Press opinion had held that there might be an embarrassing lack of public interest in the Queen Mother’s obsequies – that this was the reason the period of official mourning was shorter than it would have been in earlier days. With hindsight it looks like an unnecessary pessimism, but the Palace must have been alarmed by the public apathy that had greeted Princess Margaret’s death.
This time, however, opinion could not have been more wrong. The Queen Mother’s coffin was driven from Windsor first to St James’s Palace, for family and private visits, and then to Westminster Hall for a public lying in state. Beside her crown, with its legendary centrepiece of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, rested a single wreath of white roses and freesias that read ‘In Loving Memory, Lilibet’.
More than a quarter of a million people lined the streets to see the coffin pass and waited to applaud the Queen herself as she drove back home after seeing her mother’s catafalque put on public display. It was, the Queen said, one of the most moving things that had ever happened to her – and it was also a barometer that clearly showed better weather for the monarchy.
As the Queen Mother’s body lay in state through a long weekend (she had died on Easter Saturday), people came in their hundreds of thousands, the queues stretching far down the other side of the Thames. The opening hours of Westminster Hall had to be extended to twenty-two hours a day. Perhaps the enthusiasm was as much about us, the people, and acknowledging our century, as it was about the woman who had come to represent it. To embody our hopes and fears, our triumphs and regrets, has always been the function of the monarchy.
The Queen is seen following her mother’s coffin out of Westminster Abbey, after the funeral service of the Queen Mother on 9 April 2002. That spring had already seen the death of Princess Margaret.
As the Queen said in a speech the night before the funeral: ‘Ever since my beloved mother died over a week ago, I have been deeply moved by the outpouring of affection which has accompanied her death . . . I thank you for the support you are giving me and my family as we come to terms with her death and the void she has left in our midst. I thank you also from my heart for the love you gave her during her life and the honour you now give her in death.’
On 9 April, after a service in Westminster Abbey, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was buried at Windsor, beside her husband and with a casket containing the ashes of her younger daughter. It was the end of an era, but symptomatic, perhaps, of a new era for the Queen herself.
Both her mother and her sister, as she would say in her Christmas speech, had been ‘very much part of my life and always gave me their support and encouragement’. But in some sense, nonetheless, this would prove to have been a moment of progression for the Queen – a moment when, as someone close to her put it, she ‘stepped into the century’.
Her mother had always been a voice arguing against change, and one hard to resist. Now that voice was gone. Moreover it seemed as though she had herself taken on some of the characteristics of the relatives she had lost. The Queen Mother had been cast as the universally beloved one, Margaret as the glamorous one and Elizabeth as the steadfast one. Now she was all three.
The Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 saw her in a more relaxed mood.
The celebrations for Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee went ahead as planned. On 4 June she travelled to St Paul’s Cathedral in the Gold State Coach for a service of thanksgiving followed by lunch in the Guildhall. There she spoke of family continuity, ‘taking this opportunity to mention the strength I draw from my own family. The Duke of Edinburgh has made an invaluable contribution to my life over these past fifty years.‘
During the festivities the Queen, speaking at Westminster on 30 April, declared that if a Jubilee was a moment to define an age, then ‘for me we must speak of change . . . Change has become a constant; managing it has become an expanding discipline. The way we embrace it defines our future.’ As a sign of her determination to embrace change, the Queen invited Camilla Parker Bowles to the Golden Jubilee celebration.
In this warmer climate, it was once more possible to think about the future of the monarchy. As the Queen said when she opened the Hyde Park fountain in Diana’s memory in July 2004: ‘Of course there were difficult times, but memories mellow.’ It was unthinkable that Charles, when the time came, should become king possessed of a mistress rather than a wife. The Queen was wholly supportive when, on 9 April 2005, the Prince of Wales married his long-time love. There was again that willingness to change, to accept Charles’s dictum that Camilla’s presence in his life was ‘non-negotiable’. And there was of course a concern for the happiness of a son who, as his mother must be aware, had often found his position difficult.
When the Queen visited Bushy Park for her Golden Jubilee, the welcome of the schoolchildren reflected a renewed public warmth towards the monarchy.
Sufficient time was felt to have passed since Diana’s death for public hostility against Camilla Parker Bowles to have died down. The Queen had sounded out various Prime Ministers of the Commonwealth in the months before. Because Camilla had a first husband still living, the actual marriage had (since Prince Charles wished to marry at Windsor, rather than taking Princess Anne’s Scottish way out of the difficulty) to be a civil ceremony in Windsor registry office, which the Queen as Supreme Governor of the Church of England felt it was inappropriate to attend. But she was there at the service of dedication in St George’s Chapel which followed.
At the wedding reception the Queen first announced that Hedgehunter had won that day’s Grand National and then, linking the couple with the fences of that famous race: ‘They have overcome Becher’s Brook and the Chair and all kinds of obstacles.
When Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles in April 2005 the Queen’s expression showed her pleasure. ‘Welcome to the winner’s enclosure’, she told the couple.
