The Queen, page 21
However, it was unusual for the queen to be “bloody angry.” Her response to a faux pas or an internal palace cock-up was far more measured and modulated. She learned from an early age that a full-blown regal rebuke can make even the stoutest heart quail. When her father George VI was in the midst of one of his gnashes, his outbursts of uncontrolled anger, courtiers would be left ashen-faced and trembling.
A sharp look, a raised eyebrow, or a quizzical “Are you sure?” tended to be the regal lexicon of reproof. The queen was so controlled that when she did, very occasionally, lose her temper, those present remembered the moment for the rest of their lives.
It was on one of her walks on her Scottish estate, in early August 1979, that she first encountered Lady Diana Spencer. She was somewhat perplexed as she half remembered her but assigned the third daughter of Earl Spencer, one of her equerries from the early years of her reign, as being part of the Sandringham quadrant of her life.
Diana had grown up in the grounds of the queen’s twenty-thousand-acre Norfolk estate at Park House and as a little girl was invited over to play with Andrew and Edward and, during the Christmas holidays, to watch films. If she was mentioned at all it was as a playmate and later, a possible girlfriend for Prince Andrew, who was of a similar age.
During their conversation the winsome, rosy-cheeked eighteen-year-old explained that she was staying with her newly married sister Jane and her husband, the queen’s assistant private secretary Robert Fellowes. She described Balmoral as “magical,” a sentiment that found favor with the queen. The following summer the queen met Diana at Balmoral under quite different circumstances. This time she was a guest of Prince Charles. Everyone on the estate knew what that meant. She was undergoing what was colloquially known as the Balmoral test to see if she was suitable royal bride material. Could she divine the elusive Windsor country code or at least be a willing pupil? Those older and wiser than her had tried and failed. Some had not even bothered. Prince Charles’s onetime girlfriend, Scottish heiress Anna “Whiplash” Wallace, so named because of her fiery temper, refused at the first fence, telling her royal boyfriend that the idea of going to the Windsor family seat was “too tedious for words.”
For others the possible marital commitment implied by joining the royal family at Balmoral was an attachment too far. Lady Jane Wellesley, the daughter of the queen’s friend the Duke of Wellington, bridled at the very idea of sacrificing her life on the altar of monarchy. “Do you honestly believe I want to be queen,” she once said when cornered by inquisitive reporters.10
The bookies’ favorite had been Amanda Knatchbull, Mountbatten’s granddaughter who was even given a blank check by the ambitious patriarch to improve her wardrobe. Amanda, like a lengthening list of eligible young ladies, eventually decided a lifetime of sacrifice for the House of Windsor was not what she was put on this earth for.
Others, like Sabrina Guinness, accepted the invitation to Balmoral but then failed to crack the code. Even though her previous escorts included Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, and David Bowie, she found herself in an intimidating world. When she joined the royal family for drinks, she went to sit in a high-backed chair only to be told firmly by the queen: “Don’t sit there—that’s Queen Victoria’s chair.”11 She never recovered her equilibrium after being admonished by the head of state. On a different occasion another member of the royal family delivered a similar reproof to a friend of the then Lady Diana Spencer and, according to others, the same happened to Tony Blair when he and Cherie arrived for the traditional prime minister’s weekend.
This routine has the feeling of a long-running family in-joke, the Windsor equivalent of sitting on an embarrassingly placed whoopee cushion or skidding on a banana skin. Their sense of humor was somewhat Teutonic in the sense of laughing at another’s misfortune or schadenfreude. The younger royals, in particular Prince Andrew, hailed from the bread-roll-throwing academy of schoolboy humor. It is a kind of bullying as the recipient, unless a very close friend, is uncertain how to react—throw one back or take it on the chin. During one raucous picnic on a beach during a cruise the royals and their guests, the queen excepted, threw small pellets of bird dung at one another, a jolly activity that culminated in everyone, once again the queen excepted, being thrown into the sea.
By contrast her humor was on the dry side, like her evening martini. She and her husband would smile conspiratorially at each other when things went wrong on a royal tour, the classic being her visit to California in 1983.
