Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, at 66 the most famous and richest woman in the world, has been having family problems. Recently they have been getting worse—to the delight of writers of books and magazine and newspaper stories who have been earning immense sums of money. One of her daughters-in-law keeps turning up in the tabloids on vacation with men other than her husband, sometimes dressed in nothing above the waist. Her other daughter-in-law, a blonde, lightly educated woman, married at a virginal 20, has apparently lived unhappily for more than a decade with Elizabeth's eldest son. Their domestic squabble threatens the son's inheritance of what he has described as "the family firm.'' But the headline writers have leapt beyond. Mingling glee with gloom, cackle with shriek, they have predicted the end of the firm itself. This will not happen, of course; the firm has been doing business at the same address for a thousand years and will continue for several lifetimes, at least. But the fuss has heavily underscored a remarkable fact: for 40 years, in good times and bad, Elizabeth Windsor has faithfully performed the role suddenly thrust upon her on February 6, 1952. She has been The Queen.
She is surprisingly short. (Still, at five feet two inches, she is taller than her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who barely reached five feet.) Her hair is gray, although she colors it brown, sometimes achieving a curious effect with parts of her head covered with soft curls in each color. Her bright-blue eyes still attract admiration, but what astonishes everyone she meets is her complexion. Despite lines around the eyes and some in the forehead, it is a cliche English peaches-and-cream.
She carries no money, has no passport, no driver's license. She wears glasses, not contact lenses; even in her finest robes, wearing the Imperial State Crown for the opening of Parliament, she reaches into her handbag and puts on her glasses to read her speech. Her voice is high and flat, because she is naturally shy, but she has added warmth and banished the shrillness of her younger years. She still offers an almost pained smile in public, which makes her seem distant and unapproachable. Her mother, the 92-year-old Queen Mother, herself robust and outgoing, still chides her daughter, "Smile!''
We are speaking of Her Most Excellent Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. For 40 years, the British government has been Her Majesty's Government. The parliamentary opposition is Her Majesty's Opposition. The daily grind of government is done by Her Majesty's Civil Service. British criminals are detained in Her Majesty's Prisons "at Her Majesty's pleasure.'' The Royal Navy sails in Her Majesty's Ships. Other armed services are the Royal Artillery, the Royal Marines, and the Royal Air Force. British money is printed in the Royal Mint. People read letters delivered by the Royal Mail. There are in circulation more than one billion bank notes and 16 billion coins bearing her image; the Royal Mail prints four billion stamps a year carrying her likeness. The only great ocean liner still making regular transatlantic crossings is the Queen Elizabeth 2, universally abridged to Q.E. 2.
For Elizabeth, Edward VIII's abdication was more than a political scandal; it was a family betrayal.
The human Q.E. 2 is a mixture of ancient blue-blooded tradition with contemporary middle-class values. She is a hardworking, decent, pleasant, conscientious person lacking in formal education, social vision, artistic taste, and curiosity, whose personal interests are largely restricted to her family, her horses, and a collection of small, nasty dogs called Pembroke Welsh corgis which play at her feet and nip the ankles of visitors. She can choose her friends and subjects of conversation: she prefers talking about horses rather than books; she prefers talking to horse trainers rather than dukes or earls. "Much too grand for us,'' she will say of the latter. Her diligence on the job and her concept of duty are almost anachronistic in this last decade of our tumultuous century as she presides over the last great monarchy on earth.
Her working day at Buckingham Palace begins at eight A.M. with a cup of tea followed by an English breakfast of kippers or kidneys with toast. She spends a few minutes with the crossword puzzle in The Daily Telegraph and listens to the Queen's Personal Piper, who every morning marches to and fro playing his bagpipes at nine A.M. At 10, the Queen is in her office, a high-ceilinged room filled with antique furniture, flowers, and pictures of her children, grandchildren, horses, and dogs. Every morning, her private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, enters to find her seated bolt upright at her desk, ready to "do the boxes.'' Already, a government van has delivered to the Palace its daily load of red leather dispatch cases, filled with government papers. There are Foreign Office cables, ministerial documents, civil-service memorandums. Some papers she signs, some she comments on in the margins, some she simply initials. If there is an act of Parliament for her signature, she gives her assent by writing "Elizabeth R.'' Elizabeth also reads some of the 200 to 300 personal letters she receives every day (more than 60,000 a year), which are brought to her unopened. She sifts through the pile and selects about a dozen to read. Some are admiring, some abusive; many ask for her help. "There are occasions when I can help,'' she has said. "I can pass things to the right authorities.''
When the Queen is by herself, she lunches frugally on a slice of cold meat and salad. Teatime is hard on Elizabeth, who, watching her weight, limits herself to a single cup of tea and one sandwich. Before dinner, she sometimes has a martini, a gin and tonic, or a glass of sherry. She sips a single goblet of wine through an entire dinner, but likes to have it all. At a racetrack luncheon in Lexington, Kentucky, when a waiter tried to remove her wineglass, the Queen put out a hand. "I haven't finished yet," she said. Her primary aversions are to snails, oysters, and lobster; when she goes abroad, her hosts are thoroughly briefed on these tastes. She has a sweet tooth for chocolate cake and peppermint creams, and her special treat is to drop a lump of sugar in a cup of coffee and then, as it dissolves, spoon it into her mouth. When she decides she has had too much of this kind of thing, she disciplines herself with a strict grapefruit diet.
"For her, there are only three levels of human beings: one, herself; two, her family; and three, everyone else."
At the end of a working day, Elizabeth is not keen about seeing people for dinner. When her husband, Prince Philip, is away, she retires to her apartment, supper is brought on a tray, and, like many of her subjects, she settles down to watch television. Her tastes are unconquerably middle-class. She likes jigsaw puzzles, reads thrillers (especially those by former jockey Dick Francis) or biographies, preferably of one of her ancestors. With her family, she likes parlor games, particularly charades, but even in private she will reject a skit she considers undignified and ask for another.
In theory, the monarch is the patron of all opera and ballet companies, symphony orchestras, and theaters in Britain. In fact, Queen Elizabeth is indifferent to all of these aspects of culture. Her taste lies more with musical comedies, American jazz, American swing of the 30s, even a few Beatles songs such as "Yellow Submarine.'' She has considerable knowledge of the paintings in her magnificent collection, but has shown no interest in broadening their range: she has Leonardos and Michelangelos, but no Motherwells or Hockneys.
In a curious way, the Queen is both the ultimate snob and the ultimate democrat. As one of her friends explains, "For her, there are only three levels of human beings: one, herself, not as a person but as The Queen; two, her family; and three, everyone else. So for her the poshest duke is the same as the lowest chambermaid.'' She can react with spontaneous pleasure to a genuine show of warmth—as she did on May 15, 1991, in a Washington, D.C., housing project when Alice Frazier, a large black great-grandmother, welcomed her with "This is my palace" and gave her a husky bear hug. Equally, she instantly chills when she senses that someone is trespassing or taking advantage. Once, as Princess Elizabeth, she was at a small party at the British Embassy in Rome. A young diplomat, forgetting himself, asked, "What does your father think of that?" "Are you speaking of the King?" Elizabeth replied.
