Elizabeth the Queen (36 page)

They can seek her advice, which Patricia Brabourne described as “sound, very human, very wise.” But they don’t pick up the phone and unburden themselves. Above all, they are respectful. Even David Airlie (the 13th Earl), who first met her as a five-year-old, would never say “Oh, come off it.” One ironclad principle is to avoid repeating her precise words—what has been called a “ring of silence.” “Those who see the private side don’t say anything specific for fear of violating her trust,” said the son of one of her lifelong friends. Yet those who know her best have a knack for speaking perceptively about her character and personality without betraying confidences.

“She is not someone who is enormously intimate,” said a friend of nearly six decades. “She is a wonderful friend, hugely amusing and incredible. She is straightforward and down-to-earth, and she is thoughtful. If one of one’s children is terribly ill, she will know, and say ‘How is so and so.’ But you can’t go too close. There is an aura. You wouldn’t treat her like your best friend sitting on a sofa. It is not because she is doing it on purpose. It is just part of her. You cannot encroach on her personal life. You just don’t go there.”

Superficially, the Queen’s circle might easily be dismissed as tweedy toffs, but in fact the men are capable and accomplished, the women bright and lively, all made of strong stuff and utterly reliable. “One of her greatest strengths is she is not associated with the old landed peerage,” said Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury, very much of that group, which also includes the grand dukes of Marlborough, Devonshire, and Beaufort. “She doesn’t have a clique. She has old friends, and the people she is related to. She is family minded.”

For friendship she has relied on her extended network of cousins on the Bowes Lyon side, mainly Mary Colman, Jean Elphinstone Wills and her sister Margaret Rhodes, Mountbatten cousins Patricia Brabourne and Pamela Hicks, as well as Henry “Porchey” Carnarvon, Hugh Grafton, and Rupert Nevill, who all knew her from the wartime days in Windsor Castle, longtime family friends in the sporting set such as the Earls of Airlie and Westmorland, and Sir Eric and Prudence Penn, who were linked to the Queen in several different ways. Prudence had been a friend from teenage years, and her husband served more than twenty years at the Palace organizing ceremonial events. His uncle and de facto guardian, Arthur Penn, had been one of the Queen Mother’s best friends and advisers, and had doted on the Queen as a child, calling her “the Colonel.”

“There is absolutely no such thing as snobbism for the Queen,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Dukes and butlers or maids are all treated with courtesy and friendship.” Much the same could be said for her attitude toward Americans. Woven through her friendships are a remarkable number of strands from Britain’s former colony. David Airlie’s wife, Virginia, is the daughter of John Barry Ryan and his wife, Nin, who were prominent in New York and Newport society. Porchey himself had an American mother, Catherine Wendell from New York, and his wife, the former Jean Wallop, grew up in Wyoming. Her paternal grandfather, the 8th Earl of Portsmouth, had settled in the United States and married the daughter of a Kentucky judge. Jean’s first cousin is the Queen’s childhood friend Micky Nevill, the daughter of an American mother and the 9th Earl of Portsmouth.

When Jean Wallop arrived in England in 1955, she met the Queen over drinks at the London house of her cousin’s friends, Gavin Astor, the 2nd Baron Astor of Hever, and his wife, Irene. “I nearly died of fright,” she recalled. “The idea of the Queen was intimidating. She was a star, but she made me feel fine.” Wallop was impressed immediately by Elizabeth II’s “tremendous steadiness. She is difficult to know, but it is worth the wait. You sort of become friends. It takes a long time to know her.”

Being entertained privately by her friends has long been an important escape valve for Elizabeth II, and she is equally comfortable in a grand country estate or a tiny mews house. The hostess sends her the guest list, but the Queen relies on her to organize the seating for luncheon or dinner. She arrives in a small car, accompanied only by a detective, who discreetly sits in another room. Over dinner at John and Patricia Brabourne’s in 1966, Noel Coward found the Queen to be “easy and gay and ready to giggle.” Two years later she was in high spirits at Raffles nightclub on the King’s Road for the twenty-first birthday party for the Brabournes’ son Norton Knatchbull. She even showed up that year at the wedding of lady-in-waiting Henriette Abel Smith’s daughter, where the groom wore a flowered caftan and Mick Jagger was a guest.

M
ORE OFTEN THAN
not, Philip has been by her side for these private moments. Approaching his fiftieth year as the 1960s drew to a close, his life as consort was a swirl of activity, with an average of 370 solo official engagements a year, many of them overseas. He was, if anything, becoming even more combative in his public persona. “You have mosquitoes. We have the press,” he told the matron of a Caribbean hospital in 1966, provoking a protest from the royal reporters that he finally quelled by apologizing. Several years later he remained unrepentant, telling an audience at Edinburgh University, “I get kicked in the teeth for saying things.” He insisted to a Scottish television interviewer that “the monarchy functions because occasionally you’ve got to stick your neck out.… The idea that you don’t do anything on the off-chance you might be criticized, you’d end up living like a cabbage and it’s pointless. You’ve got to stick up for something you believe in.”

