The Queen Mother (150 page)

In October 1984 she visited Venice on behalf of the Venice in Peril Fund. This was the first time she had been to the city since she and the Duke of York had travelled on the Orient Express to the wedding of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Princess Olga in 1923. All they saw of Venice then was the railway station.

She joined the royal yacht
Britannia
at Ancona and sailed into Venice on 25 October. As well as her usual guests, she had invited the archiect Sir Hugh Casson and his wife on this trip.
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He had accepted with great pleasure in a note adorned with a watercolour sketch of a corgi reclining in a gondola, adding that he had ordered himself a sailor suit.
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She entertained on board numerous Italian officials and nobles and, although her health was now failing, the ninety-year-old explorer and writer Freya Stark came from her villa at Asolo in the Veneto.
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Queen Elizabeth had long admired Dame Freya’s work, and in 1976 she had invited her to stay at the Castle of Mey; they had kept in touch since then with letters and Christmas cards.

The weather was poor and the tides were extreme during this visit. Rear Admiral Paul Greening, the Flag Officer in command of the royal yacht, was nervous that Queen Elizabeth’s frequent tardiness might cause problems. It did. On one occasion her launch ran aground in the mud,
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and the church of San Nicolo dei Mendicoli, where parishioners were eagerly awaiting her, could be reached only by taking all the other passengers out of her motor boat.
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In St Mark’s Square, sudden rain forced her into the Cafe Florian, where she and her party were given a welcome tea. She was accompanied everywhere by swarms of photographers who, naturally, demanded that she be seen in a gondola. Her staff finally gave in and she made a short gondola ride with Admiral Greening. ‘A really memorable spectacle,’ commented the lady in waiting.
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Afterwards Hugh Casson sent her a booklet of sketches of the trip, which delighted her. ‘Every page brings back memories,’ she wrote to him, ‘mostly blissful, and one or two funny, like the speeches in Church! The Service was marvellously chaotic, &
most
enjoyable – wasn’t it? It is quite difficult to take in so much beauty in a few days, and your heavenly and lovely drawings will always be a great joy to me.’
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Johnny Lucinge arranged a trip to Tuscany in 1986. She stayed with Duke Salviati and his wife in their country house at Migliarino. Sir Harold Acton was among those who came to dine with her there.
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The next morning the Duke showed her around his greenhouses; he had started a business propagating seedlings for export and now employed 300 local people. For lunch they drove to the Villa Reale at Marlia, which had belonged to Napoleon’s elder sister, Elise, when she was Duchess of Lucca and Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