No one but her immediate family calls her by her nickname, "Lilibet." To her children, she is "Mummy"; when they speak of her to others, she is "the Queen." To everyone else, she is, on first introduction, "Your Majesty"; thereafter, "Ma'am." She is fiercely protected by her inner circle. "One of the Queen's closest friends is one of my closest friends," says an aristocratic Englishwoman. "She and I have never spoken about the Queen."
And yet, despite everything, Elizabeth's human side keeps breaking through. In London not long ago, a friend of the Queen's was walking down Regent Street when the largest, most beautiful RollsRoyce he had ever seen pulled up beside him. He looked in the window and saw the Queen. She waved at him. "I was astonished and, not knowing what else to do, did my d'Artagnan bit—half bowing and waving." Back home, he phoned Princess Margaret, whom he also knows, and told her what had happened. "Don't be silly," said the Queen's sister. "It wasn't the Queen. The Queen doesn't wave at people in the street." "I'm sorry, Ma'am," he said, "but I know it was the Queen." "Stay there. I'll call you back, ' ' said the princess. A few minutes later she called and said, "I phoned the Queen. 'Of course I waved at [him],' she said. 'It's not every day I see someone I know on the pavement.' "
The Queen, like the rest of her family, is an avid participant in the old English tradition of the weekend house party. When she attends, these gatherings are likely to have a 19th-century flavor. The women have breakfast in bed, then go downstairs to find the men sitting around reading papers. A fresh set of papers has been saved for the Queen; she goes straight to the racing pages. When the house party is over, Elizabeth changes out of the blouse and tweed skirt she has worn all weekend and puts on her silk dress and hat to be presented to the staff.
The grandest house parties of all are those given at Windsor Castle during Ascot week. One woman remembers being invited for four days a number of years ago: "It all runs like clockwork. The ladies-in-waiting—upper-class women who can talk about things that interest the Queen, like horses—tell you exactly what to do. The castle is absolutely enormous, the corridors endlessly long. I was always late and I remember running down the corridors, hoping a door wouldn't suddenly pop open and a royal pop out. In the morning you swim or ride with the Queen. If you ride, you must be careful never to get ahead of her; she always leads. The odd thing is how private [the royal family] remained. I came away from my weekend at Windsor feeling that I didn't know them any better on Day Four than I had on Day One."
In public, the Queen is the epitome of dignity. She does not use her favorite swearwords, "Bloody!" and "Damn!" She does not allow herself to seem bored or be seasick; she must always "brace up!" as she puts it. In private, however, she will describe someone, to whom only minutes before she has been royally gracious, as "bonkers" or "a fool." Normally, no one may touch her physically; dignitaries who have tried to take her arm find themselves unmistakably shaken off. In private, she has a wry humor and outbursts of genuine laughter. She is a mimic and can be particularly devastating when mocking pompous government figures or corporate giants who have been presented to her. Once, during an audience with Gough Whitlam, then prime minister of Australia, one of the corgis at her feet loudly broke wind. Rather than ignoring the interruption, Whitlam said, "That was obviously the corgi." "Who else?" asked the Queen.
The Queen's job description—the reason she and her extended family are given millions of pounds of taxpayer money every year—is to work to make the state seem human. Elizabeth, her mother, her sister, her husband, her children, and her first cousins the Kents and Gloucester are in constant motion. They visit hospitals, old people's homes, and day-care centers; dedicate schools, churches, airports, and bridges; attend film premieres and sporting events; open factories, scout jamborees, and Commonwealth conferences; plant trees; snip ribbons; unveil plaques; sign visitors' books; eat lunch; drink tea; etc., etc.
Not one of these visits is inflicted on the hosts; in every case the royal personage is invited to help bring publicity, raise money or morale. Anyone who questions the popularity of the monarchy should have a look at the baskets of letters pouring into the Palace imploring some royal highness to pay a royal visit. The work is endless. Last year, the royal family had some 3,000 public engagements within the United Kingdom and another 1,000 overseas.
"It's not only losing," she told a friend. "It's then having to present the cup to the winner."
Royal visits are elaborately programmed, minute by minute. Before she arrives, the Queen is told exactly what will happen, whom she will meet, what they are likely to say. In the 70s, she began to break away from the script and conduct her now famous "walkabouts," where she plunges into a crowd, nodding, smiling, saying hello. British royalty still eschews the feverish hand grasping practiced by American politicians. The Queen avoids both shaking hands and appearing rude by carrying a bouquet of flowers with both hands. When she travels, she is dressed as a not particularly fashionable upper-class woman. She wears colors which will make her stand out in a crowd: purple, yellow, peach, green, red, even a shocking chartreuse; never black, white, or navy blue. When traveling abroad for a number of weeks, she may take up to six tons of luggage: hats, dresses, blouses, skirts, ball gowns, tiaras, gloves, stockings, and dozens of pairs of shoes. She also takes her own feather pillow, hot-water bottle, favorite china tea set, and special white kid lavatory seat.
Everything is scripted, but once in a while nature intervenes. In the winter of 1982, the Queen's automobile was snowbound in a sudden Cotswolds storm. She took refuge in a small hotel whose astonished owner found her a room and raced about making tea. By happenstance, I stayed in the same hotel a few years later and discovered that the owner was renting the same room to honeymooners at a premium price.
The summit of social mingling with the general public is a royal garden party. In 19831 attended one at Rhodes House in Oxford. Two thousand Rhodes scholars and their spouses from around the world had come back for a reunion, and the Queen and Prince Philip had agreed to come. A wide, curving aisle had been carved through the crowd and marked by ropes. Elizabeth and Philip started from opposite ends, walking from one side of the aisle to the other, choosing whom to address at random from among the throng discreetly crowding to get to the front. Each Rhodes scholar was wearing a tag which bore his name, the place from which he had been chosen, his Oxford college, and the year he had matriculated. Near me stood a man whose tag said, "Stansfield Turner, Illinois and Exeter, 1947." Turner had been a four-star admiral, Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Southern Europe, NATO, when his former Annapolis classmate Jimmy Carter brought him. home to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Prince Philip, hands behind his back—the royal male's answer to Elizabeth's bouquet— bore down on Turner and thrust his long neck forward so that he could peer at the tag. "Ah," he said, straightening up, "and do you still live in Illinois, Mr. Turner?"
Royal visits—royal walkabouts, especially—are worrisome for the Queen's Personal Protection Officer. In the early years, there was little to fear; Elizabeth put a scarf over her head, slipped behind the wheel of her Rover automobile, and drove unrecognized from Buckingham Palace to Clarence House to see her mother, or to Kensington Palace to visit Princess Margaret: the two sisters would sit together in Margaret's garden, sipping tea and listening to popular radio programs. Even in the 60s, she would leave the Palace with her devoted friend and aide the late Lord Plunkett and drive to the Odeon Theatre in the King's Road to see a film. All this ended in 1979, when the I.R.A. assassinated Prince Philip's uncle Earl Mountbatten in his boat off the Irish coast.