Unintentional irony always tickles the regal funny bone. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that during a regal visit to a coastal town, the mayor, resplendent in his gold chains of office, proudly showed her around wooden cabinets displaying local treasures in the council chamber. In one was a splendid mayoral chain embellished with gold and gems. When the queen asked what it was, the mayor replied that it was a unique chain of office that was only brought out for very special occasions.12 She needed all of Queen Mary’s self-control not to burst into laughter.
Given her ingrained awareness of how those not in the immediate family can react to her presence, her admonishment of Charles’s girlfriend for sitting on Queen Victoria’s chair uncharacteristically jars. She has a well-deserved reputation of being a careful and thoughtful hostess, inspecting bedrooms before guests arrived and thinking of suitable books and flowers to place in their rooms. At pre-dinner drinks she is usually at her most relaxed, solicitous and humorous, such as the time Princess Margaret was chatting to thriller writer Denys Rhodes. She asked him how he was getting on with his latest book. “It’s nearly finished,” he replied, “but I desperately need a title.” At which point a voice behind said gaily: “And I cannot think of a reason for giving you one.” It was the queen, most amused with herself at this bon mot.13 So why did she embarrass Charles’s girlfriend Sabrina Guinness? The most benign explanation is that it was a social reflex, that she had said it so often over the years there was an assumption everyone knew what to expect. Or it was an unexpected lapse in someone who was constantly attuned to the sensitivities of others. Alternatively, she disapproved of Charles’s cosmopolitan girlfriend with her rock-and-roll lovers and this was one way of making her feelings known.
Fortunately Diana did not get the Queen Victoria chair treatment. During the fateful visit in September 1980, the queen expressed her satisfaction with her eldest son’s choice of houseguest. The Spencers were well known to the royal family, in fact Charles had dated Diana’s older sister Sarah several years before. For her part, Lady Diana Spencer was jolly, jaunty, and joined in. Even when she fell into a bog on a long tramp she came up laughing. She had a dry sense of humor rather like, well, her own. Diana knew the form, fitted in, and, to Prince Philip’s relief, wasn’t a stranger. “She is one of us,” the queen wrote to a friend. “I am very fond of all three of the Spencer girls.”14 That wasn’t the whole story—Diana told me years later that before she arrived at Balmoral she was terrified-“shitting bricks” with nerves.
That, though, is not the impression she left with fellow guests, who admired her guile when she accompanied Prince Charles on a fishing expedition on the banks of the river Dee. Every summer photographers patrolled along the A93 road on the public side of the Dee hoping for a glimpse of Charles with his latest squeeze. Award-winning photographer Ken Lennox, who has been taking pictures of the royal family in Deeside for decades, spotted the prince and noticed that there was a girl lurking nearby. By the time he had gotten himself into position to take a picture, the young lady in question had spotted him and very calmly walked away up the bank out of sight. When Lennox next located her he could see that she was standing behind a tree using her compact mirror to watch him. In this curious cat-and-mouse game Diana proved herself to be no ordinary quarry.
Once he had discovered her name, though, the hunt was on, the Sun newspaper splashing with the headline: HE’S IN LOVE AGAIN. Within days there wasn’t a man, woman, or child in Britain who didn’t know that Lady Diana Spencer was a polite if rather bashful kindergarten teacher whose father was the Eighth Earl of Spencer and whose family home was Althorp Hall in Northamptonshire.
An earl’s daughter at last. The queen mother was delighted, especially as Diana’s grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was one of her ladies-in-waiting. The queen and Prince Philip also felt that Diana ticked all the boxes: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, aristocratic, and without a known past. Her uncle Lord Fermoy trumpeted that she had never had a lover. In their eyes, too, it hopefully ended their eldest son’s dangerous entanglement with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of fellow officer Andrew Parker Bowles.
All seemed to be going swimmingly in Charles’s latest courtship. While Diana was caught up in the excitement of it all, members of her family sounded notes of caution. Her grandmother Lady Ruth Fermoy articulated her concerns. “You must understand that their sense of humor and their lifestyle are very different and I don’t think it will suit you.”15 It was a diplomatic way of saying that she had doubts about Diana and her suitability as Charles’s wife and consort but also a warning that, even though she might be a member of the aristocracy, there was still a social and cultural divide between royalty and the upper classes.