They have come through and I’m very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves. Welcome to the winner’s enclosure.’ A racing woman could go no further.
When Prince Charles organized a family dinner for the Queen’s eightieth birthday the next year he spoke of his ‘darling Mama’ – through all the years ‘a figure of reassuring calm and dependability’. At an official lunch at the Mansion House she herself noted that: ‘As one gets older, birthdays seem to come round quicker; they are therefore less obvious excuses for wider celebration than personal moments to count one’s blessings. As Groucho Marx once said: “Anyone can get old – all you have to do is live long enough.”’
The Queen smiling at the crowds out in Windsor to celebrate her 80th birthday.
In 2006 the Queen was presented in a new light – as played by Helen Mirren in the eponymous movie. Though the portrayal of other family members of the Royal Family was unflattering – and insiders say it shows only the suppressed public Queen rather than the sparky private one – those who know her say that essentially the picture rings true.
The Queen’s 80th birthday was greeted as a cause for national, as well as family, rejoicing.
Certainly in the end The Queen must be counted as more blessing than curse. It showed an Elizabeth whose natural compassion was at war with her rigid sense of duty, who had early been forced, by her father’s untimely death, into a lifetime of rigid formality.
At the Academy Awards ceremony in February 2007, Helen Mirren, accepting the Best Actress Oscar, said that: ‘For fifty years, and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty – and her hairstyle. 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. I salute her courage and her consistency . . . Ladies and gentlemen, I give you – the Queen!’
New Generation
In the second decade of the twenty-first century the Royal Family has seemed firmly set on an upward path. The Queen’s sheer longevity – once seen as a problem – has proved to be a strength. She is firmly established as National Treasure Numb
er One, while Diana’s sons are seen at once as flying the flag of royal tradition, and carrying on their mother’s legacy.
When the engagement of His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales to Miss Catherine Middleton was announced in November 2010, it looked as though the modern age had finally hit the monarchy. So it had, in a way, with a future heir to the throne marrying a woman rooted firmly in the British middle classes.
But in another way – as the Queen is perhaps realistic enough to have known – the match follows the tradition of centuries. Royal marriages always used to be about cementing an alliance – with some foreign power, historically. The difference is that in the twenty-first century, it is an alliance with the British people that the Royal Family needs most urgently.
When William and Kate married on 29 April the following year, and assumed the titles of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, more than two billion people worldwide – almost a third of the world’s population – are estimated to have watched the wedding (far outstripping the 750 million who watched the wedding of William’s parents). The atmosphere was overwhelmingly inclusive. The guest list cut down on foreign dignitaries to make way for such old friends as the landlord of the Old Boot Inn near the Middletons’ home village of Bucklebury in Berkshire.
That was definitely an innovation – a change from Charles and Diana’s wedding – which had the Queen’s express approval. Prince William has described how Palace officials at first handed him a proposed guest list with almost 777 names on it, all of people he didn’t know. It was the Queen herself who told them that was ‘ridiculous’, they should start with their own friends – that it was their day. There is a strong sense that she approves of Kate Middleton – interested less in her comparatively humble origins than in the fact that she comes from a stable and loving family.
As the Bishop of London declared, ‘In a sense every wedding is a royal wedding with the bride and groom as king and queen of creation.’ But this day was especially enchanting, with a Westminster Abbey full of trees, a verger caught on camera cartwheeling down the aisle, and the young couple taking an evening drive past the last of the camping crowds in a vintage car with an L-plate tacked on to it by William’s best man, Prince Harry.
The popularity of his parents and children might easily have left Prince Charles out in the cold. But he, too, is a more popular figure than he used to be. His visit of reconciliation to Northern Ireland is a case in point. That he should, after the distress he suffered over Lord Mountbatten’s death, engage with the peace process to end the Troubles did much to reclaim for him that moral high ground which has long been presented as the justification for the Royal Family and which, back in the 1990s, they seemed to have lost so completely. The Queen herself made a historic visit to Dublin in 2011 – the first by a British monarch for one hundred years – delighting her audience with a few words of Gaelic.
In a happier second marriage, Prince Charles’s relations with his family, too, seem easier. In her 2008 Christmas broadcast the Queen spoke of the ‘blessing, comfort and support’ she and her husband gained from Charles, just turned sixty. In a speech a few weeks earlier she had described their comfort in knowing ‘that into his care are safely entrusted the guiding principles of public service and duty’.
The Diamond Jubilee of 2012 saw the Prince’s praise for ‘Mummy’. It was a very different tone from the speeches of earlier years, and the Royal Family had come a long way. How to mark the Diamond Jubilee had been discussed long in advance, and far around the world. This was, after all, a historic event, with Queen Victoria the only previous British monarch to have remained so long on the throne. (And with future sovereigns likely to come to the throne at a much greater age, we will not readily see these jubilees again.) It soon became apparent that the 2,012 beacons originally planned to be lit across the Commonwealth in no way matched up to the real appetite for celebration. In the end (after the first beacon was lit in Tonga with a coconut sheath torch) there would prove to be more than four thousand in the UK alone.
