Elizabeth the Queen (55 page)

Philip never forgave Fergie for dishonoring the family. “I don’t see her because I don’t see much point,” he told author Gyles Brandreth. But the Queen, in her typically tolerant fashion, remained on good terms. During the Christmas holidays at Sandringham, she even arranged for Fergie to stay at nearby Wood Farm so her daughters could join her after celebrating with the rest of the family. “The Queen had an affection for her daughter-in-law, who often got things wrong,” said one of her senior advisers. “In a sense, though, Fergie was disarmingly guileless and you could see what she was doing up to a mile away.” Diana was another matter—secretive and scheming—and so was more difficult to forgive.

Four days after the
Mirror
scoop, the rival
Sun
dropped its own bombshell headlined “MY LIFE IS TORTURE.” The article quoted extensively from a surreptitiously recorded telephone conversation between Diana and thirty-three-year-old James Gilbey, an intimate friend who had also cooperated with the Morton book. The recording had been made at the end of December 1989 while Diana was staying at Sandringham. Their conversation was sprinkled with endearments (he repeatedly called her “Squidgy” and she referred to him as “darling”) and sexual innuendo. She revealed her duplicity when she proposed various cover stories for their assignations. Most damning were her bitter comments about Charles and his relatives. “Bloody hell,” she said, “after all I’ve done for this fucking family.”

The Palace declined to comment, while Elizabeth II strove to maintain her equilibrium. After Margaret left Scotland for a holiday in Italy, she wrote to the Queen that she “personally found great comfort in being with you” at such a difficult time and said she hoped her sister could find some solace in the beauty of the Highlands.

Diana didn’t flee Balmoral as Fergie had done. Instead, she turned, in the words of her private secretary Patrick Jephson, “alternately despairing, defiant, or lost in self-pity” and announced she would not accompany Charles on an official visit to Korea in November. Once again, the Queen intervened, this time with the help of Philip, and persuaded her to make the trip. It was a fig leaf at best. Back in London that autumn, both Charles and Diana consulted lawyers, but neither was able to take the difficult first step toward official separation.

The rush of sensational stories whipped up further attacks on the Queen for her exemption from taxes. Early in September, government officials began suggesting she might be ready to reverse the policy. That autumn the working group had nearly completed its review, with further details to be ironed out in the final proposal. David Airlie intended to present the plan to the Queen when he and his wife came to stay at Sandringham for a shooting weekend in early January—an approach he often used for difficult issues. That way, he could meet with Elizabeth II in a relaxed setting, “take time and talk round it and have Philip there,” said a senior adviser. Once she gave the go-ahead, officials reasoned, the announcement could be made in the spring of 1993.

F
ATE INTERVENED ON
Friday, November 20, the forty-fifth wedding anniversary of the Queen and Philip. She was going into an audience in the late morning when Andrew rang from Windsor to tell her that part of the castle was ablaze. A number of rooms were being rewired when a spotlight ignited a curtain in the Private Chapel, causing a fast-moving fire that spread from the Chester Tower to Brunswick Tower, destroying or damaging nine state rooms—including St. George’s Hall, the State Dining Room, Crimson Drawing Room, Green Drawing Room, Grand Reception Room, and Octagon Dining Room—and more than one hundred others. Because of the ongoing restoration work, much of the artwork had been removed from the rooms hit hardest. Andrew joined scores of volunteers including members of the Household Cavalry and the Dean of Windsor to rescue nearly all the remaining paintings, furniture, and other valuables threatened by the fire.

The Queen arrived at around 3
P.M.
“It was the most shaken I ever saw her,” said one of her senior advisers. Windsor was the home that meant the most to Elizabeth II, and the conflagration seemed like cruel retribution for the misbehavior of her wayward family. Bundled in her macintosh, a rain hat, and wellies, her hands thrust into her pockets, she stood in the middle of the courtyard looking bereft as the fire roared, and the roof above the state apartments began to collapse. The image captured her ultimate solitude more tellingly than either of her Annigoni portraits.

