Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  When they were together in public, Philip could still cause his wife anxiety with his unpredictable comments within earshot of the press. Labour MP Chris Mullin recalled a time in 2003 when the Queen was attending the Commonwealth conference in Nigeria. After an official read a statement at the opening of the new British Council offices in Abuja, Philip huffed, “That speech contained more jargon per square inch than any I’ve heard for a long time.” He then turned to a group of women and asked if they were teachers. They replied that their job was to “empower” people. “Empower?” he boomed. “Doesn’t sound like English to me!” As Mullin recorded in his diary, “By now the Queen, noticing that trouble is brewing, has turned and is pointing vaguely over the balcony. ‘Look …’ The Duke, stopping mid-sentence, retreats instantly to her side, somewhat bemused. ‘… at the pottery.’ When they have gone, I go and look. I see no pottery.”

  At the Queen’s request, the celebrations of their diamond wedding anniversary were muted and family-oriented. The couple visited Broadlands on Sunday, November 18, and spent time searching for a tree where they were photographed during their honeymoon. The Queen appeared in the same double strand of pearls and sapphire brooch ringed with diamonds that she had worn six decades earlier. For their official anniversary photograph on the grounds of the Mountbatten estate, Elizabeth II and Philip re-created a nearly identical pose—her right hand tucked into his left elbow as they smiled at each other. He looked less jaunty, but the warmth of her gaze was remarkably similar. That evening, Charles and Camilla hosted a black-tie family dinner party at Clarence House.

  The next day the Queen and Philip attended a commemoration at Westminster Abbey, where Prince William’s reading from the Book of John included the line “Let us love one another because love is from God.” Judi Dench recited verse composed by poet laureate Andrew Motion that commended “a life where duty spoke in languages their tenderness could share, a life remote from ours because it asked each day, each action to be kept in view.”

  The royal couple flew to Malta on the 20th for a sentimental journey to the island where they had enjoyed unencumbered happiness and a brief spell of normality as a young married couple. A month later they received a belated anniversary gift with the birth of their eighth grandchild, James Alexander Philip Theo Wessex. As they had with his older sister, Edward and Sophie decided their son would not be known as a Royal Highness, enabling both of the children to pursue a life outside the royal orbit.

  THROUGHOUT THE CELEBRATIONS, Elizabeth II and Philip were keeping a secret: their twenty-three-year-old grandson, Prince Harry, a second lieutenant in the Household Cavalry regiment of the Blues and Royals, was about to be sent to Helmand Province in Afghanistan for a seven-month deployment. Since the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, Elizabeth II had received regular updates from top officials in the military and Foreign Office, so she was well aware of the treacherous combat conditions facing the British military in both places.

  Her role as the head of armed forces is one of her most sacrosanct duties. With her hierarchies, rituals, traditions, and clothing created with a military-style sense of occasion, she is a soldier at heart. Members of the military are acutely aware that they are fighting for Queen and Country. “The royal family has pride and joy in the military,” said General Charles Guthrie, Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank, who was the chief of the Defence staff from 1997 to 2001. “Come hell or high water, the military is loyal to the Queen, who is their commander in chief.”

  Since her days with the garrison at Windsor Castle during World War II and her brief service in uniform with the Auxiliary Territorial Service, she has taken a keen personal interest in military matters, meeting informally with the top brass over lunch and dinner as well as in audiences. She visibly relaxes in the company of soldiers, not thinking twice about walking into a battalion of a thousand men. Once she helpfully sent a commander a photograph from a magazine showing a piebald shire stallion she considered suitable for service as a drum horse for the Household Cavalry.

  Her knowledge of military traditions and practices is encyclopedic, as officers serving her quickly learn. When Johnny Martin-Smith, a lieutenant on guard duty at Windsor Castle, was invited to dinner with the Queen, she turned to him and said, “Do the Welsh Guards have new uniform requirements? Are red socks allowed?” She had been looking out the window that day at a Welsh Guards soldier setting up a bandstand who had worn red instead of regulation green socks.

