The Queen Mother (149 page)

She and her party spent the best part of two days in and around Avignon, the former Papal State: they visited the Château de Castille, briefly home of the exiled Stuart royal family after the failed 1715 rising, and now owned by an Englishman, Douglas Cooper, who had filled it with a remarkable collection of paintings by Picasso, Braque and others. They sauntered on the bridge where ‘on y danse tout en rond’ and visited the Palais des Papes; they went to the ancient town of Arles, where the Arena was being prepared for a bull fight, and the wilderness area of the Camargue.
Paris Match
commented on her tireless progress: ‘La reine mère sillonne [criss-crosses] infatigablement la Provence.’
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At the fortress-like Château d’Ansouis, perched on top of a rocky spur in beautiful country, and home to generations of the Sabran family, she was entertained by Lord Euston’s cousin the Duchesse de Sabran-Ponteves, to a feast including whole black truffles.
She and her party enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of Provence – Hugh Euston commented that the people were ‘ideal, much better (& funnier) than the ones in Touraine [on her visit to the Loire two years before]’.
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At the end of her trip, on 10 April, Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to the Hotel de Ville at Fontvieille and was received by the Mayor – he was thought to be a communist but had bought a new suit for the occasion and made a charming speech. On arrival at the Château de Castries, the Duc met Queen Elizabeth at the door holding a lighted candelabrum, as was the custom when the King of France visited a subject. When she left the next day for London, the maid at the Château Légier, who had cooked excellent meals for the party, remarked, ‘La Reine Mère est bien plus commode que Madame.’
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On a shorter visit to Normandy and Brittany in May 1967, Queen Elizabeth used the royal yacht
Britannia
(in which she had just completed a tour to the West Country) as her base, and had on board Dick Wilkins and her niece Margaret Elphinstone with her husband Denys Rhodes, together with Ruth Fermoy and Ralph Anstruther. Martin Gilliat and Alastair Aird were also in the party and Charles de Noailles joined them. Bad weather rather spoiled the visit, but she enjoyed seeing both the Bayeux Tapestry and Mont-Saint-Michel. Aboard
Britannia
, Ruth Fermoy took her familiar place at the piano and there was singing and dancing.
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By the late 1960s Charles de Noailles, unlike the Queen Mother, was flagging; he stood aside and the role of her escort was taken on by Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, an elegant Frenchman of her own generation. He had known Queen Elizabeth since the 1930s, and during the war he had been at the French mission in Britain when, he recalled later, ‘she was very kind to the French.’
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He came from an ancient family, and he had connections with great houses all over the country. He was a most sophisticated tour guide and also arranged Italian trips for her.

