A Brief History of the Private Life of Elizabeth II Read online

  It is often a good deal livelier in other countries for, though she herself is usually treated with respect, the stories reported there are frequently exaggerations or outright inventions. Without the constraints of deference or litigation that apply in Britain, journalists can afford to be more colourful. France Dimanche, for instance, specialises in reporting alleged quarrels in the Royal Family – it has frequently predicted the Queen’s imminent divorce – as well as numerous threats to abdicate. Abroad, the notion of a monarch is, in any case, often something of a novelty. When she went to St Petersburg (the first British monarch to do so) in 1994, a member of the public was quoted as saying: ‘We see presidents all the time, but how often do we have a visit from a real queen?’ When a German was asked what is the function of his country’s Federal President – for the government is run by the Chancellor – he thought for an instant and replied: ‘It means we have someone to meet the Queen when she comes on visits.’ She is, in other words, a reference point – an affirmation of their own importance – even for people in countries with which she has no connection. More than two centuries after American independence, this descendant of the Colonies’ former ruler is sometimes seen as more than a VIP when she goes to the USA. In 2007 she visited Richmond, Virginia shortly after a number of students at a nearby university had been massacred by a gunman. It was arranged that the Queen meet the families of victims and spend time with them in private conversation. It is difficult to imagine any other foreign dignitary – except perhaps the Pope – doing such a thing.

  But what exactly is it that she does? She presides over a country that is run by others. She makes Acts of Parliament – and all sorts of other documents – legal by putting her signature on them. She appoints ministers, ambassadors, bishops, judges and military officers. She gives out medals to those people others have deemed worthy of them. She discusses the state of the country every week with the head of the government, and is allowed to suggest or advise solutions to problems, though she herself cannot even vote. She is required to be constantly on show, so that people throughout her realms will know she is aware of them and interested in what they are doing, and this takes a good deal of her time. She has to represent the nation abroad so as to improve relations with other countries, and to represent it at home by speaking to her people at moments of national significance, as well as by opening important buildings or exhibitions or sporting events. She leads the country’s mourning on Remembrance Sunday, and every Christmas she has to appear on television to wish her subjects well for the coming year.

  She carries out these tasks because she inherited them. She does so without fuss or complaint, and with considerable expertise. Yet whatever the position into which the Queen was born, she could not have fulfilled her destiny so well had she not had a personality suited to the task. Although chosen by accident of fate, she happens to have a passion for it, a genuine sense of vocation. She has her father’s modest and conscientious nature, which helps her survive the numbing boredom of official events. She is also a woman of fixed tastes and habits, and these have not altered in any significant way since she succeeded to the throne. She does not like to see change in her routine or her surroundings. Becoming queen at the age of 25, she very quickly grew into the job – assisted by her husband, her mother and her father’s advisors – establishing an infrastructure of work and travel and leisure that she has not substantially altered since. She likes being queen, and she knows she is successful at it, so she has no wish to do things differently. She prefers a life that is planned and predictable and this is as well, for without it she could not cope with the heavy workload she continues to carry. She sees it as a job for life rather than, like her counterparts in the Netherlands, a position from which she can retire. Aware of the extent to which she represents national continuity, she wishes to carry on.

  This continuity is reflected even in her appearance. She has not, as most women of her age have done, altered her hairstyle for almost half a century. Nor will she, for it has to look just as it does on coins and banknotes. Although the clothes she wore in the 1950s seem dated when seen in pictures, her personal taste coalesced in the following decade and has not changed significantly since. Naturally her wardrobe is stylish and expensive, but it has never followed fashion to any significant degree – there was never any question of adopting the foibles of the 1960s or 1970s – and dresses seen in photographs from 40 years ago look much the same as those she wears today. Never in fashion, she is never out of fashion. She has not developed fads for pastimes, or cuisine, or travel to particular places. Although she could belong at once to the ‘jet-set’ if she wished to, she does not care for the lifestyle or most of the hobbies. She has no interest in skiing, sailing, playing golf or tennis, though members of her family do all of these. She has no desire to sit at gaming-tables. She is as passionately interested in horses as when she was a small girl, and as addicted to the decidedly unglamorous pleasures of dog-walking and country life that she has enjoyed since childhood. Her personality and tastes, in other words, formed early and have remained consistent ever since, adding to the sense of timelessness about her that many find reassuring. As with her tastes, so with her attitudes. Princess Elizabeth’s views and habits merged seamlessly with those of her parents and grandmother.