In 1981 the Queen, in uniform, was riding sidesaddle down the Mall to the ceremony of Trooping the Colour. Suddenly, a young man in the crowd pushed up to the wooden barricade, raised a 9-mm. pistol, and fired six shots directly at her. With her horse rearing, people screaming, and policemen running, Elizabeth somehow managed to keep her seat. All the shots turned out to have been blanks; the youth was a 17-year-old member of an anti-monarchist organization. Pale, but under control, the Queen indicated that the procession should continue.
Despite this—and the famous 1982 episode of the intruder in the Queen's bedroom—security for the Queen is more discreet than for an American president. On most public occasions, the Queen and the royal family seem to move about accompanied only by a single, nearby police inspector in addition to the bobbies keeping back the crowds. (In fairness to the U.S. Secret Service, four of the last 25 American presidents have been assassinated, and two others have been shot at, while no British monarch has ever died this way.)
Since the mid-80s the Queen has been making quiet, private trips wholly devoted to her own pleasure: she has been visiting Kentucky to see horses. Elizabeth, like her great-grandfather King Edward VII, is addicted to horses and horse racing. Since the beginning of her reign, she has owned a succession of winning animals—Monaveen, Aureole, Winston, Doutelle, and Highclere. She is fascinated by the computerized calculation of bloodlines, indicating which stallion should be bred to which mare in order to produce a champion. She wants to win the Epsom Derby and she wants to do it from the beginning: by breeding a winning horse, not buying a yearling or a veteran bred by someone else. She is highly competitive. At a racetrack, watching her horse wearing the royal racing colors of purple, gold, and scarlet, she sometimes forgets who she is, screams with joy, and jumps up and down. When she is present and her horse fails to win, she has to be stoic. "It's not only losing,'' she told a friend with a wry smile. "It's then having to present the cup to the winner."
Most of the Queen's horses are kept at Wolferton Stud and Sandringham Stud. Three of her mares are at two farms in Versailles, Kentucky, near Lexington. Three times in recent years, Elizabeth has gone to Kentucky, to drive through the Bluegrass Region, visit her mares and their foals, see the great stallions which produce the fastest Thoroughbreds in the world, and spend days and evenings with the local farm owners and horse trainers, whose talk is so congenial to her. She arrives at a farm in a limousine, steps out wearing a simple flowered dress and sensible pumps, and walks through the elegant barns, which have been searched for bombs by a pack of sniffing German shepherds.
"If Charles had come to his mother and said, 'Diana and I are miserable, the Queen wouldn't have known what to say."
Then she walks into a paddock and the horses are led out.
"You can always tell the degree of a person's horsemanship by the way they look at a horse," says another experienced horsewoman. "The Queen did it in the most professional possible way."
She is prodigiously rich. Fortune has called her "the wealthiest woman of all" and recently estimated her personal fortune at $11.7 billion. This figure does not include the larger castles and palaces in which she lives, nor the yacht and planes in which she travels, nor the royal regalia—the 14 crowns, the scepter, orb, and jewels she wears and carries on ceremonial occasions.
The state provides the sovereign with six royal residences, five of them currently used by members of the royal family. Buckingham Palace, in the heart of London, has 600 rooms, a staff of 368, and as with most great old English houses, its drawing rooms and drafty corridors filled with paintings and statues are clammy in winter. On weekends, the Queen moves to Windsor Castle, 20 miles west of London. This is a true, turreted fortress, a royal citadel for 800 years. "From this Tower the world is ruled," Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria's grandson, proudly told his German courtiers during a visit in 1899. The castle, at the edge of Windsor Great Park, has more than 1,000 rooms, a gallery of magnificent paintings, a state banquet hall where 160 can sit at a single, long table, and a cathedral-like chapel where many monarchs are interred. In Edinburgh, there is the Palace of Holyroodhouse, ancient royal seat of the kings and queens of Scotland. The state also provides the royal family with St. James's Palace in London. Dating from the 16th century, the time of Elizabeth I, it is the source of the expression "the Court of St. James's." Attached to St. James's Palace is Clarence House, the home of the Queen Mother. Kensington Palace, built in red brick, in part by Christopher Wren, in Kensington Gardens, is the London home of the Prince and Princess of Wales and their children, and of Princess Margaret. Finally, there is Hampton Court, the Tudor palace of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey.
Elizabeth and her family have the use of the royal yacht, Britannia, built in 1953 for $6 million, which, with its permanent crew of 277, costs $20 million a year to maintain. There is also a 10-car royal train, which costs $770,000 a year. The three jet aircraft and two helicopters of the Queen's Flight are maintained by the Ministry of Defence for $12 million a year.
Many splendid objects have a blurred, shadowy ownership; they are called the Queen's, but they belong, in large part, to the state. They include a matchless collection of Holbeins, Vermeers, Canalettos, Michelangelos, Raphaels, and Van Dycks, not to mention a breathtaking accumulation of 600 Leonardo da Vinci paintings and drawings. The Queen also owns one of the world's finest private stamp collections, much of it assembled by her grandfather George V. In her drawing rooms and parlors, on her shelves or in her closets, are beautiful objects by Faberge, superb porcelains, antique silver, and exquisite antique French furniture. Technically, all this belongs to the sovereign, but it is also considered part of Britain's national heritage. Elizabeth can no more sell off the Leonardos, the stamps, or the porcelains than she could sell the Imperial State Crown. An attempt to do so would precipitate an instant constitutional crisis.
The Queen does have some possessions which she could sell without the permission of any politician or council of arts. She owns Sandringham, a 150-room red brick country mansion on a 17,000-acre estate in Norfolk. Bought in 1862 to provide the then Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) with his own country manor, it is still a Victorian house filled with display cabinets, tapestried screens, footstools, tables crammed with bric-a-brac and framed photographs. She also personally owns Balmoral, a gray granite castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, acquired and rebuilt by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 1850s and surrounded by 80,000 acres of the finest stag- and grouse-hunting country in the Highlands. To this fastness the royal family retreats in August and September, turning out as often as possible in kilts of Royal Stuart tartan.
More significant, Elizabeth has a personal portfolio of stocks worth between $5 billion and $6 billion. In Britain the Crown Estate possesses more than 300,000 acres of prime agricultural land. In London alone, it owns large tracts of real estate, including, by one estimate, more than 2,000 buildings. Much of Regent Street, Regent's Park, Victoria Park, and some of Kings way belong to the Crown, along with Canada House, South Africa House, and Hyde Park Comer. In New York, the Queen is said to have owned part of Manhattan's West Side, and at one point, according to statements in the Congressional Record, she owned a 38,000acre cotton plantation in Mississippi for which the U.S. Department of Agriculture was paying her a subsidy to reduce the crop. She has 60 racehorses—stallions, broodmares, yearlings, and foals. Ascot racetrack, England's most prestigious, belongs to the Queen.
