Elizabeth the Queen (64 page)

On Friday, September 14, the Queen joined a congregation of 2,700, most of them Americans, at St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service honoring the September 11 victims. Prince Philip read the lesson, and everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which hadn’t been heard there since the 1960s when it was played for John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. “When our National Anthem was played, I watched the Queen as she sang all the words,” recalled Jackie Davis, the wife of an official at the American embassy. “I thought to myself, ‘If she can do that, then I can learn the words to “God Save the Queen.’ ”

On September 20, Tony and Cherie Blair traveled to New York to participate in another memorial for the victims at St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue. The prime minister did a reading from Thornton Wilder’s
The Bridge at San Luis Rey
, but “A Message from Her Majesty the Queen,” read by British ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer, most eloquently caught the intense sadness of the moment. Written by Robin Janvrin, it ended with what Bill Clinton called a “stunning sentence”: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” Those words were so evocative, and so true, that they were carved in stone not only at St. Thomas’s, but at a memorial in Grosvenor Square near the American embassy in London.

Tony Blair kept the Queen up to date on developments over the following weeks that led to the October invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, Britain, and other NATO forces. Their mission was to unseat the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban forces and root out the al Qaeda terrorists who had trained there for the devastating attacks. It was the first step in the global war on terrorism that escalated two years later with the invasion of Iraq and ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein, who was suspected of illegally making weapons of mass destruction intended for use against the United States and its allies.

From time to time during this period, Blair relied on the Queen for guidance. “Obviously there was a huge focus on the Arab world,” he recalled, “and that is something she has immense experience of. She has dealt with many of the royal families, with many of the ruling families, over a long, long period of time, and she has a lot of real insight into how they work, how they operate, how they think, the best way of trying to make sure that we reach out to them.”

L
UCIAN
F
REUD UNVEILED
Her Majesty the Queen
at Buckingham Palace on December 20 and donated it to the Royal Collection in honor of the Golden Jubilee. Much of the reaction from the press was negative: “extremely unflattering,” said the
Daily Telegraph;
“a travesty,” pronounced
The Sun
.

The painting is shocking in several respects, starting with its size: only nine inches by six inches. Because it is so small, it is peculiarly concentrated, showing only the Queen’s head and a small part of her shoulders. Without the diadem, she would be barely recognizable. “You gaze at it for half a minute,” said Clarissa Eden, who was also painted by Freud. “Suddenly you realize it is the Queen.” Her face is harsh, the expression a scowl, the eyes hooded, the skin a rough patchwork of white and orange streaks, the heavy chin with a masculine five-o’clock shadow.

Yet despite Freud’s failure to show such attributes as her expressive eyes and luminous skin, he does capture in a mesmerizing way the essence of her dutiful and determined nature, as well as her strength and stoicism. “This is a painting of experience,” said Adrian Searle, art critic for
The Guardian
. So too is it an artwork of its time. “It could not have been painted ten years earlier,” said Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery since 2002.

Freud said the Queen looked at the portrait while she was being painted but she did not tell him what she thought. Sir Hugh Roberts, director of the Royal Collection, reflected the official Palace view when he called the portrait a “remarkable work.” Even more telling was a commentary by Jennifer Scott, the assistant curator of paintings for the collection, who wrote that it “feels real and earthy, almost as if Freud peeled away the layers of deportment that come so naturally to a monarch and painted the person underneath.”

C
HRISTMAS AT
S
ANDRINGHAM
was unsettled that year. Margaret, now seventy-one, had suffered two more strokes in the beginning of 2001, leaving her partially paralyzed and bedridden as well as blind. When she made a brief appearance at the one hundredth birthday party for her aunt Princess Alice, the Dowager Duchess of Gloucester, on December 12 at Kensington Palace, Margaret wore sunglasses, and her face was swollen from steroid medications. Anne Glenconner, Margaret’s longtime friend and Norfolk neighbor, came to Sandringham and arranged to have a television installed in the princess’s room, along with a hot plate so her nurse could make scrambled eggs. “What a good idea!” the Queen said. Prince Charles was especially solicitous, sharing with Anne Glenconner the task of reading aloud to his aunt, who by then could barely speak. “Her quality of life was not good,” said Glenconner.

