Elizabeth- the Queen and the Crown

by Sarah Gristwood

  In the second decade of the Queen’s reign, in an era of unprecedented change, the initial enthusiasm that had greeted the New Elizabethan Age in the 1950s was beginning to die away. The monarchy could no longer rely on unquestioning support. As early as 1963, the BBC’s new satirical show That Was the Week That Was could perform a spoof of the royal barge sinking with the Royal Family on board.

  It is true that one potential problem for the monarchy had simply melted away. A succession of Conservative and essentially aristocratic Prime Ministers – with power passed from Churchill to Eden, and then from Macmillan to Alec Douglas-Home – had first been broken when the Labour victory of 1964 brought Yorkshireman Harold Wilson into power. Palace officials were taken aback when Wilson arrived to kiss hands not only accompanied by a large group of his family, but wearing a strange variant of the traditional formal morning dress.

  The Queen put Wilson on his toes by quizzing him on the country’s financial problems, about which, he said, she was better informed than he, and leaving him feeling ‘like an unprepared schoolboy’. Within weeks ‘he would have died for her’, a lady-in-waiting reported. It was during Wilson’s first year in office that the Queen had to read the secret protocols arranging the government of Britain in the event of a nuclear attack. These were, after all, the years of the Cold War.

  As Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II addressed the Council of Europe, an international human rights organization, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall in May 1969.

  A foreshadow of the events of the late 1990s came in 1966 when an avalanche of mud and debris cascaded on to the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, engulfing its primary school, killing more than a hundred children. The Queen, urged to go there immediately, refused, and for the best of motives. The arrangements for her visit might distract from the rescue effort – what if she caused rescuers to miss ‘some poor child that might have been found under the wreckage?’ she asked. When she did visit a week later, her emotion was palpable; sorry, as she told the villagers with tears in her eyes, ‘I can give you nothing except sympathy.’ But in the years ahead such restraint could be misunderstood, and taken for a lack of care.

  By the end of the 1960s, polls were finding more people who thought the monarchy an out-of-touch anachronism – and, in a youth-oriented era, hailing the idea that the heir to the throne should automatically succeed when he or she reached thirty-five. Some polls found the Queen merely ‘not unpopular’ in the country. There was (with inflation making the royal finances less secure) an increasing awareness of a need to sell the monarchy to the people – a ‘distinct wind of change at the Palace’, as a BBC memo put it. The royals reacted surprisingly readily, and the result was the 1969 film Royal Family.

  It was Prince Philip who had always promoted the idea of television as a medium through which the monarchy could pass on its message – in this case, both the ‘relentlessness’ of the Queen’s job, and the fact that she was by no means the one-dimensional figure more traditional coverage was making her appear. The Queen was at first reluctant but allowed herself to be persuaded, and shooting began on 8 June 1968.

  A relaxed moment at Windsor for the Queen and her eldest son.

  Seventy-five days of shooting in 172 locations; 43 hours of film that would be cut down to 110 minutes. The Queen was shown working on her red dispatch boxes at Sandringham, at Balmoral, on Britannia and on the Royal Train; abroad on state visits; giving lunch to President Nixon; receiving the Prime Minister for his weekly audience. The film also showed Prince Charles water-skiing and working on his college history essay; Prince Philip piloting a plane and painting a watercolour. And it showed the Queen herself riding, watching a sitcom on television, driving her children out in a Land Rover and helping with a family barbecue.

  The 1969 fly-on-the-wall documentary Royal Family saw cameras follow the royals for several months as they went about their daily business. Inevitably, however, scenes like this family lunch at Windsor can seem rather stilted.

  The consciously ordinary atmosphere of the barbecue, the stodginess of clothes and tastes, must have seemed reassuring. But was it perhaps a little disappointing, too? Prince Philip believed that if people could see their head of state and her close family ‘as individuals, as people, I think it makes it much easier for them to accept the system.’ He was all against the idea of any ‘remoteness or majesty’ in the people’s view of their monarchy. But many others disagreed. Walter Bagehot, writing of the monarchy a century earlier, had said ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic,’ and even David Attenborough, one of Royal Family’s producers, believed they would suffer from the loss of mystique.