He found her an easy client. ‘When we first arrive people are delighted, but probably sometimes a little nervous. Not for long though; she’s such a charmer. It’s that extraordinary natural niceness she has, and then that kindness.’
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He thought her love of France was in her Scots blood and she in turn was ‘adored’ by the French, he said. ‘There’s not a village we pass where people are not at their windows or in the street waving at her. I think she’s about the most popular
person I know, and in France certainly.’ Her vitality, he thought, came from her curiosity, her sense of fun and her natural good health. He thought her perceptive and able to see people as they really were. She rightly had a sense of her mission and role, and while people were excited to see her he never saw anyone become familiar – ‘they wouldn’t do it because she inspires natural respect in people.’
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Her sense of fun was very much to the fore on these trips and many of them featured moments that could have come from the pages of her beloved P. G. Wodehouse. On a trip to Burgundy, in 1976, the Prince arranged for them to stay at the Château de Sully, as guests of the Duc and Duchesse de Magenta. It was a chilly April; after dinner, attended by a canon of Autun Cathedral who (according to Anstruther) ‘wore a trendy white polo-neck sweater and was obliged reluctantly to say Grace’, they all went on to the balcony and, in a light frost, fed the carp in the moat. The next day the canon showed Queen Elizabeth his Cathedral; a choir of children held pink roses and sang Purcell in her honour.
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An unhappy incident occurred when the Captain of the Gendarmerie who was escorting the cars was thrown from his motorcycle into a ditch. Fortunately he just missed hitting a telegraph pole, but even so he broke his arm in two places and looked alarmingly white as he lay on the ground. The Queen Mother and the Duchesse de Magenta covered him with a rug and a coat and they waited for forty-five minutes, picking violets and cowslips by the roadside, ‘keeping a watchful eye on the Captain’ until an ambulance finally arrived.
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At Cluny, the Queen Mother admired the stallions of the State Stud; at Tournus she stopped to see the Cathedral, its pink brick pillars aglow in the afternoon light. Lunching at La-Roche-en-Brenil with the Montalembert family she met again a dancing partner from debutante days, Comte Willy de Grünne. At one dinner, the Prefet’s wife produced from her bag a mouth organ which she gave to Queen Elizabeth. When the Queen Mother retired to her room, she was serenaded by the son-in-law of the house, who for some reason was known in the family as ‘Naughty Boy’, playing a hunting horn outside. The Queen Mother responded by playing the ‘Marseillaise’ on her mouth organ from the window.
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In 1977 came the turn of the great vignerons in Bordeaux. She stayed at Château Mouton with Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who showed her his cellars and then drove her to lunch with the Baron
and Baronne Elie de Rothschild at Château Lafite. In Pauillac the entire town seemed to be on the streets to welcome her; in one village the local pony club formed a guard of honour, all waving Union flags. It was a shorter visit than usual and so at a lunch at the Château de Beychevelle she met all the owners whose great estates she did not have time to visit – Latour, Margaux, Pontet Canet, Yquem.
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When she went to the Dordogne in 1978 she was received by the Mayor of Limoges and the British Consul General, Robert Ford. Her hostess on this occasion was the Baronne Henry de Bastard. Her house, the Château de Hautefort, had just been restored for the second time – after the first restoration one of the neighbours’ children had apparently dropped a cigarette and burned it down.

On the first evening of her visit Queen Elizabeth attended a pre-dinner reception at the chateau for the Mayor and local notables. ‘This was a great success,’ noted Anstruther wryly, ‘too great, in fact, as they were still there after dinner.’ She was fascinated by the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux which were opened especially for her. That was followed by lunch in a charming country hotel and then a visit to the beautiful town of Sarlat.
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Her host and hostess in Lorraine in 1979 were the Prince and Princesse de Beauvau-Craon, at their magnificent early-eighteenth-century chateau, Haroué. The Queen Mother’s hostess was struck by the fact that, along with her police officer, her dresser, two chauffeurs, a footman and a page (whose main task appeared to be mixing extremely dry martinis), she brought a hairdresser with a broken arm. This, the Princesse gathered, was because Queen Elizabeth wanted him to see France.
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As with all of her visits, this one began with a reception for the local authorities. The Mayor and the municipal council came to Haroué for drinks and presented her with a medal, which she examined closely and gave to Ralph Anstruther, saying, ‘Gardez-moi ce trésor.’ They were enchanted. According to her hostess, ‘Elle rayonnait’ – she radiated warmth; although the visit was officially incognito, going about with her was ‘rather like following a pop star’; people waved out of their windows and exclaimed, ‘Qu’elle est mignonne!’
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There was a long drive in pouring rain to Selestat in Alsace, for lunch at a restaurant with Commandant Paul-Louis Weiller, an air ace in the Great War. The restaurant served soup with frogs legs in it,
even though Clarence House had insisted that she did not like them. Laure de Beauvau-Craon recalled that Weiller had been called ‘froggie’ in England in his youth, and was determined to make his English guests pay the penalty. Outside the window, a band played gamely in the rain.