Four months past her 101st birthday, the indomitable Queen Mother was fading as well. She came down with a respiratory infection that kept her confined mainly to her room at Sandringham. In early February, Margaret was driven back to Kensington Palace, while her mother remained in Norfolk to recuperate. As the princess was wheeled to the car, the Queen Mother “carried out the family tradition of waving a white handkerchief in farewell.”

Accession Day, on February 6, was usually observed privately by the Queen. But to mark the fiftieth anniversary of taking the throne, she not only appeared publicly, she sent out a message of thanks with a modern twist—on the Internet through her official jubilee website. She started the day at Sandringham with an early morning ride, then traveled by car to nearby King’s Lynn to open a new cancer unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where she talked to patients and toured the facility. Her visit was intended in part as a tribute to her late father’s struggle with lung cancer.

Two days later, Margaret had another stroke. After she showed signs of heart problems, she was rushed to King Edward VII Hospital late that night. With her son and daughter at her bedside, the princess died at 6:30
A.M.
on Saturday, February 9. The Queen was at Windsor Castle, while Philip had stayed on at Sandringham for a shooting weekend. Charles immediately drove to Norfolk to console his grandmother. Resolutely positive as always, she told her grandson that her daughter’s death “had probably been a merciful release.”

Margaret’s funeral took place at 3
P.M.
in St. George’s Chapel on Friday the 15th—fifty years to the day since her father, King George VI, was laid to rest. She had been eligible for a “royal ceremonial funeral,” but her wish was to “depart without a fuss,” so she requested a “royal private funeral,” by definition a less public ceremony. Unusually for a member of the royal family, she also requested cremation, with instructions that her ashes be placed with her father’s remains in his vault at the chapel.

The princess had selected the readings and the music for the service, which showed not only what her good friend George Carey called her “rooted and firm” adherence to the Church of England, but her love of ballet. As the 450 mourners entered the chapel, the organist played Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
. The congregation included thirty-seven members of the royal family, and friends from show business such as actresses Judi Dench and Felicity Kendal. Roddy Llewellyn and Tony Snowdon were there as well.

The Queen Mother had fallen at Sandringham and cut her arm two days earlier. But she had insisted on attending the funeral, and the previous day had been flown to Windsor by helicopter. She arrived at the chapel by wheelchair after the Queen and was seated near her daughter’s coffin, which was covered with Margaret’s personal Royal Standard and arrangements of white roses and pink tulips.

Following the service, eight Royal Highland Fusiliers in tartan trousers and dark jackets carried out the coffin as trumpeters sounded “The Last Post” and “Reveille.” A bagpiper played “The Desperate Struggle of the Bird,” which seemed a suitably melancholy lament for a princess who had seen so much unhappiness. The Queen Mother managed to stand briefly as Margaret’s coffin passed, and she kept her emotions in check, but as the Queen stood outside the chapel watching the coffin being placed in the hearse, she lowered her head to wipe away tears. “It was the saddest I have ever seen the Queen,” said Reinaldo Herrera, Margaret’s good friend.

By the time family members joined Elizabeth II at the castle for tea afterward, she had regained her composure. She was already turning her attention to her departure in three days for Jamaica, the first stop on a two-week Golden Jubilee Commonwealth tour that would also take her to New Zealand and Australia.

“She went as scheduled,” said a member of the royal household. “You never would have known. She was doing her duty, smiling, laughing, engaged in everything. Maybe privately she showed her grief, but we didn’t see it.” The Jamaicans gave a flag-waving welcome to the woman known in the local patois as “Missis Queen” and “The Queen Lady.”

The crowds in New Zealand and Australia surpassed expectations as well. Sir Edmund Hillary, whose conquest of Mount Everest had coincided with Elizabeth II’s coronation, attended a garden party for her in Auckland and said, “Most people much prefer to have a Queen as head of state rather than a broken-down old prime minister.” In Queensland thirty thousand people stood in the rain to hear her remarks at the “people’s day” fair. When Queenslander Ted Smout told her he was 104 years old, she said, “Oh, my mother is only 101!” In private she talked “constantly” of Margaret, and she called every day to check in with her mother. On her return to England on Sunday, March 3, she went immediately to Royal Lodge for a visit.