  More than two-thirds of the population of Britain watched Royal Family – but the Queen has since ordered that it be withdrawn from view.

  Nevertheless, 23 million people watched Royal Family when it aired on the BBC in black and white on 21 June 1969 – another 15 million when ITV showed it in colour. Even allowing for repeat viewers, more than half of the population of Britain must have seen the film, and the reception across the Atlantic was equally enthusiastic.

  From the modernity of a broadcast media appearance to what looked, at least, like a medieval ceremony . . . the Royal Family were eager to show that they could play both cards. Ten days after the film was shown Prince Charles was invested as Prince of Wales in the courtyard of Caernarfon Castle. With his youthful face incongruous above the ermine and velvet cape, he knelt before the unromantically modern-clad figure of his mother and vowed to be her ‘liege man of life and limb’.

  The ceremony, designed by Princess Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon, was in fact a modern creation, and (as the Queen told Noël Coward later) both mother and son were stifling giggles at the memory of the dress rehearsal, when an over-large crown had extinguished Charles ‘like a candle-snuffer’. But the event, watched by a huge audience worldwide, did give another feelgood factor – and such were desperately needed in what were revealing themselves as alarmingly changing times.

  On 1 July 1969, the Queen invested her son as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle. Despite the formality of the ceremony, the family joked among themselves that the crown, before it was adjusted to fit, looked like a candle-snuffer on Charles’ head.

  One element in the reinvention of the royals over the preceding century had been to present them (under Prince Albert’s guidance) as the nation’s first family, an ideal of middle-class morality. But now that very ideal seemed out of sync with the age of free love and of feminism.

  Small wonder, perhaps, that the painter Pietro Annigoni, returning to make another portrait of the Queen in 1969, found her both frailer and harder than when he first painted her fourteen years before. He told the Queen he saw her as condemned to solitude by her position, and that was how he planned to show her. She was content to go along with his vision, whether or not she agreed. ‘One doesn’t know oneself,’ she once said.

  The Queen once regretted that, unlike her mother, she had as she aged the kind of face that looked sulky in repose. Watching herself on television, she exclaimed to Philip that she had on ‘my Miss Piggy face’! The feelings with which so many refuse to credit her make things, if anything, worse. Said Labour parliamentarian Richard Crossman: ‘When she is deeply moved and tries to conceal it, she looks like an angry thunder-cloud.’ And there was, by the early 1970s, a certain amount to look angry about.

  In 1970, the Conservative but uncongenial Edward Heath replaced Harold Wilson. He too came to value his audiences with the Queen. ‘The fact that she has all these years of experience and is imperturbable is a source of encouragement in itself,’ Heath said, noting that as someone who had met and corresponded with so many world leaders she was particularly good ‘on overseas stuff’.

  It was Heath who took Britain into the Common Market, the European Economic Community, and perhaps thus weakened ties with the Commonwealth, so dear to the Queen’s heart. In 1974, Wilson was once more returned to power – but by then the Queen
had problems closer to home.

  In March of that year there was a terrifying attempt to kidnap Princess Anne at gunpoint while she was being driven along the Mall. The Queen is notably cool about personal danger. When, seven years later, six blank shots were fired at her as she rode to the Trooping of the Colour ceremony, her only reaction was to reassure her horse. And when, the year after that, the disturbed Michael Fagan broke into her bedroom, she held the intruder in conversation until the alarm could be raised. But the armed kidnap attempt on one of her children must have shaken her.