It had become part of the pattern of the visits that Johnny Lucinge would organize a private dinner at a restaurant, and this time it took place at Le Capucin Gourmand in Nancy. A crowd of striking workers gathered outside the restaurant: according to Princesse de Beauvau-Craon, they had been locked out of their factory and wanted to force the Prefet, who was among the diners, to intervene, although
Le Figaro
reported later that they had intended to kidnap the Queen Mother to draw attention to their dispute. An unlikely story, perhaps; but it seems an angry crowd surrounded her Daimler as she left the restaurant. According to the Princesse, the Queen Mother behaved like ‘un torero face au taureau’. She walked slowly towards the strikers, beamed at them and started to talk to them. She got an ovation and shouts of ‘Vive la Reine!’
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She loved the beautiful library at Haroué and one evening, as she sat there with a glass of champagne, hearing that Ralph Anstruther and others in her party were missing, she said, ‘They must have found a low joint in Nancy.’ Her host and hostess told her that the family had buried its silver in the grounds of the chateau during the war but never found it again. To their surprise the plane which arrived to take Queen Elizabeth home brought out a large package from Harrods which she had ordered – it was a metal detector. Sadly, after digging several holes in the garden the Princesse discovered only water pipes, and her husband put an end to her searches.
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In 1980 Queen Elizabeth stayed with Monsieur and Madame Kilian Hennessy in Cognac, where she was offered brandy from the year 1800 to taste, before visiting historic châteaux and Romanesque churches.
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In May 1981, she returned to the Loire, eighteen years after her first visit, and stayed at the moated Château de Serrant, near Angers; this was once the property of an Irish Jacobite family which had assisted Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45, and now belonged to the Prince and Princesse de Ligne-La Tremoille. She watched a display by the Cadre Noir at the cavalry barracks at Saumur, and went to Gennes to lay a wreath of poppies at the memorial to the cavalry cadets who had defended the bridge over the Loire in 1940 and held up the
German advance; they were nearly all killed.
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She was delighted with this trip, writing to Ralph Anstruther, ‘I thought that this year it was better than ever.’
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In 1982 she made what was inevitably a rather formal trip to Paris to open the new wing of the Hertford Hospital, of which she was patron. She stayed at the British Embassy and called on President Mitterrand. Johnny Lucinge gave a cocktail party at his flat and among the many guests was Princess Olga, the widow of her old friend Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, who had died in 1976.

In 1983 it was the turn of Champagne, where she stayed again with the Kilian Hennessys in a house which had belonged to the Chandon family. Champagne flowed throughout an excellent dinner. She was driven around the miles of Moet and Chandon cellars in an electric car.
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In Epernay she talked to a survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Madame Servagnat, who with her husband had been in the wartime Resistance and had helped British airmen shot down over France. Queen Elizabeth praised her courage. ‘Vous avez donne l’exemple,’ Madame Servagnat replied.
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In 1984 the Queen Mother visited the Sarthe region, south-west of Paris, and stayed with the Comte and Comtesse René de Nicolay at the Château du Lude on the River Loir. The streets of the little town of Le Lude were decked with Union flags and Tricolours, the Mayor received her with a ‘vin d’honneur’ and the town band played ‘God Save The Queen’ and the ‘Marseillaise’ before enthusiastic crowds.
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‘She is very
bon vivant,
’ the Comtesse later recalled.
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At the Château de Bournel, a large nineteenth-century house in Franche Comté, the following year the Marquis de Moustier was on the doorstep to greet her, but the rest of the family were all off hunting a dormouse in the dining room. Eventually they were presented to her. This house, which had wonderful views of the ‘ligne bleu des Vosges’, was unusual in France in that it had passed intact from father to son for many generations. After visiting Besançon and other sights of the area, the Queen Mother was presented with a substantial and very heavy local cheese which was much appreciated after her return to Clarence House.
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One should not underestimate the difficulty to which Queen Elizabeth’s guide, Johnny Lucinge, was put in organizing these tours. The diarist James Lees-Milne, who could be unkind, recalled talking about it to Lucinge:

Johnny Lucinge’s daughter, the Marquise de Ravenel, later recalled that when her father ran out of castles in France, he looked to Italy, where fortunately he had good friends.
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Queen Elizabeth was happy to go there.