Elizabeth the Queen (59 page)

His words were meant to be placatory, and in some respects they were, simply by filling a vacuum and crystallizing inchoate feelings of affection and loss. But the royal family thought that Blair’s choice of “People’s Princess” helped stir up rather than pacify public feeling. George Carey worried that the description might “encourage the temptation of some to make her an icon to set against the royal family. Those fears were to be realized that week.”

The Queen and her family attended the regular Sunday service at Crathie. No mention of Diana was made in the prayers, which is customary in the Church of Scotland, where the ministers “don’t pray for the souls of the departed, because God has discharged them,” said a former senior official in the church who has often preached at Balmoral. But the press chose to portray the omission as an insult to Diana’s memory, and criticized the Queen for taking William and Harry to church only hours after their mother’s death. “They handled it like ostriches,” said Jennie Bond of the BBC. In fact, the princes wanted the comfort of religion at that moment. By one account, William said he wished to “talk to Mummy.” Everyone including the boys behaved as the royal family always does, with stiff stoicism in the face of emotional pain, which prompted still more criticism for their seeming insensitivity.

At that point, the family withdrew from the public gaze. The Queen’s intentions were pure from the outset—the kind of “unstoppable mothering” she had shown Timothy Knatchbull after the Mountbatten bombing in 1979. She believed William and Harry should be kept in the Highlands for as long as possible, surrounded by those who loved them. Like their father, the boys had been imbued with an enjoyment of the countryside. The Queen made certain the princes could stalk and fish with their cousin Peter Phillips, and gather with the family on the hills for barbecues. “To take them away to have nothing to do in Buckingham Palace would have been horrible,” said Margaret Rhodes.

The Queen secured a Royal Air Force plane to fly Prince Charles, along with Diana’s sisters, Sarah and Jane, to Paris to bring back the princess’s body. Elizabeth II also asked that Blair meet the plane at RAF Northolt airport on Sunday afternoon. In recognition of the Queen’s wish that the late princess be treated like a member of the royal family, Diana’s coffin was draped with her own Royal Standard, an adaptation of the sovereign’s heraldic banner in red, gold, and blue.

Elizabeth II initially yielded to the wish of the Spencer family that Diana’s funeral be private, but after conferences with her advisers, she recognized the need to do something akin to a royal ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey—although not a full-blown state funeral. She was helped by Robert Fellowes, who brought his wife, Jane, and the rest of the Spencers around. The funeral plans for members of the royal family are not only exhaustively planned in advance, they have code names: London Bridge for the Queen, Tay Bridge for the Queen Mother, Forth Bridge for Prince Philip. But there were no plans in place for Diana’s funeral because she was no longer technically a member of the royal family. “We can’t look at the files,” David Airlie told his colleagues. “We have to do it
de novo
.”

Working throughout Sunday and long into the night, the courtiers at Buckingham Palace planned a funeral for the following Saturday that combined elements of the traditional and the modern: Diana’s coffin on a horse-drawn gun carriage (primarily so it could be seen better than in a hearse) with twelve pallbearers from the Welsh Guards, followed by five hundred workers from Diana’s charities instead of the standard military procession, which she would have disliked. “We wanted the people who had benefited from her charities, not the chairmen and trustees,” said David Airlie. “It was also important to bring a cross-section of the public not normally invited to the Abbey—the people Diana associated with.” Rather than a lying-in-state at Westminster Hall, the courtiers came up with condolence books for the public to sign at Kensington Palace and St. James’s Palace, where Diana’s body would rest privately on a catafalque in the Chapel Royal until the funeral.

Airlie phoned Janvrin at Balmoral early Monday morning to relay the outlined plan. By 9
A.M.
the Queen had given her approval. “She was very happy with the charity workers,” recalled Ross. It would be “a unique funeral for a unique person,” the Palace announced.

The Lord Chamberlain supervised a series of meetings with all interested parties including the police and military as well as several of Blair’s key operatives specifically invited by Airlie. They hammered out the details for what the press was now calling the “people’s funeral,” including such unconventional touches as a solo by Elton John and a reading by the prime minister, while excluding such traditional fanfare as trumpeters and drums. By Tuesday afternoon they had written everything down and transmitted it to Balmoral so the Queen could “see the totality.” Again she approved their proposals readily and without discussion. “She is much better with paper, especially for something long and complicated,” said Ross. “She speed reads. She is very quick with paper.”

