Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  On Thursday afternoon, December 18, 1997, Burrell had a lot on his mind when he arrived at her private sitting room on the first floor overlooking the gardens. During their ninety minutes together, he spoke “at length” about Diana’s troubles and her feelings toward Charles. He said that Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had been shredding her daughter’s letters and memos during visits to Kensington Palace, and he told the Queen “he had taken some of the princess’s papers for safekeeping”—just one topic among many before he and the Queen parted company.

  Three years later, in January 2001, acting on a tip from another former royal servant, police raided Burrell’s home. They turned up more than three hundred items from Diana’s estate, including designer clothing, jewelry, handbags, and furniture, as well as a lesser number of belongings allegedly taken from Charles and William. The former butler was charged with theft. As the investigation progressed, the Queen was briefed several times by Robin Janvrin, but she didn’t mention her talk with Burrell because, as she later said, she didn’t think his passing reference to safeguarding Diana’s papers was relevant in the context of the charges Burrell faced. Nor, for his part, did Burrell disclose the nature of their meeting to his own lawyers because, he said, it was “private.”

  Burrell’s trial began on Ocrtober 14, 2002, the day before the Queen returned to England from her ten-day Golden Jubilee tour of Canada. On Friday the 25th, while being driven to a memorial service, Philip and Charles were discussing the much-publicized case. Philip mentioned to Charles that the Queen had met with Burrell after Diana’s death and that the butler had talked about keeping some documents. This was apparently the first Charles had heard of the meeting. He immediately relayed the information to his private secretary, who alerted the authorities. On November 1, the prosecution dropped the case because it was based “on a false premise that Mr. Burrell had never told anyone that he was holding anything for safekeeping.” Even though what Burrell told the Queen pertained only to an unspecified number of papers out of the substantial hoard of valuable belongings, it was enough to stop the trial.

  The press pounced on the dramatic turn of events and suggested that the Queen and her son had somehow tried to halt the trial to prevent embarrassing public testimony about the late princess and the royal family. Equally damaging was the alternative explanation—that she was an “old woman being forgetful.”

  In fact, the Queen had not forgotten the incident at all. Earlier in the autumn at Balmoral, when the upcoming trial was in the news, Elizabeth II had been entertaining her guests over drinks before setting off for a barbecue. “She was playing patience, very content and very relaxed,” said a friend sitting with her that day. “Almost in passing, she talked about the conversation she had had with Burrell. Her recollection was very clear, that Burrell had told her he had taken a few documents as opposed to hundreds of things.” The impression she gave was that Burrell’s disclosure was minor. “She told me she thought no more about it,” said her friend. “It only became a topical matter because the trial was going to be taking place and it was on people’s minds. What she said was so matter-of-fact that she must have discussed it on other occasions.”

  Michael Peat, who by then had moved from Buckingham Palace to be Charles’s private secretary, conducted an exhaustive examination of whether there was “anything improper or remiss” in the termination of the Burrell trial. Peat found “no evidence” that the revelation was meant to derail the trial. He pointed out that if the Palace had wanted such an outcome, there had been “numerous prior opportunities to intervene to prevent or stifle the prosecution.” It was only after the trial unfolded that press accounts reported the crux of the prosecution’s case, which was to prove that Burrell had spirited away hundreds of items without telling anyone.

  A week after the trial collapsed, the Queen took on a task her mother had carried out faithfully every year, visiting the Field of Remembrance outside Westminster Abbey, where nineteen thousand tiny crosses had been planted in tribute to members of the British armed forces who had died in combat, a tradition that began in 1928 to honor those killed in World War I. The Queen Mother had invariably stayed longer than expected, stopping to speak to as many former servicemen and members of deceased veterans’ families as she could. The previous November she had braved freezing temperatures to plant her cross, and now the Queen planted her own during a brief prayer ceremony attended by several thousand people. As the service concluded with a minute of silence, Elizabeth II had tears streaming down her cheeks.