N
EARLY A MONTH
later, she was back at Windsor for Easter weekend. The Queen Mother had become noticeably weaker, but she had been lucid enough in the previous week to call friends and relatives with various instructions that were meant to be final wishes. On the morning of March 30, 2002—Easter Saturday—the Queen was out for her customary ride when she received a message from the doctors attending her mother that the end was approaching. When Elizabeth II arrived in her riding clothes, the Queen Mother was in a chair by the fireside in her dressing gown. The two women exchanged a few private words, and the Queen Mother did not speak again. Shortly afterward she closed her eyes and fell unconscious as Canon John Ovendon, chaplain of the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park, held her hand and prayed.

Elizabeth II went back to the castle to change and returned to Royal Lodge with Margaret’s children, David Linley and Sarah Chatto. The Queen Mother’s niece and close friend Margaret Rhodes was there as well. She lived nearby in the Great Park and had been faithfully visiting her aunt every day. At 3:15 in the afternoon the Queen Mother died peacefully at age 101, surrounded by her surviving daughter, her two grandchildren, and her niece, all of whom were crying. Tony Blair spoke to the Queen that evening and found her “very sad but dignified.” Prince Charles, who was in Klosters, Switzerland, on a skiing holiday with his sons, rushed to Windsor the next day to pay his respects to the grandmother he called “the original life enhancer.”

The Queen Mother’s “Tay Bridge” funeral plan unfolded as she had meticulously planned. By custom, it was not called a state funeral—reserved for reigning monarchs, with rare exceptions such as Winston Churchill—but a royal ceremonial funeral that was identical in its trappings. The Queen and her advisers were concerned at first whether there would be sufficient public interest to justify the nine days of official mourning, including three days of lying in state. These misgivings were prompted in part by modest-sized crowds outside Buckingham Palace and lines for the condolence books at St. James’s Palace, and by coverage in admittedly pro-republican newspapers such as
The Guardian
, which ran a headline on the day after the Queen Mother’s death: “UNCERTAIN FAREWELL REVEALS A NATION DIVIDED.”

By Friday, April 5, when the Queen Mother’s coffin was taken on a gun carriage in an elaborate procession from St. James’s Palace to Westminster Hall for the lying in state, the naysayers were proved wrong, as an estimated 250,000 people lined the route, in some places twenty deep. Draped over the coffin was her red, gold, white, and blue personal standard emblazoned with the familiar heraldic designs as well as bows and rampant lions from her family coat of arms. Resting on top was a wreath of white camellias bearing a card saying “In loving memory—Lilibet.” In front of the flowers was a purple velvet cushion holding the Queen Mother’s glittering coronation crown set with the legendary 105-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond.

The horses of the King’s Troop pulled the gun carriage, and 1,600 members of the armed forces representing regiments from Britain and the Commonwealth marched to the somber music of military bands accompanied by muffled drumbeats. Immediately following the coffin were all the male members of the royal family plus, for the first time, Princess Anne. Like her brothers Charles and Andrew, she wore a naval uniform with trousers, a privilege of her rank as an honorary rear admiral.

They met the Queen and Margaret’s daughter, Sarah Chatto, at the door of Westminster Hall, and the pallbearers carried the coffin to the seven-foot-high catafalque where George VI had lain in state five decades earlier. After the Archbishop of Canterbury conducted a brief prayer service for the family, the Queen and Prince Philip were driven back to Buckingham Palace. As she waved to the crowds, Elizabeth II’s expression was ineffably sad. As their car left Parliament Square and turned into Whitehall, the crowds of silent mourners unexpectedly burst into applause that continued along the Mall. “It was very emotional for her,” said one of her relatives. “It made her realize people really cared.” The Queen said that the moment was “one of the most touching things” that had ever happened to her.