One of Elizabeth II’s friends gently ribbed her by sending a cartoon titled “The Queen” from The Spectator magazine. It showed the interior of a movie theater with someone’s view of the screen being obstructed by a person wearing a crown. The Queen was tickled by the cartoon, but she told her friend she was holding to the agreement she had with Blair—stubbornness perhaps, but also a sign of her lack of self-absorption. When the film came up in a conversation with Monty Roberts, she asked him not to see it, even when he told her he heard it was flattering. “I suppose it depends on your point of view,” the Queen said. “I think she preferred me to know her the way I know her,” he recalled.
Nearly everyone else who knew the Queen did go, and they almost unanimously felt that the portrayal “rang true,” as Nancy Reagan said—from the way it captured aspects of her character and personality to her sturdy walk and the way she put on her spectacles. But they also observed that because of the tragic circumstances of the film, Mirren’s Elizabeth II was more like her restrained public image than her relaxed and jolly private self. Most agreed that the depiction of Philip was unduly harsh, and that both the Queen Mother and Robin Janvrin had been mischaracterized. But even Elizabeth II understood the phenomenon created by the film, according to her friends. Palace officials were delighted when the movie spawned articles in fashion magazines about “Balmoral chic” as sales of Barbour waxed jackets surged.
“You know, for fifty years and more Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle,” said Helen Mirren to appreciative laughter after winning the Oscar for best actress in February 2007. “She’s had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head, her handbag on her arm, and she’s weathered many many storms, and I salute her courage and her consistency.” Holding the Oscar aloft, she concluded, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘The Queen!’ ”
“She’s a real role model. She’s just
very helpful on any sort of difficulties
or problems I might be having.”
Prince William escorting his grandmother during a visit to his base in Wales, where he worked as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot, April 2011. Ian Jones Photography
TWENTY
A Soldier at Heart
IN APRIL 2007, THE QUEEN SAT FOR HER FIRST PORTRAIT BY AN American, the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Not only was the sitting limited by her schedule to just twenty-five minutes, it was to be filmed for yet another television documentary about the Queen carrying out her duties. She agreed to wear the stunning Queen Mary tiara, the Nizam of Hyderabad diamond necklace, a white satin gown embroidered with gold, and her flowing dark blue Garter robe. Leibovitz was surprised to learn that Elizabeth II did her own makeup and got her hair done just once a week.
In a brief conversation the evening before the photo shoot, the Queen spoke fondly to Leibovitz about British photographer Jane Bown, an octogenarian who had done her portrait the previous year. “She came all the way by herself!” the Queen said. “I helped her move the furniture.” Leibovitz replied, “Well, tomorrow is going to be the opposite of that.”
Unusually for a woman who prided herself on punctuality, the Queen arrived twenty minutes late for her sitting. “I don’t have much time,” the Queen said to the photographer, who noticed that the dressers “were staying about 20 feet away from her.”
Elizabeth II was clearly vexed to be surrounded by the photographer’s large entourage. When Leibovitz asked her to remove her “crown” to make the image less dressy, the Queen said, “Less dressy! What do you think this is?” But she calmed down and yielded to the photographer’s requests to vary her costume and her pose. Leibovitz later said she loved the Queen’s “feisty” personality and respected her willingness to fulfill her commitment, however tiring and stressful.
The resulting images were stunning. The most striking showed the Queen without the tiara and wearing a simple navy boat cloak with gleaming brass buttons, her arms and hands unseen, standing in front of a digitally superimposed background of a wintry sky and the bare trees of the Palace gardens. It was a frank attempt by Leibovitz to evoke earlier iconic images by Beaton and Annigoni symbolizing the Queen’s solitude, as well as “an appropriate mood for this moment in the Queen’s life.”
The photos were unveiled on the eve of the Queen’s tenth trip to the United States, and her third state visit, this time hosted by George and Laura Bush. Before her departure, she gave a reception at Buckingham Palace for 350 prominent Americans in London. Washington Post correspondent Kevin Sullivan joined one of the small semicircles of people to be introduced to the Queen, which also included Don Johnson, who was starring in Guys and Dolls in the West End, Terence Kooyker and Andrew Wright, who were rowers at Oxford, and Brian McBride, one of the top players for the Fulham professional football team.
The Queen showed no sign of knowing that Johnson had starred in the hit television series Miami Vice, but when she was introduced to the rowers, she asked to see their big hands, which were covered with calluses and blisters. “The Queen examined them closely, and sympathized as if the young men were her grandchildren,” recalled Sullivan, who also noticed that she had “a disarming habit of smiling only when she finds something funny” and lacked “the political perma-smile.” As she was talking to McBride, another man ignored protocol and barged into the group. “Do you play football too?” the Queen asked. “No,” he replied. “I sell pancake and waffle mix, mostly in the Middle East.” “How interesting what people will eat,” said the Queen, as she turned to approach another group.
