The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  The Royal Library at Windsor Castle is also part of the Royal Collection, and for almost twenty years it was the province of Oliver Everett, an early casualty of the Princess of Wales’s curious behaviour. A former diplomat, he was her first Private Secretary and Comptroller to their household but was sent packing after just two years. He was given sanctuary in the Library, where it was always felt his talents were wasted, although this is no ordinary library. Housed in three rooms dating from the reign of Henry VII to that of Charles II, it is more like a museum of the British monarchy. Among its thousands of books is an important collection of illuminated manuscripts dating from about 1420; the original manuscripts of various poets and authors including Byron, Dickens and Hardy; more than 250 incunabula (the earliest and rarest Western printed books dating from before 1500); and the writings of several sovereigns, among them a signed copy of the book Henry VIII wrote against Luther in 1521, which earned him the title Defender of the Faith, and the description of her father’s coronation that the present Queen wrote in an exercise book at the age of eleven. It houses Old Masters drawings, watercolours and prints, plus collections of fans, maps, coins and medals, orders and decorations and portrait miniatures. But it also has a collection of random objects ranging from the overshirt worn by Charles I at his execution in 1649 to the Duke of York’s flying gloves from the Falklands War in 1982.

  None of this is financed by the taxpayer, as Sir Hugh is proud to boast. He has no Grant-in-Aid for his empire, and no money from the Civil List. The income that keeps them all afloat comes from the lucrative business of opening the palaces to the public (Buckingham Palace, the Royal Mews, Windsor Castle, Frogmore House and Holyroodhouse) – another of Peat’s recommendations – and from the galleries in London and Edinburgh, and a handful of shops at each of the above as well as online.

  Nor do they get a brass farthing from the unoccupied palaces; Hampton Court, Kensington Palace State Apartments, the Tower of London, the Banqueting House, Kew Palace and Queen Charlotte’s Cottage all come under the Secretary of State for the Environment and are run by the Historic Royal Palaces Agency. And yet all furnishings and works of art on display – not to mention the Crown Jewels – are part of the Royal Collection. The unoccupied palaces have always been maintained by the government but the department was restructured after the fire at Hampton Court in 1986, which killed an elderly widow who lived in a grace and favour apartment. (The next day the minister responsible went to inspect the damage; he decided something had to be done when, on asking who was responsible for Hampton Court, individuals from about ten different departments put up their hands.)

  Maintaining the Royal Collection is incredibly expensive – last year it cost about £4 million.

  You can’t give the finest works of art in the world to just anyone to clean and restore, so everyone we employ is at the very top of the tree. We have the painting conservation team based at Windsor, the paper conservation team, also at Windsor, which looks after books, drawings, watercolours and prints; the furniture conservation workshops in London, which looks after furniture, ceramics, metalwork, arms and armour and gilt-wood. We do all of that in-house. The Forth Bridge has nothing on a collection like this. We’re dealing with a collection that’s getting older by the day, canvas gets weaker, paint gets thinner, gilt-wood gets chipped, joints get weak, veneer falls off, porcelain chips; it all requires constant maintenance. What sets this collection apart from a museum collection is it is very much a collection in use. The Queen likes to use eighteenth-century services for decorating tables for state visits. In a museum these would be behind glass all the time and never touched. This adds a completely different dimension to it; it’s continuously in use. Paintings cannot be under microclimatic conditions at all times, as in a museum, and part of our job is to make sure things are kept in as good conditions as possible.

  That these treasures are not kept in museums is good news for the people who visit Buckingham Palace, either as guests or paying visitors. They see breathtaking art and a building steeped in history yet one still inhabited by the most famous family in the world. However, the boast that the Royal Collection is entirely independent and self-financing comes at a price. They have stepped irrevocably into the grubby world of retailing, and any shortcomings by Royal Collection Enterprises staff in dealing with suppliers – not unknown although inevitable, perhaps, in such a competitive and price-sensitive business – become a talking point and, because of the brand, it is the monarchy’s name that suffers.

  NINETEEN

  All the King’s Horses – The Private Queen

  Early in the 1990s a middle-aged Californian cowboy with an extraordinary talent for handling horses found himself on the verge of bankruptcy. He had worked with horses all his life. At the age of eight he was a Hollywood stunt rider and doubled for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. He had bred, trained and ridden horses. He had produced champions but now he was persona non grata in the horse world because he had had the temerity to suggest that it was unnecessary to hurt and frighten horses in order to get them to do what you wanted.

  His father was a trainer who had hurt and frightened horses; he had also hurt and frightened his son. He had endeavoured to break the child with the same brutality as he broke his young horses. By the age of twelve the boy had seventy-one broken bones in his body. As a result, he grew up with a passionate belief that there was another, kinder, way to treat both horses and human beings.

  His name was Monty Roberts; he was the real life ‘Horse Whisperer’. Now nearly seventy, his methods for starting horses have been adopted by forward-thinking, enlightened people all over the world, his books on the subject have sold in their millions and he no longer has to worry that he might be forced to sell the farm.

