The Queen, page 29
On Friday afternoon, after flying down from Scotland, the queen and Prince Philip finally made their much-anticipated appearance among the grieving crowds. A momentary expression of anxiety flashed across her face, betraying her uncertainty as to how her people would react. “We were not confident,” an ex-courtier stated, “that when the Queen got out of the car, she would not be hissed and jeered at.”27 As soon as the queen walked among her people the ugly atmosphere evaporated and the crowds erupted into spontaneous if polite applause. When an eleven-year-old girl held out a bouquet of red roses the queen asked: “Would you like me to place them for you?” The girl replied: “No, Your Majesty, they’re for you.”28
Back in the palace, the queen and her husband spent a long time talking about the public mood. The royal couple could barely process what was going on. It was like entering another world. As a senior aide explained: “At Balmoral, she hadn’t taken it in. You never know what it is like until you are actually there. All the remarks and people hugging each other, sobbing—the whole nation seemed to have gone bananas. The Queen and Prince Philip felt utterly bewildered.”29
They would have understood the national mood more keenly had they been in London, at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle, when the tragedy happened. It was their fortune or misfortune, depending on perspective, that they were staying at Balmoral, which is remote and beautiful but is truly like entering a time warp. Nor did they fully appreciate, along with many others, the impact of Diana’s death on the national psyche. “The world has lost the plot,” wrote commentator Gyles Brandreth at the time.30 Yet for the public, who had keenly watched the upward trajectory of Diana’s life, it was the suddenness of her death that was so difficult to bear. It was an unequal end to everything that had gone before in her life. The queen and her family did not see what the public saw. They mourned someone whom they all knew, the family lamenting the flawed individual rather than the saintly icon. Years later Harry discussed his own confusion. He heard people sobbing when he couldn’t bring himself to cry for his late mother. His father felt a similar sense of bafflement, the Prince of Wales recalling: “I felt an alien in my own country.”31
At the time the queen was preparing for only the second special televised address of her reign—the first was in February 1991 before the First Gulf War. “She knew it was something she should do,” noted one senior adviser.32 Her speech was initially drafted by her private secretary, then discussed with the queen, Prince Philip, and other courtiers before being sent to Downing Street for final approval. As Blair and Campbell read the draft, one of the duo suggested that the sovereign should speak not only as the queen but as a grandmother. It was a touch of genius.
The queen agreed to be filmed live in the Chinese Dining Room in front of a large window overlooking the Mall, which was teeming with flowers and mourners.33
Her three-minute-and-nine-second speech was one of the most effective of her reign. Her uncomplicated authenticity, clear reading, and respect toward the late princess meant that there was an immediate “dissipation of hostility to the Windsors.”34
She spoke of the disbelief, incomprehension, and sense of loss. “We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now as your queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart. First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness. I admired and respected her—for her energy and commitment to others and especially for her devotion to her boys.”
With a nod to the criticism of herself and her family she continued: “I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.”35
She had been slow to change direction when it became clear she was out of step with the nation, and though the boys were the focus of the family and her own concerns there had been nothing to stop a camera crew filming a similar message at Balmoral several days earlier. This would have stopped criticism of the royal family and the monarchy in its tracks.
Her speech, though several days late, had done the trick. George Carey remarked that “it showed her compassion and understanding, it went a very long way toward silencing her critics and removing the misunderstanding that had developed.”36 Support for republicanism dropped after the speech.
At dinner that evening, one final question needed to be answered—would William and Harry walk behind their mother’s coffin and follow royal tradition? While the final decision was left to the princes themselves, in the end it was the intervention of their grandfather Prince Philip that proved decisive. “If I walk, will you walk?” he asked.37 When William agreed, Harry followed his lead. “The boys are very close with their grandparents, adore them,” observed press secretary Dickie Arbiter. “Significantly, they walked for their grandfather, not their father or uncle.”38 There was also the fear that if only Prince Charles and Charles Spencer walked, the future king, who had received numerous threatening letters during the week, could be jeered at or physically attacked by a member or members of the crowd who blamed the prince for Diana’s death.
On the day of the funeral the queen and her family assembled outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. As the funeral cortege passed the royal party, the queen bowed her head in a moment of obeisance, acknowledging Diana herself but also perhaps what she represented about the changing values of modern Britain.
As the queen and other members of the family bowed their heads in respect, Princess Margaret remained upright and upstanding, looking like she would rather be somewhere else. Somewhat bizarrely, as the queen and Margaret waited for the arrival of the cortege, she had been nagging the queen about improving the lavatories at Kensington Palace.39 It was a moment that symbolized the estrangement between two former royal neighbors.40
Paradoxically it was the fact that the boys displayed the traditional royal virtues of stoicism and fortitude amid a sea of tears that lent the funeral such an emotional resonance. They adhered impeccably to the maxim of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone: “You don’t wear private grief on a public sleeve.” Prince Philip comforted his grandsons on that lengthy walk by quietly pointing out historic landmarks and explaining their background.41
A worldwide audience of two and a half billion watched as Tony Blair read from the Bible and Diana’s sisters Jane and Sarah read poems inside Westminster Abbey while Elton John gave an emotional rendition of his hit song “Candle in the Wind,” which he dedicated to the late princess.
