband to raise Sarah and her older sister. Ronald Ferguson played polo with Prince Philip, served as Prince Charles’s polo manager, and ran the Guards Polo Club at Windsor, connections that inevitably brought his daughter together with Andrew.

  By the summer of 1985, when their romance began, the tabloids had already named the prince “Randy Andy” for his flamboyant exploits with an assortment of women, including Koo Stark, an American actress who had appeared in a soft-core pornography movie in 1976. Rather than trying to control her second son, the Queen indulged him. One of her ladies-in-waiting recalled a time when she and the Queen were writing letters together under an awning at Sandringham. “Suddenly from the bushes to the left there were screams and giggles,” said the lady-in-waiting. “Around the corner came Andrew dragging the gardener’s daughter, her dress in disarray. The Queen took no notice and kept on dictating the letters.”

  Andrew and Sarah delighted in crude jokes and boisterous behavior. Still, Elizabeth II was charmed by Sarah, who loved to stalk, shoot, and fish at Balmoral—all of which gave her an automatic edge over Diana. Fergie regularly rode with the Queen, and “felt favored and blessed.… I was robust and jolly and not too highly strung.” It also helped that Fergie’s cousin was Robert Fellowes, recently promoted to deputy private secretary. “She’s very sharp and clever,” said Princess Michael of Kent, “and she has made very great friends with the Queen.”

  On their wedding day, the Queen conferred on Andrew and his wife the titles Duke and Duchess of York. As they stood together on the Buckingham Palace balcony after their service in Westminster Abbey, they thrilled the crowds with a distinctly un-royal and lusty kiss. Three of the Queen’s four children were now married, and she already had four grandchildren, with the expectation of more to come. To all appearances, she was the matriarch of a happy and burgeoning family.

  “No one could curtsy lower

  than Margaret Thatcher.”

  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher curtsying to the Queen at 10 Downing Street, December 1985. Tim Graham/Getty Images

  FIFTEEN

  Family Fractures

  AMID THE WEDDING CELEBRATIONS, THE QUEEN HAD TO CONFRONT news reports that raised serious questions about her professional conduct. On Sunday, July 20, 1986, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times splashed a sensational page-one story claiming that Elizabeth II was dismayed by the policies of Margaret Thatcher. The Queen purportedly took issue with her prime minister’s opposition to the Commonwealth’s advocacy of economic sanctions against South Africa to bring an end to apartheid, her tough tactics to break the miners’ union during a long and violent strike in 1984 and 1985, her granting the United States permission to refuel at British airbases before launching a bombing mission against Libya the previous April, and her assaults on entitlement programs that had been supported by a “consensus” of Tories and Labour since the end of World War II. According to the Sunday Times report, the Queen not only regarded Thatcher’s approach to governing as “uncaring, confrontational and divisive,” she had become an “astute political infighter who is quite prepared to take on Downing Street when provoked.”

  Elizabeth II’s senior advisers were dining at Boodle’s, the men’s club on St. James’s Street, with the private secretaries to sovereigns of eight countries on Saturday night when a call came through that the story was breaking. The courtiers dispatched an assistant press secretary to Victoria Station to grab copies of the newspaper as the truck delivered them at eleven o’clock. “It was like a scene out of Trollope,” said one of the courtiers. “This serene dinner with dignitaries was going on, and at the other end of the room one private secretary was on the phone with Buckingham Palace, another with The Sunday Times, and another with Downing Street trying to defuse the story.”

  “Margaret Thatcher was very upset,” said Charles Powell. “She was furious that someone put that in the papers, but she didn’t think it was the Queen.” More than anything, the prime minister worried that “ordinary people” would be offended that she could be “upsetting the Queen.” Elizabeth II was angry as well. She called Thatcher on Sunday from Windsor Castle to say that the allegations were completely untrue, and the two women “commiserated with each other,” according to a senior courtier.

  Palace press secretary Michael Shea issued a swift denial. He was more distraught than his colleagues, and they began to suspect that he had been indiscreet. A graduate of Gordonstoun with a doctorate in economics from the University of Edinburgh, he had served for fifteen years as a diplomat before joining the Palace in 1978 to run the press office—an appointment that raised eyebrows at the time because he was said to have a skeptical view of the monarchy.

  There had been press reports in previous weeks speculating that Elizabeth II was concerned that some members could leave the Commonwealth over Thatcher’s South Africa policy. At the October 1985 meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Nassau, Thatcher had vigorously opposed a package of harshly punitive economic sanctions, arguing that they would lead to black unemployment in South Africa, harm the exports of British businesses, and push the white minority government headed by P. W. Botha even further to the right. The Queen had encouraged Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who was serving as chairman of the Commonwealth, to work with the other leaders to find a unified position in their efforts to end apartheid.

  Elizabeth II offered n
o opinion about sanctions. But as in Lusaka six years earlier, she dispelled tensions in her individual meetings with the leaders, this time in her stateroom on Britannia, emphasizing the “moral obligation” to keep talking. Thatcher eventually compromised by signing the group’s communiqué denouncing apartheid, calling for curbs on bank loans and trade missions, and establishing a group of seven leaders to meet in London the following August to consider further actions. The Sunday Times article landed only days before the so-called mini-summit was scheduled to begin.

  The newspaper’s sweeping claims about domestic as well as foreign policy ran counter to the Queen’s ironclad rule, which she had followed for the thirty-four years of her reign, to be utterly discreet about political matters. “She never expressed her views on sensitive topics,” said one of her senior advisers. Nor did she have any foreknowledge of the Sunday Times article, which her private secretary, William Heseltine, emphatically denounced as false. The question became not only who would leak such an account, but why.

  To shield its informant, The Sunday Times had misleadingly said it had multiple sources, but by the end of the week the culprit was unmasked as Shea. He admitted that he had spoken to reporter Simon Freeman on a background basis several times by telephone, thinking he was briefing him for a speculative story on the monarchy in the twenty-first century. Shea said he talked in general terms and that Freeman and the newspaper’s political editor, Michael Jones, had “misinterpreted” his words. Freeman insisted that Shea had specifically attributed left-of-center opinions on a range of issues to the Queen, and that the story had been cleared by the press secretary before publication. Shea countered that Freeman had withheld “crucial parts” when he read back the story.