There was also the looming presence of Mrs. Parker Bowles, which was a matter of concern for both Diana and the queen. In November 1980 Bob Edwards, editor of the Sunday Mirror, ran a story suggesting that Lady Diana had secretly joined Prince Charles aboard the Royal Train at Holt, Wiltshire. Acting on the personal instructions of the queen, the palace denounced the story and demanded a retraction. Edwards refused, quoting an “impeccable source.”16 Diana knew that she hadn’t been on the Royal Train but had a jolly good idea who had been: Mrs. Parker Bowles. The scales were beginning to fall from her eyes. Unbeknownst to the queen and her court, another, ultimately calamitous narrative was developing.
During that fevered Christmas and New Year at Sandringham, the influx of national and international media was such that the queen herself felt under siege. She could not even ride out without being photographed. It was so frustrating that at one point she snapped, shouting at photographers to go away. It was a measure of her impotence and anger that her holiday was being interrupted in this unruly manner. The cause of the queen’s unease was the innocent presence of Lady Diana Spencer in the house party—again at the invitation of Her Majesty. As she later told me: “The Queen was fed up.” For his part the Prince of Wales was indecisive and confused about his romantic future. This was nothing new. His romantic prevarication toward Camilla Shand, now Parker Bowles, was now a matter of profound regret.
As he pondered his next move, his circle of friends weighed in on Diana’s suitability. The endorsement was hardly enthusiastic. Princess Anne thought the third Spencer daughter a “silly girl”17—perhaps in retaliation for Charles’s own dismissal of her choice of husband as “Fog”—while Mountbatten’s grandson Norton Romsey and his wife Penny felt Diana was in love with the position rather than the man.
Years later when I was researching my biography Diana: Her True Story, which was written with the complete participation and enthusiastic support of the late princess, I asked Diana and her best friend Carolyn Bartholomew that very question: position or man? Both, speaking at different times, unhesitatingly said, “Man.” While Diana was certain in her mind about her love for Prince Charles, he was unsure. It was such an awesome commitment.
The queen was more matter-of-fact. She thought that Diana’s supportive, positive nature and girlish high spirits would make an ideal foil for her often disconsolate, melancholic son. The young kindergarten helper would, she thought, make a perfect companion and helpmate. At the same time, after her encounter with the scruffy ranks of the mass media in her own backyard, the queen sympathized with Diana’s situation. Every time she left her shared apartment in Coleherne Court, Earls Court, she was tailed by a phalanx of photographers. The queen accepted, even if her son did not, that this state of affairs couldn’t continue for much longer. It was damaging both to the reputation of the crown and to Lady Diana. In part the situation was one of Prince Charles’s own making as he had suggested in a magazine interview that thirty was a good age to marry. From the moment he celebrated that significant birthday the marital starting gun was fired, every girl he so much as looked at considered a future queen. During the siege of Sandringham, the queen spoke to Prince Philip and he, as was his custom, dealt with the matter by writing a letter. This was not unusual; all the royal children received letters of some sort or other from “Pa.” It was a traditional way the family had of broaching delicate or emotional matters. In what he considered to be a sympathetic and understanding missive, Charles’s father outlined the issues facing both sides. The relationship had gone far enough. Either it should be ended for the sake of the reputation of an innocent girl or the prince should ask for her hand in marriage. In short, stop dithering. When the full disaster of his marriage unfolded Charles would later tell friends that his father had bullied him into marriage, that the letter was an ultimatum. Even his circle didn’t interpret it that way. They felt that his father was simply asking him to make a decision one way or another. Charles, used to his father’s bombastic nature, read between the lines and concluded that Prince Philip, speaking also on behalf of his mother, wanted him to get on with it.
