Her Majesty (44 page)

The Gentlemen Ushers are already parking the first fruits of their hunter-gathering in the Queen’s lane, explaining that any bowing or curtseying is optional, that it’s ‘Your Majesty’ followed by ‘Ma’am as in jam’. They have made brief notes about everyone and hand their cribsheets to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel, who will introduce guests to the Queen. That way, he can cover the basics in his introduction ‘Ma’am, may I introduce you to Mr John Jones from Leicester who has been a fireman for twenty years’ – and there is no need for the usual, ‘What do you do?’ The Queen gets straight down to conversation.

Jan Butler and her two colleagues from the Girl Guides are still in a mild state of shock. They came here expecting a nice day out. One of Birdwood’s team grabbed them on the steps and here they are moments away from a formal introduction to their patron (and founder member of the 1st Buckingham Palace Guide Unit in 1937). Lord Peel does the introductions and suddenly they are chatting away about their big anniversary. ‘The Queen knew it was our centenary,’ says Butler afterwards as she seeks a badly needed cup of tea. ‘And she knew what a lot of work we’ve been doing. We’re thrilled.’ The Queen has now moved on to Lieutenant Paul Evans of the Royal Navy and his wife, Annie. At six foot two inches tall, Evans suddenly realises that the Queen is having to look up at him and has the sun in her eyes. ‘Would you like me to move to block it out?’ he asks her. ‘Would you,’ the Queen replies. ‘You’re awfully tall.’

Over in the Duke’s lane, there is some lively banter with Derek Martin, the actor who plays cab driver Charlie Slater in the BBC soap
EastEnders
. Martin is King Rat, the head of the show business charity the Grand Order of Water Rats. The Duke is a Companion Rat. ‘Where’s your emblem?’ asks Martin, pointing out that all members are liable to a fine if they are spotted in public without their Water Rat badge. ‘It’s on the premises!’ the Duke pleads.

A less formal crowd has gathered round the Earl and Countess of Wessex. Neena Lall, a primary school teacher from east London, has decided that she is not going home without meeting a member of the Royal Family. So she asks a Gentleman Usher if she can meet the Earl. Moments later, they are discussing education in the East End. ‘It’s my birthday!’ she adds. ‘Happy birthday!’ the Earl replies. ‘It’s made it a very special day,’ she says afterwards. ‘It pays to be pushy.’

Most guests are just happy to gawp and to eat. During the afternoon, the guests will consume gallons of the Queen’s own ‘Garden Party’ tea (a blend of Assam and Darjeeling) and as much food as they can eat from a menu which includes old favourites like scones with clotted cream, coffee eclairs and Wiltshire ham sandwiches plus a few more modern touches such as smoked salmon bagels and passion fruit tarts. There is iced coffee and Sandringham apple juice for those who don’t want tea. The whisky in the Dundee cake will be the only alcohol available. The Queen checks it all herself beforehand and makes a few subtle regional variations when in Scotland – shortbread instead of strawberry tart, smoked salmon on oatcakes rather than bagels. For reasons which are not entirely clear, the Scottish guests also devour nearly twice as much fourteen items per head. Perhaps it is the fact that there is more garden to explore at Buckingham Palace. Snooping is positively encouraged.

‘At any formal occasion, it is the touch of informality which makes it enjoyable,’ explains Jonathan Spencer of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. ‘We want people to go away thinking “Gosh, I enjoyed that” rather than “Phew, I didn’t make a mistake”.’ His colleague Alexander Scully has now produced a new booklet for every guest. It not only contains a map of the garden but also includes walking times so that people can work out how long it will take them to get from, say, the Waterloo Vase to the nearest cup of tea. ‘People can go off and explore and kick their shoes off and sit under a tree if they want to,’ says Scully.

For the Queen, however, there is no choice. After more than an hour in her lane, she adjourns to the Royal Tent where a group of VIPs are waiting to meet her. Today they include Lady Thatcher, the Archbishop of York and Lord Strathclyde, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who has brought his mother-in-law. Next door, in the Diplomatic Tent, there are thirty-four ambassadors (countries are invited in strict rotation). Guatemala and Jordan have brought their children. In one corner, Birdwood and his perspiring team have a quiet debrief over iced coffee. They are pleased.