The Queen’s own contribution to the debate comprised two firm opinions: that the use of public funds should be minimized, and that the public should not be ‘forced to celebrate’. The first was resolved by the large number of projects funded by private sponsorship; and about the second she need not have worried.
Events extended through the spring and summer. (Understandably, the Queen has always preferred to limit celebration of the February day on which she actually acceded to the throne. To her, after all, it was the day on which her father died.) Her children and grandchildren embarked on a series of visits on her behalf to the Commonwealth countries – visits she would, at a younger age, have undertaken in person. The occasion was also marked with commemorative coins and stamps, a special lottery grant, a time capsule and the renaming of a stretch of Antarctica.
Perhaps the most ‘English’ celebration was the tea party held by a group of climbers atop a Canadian Arctic mountain; the most international, a special Google Doodle. The most traditionally monarchical was the lunch the Queen hosted at Windsor for more than twenty current or former monarchs.
Especially interesting was the Jubilee Hour initiative by which, in recognition of the Queen’s sixty years on the throne, organizations or individuals could pledge sixty minutes of their time to help their local community. Some 2.75 million hours were pledged. As the Buckingham Palace statement put it: ‘It was the Queen’s hope that her Diamond Jubilee would provide an opportunity for communities, groups and individuals to come together in a way that they would not otherwise be able to do.’
The bulk of the Jubilee events – formal celebrations in London, and street parties around the country – were concentrated over one four-day-long bank holiday weekend in June. On Sunday 3 June, the River Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant was held, the largest flotilla of boats the river had seen in 350 years – barges, cruisers, skiffs, Dunkirk ‘little boats’ – marred only by terrible weather. The next day brought a picnic for ten thousand before the Diamond Jubilee Concert, which featured performers representing musical styles from throughout the Queen’s reign, including Shirley Bassey, Grace Jones and Kylie Minogue.
The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was marked by a service of thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral on 5 June 2015. Elizabeth II is only the second British monarch to reach this anniversary, the first being Queen Victoria.
On 5 June, there was a national service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s, to which the Queen was accompanied by Charles and Camilla, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. They were joined by a host of younger royals. But it seemed particularly poignant that she had to attend this ceremony without her husband by her side.
After the river pageant Prince Philip gallantly stood in the open air by his wife, tapping his foot to music as the royal barge steered up the Thames through drenching rain. The year before, the Queen had made him the nation’s Lord High Admiral, a title she herself had borne until then. However, the next day Philip was suddenly admitted to hospital. The Queen had to go through the rest of the celebrations without him, and it seemed all too clear a symbol of what may be ahead. The Duke of Edinburgh, almost five years older than his wife, was seemingly in less robust health than she.
Prince Philip, on the death of her mother and sister, had become the only person who could speak to the Queen on terms of equality, who could give her the affectionate nickname of ‘Bet’, for ‘Lilibet’. In the spring of 2017, news that he would be retiring from public life sparked a wave of concern, and of interest in what had become the longest royal marriage in British history.
The Duchess of Cambridge has spoken of the importance for the Queen of having the support of a husband not only on public occasions, but ‘behind closed doors’, saying truly that having to fulfill her role alone would be ‘a very, very lonely place to be’. The world knows Elizabeth II is a woman who meets with stoicism whatever comes. But the loss of her husband at her side could only be immense (the more so since many of the network of c
ousins and long-serving courtiers on whom she long-relied upon have already predeceased her).
The Queen has, however, always been temperamentally attuned to looking at the future in a positive way. Recent years have seen her engage – at least nominally – with the new media generation, sending a token tweet and observing the activities of her grandchildren on Facebook. The opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games saw her almost making showbusiness history as the first monarch to appear in a James Bond movie sketch. The Queen herself was seen being escorted out of the Palace by Daniel Craig, in his character of 007 – and then, for one delirious second, we seemed to see the 86-year-old monarch parachuting down from the stadium roof. Sportingly, the real Queen made no difficulty at all about agreeing to wear the same outfit as the stunt double who actually leapt from the helicopter.
But there is, of course, a new generation coming into the Royal Family. The Queen’s first great-grandchild, Savannah Phillips, had been born in 2010, to Princess Anne’s son Peter. In December 2012, news that the Duchess of Cambridge was pregnant triggered a rush to change the rules of succession laid down more than three hundred years before – notably, the rule that a male heir would always be given precedence over a female.
The Queen was by no means averse to this change. In March and October the preceding year, her speeches had twice referred to the fact that the Commonwealth was that year celebrating women as ‘agents of change’, which ‘reminds us of the potential in our societies that is yet to be fully unlocked, and it encourages us to find ways to allow girls and women to play their full part.’ It was a theme to which she would return.
In the event, the birth of Prince George on 22 July 2013 made the succession changes irrelevant in the immediate future. But Princess Charlotte, born on 2 May 2015, will continue to follow her elder brother George in the succession rather than being displaced by any future boy. And the new legislation will endure – for as long as the (now modernized) monarchy does.
Elizabeth- the Queen and the Crown Page 11