  IF THE QUEEN showed traces of emotional fragility after the ups and downs of 2002, her physical health was as robust as ever. At the Windsor Horse Show the previous May, spectators had marveled at her vigor while following Philip on one of his competitive carriage driving marathons in Windsor Great Park. “She drove her own Range Rover to each of the obstacles every half mile,” recalled Nini Ferguson, one of the American competitors. “Philip was driving four horses. She would watch him do the obstacles, then run back and jump in her car. She was in her wellies, with her scarf flying, followed by four or five corgis. She had such spirit and energy, and she seemed so young.”

  In early January 2003, Elizabeth II slipped while walking on uneven ground at Sandringham after visiting Desert Star, one of her most promising colts. She tore cartilage in her right knee, which required arthroscopic surgery. In a letter to Monty Roberts, she expressed her frustration over being stuck “languishing indoors,” unable to ride or walk her dogs. She recovered well and had an identical operation on her left knee less than a year later to repair minor cartilage damage that her doctors had discovered. She walked for several weeks with a cane, but was soon back into her weekly riding routine. Her one concession to age was using Fell ponies as her mounts rather than the larger horses she had been riding for decades. “They are about 14 hands high, solid squat things,” said Michael Oswald. “Not many her age ride at all, so they are safe conveyances.”

  With her mother and sister gone, Elizabeth II came to rely more on her extended family for companionship. Her long-standing ritual on Sundays at Windsor had been to have a midday drink at Royal Lodge after attending the service at the Royal Chapel of All Saints. Now she would go instead to visit her cousin Margaret Rhodes, a small and sprightly countrywoman. Her cottage in Windsor Great Park is simple and cozy, with modest furnishings and rubber toys for Gilda, her West Highland terrier, strewn on the floor. The tables in her sitting room are filled with photographs of the Queen Mother, King George VI, and Elizabeth II in her Balmoral garb.

  When Margaret’s husband was stricken with terminal cancer in 1981, the Queen gave them the house so they could be closer to London hospitals than their farm in Devon. “How would you like to live in suburbia?” the Queen asked. “It was the answer to a prayer,” Margaret Rhodes recalled.

  Each Sunday the Queen takes the wheel of her Jaguar for the short drive from the church. Her cousin greets her with a curtsy, and the Queen perches on the faded sofa in the sitting room, her hat firmly in place, ready for the return trip to the castle. As Elizabeth II sips her gin and Dubonnet, the two women talk about the events of the previous week, and swap news about family matters and various people they know—the health of an elderly stalker at Balmoral, for example.

  The events of 2002—her personal losses as well as the acclaim for her jubilee—had turned a page, and the difficulties of the 1990s had now been relegated to history. The Queen was smiling more in public. She seemed warmer, more approachable, and more relaxed, in some ways more like her mother. “This may sound impertinent,” said Robert Salisbury, “but I would guess the Queen has rather blossomed since her mother died.” Monty Roberts felt that she was showing “more understanding of the wonders of life than she had before.”

  During a small dinner in 2003 with a group of Grenadier Guards in the Officers Mess at St. James’s Palace—a handsome high-ceilinged room decorated with antiques, regimental silver, a wooden officers’ latrine door from the tre
nches of World War I, and a portrait of the young Queen Victoria—laughter and loud conversation could be heard through the open windows. A call came through from the Queen’s comptroller, Malcolm Ross, who had an apartment in the Palace. He was complaining about the noise, not knowing the identity of the guest that evening. The officer of the guard conveyed the message to the Queen, who replied, “Oh tell Malcolm not to be so silly.”

  Robert Salisbury detected a shift in Elizabeth II’s manner when he was seated next to her at the seventieth birthday party for Ginny Airlie at Annabel’s in February 2003. The Queen told friends how much she had been looking forward to the party because it was the first time she had been in a nightclub since the early days of her marriage. “Never have I seen anyone have such a good time,” said Annabel Goldsmith (after whom the club had been named), who was also seated with the Queen. “Here was this austere woman laughing and joking. She was amusing the whole table.”