It was Charles Spencer who publicly threw down the gauntlet to the royal family and the mass media, implicitly rebuking the royal family for stripping the princess of her appellation Her Royal Highness, and for the cool way they raised their children. “Diana,” he said, “needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.” He pledged to William and Harry that the Spencers, their “blood family,” would continue the imaginative way in which Diana was steering her sons “so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.” He highlighted too the way the media was on a quest to “bring her down.” As he finished his peroration, praising his sister as the “unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds,” applause rippled from the crowd outside the open doors of the abbey. Inside the abbey, after a moment of recognition, the congregation, including William and Harry, also applauded his address. It was, however, unclear whether the applause was in acknowledgment of the earl’s assessment of his sister, the mass media, or the royal family.
The queen stared ahead, stony-faced, as did her husband. Prince Charles was so incensed that he had to be restrained from issuing a public statement. As Dickie Arbiter recalled: “The mood inside the royal family was very angry about what he said and the courtiers were apoplectic, shell-shocked.”42 The queen felt that Diana’s brother should have made more of Diana’s evident Christian qualities, a point the Archbishop of Canterbury made before the service. It was an opportunity missed, she felt.
After the funeral and Diana’s burial at Althorp, the royal family returned to Balmoral. The next day, exactly a week after the accident, Tony and Cherie Blair flew to the queen’s Highland home for an abbreviated prime minister’s weekend. During his private audience with the queen, Blair spoke about the possible lessons to be learned from Diana’s death. He recollected that the queen was “reflecting, considering and adjusting.”43 Before she headed off on her delayed Italian holiday, Princess Margaret sent her older sister a note of thanks for “how kindly you 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.”44
After such a bruising week, the queen appreciated the loyalty and support of a sister who knew her so intimately. Brought up not to show emotion in public, Margaret, like the queen, found the wailing and keening hard to understand.
In another private letter, this time a reply to a close confidant, Lady Henriette Abel Smith, the queen spoke of the negatives and positives that had emerged from the funeral week. In a typed portion she wrote: “It was indeed dreadfully sad, and she is a huge loss to the country. But the public reaction to her death, and the service in the Abbey seem to have united people around the world in a rather inspiring way. William and Harry have been so brave and I am very proud of them.”
In her own handwriting she continued: “I think your letter was one of the first I opened—emotions still so mixed up but we have all been through a very bad experience!”45
Even though the queen had been on the throne for more than forty-five years, following Diana’s death it felt as if the queen, or rather the monarchy, was on probation. She had gone head-to-head with her people and by and large the people had won.
While the mantra from Buckingham Palace was that lessons had been learned, a skeptical nation watched warily—and reserved judgment. It was recognized that the disconnect between sovereign and society during the tumultuous funeral week would take some healing, although the polls clearly showed that the people didn’t want a republic. They wanted to see a modernized monarchy more in touch with multicultural Britain. For a woman schooled in precedent and tradition with the unspoken question What would my father have done? always hanging in the air, any reform would be sensible and incremental. She was also stubborn when under threat. When Lord Altrincham argued for the abolition of the presentation of debutantes at Buckingham Palace, the queen delayed the decision for a year so as not to give the radical lord the satisfaction of saying: I told you so.
And Britain was changing. While new Labour prime minister Tony Blair praised the queen as “the best of British” at a lunch to celebrate her fiftieth wedding anniversary in November 1997, he was on the cusp of overseeing a remodeling of the political landscape, with closer European integration, devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Island, an elected mayor of London and London Assembly, as well as integration into European laws. With a growing movement for Scottish devolution and the queen’s beloved Commonwealth of Nations something of a political afterthought, the nation was fundamentally evolving—and not in a way that necessarily enhanced the monarchy.
Amid calls for a “People’s Monarchy” to mirror the work of the “people’s princess,” the queen gradually adjusted her public persona, often with the advice of pollsters, well-connected diplomats, and media mavens. Prince Philip was especially interested in the new monarchy website, www.royal.uk, while the inception of the Way Ahead Group, which comprised senior members of the family and their advisers, was designed to give early warning of problems ahead and chart a safe course for the monarchy in the future.
Though the queen said, “I don’t do stunts,” meaning that she wouldn’t play up to the camera or the prevailing view, the media pack was now swollen with correspondents looking for signs of the “Diana effect.” Had the queen truly learned lessons from Diana’s life and altered her tone and style accordingly? The omens seemed positive.
When the queen visited a school she now sat with the children rather than standing with the head teacher. At a drive through McDonald’s in Ellesmere Port in 1998 she allowed herself to be photographed with excited staff, and on a 1999 visit to the Craigdale estate in Glasgow she joined pensioner Susan McCarron for tea and chocolate biscuits in her neat-as-a-pin bungalow.