  “The Queen has an eagle eye, possibly better than 15 eagles,” said a Palace courtier. After her annual birthday parade, she gives her critique to senior officers, sometimes asking why a soldier was standing several feet out of position or moving his fingers on his rifle. “I hope that man who cut his hand is going to be all right,” she said one year to the officer in charge. A soldier in the front row had cut himself on his bayonet and nobody else had noticed except the Queen, who had been standing at some distance. “Cut himself, ma’am?” replied the officer. “Yes,” said the Queen, “the one in the middle, the 3rd or 4th man.”

  The Queen “wouldn’t read a three-volume history of Afghanistan,” said Charles Guthrie, who met with her frequently. But through her briefings by officers and meetings with soldiers returning from the front lines, along with reading her boxes and newspapers and watching reports on television, her knowledge is impressively up to date. “You could tell her what you thought,” said Guthrie. “You could be critical of government, and she would listen. She would not comment. She would not get into gossip. She would question on certain things that were topical, but it wasn’t an interrogation. It was a conversation. She absolutely understands her constitutional prerogatives and does not stray into areas that could be unconstitutional. She doesn’t try to run the army.”

  When the Labour government consolidated many of the army’s historic regiments in 2006 to cut costs, she made inquiries but stayed out of the debate. “She knew we had too many regiments,” said senior Blair adviser Jonathan Powell. “She was concerned, but she was not a lobbyist pushing an agenda.” Speaking to one of the army chiefs, however, she couldn’t conceal her sadness when the venerable Black Watch was merged with five other regiments to become a battalion within the new Royal Regiment of Scotland. The Queen Mother had been colonel-in-chief of the Black Watch for sixty-five years, and three of her brothers, including one who died in battle during World War I, had served in the regiment.

  The Queen fully supported the decisions by William and Harry to enter the military. “It is a traditional thing to do, a good thing to do,” explained Charles Guthrie, who discussed it with her. “It teaches a lot about leadership. It mixes up royals with different examples of society, people from poor backgrounds, which is helpful and certainly very good.” Choosing the army rather than the navy, where the princes’ father, uncle, and grandfather had served, reflected the practical reality of modern warfare and the decline of Britain’s importance as a naval power. The military gave William and Harry jobs that kept them away from the limelight—and the press.

  The imposition of discipline in the context of regimental camaraderie was particularly good for Harry, whose high spirits threatened to turn him into a scapegrace. He got caught using marijuana when he was seventeen, prompting his father to march him off to visit a drug rehabilitation center and listen to recovering addicts. There were other unfortunate incidents involving the third in line to the throne—sightings of drunkenness at London clubs and at a costume party where Harry wore a swastika armband. Because of his red hair and freckles, it had long been rumored that his father was James Hewitt—despite the well-documented fact that Diana didn’t meet the cavalry officer until after Harry was born. While Diana strongly resembled her maternal grandmother, Ruth Fermoy, she scarcely looked like her father’s side of the family. Harry, however, inherited the ginger looks of the Spencers.

  It was first proposed early in 2007 that Harry be posted to Iraq. He was determined to serve with his regiment, but when pub
licity about the prospect led to terrorist threats against him, Army Chief of Staff Sir Richard Dannatt vetoed his participation. The Queen had favored his deployment, and she helped talk Harry through his frustration. She supported his resolution to “turn to the right and carry on,” he recalled.

  When the Blues and Royals regiment was called to Afghanistan later in the year, Dannatt consulted with Gordon Brown, the Prince of Wales, and the Queen. They decided to deploy Harry under an embargo reached with selected news organizations that agreed to publicize the details of his experience once he had returned safely to Britain. As with her decision to back Andrew twenty-five years earlier, the Queen didn’t hesitate. She broke the news to her grandson in December on a weekend at Windsor Castle. “I think she’s relieved that I get the chance to do what I want to do,” he said at the time. “She’s a very good person to talk to about it.”