Contrary to popular mythology about hidebound courtiers, the Queen’s men showed flexibility and ingenuity that week. Airlie had been at the vanguard of modernizing Buckingham Palace operations for more than a decade. Robert Fellowes proved surprisingly “shrewd and savvy,” in Tony Blair’s view. Robin Janvrin was “completely au fait with where it was all heading,” Blair recalled. Even Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s antimonarchist press spokesman, remarked that the courtiers “encouraged creative thinking and even risk-taking.” The Queen trusted them and responded decisively to such suggestions as doubling the route of the funeral procession to give greater access to the crowds and putting giant video screens in Hyde Park to televise the funeral.

But she dug in her heels over what she considered unreasonable demands from the press and public that violated deeply embedded traditions as well as her family’s wish to deal with the tragedy privately. By Tuesday it was clear that Diana’s death had triggered an unprecedented display of mass grieving by mourners who poured into London, by one estimate “at a rate of 6,000 per hour.” They heaped flowers, stuffed animals, signs, balloons, condolence notes, and other tributes along the railings of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, and they camped out in the parks, hugging and weeping as if for a close relative or intimate friend. By Wednesday night some three quarters of a million people had stood in line, some for more than ten hours, to sign the condolence books that multiplied rapidly from four to thirty-four in two days. It seemed as if Diana’s own displays of raw emotion—leading “from the heart not the head,” as she said in her
Panorama
interview—had prompted the citizenry to abandon the dignified restraint they had shown after the deaths of King George VI and Winston Churchill.

The crowds at first had vented against the tabloids, inflamed by Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, who said hours after his sister’s death, “I always believed the press would kill her in the end.” Outside Kensington Palace on Sunday, mourners had shouted at a group of reporters, “Happy now?” But by midweek, the anger turned against the Queen for remaining sequestered in the Highlands and failing to acknowledge the pain felt by her subjects in London. “If only the royals dared weep with the people,” said
The Independent
in a critical editorial on Wednesday. “The media were circling, looking to blame someone other than themselves,” said one of Elizabeth II’s top advisers. “They needed to direct it at the other target,” Blair observed. “And to be fair, they were releasing genuine public feeling.” As a symbol of the Queen’s apparent indifference, the press focused on the empty flagpole above Buckingham Palace and demanded that a flag be flown at half-staff to honor Diana.

By centuries of custom, the only flag to fly at the Palace was the Queen’s Royal Standard, and only while she was in residence. It could never be flown at half-staff because once a monarch dies, the heir immediately takes the throne in an unbroken chain of sovereignty. But the crowds had no patience for such distinctions, and their mood verged close to mutinous. “I think the thing that impressed me most was the silence, which I found worrying,” said David Airlie, who took several walks outside the Palace.

On Wednesday the Queen’s London advisers suggested that she put aside tradition and fly the Union Jack at half-staff, but she was unyielding, as was Philip. “Robin had to describe the feeling in London,” said Malcolm Ross. “It was a torturous process because she felt so strongly. Robin said he metaphorically had blood pouring down his face because she had scratched his face metaphorically. He had to come back to her again and again.”

Later that day a Palace spokesman tried to defuse the growing pressure by saying that “all the royal family … are taking strength from the overwhelming support of the public who are sharing their tremendous sense of loss and grief.” Tony Blair publicly defended the Queen as well, although he knew, he later said, that “the fact that I was speaking only served to emphasize the fact that she wasn’t.” Reluctant to confront Elizabeth II himself and be “as blunt as I needed to be” with “very direct advice,” Blair called Charles, who said he would speak to his mother. Charles told Blair that he agreed the Queen could no longer “hide away” and needed to “come to London to respond to the public outpouring.”