Group Captain Hugh Rolfe, in charge of the Queen’s lane, reports that the Monarch met a bumper tally of twenty-six different groups, including a bus driver and a lady in a wheelchair clutching a 1946 invitation which she was determined to show to the Queen. The Duke met all fifty of his pre-arranged guests plus another twenty groups besides, although there is a frisson of professional disappointment that the Duke was introduced to three Royal Navy groups in a row. There has obviously been a quiet word to all the disabled guests because, as the Queen and her family return to the Palace, all the wheelchairs have been lined up alongside the path. There is informal chat. One elderly gent is so overcome by the moment that he finds the strength to stand up in his wheelchair as the Queen passes by. It’s not quite a miracle. His carer urges him to sit down. Sue Bradshaw, a civil servant from Cornwall, was worried about bringing her seventy-seven-year-old mother, Connie Timmins, all the way from Cornwall in a wheelchair but mother was not missing it for anything. She was supposed to have come to the Palace thirty years before, she explains, but her husband was having his leg amputated that day. Her only complaint is that someone put too much pepper in the cucumber sandwiches. ‘We felt like royalty, today, we really did,’ says her daughter. ‘And, look, I’ve got a souvenir.’ She is clutching a copy of the menu.

It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a British monarch who has witnessed such a revolution in the social diversity, the expectations and the emotional
language of the population. The tears and flowers which followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, are often cited as an example of Britain’s psychological transformation from wartime stoicism to touchy-feely, extrovert emotion. The untold story of the royal hearse is illuminating. After it had carried the Princess’s coffin to her final resting place at Althorp, it had to be rebuilt. So desperate were the crowds to ensure that their bouquets landed on the roof of the vehicle that many had loaded them with stones to make them fly further. According to one member of the funeral cortege, the hearse was ‘corrugated’ by the end of the journey.

As in the wider world, so within the Royal Family itself, some social boundaries have not merely shifted but disappeared. At the start of the reign, Princess Margaret was effectively barred from marrying a divorcee. By the late sixties, the Queen still sought the government’s approval before permitting her divorced cousin the Earl of Harewood to remarry (he had to do so in America). By 1992, her own daughter was divorced and remarrying in a Scottish church without a word to the Cabinet. Reflecting but also embracing the changing attitudes of society is a challenge for any monarch. George V understood this well, hence the royal turmoil in the summer of 1917. As the Great War was bleeding Britain of a generation, the Royal Family not only abandoned its German names and titles and became the House of Windsor but the King also introduced the Order of the British Empire. It would be one of the great legacies of his reign. The Order of the British Empire suddenly opened up the prospect of national recognition to millions of ordinary people. Until then, the only orders of chivalry were for grandees (the Orders of the Garter in England and Thistle in Scotland), diplomats (St Michael and St George), commanders (Bath) and royal officials and staff (the Royal Victorian Order). The Order of the British Empire was universal – and unisex. The King created the first knighthood for women, the damehood. Everyone could aspire to one of the Order’s five ranks: Member (MBE), Officer (OBE), Commander (CBE), Knight or Dame (KBE/DBE) and, most exalted of all, Knight or Dame Grand Cross (GBE). Today, the Order is thought to number 120,000 living recipients, all of whom have the right to hold services in the Order’s chapel in St Paul’s Cathedral. By contrast, the Order of the Bath has 1,800 living members. Most exclusive, with just sixteen, is the Order of the Thistle.

George VI sought to bridge the social divide in other ways with his factory tours, his groundbreaking meetings with trade unionists and his boys’ camps for pupils from both private and state sectors. Like his father, he also extended the honours franchise further. During the Second World War, he wanted decorations to reflect acts of great courage which
had not occurred in combat. To this day, the George Cross ranks alongside the Victoria Cross as recognition of the highest bravery.

With the exception of Edward VIII, modern British monarchs have been careful to respect the great royal paradox, namely that we want our monarchs to be just like ‘us’ but also completely different from ‘us’. What they must never do – and it is a lesson which so many defunct European royal houses failed to learn – is appear superior to ‘us’. It helps that they marry ‘us’, too. When Prince Charles was born, the press made much of his direct descent from Robert the Bruce and Owen Glendower but also rejoiced in the fact that he is descended (via the late Queen Mother) from a clergyman and a plumber called John Walsh. The new Duchess of Cambridge, whose own antecedents include mill owners, solicitors and carpenters, is by no means the first to bring a splash of fresh genealogical colour to the royal family tree.

However arcane the rituals of the early twentieth-century Court may seem to modern minds, the British Royal Family was way ahead of their European cousins in social terms. In 1913, at the wedding of Prince Ernst August of Hanover to Princess Victoria of Prussia, there was royal apartheid when the orchestra struck up a waltz which could only be danced by those listed in Part I of the
Almanach de Gotha
(the old studbook of European royalty). The minor royalty listed in Part II were obliged to leave the dance floor. Queen Mary, deeply conscious of her relatively minor German royal ancestry, studied it to the point of obsession. Our Queen’s own interest in pedigree is limited to horseflesh and dogs.