  From his arrival only days before Christmas, Harry served on the front lines at a forward operating base under regular fire from machine guns, snipers, rockets, and mortars. He called in air strikes and routinely went out on foot patrol through dangerous Taliban-held terrain. As a troop leader responsible for eleven soldiers doing reconnaissance work, he was undeniably in danger. At the same time, he was “‘mucking in’ with every other soldier, cooking his own rations, taking his turn making brews for himself and his mates, cleaning his rifle and equipment,” wrote Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.

  The secret of his deployment held for ten weeks, until an Australian magazine and a German newspaper broke the blackout, and an American website, the Drudge Report, picked up the news. The Ministry of Defence withdrew Harry from Helmand, at least in part to ensure the safety of his battle group. Before leaving, the prince said, “All my wishes have come true. I managed to get the job done.” He was also grateful, he said, because “it’s very nice to be sort of a normal person for once. I think it’s about as normal as I’m going to get.”

  THE FINAL MONTHS of 2007 marked the appearance of another work of fiction that captured the public imagination about the Queen. In The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett’s fictionalized Elizabeth II discovers a passion for reading—an opsimath, she calls herself, delighted to find a word describing a tate-blooming learner. She neglects her official chores as she breezes through an eclectic canon including Mitford, Austen, Balzac, Pepys, Byatt, McEwan, Roth, and even the memoirs of Lauren Bacall, whose life she envies for having “had a much better bite at the carrot.” The Queen confuses those she meets by asking about their reading habits, throws her courtiers and her family into a state of high alarm, and eventually decides to take up writing and redeem her life “by analysis and reflection.”

  It is a thoroughly fanciful plot, given the Queen’s deep-seated sense of duty and practical turn of mind. But as in A Question of Attribution twenty years earlier, Bennett zeroes in on the Queen’s underestimated qualities and depicts a shrewd, observant, and inquisitive character whose sly wit (“Oh do get on!” she mutters while reading Henry James at teatime) is a believable facsimile of Elizabeth II’s tart asides.

  The book was a runaway bestseller in Britain and the United States, propelled by word of mouth and rave reviews. After The Queen, wrote Jeremy McCarter in The New York Times Book Review, the book “offered yet another reason to think warmly of Her Majesty, another reminder that marble has veins.” Like the film, Bennett’s book tapped into a yearning for Elizabeth II to break out of the royal cocoon, and to show some of her repressed mischief. The most touching aspect of Bennett’s depiction is his character’s discovery of egalitarian anonymity when immersed in a book: “It was shared, it was common.… Between these covers she could go unrecognized.”

  The real Queen keeps her views of literature well guarded, but she does take a special interest in the annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a competition for authors around the world. She reads the winning novels for pleasure intermingled with obligation. Most of them are historical fiction, and in recent years she has enjoyed The Secret River by Kate Grenville, on the early colonization of Australia; Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, about Papua New Guinea; and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, on the slave trade with Canada. Each summer she invites the winner to Buckingham Palace for an audience. “It’s very informal,” said Mark Collins, director of the Commonwealth Foundation, who accompanies the authors. “It’s upstairs in her private apartments, and we’re knee-deep in corgis running around.” For twenty minutes she conducts an earnest discussion touching on the writer’s roots, the source of inspiration, and how the book developed. “She asks how the locations came to be selected, and the characters, and any reflections on the country that the author might have,” recalled Collins. “The discussion rattles along tidily.”

  ELIZABETH II IS not the sort to brood about mortality, but in the early years of her ninth decade she almost seemed to be making her way down a sort of royal bucket list, checking off things she hadn’t done before, and places she hadn’t seen. In June 2008, she attended her first luncheon at Pratt’s, an exclusive men’s club in St. James’s owned by the Duke of Devonshire. At the invitation of a conservation group called the Shikar Club, she joined her husband and ten other members for drinks in front of a large fireplace, followed by a robust meal of smoked salmon, lamb cutlet, and treacle tart. The following July she watched the annual Swan Upping, a ritual dating to the twelfth century when the swans on the Thames (which belong to the sovereign) are officially counted. She even started taking a regular commuter train to and from King’s Lynn in Norfolk for her annual winter break at Sandringham. She didn’t sit with the regular passengers, however; for security reasons, she and her small party took over a first-class compartment.