Elizabeth does not keep all of the income produced by these properties. By agreement with Parliament, the income from the Crown Estate (her real-estate holdings in London and the country), $125 million last year, goes straight to the Treasury. In return, she receives the Civil List, a kind of royal expense account voted by Parliament to cover the costs of running the royal household (including the households of her three younger children and their families, her mother, her sister, and her first cousins the dukes of Gloucester and Kent and their families). More than two-thirds of this money goes straight into paying the salaries of the hundreds of people who actually or nominally wait upon the royal family— from the Lord Chamberlain to the Keeper of the Swans. At times during Elizabeth's reign, outraged Labour M.P.'s have demanded that the Civil List be cut. Discreetly, the Queen has revealed that she has been supplementing the Civil List from her private funds to pay her bills. The ironic result is that under Harold Wilson, a Labour prime minister, the List was nearly doubled; then, under James Callaghan, another Labour P.M., doubled again. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher's government reached a new, long-range agreement with the Palace: every year for 10 years the Queen would receive £7.9 million ($15 million) from the Civil List. From this sum in 1990, the Queen and her extended family paid $ 111,475 for laundry, $243,075 for printing and stationery, $66,412 for flowers, and $23,681 for newspapers. All in all, adding the Civil List to the costs of maintaining royal buildings, yachts, airplanes, and other perks, the monarchy is reckoned to cost British taxpayers around $115 million a year.
Despite the fact that the Queen pays into the Treasury about the same amount she draws out, an overwhelming majority of Britons (75 percent in a recent poll) feel that she should pay a tax on her private wealth, as other royals do. The Queen's income from these sources has never been made public. To calculate the tax, the tax base would have to be known, and up to now no major politician or political party has wished to fling open this door. Several times during her reign, most recently in 1991, Parliament has taken up the question of the Queen's finances and decided that she should not pay an income tax. In August, however, Elizabeth reportedly decided on her own that she would begin to pay a tax on her personal income.
The Queen is not simply a crowned, ornamental icon. Though her role in the British constitution and government is detached and formal, it is nonetheless serious and essential. A prime minister cannot take office until summoned by the monarch and asked to form a government. (In fact, the Queen is bound by tradition to summon the leader of the majority in the House of Commons.) Acts of Parliament do not become law until signed by the Queen. (Again, she cannot refuse to sign.) As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century constitutional authority, said of Queen Victoria, "She must sign her own death warrant if the two Houses put it up to her. ' '
Bagehot described the Queen's role in the British constitution as "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn." Elizabeth exercises these rights every Tuesday evening at 6:30 P.M., when the prime minister pays her a visit. When she is in London, these meetings take place in the Audience Room at Buckingham Palace. No one else is present; no notes are taken on either side. These sessions, stretching back over 40 years, have equipped Elizabeth II with a depth of political knowledge and experience unrivaled by any head of state or political leader in the world. Beginning when she was 25 and received 77-year-old Winston Churchill, the Queen has received nine prime ministers: Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Major. No prime minister can match her knowledge of Britain's state secrets. She is the only living Briton who knows every secret of the past four decades; prime ministers have access to such information only while in office. All of these politicians have testified to her political acumen. Macmillan, 35 years ago, found her "incredibly well informed." Harold Wilson said she was "the most professional head of state in the world.... My God, she put me through it if I hadn't done my homework."
Elizabeth's relationship with the only woman among her chief ministers was complicated and mysterious. No one knows what was said during Margaret Thatcher's more than 300 visits to the Audience Room. M.P.'s who were witnesses to and often victims of Mrs. Thatcher's ruthless wielding of power in the Commons and her love of confrontation could not imagine the imperious prime minister deferring even to the Queen. Differences showed briefly in public over the European Economic Community and the Commonwealth (a loose organization of 50 former British dominions and colonies which now have nothing in common except that the Queen is the formal head); the Queen favored both institutions, the P.M. was dubious.
In 1986, as Commonwealth leaders prepared to meet in Zimbabwe to issue a statement opposing apartheid, Mrs. Thatcher balked at imposing strong British sanctions against South Africa. The Queen became involved. The London Times published a story, which could only have come from Palace sources, saying that Her Majesty considered Mrs. Thatcher's policies "uncaring, confrontational, and socially divisive."
To assume, however, that Margaret Thatcher habitually defied the Queen is to misunderstand both women. Elizabeth descends from William the Conqueror; Mrs. Thatcher is the daughter of a grocer. Once, after the P.M. and the Queen had appeared at a public ceremony wearing similar dresses, Mrs. Thatcher suggested to the Palace that she and the Queen coordinate their wardrobes in advance so as to avoid future embarrassment. The reply might have come from Queen Victoria: "Do not worry. The Queen does not notice what other people are wearing."
"In its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon magic." This adage on monarchy by Walter Bagehot was still the way royalty was treated when Elizabeth II came to the throne. The press was deferential and obedient; editors checked with the Palace to be sure that the stories they were running were approved. Then, in the rush of the liberated 60s, it was feared that the monarchy would be seen as an institutional Miss Havisham, living in a darkened, airless world of cobwebs and dust. The curtains parted.
The first move to let in light came from the Palace itself. Royal advisers, wishing to keep the monarchy popular, decided to alternate the images of majesty and pomp with those of a normal, hardworking family whose behavior and basic values reflected those of middle-class Britons.
The decision backfired. Given a taste of royal intimacy, editors, publishers, and readers wanted more. The Palace Press Office found itself dealing with a tidal wave of demand for personal details, intimate pictures, drama, conflict, novelty, and emotion. Over the years, it has grown worse. In global journalism, there is nothing to be compared to the British public's obsession with the private lives of the royal family. Today, the Palace Press Office is a fortress under siege. The official reaction to every story, inaccurate or accurate, is aloof, impenetrable silence. "We couldn't possibly comment" is the Palace's response to all questions about the family's private life.
Inside the Palace, the royal family, officially imperturbable, boils with passionate hostility against the press. Prince Philip has never tried to hide his contempt. "Which are the press and which are the bloody apes?" he shouted in Gibraltar. "Stuff it up your you-know-what," he told a microphone-wielding reporter in Texas. "Only such a mammoth organization as the BBC could think of asking such a bloody silly question," he replied to a journalist who had asked him the color of the bears he had seen that morning at the zoo.
The Queen is better at controlling her temper in public. The nearest she came to a public outburst was at Sandringham in 1981. Wearing a scarf, a raincoat, and a pair of Wellington boots, and surrounded by a pack of wet Labradors, she was pursued across her fields by a mob of photographers and reporters. Pale with anger, she turned on them and said, "I wish you would go away!" None did. In private, Elizabeth shares her husband's sense of indignation. Reading the daily summary she is given of all press references to her family, "she has fits of rage," says a royal biographer. And the nastiest storm is still to come: the subject of Kitty Kelley's next book is the royal family.
Elizabeth is the third British monarch in a row who was not born Heir to the Throne. Her grandfather and father, both second sons, succeeded to the throne only after older brothers had been removed by death and abdication. Her father, George VI, was a shy, nervous man, afflicted with ulcers, knock-knees, and a painful stutter. His greatest luck was to marry Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the sturdy, fearless, commonsensical ninth child of the Scottish Earl of Strathmore. His worst was, at 40, to have to succeed his glamorous, widely beloved older brother on the throne of England.
