Elizabeth the Queen (37 page)

I
N
J
UNE 1970
, H
AROLD
W
ILSON CALLED A GENERAL ELECTION ON
the assumption that he could bolster Labour’s majority in Parliament. But he misread the opinion polls as well as public dissatisfaction over rising prices and an increase in unemployment. The Conservatives won decisively in a surprising upset. Fifty-three-year-old Edward Heath came to Buckingham Palace on the 19th to kiss hands, the first Tory premier to be elected by his party rather than appointed by the Queen.

That night Elizabeth II gave a grand ball at Windsor Castle to celebrate the seventieth birthdays of the Queen Mother; the Queen’s cousin Dickie Mountbatten; her uncle Harry, the Duke of Gloucester; and Henry Somerset, the 10th Duke of Beaufort, who had been her ceremonial Master of the Horse since the beginning of her reign.

The ball was a Patrick Plunket production, with the castle floodlit and fuchsias in pots lining the Gothic entrance hall. Many of the guests were celebrating the Tory victory. “We had been expecting to put up with Wilson and his loathsome mob for another five years,” wrote Cecil Beaton, “and quite dramatically all was changed.” When the new prime minister arrived like a conquering hero, the guests cheered. “I was told that he blushed to his collar,” Beaton recorded.

Yet Heath, who was Wilson’s exact contemporary, proved to be heavy going for the Queen, who was ten years his junior. Like his Labour predecessor, his origins were modest. He had excelled in the grammar school system and earned his degree at Oxford. Heath’s provincialism had a cultured gloss from his expertise in classical music and skill as a yachtsman, although neither was a fruitful source of small talk with Elizabeth II. A confirmed bachelor described as “celibate” by Philip Ziegler, his official biographer, Heath was at best indifferent to women and at worst contemptuous of them.

The Queen’s sixth prime minister had a reputation for being brusque, even rude. Wilson described him as “cold and uncompassionate.” He lacked Wilson’s bonhomie and instinctive deference. Even worse, from the Queen’s standpoint, he was humorless and remote. She could find traits to admire: certainly his political talent and accomplishments as well as his determination and his honesty. But given his personality, Heath’s unfailing courtesy to his sovereign could be cloying at times.

Heath learned quickly to appreciate the Queen’s value and found their audiences rewarding, especially since he had no spouse in whom to confide or share his frustrations. He described her as a patient listener when he unburdened himself “a good deal” beyond the agenda drawn up by their private secretaries that she kept on a card placed on a nearby table. “The fact that she has all these years of experience and is imperturbable is a source of encouragement in itself,” he said. Heath also found that extensive correspondence with foreign leaders made her “very useful … particularly on overseas stuff.”

He did not, however, share her passion for the Commonwealth, which led to tensions between them. From the moment of his election, Heath was determined to pick up Macmillan’s quest for admission to the Common Market after French president Charles de Gaulle had twice rebuffed Britain’s application. Heath applied a messianic zeal to the task of persuading French president Georges Pompidou, who continued to hold the veto power. To demonstrate to France that his country was truly European, Heath downplayed the importance of the Commonwealth. He also antagonized a number of its African members when he dropped the arms embargo against South Africa enacted by Wilson in 1967 and resumed weapons sales to the apartheid regime. Both Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania threatened to leave the Commonwealth.

Fearing confrontations at the Commonwealth leaders’ meeting in Singapore in January 1971, Heath banned the Queen from attending. As he expected, the Africans pummeled him, but nobody bolted. According to Heath biographer John Campbell, the Queen was “deeply unhappy with Heath’s undisguised disrespect” for her beloved Commonwealth and “greatly upset by the rows which disfigured” the 1971 meeting. Martin Charteris said that if she had been allowed to attend, the acrimony would have been reduced if not eliminated. “It’s like Nanny being there,” he said. “She demands that they behave properly in her presence.… She knows them all and they like her.” She resented being excluded and “she was determined it was not going to happen again.”

The United States was also given short shrift by Heath in his pursuit of stronger European connections. Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, wrote that not only did the prime minister fail to cultivate the “special relationship,” he “actively sought to downgrade it.” Nixon did everything he could to establish good rapport with Heath, and to please the Queen as well. On the heels of his dinner for Philip, the president invited Charles and Anne to the White House in July 1970—their first trip to America and the fourth such visit by a Prince of Wales since 1860.