  The next day, Elizabeth II had an engagement at St. Alban’s Abbey, north of London. As she was being introduced to dignitaries, the dean of the abbey spotted Robert Salisbury, and asked the Queen whether she had met him before. “Oh yes,” said the Queen in ringing tones. “Robert and I were in a nightclub last night till half past one.”

  She also acquired a new confidante in Angela Kelly, who had taken Bobo MacDonald’s place. Twenty-five years the Queen’s junior, Kelly had been a soldier who joined the royal household as a maid and worked her way up through the ranks to dresser, a title Kelly herself upgraded to “personal assistant.” Like Bobo, who was the daughter of a railwayman, Kelly had modest origins in Liverpool, where her father worked in the dockyards. But unlike Bobo, who kept a low profile, Kelly, a plump blonde with an effervescent personality, became a visible presence in the Queen’s entourage.

  When Kelly is with the Queen “there is lots of jolly laughter,” said Anne Glenconner. “She has moved into the vacuum created by the death of the Queen’s sister and her mother,” according to one of the Queen’s relatives.

  Kelly tends to the royal wardrobe in a rigorously professional way, adapting the traditions of Hartnell and Amies with an eye to the theatrical requirements of the Queen’s public appearances. Kelly often accompanies household officials on reconnaissance trips (“recces”) for foreign tours, checking the backgrounds where the Queen will be appearing and researching national colors as well as hues that might have positive and negative significance. “Angela understands the Queen needs to wear something that sets her apart from the crowd when she is at a distance, and that inside she can wear beige and grey, things that are more neutral,” said a senior royal adviser. Kelly uses new couturiers such as Stewart Parvin, but she also designs many of the Queen’s dresses, coats, and hats herself and has them made in-house at lower cost.

  The Queen has long taken a keen interest in her jewelry and knows the history of the pieces in her extensive private collection. She enjoys displaying her beautiful jewelry whether in public or private, sometimes at dinner parties wearing multiple rings, even on her index fingers. Once, when she was introduced to Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the American creator of JAR jewelers, at a Winfield House dinner, she said, “I have heard that Damien Hirst has been using diamonds to make a jeweled skull, but I prefer the diamonds around my neck.”

  Angela Kelly has built on her boss’s expertise by developing computerized inventories so she can have the most up-to-date facts at her fingertips when she sets out a tray with pieces for the Queen’s selection. “Angela will come up with something she has found God knows where,” said a lady-in-waiting. “If the brooch is from Mexico, she will say where the stones are from. She is interested in it, and she makes it fun.”

  ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2003, the Queen and her courtiers awoke to a “World Exclusive” in the Daily Mirror: a page-one photograph of a footman on the famous Buckingham Palace balcony with INTRUDER emblazoned above his head. Another headline explained: “As Bush arrives, we reveal Mirrorman has been a Palace footman for TWO MONTHS in the biggest royal security scandal ever.” Inside the paper were fourteen pages of surreptitiously snapped photographs and descriptions of royal family routines and private quarters, punctuated by equally sensational headlines (“I COULD HAVE POISONED THE QUEEN”). It was all the handiwork of twenty-six-year-old Mirror reporter Ryan Parry, who lied his way into a job as a footman and bolted with his story, violating the confidentiality agreement he signed when he was hired.

  The newspaper tried to frame the stunt as a public service, but it was mainly a peek into the private lives of the Queen and her family. The most talked-about photograph was of the breakfast table laid for the Queen and Prince Philip with white linen, a floral centerpiece, silver cutlery, and bone china, along with an inexpensive transistor radio and three perfectly aligned Tupperware boxes containing cornflakes and porridge oats. Parry wrote that the Queen preferred her toast “with light marmalade,” but she ended up feeding most of it to the corgis under the table.

  He reported that each royal tea tray had its own map, that Prince Andrew was a teetotaler who sometimes swore at his footman, and that Princess Anne required her breakfast bowl to “contain a very black banana and ripe kiwi fruit,” and went about her business “without a fuss.” Parry described Sophie Wessex as “kind and grateful,” and the Queen came across as chatty and congenial—“not nearly haughty enough for the job,” observed The Sunday Times.

