The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  They were a fascinating bunch and more joined us as we talked. The youngest was a small boy of seven who had been coming to royal engagements with his mother since he was seventeen days old. They were the only ones related to each other. The rest, guessing wildly, were probably in their thirties, forties and fifties, most of them women; they were bright, articulate and at great pains to convince me they were neither mad nor sad. This is their hobby, a strange one, they admit, but one that gets them out of the house, takes them all over the country to parts they otherwise might never visit, and provides them with friends from all over that they enjoy meeting up with. They know where the Queen will be from a list published on the internet and when their families and friends go off to football matches or on shopping trips, they pack up their picnic gear, their warmest jackets, hats, scarves and gloves and set off to watch the Queen and, less frequently, other members of the family, too. Some of them lived so far away they had had to spend the night in a bed and breakfast in Liverpool; others had set off well before dawn. They were all hugely knowledgeable about the Royal Family and great admirers of the Queen but not unconditionally so. One of her long-standing ladies-in-waiting had died a couple of weeks before and they were disappointed that the Queen had not gone in person to her funeral. ‘She should have done. She should have been there.’

  The Queen recognizes her fans and has spoken to them all several times, and also to the little boy – and remarks to his mother about how much he has grown. There are other regulars too who are more obsessive. One man who dresses in funny hats with Union Jacks on them is always giving the Queen poems, and engages her in conversations from which she clearly finds it difficult to extricate herself.

  Meeting the public in these circumstances is one of the least enviable parts of the job. There are always many, many more hands outstretched, posies offered and children thrust to the front than the Queen or anyone else can possibly acknowledge: old faces, young faces, people in wheelchairs and pushchairs, people in woolly hats and anoraks, in uniforms and in their Sunday best, all of them looking expectant, excited and hopeful that they will catch the Queen’s eye, that she will stop beside them and say something they can tell their family and friends about and remember for ever. There are hundreds of eyes on her and dozens of cameras. People seem to feel the need to capture their moment in the Queen’s gaze for posterity and very often the Queen is left trying to communicate with faces hidden behind flashing instamatics. But she is used to it and seems unfazed by anything that anyone says or does, moving slowly along the line, smiling, taking flowers and passing them to her lady-in-waiting or her equerry, who are never far from her side. She doesn’t take everything that is offered, doesn’t respond to everyone’s pleading, doesn’t pick out every elderly or handicapped face at the front and doesn’t sign autographs. It is inevitable that people will be disappointed – that is the nature of walkabouts – there are just too many people and she doesn’t have youth on her side. But some people get lucky and their day is made, all the hours of standing in the cold rewarded in a thirty-second exchange.

  The Queen does not have youth on her side. On that Thursday she was two weeks short of her seventy-eighth birthday; the Duke of Edinburgh, who is beside her and supporting her on every engagement, talking to dignitaries, talking to people in the crowd as she does, was two months short of his eighty-third birthday. Most people of their age have been retired for years, and many do nothing more strenuous with their days than potter in the garden, do the crossword or play with the grandchildren.

  The Queen has supposedly slowed down a little. The Prince of Wales has done a number of foreign tours on her behalf, particularly the long-haul ones, and he conducts an increasing number of investitures, but that week you would never have known it and there is absolutely no chance of the Queen retiring to potter anywhere. When she was nearing sixty, her then Press Secretary had his knuckles rapped; he rang the Queen from the squawk-box on his desk and told her that Queen Juliana of the Netherlands had just abdicated. ‘Typical Dutch,’ said the Queen and hung up on him. Even if she became incapacitated in some way it is still unthinkable that she would abdicate; far more likely that a regency would be adopted. She promised at her coronation to give her life, whether it be short or long, to the service of her country and that is the premise on which our hereditary monarchy is based. She, Prince Charles and Prince William all understand that, and although it asks a lot of the individual, to have a Head of State who has been in the post for over fifty years, been around the world several times, met most other heads of state, witnessed events and observed and absorbed more than fifty years of national and international politics is a priceless commodity. And one that often seems to be better appreciated outside Britain than it is at home.

  France, for example, which shed its monarchy more than two hundred years ago, greets the Queen with rapture. At the beginning of the week that I saw her in Liverpool she had been on her fourth state visit to France and it had been a dazzling success. Her previous state visit, in 1992, happened to begin the day after the first instalment of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, in the Sunday Times. Robin Janvrin and Charles Anson had been across to recce the tour some months before. They were given the red-carpet treatment themselves. They went to a huge meeting with the chief of protocol and a collection of very senior officials in a magnificent glittering state building. The chief of protocol opened up a book and said, ‘This is how we do state visits.’ Then he closed the book firmly and in front of a hundred functionaries said, ‘Now, what would the Queen like to do? Just tell us, we’ll do anything she wants.’ When the Queen arrived in Paris on the Monday the British press were in a frenzy, desperately trying to get a reaction to Morton’s revelations. No one would speak to them. The French – officials and ordinary people in the street alike – couldn’t have been less interested in the story that was sending shock waves the length and breadth of Britain. ‘Listen,’ they said, ‘we’ve got the Queen here. We’re not interested in this story – it’s just gossip, just someone writing a book.’ Their entire focus was on the Queen, who they regarded as a very special visitor.