While touring North America in the autumn of 1969, Philip followed his own advice—and generated unfortunate headlines in the process. He first told a group in Ottawa, “The answer to this question of the monarchy is very simple. If the people don’t want it, they should change it. But let us end it on amicable terms and not have a row. The monarchy exists not for its own benefit, but for that of the country. We don’t come here for our health. We can think of better ways of enjoying ourselves.” Having annoyed the Queen’s subjects in Canada, he then made his way to the United States to stir up even more controversy.

It had been ten years since the Queen had been to America, but Philip had made several subsequent trips to promote trade with Britain and gather support for his favorite causes. During a ten-day swing in 1966, he even jumped into a swimming pool on a dare at a Miami Beach reception to secure a $100,000 donation for the Variety Club charities. Three years later, President Nixon organized a stag dinner for the duke on November 4, with 105 men from the administration, Congress, military, and judiciary as well as leaders from business, communications, and academia.

By sheer happenstance, Barbara Walters of NBC’s
Today
show was at the White House filming an interview with Nixon’s daughter Tricia. When Walters saw the president, she chided him for failing to include any women in his dinner that evening for Philip. He tried to make amends by offering to persuade the duke to appear on her show, a request that had already been turned down. “I had never thought of the President of the United States as a booking agent,” Walters recalled.

But the next morning, Philip was on the air when Walters asked, “Might Queen Elizabeth ever abdicate and turn the throne over to Prince Charles?” “Who can tell?” Philip replied. “Anything might happen.” His flippant remark made a big splash in the British press and prompted an outpouring of support for the Queen in the streets before the Palace issued an emphatic statement that she would remain on the throne. Walters wrote to apologize to Philip for causing such an uproar. He thanked her, saying he was happy to have been the “means of unlocking such a spectacular display of cheerfulness and goodwill … particularly in this day and age when most demonstrations seem to reflect nothing but anger and provocation.” To Nixon, he declared that he had found Walters “particularly charming and intelligent.”

Far more significant were comments Philip made the following Sunday on NBC’s
Meet the Press
, which was billed by
Time
magazine as the forum in which the “Duke of Edinburgh jousts verbally with his friendly adversary, the Fourth Estate.” Asked how the royal family was coping with inflation, he said, “We go into the red next year. Now, inevitably, if nothing happens we shall either have to—I don’t know, we may have to move into smaller premises, who knows? … We had a small yacht which we had to sell, and I shall probably have to give up polo fairly soon.” Philip’s answer was too candid by half, and certainly damaging in its offhand tone. But the topic was serious. Inflation had been eroding the British economy, and had taken its toll on royal finances as well. Consumer prices had risen by 74 percent since 1953, and salaries for royal employees, typically lower than in private industry, had increased by 167 percent.

The Civil List, the principal allowance from the government for the Queen’s official expenditures, had been fixed since her accession at £475,000 annually, which was adequate for the early years when she had even been able to set aside the surplus for future contingencies. But as inflation picked up steam in 1962, expenses began outrunning income, and her surplus funds were used to cover growing deficits. By the time Prince Philip spoke out, the Queen faced the prospect of subsidizing the Civil List from other sources. The Queen had access to substantial income from the Duchy of Lancaster, a tax-free portfolio of properties and investments earmarked for both public and private purposes, as well as purely private income (also untaxed) of indeterminate amount, that supported Balmoral, Sandringham, her racing enterprise, and a range of personal expenses.

Other costs of the monarchy were supported by grants from government departments for the upkeep of the royal palaces, transportation, and security. But the Civil List expenditure was a political lightning rod for Labour Party critics who objected to underwriting the wealthy royal family—not only the Queen but her husband, mother, sister, daughter, and assorted other relatives who shared royal duties. (Charles, as the Duke of Cornwall as well as the Prince of Wales, had access to his own income through the extensive holdings of the Duchy of Cornwall, dating from the Middle Ages.) The critics ignored the fact that the source of the Civil List funds was the monarch’s Crown Estate, and that the amount allocated to the royal family represented a sliver of the revenue that the Crown Estate had been handing over to the government Treasury for more than two hundred years.

Philip’s remarks lit a fuse just as the Queen formally requested an increase in the Civil List payment. The issue exploded into heated debate in Parliament, with calls for a thorough examination of royal finances. Even Harold Wilson expressed his dismay over Philip’s comments, and on November 11, 1969, he announced that a select committee would conduct an investigation and make recommendations to Parliament.

The Queen’s image at the dawn of the new decade was captured in the Annigoni painting unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery on February 25, 1970. It was a striking depiction, shorn of the glamour and beauty of his first portrayal, at once wonderful and strange. This time she wore the red mantle of the Order of the British Empire, unadorned and again bareheaded, against a plain evening sky above a deep, long, and low horizon. She appeared at full length, and the emptiness of the background accentuated the solitary burdens of her office. Her expression was stern, yet her eyes looked slightly wistful. At a time of political and social ferment, Annigoni captured a reassuring certitude and dedication about the Queen, looking across her nation and her people.

Like the wedding of the Queen
and Philip a quarter century
earlier, the pageantry of their
daughter’s celebration struck
a bright spark at a particularly
bleak moment for Britain
.

The royal family on the Buckingham Palace balcony after the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, November 1973.
Mirrorpix

ELEVEN

“Not Bloody Likely!”