  Her sister’s marriage was in difficulties. Lord Snowdon was a serial womanizer. Princess Margaret, too, had already reputedly sought consolation outside her marriage, and in 1973 she was introduced to Roddy Llewellyn, seventeen years her junior, with whom she would go on to have an open affair that lasted for almost a decade. The relationship between husband and wife had become vicious, to the point where he would leave her notes reading ‘Things I Hate About You’. It did not help that the press were no longer prepared, as in bygone decades, to maintain a degree of gentlemanly discretion – not, at least, the new boy on the scene, Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sun and News of the World.

  These were difficult years all round, not least because of the economic clime – galloping inflation, a falling stock market, oil prices doubling, and the clash between government and trade unions that culminated in the three-day week, with its system of compulsory closures and sporadic blackouts. Other territories in the Commonwealth, of which the Queen was always very much aware, had their own problems; notably the terrible famine in Bangladesh.

  The Queen’s Christmas message at the end of 1974 sounded an uncharacteristically downbeat note. ‘We have never been short of problems, but in the last year everything seems to have happened at once . . . The trouble with gloom is that it feeds upon itself and depression causes more depression . . . In times of doubt and anxiety, the attitudes people show in their daily lives, in their homes, and in their work, are of supreme importance.’

  This, of course, had always been her theme. Business as usual, and not just as a matter of practicality, but as a duty. Look for the rays of sunshine where you can.

  By the time of her Christmas broadcast in 1971, the Queen had become well-accustomed to the microphone.

  And as Princess Anne reached maturity, the Queen must have taken pleasure in the fact that at least one of her older children was finding her feet – and in a way that was particularly congenial to Her Majesty.

  As the 1970s dawned, Princess Anne was using the freedom now accorded to a royal to pursue an equestrian career. Emancipated from school at Benenden, entering her twenties, she celebrated the new decade by winning the individual title at the European Eventing Championship, and being voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1971.

  The Queen cantering up to the start of the track at Royal Ascot race course, where she used to enjoy a private ride with her family.

  In 1976, Anne would compete as one of the British team at the Olympic Games in Montreal, riding the Queen’s horse Goodwill. It is, of course, a passion – and a proficiency at international level – that Anne’s own daughter, Zara, has come to share, just as the Queen’s interest was inherited from her father.

  Horses have always been the passion of the Queen’s life. It started early – her cousin Margaret Rhodes recalled that as children they played endlessly at being horses, at Elizabeth’s desire, ‘and it was obligatory to neigh’. It’s a passion which has kept her in the saddle into old age, still refusing to wear the almost mandatory hard hat, and it seems telling that it is the world of the stable which permits the only known display of rebellion on the part of this most dutiful lady.

  Her horses, like her dogs, allow her an element of being ordinary. They have, after all, no sense of monarchy or ceremony. They respond not to her rank, but to her abilities.

  Horses, she herself said once, ‘are the greatest levellers in the world’.

  The family that plays together, stays together . . . The Royal Family posing for the camera before riding at Windsor in 1957.

  Riding, of course, has been a traditional pastime for the upper classes; and the young Elizabeth and Margaret were far from the only children of privilege to tack and groom their ponies themselves. But Princess Elizabeth was unusual in having been able to share with her father visits to his racing stables, talking to the trainers and jockeys and learning the skilful matching of qualities and track records that might breed a winner.

  As a child she was lucky, though not unusual, in having two riding lessons a week. What was, again, unusual was that, from the time of her father’s accession to the throne, she was given lessons in riding sidesaddle, as well as astride. The arcane skill would be necessary when, as sovereign, she had to balance on a sidesaddle holding crop and reins in one hand, the other raised in a salute, as she surveyed the annual ceremony of Trooping the Colour.

  It is only since 1987 that she has watched the ceremony from a horse-drawn carriage, and that was more to do with the retirement of her black mare Burmese than with any acknowledgement of anno domini. In her eighties, the Queen still continued to ride for pleasure whenever her schedule allowed, albeit on a sure-footed Fell pony rather than the larger mounts she used to prefer.