She spent about an hour in the gray drizzle before going to the private apartments to help her staff move out precious possessions in case the fire spread further. After the firefighters brought the blaze under control, she and Andrew inspected the damage.

Though Philip was away at a conference in Argentina, he spoke with his wife at length on the phone. The Queen Mother invited her daughter to spend the weekend with her at Royal Lodge, an occasion for extended conversation and some soul searching. “It made all the difference to my sanity after that terrible day,” the Queen wrote to her mother the following week.

Heritage Secretary Peter Brooke announced that the estimated £20 million to £40 million cost for restoration would be borne by the government. It was entirely appropriate because royal residences cannot be commercially insured. Moreover, the expenses of running and restoring Windsor Castle—including those under way when the fire broke out—were customarily paid by the government. But to the astonishment of both the Queen and John Major, the
Daily Mail
led an angry populist crusade against this plan, fueled by cumulative resentment of the royal family’s younger generation. At a time of economic recession the cry went up for the Queen to pay for the restoration, and to start paying taxes as well.

In a matter of days, Palace officials scuttled their timetable and gained the Queen’s approval of their tax plan. She and Prince Charles would voluntarily pay tax on their private income from the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall, respectively, starting in 1993. The Queen would also reimburse the government from her private funds for the £900,000 a year in Civil List payments to Andrew, Anne, Edward, and Margaret to cover their official expenses. To help finance the Windsor Castle restoration, she agreed to open the state rooms at Buckingham Palace to members of the public for an admission fee.

The impetus for the new Buckingham Palace policy came from Michael Peat, strongly supported by David Airlie, and had been debated for many months. At first the Queen felt it would be “lifting too much veil on the mystery of monarchy,” said a courtier. “Being invited to the Palace was a special privilege and being inside was a special privilege. Would tours cheapen it?” On the other hand, “She could see that it was a good thing for a more open monarchy, providing access to the royal collection, which after all belongs to the nation,” said another senior adviser. “Everyone could see the point of it, but the Queen was concerned about how to make it work without impinging on the working of the Palace and on security.” The Prince of Wales advocated the idea, but the Queen Mother, who took a dim view of change, was strongly opposed, as she had been in 1977 when the Queen first began offering public tours of Sandringham House.

Elizabeth II ultimately embraced a compromise to admit the public to the Palace during the months when she was in residence at Balmoral. The Queen Mother accepted the new policies, although she insisted to Woodrow Wyatt that her daughter “let Major persuade her” to pay taxes, adding that Margaret Thatcher “never would have suggested that or allowed it.” Major had actually been reluctant at first, and he was indignant about the uproar in the press over financing Windsor Castle, which he called a “very miserable and mealy-mouthed response. It just seemed so mean spirited and out of character for the British nation.”

Yet opening the Palace became “one of the central features of innovation of the Queen’s reign,” said one of her senior advisers. It also proved a revenue bonanza, not only financing three quarters of the £37 million tab for the castle restoration (with the rest from cost savings measures at all the palaces) but helping to cover the ongoing costs of upkeep.

Four days after the fire, the Queen appeared at the Guildhall in the City of London for a luncheon hosted by the Lord Mayor to honor her forty years on the throne. She was suffering from a severe cold, with a temperature of 101 and a raw throat from the smoke she had inhaled. Wearing a dark green dress and matching hat with an upturned brim, she looked drawn, and her voice was raspy and thin as she began her remarks. Robert Fellowes had drafted the speech, but it bore the Queen’s touchingly personal imprint. “Nineteen ninety-two is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure,” she said. “In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘
Annus Horribilis
.’ ”

She went on to mildly rebuke “some contemporary commentators” by saying that the judgment of history offered an opportunity for “moderation and compassion—even of wisdom—that is sometimes lacking in the reactions of those whose task it is in life to offer instant opinions on all things great and small.” She acknowledged the value of criticism, noting that “no institution … should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t”—an oblique but unmistakable reference to her republican critics. “Scrutiny … can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humor and understanding,” she added. “This sort of questioning can also act, and it should do so, as an effective engine for change.”