This older brother, Elizabeth's uncle King Edward VIII (known within the family as David), began his brief reign in January 1936. He was 41 years old, a dazzlingly desirable bachelor, besottedly in love with a married woman. He had had many love affairs, all with married women. Six years before his accession he had met Mrs. Ernest Simpson, originally Wallis Warfield of Baltimore. When David became King and Mrs. Simpson filed for divorce from her husband, a constitutional crisis loomed. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin warned that if the King married Mrs. Simpson he and his Cabinet would resign. The prime ministers of Canada, Australia, and South Africa fiercely objected to a marriage. For 10 months, the struggle continued. Before his formal coronation, King Edward VIII surrendered and abdicated, the first such voluntary departure from the throne in the thousand-year history of the British monarchy. Before leaving England, the exKing—given the title Duke of Windsor— told a worldwide audience, "I have found it impossible... to discharge my duties as King... without the help and support of the woman I love."
From being a daughter of a king's brother, Elizabeth became Heir to the Throne. She had been born a decade before, on April 21, 1926, delivered by cesarean section and named after her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
Her sister, Margaret, arrived four years later. The two have always been close. Elizabeth was quiet, cool, and disciplined; Margaret was exuberant, unpredictable, and vulnerable. From the beginning, Elizabeth's role was to protect and guide her little sister; in photographs she sits with her arm confidently around the smaller Margaret. Princess Margaret never was easy to dominate, however. In 1936, when their Uncle David's abdication made their father the king, six-year-old Margaret asked 10-year-old Elizabeth whether that meant that she would become the next monarch of England. "Yes," said Elizabeth. "Poor you," said Margaret.
It was the behavior during the war of George VI, his wife, and his two young daughters that restored the prestige of the British monarchy, trampled during the abdication crisis. During the Blitz, the King might have moved to Windsor, Sandringham, or even to one of the overseas dominions. Instead, he chose to stay in his capital and share the ordeal with his subjects. As Queen Elizabeth, his wife, explained, "The children can't go without me. I can't leave the King, and of course the King won't go." Buckingham Palace was bombed. Icy winds whistled through shattered windows covered with boards. The King worked two nights a week in a factory that made precision parts for Royal Air Force machine guns. In the morning, he took a bath, drawing the wartime five inches of lukewarm water. Princess Elizabeth, 13 when the war began and 19 when it ended, worked for a while repairing three-ton army trucks. Every morning, the King and Queen toured the streets bombed into rubble, visited the injured in hospitals and the homeless in shelters. In the afternoons, they had tea with air-raid wardens, firemen, and policemen.
After the war, George VI was never well. On the night of February 5, 1952, he sat in his armchair before a fire at Sandringham, doing a crossword puzzle. Nearby, Princess Margaret played the piano. Sometime after he went to bed, his heart stopped. When his wife was told in the morning, she said at once, "Lilibet must be informed." Then she corrected herself: "The Queen must be informed."
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip had spent the night at the famous Treetops Hotel in Kenya. In the morning, Philip told her. She cried and then took from her luggage a sealed envelope containing a draft Accession Proclamation and a message to the houses of Parliament carried with her because of her father's precarious health. At 25, this young wife, married four years, the mother of two young children, became Elizabeth II, the 40th British monarch since William the Conqueror.
Her husband has spent many of his 71 years searching for a name, a nationality, a language, and a religion. Philip was born, nominally Greek, to a deaf mother on the dining-room table of a dilapidated Corfu villa which lacked electricity, heat, and running water. His father, Prince Andrew, was the seventh child of George I of the Hellenes. His mother, Princess Alice, was the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord of England at the beginning of World War I. Each family's nationality was relatively recent. George I had started life as Prince William of Denmark. Louis of Battenberg was by birth a German, an embarrassment which eventually caused the family to change its name to Mountbatten. Philip was born Prince Philip of Greece. He learned English, German, French, and sign language, through which he communicated with his mother—but never Greek.
Soon after Philip was born, his father disgraced himself as a soldier in a Greek war against Turkey. The throne of Greece bounced from hand to hand, and little Prince Philip became one of those European royal children with excellent bloodlines and no bank account. He was brought up by friends and relations in France, Germany, Romania, and Britain. Although his three sisters were educated in Germany and married German noblemen (one of whom became an SS colonel on Himmler's personal staff), Philip was sent to the famous Gordonstoun school in Scotland. There the Greek prince, with blue eyes, white-blond hair, and chiseled nose, arrogant and athletic, soon became Top Boy. At the start of World War II, with the help of his uncle Louis Mountbatten, he enrolled at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and, during the war, saw action aboard battleships, cruisers, and destroyers.
Philip and Elizabeth met at Dartmouth when she was 13. He was 18, dashing, self-confident, flirtatious. She fell in love and kept his picture on her dressing table. Philip was not seriously interested in an adolescent girl. After the war, when both were six years older, Philip saw her differently and began driving up to London in his black MG to see her. In 1946, when Philip proposed, George VI objected, arguing that his prospective son-in-law lacked a name and was not Church of England. Both flaws were quickly repaired. The Archbishop of Canterbury accepted Philip's profession of faith, and Philip selected his mother's name, becoming Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, R.N. Before the wedding, on November 20, 1947, the King catapulted him upward: he became His Royal Highness Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, and Duke of Edinburgh.
For four years, Elizabeth and Philip alternated royal duties and postings to different naval stations and ships. All this changed the moment in Kenya when his young wife became Queen of England. Philip was now obliged to call his wife "Ma'am" in public, to bow to her at meetings of the Privy Council, to walk three feet behind her in public. He was not permitted to read the contents of the red government dispatch boxes brought to the Queen every day. Subordinated, excluded, his masculine pride offended, he boiled with frustration. "I'm just a bloody amoeba! That's all!" he shouted. Asked his opinion, he responded, "If I did give an opinion it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference one way or another." In private, he insisted on carrying his own bags, driving his own car, operating Palace elevators and home-movie projectors, pouring drinks himself, and dialing phones direct, without having Palace operators place his calls. Unwilling to go through the Palace hierarchy to get a late-night sandwich, he installed a kitchenette next to his bedroom.
During the first two decades of the reign, when he was the only adult male in the Queen's immediate family, he was allowed to speak out in public. Sometimes, his exasperation with protocol turned to public rudeness, even obscenity. "This is a bloody waste of time!" or "Let's get the hell out of here!" he would shout in the middle of shaking hands and making small talk at an industrial convention. "I am one of those stupid bums who never went to a university. . . and a fat lot of harm it did me," he told an audience of university graduates. He embarrassed the Queen by saying that unless the Civil List was increased he and his wife might have to leave Buckingham Palace and sell the royal yacht.
