Elizabeth the Queen (20 page)

Toward the end of Philip’s trip, his longtime friend and loyal private secretary, Mike Parker, suddenly left for London when his wife, Eileen, filed for divorce, accusing her husband of adultery. The news splashed across the British tabloids, and Fleet Street conflated Parker’s prominent position in the royal household with Philip’s months overseas to raise questions about the stability of the royal marriage. The press focused on the duke’s attendance for several years at a stag luncheon group in Soho called the Thursday Club that included Parker as well as actors David Niven and Peter Ustinov. While nothing untoward was said to have occurred at these gatherings except drinking, smoking, and telling racy tales, one of the participants, celebrity photographer Stirling Henry Nahum, popularly known as “Baron,” was alleged to have provided his apartment for assignations between the duke and an unnamed “party girl,” causing a “rift” in his marriage.

Given Philip’s matinee idol looks and eye for feminine beauty, he had been linked in the rumor mill for some time to various actresses and society beauties such as Pat Kirkwood, Helene Cordet, and Katie Boyle—all of whom denied anything more than friendship or a glancing acquaintance. The story of the “party girl” had no basis in fact, and Philip was “very hurt, terribly hurt, very angry” about the allegation. The Queen took the unusual step of authorizing her usually tight-lipped press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, to issue an explicit denial, saying, “It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke.” There the matter rested, although rumors of Philip’s supposed dalliances would continue to surface whenever he was spotted on the dance floor or in lively conversation with a pretty woman.

Parker resigned his position to quell the publicity while his case wound through the courts. Elizabeth II and Philip were reunited on February 16, 1957, in Portugal, a moment she used in her own sly fashion to dispel questions about the state of her marriage. When her tanned and freshly shaven consort boarded the Queen’s plane, he found her and the members of her household all wearing false beards. The royal couple spent two days alone before they resumed their public roles on a three-day state visit in Portugal. Reporting on his tour at a luncheon in London on the 26th, the duke took pains to note that in his younger days being away for four months would have meant “nothing at all,” while now for the “obvious reasons” of his wife and family, the prolonged absence “meant much more to me.” But he went on to say that “making some personal sacrifice” was worthwhile to advance the well-being of the Commonwealth “even a small degree.”

Just four days earlier, the Queen had rewarded that sacrifice and Philip’s work generally as her consort by officially making him a Prince of the United Kingdom—a more elevated title than the royal duke designation he had held since their marriage. The idea had come from Harold Macmillan, the new prime minister, who shrewdly saw it as a way to further reinforce Philip’s standing with his wife, as well as in the eyes of Britain and the Commonwealth.

Despite a naturally gloomy cast of mind, Macmillan took charge with a burst of optimism, moving smartly away from the Suez shame and reaffirming Britain’s status as a great country filled with industrious citizens. “Most of our people have never had it so good,” he famously said on July 20, 1957. Under his watch, Britain did indeed grow more prosperous. Shortly after moving into 10 Downing Street, Macmillan also worked deftly to mend the special relationship frayed by Suez, quietly orchestrating an invitation from Eisenhower to the Queen for a state visit to the United States in the fall of 1957.

Macmillan had an easier relationship with Elizabeth II than his jittery predecessor, not as cozy as Churchill’s but sympathetic, notably on her part, although she sometimes became irritated by his antique affectations and tendency to pontificate. Like Churchill, Macmillan had an American mother (invariably described as pushy or dominating) and what his biographer Alistair Horne characterized as an “instinctive reverence towards the monarchy.” The prime minister was astute, witty, and urbane, capable of the sort of penetrating character assessments that intrigued the Queen, who savored political gossip.

Macmillan was a complicated character, a combination of cunning and vulnerability, deeply religious as well as ruthless. The grandson of an impoverished Scottish farmer who built a fortune as a book publisher, Harold had received all the advantages of an education at Eton and Oxford. In World War I, he was wounded five times, an experience that gave him unusual affinity with the working-class men who had served with him in the trenches, along with a measure of survivor’s guilt.