Elizabeth II and Philip arrived in Richmond, Virginia, on Thursday, May 3. In a speech to the Virginia legislature she expressed her condolences for the massacre at Virginia Tech the previous week in which a lone gunman killed thirty students and teachers before committing suicide. She also adjusted her schedule to meet a group of survivors of the shooting. Then she traveled to Jamestown, where she commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the first British settlement—fifty years after her first visit during the Eisenhower presidency. Surveying the archaeological relics, she spotted exhibit 15, an iron spatula labeled “for severe constipation.” She beckoned her traveling physician, Commander David Swain, who was always only a few steps away with his large black case containing vital medications and blood plasma. Pointing at the crude implement, she exclaimed, “You should have some things like that!”
Over the weekend she fulfilled her lifelong dream of attending the Kentucky Derby, and for the fifth time she was a guest at the Farish farm. The former ambassador and his wife remained close to the Queen, and once again Sarah Farish greeted her by publicly kissing her on both cheeks.
Elizabeth II was no longer sending as many mares to Kentucky. The center of gravity among breeders had shifted to the powerhouse stud farms of Ireland, which offered high-caliber stallions for her to choose from without subjecting her mares to transatlantic travel. It had been politically impossible for her to send her mares across the Irish Sea until the 1998 Northern Ireland peace settlement took effect. Now her new bloodstock adviser, Henry Carnarvon’s son-in-law John Warren, was trying to invigorate the royal thoroughbred line and make it more competitive, in the hopes that the Queen could finally win the elusive Derby at Epsom.
But the Queen still enjoyed relaxing in bluegrass country with like-minded friends she had known for decades, and for the first time Philip was along to share the experience. In the garden at Lane’s End Farm, she sipped a late afternoon martini and fretted about the performance of Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara Phillips, at the Badminton Horse trials. “Nobody pays any attention to what Granny thinks!” she said.
At the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, the Queen was intrigued by the winning jockey, Calvin Borel, a Cajun who could barely read and write but was known for his uncanny affinity for horses. Anticipating the Queen’s interest, Laura Bush had set aside two places at the state dinner two days later and extended an invitation to Borel. Amy Zantzi
nger, her social secretary, arranged for him to be outfitted in white tie, and for a Louisville dress shop to be opened on Sunday so his fiancée could buy a gown.
George Bush managed to inject a note of unintended levity in his opening remarks on the White House South Lawn before seven thousand guests on Monday, the 7th. “You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 177—uh 1976,” he said. After a beat, he winked at the Queen and said, “She gave me a look only a mother could give a child.” Elizabeth II and Philip had a quiet lunch upstairs in the Yellow Oval Room with members of the Bush family, including the forty-first president and Barbara Bush, who accompanied the royal couple to the World War II memorial on the Mall, the last stop in a fast-paced two-day visit that included stops at NASA and the Children’s National Medical Center.
Other than a short walk with the president and first lady from the White House to Blair House aross the street on the first day, the Queen was barely seen by the general public. The crowd of one thousand in the cordoned area included numerous children, and the Queen stopped to talk to them along the way. One member of her entourage commented that “it was sad that security was so tight. Even the walk was stage-managed.”
That afternoon at the British embassy garden party, the Queen spotted her friend Frolic Weymouth and went straight over to him. “So glad to see you,” she said with a smile. “How are you? I heard you were sick.” The artist knew she collected pepper grinders, so earlier in the year he had sent her one made of plastic that he found in an Italian restaurant. It was in the shape of a waiter, and with a turn of the head, a recording inside said in an Italian accent, “You’re breaking my neck!” Weymouth had received a prompt thank-you note from the Queen saying how much she had laughed. At the garden party as they finished their conversation, he said, “Oh Ma’am, do you need another pepper shaker?” At that point, Weymouth recalled, “she lost it. She started laughing and hitting her pocketbook. Then she became dignified again and moved on.”
Calvin Borel met Elizabeth II in the receiving line at the state dinner that night. Posing for an official photograph between the monarch and the first lady, Borel did what Laura Bush called “the sweetest thing” as he wrapped his arms around both women. By now infringements of protocol such as touching the Queen were becoming almost routine. In her toast, the Queen spoke fondly of the “vital wartime alliance” forged by Winston Churchill that had carried forward across the decades as a “partnership always to be reckoned with.”
The following night she hosted a dinner in honor of the Bushes at the British embassy. All day her advisers had been urging her to include in her toast a lighthearted reference to the president’s verbal stumble the previous day until she finally relented. “I wondered whether I should start this toast by saying, ‘When I was here in 1776 but I don’t think I will,’ ” she said as the guests laughed knowingly. “It was the perfect retort,” recalled Bush. When the Sovereign’s Standard was lowered from the embassy flagpole at the conclusion of the evening, the Queen and Philip were whisked to Andrews Air Force Base for their flight home, he in black tie and she in her gown and tiara.
ON JUNE 27, 2007, Tony Blair resigned as prime minister under pressure from his fifty-six-year-old chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown. It was a quiet coup by the Scotsman after a decade of playing second fiddle to the charismatic prime minister. Largely because of widespread opposition to the Iraq War, Blair had become deeply unpopular, which strengthened the Labour bloc led by Brown. Blair finally yielded two months after passing the Labour Party record of ten years as prime minister.