  Her visit in April 2004 was to celebrate the centenary of the Entente Cordiale – celebrations that concluded with a return visit by the French President Jacques Chirac to Britain the following November. It had been a hundred years since her great-grandfather Edward VII had sailed across the Channel to set in train the ‘special agreement’ that put an end to years of hostility between the two countries. When he arrived he had been booed, but by the time he left Parisians were crying, ‘Vive notre Roi’. The Queen arrived to a much warmer welcome than her great-grandfather and her journey was very much more comfortable. She and the Duke of Edinburgh travelled with Eurostar in a specially named train – Entente Cordiale – its nose freshly painted with the flags of both countries with two drivers, one French, the other British. The symbolism of having come through the Channel Tunnel, which now links the two nations, was not lost on either side.

  Rail workers had sprayed the tracks with melon-scented air freshener by way of welcome and schoolchildren waiting on the platform at the Gare du Nord cheered. At the place de la Concorde, the very spot where King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette lost their heads during the French Revolution, she was accorded full military ceremony – proof that while the French may have dispensed with their monarchy they still treasure some pomp and pageantry – and 150 mounted members of the Republican Guard trotted behind her as she progressed through the streets of Paris. In the Champs-Elysées she inspected the Guard of Honour, but security was so tight that only a few schoolchildren could see her. The French had deployed 2400 uniformed officers and an unspecified number of plain-clothes policemen to guard their special guest. Sharp-shooters on the rooftops tracked her movements and the shops she visited in the rue Montorgueil had been thoroughly searched beforehand. The last time France had had a state visitor, security had been so intense with roads blocked off and diversions everywhere
that any goodwill that might have been generated by the sight of a foreign president in the city evaporated in the chronic traffic jams. The Queen hates the security she is forced to live with, as do all of the family. She recognizes that, sadly, it is a necessary part of modern life, but insists that it shouldn’t come between her and the public who want to see her. She specifically asked for the security in Paris to be low key and, as if to prove the point, went on a short walkabout outside the Elysée Palace where hundreds of Parisians had gathered to cheer.

  ‘I believe that we mark this week a most significant anniversary for our two nations,’ she said at the state banquet held in her honour at the Elysée Palace.

  If I may be allowed tonight one small British understatement, our historical relationship has not always been smooth. For centuries we fought each other fiercely, often and everywhere – from Hastings to Waterloo, from the Heights of Abraham to the mouth of the Nile. But since 1815 our two nations have not been to war. On the contrary, we have stood together, resolute in defence of liberty and democracy, notably through the terrible global conflicts of the twentieth century.

  This was far from inevitable when we reflect on how close we came to war over our colonies at the end of the nineteenth century. That we turned away from conflict to the path of partnership was due to the single-minded efforts of a small number of enlightened individuals dedicated to Franco-British rapprochement. Their immense achievement was the Entente Cordiale signed one hundred years ago this week. I am proud of the part my great-grandfather, King Edward VII, played in this historic agreement. It was his initiative, and that of your President Loubert, to insist on reciprocal state visits in 1903 which did so much to create the popular atmosphere for the successful political negotiations to settle our colonial disagreements the following year.

  I hope that this state visit, and the season of Entente Cordiale celebrations closing with your visit to London, Mr President, in the autumn, will likewise contribute to a new era of Franco-British partnership. Our circumstances a century on are perhaps not entirely dissimilar.

  For just as our statesmen and my great-grandfather realized a hundred years ago, we too need to recognize that we cannot let immediate political pressures, however strongly felt on both sides, stand between us in the longer term. We are both reminded that neither of our two great nations, nor Europe, nor the wider Western Alliance, can afford the luxury of short-term division or discord, in the face of threats to our security and prosperity that now challenge us all.

  Of course we will never agree on everything. Life would be dull indeed, not least for the rest of the world, if we did not allow ourselves a little space to live up to our national caricatures – British pragmatism and French élan; French conceptualism and British humour; British rain and French sun; I think we should enjoy the complementarity of it all.

  Exchanges of visits by heads of state have been happening for centuries as a way of demonstrating friendship between two countries – and one of the earliest was with France, when in 1520 Henry VIII invited Francis I of France to join him in the Field of Cloth of Gold to put a seal on a new treaty of friendship between them; Edward VII’s treaty, so far, has been altogether more successful. The convention until recent times was that sovereigns only made one state visit each way during the course of their reign, unless the head of state changed, but since there are now more republics than monarchies and presidents change more frequently than monarchs, the rule has become more relaxed. The Queen usually makes two state visits a year and has two incoming visits from heads of state, selected after discussions between the private secretaries of the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. There used to be three a year but Margaret Thatcher reduced the number when she was Prime Minister, partly because having been on the throne for forty years the Queen had already entertained most long-term heads of state, and partly on the grounds of cost – which is borne by the government. The cost is considerable: £0.7 million in the year to 31 March 2004, and that’s not counting the cost of police and Army security and of the Armed Services ceremonial. The Queen made just one visit abroad during that year, to a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Nigeria, and received two visiting heads of state – the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and the United States President, George W. Bush, the security for which was the tightest ever mounted, and therefore one of the most expensive visits ever made.