He vaulted into the aristocracy when he married the third daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, Lady Dorothy Cavendish, who tormented him by conducting a decades-long affair with Robert Boothby, a flamboyant and amusing bisexual politician. The relationship was an open secret (“We all knew about it,” the Queen Mother years later told her friend Woodrow Wyatt, a conservative columnist for
The Times
and
News of the World
) that made Macmillan’s humiliation even more agonizing. At the beginning, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and over time he coped by developing “a mask of impenetrable calm.” Yet behind what U.S. ambassador David Bruce called a “Victorian languor,” Macmillan was capable of “force” and “determination,” as well as “swift action.”

More at ease in the like-minded company around the bar at White’s, the men’s club on St. James’s Street, he nevertheless quickly warmed to the Queen, a different sort of woman from his social acquaintances, with an intelligence and detailed mastery of domestic and foreign policy issues that astonished him from the outset. He readily took advantage of her total discretion and maternal kindness, describing her as “a great support, because she is the one person you can talk to.”

Butler, the veteran lieutenant who made the Tuesday evening trip to Buckingham Palace when Macmillan was traveling abroad, held a similar view of her gifts as an interlocutor. “She never reacted excessively,” he later said. “She never used a phrase carelessly. She would never give away an opinion early on in the conversation.” Rather, she would solicit an opinion and “listen to it right through.”

In his nearly seven years in office, Macmillan and Elizabeth II had a genuine working partnership. He frequently sent her long letters filled with appraisals of world leaders and confessions about his setbacks, as well as droll vignettes and grim prognostications. The Queen dispatched handwritten replies that were unfailingly encouraging and appreciative. Macmillan was taken with her informality and her sense of fun. Like many others, he wished she could “be made to smile more” in public. On learning of his reaction, she remarked that she “had always assumed people wanted her to look solemn most of the time.”

A
FTER A HIATUS
of six years, the thirty-one-year-old sovereign was now keen to have more children, as was her husband. Dickie Mountbatten blamed the delay on Philip’s anger over the Queen’s rejection of his family name after the accession. But by her own account, she had postponed her dream of having a large family primarily because she wanted to concentrate on establishing herself as an effective monarch.

During a visit to Buckingham Palace in May 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt met with Elizabeth II for nearly an hour the day after Prince Charles had undergone a tonsillectomy. The former first lady found her to be “just as calm and composed as if she did not have a very unhappy little boy on her mind.” The Queen reported that Charles had already been fed ice cream to soothe his painful throat, yet it was 6:30 in the evening, and she was compelled to entertain the widow of a former U.S. president rather than sit at the bedside of her eight-year-old son.

While the Queen certainly loved her children, she had fallen into professional habits that kept her apart from them much of the time. They benefited from nurturing nannies—for Charles in particular, Mabel Anderson was a “haven of security”—and a doting grandmother. But because of her dogged devotion to duty, amplified by her natural inhibitions and aversion to confrontation, Elizabeth II had missed out on many maternal challenges as well as satisfactions. “She let things go,” said Gay Charteris. “She did have work every day. It was easier to go back to that than children having tantrums. She always had the excuse of the red boxes.” An iconic 1957 photograph taken by Princess Margaret’s future husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, inadvertently crystallized the distance between the royal parents and their children. It shows Elizabeth II and Philip leaning on a stone bridge in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, gazing with admiration at Anne and Charles sitting on a rock below, reading a book.

The downside of the Queen’s approach to motherhood had been clear to Clarissa Eden during a stay at Windsor Castle in April 1955 when she and her husband joined the royal family for a picnic. Six-year-old Charles flopped onto Anthony Eden’s chair, prompting the Queen to tell the boy to move. When he refused, she asked him again, “because it is the prime minister’s cushion and he is tired.” But the young prince wouldn’t budge. Then when Charles wouldn’t eat his food because he hadn’t washed his hands, the Queen Mother indulged him by saying, “Oh I do understand the feeling. Put some water in a saucer for him.” Clarissa Eden was mildly amused by the prince’s spoiled behavior, but surprised that the Queen “didn’t say, ‘Come on Charles, get up,’ but I suppose she doesn’t like scenes at all cost.”