Elizabeth II’s two older children were being introduced to the round of royal duties, much as she had been instructed during her childhood. “I learnt the way a monkey learns—by watching its parents,” Charles once said. During Anne’s trip to New Zealand with her mother and father in March 1970, royal image maker William Heseltine modernized the Queen’s regular routine by adding the “walkabout”—taking a casual stroll to chat and shake hands with ordinary people. Her daughter was expected to follow suit. “At nineteen years old suddenly being dropped in the middle of the street,” Anne recalled. “Suddenly being told to pick someone and talk to them. Fun? No I don’t think so. A challenge.”

Nixon laid on an ambitious program for Charles and Anne’s two days in Washington: lunch on the presidential yacht
Sequoia
and a cruise to Mount Vernon, a steak cookout at the presidential retreat at Camp David, a dinner dance for seven hundred on the White House lawn, a Washington Senators baseball game, and visits to monuments and museums. Their socializing included the Nixons’ twenty-four-year-old daughter, Tricia, who had attended Charles’s investiture in Wales the previous year, as well as her younger sister, Julie, and Julie’s husband, David Eisenhower, the grandson of the former president. More than three decades later, when Charles and his new wife, Camilla, visited George W. and Laura Bush at the White House, he joked that the Bushes had better not try to fix up their twin daughters with his sons William and Harry the way Nixon had worked to set him up with Tricia.

Nixon set aside a half hour to meet Charles in the Oval Office. In a briefing paper, Kissinger advised him to solicit the twenty-one-year-old prince’s views on the Commonwealth, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, his impression of Canada, and of the “hopes and aspirations of his generation.” They ended up talking for ninety minutes on a wide range of topics. When Nixon urged Charles to be a “presence” while not completely avoiding controversy, the prince “pointed out one must not become controversial too often otherwise people don’t take you seriously.” Charles added in his diary afterward, “to be just a presence would be fatal.… A presence alone can be swept away so easily.”

The following October, Nixon was back in Britain for consultations with Heath. The Queen, who was on vacation at Balmoral, expressed concern that she would seem discourteous if she did not see the American president during his brief stay. Her advisers considered an invitation to Windsor or Buckingham Palace, but decided that neither place would be “suitable for entertaining a large party at short notice.” Instead, she accepted Heath’s invitation to fly down from Scotland and join Nixon for luncheon at Chequers—her first visit to the prime minister’s country residence. It was an opportunity, said Heath’s principal private secretary, Robert Armstong, for the Queen to meet Nixon “during his four-hour stay … without formality and without undue inroads into the time available for official discussions between the President and the Prime Minister.” Nixon was grateful for the Queen’s “signal kindness,” and the visit was a success.

For all his impatience with the pomp and ceremony that Wilson had found thrilling, Heath had been brought up a royalist, and he was eager to do what was necessary to support an institution that worked well. The Civil List inquiry into royal finances promised by Wilson took shape under his successor as a select committee with a Tory majority that met a half dozen times in 1971. Michael Adeane gave detailed testimony about the Queen’s official duties, the first comprehensive justification of her value to the government and the nation. He also revealed the concentration and care behind her seemingly uncomplicated daily rounds. “Taking a lively interest in everything, saying a kind word here and asking a question there,” he said, “always smiling and acknowledging cheers when driving in her car, sometimes for hours, had to be experienced to be properly appreciated.”

Labour critics questioned why the Queen was immune from taxation and demanded to know the size of her private fortune. William Hamilton, a strident republican member of the committee, called Princess Margaret—who had an admittedly light schedule of official engagements, including just thirty-one outside London in 1970—an “expensive kept woman.” The Palace pointed out that estimates of the Queen’s net worth as high as 100 million pounds were overblown, since most of her assets—her art collection, the Crown Jewels, the contents of the three state-owned palaces—were held in trust for the monarchy, yielded no income, and could not be sold.

