Elizabeth the Queen (21 page)

Now he was taking aim at those who served—or rather in his view failed to serve—the monarchy, which he said he supported. His title gave him instant credibility, as did his education at Eton and Oxford and his service as an officer in the Grenadier Guards—all spawning grounds for the Buckingham Palace courtier class. Altrincham denounced those advisers as a “tight little enclave” of “tweedy” aristocrats who filled the Queen’s official speeches with platitudes. “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth,” he wrote, “is that of a priggish schoolgirl,” preventing her from coming into her own “as an independent and distinctive character.” Altrincham urged the royal family to surround itself with a more racially and socially diverse group, creating a “truly classless and Commonwealth court” that could more imaginatively help the Queen achieve the “seemingly impossible task of being at once ordinary and extraordinary.”

This line of criticism echoed a little-noticed essay by journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge in the
New Statesman
two years earlier. Prompted by the media circus created by Princess Margaret’s drama with Peter Townsend, Muggeridge had warned in October 1955 of the dangers of overexposure in the press. He presciently advised the royal family to install an “efficient public relations set-up” to replace “rather ludicrous courtiers” in an effort to control the press and “check some of the worst abuses.” Better advisers, he wrote, would help the royal family “prevent themselves and their lives from becoming a sort of royal soap opera.” Muggeridge, a clever polemicist, offered this sound advice in a restrained and respectful way. His most provocative observation was that the monarchy had “become a kind of
ersatz
religion,” and he suggested that the British royal family might consider the Scandinavian approach of living “simply and unaffectedly among their subjects.”

Altrincham’s like-minded analysis might have attracted little more than raised eyebrows among the 4,500 readers of his journal had he not had the temerity to attack the Queen personally for her “debutante stamp” and her “woefully inadequate training” for the job of sovereign. “ ‘Crawfie,’ Sir Henry Marten, the London season, the race-course, the grouse-moor, canasta and the occasional royal tour,” he wrote, “would not have been good enough for Elizabeth I!”

What’s more, he singled out Elizabeth II’s “style of speaking, which is frankly ‘a pain in the neck.’ Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text.… Even if the Queen feels compelled to read all her speeches, great and small, she must at least improve her method of reading them. With practice, even a prepared speech can be given an air of spontaneity.” In the spirit of what he described as “loyal and constructive criticism,” Altrincham observed that once she had “lost the bloom of youth,” her reputation would depend primarily on her personality. “She will have to say things which people can remember,” he wrote, “and do things which will make people sit up and take notice.”

His words drew a torrent of indignant criticism in the press and within the Establishment. The tabloids ran banner headlines about the “attack” on the Queen.
The Sunday Times
called Altrincham a cad and a coward, and Henry Fairlie wrote in the
Mail
that the Queen’s critic dared “to pit his infinitely tiny and temporary mind against the accumulated experience of centuries.” Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, dismissed Altrincham as “a very silly man.” B. K. Burbidge of the League of Empire Loyalists slapped Altrincham in the face during an encounter on a London street. The magistrate who fined Burbidge one pound for the assault couldn’t help sympathizing with the man’s anger, saying that “95 per cent of the population of this country are disgusted and offended by what was written.”

Inside the Palace, the essay was taken as constructive criticism. Martin Charteris privately described it as a “real watershed for the post-war monarchy” and said the author had performed a “terrific service.” By some accounts, Prince Philip—no fan of crusty courtiers—felt the same way. With help from her husband and various professionals such as the BBC’s David Attenborough and Antony Craxton, a friend of Philip’s from Gordonstoun days, the Queen improved her delivery of speeches, mainly by lowering her voice and smoothing out her clipped accent. But she continued to read her prepared scripts rather than risk violating her neutral position as monarch with a misspoken word. Contrary to Altrincham’s prediction, even after she had lost her youthful bloom, the public respected her stolid style, along with her self-effacing refusal to “make people sit up and take notice.”