Philip dislikes his wife's corgis, frequently travels alone, but is always with her when it is expected of him. He has been known to speak sharply to her, to refuse to walk behind or open a car door for her. Elizabeth handles him regally; once, when he threatened to walk out on a lengthy portrait sitting, she coolly snapped, "You just stand there!" A recent female guest at the Palace believes that "they clearly loathe each other. We were talking at lunch about his work with animals in Africa when he burst out bitterly, 'Well, it's you females who do all the choosing of the mates.' " This woman's husband sees the royal marriage differently. "It's a settled relationship, not marked by any great passion," he says. "Both sides have roles to play and play them well." Philip has been rumored to have had girlfriends, even a mistress. The actress Merle Oberon, who in 1968 entertained the Prince without the Queen at her Acapulco villa, was a glamorous suspect. Neither the Queen nor Bruno Pagliai, Ms. Oberon's multimillionaire husband, appeared to worry, nor did the telephoto-lens brigade ever manage to send home an incriminating picture.
It has been argued that Philip has escaped exposure because the British people do not want to read about anything that would hurt the Queen. "The rest of the family is fair game," says a titled Englishwoman, "but Prince Philip's private life is protected by the cordon sanitaire around the Queen." That may be granting too much scruple to London's relentless, know-everything, print-anything, checkbook journalists. It may just be that Prince Philip has been a faithful husband.
It seems less likely that he has been a model father, particularly in bringing up his sons. Philip's perfectionist, bullying streak has made him an aggressive, intolerant parent. He wanted his sons to become strong, virile, and athletic like himself. He sent them to Gordonstoun, in Scotland, his own school, to endure cold showers and manly games, and be hardened. When they came home, he avoided tenderness and humor; Prince Charles has said that he never could remember laughing or joking with his father. This unloving approach may have worked with Prince Andrew, a roly-poly child never lacking in confidence. It functioned less well with his more sensitive sons, Prince Charles and Prince Edward. Charles did his best: learning to fly both planes and helicopters, parachuting for sport 1,200 feet into the Channel, commanding a mine hunter, becoming expert at polo. Edward tried and gave up. To the delight of both parents, he decided to enter the Royal Marines. "He's the first in our family to become a Marine," Philip proudly told American admiral Sylvester Foley, whose own son is an officer in the U.S. Marines. When Edward dropped out of Marine training in 1987 and instead went to work in the theater for Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Queen was disappointed; Prince Philip was furious.
One thing is certain about Philip: he was not a father who trained his sons to care what women thought or felt. The result—young men brought up as royalty, hardened at an all-male school, disciplined in the military, two of them married to young women who had no preparation for what was expected of them or what was to come—we now have seen.
During Queen Victoria's reign, the monarchy's role was to set the British people an example of how to behave. George V and George VI, Elizabeth's grandfather and father, endeavored to extend royal role-modeling beyond social manners into areas such as temperance, financial rectitude, and marital fidelity. George V, as stem and moral as a village rector, had bad luck with his son Edward VIII. George VI produced the exemplary Elizabeth. But Elizabeth herself, in a reign almost as long as those of her father and grandfather combined, has presided over a succession of family marital disasters. The fact is that every royal marriage since that of Elizabeth herself to Philip 45 years ago has ended in, or has seemed on the brink of, divorce. As, one by one, the royal marriages have foundered, the monarchy itself has been weakened.
It has been argued that the cause of all the trouble in the royal marriages is marrying commoners. It is true that all four of the marriages in the Queen's immediate family which have turned sour—Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, Prince Charles and Diana Spencer—have involved a mingling of royal and common blood. In earlier times English royal children were married off to German princes or princesses and thereafter, happy or not, were expected to make the best of it. Today, after two world wars against Germany, royal Germans are not as welcome, and the supply of other foreign princelings—especially Protestant princelings—has dried up. Accordingly, Elizabeth's sister and children have chosen their mates from among Elizabeth's subjects. At least among commoners, it was hoped, royals could find mates with compatible interests. Yet those chosen have necessarily little knowledge of or preparation for what they are getting into: life in a goldfish bowl, incessant ceremony, false smiles, numbing small talk.
The first of these troubled marriages was Princess Margaret's. In 1955 she had bowed to intense pressure from Palace and government officials to not marry the man she loved, 40-year-old divorced R.A.F. hero Peter Townsend. Within a few years, she met a slight, boyish, talented young photographer named Antony Armstrong-Jones, who shared her interest in the bohemian world of artists, dancers, and musicians. Although he was a commoner, when Margaret told her mother and sister that he had proposed and she had accepted, both were pleased. When Margaret became pregnant with their first child, Armstrong-Jones was created Earl of Snowdon.
But the marriage struggled. Snowdon wanted to go back to work. Accompanying his wife on her royal rounds bored him. He was rude to her in public and, reportedly, behaved much worse in private. In 1976 an announcement was issued from the Palace: "H.R.H. the Countess of Snowdon and the Earl of Snowdon have mutually agreed to live apart." Two years later, in 1978, they divorced.
Earlier, rejecting the path taken by her Uncle David, Margaret had played by the rules, done her duty, and turned away the man she loved. The Queen was sad and grateful, and the country uncomfortable, but it was generally agreed that she had done the Right Thing. Subsequently marrying and finding the marriage intolerable, she became the first major royal divorcee of our time. By then, a quarter of a century later, public opinion had evolved and no one made a serious fuss.
Today, to the public, even the press, Princess Margaret is the prodigal returned. She does her share of ribbon cutting, and remains what she has been since childhood: the Queen's most intimate friend. A special telephone line links Princess Margaret's apartment in Kensington Palace to the Queen's apartment in Buckingham Palace so that the two sisters can talk without going through an operator—when one phone is picked up, the other rings. Margaret remains the unpredictable diva, Elizabeth the protective tomboy. Even the Queen steers clear of her sister's temper. A friend remembers seeing the Queen walk into a room and notice Margaret out on the terrace, sitting in the sun, reading. When her sister did not take off her sunglasses, get up, and say hello, Elizabeth said, "Oh, goodness! Is Margaret in a bad humor?"
Princess Anne, the Queen's second child and only daughter, found a partner with an identical passion: a country gentleman single-mindedly devoted to riding horses. Beyond good looks and pleasant manners, Captain Mark Phillips was a simple fellow; in school, he had been called "Fog" because he was "thick and wet." The marriage began well. Princess Anne told her mother she wanted to live an unexceptional life running a farm. To this end, she refused titles for Captain Phillips and their children. Anne may have been a difficult wife, headstrong, temperamental, sharp-tongued, and haughty. Phillips disliked garden parties, hated Balmoral, and avoided royal-family gatherings whenever possible. Both traveled, increasingly apart, to international riding events. A decade ago, she was rumored to be having an affair with a police sergeant in her security detail; six years ago, Phillips allegedly fathered a child by a woman he had met at an equestrian event in New Zealand. Last spring, after 19 years of marriage, they were divorced.
