Elizabeth the Queen (44 page)

Queen and prime minister thrived in a masculine world, but in different ways. Elizabeth II “was reserved but she could give you not quite a come-hither look, but one which was so friendly as to be encouraging,” said her long-serving courtier Edward Ford. “She made us feel like men.” Thatcher, who had just one woman in her cabinet, asserted her position with an intimidating firmness—earning the nickname “the Iron Lady”—that the Queen would have considered unnecessary if not unseemly for herself.
Spitting Image
, the satirical television show featuring large puppets that caricatured politicians, the royal family, and a slew of celebrities, famously presented a skit in 1984 showing the prime minister and her cabinet sharing a meal. “Would you like to order, sir?” the waitress asked Thatcher (dressed in a man’s suit and tie, holding a cigar in her left hand). “Yes, I will have a steak,” she replied. Waitress: “How’d you like it?” Thatcher: “Oh, raw please.” Waitress: “And what about the vegetables?” Thatcher: “Oh, they’ll have the same as me.”

Princess Michael of Kent, the wife of one of the Queen’s cousins, came up with a surprisingly apt description of the division of labor between Britain’s two female leaders, each of whom had a powerful aura: “The Queen is the mother of the country,” she explained to her children. “She sends you to school.” Margaret Thatcher was “the headmistress who makes the rules you have to obey.”

Yet the prime minister was scrupulously deferential to her sovereign. “No one could curtsy lower than Margaret Thatcher,” said Charles Powell. “If I did it you would need a crane to pull me up. She came from a very patriotic lower middle class family who had huge respect for the royal family and the Queen, so as a result she would have been slightly formal.” Thatcher once said that if she were a visitor from Mars required to create a constitutional system, “I would set up … a hereditary monarchy, wonderfully trained, in duty and in leadership, which understands example, which is always there, which is above politics, for which the whole nation has an affection and which is a symbol of patriotism.”

One obligation the prime minister regarded as burdensome was the annual autumn pilgrimage to Balmoral, which she did “out of loyalty,” said Charles Powell. She invariably arrived in a tweed suit and heels, utterly ill-equipped for country life. “Does the prime minister like to walk in the hills?” asked one frequent guest. “The hills?” replied the Queen. “The hills? She walks on the road!” Elizabeth II also knew that Thatcher never accepted the custom of withdrawing with the other women after dinner. “The Queen finessed it by always inviting the Thatchers to a barbeque, which was more informal than a dinner in the castle, so didn’t follow the convention of having the ladies withdraw,” explained a fellow guest. An equerry was assigned to play golf with Denis Thatcher, and the Queen routinely took the prime minister for tea at Birkhall, since the Queen Mother was an enthusiastic admirer of Thatcher. On the final day, the prime minister and her husband usually left at dawn.

Only three months after taking office, Margaret Thatcher encountered a surprisingly assertive Queen in her role as head of the Commonwealth. The cause was the outcast white minority government in Rhodesia led by Ian Smith that had been worn down by persistent attacks by black guerrillas. In late July and early August 1979, the Commonwealth leaders were set to meet in Lusaka, the capital of neighboring Zambia, to endorse a proposed conference in London between Smith and all factions including black guerrilla leaders Robert Mugabe (an avowed Marxist) and Joshua Nkomo to end the Rhodesian conflict and prepare for free and fair elections. The British prime minister regarded the guerrilla leaders as terrorists and favored a power-sharing agreement that Smith had already negotiated with a more moderate black party.

Because the guerrilla forces were operating out of bases in Zambia, Thatcher tried to prevent the Queen from attending the Commonwealth meeting on the grounds that she might be at risk. But Elizabeth II well remembered being banned by Heath from the Singapore meeting eight years earlier, and she insisted on traveling to Africa. Before arriving in Lusaka, the Queen set aside nine days for state visits to Tanzania, Malawi, Botswana, and Zambia. What she heard made her increasingly concerned that a number of African countries could leave the Commonwealth unless the black majority took charge of governing Rhodesia. During the Malawi state banquet she was so engrossed by Dr. Hastings Banda, the country’s “President for Life,” that she let her manners slip and kept her elbows on the table as they talked at length. Little wonder, since Banda was one of Africa’s most idiosyncratic leaders—a repressive dictator educated in the United States and Scotland who had practiced medicine in the United Kingdom, where he took to wearing Homburg hats and three-piece suits.