  Photographs and descriptions of the private apartments highlighted Andrew’s penchant for stuffed toys and pillows embroidered with messages such as “Eat, Sleep, and Remarry,” Anne’s sitting room where “every surface is covered with books, ornaments, piles of paper and magazines,” and Edward and Sophie Wessex’s modern decor and tidy housekeeping. Parry even snapped a picture of the carpeted Wessex bathroom adorned with a cartoon showing the Queen speaking to a group of penguins in “royal garments.”

  The next day the Mirror struck again, with “our man’s exposé of Windsor,” showing Parry on page one petting two of the Queen’s corgis in front of the castle, followed by eleven pages of photographs and descriptions of his weekend working for the Queen. His picture of her breakfast table included her lineup of morning newspapers: as always, the Racing Post was on top, followed by the Daily Mail, Express, and Mirror (with its revelation of the day, an excerpt from Paul Burrell’s tell-all book about the royal family), then the Daily Telegraph and The Times.

  Parry recounted that the Queen dined alone while watching her surprisingly lowbrow choice of television programs: The Bill, a popular police drama (“I don’t like ‘The Bill,’ ” she told Parry as he poured her coffee, “but I just can’t help watching it”), the long-running soap opera EastEnders, and, somewhat improbably, Kirsty’s Home Videos, a comedy show featuring footage of ordinary people that included “a fair share of bare bottoms.” There was also a photo spread of the castle’s luxurious Victorian summerhouse, with its potted plants, sculptures, swimming pool, indoor badminton court, table tennis, and netted cage surrounding Philip’s wooden polo practice horse.

  The Queen was furious, and her lawyers took immediate legal action against the newspaper, citing “a highly objectionable invasion of privacy, devoid of any legitimate interest.” She obtained a permanent injunction that prevented the Mirror from publishing anything further and restrained the newspaper’s ability to reprint many of the photographs. The newspaper paid £25,000 toward the Queen’s legal costs, gave the Palace all unused photographs, and destroyed its unpublished stories.

  But the Mirror’s editor, Piers Morgan, who went on to become a television personality in the United States, had succeeded in his mission. Not only did he embarrass the royal family, he timed publication—with its predictable cascade of coverage in the other newspapers—to coincide with the arrival of George and Laura Bush for the second state visit by a United States president. The only other American leader to be entertained on the same scale at Buckingham Palace over several days was Woodrow Wilson in December 1918.


  The Bushes’ historic trip was already clouded by security concerns and the prospect of thousands of protesters marching against the war in Iraq. As a result, the Queen was forced to shelve the traditional welcoming ceremony in Horse Guards Parade followed by a procession of carriages along the Mall to Buckingham Palace. Instead, there was a truncated version in the forecourt behind the railings where the Changing of the Guard usually took place. The Bushes were driven from the rear of the Palace (where they had spent the night) around to the front. They walked up the red-carpeted stairs into a specially built pavilion to greet the Queen and a line of dignitaries. The Household Cavalry trotted past, the president and the Duke of Edinburgh inspected the guard of honor, and everyone then walked inside for lunch—all of which had an improvised feel that the press roundly mocked.

  The Bushes, however, were delighted, and the Queen, who already had an easygoing relationship with the first couple, made them feel welcome. “She was unruffled by the protests,” George Bush recalled. “She had seen a lot during her life, and it didn’t seem to faze her. Nor did it faze me.”

  That evening the Queen hosted a white-tie state banquet for 160 guests. The following night George and Laura Bush returned the hospitality with a smaller and less formal dinner hosted by Will and Sarah Farish at Winfield House. Among the sixty guests were prominent Americans in Britain such as U.S. senator George Mitchell and Rose Marie Bravo, the CEO of Burberry. “It was like old friends week,” said Catherine Fenton, the White House social secretary. “The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh greeted the Farishes affectionately, and there was lots of laughter.”