Her Majesty (11 page)

The regal aura can certainly humble the most distinguished visitors to the Palace. Cool-headed recipients of the most illustrious decorations can be a bag of nerves in the royal presence. But it is interesting to learn that the Queen commands the same reverence among her own heirs and successors. ‘Even within the family [it happens],’ admits Prince William. ‘I say to people “she’s my grandmother to me first and then she’s the Queen.” Words that come from her, I take very personally and I really appreciate.’

The future monarch certainly considers himself extremely lucky to have both his father and his grandmother to consult on the job that lies ahead. No trainee sovereign has ever had so much experience on which to draw. ‘My relationship with my grandmother has gone from strength to strength,’ he says. ‘As a shy younger man it could be harder to talk about weighty matters. It was: “This is my grandmother who is the Queen and these are serious historical subjects.” As I’ve got older, she’s become an even more important part of my life so it’s much easier. And obviously, with the wedding, she was a massive help.’

The Queen, he acknowledges, was a wonderful ally as the young couple started making wedding plans – only to discover that officials had been preparing lists without asking him. ‘For instance, I came into the first meeting for the wedding, post-engagement. And I [was given] this official list of 777 names – dignitaries, governors, all sorts of people – and not one person I knew.’ The Duke, Prince William, chuckles as he recalls his own sense of helplessness in the face of this earnest if well-meaning interference. ‘They said: “These are the people we should invite.” I looked at it in absolute horror and said: “I think we should start again.”’

It was the Queen who came to his rescue: ‘I rang her up the next day
and said, “Do we need to be doing this?” And she said: “No. Start with your friends first and then go from there.” And she told me to bin the list. She made the point that there are certain times when you have to strike the right balance. And it’s advice like that which is really key when you know that she’s seen and done it before.’ The list was duly ‘binned’. And a grateful Prince William absorbed another useful lesson in striking that delicate balance between ‘personal’ and ‘duty’.

On other wedding matters, however, he rapidly learned that there was absolutely no room for manoeuvre. ‘I wanted to decide what to wear for the wedding,’ he recalls. As a commissioned officer in all three Services and a serving member of the Royal Air Force, the Prince certainly had a few choices. Except that he did not. ‘I was given a categorical: “No, you’ll wear this”!’

Having just appointed the Prince to the position of Colonel of the Irish Guards, his most senior military appointment – and one of
her
Guards regiments to boot – the Queen was quite clear that her grandson should be getting married in his Irish Guards uniform. ‘So you don’t always get what you want, put it that way,’ he laughs. ‘But I knew perfectly well that it was for the best. That “no” is a very good “no”. So you just do as you’re told!’ Besides, as a serving officer in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, he could hardly disobey an order from the Commander-in-Chief.

The Prince admits that there are so many things that he would like to ask the Queen about. But he is both conscious of the demands on her time and the fact that she is a great believer in learning through experience. ‘It goes back to trying to work it out for yourself,’ he explains. ‘I know that if I ask her questions, I’ll be expecting one thing and something else will happen.’ Does the Queen give him a long briefing before a big trip like his 2011 tour of Canada? ‘I prefer to do a “post-debrief” than a “pre-debrief”,’ he replies. ‘It’s a bit easier and there are no hidden expectations.’

But he finds it immensely reassuring to know that there is such a repository of wisdom and experience to consult: ‘There’s no question you can ask and no point you can raise that she won’t already know about – and have a better opinion. She’s very up for that sort of thing. And for me, particularly, being the young bloke coming through, being able to talk to my grandmother and ask her questions and know that there’s sound advice coming back is very reassuring.’

History has only yielded three octogenarian monarchs. By the age of eighty, neither George III nor Victoria played a particularly active role in the life of the nation. The Queen, on the other hand, has barely
amended her schedule from that of twenty years ago. Students of the Court Circular might have spotted a gentle reduction in the number of afternoon engagements; slightly shorter state visits overseas; slightly more events at Windsor Castle (home); slightly fewer at Buckingham Palace (the office). But it’s mere tinkering compared to Victoria’s withdrawal from public life or George’s decrepitude.