Prince Andrew, Duke of York, reportedly the Queen's favorite, was born in her second surge of childbearing. (Andrew is 12 years younger than Charles and 10 years younger than Anne; his brother Edward, Elizabeth's youngest child, is 4 years younger than Andrew.) Andrew was a strong, happy-go-lucky boy, in contrast to his shy, introspective older brother. Like his sister, Andrew chose a mate with whom he had a lot in common. Sarah Ferguson was a freckled, redheaded, breezy, outgoing, good-time girl. She had had affairs. Most of the aristocracy and many of the Queen's friends disdained her, describing her as "common" and "vulgar." Andrew apparently didn't mind. Nor did the Queen, who wanted Andrew married.
Besides, the Queen liked Sarah Ferguson. Fergie rode, she was spontaneous, and she didn't upstage her mother-in-law. "I like her because she helps me," the Queen once told a friend. Because she liked her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth tolerated Sarah's antics. Once, after a private lunch at Buckingham Palace attended by the Queen, the Duchess of York, and some of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, the party rose from the table to follow the Queen into a drawing room. Sarah, behind her mother-in-law, imitated the Queen's walk. Suddenly, Elizabeth turned around and caught Sarah in the act. The ladies-in-waiting, horrified, thought, Now she's had it. Instead, the Queen burst out in delighted laughter.
Fergie resented the fishbowl aspect of being a royal, but all seemed well until last year, when photographs of her with Houston oil heir Steven Wyatt vanished from his London flat and reappeared in a British tabloid. Andrew exploded. "He can accept that his wife has a past," a friend explained, "but he can't stand it being flaunted in front of him." Last winter, he gave his wife an ultimatum. To his amazement, she walked out. They were formally separated in March. Divorce negotiations were under way; meanwhile, the couple began doing things together again. Then, at the end of August, more photographs blossomed in the tabloids. This time they pictured a topless Fergie embracing Texan John Bryan while her children watched. Again the Queen shuddered, and newsstands sold hundreds of thousands of additional copies.
Potentially far more damaging to the monarchy than anything Fergie could do was a scandal involving Princess Diana. Andrew Morton's book Diana: Her True Story, first serialized in London's Sunday Times (the paper paid $462,500), announced that the Princess of Wales, goddess of the Cult of Diana, had five times tried to kill herself, largely because of her despondency over her husband's friendship with another woman. Worse, the book seemed to bear the Princess's tacit approval; if she hadn't encouraged it, she had at least permitted her friends to cooperate with the author. The book told a depressing story. Diana Spencer's mother left her father when she was six; as a child, Diana lay in bed listening to her little brother sobbing, "I want my mummy. I want my mummy." Like an upperclass Cinderella, Diana had little serious schooling, came to London to work as a nanny, never had a lover, and was, therefore, certifiably virginal. Her music was rock and pop, her literature Danielle Steel, and her stepgrandmother Barbara Cartland.
When Prince Charles first met this gawky, androgynous child, she was 16; like everyone in his circle, even his closest friends, she called him "Sir." The Prince had had women friends, including, many years before, Camilla Parker-Bowles, of whom Diana has reportedly become so feverishly jealous.
Why did Charles choose Diana instead of the intelligent, older woman he needed? Perhaps because by the time he was ready to choose, most of the women his age had married. Diana seemed a strong young girl who could be counted upon to produce an heir for England. And because she was a virgin, no shadow could fall on her husband, the future King, or her child, who one day would be King or Queen. In addition, says a friend, "he was physically taken with her. He's a very physical man and he was genuinely in love with her."
And so she married, far too young to marry anyone, let alone the Heir to the Throne. Very quickly, something went wrong. According to one woman close to the royal family, "Prince Charles was a charming young man who married a child but didn't explain the rules. " The "rules, " this woman hinted, were not just the need to live in the public eye but also a code of private behavior for royal males handed down from King Edward VII. The ultimate rule was that any extramarital relationship was acceptable as long as it remained discreet. The ultimate sin was not infidelity, but public mention which led to scandal. Andrew Morton declares that it was Princess Diana's realization that Prince Charles expected her not to mind that drove her to hysteria. According to Morton, within six months of her wedding, she made the first of her suicide attempts. The Prince of Wales turned back to his older friends. This stirred Diana to greater frenzy; before long she was overeating and inducing herself to vomit, and consulting soothsayers, tarot-card readers, hypnotherapists, astrologers, and practitioners of healing crystals.
'Philip burst out bitterly, 'Well, it's you females who do all the choosing of the mates'"
None of this emerged in public. What the public saw was not the lonely, hysterical, bulimic Di, but Di the Gorgeous, Di the Magnificent. She was the most popular, the most fashionable, the most photogenic of the royal family, a storybook princess smiling from a thousand magazine covers. Every year she became more beautiful, a tall, slender woman, perfectly shaped for high-fashion clothing, wearing bold colors, long split skirts, and broad-brimmed hats. Men who met her thought, unroyally, about sex. One admirer was unable to stop talking about her shoulders: "She had this wonderful, deep tan and was wearing a strapless evening dress. Her shoulders were so beautiful that I almost couldn't keep myself from touching them."
She matured in other ways. Visiting hospitals, the elderly, and children, she reached out in a natural, unaffected way most of the royal family cannot manage. She took a special interest in AIDS patients, demonstrating with a single handshake her rejection of the phobia surrounding the disease. To the press, she was a godsend, a running story, constant money in the bank. And the more loving the eye turned on Diana, the more disapproving the view of Charles. He was now the aging husband of a youthful, compassionate beauty. While he talked with philosophers and railed at modern architecture, she, not he or his family, represented the glamour and the future of the monarchy.
The Queen was far from pleased by all the attention paid to her fashionable daughter-in-law. Long ago, she confided to a friend that "life is more difficult now that we've got this tiresome girl." Diana seemed to lack even simple family politeness. Most days when she was in London, the Princess of Wales drove over from Kensington Palace to swim in the large pool at Buckingham Palace; afterward, she rarely bothered to go upstairs to say hello to her mother-in-law. Elizabeth scorned Diana's chic wardrobe as verging on vulgarity. If one marries into a family at the summit of society and if the family's traditions go back to Aethelbald and Wiglaf, why worry about one's hat brim and hemline?
Elizabeth bears partial responsibility for what has happened to her children's marriages. If Prince Philip was a cold, unforgiving father, the Queen also has had difficulty expressing warmth. Her children grew up observing their parents. As one upper-class Englishwoman put it, "If Prince Charles had come to his mother in recent years and said, 'Diana and I are miserable. I don't know what to do about my marriage,' the Queen wouldn't have known what to say."
The Prince of Wales's reaction to the stories in Andrew Morton's book was shock and hurt. He refused to read them, but when certain phrases were read to him by friends, he reportedly commented, "I can hear my wife's voice saying exactly the same words." He worried about what Diana had done to their two young sons. Her behavior, Charles thought, was more than a breach of taste, or a defiance of the royal family's code of silence; it was selfish, spiteful, and cruel. If Diana was unhappy surely there was a better way to deal with it than by finding a gossipist who intended to sell his work to the highest bidder. Despite his feelings, the Prince decided not to respond in public. Morton's book affected not just Charles's marriage and his future, but the future of the British monarchy. Accordingly, as he was bound to do, he finally consulted the monarch.