The most successful monarchs have often been those condemned for their ordinariness. European princes, with gold braid and uniforms for every occasion, would mock George V for wearing plain clothes or for raising his family at York Cottage, Sandringham, in a house full of department store furniture.
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The same continental cousins would scoff at photographs of the King Emperor perched uncomfortably on a miniature railway or digging potatoes during the Great War. They were less quick to sneer when their own thrones started collapsing. As King Farouk of Egypt would note some years later, as his own throne was about to fall: ‘There will soon be only five kings left – the Kings of Diamonds, Heart, Spades and Clubs, and the King of England.’

The British Royal Family, like the British public, sees something richly comic about Ruritanian princelings standing on too much ceremony and lineage. It’s no laughing matter among some European royalty, however. ‘It’s junior foreign royalty like Princess Michael of Kent who tend to be the most
protocolaire
, worrying about people bowing and curtseying to them,’ says one royal intimate. ‘It’s usually the ones who’ve lost their thrones who are the most serious about it because they have nothing else to think about. It’s always more important to bow to someone like King Constantine of Greece because he’s lost his throne so he’ll be more sensitive about it.’ That is not to say that there hasn’t been some crashing home-grown snobbery around – and about – the monarchy. The original champagne socialist, Beatrice Webb, described Edward VII as a ‘welloiled automaton … unutterably commonplace’ and George VI and Queen Elizabeth as ‘ideal robots’. H. G. Wells attacked George V for his ‘alien and uninspiring’ Court – ‘I may be uninspiring but I’m damned if I’m an alien,’ he is said to have retorted. Some of the most withering remarks about the Royal Family often come from ancestor-worshipping aristocrats. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in 1957: ‘Duchesses find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal.’ Harold Macmillan’s wife, Lady Dorothy, the daughter of a duke, was heard to exclaim on being informed that her husband had been summoned to the Palace: ‘What do
they
want?’ Her sentiment was no different from that of a grand Norfolk neighbour of the Royal Family. When his wife suggested inviting George V and Queen Mary to dinner, the Earl of Leicester is said to have replied: ‘No, don’t encourage them.’

Prince Philip’s supposed Greekness is a source of jokes to this day. Soon after the Queen came to the throne, he became infuriated by people asking him how he was coping with life at Windsor Castle, the implication being that it must all have been a bit overwhelming for a rootless pauper born in Corfu. He had a ready response: ‘Well, my mother was born here and my grandmother was born here and my great-great-grandmother lived here so I know the place quite well.’

Another new arrival into the royal fold, Tony Armstrong-Jones, also resented any ‘Cinderella’ treatment – almost as much as he had disliked being steered towards the tradesman’s entrance during his days as a photographer. His subsequent marriage to Princess Margaret and elevation to an Earldom was a source of eternal embarrassment to his former boss, the society writer Betty Kenward, author of Jennifer’s Diary in
Harpers & Queen
magazine. She had once reprimanded him in public, declaring: ‘My photographers
never
speak to me at parties.’

The Sovereign can never be ‘one of us’, not least because sixty million
people will all have different ideas about what ‘us’ means. Just as the Queen is expected to be above politics, so she is expected to be above that most sensitive, inflammable and confusing issue – class. ‘The Queen is class-blind. If you’re grand enough, it’s much easier to be completely oblivious of the class structure below you,’ observes a former Private Secretary. Whatever one’s analysis of the class structure, monarchs are unquestionably in a class of their own. The Queen’s own accent has changed – less clipped, lower in tone than at the start of the reign – and she has remarked that her own grandchildren speak ‘Estuary’ English (a view supported by the famously plummy critic and aesthete Brian Sewell). Some purists even argue that she has picked up the odd populist habit herself, including her pronunciation of ‘Jubilee’.
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Yet it would be absurd to describe the monarchy as ‘classless’. It is an organisation entirely based on hierarchy. It has its own internal honours system, the Royal Victorian Order, with strict gradations. A footman, for example, will never get a knighthood any more than a Lord Chamberlain will get the Royal Victorian Medal. The Queen draws her closest female confidantes, her ladies-in-waiting, from the traditional aristocracy and most of her circle of personal friends are from the same stratum of society, too. But that does not make the modern monarchy class-ridden or, in modern parlance, snobbish. Like most people, the Queen and her family have friends of similar age, background and interests. The institution she runs is, by definition, traditional. But, crucially, what it does not seek to do is represent or lean in favour of a particular order or class, however much others may think it does. And that has been one of the fundamental changes of this reign.