During a tour of Malaysia in September 1998 she signed a Manchester United football for fans and even allowed glimpses of humor to shine through her normally impassive facade. She let it be known that when England had a goal disallowed during a World Cup match with Argentina she had thrown her arms up in the air in disgust at the decision and declared “one is not amused.” As a further nod to egalitarianism, she took the train to and from King’s Lynn in Norfolk for her annual festive holiday in Sandringham. Several commuters expressed their shocked delight at walking past her first-class carriage and seeing the queen quietly looking out at the passing parade.
As the Sunday Telegraph observed, “We are not seeing a new Queen. What we are gradually noticing is the same Queen reflecting the changing society around her.”46
In a further nod to Diana, the Union Flag was now routinely raised over unoccupied royal residences. The bare flagpole that caused so much concern during the funeral week was no more. “The princess was very good at picking issues,” a palace official reflected, “and we have to learn from that. She was very good at keeping abreast of topics of public concern. That was one of her strengths and a lesson that could be learned.”47
In December 1997 the royal yacht Britannia, the floating country home and safe haven on overseas visits, was decommissioned in Portsmouth after half a lifetime’s service. The queen was reluctant to say goodbye as the yacht held so many memories of happy times as a family, particularly the annual Western Islands cruise. Before the formal service, the queen and her family took one last lingering look around the yacht. It was an emotional private farewell, the queen seen dabbing away tears before retiring for lunch in the state dining room. Later at the public ceremony on the quayside the queen and the princess royal, who was also distressed, watched tearfully as the Royal Marines Band played the highly evocative “Highland Cathedral” during their final farewell. It was quickly pointed out by several media pundits that they never shed a tear for the princess though they cried over a floating piece of metal.
The yacht was stripped of all its royal memorabilia, including a narwhal tusk and oil paintings by Prince Philip, before she was sailed to Leith Harbor in Scotland where she is now a popular tourist attraction. Most of the artifacts have been reinstated.
At Kensington Palace a similar operation had been undertaken by the Spencer family. Everything in Diana’s apartment was removed lest trophy hunters sell Diana memorabilia. Her butler Paul Burrell complained that Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had even shredded the blotting paper on her daughter’s desk.
Within a matter of months all traces of her had been removed from her former royal home.
13
Two Weddings and Two Funerals
While Diana was gone but not forgotten, Camilla Parker Bowles, now divorced, was very much around and Prince Charles made it abundantly clear that she was not going anywhere.
His obdurate attitude placed the palaces of St. James and Buckingham on a collision course. The prince had already laid the groundwork for her continuing presence in his life; publicly in his 1994 documentary where he said that Camilla was a good friend then and would be in the future, and privately in her role as the mistress, albeit low-profile, of Highgrove.
This did not please the queen who had wanted Camilla gone, both before and after Diana’s death. Her senior officials, notably her principal private secretary Sir Robert Fellowes, were in firm agreement. They felt that the prince’s desire for self-fulfillment was in danger of jeopardizing the monarchy.
As Camilla’s biographer Penny Junor noted, “It was nothing personal. She had been very fond of Camilla in all the years she had been married to Andrew but it was Camilla who had been responsible, wittingly or not, for all the disasters that had befallen the prince since his marriage.”1
The queen could be forgiven for thinking that Charles had not spent enough time working on his marriage before going back to Camilla’s soothing ministrations. However difficult Diana had been—and the queen knew all about her wayward behavior—she had deserved more than the four or five years he had devoted to married life before going his own way. The now unanswerable question was whether Charles and Diana would have remained married had Camilla not been on the scene.
Few at the official fiftieth birthday party for Charles held at Buckingham Palace would have sensed the familial tension in the air. An estimated 850 guests including Prime Minister Tony Blair and former premier Margaret Thatcher, toasted his achievements and life in the presence of the queen and Prince Philip. The queen praised her son for his “diligence, compassion and leadership.”2 It all seemed so friendly and easygoing. Prince Charles referred to the queen as Mummy, a description that always got an amused reaction—so much so that he used it often.
Behind the public smiles, relations between “Mummy” and “darling” could not have been worse. The first issue was the thudding absence of Charles’s companion Camilla Parker Bowles, who had deliberately been left off the palace invitation list by the queen. Second was an ITV television documentary, broadcast to coincide with the prince’s birthday, that had the fingerprints of his charming but ruthless deputy private secretary Mark Bolland all over it. A “senior official” had briefed the TV producers that Charles wanted a slimmed-down monarchy and would be “privately delighted if the queen abdicated.”3 When confronted by the queen, Charles apologized and said the story was untrue. However, this was by no means the end of the matter. A rival BBC documentary, also well briefed by an anonymous official, emphasized that Charles was irritated with the queen for not stepping back from more of her official duties and letting him take over. To make matters even more awkward, one of the queen’s aides anonymously briefed the BBC show on the queen’s attitude toward Camilla. “The Queen has not and will not formally meet with Camilla. She will not even appear at the same social function.”4 In fact she had not been on the guest list of either the queen or the queen mother for the last fifteen years or so.