  Ceremonial is something the British do to perfection and it is at state visits that the splendours of our national heritage and the pomp and pageantry really come into their own. Visiting heads of state are treated as genuine guests of the Queen and want for nothing. She oversees all the plans, chooses all the menus, checks the suites that her visitors will stay in at Buckingham Palace or Windsor – or occasionally Holyroodhouse – to make sure that the flowers, the books and everything that has been laid out for them are right for the occasion; she decides on the presents that will be given to her guests and even checks the dining arrangements once the table has been laid for the state banquet on the first evening. From the moment a decision is made about who is to be invited, the organization falls to the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, who has been in charge of all things ceremonial since 1991. In his early sixties, with an Eton and Sandhurst pedigree, followed by twenty-three years in the Scots Guards and now nearly twenty years at Buckingham Palace, he can do state visits, weddings, jubilees, investitures and state funerals standing on his head. And in between times he is in charge of a whole host of things including the Crown Jewels, the Queen’s chapels, chaplains and choirs, styles, titles, protocol, royal warrants, swans and the fifteenth-century ceremony of swan upping.

  It is a popular misconception, a hangover from the Middle Ages, that all swans in Britain belong to the Crown. They don’t. It was only ever swans on the Thames that belonged to the sovereign, and in 1473 a royal charter was granted to the Worshipful Company of Vintners allowing them to own swans on the river too, and a few years later the Dyers were also given permission. From then on it became necessary to mark the swans so they could tell who owned which. Unmarked birds belong to the sovereign, those with a mark to the right of their beaks to the Dyers and those to the left to the Vintners. And every year since then, on the Monday of the third week in July, the royal swan keeper, accompanied by a representative from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, the Queen’s swan uppers and the swan marker of the Vintners’ Company and the swan master of the Dyers’ Company and their men – all dressed in special uniforms – set off upstream from Blackfriars in London to Pangbourne in Berkshire, in six rowing boats known as Thames skiffs. The journey takes five days and the task is to find the broods of cygnets and their parents, identify the adult birds and mark the young in the same way. The first man to sight a brood shouts ‘All up!’, warning everyone to get into position to catch the swans.

  State visits follow a formula. The visiting heads of state arrive before lunch on a Tuesday at Gatwick Airport, where they are met by a junior member of the Royal Family and taken on the royal train to Victoria Station. Until ten or twelve years ago, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, possibly other members of the family and various dignitaries, including the Prime Minister, would meet their guests – head of state, spouse and cast of fourteen – at the station in carriages. A long procession, escorted by the Household Cavalry, would then make the journey to Buckingham Palace along Victoria Street to Parliament Square, up Whitehall, through Horse Guards Arch and into the Mall, thus knocking out seventeen bus routes for the day that run from the north of London to the south. In response to public criticism the procession was scrapped and the Queen now meets her guests at Horse Guards Parade. An informal lunch for sixty follows – six round tables for ten with a member of the Royal Family heading each, which the Queen describes as an ‘ice-breaker’ – then an exchange of gifts and occasionally decorations.

  That evening the state banquet takes place, at which
165 people sit down to dinner in the Ballroom round a horseshoe-shaped table that will have taken up to seven hours to prepare. There are no tablecloths: the tables are highly polished, lavishly decorated with floral arrangements and gold candelabra, laid out – using a ruler to measure the space between each setting – with gleaming George III or George IV silver and gilt cutlery and porcelain from one of the many priceless services in the Royal Collection. Some of it is kept in the vaults; the rest of it, when not in use, lives in one of the display cases in the Queen’s Gallery and it is only handled by people who have been specially trained to work in the china and silver pantries. If the banquet is at Windsor Castle, in St George’s Hall – as it was for President Putin in 2003 – the tableware is transported from London, as are the staff to prepare for the evening, to cook and wait at table. The glassware is cut-crystal made for the coronation in 1953 and hand-engraved with EIIR, the Queen’s royal cipher; the wine that is served in it, the finest from the royal cellars, is looked after by the Yeoman of the Cellars. The family are not wine enthusiasts but others in the Palace are; there is a tasting committee which includes Masters of Wine from among the Royal Warrant Holders, and wines are bought en primeur through the Clerk of the Cellars and laid down until such time as he advises they are ready for drinking. According to the accounts for 2003–04, there is currently £365,000 worth of wine in store.