Elizabeth II arrived in Lusaka on July 27, 1979, two days before Thatcher, for meetings with Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda in which she urged him to subdue the anti-British rhetoric in the local press. During the four-day Commonwealth conference she followed her customary routine as the organization’s symbolic head by hosting a reception and banquet for all forty-two leaders. That evening she uncharacteristically stayed until nearly midnight, “quartering the room and talking to the various heads of governments,” recalled Chief Emeka Anyaoku of Nigeria. “I am convinced that the intervention spurred the organization—which was on the point of possibly splitting up—on to compromise.”

Her informal role continued behind the scenes, when she received each leader in a private audience for fifteen to twenty minutes in her bungalow. In those sessions, particularly with the Africans, she conveyed sympathy for their position without explicitly stating her own, and they came away impressed by her knowledge of their problems. By bringing down the temperature, the Queen made it easier for Thatcher to move toward the Commonwealth position, which others, notably her own foreign secretary, Peter Carrington, and Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser, had openly urged her to do. The African leaders yielded as well, agreeing to consider a formula for some white representation in Rhodesia’s new parliament.

No one could pinpoint what exactly the Queen had done beyond playing what Carrington called “an enormous role in calming everything down.” By the end of the meetings, Thatcher signed the Lusaka Accord calling for a constitutional conference at London’s Lancaster House in September. The Queen “talked to Mrs. Thatcher and to Kaunda,” said Sonny Ramphal of Guyana, the Commonwealth’s secretary-general at the time. “The fact that she was there made it happen.”

Britain’s prime minister enthusiastically embraced the peace process, which led to an agreement on December 21 calling for a cease-fire, free elections, and Rhodesia’s independence in April 1980 as the Republic of Zimbabwe, the forty-third member of the Commonwealth, with Robert Mugabe as prime minister. Only in time did Thatcher’s initial misgivings about Mugabe prove prescient, as he set himself up as an egregiously corrupt dictator, brutally crushed his political rivals, drove the white farmers from their land, and destroyed what had been Africa’s most vibrant agricultural economy. In 2002 the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe’s membership, and Mugabe permanently withdrew the following year.

S
HORTLY AFTER RETURNING
to England from Africa on August 4, 1979, the Queen headed to Balmoral for her annual holiday. Whenever she and Philip are having lunch together in the castle, courtiers are forbidden from disturbing them except in an emergency. So at midday on Thursday, August 27, when Robert Fellowes, her assistant private secretary, entered the dining room, Elizabeth II knew he bore bad news. That morning, during a holiday at the Mountbatten vacation home at Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, a twenty-seven-foot fishing boat carrying six members of their family and a local boy had been blown up by an IRA bomb. Philip’s uncle and the Queen’s cousin, seventy-nine-year-old Dickie Mountbatten; John Brabourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother, Doreen; Nicholas Knatchbull, one of the Brabournes’ fourteen-year-old twin sons; and Paul Maxwell, the fifteen-year-old Irish boy, had been killed. Patricia and John Brabourne and their surviving son, Timothy, were critically injured.

The Queen and her family were grief-stricken. Prince Charles considered Mountbatten “his closest confidant and the greatest single influence.” Writing in his diary, Charles described his great-uncle as “someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism.… Life will
never
be the same now that he has gone.”

The Queen called the hospital and had a long conversation with family members, but only Philip wrote a condolence letter. As a Red Cross doctor explained to Patricia Brabourne, “That kind of private person has strong feelings but doesn’t want to convey them. She would feel what she might say would be totally inadequate, so why try.” By contrast when her sister Pamela Hicks once wrote a note about the death of one of the royal corgis, the Queen replied with a six-page letter. “A dog isn’t important,” Hicks figured, “so she can express the really deep feelings she can’t get out otherwise.”

The royal family traveled to London for a full ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 5, with massed military bands and 122 naval ratings pulling the gun carriage holding Mountbattten’s coffin. The earl had planned every detail of his commemorative ceremony, and there had been numerous rehearsals in the previous week. When the family boarded the train to Romsey for the burial, the Queen said to her cousin Pamela, “Please sit with me and tell me everything that happened.” “She hardly made any remark,” Pamela Hicks recalled. “But she absolutely listened to every word.” After the interment, the family gathered at Broadlands. In the absence of her parents, who were still hospitalized, Joanna Knatchbull, the eldest of the Brabournes’ daughters, served as hostess, waiting at the front door. Elizabeth II stepped out of the car, her eyes reddened from crying. “Ma’am, would you like to go upstairs?” Joanna inquired. “Yes I think I would,” replied the Queen.