  Windsor is the base from which she can watch proceedings at the Royal Windsor Horse Show – she won a prize, for the single private driving class, at the second show in 1944 – and at the Guards Polo Club. Her appearance at Royal Ascot is a behatted public fixture, but out of the public eye she and other members of the Royal Family used also to enjoy a private race with each other along five furlongs of Ascot track. Her mother (whose racing expenses she often paid) shared her preoccupation with racing, albeit that the Queen Mother as an owner leaned more towards National Hunt racing, while the Queen breeds for the flat.

  Those who work in the Queen’s racing stables (around Sandringham and Hampton Court, and in Berkshire) say her interest in breeding and training is that of a professional. She is said to read the Racing Post over breakfast every morning and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the stud book. Making her own photographic record of mares and their foals at Sandringham, she is prepared even for the challenging world of the covering shed and is happy to stand out for chilly early hours on the gallops. She has usually about twenty-five horses in training each season, racing in the royal silks: royal purple with scarlet sleeves and a black velvet cap. Her pleasure in watching them is visible to everyone and she is not above having a bet. ‘One has perhaps the gambling instinct,’ as she says.

  The Queen had a stream of winners in the first years of her reign. She was Britain’s top money winner in 1954 and 1957, thanks in part to Aureole, the horse for which she had been so concerned on Coronation Day. In the event, the temperamental Aureole was beaten into second place that year but next year won the aptly named Coronation Cup, and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, going on to become a two-time champion sire.

  The Queen has always enjoyed a strong rapport with horses, relishing the fact that the animals have no idea of her royal status.

  The 1960s were less successful racing years for the Queen, but 1974 (soon after Princess Anne married fellow equestrian Mark Phillips in a big public ceremony), brought the repeated successes of her filly Highclere. When, on a visit to America, she was given her first computer, the use she found for it was to keep track of all the information on her bloodstock. Although racing is a business, the Queen takes a more personal approach.

  With an instinctive understanding of horses, she displayed great interest in the training techniques of ‘horse whisperer’ Monty Roberts, once snatching a whole week from her schedule to watch him at work and making the California cowboy a genuine friend. Time out to spend with horses and horse people, in bluegrass country or in the West, has always featured heavily in her enjoyment of the USA. A courtier who saw the Queen on one of her visits to her Kentucky friends, Will and Sarah Farish, spoke of how much she
relished ‘an atmosphere of informality and gaiety that I never saw in England’.

  The Queen can usually be found surrounded by corgis and ‘dorgis’ (a corgi/dachshund cross) – as here, arriving at Aberdeen Airport to start her holiday at Balmoral in 1974.

  The Queen is almost as famous for her love of dogs as of horses, and though she exercises a notably firm control over the gun dogs on her various estates, the corgis inside her palaces are treated with more indulgence. Visitors are sometimes taken aback when the Queen enters a room surrounded by, as Princess Diana once put it, a ‘moving carpet’ of fur. Her corgi Susan went on honeymoon with her, and all her corgis since have been Susan’s descendants. Since one of her corgis bred with Princess Margaret’s dachshund Pipkin, she has also had a number of dorgis, a corgi/dachshund cross. When the Queen Mother died, the Queen took on her corgis – but in recent years she herself has refrained from breeding any new young dogs.

  Prince Philip’s feelings for horses are less visceral. Polo was a sport he took up after his marriage, and relished for its pace and fierce competitive edge. When in the 1970s arthritis made polo impossible, he took to carriage driving with equal verve. He and his wife, after all, were now in their middle years. The Queen had already reigned longer than most of her predecessors, for all that, as we now know, this would prove to be only the first act in the long story of her reign.

  Home and Away

  The 1970s were difficult times, both for the country and the monarchy. It was in full awareness of that difficulty that Palace and politicians began discussion of how best to celebrate the Silver Jubilee which, in 1977, saw the Queen mark twenty-five years on the throne.