There is a Brigadoon quality at Balmoral that makes it difficult to appreciate the emotional temperature 550 miles away. But the Queen had been willing on a number of occasions to fly south when duty called—to accept Macmillan’s resignation when he was hospitalized, to have lunch with Richard Nixon at Chequers, to greet her son Andrew at Portsmouth after the Falklands campaign, and to attend Bobo MacDonald’s funeral. Her unwillingness this time was impelled by a desire to shield her grandsons from further upset. For the Queen it was an ironic turnabout. After being criticized so often for putting duty over family, she found herself being pilloried for doing the reverse. “If she had come down, there would have been adverse press about the heartless grandmother leaving her grandchildren in a time of grief,” said Dickie Arbiter, a former press spokesman for the Queen.

The tabloids on Thursday morning turned up the heat with headlines screaming “SHOW US YOU CARE” (The
Daily Express
); “WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? WHERE IS HER FLAG?” (The
Sun
); and “YOUR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING: SPEAK TO US, MA’AM” (The
Daily Mirror
). A survey by MORI (Market & Opinion Research International) found that 25 percent of the public felt the monarchy should be replaced, a significant rise from the 19 percent average dating back to 1969. Alastair Campbell called Fellowes and Janvrin to report that the mood on the street had become “dangerous and unpleasant.” “Robin Janvrin told me the Queen was composed but distressed by the way the nation assumed she did not care,” said George Carey. In a conference call that morning with the London team, the Queen grasped the gravity of the situation—not only that her absence was endangering the monarchy itself, but that she needed to fulfill her role as the nation’s leader in a time of crisis.

The vehemence of the press played a part in her decision, but more important was the persuasiveness of her advisers. Rather than traveling to London overnight by train for arrival shortly before the 11
A.M.
funeral on Saturday, she and the family would fly down on Friday. That evening, she would make a televised speech, and she would pay her respects at Diana’s coffin in the Chapel Royal. Once she left Buckingham Palace on Saturday for the funeral, the Royal Standard would be lowered, and for the first time a Union Jack would rise on the flagpole, to remain at half-staff in tribute to Diana.

The Queen also asked Andrew and Edward to visit Diana’s coffin on Thursday afternoon and then walk among the crowds on the Mall back to Buckingham Palace—the family’s first overt gesture of public sympathy. The princes chatted with the mourners, who greeted them warmly. “It was an extraordinary experience feeling the atmosphere outside the Palace,” Andrew recalled. “It was unreal … completely unreal, beyond anybody’s expectation or understanding.”

At midday Blair called the Queen at her request so they could discuss the new plans. “It was the first time I’d heard him one on one with the Queen, and he really did the ma’am stuff pretty well,” recalled his press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, who was listening in. “He said he felt she had to show that she was vulnerable and they really were feeling it. He said, ‘I really do feel for you. There can be nothing more miserable than feeling as you do and having your motives questioned.’ ” Blair remembered that the Queen “was now very focused and totally persuaded. It wasn’t easy, but it was certain.”

That afternoon, Palace press secretary Geoffrey Crawford stood in front of St. James’s Palace to read an unusual statement that not only explained what would happen the next day, but displayed a new softness in describing the Queen’s feelings. “The royal family have been hurt by suggestions that they are indifferent to the country’s sorrow,” he said, adding that Diana’s sons “miss her deeply.” Crawford reiterated the wish of William and Harry to be in the “quiet haven” of Balmoral and the Queen’s efforts to help them “come to terms with their loss” as they prepared themselves “for the public ordeal of mourning their mother with the nation.”

Though she was willing to show some emotion in order to comfort her people, above all, Elizabeth II had to be a strong leader for her family as well as the nation. Her sister, Margaret, later thanked her for “how you kindly arranged
everybody’s
lives after the accident and made life tolerable for the two poor boys … there, always in command, was you, listening to everyone and deciding on all the issues.… I just felt you were wonderful.”

Philip suggested that on the eve of their return to London the family attend a service at Crathie. Unlike the previous Sunday, Diana’s name was mentioned by the minister, Bob Sloan, this time in a prayer of comfort for the grieving royal family. Afterward, they stopped in front of a horde of photographers at the Balmoral gates—the boys in dark suits and the men in their customary tweed jackets and tartan kilts—to inspect the flowers left by mourners. At 2:40
P.M.
on Friday—five days after Diana’s death—Elizabeth II and Philip arrived at the Buckingham Palace gates, with the unannounced intention of making the same gesture.