  To many, what adds to the impression that she lives in some parallel universe is that she does not express views on the important issues of the moment. She is clearly comfortable with the constitutional position that she remain aloof from the political process. The whole point of a constitutional Head of State is that he or she has no ties to any party, is not to blame for government policy and thus stands apart from the crises that embroil politicians and public, representing the long-term view and keeping matters in perspective. In fact, she is intensely aware of political developments and, after a 60-year reign, is a very experienced observer of the national mood. She meets the Prime Minister every week. She invites senior politicians to banquets at Buckingham Palace or to ‘dine and sleep’ at Windsor. She has numerous opportunities to discuss, or to hear about, issues from those most deeply involved in them. She has plenty of opinions, though these are not made known to the public. In private she is lively, shrewd and surprisingly funny; as impatient with pomposity in others as she is with toadying, and skilled in mimicry. She is largely unflappable, given to quiet annoyance but never explosive rage when something goes wrong, and amused by minor mishaps provided no one is hurt or humiliated by them. She has a spontaneous wit that can cause her guests to burst out laughing (she once asked a friend of Prince Charles who had driven to Windsor Castle for lunch, ‘Did you find it all right?’) We know these things, because we read about them, but we also know the public will never be allowed to see this side of her.

  Much is known about her hobbies and pursuits (the Turf, the Daily Telegraph crossword, detective novels, enormous jigsaws). Thanks to an insatiable appetite for royal trivia, many people now know that she breakfasts on cereal kept in Tupperware containers. Some of these are half-truths, untruths or speculations anyway. She is said to hate shellfish, since they are banned from menus when she is abroad on state visits. That may not be for reasons of personal preference, but rather because any ill effects from eating them could ruin her timetable and involve letting down people who have waited to see her. Her aversion to avocados, however, is well documented. She thinks they taste ‘like soap’.

  Much is also known about the important experiences of her past life, simply because it has always been lived in public. Even such a personal matter as meeting and falling for her future husband has been, if we are to believe the account of her former governess, told in detail. Nevertheless she has kept private an enormous amount about herself. Unlike her husband and her children, she does not give interviews – though she has occasionally offered personal memories as part of a documentary. In this reticence she has followed the example of her mother who, despite a sociable and outgoing nature, maintained strict silence with
regard to journalists until the very end of her life (when she spoke on television at the time of her 100th birthday, many viewers had never previously heard her voice). Given the media-savvy ways of the Royal Family’s younger generations, it is unlikely there will ever again be a monarch who retains such a sense of mystique as Elizabeth II.

  She has never gone to school, never done housework or even her own packing, never carried or seriously handled money (the banknote she puts in a church collection is passed to her by an Equerry). All of these things are, of course, a result of her position. Even the circumstances in which she must take her chances with fate, however, have gone without a hitch. Every one of her children and grandchildren has been born healthy. She herself has never known a day’s serious illness. Although she fell in love with the first eligible man she encountered, at an age when it might have been argued that she could not have known her own mind, she has been happily married to him for her entire adult life. She has never experienced frustrated love, nor the pain of divorce, though her sister – sadly – knew both.

  However rarefied the world in which she moves, the Queen has, to a larger extent than people perhaps realise, participated in the events of the 20th century. Her exalted position does not guard her against the slings and arrows of fortune. Given the long military tradition of her family, her male relatives have seen their share of danger. Her father was at the Battle of Jutland. Her future husband – of whom at that time she was already fond – saw action in the Mediterranean and risked his life on the convoys. Her second son was in the Falklands campaign, and more recently her grandson Prince Harry served for 10 weeks in Afghanistan. One of her mother’s brothers was killed in the First World War, and another was a POW. Her uncle, the Duke of Kent, was killed in the Second World War while aboard an RAF aircraft. Even in peacetime there have been tragedies: her cousin, Prince William of Gloucester, also perished in an air crash, in 1972. Her husband’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was murdered by IRA terrorists in 1979. She and her parents lived through the Blitz, in which their London home – Buckingham Palace – was deliberately targeted by the Luftwaffe and badly damaged.

  She and her family are familiar with stress and danger, and her life has contained plenty of anxious, awful moments. Apart from these extreme circumstances, she has known the trauma of her three eldest children’s unhappy marriages, and periodic pressure to make household economies, since her finances are often commented upon in the media. She has even, despite the presence of policemen, Household regiments and all manner of ceremonial bodyguards to protect her, awoken to find a prowler in her bedroom. Although the scale of her surroundings may be beyond comparison with that of most of her subjects, she too has been subject to adversity.

  In spite of the affection with which the public regards her, she has not been able to enjoy the luxury of complacency. IRA terrorism posed a considerable threat to the Royal Family from the early 1970s onward. Even before that she had faced the possibility of violent unrest, from Welsh nationalists at the time of her son’s investiture as Prince of Wales (their bombing campaign, minuscule in comparison with what came later, is largely forgotten today), or from Quebec separatists who booed her – and might have done much worse – when she visited Canada in the 1960s. ‘Danger,’ she once said, ‘is part of the job,’ and she refuses to let the prospect of assassination interrupt her routine. No matter what layers of security exist between the Queen and the public, she has to have more personal, physical courage than many people realise or appreciate – as was seen in 1981, when a young man fired shots at her as she rode along the Mall.