The son of a minister in the Church of Scotland, Brown had been a scholastic prodigy, entering the University of Edinburgh at age sixteen and eventually earning a doctorate. He had a brooding manner matched by a burly and sometimes disheveled appearance, and he advanced in politics despite what Blair called “a lacuna—not the wrong instinct, but no instinct at the human, gut level. Political calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero.” Brown’s success was fueled by his prodigious energy, formidable intellect, and intense focus. But he was an odd duck: capable of quick wit, but more often socially maladroit and programmed in his casual social interactions.
Brown was touched by tragedy as well. An accident while playing rugby as a teenager left him blind in one eye, and his vision was also impaired in the other eye. He didn’t marry until age forty-nine, and he and his wife, Sarah, lost their first child ten days after her birth in 2002. They later had two sons, one of whom was afflicted with cystic fibrosis.
Elizabeth II knew Brown from a decade of his briefings before presenting the annual budget. In his audience the previous year he had assured her that he had “some good information about how we’re trying to support the troops.” “They’re very pushed now, in so many places,” the Queen commented. When she told him that Prince Andrew had recently visited Iraq, Brown assured her the government was “doing some investment in helicopters.” “It would be good if the helicopters we bought actually could work,” she pointedly replied.
The Queen treated Brown correctly, and the prime minister was “tremendously respectful of the royal family,” said Simon Lewis, who served as Brown’s press secretary for his last year in office. “If any Palace-related issues came up, he would say, ‘Simon, make sure we’re on top of that.’ He was sensitive to the nature of the relationship and getting on smoothly.” Compared to the thoroughly urban Tony Blair, it helped that Brown came from a country background, with a home overlooking the Firth of Forth.
Brown said he relied on the Queen’s knowing “what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes you go back and change a bit of your speech.” But he especially valued her sense of humor and how “she’ll be talking about things that make both her and me laugh.” When the Queen was with friends, he sometimes was the target of that humor; her talent for mimicry and years of listening to Scottish brogue enabled her to render a spot-on imitation of her new prime minister. Brown’s visits to Balmoral, said Margaret Rhodes, “brought a certain amount of heavy weather.”
ELIZABETH AND PHILIP hit another milestone on November 20, 2007, as the first Queen and consort to celebrate sixty years of marriage. “With the absence of her mother and sister, the Duke of Edinburgh has been her emotional touchstone,” said one of the Queen’s senior advisers. When he was away, staying at Wood Farm on a shooting weekend at Sandringham, for example, he would ring her up every day. “They are not physically demonstrative, but they have a strong connection,” said another courtier. “She still lights up when he walks into the room. She becomes softer, lighter, and happier.”
Their religious bond deepened as well. Her unwavering faith was ingrained from childhood, while Philip’s meandered from the Greek Orthodox beliefs of his parents through his confirmation as an Anglican to his probing of theological and interfaith issues. “His approach is much more restless than the Queen, more focused on the intellectual side,” said George Carey. “He is searching, and he has been a bridge builder, putting faiths together. He has more time to do that, and the Queen stands back and lets him.”
Yet Elizabeth II and Philip, according to their cousin Pamela Hicks, are “not a sweet old Darby and Joan by any means. They’re both very strong characters.” One point of disagreement concerned the press. “I don’t read the tabloids,” Philip sputtered to Jeremy Paxman, the BBC’s grand inquisitor, in 2006. “I glance at one [broadsheet]. I reckon one’s enough. I can’t cope with them. But the Queen reads every bloody paper she can lay her hands on!”
After Philip took one too many spills in his competitive carriage driving, Elizabeth II put her foot down and insisted that he stop, although he continued to drive for pleasure. On other matters, she simply avoided confrontation. When her husband’s dressing room at Sandringham needed to be repainted, “on Her Majesty’s instruction we had to match the dirty paintwork so he wouldn’t know,” said Tony Parnell, for more than three decades the foreman responsible
for looking after the house. “I don’t think he ever knew.”
Elizabeth II gave Philip the latitude to experiment in his supervision of her estates. At Sandringham he created a truffière, an orchard designed to produce organic truffles, in addition to breeding French partridges (“incredibly stupid birds,” he said) and growing fruits for the production of apple juice and black currant cordial. He was responsible for their private art collection, buying at shows in Edinburgh, where he had an eye for up-and-coming artists, and hanging the paintings himself in their private apartments. The Queen, however, continued to supervise the decor in their private homes. “Her taste was very modest in terms of decoration and fabrics,” recalled Tony Parnell. “It was almost replacing like for like.”
Philip frequently rode through London inconspicuously in his own Metrocab, sometimes taking the wheel himself. Once he drove his taxi to a dinner with friends at a modest flat on the edge of Belgravia belonging to Jane Westmorland, widow of the 15th Earl. “He wore a cap like a taxi driver and the detective sat in the back seat,” recalled Frolic Weymouth. “He drove around and around in the circle out front to show us how easily the cab could turn.”
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.”
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