The committee issued its report on December 2, and Parliament passed the Civil List Act of 1972, which gave the Queen what she wanted: a rise in the Civil List payment to £980,000 a year for ten years, and increased disbursements for the other members of the royal family to cover their performance of public duties. (Princess Margaret’s rose from £15,000 annually to £35,000.) Elizabeth II’s Privy Purse, which covers personal as well as some public expenses such as staff pensions, would no longer receive a stipend from the Civil List and would be funded only by her Duchy of Lancaster income. For the first time, there would also be annual reviews. The press now had a way to raise such matters as taxation as well as support of peripheral members of the royal family in the years to come.

At the beginning of 1972, Michael Adeane decided to leave his post three years before his scheduled retirement, and Martin Charteris was named private secretary. “Martin was given his chance, and he blossomed,” said Gay Charteris. “He said, ‘The only thing I want to do is show the public what she is really like.’ I think he helped do that.” By way of reinforcement, Charteris used to say to Elizabeth II, “Your job is to spread a carpet of happiness.” Once he took the number one spot, the Queen’s speeches showed his deft touch, with dashes of humor that had previously been absent. He also got along well with William Heseltine, who became an assistant private secretary, and Ronald Allison, the new press secretary, who had worked on Fleet Street and understood the thinking of reporters.

T
HE
Q
UEEN AT
age forty-five was brimming with energy and blessed with a robust constitution. In November 1971 she somewhat improbably caught chicken pox—not even, she said, from one of her own children. She called it a “ridiculous disease” and submitted to confinement during her contagion. Once she was free of infection but still “covered in spots,” she resumed her duties inside the Palace, including receiving the prime minister at the Tuesday audience. After Heath sent her a rather stiff note “to commiserate with you” about the illness, she replied in a lighthearted tone thanking him for his kindness, and expressing her frustration that she couldn’t yet go out into crowds for fear she could be reinfected “from
them
—one can’t win from a virus!”

It was a rare moment of ill health for the Queen. She was always a great believer in the virtues of fresh air and exercise, including her regular riding and daily walking. Wearing gloves on her public rounds and avoiding people with coughs and sniffles was also part of her routine. During her thirties and forties she nevertheless suffered from occasional colds, laryngitis, and bouts of sinusitis, which seldom prompted complaints or slowed her down. “She has a theory that you carry on working and your cold gets better,” said a cousin of the Queen. One exception was after Charles’s investiture, when a severe cold forced her to cancel engagements for four days.

Her ear, nose, and throat specialist for many years, Sir Cecil Hogg, used to make house calls at the various royal residences. After his first visit to Buckingham Palace, he reported “how unnerving it was to get under the bedclothes with the Queen in her nightie to test her chest and listen to bubbles inside,” said Min Hogg, his daughter. “He said she was quite good at putting him at ease. When he was under the bedclothes she would say, ‘I’m as nervous as you are.’ ”

While Elizabeth II has a full complement of doctors, including specialists, she also put great faith in homeopathic remedies long before such nostrums were commonplace in the culture. Her belief, shared with her mother, is that they “can do no harm and may well do you good,” explained Lady Angela Oswald, a Norfolk neighbor and friend. Homeopathy—taking diluted substances that would induce symptoms of illness if used in larger doses—was embraced by Queen Victoria, and in 1923 Sir John Weir, a Scottish doctor, began administering such treatments to members of the royal family. On Weir’s retirement in 1968, the Queen appointed her first female court physician, Dr. Margery Blackie, another homeopathic expert. Among Blackie’s more exotic treatments was Malvern water with a trace of arsenic for sinus infections.

The homeopaths would come “for whatever was wrong with them,” said Min Hogg. “The real physicians and surgeons would put their eyes to heaven.” Still, Elizabeth II has always respected the professionalism of her medical specialists. When Sir Cecil turned seventy in 1971 and had to retire—a mandatory rule imposed by the Queen’s medical advisers—she told him, “I am sorry, because you have such a steady hand.”

I
N THE THIRD
decade of the Queen’s reign, she stepped up the pace of her foreign travels—fifteen Commonwealth trips, including six lengthy tours of Pacific countries, designed to reinforce their standing with Britain, along with state visits to seventeen non-Commonwealth countries. One of the most significant of these was a goodwill trip to France in May 1972 that set the stage for Parliament’s ratification of a treaty allowing Britain to join the Common Market, which Heath had negotiated after intensively wooing a skeptical Georges Pompidou.