On that particular spring afternoon Philip, the resident disciplinarian, was enjoying himself on the nearby lake in a flat-bottomed punt. If the Queen erred toward leniency, her husband was often too tough. In his role as head of the family—“the natural state of things,” in the view of Elizabeth II—he enforced the rules, insisting, for example, that Charles make his bed each morning and arrive punctually for breakfast. Philip called all the shots for the heir apparent, who was in many ways markedly different from his father: diffident, insecure, introspective, and athletically awkward. From an early age he was, in the words of the Queen Mother, “a very gentle boy, with a very kind heart.” Although two years her brother’s junior, Princess Anne was a much sturdier character: self-confident, rigorous, and assertive like Philip.

The most important decision for Charles concerned his education. (As was traditional among the upper classes, Anne would continue to be taught by a governess until she was ready for boarding school at age thirteen.) In an effort to create a semblance of normal life, the duke and Queen decided to send their son to a private primary school—the first ever for an heir apparent. Philip selected Hill House School in London, a five-year-old academy founded on Plutarch’s credo that a child’s mind was “not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” After Charles’s years in the nursery, being in a classroom with other boys was a novelty, and he was exposed to such leveling experiences as sweeping the floors and riding a bus to the athletic fields. But Charles had only one year in which the embers barely began to glow before his parents packed him off in the autumn of 1957, two months before his ninth birthday—the year when upper-class boys customarily went to boarding school—to his father’s alma mater, Cheam School in Hampshire.

Philip chose a school that conformed to his vision of educating the “whole” child. But he also saw his mission to toughen up his son’s apparent softness. Describing his rationale years later, the duke wrote, “Children may be indulged at home, but school is expected to be a Spartan and disciplined experience in the process of developing into self-controlled, considerate and independent adults.”

From the moment he entered his dormitory, Charles was miserable. Although over the following five years he would adjust to the strict regimen and coexist with more than eighty boys in the classroom and on the playing fields, he always remained slightly apart, pining for the distant solace of home. Explaining his inability to make many friends, he later said, “I always preferred my own company, or just a one to one.”

He became even more self-conscious about his singular position when at the end of his first year his mother gave him the title Prince of Wales—the most vivid symbol of his place in the royal succession. He had no idea what was coming as he and several other boys met in the headmaster’s study during the summer of 1958 to watch the telecast of the Queen’s message closing the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff—the quadrennial sporting competition sponsored by member nations. When she made the momentous announcement, Charles cringed with embarrassment as the crowds on the small screen cheered, “God Bless the Prince of Wales.”

His parents were well aware of his unhappiness at school; the Queen even wrote of her son’s “dread” on returning to Cheam after a holiday. But they believed in the need for a stiff upper lip, and the Queen deflected her son’s complaints to her husband. With his brusque manner and tendency to criticize rather than encourage, Philip was notably unsympathetic, which drove an ever-widening wedge between father and son.

As a practical matter, boarding school made sense for Charles given the busy schedules of the Queen and Prince Philip. It also kept him away from the prying eyes of the press. Until then, coverage of the monarch in newspapers and magazines—and in the hushed and impeccable voices of the British Broadcasting Corporation—had been reliably deferential to the Queen, according her praise verging on adoration while directing episodes of sensationalism at others such as her husband and her sister. The press was now for the first time publishing articles critical of Elizabeth II and her closest advisers.

I
N THE USUALLY
slow month of August 1957, when the Queen and her court had decamped for their annual holiday in the Scottish Highlands, an obscure publication called
National and English Review
ran a piece called “The Monarch Today” by the magazine’s editor, thirty-three-year-old John Grigg, the 2nd Baron Altrincham. He was a contrarian Tory who had already attracted attention for campaigning against his fellow hereditary peers who sat in Parliament’s House of Lords, many of whom he said were “not necessarily fitted to serve.” He had also advocated the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, and fiercely criticized Anthony Eden’s Suez invasion.