The audience of dignitaries gave her a standing ovation. Even the
Daily Mail
praised her “intense and complex” remarks as an indication that she was open to some necessary reforms in the monarchy’s conduct.
“Annus horribilis”
became one of the memorable catch-phrases of the Queen’s long reign, although its author, former assistant private secretary Sir Edward Ford, admitted that as a classical scholar he should have more precisely said “
annus horrendus,
” meaning a horrid year. “
Horribilis,
” he later explained, meant “a year capable of scaring you.” In many respects that description was equally apt.

* * *

A
T THE TIME
of her Guildhall speech, the Queen knew that more bad news would soon be emerging about Charles and Diana. During their trip to Korea in early November, Diana had privately been “in a state of desperation, overcome by nausea and tears.” She seemed to be sleepwalking through her public appearances, her expression either bored or anguished, and Charles looked intensely uncomfortable. The tabloids pounced on the visible signs of strain, calling the royal couple “The Glums.”

Shortly after their return to England, Diana pushed Charles to the breaking point when she informed him at the last minute that she and their sons would not be attending his annual shooting party at Sandringham. At that moment, Charles decided that “he had no choice but to ask his wife for a legal separation.” The day after his mother’s “
annus horribilis
” speech, he met with Diana at Kensington Palace and told her of his decision.

On Wednesday, December 9, John Major stood before the House of Commons to announce that the heir to the throne and his wife would be separating. He hastened to add that they had “no plans to divorce and their constitutional positions are unaffected.… The succession to the Throne is unaffected by it … there is no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned Queen in due course.” Major’s case was less than persuasive, since the notion of a bitterly estranged but still married royal couple going through a coronation together took the monarchy into hazardous territory. “With hindsight it was a mistake to have said that,” said cabinet secretary Robin Butler. “It was seen as softening the blow, showing that she was not being thrown into outer darkness.”

Some relief from the turmoil came the following Saturday when Princess Anne married Commander Timothy Laurence in Crathie Church at Balmoral on an overcast and frigid day. Anne wanted a religious wedding, but as a divorcée she could not be married in the Church of England, so she chose the more forgiving Church of Scotland. The arrangements were so hastily made that the Queen Mother had to leave her weekend house party at Royal Lodge in the morning and fly back to London to rejoin her guests for dinner.

The forty-two-year-old bride and her thirty-seven-year-old groom exchanged vows in a private half hour ceremony before a congregation of thirty guests that included her two children, three brothers, and her aunt as well as her parents and grandmother. Laurence wore his Royal Navy uniform, and Anne was dressed in a knee-length white suit. Instead of wearing a veil, she tucked a small bunch of white flowers in her hair. Her only attendant was her eleven-year-old daughter, Zara. Since Balmoral Castle was shuttered for the winter, the group repaired to Craigowan Lodge for a short reception after the ceremony. It was a far cry from the pageantry of Anne’s first wedding two decades earlier.

In her Christmas message, the Queen revisited her time of troubles, mainly to express her gratitude for the “prayers, understanding and sympathy” that had given her and her family “great support and encouragement.” Never one for self-pity, she sought to give her “sombre year” context by emphasizing those who put service to others above their difficult circumstances. She singled out Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, a former RAF pilot who had become an advocate for the disabled. His heroism and “supreme contempt for danger” during World War II had earned him the Victoria Cross, and the Queen had further honored him in 1981 with the Order of Merit.

She had seen him earlier in the year at an Order of Merit gathering not long before he died from a “long drawn-out terminal illness.” The encounter “did as much as anything in 1992 to help me put my own worries into perspective,” she said. “He made no reference to his own illness, but only to his hopes and plans to make life better for others.” He had “put Christ’s teaching to practical effect,” and his “shining example” could “inspire in the rest of us a belief in our own capacity to help others.” Drawing from Cheshire’s inspiration, she pledged—yet again—her “commitment to your service in the coming years.” With her characteristic resilience, she put the year behind her, turning to meet the “new challenges” of 1993 “with fresh hope” in her heart.