Elizabeth the Queen (56 page)

Uncertain how the people would
react, the Queen betrayed a trace
of anxiety in her expression.
As she and Philip walked toward
the floral display, the crowd
began clapping
.

The Queen and Prince Philip surprise the crowds outside Buckingham Palace by walking among the thousands of floral tributes to Diana, Princess of Wales, September 1997.
Camera Press London

SEVENTEEN

Tragedy and Tradition

A
NOTHER WAVE OF TABLOID HEADLINES IN MID-JANUARY ABRUPTLY
dashed the Queen’s hopes for a dignified new year. Both the
Daily Mirror
and
The Sun
published compromising transcripts of a telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla that had been secretly recorded in mysterious circumstances during December 1989, the same month as Diana’s now infamous “Squidgy” tape. In much of the conversation, Camilla tried to boost Charles’s spirits (“You’re a clever old thing, an awfully good brain lurking there, isn’t there?”). But attention focused on their inane sexual banter, especially Charles’s juvenile wish to be reincarnated as a tampon so he could “live inside your trousers.” The Palace declined comment, but the tapes were undeniably authentic and confirmed Diana’s allegations about her husband’s affair. In a poll published by the tabloid
Today
, 68 percent of the respondents thought Charles had tarnished his reputation, and 42 percent thought ten-year-old Prince William should be the next king.

The Queen briefly managed to shift attention from the scandal when David Airlie held a press conference in February “to explain to the media exactly why the Queen had decided to pay tax and the way in which it was going to be done.” The Queen’s senior advisers did not speak for the record, on the principle that “courtiers should be neither seen nor heard.” But the Queen wanted her Lord Chamberlain to show her willingness not only to move with the times, but to answer all questions openly on her behalf.

Airlie intentionally held the briefing in the historic Queen Anne Room at St. James’s Palace under the huge portraits of kings—a not so subtle reminder that he was representing centuries of tradition. He spelled out the details of taxes to be paid on Elizabeth II’s private income as well as capital gains, after various deductions, including stipends paid to Prince Philip and the Queen Mother for their official expenses. The press pounced on the most important exclusion, asking why inheritance tax would not be paid on assets such as Sandringham, Balmoral, and the Duchy of Lancaster that were passed on to her successor.

“Is she not like us?” asked one reporter. “She isn’t like you!” Airlie bantered, explaining that the sovereign must have private resources that shouldn’t be dissipated through inheritance. Airlie’s presentation helped mollify complaints about royal finances, although questions remained about the magnitude of the Queen’s wealth and the level of expenses for luxuries such as
Britannia
.

Later that year, while the Queen was at Balmoral, Bobo MacDonald, her beloved former nursemaid and longtime dresser, died in her suite at Buckingham Palace at age eighty-nine. She had been semiretired from her duties for a number of years, but remained close to Elizabeth II, who had hired two nurses to provide round-the-clock care after Bobo’s health began to fail. The Queen came down to London from Scotland to attend the funeral, which she arranged at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace. Joining her were other family members and staff, including Bobo’s sister Ruby, also a longtime employee in the royal household. Bobo had served her “little lady” for sixty-seven years, and the Queen marked her passing with typical restraint.

None of the Queen’s children stirred up further problems in 1993, although Diana proved to be a continuing distraction. On the one hand, she devoted herself to a range of charitable causes such as drug and alcohol abuse, hospice care, debilitating illnesses such as AIDS, and services for mentally handicapped children. But behind the scenes she was feeding information on her whereabouts to Richard Kay, the royal reporter at the
Daily Mail
, in an effort to upstage Charles as well as other members of the royal family. She was also cooperating with Morton on yet another book.

She had ended her affair with James Hewitt, her former riding instructor, in 1991 when he became the focus of press surveillance. “She simply stopped ringing and taking my calls,” he said years later. She then became involved with a married art dealer named Oliver Hoare. It was a tempestuous relationship, something of an obsession for the princess, who pestered the Hoare household with anonymous telephone calls that prompted a police inquiry. The press got wind of the romance and began reporting sightings toward the end of 1993.

Around the same time, Diana tearfully announced that she was retiring from public life and needed “time and space” to get her bearings and focus on her sons, blaming the intolerable pressure of “overwhelming” media attention. Both the Queen and Prince Philip had urged her to proceed quietly if she wished to disengage from her royal obligations and her charities. Even though she opted for public melodrama, they still invited her to join the family at Sandringham for Christmas. In an atmosphere thick with tension, the Queen got particularly cross when a pack of tabloid “snappers” showed up to take pictures of the princess as she arrived.

Elizabeth II was riding at Sandringham several weeks later when she suffered a rare accident as her horse tripped and fell. She had her hand on the horse’s neck, which allowed her to give him a push when he was rolling over on his side. But he landed on her nevertheless, severely injuring a ligament in her left wrist. Her mount was Centennial, the stallion famously ridden twelve years earlier by Ronald Reagan, who sent her a solicitous letter. “I wasn’t paying enough attention!” she wrote in her reply to the former president. She went on to describe the accident in detail and share her frustration at having her arm encased in plaster.