Ultimately his letter did have the desired effect of provoking his eldest son into action. Charles returned from a skiing trip and asked Diana to Windsor Castle as he had something important to say to her. They met in the nursery, a bare, unremarkable room with worn green carpet and matching colored walls studded with ancient family photographs. Hardly the stuff of a fairy-tale romance. Not a rose or flickering candle in sight. Even the gruff Prince Philip managed a proposal at Balmoral “beside some well-loved loch, the white clouds overhead and curlew crying.”18
Diana arrived at Windsor Castle about five o’clock on February 6, 1981, to be asked by Prince Charles if she would marry him. Diana took up the story: “I laughed. I remember thinking: ‘This is a joke,’ and I said: ‘Yeah, OK,’ and laughed. He was deadly serious. He said: ‘You do realize that one day you will be Queen.’ And a voice said to me inside: ‘You won’t be Queen but you’ll have a tough role.’ So I thought: ‘OK,’ so I said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘I love you so much, I love you so much.’ He said: ‘Whatever love means.’ He said it then.”19 Then he rang the queen.
Whatever love means: three words that came to haunt him, especially as he repeated almost the same equivocal phrase during the engagement interview before the world’s media on February 24, 1981, on the lawn at Buckingham Palace. Then he said “Whatever ‘in love’ means.” His ambivalence was unnerving for the princess to be. From an upper-floor window, the queen watched the couple and attendant media unnoticed. It was a moment of quiet triumph. After so many years of prevarication by her son, at last he had chosen a girl who had the pedigree, personality, and popularity to support and nurture the future king. At last the kingdom seemed secure.
At this moment of triumph, shadowy forces plotted to assassinate the head of state. The success, as the Provisional IRA saw it, of Mountbatten’s murder eighteen months previously had encouraged them to aim higher.
This time the queen was in the crosshairs of their murderous campaign. As the palace planners prepared for the wedding of the year, the IRA began their own deadly plotting. On May 9, just over eleven weeks before the wedding, the queen was due to open Sullom Voe oil refinery on the Shetland Islands, a place so far north it was as near to Norway as Britain. Employing more than six thousand workers and costing £1.2 billion ($6.5 billion in 2021), the facility, which took six years to build, was one of Europe’s largest construction projects.20
Unknown to the site’s operators, the oil company BP, at least one of the workers there was a member of the Provisional IRA. When the queen was due to open the facility, tensions across the water in Northern Ireland were at an all-time high. The death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands at the Maze prison on May 5 sparked fierce rioting in nationalist areas and an upsurge in IRA attacks.
While violence raged in Northern Ireland, on the Shetland Isles the IRA unit at Sullom Voe received a parcel posted from Ireland. It contained seven pounds of gelignite and a twelve-day timer device. A second bomb was also due to arrive but was delayed in the post. The IRA operative, fearing that the second bomb had been intercepted by security services, hid the first bomb in a power station, set the timer, and then escaped back to Ireland.
As the band struck up the national anthem and the queen prepared to deliver her speech, there was a sharp bang from the power station five hundred yards away, the noise mainly masked by the band. Fortunately the first bomb only partially detonated, and BP was able to claim that the small explosion was just an electrical fault. If the Irish postal service had been more efficient, Saturday, May 9, would have gone down in infamy—especially as the queen was also accompanied by Prince Philip and King Olav V of Norway.
Given the confusion surrounding the “non explosion,” the incident received scant attention, much to the fury of the Provisional IRA, which felt obliged to release two statements claiming responsibility. The second stated: “Had we managed to place Saturday’s bomb close enough to the British Queen she would now be dead.”21 Their claims were overshadowed by the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II later that month and the happier news that the queen had become a grandmother for the second time following the birth, on May 15, of Zara Phillips, the infant daughter of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips.
Just a month later the queen faced another assault, this time with the world watching. As she rode along the Mall on her nineteen-year-old Canadian horse Burmese during the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony, six shots rang out from the crowd. The gun was fired by Marcus Sarjeant, then seventeen, who was quickly wrestled to the ground by two guardsmen, a police officer, and a St. John Ambulance volunteer. Amid a flurry of activity, the queen, who had seen her assailant for a split second before he fired at her, was a study in calm. Years of riding experience meant she was able to soothe her startled mount, who was more alarmed by horsemen of the Household Cavalry riding toward her than the initial gunshots, which it later turned out were blanks fired from a starting pistol.