  Her position requires her to be on show, to move among crowds, and therefore to be vulnerable to the shouted insults of drunks or to the assassin’s bullet, but she has long since weighed up the risks and decided that she will carry on regardless. On occasion an entire visit has been advised against by the Foreign Office because the host country was deemed too unstable to protect her. This was the case with Ghana in 1958 as guest of the unpopular Kwame Nkrumah. Sitting next to him in a dozen places, she could be injured by some attempt on him. The Queen, overruling her advisors, insisted on going. ‘How silly I should look,’ she told them, ‘if I was scared to visit and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception.’ She returned safely, and the tour was a great success. The fact that she has always been sanguine in the face of potential danger is, perhaps, not the least impressive of her qualities.

  There are different kinds of courage, and she must have several of them. The Queen lives on a constant and unrelenting diet of bad tidings. She watches the news like the rest of us, but she often knows more than we do. During the Cold War she will have had far greater knowledge of the dangers to peace – and the risk of nuclear annihilation – than her people. Imagine the stress her position must have involved during the crises over Berlin and Cuba. Yet through it all she maintained an apparently genuine sense of calm, and carried on with her job, including the archaic ceremonial, as if nothing were amiss. Murders, terrorist outrages, natural disasters at home or in the Commonwealth and beyond – all these are reported to her because there is often something official she is required to do, such as sending condolences or expressing the nation’s sorrow. As already seen, when visiting an American city she met the families of those killed by a frenzied gunman. Whatever can you say to console one person in those circumstances, let alone a whole series of grieving relatives? It cannot have been easy, and they were not even her subjects, yet she did it.

  Suppose that, like her grandfather George V in the years between the wars, she feels that society is going to the dogs. This is distinctly possible, given that she is an elderly lady of traditional bent who has very high personal standards of morals and integrity. She not only cannot publicly disapprove of things, she may be obliged to sign the very legislation that legalises what was previously unacceptable. This takes courage too. As one of her Private Secretaries, Sir John Colville, put it: ‘By sheer strength of willpower the Queen controls the impatience she must often feel, and never fails to look imperturbable. Nothing is better calculated to win the esteem of her subjects.’ Besides courage, she has several advantages that have helped to make her the effective ruler she is. The first was training, the second was temperament, the third was routine and the fourth was advice.

  From the age of 10 – when her uncle abdicated – she was intensively schooled for the position she would occupy. She worked very closely with her father, whose style and tastes she consciously continued, and in the early part of her own reign used many of the same advisors and officials. She and her father had had, in fact, the same tutor – Queen Mary (1867–1953), redoubtable widow of King George V, who trained them rigorously in the correct performance of duty. Once described as ‘the most queenly of queens’, Mary’s rigid bearing can be seen at a glance in old photographs. She was expert in protocol and appropriate behaviour, instilling an indelible sense of service by which personal wishes, and feelings, were entirely secondary to the demands of duty, just as she educated her granddaughter to appreciate the cultural riches that make up the Royal Collections. It is worth remembering that this influence was directed at Elizabeth for the first 25 years of her life, and will have taken on added importance when she became heir – a thorough and intensive indoctrination of a willing pupil who responded by modelling herself on the old lady. If a certain toughness of character has been passed on, that is hardly surprising. What she also inherited, however, was a lifelong awareness of the need to justify her position by hard work and goodwill.

  Elizabeth was also, and more specifically, taught by her father. Having had no preparation for his own succession, he wanted to ensure that she was fully ready for hers. Queen Victoria would not let her eldest son see the contents of dispatch boxes; George VI habitually sent for his daughter to go through his with him. The first time she took the salute at Trooping the Colour he gave her a rigorous inspection of uniform and drill before she left the Palace. From her mother’s example she learned how to
charm – how to talk easily to others – even though her own personality did not enable her to do this so effectively. Everywhere around her were mentors, teachers, examples. She grasped the importance of what she was doing, and strove to do it well. The Queen’s formative years were, of course, interrupted by the Second World War. Because she did not attend school or university, it might be assumed that she lacks the intellectual discipline to analyse and retain information. In fact, she was soundly, privately educated in the subjects – history and constitutional law, for instance – that had bearing on her future. She may not have had the stimulus of a school environment, or the spur of examinations or of competition with other pupils, but she had the benefit of one-to-one tuition and her intellectual training, if limited in scope, was excellent. Because she came to the throne when young, she has also had the experience of learning her job by doing it.

  Her second advantage was temperament. It is a point worth emphasising that Elizabeth never had what might be called a ‘Prince Hal phase’, in which she rebelled against her upbringing or her destiny. She accepted it and prepared for it and looked forward to it. Her views never clashed with those of her family or the people who sought to train her. While her uncle David, as King Edward VIII, often ignored the red dispatch boxes sent to him by the government, Queen Elizabeth makes a point of reading everything in hers, going through them for an hour or two each evening. Through concentration and long practice she can absorb and retain large amounts of information and weigh its implications. The Queen has an extremely good memory for both facts and faces. On subjects that engage her interest, such as art and antiques, she has amassed considerable knowledge. On the breeding, training and racing of horses, her lifelong enthusiasm, she has a level of expertise that is overwhelming.