Still in a cast, she embarked on a three-week tour of six Caribbean countries and Bermuda in February and March. Visiting that part of the world gave her special satisfaction. “She has no regard for color,” said longtime BBC correspondent Wesley Kerr, a native Jamaican raised by white foster parents in Britain. “Jamaica is her fourth-biggest realm. When she refers to herself as the Queen of Jamaica she says it with utter conviction. In the Caribbean there is a closeness.”

The Queen knew Kerr had a large extended family in Jamaica that numbered nineteen half siblings on his father’s side. “Did you see your father, Mr. Kerr, and did he see me?” she asked during one gathering. On another day, Kerr marveled at her composure during a walkabout in Kingston. “A group of women were grabbing her and saying ‘Nice! Nice!’ ” said Kerr. “She didn’t flinch but her bodyguards almost grabbed her. She didn’t mind the contact. She didn’t want to be like a piece of china.”

Three months later, Elizabeth II observed a meaningful event in her own life and that of her country when she marked the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day on June 6, 1994. She also had her first extended time with the forty-second American president, Bill Clinton, and his wife, Hillary. On the eve of the celebrations at the Normandy beaches, Elizabeth II and Philip hosted a banquet in Portsmouth and invited the Clintons to spend the night on
Britannia
.

Seated next to the sixty-eight-year-old Queen at dinner, the forty-seven-year-old president was taken with “the clever manner in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information and insights without venturing too far into expressing her own political views.… Her Majesty impressed me as someone who but for the circumstance of her birth, might have become a successful politician or diplomat. As it was, she had to be both, without quite seeming to be either.” From her place between Prince Philip and John Major, Hillary watched as the Queen “nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories.” The next day on the beach at Arromanches, the Queen “was clearly happy as the veterans—her generation—marched past,” wrote William Shawcross. “There was a rare catch in her voice as she and the old men reveled in their pride in each other. Her heir, Prince Charles, also there, was equally moved.”

T
HE EVIDENT HARMONY
between mother and son was dispelled later that month when Charles shocked his parents by appearing in a television interview with journalist Jonathan Dimbleby. The prince had been cooperating with Dimbleby for two years on the TV program and a companion biography, ostensibly to highlight his charitable ventures on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his investiture as Prince of Wales. Of equal importance to Charles was the chance to counteract the negative portrait of his character that Diana had given to Morton and others in the press.

After the project was well under way, Charles briefed his parents on its general contours, and they advised him to avoid any frank discussion of private matters. He had other ideas. The two-and-a-half-hour documentary on June 29, 1994, covered a wide range of anodyne topics, but all were eclipsed by a brief exchange addressing the “damaging charge” that Charles had been “persistently unfaithful” to Diana “from the beginning” of the marriage. Charles said he had been “faithful and honorable” to his wife until their marriage “became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.” He didn’t mention Camilla as other than “a friend for a very long time,” but it was clear she was his mistress, and that their affair had resumed five years after Charles and Diana were married.

Charles genuinely believed his straightforward response would put to rest “the myth that he had never intended to make his marriage work.” He gained public sympathy largely because of his demeanor, which was tormented and remorseful rather than callous. Still, his public admission of adultery embarrassed his mother and violated her code of discretion. It also raised the ante with Diana, provoking her to consider her own retaliatory television appearance.

Two months later the Queen had even greater cause for dismay when she learned that Charles had provided Dimbleby with diaries, letters, and official papers. John Major was concerned as well, telling Woodrow Wyatt that he might use the Official Secrets Act (a British law that shields state secrets) to prevent publication of anything from ministerial documents. Charles complied when the Queen asked for the return of the confidential papers, but their relationship was so strained that he didn’t visit his parents at Balmoral, staying instead with the Queen Mother at Birkhall.

Elizabeth II was beginning a historic four-day trip to Russia in mid-October—the first visit by a British monarch since her great-grandfather King Edward VII met with Tsar Nicholas II in 1908 aboard a yacht in Russian waters—when an excerpt of the Dimbleby book appeared in
The Sunday Times
. The contents of the 620-page book drove a deeper wedge between Charles and his parents. He portrayed his mother as a remote figure during his unhappy childhood, and described his father as overbearing and insensitive. Elizabeth II and Philip were stung by these characterizations, according to their friends. She refrained from comment, although all three of Charles’s siblings were indignant and rebuked him to his face. When asked about the controversy, the Queen Mother signaled her disdain with a wave of her hands and exclaimed, “That Jonathan Dimbleby!”

While the press focused on the Dimbleby revelations at home, the Queen carried on in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Her visit tapped dark historical currents. The Romanov rulers of the Russian empire and the British royal family had been close relatives. When the Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, it was the Queen’s grandfather King George V who sealed their fate by refusing to give political asylum in Britain to his Romanov first cousin. Paradoxically, the Soviet Communist Party had always shown the British royal family considerable respect. Still, the Queen could not in good conscience visit Russia until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.