  For shooting, stalking, and fishing weekends at Sandringham and Balmoral she began including more guests a generation younger. “We have seen less of them,” said a woman who had been a regular guest of Elizabeth II and Philip since the 1950s. “They don’t just see the old fogies.”

  The children of her longtime friends found that she responded readily when they invited her to informal dinners, where she took time to chat with their own teenage children, asking them questions and listening intently. When one of her bridesmaids, Lady Elizabeth Longman (known to her friends as “Smith”), turned eighty, Elizabeth II went to a cocktail party in her honor in a small flat. While a female protection officer waited in the car, a guest escorted the Queen up in a rickety elevator. She stayed for more than an hour and spent a full fifteen minutes talking to Smith’s grandson, Freddy Van Zevenbergen, a designer who built scale models of grand houses.

  For the first time in nine years, the Queen had a winner on the final day of Royal Ascot in June 2008. Her two-year-old colt Free Agent was running behind what John Warren called “a wall” of ten other horses with only three furlongs to go in the Chesham Stakes. But Free Agent, ridden by Richard Hughes, broke through and won by two and a quarter lengths. “I’ve done it!” the Queen shouted. Seated between Warren and her husband, she jumped up and punched the air with her fist—an unusual public display captured by BBC cameras for the evening newscasts. “It was a moment of real joy,” said John Warren. Afterward, “she raced to the paddock like she was 20,” said her fifty-two-year-old bloodstock adviser. “We were struggling to keep up with her. The jockey was trying to explain what had happened but all the Queen wanted to do was touch her horse.”

  Earlier in the week at Ascot, Helen Mirren was in attendance to present a trophy, and the Queen asked her cinematic alter ego to the royal box for tea. “I wouldn’t have been invited to tea if she had hated the film,” said Mirren. “I was very touched to be invited.” The Queen said, “Hello, it’s lovely to meet you,” followed by some “horsey chat.” It was only the second time Elizabeth II had met an actress who played her. Some years earlier she had encountered Prunella Scales, who portrayed the Queen in A Question of Attribution. When Scales bowed to Elizabeth II in a receiving line, the Queen said, “I expect you thin
k I should be doing that to you.”

  ELIZABETH II’S ELDEST son celebrated his sixtieth birthday in November 2008, making him the oldest Prince of Wales in history, passing King Edward VII, who was fifty-nine when he succeeded Queen Victoria on her death in 1901. Elizabeth II hosted a black-tie reception, orchestral concert, and dinner in Charles’s honor at Buckingham Palace on the eve of his birthday on the 14th. More noteworthy was the visit she and Philip made a day earlier to the headquarters of his signature charity, the Prince’s Trust, which since its founding in 1976 had helped more than a half million disadvantaged youths learn skills and find jobs.

  Throughout his life Charles has craved the approval of his parents, and the Queen’s remarks that day represented a rare public expression of support for his philanthropic work with his twenty charities and as patron or president of 350 other organizations. “For Prince Philip and me there can be no greater pleasure or comfort than to know that into his care are safely entrusted the guiding principles of public service and duty to others,” the Queen said.

  Charles overtook his sister, Anne’s, record as “hardest working royal,” with 560 official engagements in 2008. (She came close with 534.) His mother logged 417 visits in the U.K. and overseas that year—down only slightly from 440 in 2007. At age eighty-two—seventeen years past Britain’s mandatory retirement age at the time—she had no intention of slowing down. The previous December she had become the oldest-ever monarch when she passed Queen Victoria, who lived eighty-one years and 243 days.

  She continued to carry out her duties as she had since her accession, serving as head of state—representing her government officially at home and abroad—as well as head of nation, connecting with people to reward their achievements and remain in touch. But while in the early years of her reign she presided over twenty-six investitures a year, that number was gradually pared to fifteen, with Prince Charles and Princess Anne splitting the rest.