  ‘The person who did all of this was Her Majesty,’ he says.

  She was the one who found me and believed in me and she said, ‘There must be a book.’ And she didn’t let it go.

  Sheik Mohammed could have endorsed it, but he wanted it for his horses, not for anyone else’s, Walter Jacobs wanted it to be exclusive to Germany, Ronald Reagan said, ‘You just keep that under your hat, we’ll have some real nice racehorses’, and Her Majesty’s first words were ‘We’ve got to get this out to the rest of the world’. She’s the only one who came at it with a generous attitude. Her primary motivation I think is it’s a better way, a kinder way, and we’ve been making a lot of mistakes. I also believe in the time she has watched and worked with me that she believes there will be better racehorses and horses and carriage and Household Cavalry horses as a result.

  The Queen read about Monty’s methods in a magazine when she was staying with horseracing friends in Kentucky. She was intrigued. A few days later she saw a second magazine with another piece about Monty. As soon as she arrived home she asked one of her trainers his opinion. ‘It’s a load of rubbish,’ he said. She asked Sir John Miller, as Crown Equerry responsible for all the Queen’s non-racing horses, what he thought. ‘Rubbish,’ he echoed. That was the standard view at the time. For centuries man had been dominating horses by inflicting pain on them if they didn’t obey him. Monty’s methods were revolutionary: he used no violence; he doesn’t even raise his voice. He uses the language that horses use in the herd.

  The Queen persisted. Knowing he had a friend in California, she bought Sir John Miller an airline ticket and asked him to go and visit the friend and check out this Monty Roberts. ‘If you still think it’s rubbish when you’ve watched him, fine; but if you think there’s anything to it, I want to see him.’ The friend lived six miles from Monty and knew him well; and when he said he was bringing the Queen of England’s Crown Equerry to see him, Monty was convinced it was a prank.

  ‘Sir John got out of the car and he looked like something out of Central Casting,’ says Monty, a big man, gentle, generous and amused. ‘Tweeds, waistcoat, white moustache, cane, perfect English accent. He watched me do several horses, got back to the house and said, “What are you d
oing on 1 April? I think the Queen will want you to come to Windsor Castle.” Ten days later I had an invitation.’

  The first of April fell during a very busy week for the Queen. The Russian President Gorbachev and his wife Raisa were in Britain on a state visit and they were due to have lunch at Windsor Castle the day Monty arrived. He was told he might not get to meet her at all, that she might only be able to watch his demonstration on video. Then he was told he would meet her; she would watch him for an hour in the morning before her lunch. He was nervous. At home he trained his horses behind a wooden fence; no good if people were to see, so he found a metal cage, which they erected inside the schooling ring at Windsor. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother all came to watch that first morning, as did the Queen’s stud groom, Terry Pembury, and a number of female grooms. The Queen had selected twenty-three young horses with which to test him, including a filly belonging to the Queen Mother. Apart from the Queen, who had an open mind, the audience was deeply sceptical.

  The morning went well but at lunch he couldn’t help noticing Sir John Miller and the grooms speaking into walkie-talkies out of earshot. Exactly why became clear as they got up to leave. The girls thought he had in some way hypnotized the horses he had handled that morning. ‘Her Majesty’s very upset with what these girls are saying,’ said Sir John, ‘and she has sent a truck off to Hampton Court to get two three-year-old piebald stallions that are due to be drum horses some day.’

  ‘These little babies were Suffolks, huge and raw as can be,’ says Monty.

  They weighed a ton. The two of them were in this little horsebox, there is steam pouring out of it and the truck is rocking from side to side, and they bring one of them out and bring him into the cage. There’s a bigger audience in the afternoon, so Sir John goes into the cage to introduce me, and the horse runs him out of it. So he introduces me from the outside. I go in, and the other horse outside is screaming at the one inside and I think, I’ve just got to block everything out. You can’t do my job when your adrenalin level is going through the roof; it was nothing to do with the horses, but with all those people there. So I blocked it all out like never before, and knew immediately he was going to be okay. In thirty minutes I had a rider on him and had him trotting around. The Queen was jubilant; the girls were sliding out and going back to the stables not saying a word. I said, ‘No, no, there’s another one outside.’ They said, no they had things to do, and the Queen knew they did but she wanted them to watch, so they did, and the second horse was just as good.

  The Queen was profoundly affected by what she had seen and had plenty of questions about why the horses had behaved as they had. The Duke of Edinburgh was predictably curt – ‘I’ve got a whole lot of ponies out there that I don’t think you could do that with’ (during the next few days he was proved wrong) – but the Queen Mother, who had great difficulty walking at that time and was leaning heavily on two of her staff, had tears streaming down her face. ‘That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ she said, stiffening only slightly when, without thinking, Monty put a pair of comforting arms around her.