Officials do not talk of the Queen winding down or cutting back on her duties. They say that she is ‘making better use of her time’. No wonder our stock image has not changed all these years. So what is the secret of her durability? The answer would seem to be a combination of health, faith and attitude – plus Prince Philip.

Lord Charteris, one of the most colourful royal private secretaries of the twentieth century, summed it up as follows: ‘She sleeps well, she’s got very good legs and she can stand for a long time. The Queen is as strong as a yak.’ She certainly hates any suggestion of infirmity. Sailing round Scotland in the Royal Yacht in its final years, the Queen was infuriated to come down to breakfast and read newspaper rumours of a heart condition. She had been spotted attending a Harley Street clinic for a routine check-up and the press had jumped to conclusions. The next morning,
Britannia
was due to visit a lighthouse. A member of the entourage describes the scene: ‘There are all these camera crews there, having read about the Queen’s heart problem. We get to the lighthouse and the Queen, on her own initiative and without warning, goes whoosh – straight up to the top. When she gets to the top of the lighthouse, she waves down at the cameramen. End of story.’

Having enjoyed good health throughout her life, she is not always entirely sympathetic to those around her when they fail to keep up. The Queen was more bemused than concerned when Margaret Thatcher started feeling faint at the annual diplomatic reception: ‘It was always intolerably hot at that diplomatic reception as there was no air. It had been a long day and Mrs Thatcher had to sit down,’ remembers one of the royal party. ‘The Queen went sailing by like
Britannia
and just said: “Oh, look, she’s keeled over again.”’As Sir William Heseltine, a former Private Secretary whose Palace career spanned almost thirty years, from the sixties to the nineties, puts it: ‘The Queen has a great capacity for measuring herself.’

He recalls the final stages of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee tour which concluded in Northern Ireland. The terrorist threat was at its highest level and there were serious misgivings at Cabinet level about this final exercise. After tens of thousands of miles and millions of people, the added tensions were taking their toll on the royal party. Sir Martin
Charteris (then not yet a peer) had already decided that this would be his final bow and that he would retire at the end of the Ulster tour.

‘They were nervous days. Merlyn Rees [Home Secretary and former Northern Ireland Secretary] was a bag of nerves and trying to stop the Queen doing things; but she was determined to go round and meet everyone,’ says Heseltine. ‘The Queen said goodbye to Martin Charteris and he formally took his leave on the last day. I have a picture of Martin and me. We look at the last stages of exhaustion. But the Queen could have done a couple more days.’

The stress of royal duty is seldom discussed, not least because it invites the inevitable riposte from the commentariat: ‘Stress? Those royals don’t know the meaning of the word.’ It is true that no plane or train is ever going to leave without them; job security is not an issue; they will never endure the scream-inducing frustrations of lost luggage, parking tickets and call centre idiocy. But royalty is a life, not a career. ‘The Queen knows she doesn’t have to go on the Underground or queue for a bus or deal with the other daily hazards of our lives,’ says Ron Allison, former Press Secretary. ‘And that is part of what makes her determined to do her duty as she sees it, to go to Belfast in the pouring rain.’ And while politicians and celebrities by definition have an appetite for the spotlight, the same is not true of the Royal Family. George VI loathed public-speaking – as the 2011 Oscar-winning film,
The King’s Speech
reminds us – and his successor is not much more enthusiastic. Yet speeches are expected and speeches must be delivered. If the Queen’s engagements have become more adventurous over the years, the same could not be said for her speeches – usually safe and giving little of herself. This is in part down to the fact that she normally speaks ‘on advice’, her words crafted by ministers and civil servants as well as her own officials and herself. On occasion, they can combine to produce a great speech, such as her words of reconciliation during her state visit to Ireland.
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Her message of condolence to the United States following the 9/11 atrocities contained a phrase so astute that it has now entered the language of bereavement: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Most of the time, though, she and her speech-writing team err firmly on the side of caution. ‘The Queen is not keen on – and possibly not capable of – making off-the-cuff speeches,’ says one
former adviser. ‘She thinks it’s dangerous, which it obviously is. But particularly with an American audience, I find myself wishing she’d let go – which, of course, the Prince of Wales is very good at. Her instinct is to be very cautious.’ And why not? For someone who has never had a politician’s craving for the microphone, a lifetime of compulsory oratory must, at times, have seemed a formidable burden.