One thing Diana obviously must have known was that in taking on her husband she also would be taking on the Queen. Elizabeth was bound to react— perhaps not as Charles's mother, but as custodian of a thousand-year-old institution. The press was reporting that the future Queen of England had tried to kill herself because the future King had made her miserable. This has wide implications.
The first meeting between the Prince and the Queen took place on June 12, five days after the first excerpt of Diana: Her True Story appeared in The Sunday Times. The Queen asked Charles where matters stood. He replied that he believed his marriage was headed for a separation. Elizabeth said that it appeared that Diana was temperamentally unsuited for the role of Queen Consort, but that, for the moment, it would be best to wait.
A second, more dramatic meeting, at Windsor Castle, occurred three days later, on June 15. This time not only the Queen and Prince Charles but also Prince Philip and Princess Diana were present. Philip was furious, Elizabeth icily matter-of-fact. Nothing could undo what had been done, she said, but the family would take steps to limit further damage to the monarchy. The Queen insisted that the couple agree to maintain a façade of togetherness in public. She also proposed that they try a cooling-off period for three to six months; she even suggested that they take a trip together and try to work things out.
For the moment, Diana seems reconciled to this arrangement. She will remain married to Charles, appear with him in public, keep her title and allowances, do her royal visits and walkabouts, and live apart from him in private. The factor motivating her is her desire to keep her two young sons, Prince William and Prince Henry, "the Heir and the Spare." She has made it plain that she will never relinquish her right to bring them up. But the weapon of her children is double-edged. It also means that she cannot simply divorce her husband, pack up her children, and go where she likes, as another mother might. The two young princes would not be allowed to leave England permanently, nor would the royal family tolerate the future King and his brother being brought up by a stepfather.
Could Charles divorce Diana and still ascend the throne? Constitutionally, the monarch must be a communicant of the Church of England, and the Prince of Wales would still be a communicant if he were divorced. It is a subsequent remarriage that would cause complications. The Church of England does not sanction remarriage. Charles could marry outside the church, but it might be difficult for him to present himself as Supreme Governor of the Church and Defender of the Faith.
There is a solution so far unproposed: break the connection between the monarchy and the Church of England. Divorce is a permanent, ineradicable fact of modern life. Why insist that a single family in the nation live in a time warp?
The Church of England, furthermore, was founded in divorce. (Henry VIII, wanting a son, divorced his Spanish wife and married Anne Boleyn. When the pope refused to recognize these proceedings, Henry broke with Rome and founded his own church.) English monarchs did not scruple about divorce until the time of Queen Victoria, whose code of conduct even her son ignored. Why should the British monarch be Supreme Governor of a single, Establishment church? Why should a disestablished Church of England not govern itself as British Methodists, Baptists, Jews, and Muslims do? Members of the royal family would still have trouble finding mates able to live in a fishbowl, but at least they could marry whom they liked and, if the marriages failed, not have to choose between a national crisis and living a lifetime with a person they did not love.
From time to time in recent years, there have been suggestions that the Queen should abdicate at a dignified age rather than wait to leave the throne by death. Most of these suggestions have originated in sympathy for Prince Charles, who— occupationally—sits on the sidelines, watching his life go by.
There is a precedent in modern Continental monarchy for this kind of businesslike reshuffle at the top of a royal firm: it has happened twice in the Netherlands, a queen abdicating in favor of her daughter. In England, during the 80s, there were occasional, small hints that Elizabeth was considering retirement. None of her close friends doubted that, if it were possible, she would be happiest retreating to a large country house where she could spend the rest of her days surrounded by horses and dogs.
Always, however, two powerful arguments have overruled Elizabeth's wistful dream of peaceful retirement. One was the haunting childhood trauma of the crisis created by her Uncle David. For Elizabeth, it was more than a political scandal; it was a family betrayal. Edward VIII's departure forced her frail, shy, spectacularly ill-equipped father to wear the crown. Ever since, Elizabeth has considered her uncle's conduct the prime example of how a British monarch should not behave. Also, Edward VIII abdicated before his coronation. Accordingly, he was never anointed with holy oil by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he never promised God and his people that he would perform his duty for life. Elizabeth was anointed and did make this promise. "The Queen did not get her job like a bank manager by mere promotion," explains one royal traditionalist. "She can't just take off the crown and walk away. It would devalue the coronation, the throne, and be a long step toward the end of the monarchy. This she will never do."
In fact, her decision has been publicly announced. Even before Andrew Morton's book cast a shadow on the Prince of Wales, Elizabeth II made up her mind that she, like 38 of her 40 royal predecessors (the exceptions were James II and Edward VIII), would wear the crown until she died. In her Christmas '91 broadcast, she declared to her people, "With your prayers and your help, and with the love and support of my family, I shall try to serve you in the years to come." Subsequently, in a lengthy BBC Television portrait of the Queen titled Elizabeth R, broadcast in Britain last spring and to be shown in the United States in November, viewers clearly heard their sovereign's matter-of-fact statement: "After all, it's a job for life." For Charles, the wait could be a long one.
And whenever his time does come, will there be a monarchy for Charles to inherit? Some say it is absurd, an expensive charade, to set a man or woman on a throne and pretend that this crowned figure rules or represents a modern nation. The British people do not agree. Opinion polls consistently show massive approval of the Queen herself (one-third of the population dreams about her; most of these dream that they are having tea together). The monarchy does almost as well.
Popular consent is the bedrock on which the institution rests. If majorities in both houses of Parliament ever voted for abolition of the monarchy, it would go. Prince Philip put it candidly: "The answer to this monarchy question is very simple: if people don't like it, they should change it. The monarchy exists not for its own benefit but for the country." The Queen has added that if Parliament decides it has no need for a royal family, "we'll go quietly."
This is not likely to happen soon. One does not lightly throw away an institution rooted in a thousand years of national life and consciousness. The Queen is more than an integral part of the British constitution; she is part of being British. She has performed flawlessly. Over a period of 40 years, she has never made a misstep. Following the example set by her father, she has fulfilled her role and done her duty. This the British people respect. And as the years pass, and her 40th anniversary becomes her 50th, and perhaps beyond, respect will turn to reverence. Already, a majority of Britons cannot remember when she was not Queen, and every year that number will increase.
Despite all the daylight that has been let in, the magic is still there.
Last June, only six days after the first installment of Andrew Morton's book appeared on the newsstands, the Queen and her family turned out for this year's Trooping the Colour on the Queen's Birthday. Down the Mall came a carriage containing the Queen Mother in yellow, the Princess of Wales in white, and little Prince Harry wearing a blue blazer. A mass of cavalry trotted by. Then came a small, simple carriage drawn by two white horses. In it, quite open and unprotected, her back as straight as a mast, sat a small woman dressed in peach. She looked from side to side and, occasionally, as people applauded and cheered, raised her hand in a careful, regal wave. Immediately behind, wearing the scarlet tunics and tall bearskins of colonels of the Guards, rode her husband and her heir. But she was alone, vulnerable yet invincible. She was The Queen.
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