  The Queen watched him work with her horses all day, every day of that week – Monty is convinced she told her Private Secretary to clear her diary. On one day the editor of Horse and Hound, Michael Clayton, came to watch and asked the Queen whether he could write an article about Monty’s method and use a photograph of her to accompany it; she agreed. ‘There was the door-opening of all time,’ says Monty. And at the end of the week she lent him a car – a Ford Scorpio, armour-plated underneath – and sent him off to give demonstrations in twenty-one cities around the country, telling Sir John Miller to set the cage up, get some horses for Monty to work on and organize everything. ‘I want the people of Great Britain to know about this,’ she said. ‘Her Majesty was my first tour guide,’ says Monty, grinning.

  Since that week Monty Roberts has been a guest at Windsor Castle on more than twenty occasions. He stays in South Lodge or with Sir Richard Johns, governor of Windsor Castle, and his wife in the Norman Tower, but always sees the Queen for a private lunch or tea, and she is always fascinated to hear what he has been doing. All her horses are now started and trained using his methods; so too are the Duke of Edinburgh’s ponies and driving horses, and he has been called in by the Household Cavalry on innumerable occasions. They normally take ten years to train a horse to take the lead; he had one ready within six months.

  The Queen’s patronage has been fantastic but it is Monty’s books that have spread the word worldwide. ‘And that was all Her Majesty’s idea too. “You know there must be a book,” she said. I told her I wasn’t a book-writing type so I said couldn’t we just do some more videos. “No,” she said. “Videos go away, they are not for ever; the written word is for ever. There must be a book.”’

  Monty looks, sounds and dresses like the Californian cowboy he is and has, I suspect, spent more time on the back of a horse than he ever did in a classroom. The idea of a book was daunting and so he quietly forgot about it and hoped the Queen would, too. That autumn she asked him back to do some teach-ins with Horse and Hound.

  Her first words when I saw her were, ‘How are we coming on with the book?’ I knew then that there was going to be a book, I didn’t know how, but I knew she wasn’t going to let it go. And so next time I brought her some pages and she was shocked at how badly I wrote. I thought it was going to be a How To book. She was very kind, she read them and did not throw them at me and say they’re rubbish, but her body language did and she said, ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t tell a How To story of a discipline that no one’s ever heard of before until you know the person and how they came to these conclusions, so you must give us a more autobiographical look at this and then maybe do the How To bit.’ So I was sent away with my homework under my arm again, totally lacking in any talent.

  After the Queen had read the next attempt she said, ‘I don’t think you should write a book. Get one of these little tape recorders and tell your story, because when you tell me your story I understand it; when you start to write it becomes very stiff and it isn’t you, it isn’t in your voice.’ So Monty went back to the drawing board.

  The Man Who Listens to Horses was published in 1996 in 14 countries and sold over three million copies. Monty Roberts has now written five books – one of them describing how his method of handling horses can be translated into the human world – and it is currently being practised with remarkable success at a failing junior school in Birmingham that was on the verge of being shut down.

  Monty had just been visiting the school the day I met him. ‘It’s amazing what’s going on there,’ he says. ‘My methods have been moving into the human field for thirty-five years now but it was all behind closed doors until Her Majesty made the doors open. They now want me to go to Australia and free the aboriginal people and help them to get violence and drugs out of their lives.’

  It is not surprising that the Queen should have been so taken with Monty Roberts and his methods. He is the most charismatic man and she has always adored horses; they have been her escape from the unreal world in which she lives and they respond well to her. As Sir John Miller says, ‘She has an ability to get horses psychologically attuned to what she wants, and then to persuade them to enjoy it.’

  TWENTY

  The Sport of Kings

  Horses are the Queen’s one indulgence, the one interest in her life on which she spends serious money. She has ridden since she was a small child, having been introduced to racing by her grandfather, King George V, who liked nothing more than to take his young granddaughter to visit the royal stud at Sandringham. It was he who gave her her first pony when she was six. He also loved dogs, the Queen’s other great love in life. She breeds and trains gun dogs – all registered at the Kennel Club with the prefix Sandringham, which is where she has kennels. Her grandfather bred Labradors and reintroduced the Clumber breed of spaniels (particularly good for rough shoot
ing) which were originally started by Edward VII. Edward VII was an avid breeder, he built kennels at Sandringham designed to house up to 100 dogs – which Edward VIII during his short reign closed down. George VI re-established them with Labradors and the Queen has continued the breeding programme, although in 1968 she demolished the old kennels and built a smaller complex. The breeding and training of gun dogs is one of her great passions, and as with horses, something about which she is a genuine expert. She has produced many Field Trial Champions over the years and Sandringham dogs are recognized in shooting circles as one of the top of the breed in the country.

  But it is her corgis for which she is better known. It was her father who introduced the family to corgis, and who gave the Queen her first on her eighteenth birthday, from which most of her subsequent corgis are descended. She currently has a fleet of five corgis (one inherited from her mother) and two dorgies (a cross between a corgi and a dachshund) and was devastated in 2003 when one of Princess Anne’s bull terriers attacked and killed one of them. The only thing that makes her cross is when a visitor treads on one of her dogs.