A rare example of serious regal fatigue came in the immediate aftermath of the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969. It had been a summer of relentless royal activity, including the screening of the most eye-popping royal documentary ever made,
Royal Family
. The Prince’s investiture was the first made-for-television royal event, a pantomime of ancient druidry and medieval homage set on a sixties film stage with a chi-chi perspex canopy. But it was taking place against a backdrop of nascent Welsh separatist terrorism. The members of the Royal Family were doing their best to look on the bright side. As the Queen later told Noël Coward, she had been ‘struggling not to giggle’ because, at the dress rehearsal, the crown she had placed on the Prince’s head was too big and ‘extinguished him like a candle-snuffer’.

‘There was a fairly tense atmosphere the night before with bombs going off as we were on the Royal Train,’ recalls a former member of the Royal Household. At one point, a bomb hoax stopped the train altogether. As it chugged towards Caernarvon on the morning of the event, the onboard television was showing old footage of the investiture of the last Prince of Wales and the Queen Mother tried to lift the mood. ‘Oh, you’ve missed it, darling,’ she joked as the Prince appeared for breakfast. ‘It’s already happened.’

But there was no hiding the news of a bomb explosion thirty miles away (it had killed two men, believed to be its makers). Another blast could actually be heard by the royal party as a bomb went off in a Caernarvon goods yard and, come nightfall, a soldier would be killed in a car explosion. Added to the political and security tensions was the fact that this was all being watched around the world. It was arguably the biggest set-piece royal event since the Coronation but without the same all-embracing sense of goodwill.

Once it was over, the Prince of Wales began a tour of Wales but the Queen returned immediately to London. She then took to her bed for several days while the Palace issued a statement saying that Her Majesty had suddenly developed a ‘feverish cold’. The royal physician, the late Sir Ronald Bodley-Scott, advised the cancellation of all engagements, including a trip to the tennis at Wimbledon where the Queen had been due to watch the ladies’ final between Ann Jones and Billie-Jean King.
A senior Palace official now admits that it was not a cold at all. It was nervous exhaustion. It would be six days before the Queen was seen in public again. This turns out to have been a genuine and very rare case of royal stress.

If the Queen and her family are conscious of the danger lurking in every crowd, they do not show it. But it is hardly conducive to job satisfaction. ‘Logic tells you to deal with assessed threats,’ says a former member of the Royalty Protection team. ‘But history tells you that the greatest threat is from fixated lunatics.’

Queen Victoria survived six assassination attempts. Her second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, was shot and badly wounded during the first royal visit to Australia in 1868 and the future Edward VII escaped uninjured from shots fired by an anarchist in Brussels in 1899. In March 1974, Princess Anne escaped a kidnap attempt by an armed loner during which her protection officer was shot three times.
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The Princess proved an imperturbable target. On being ordered out of her car by the kidnapper, she replied ‘not bloody likely’. After reading a confidential report, Prime Minister Harold Wilson noted in the margin: ‘A very good story. Pity the Palace can’t let it come out.’ Both the Queen and the Prince of Wales have been the targets of gun attacks – Her Majesty during the 1981 Birthday Parade and the Prince in a Sydney park in 1994. In both cases the bullets turned out to be blanks fired by disturbed youths, though no one knew that at the time. In 2010, the Rolls-Royce carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to the Royal Variety Performance was attacked when it strayed into the path of a riot. The couple pressed on with the engagement. ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ the Duchess remarked on arrival.

The risk is not just on the streets. In 1982, the Queen had the unimaginable shock of being woken by an intruder in her bedroom. A series of police blunders meant that she had to keep Michael Fagan, another mentally disturbed loner, talking for ten minutes until a chambermaid entered with the cry: ‘Bloody hell, Ma’am. What’s he doing in there?’ ‘I don’t think the Queen ever got the credit for what she did then because it was almost too embarrassing to talk about it,’ says Ron Allison. ‘That, to me, is still the most extraordinary single event which has happened to the Queen.’