Charteris’s gratitude for Altrincham’s wake-up call reflected other ways the Queen adapted to the times, democratizing some of her activities and eventually diversifying her staff. The following year marked the last of the elitist “presentation parties” for debutantes at Buckingham Palace, an antiquated upper-class ritual dating back to the court of George III, to be replaced by additional royal garden parties open to a wider spectrum of people.

While these changes were beginning to take shape behind the scenes, Malcolm Muggeridge added to the imbroglio in October 1957 by writing an essay titled “Does England Really Need a Queen?” in the American weekly magazine
The Saturday Evening Post
. He not only expanded his earlier themes of “royal soap opera,” he raised the ante with his sarcastic tone and blunt criticism of the Queen and those who revered her.

He reported that “those who mix socially with the royal family” are the most “contemptuously facetious” about the Queen. “It is the duchesses, not shop assistants,” he wrote, “who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal.” He said the Queen fulfilled her duties with “a certain sleep-walking quality about the gestures, movements and ceremonial.” Worse still, she was “a generator of snobbishness and a focus of sycophancy.”

Muggeridge got an even more vehement pummeling in the press than Altrincham. He was harassed on the street, his house was vandalized, and he received vitriolic hate mail, some of which contained excrement and razor blades. The BBC even temporarily banned him from its airwaves. When he returned, he became one of the network’s preeminent broadcasters.

O
NE REASON FOR
the intensity of the reaction was the article’s intentional timing to coincide with the Queen’s much anticipated visit to North America. Arriving in Canada on October 12 for a five-day visit, she made her first live television broadcast, speaking alternately in English and French to an audience of fourteen million out of Canada’s 16.5 million population. She used a TelePrompTer for the first time, which enabled her to look straight into the camera. She came across as “shy, a bit bashful and sometimes awkward,” but endearing because her performance “was so human,” according to
The New York Times
.

Perhaps the criticisms of Altrincham and Muggeridge had already sunk in, because she uncharacteristically began her seven-minute speech by telling her viewers, “I want to talk to you more personally.” She went on to say, in almost confidential fashion, “There are long periods when life seems a small dull round, a petty business with no point, and then suddenly we are caught up in some great event which gives us a glimpse of the solid and durable foundations of our existence.”

The following day she was the first sovereign to open the Canadian parliament. So Canadians could feel they were “taking part in a piece of Canada’s history,” she also agreed to television coverage of her speech from the throne in Ottawa’s Senate chamber.

The Queen was especially looking forward to her second trip to America. Writing to Anthony Eden, she said, “there does seem to be a much closer feeling between the U.S. and ourselves, especially since the Russian satellite [Sputnik] has come to shake everyone about their views on Russian scientific progress!” Unlike her lightning visit in 1951, this would be a full-dress affair: six days in Washington, New York, and Jamestown, Virginia, where she would celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first British colony in America.

She had an affectionate relationship with the sixty-seven-year-old American president that dated back to World War II when Eisenhower was in London as Supreme Allied Commander. He had enjoyed a “devoted friendship” with her parents, and he liked to recount how they had once arranged for him to have a special tour of the private areas of Windsor Castle. To ensure the general’s privacy, they had decided to remain in their apartments. But on the appointed day George VI had forgotten, and he and his family were on a terrace above the rose garden having tea with Margaret Rhodes at a table covered to the ground with a white tablecloth. As Eisenhower and his group approached, the King knew that their presence would stop the tour. “We all dived under the table and hid,” the Queen said years later. “If [Eisenhower] and his party had looked up … they would have seen a table shaking from the effect of the concerted and uncontrollable giggles of those sheltering beneath it,” recalled Margaret Rhodes. When George VI later recounted the story to Eisenhower, the general “was so staggered by the King of England hiding,” said Elizabeth II.

A crowd of ten thousand greeted the Queen and duke on their arrival in Virginia on October 16 for a day-long celebration in Jamestown and Williamsburg. They were accompanied by an entourage of sixty-six, including the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. In Williamsburg the Queen gave a brief speech from a balcony at the College of William and Mary, praising the “enlightened and skilled statesmen” who founded the American republic. “Lord what’s-his-name was way off base,” wrote
The Washington Post
. “She is no orator, but those who heard her today thought that there was a nice lilt to her voice.”