A month later, Elizabeth II made her most meaningful gesture when she invited fourteen-year-old Timothy Knatchbull to stay at Balmoral after his release from the hospital. He arrived at the castle late at night with his older sister Amanda, when he spotted the Queen “striding down the corridor” like “a mother duck gathering in lost young.” She greeted Timothy and his sister with kisses, served them soup and sandwiches, took them to their rooms, and started to unpack until Amanda persuaded her that she should go to bed. “She was in almost unstoppable mothering mode,” Timothy recalled.

In the following days, the Queen monitored Timothy’s bedtimes, suggested when he shouldn’t attempt going out onto the grouse moor, and took care to ensure that her own doctor came to dress his wounds. “She was caring and sensitive and intuitive,” he said. Seated next to him at lunch, she seemed to sense his need to talk about the terror attack. “She didn’t probe. She has a brilliant way of using her ears as magnets and getting people to talk. I spoke to her in a way I hadn’t spoken, articulating things other people hadn’t drawn out of me.”

When Prince Charles pondered the manner of his Uncle Dickie’s death, he wrote, “I fear it will take me a very long time to forgive those people.” Princess Margaret reacted even more harshly. During a visit to Chicago that autumn, when someone expressed sympathy over the attack, she said the Irish were pigs. Elizabeth II kept her own counsel. “She had all the feelings of hurt and shock one could expect,” said Timothy Knatchbull. “I would be surprised if she hadn’t had flashes of anger and incredulity. But never has she departed from her high standards: a caring dignified stance, and a recognition that the peoples of both the United Kingdom and Ireland have sufferings and wounds of their own.” In their many conversations, he saw “no evidence whatsoever” that she had hardened her views of Ireland.

One unlikely source of consolation for Prince Charles was his long-ago love, Camilla Parker Bowles, by then the mother of two children with a husband who was openly unfaithful. In 1979, after the birth of her second child, she and Charles had resumed their romance, a development noted by Andrew Parker Bowles’s fellow officers in the Household Cavalry. One of them reported the affair to the Queen, who took it in but said nothing to her son.

A
T THE SAME
time, Charles had become acquainted with Lady Diana Spencer, the granddaughter of the Queen Mother’s longtime friend and Woman of the Bedchamber, Ruth Fermoy (widow of the 4th Baron Fermoy), and the daughter of the Queen’s former equerry Johnnie Spencer, the 8th Earl and scion of one of the great landed Whig families, with a fortune dating from the Middle Ages. The Spencers had been part of the group of English noblemen that had saved Britain from Catholic rule by bringing the Protestant Hanovers to England in 1714, a legacy that gave Diana a feeling of superiority over the royal family. Much later, after her marriage to Charles had fractured, she told her divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius, that she regretted marrying into a “German family.”

Johnnie Spencer had been with the Queen and Prince Philip on their six-month Commonwealth tour after the coronation. Before they departed in November 1953, he had proposed to Frances Roche, the daughter of Ruth Fermoy, but he left the tour—highly unusual for a courtier—after only two months to return to England. “By the time we reached Australia, he was so love struck with Frances that the Queen said, ‘Johnnie you have to go back,’ ” recalled Pamela Hicks, then a lady-in-waiting.

The Spencers lived at Park House in Norfolk, which they rented from the Queen, and had three daughters—Sarah, Jane, and Diana—and a son, Charles. But while they lived only a stone’s throw from Sandringham, the family only had occasional contact with their royal neighbors after Johnnie resigned from the Queen’s household to make his living as a gentleman farmer. In September 1967, when Diana was six, Frances left her husband for her lover, Peter Shand Kydd, which led to an acrimonious divorce followed by Frances’s marriage to Shand Kydd. Sarah and Jane Spencer were away at boarding school, so Diana and her three-year-old brother felt the brunt of the bitterness—an experience that marked Diana deeply and contributed to her lifelong emotional instability. At age nine she went to the first of two boarding schools, both of which provided a nurturing environment, although she was a poor student, twice failing all of her O-level exams. After an unhappy six weeks at a Swiss finishing school, Diana returned to England in 1978, and a year later took a job as an assistant at the Young England Kindergarten in London.