The following morning they flew to Washington on Eisenhower’s aircraft, the
Columbine III
, a swift and sleek propeller plane with four powerful engines on its long wings. As they waited to take off, Philip immersed himself in the sports section of the newspaper while Elizabeth II unlocked her monogrammed leather writing case with a small gold key and began writing postcards to her children. “Philip?” she suddenly said. Her husband kept reading. “Philip!” she repeated. He glanced up, startled. “Which engines do they start first on a big plane like this?” Her husband looked momentarily perplexed. “Come on now,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t wait until they actually
start
them, Philip!” He offered a guess, which turned out to be correct. (They went in sequence, first on one wing from the inner engine to the outer, then the inner followed by the outer on the other wing.) “He was flustered,” recalled Ruth Buchanan, wife of Wiley T. Buchanan, Jr., Eisenhower’s chief of protocol, who sat nearby. “It was so like what an ordinary wife would do when her husband wasn’t paying attention.”

Riding into the capital with the president and his wife, Mamie, in a bubble-top limousine accompanied by sixteen bands, they were cheered along the route by more than a million people who were undaunted by intermittent rain showers. The royal couple spent their four nights in the most elegant guest quarters in the recently renovated White House—the Rose Suite furnished in Federal style for the Queen (later the Queens’ Bedroom and Sitting Room, named in honor of all its royal guests) and the Lincoln Bedroom, with its eight-foot-long carved rosewood bed, for the Duke of Edinburgh.

Much of the visit was given over to the usual receptions, formal dinners at the White House and British embassy (complete with gold plates flown over from Buckingham Palace), and tours of local sights, several of which offered unguarded glimpses of the Queen, described in news accounts as “the little British sovereign” or “the little monarch.”

It was evident to Ruth Buchanan that the Queen was “very certain, and very comfortable in her role. But she didn’t let the barrier down. She would maintain a stance, and she was very much in control of what she did, although she did laugh at my husband’s jokes.” Once when Buchanan was waiting for her husband to escort the royal couple to their limousine, “I could hear her guffawing. You didn’t realize she had that hearty laugh. But the minute she rounded the corner and saw us, she just straightened up.”

British ambassador Harold Caccia threw a garden party for two thousand under five tents lined with fiberglass that shimmered like silk, preceded by a more exclusive meeting with eighty diplomats and their wives. During a tour of the National Gallery, the Queen confessed to its director, John Walker, that she had recently longed to buy a Monet at a London auction, but couldn’t afford the “staggering amount.”

Vice President Richard Nixon treated the royal couple to a luncheon with ninety-six guests in the orchid-bedecked old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol. It was their first encounter with the incisive but socially awkward vice president. Perhaps taking note of the recent criticism of the Queen, Nixon talked to her about speaking techniques. The next day he even sent her a book with some “rather startling ideas” that he thought could be helpful:
The Art of Readable Writing
, by noted language expert Dr. Rudolf Flesch, an advocate of “plain talk.”

On the third day the Queen indulged in some unusual departures from the normal run of activities. She had specifically asked to see an American football “match,” as she put it, so the White House arranged for her to sit in a “royal box” at the fifty yard line at the University of Maryland’s Byrd Stadium for a game against the University of North Carolina. On the way she spotted a Giant supermarket and asked if a visit might be arranged so she “could see how American housewives shop for food.”

To the cheers of 43,000 spectators, the Queen walked onto the field to chat with two opposing players, both strapping lads in crew cuts. Dressed in a $15,000 mink coat given to her by Mutation Mink Breeders Association, a group of American fur farmers, she watched the game intently but seemed “perturbed” whenever the players threw blocks. It was a quintessential American display: cheerleaders doing cartwheels, high-stepping drum majorettes, marching bands, and North Carolina girls costumed in large cigarette packs covering their heads and torsos, dancing as an announcer boasted about their state’s “parade of industries.”