One of the high points of the trip for the Queen Mother was a visit to the Villa Capponi, where she had stayed with her grandmother before the First World War. She looked again at the view over Florence she had first seen some eighty years earlier, then drove to Sir Harold Acton’s home at La Pietra. In yet another villa with an exquisite garden, she met Pietro Annigoni, who gave her a book of
the frescos he had just painted for Padua Cathedral. On the last evening, Johnny Lucinge took her party to dinner at the restaurant Solferino in the village of Marcario-in-Piano; after an excellent alfresco meal, in the company of a group of friendly doctors from Lucca, the party drove to Pisa to see the Tower, the Cathedral and the Baptistery. The Queen Mother talked with a group of students who had a guitar and were singing Neapolitan songs.
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In her six-page letter of thanks, she told Johnny Lucinge that he must be a magician to be able to conjure up such beautiful houses. The Duke, she said, ‘with his splendid Graeco-Roman head made us feel so happy’ and the villas, ‘the gardens, the picnics, the fun of it all, will always remain a happy wonderful memory’. She loved the evening at Pisa and the charming restaurant dinner, with all the doctors. ‘I couldn’t help wondering about their patients.’
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In 1987 she visited the Palladian villas of the Veneto. She stayed at the Hotel Cipriani in Asolo and saw Freya Stark again. In the Villa Maser she admired the frescos by Veronese, and visited the only country church that Palladio built; the same afternoon, in Castelfranco, she visited the eighteenth-century theatre – a young boy played the British National Anthem on the piano as she arrived. She then went to the Duomo San Liberale to see Giorgione’s
Madonna and Child
. She went shopping for local china and tried the fiery local grappa; wherever she went she was greeted by enthusiastic crowds.
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In June 1988 she took her party to Sicily and Naples in
Britannia
. She was not feeling well when she flew out from London and was rather dreading her crowded schedule. But the Mediterranean sunshine revived her and she carried out an exhausting round of official and private visits with her habitual zest and energy. In Salerno she laid a wreath at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Battipaglia, and met the gardener and his son who together had looked after the graves since 1945.
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She entertained on board
Britannia
– one night her grandson Prince Andrew, who had joined the Royal Navy in 1979 and whose ship HMS
Edinburgh
was in the Bay of Naples, came to dinner – and she was feted and feasted in beautiful palazzi in both Sicily and Naples. The Archbishop showed her over the exquisite Cathedral at Monreale above Palermo, and then gave the party tea in his palace.
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Hugh Casson, whom she had again invited aboard, was impressed by her stamina; after each full day’s sightseeing ‘at six-thirty every evening
she’d give a party on the ship for all the local dignitaries, and at eight-thirty it would be a dinner party, and at midnight she’d have the officers from the wardroom for a last drink before going to bed.’
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The British Ambassador in Rome, Sir Derek Thomas, agreed – he reported to the Foreign Office that ‘Her sparkling personality, her unflagging energy, and her keen enjoyment of life – so manifestly undulled by the passage of years – were universally admired by all whom she met.’
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She enjoyed the Italian trips but her greater love remained France. When Prince Jean-Louis asked her at the end of the Sicilian trip, ‘What about next year, Your Majesty?’ she replied, ‘ “Oh you know, I miss France a lot.” So that made me understand that she’d like to come back.’
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But the Prince, her second cicerone and only three years her junior, was beginning to tire. In 1989 he took Queen Elizabeth to the Languedoc, where her party stayed in a quiet, comfortable hotel, the Hotel de la Reserve, in Albi on the banks of the River Tarn. There they visited the Toulouse-Lautrec family house, which now belonged to a young friend of Johnny Lucinge, Bertrand du Vignaud de Villefort, and his sister, whose mother was a Toulouse-Lautrec. The Prince had in fact asked the young man to take over his role.

The tour-director designate quickly discovered what he was up against. On the afternoon of the Queen Mother’s arrival, after the customary reception for local dignitaries, he had left a short interval for the eighty-eight-year-old traveller to rest. Instead, he found himself hurriedly improvising a visit to two local villages in response to a telephoned request for ‘something to do before dinner’.
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Two days later the party visited Toulouse on the same day that the right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen was holding a rally there. The authorities were anxious to get Queen Elizabeth away before this began; she wanted to stay and said – mischievously – that she would love to meet Le Pen. In the event she left before the rally, having proved, according to Sir Ralph Anstruther’s account, a greater attraction than the politician. She questioned du Vignaud about Le Pen; although conservative in her own ideas, she was worried by the tendency he represented.
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Nineteen-ninety saw her in Brittany; she took a French naval barge up the River Odet to Quimper and had an excellent picnic lunch on board. In Quimper itself, the enthusiastic crowds were too
big for her to be able to carry out a planned tour of the Old Town. At lunch the next day the Naval Pipe Band from Lorient played for her. They had gone to great trouble to learn a Scots tune – they had chosen the dirge ‘Flowers of the Forest’.
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In 1991 she made what proved to be her last French trip. Appropriately, it was to Savoie, where Johnny Lucinge’s family had once ruled over Faucigny as an independent state. She stayed at the Hotel Royale in Evian and toured châteaux, gardens and churches on the edge of Lake Geneva and in the mountains near by, and laid a wreath on the memorial to Resistance fighters at the cemetery at Les Glières.
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In early May 1992 she added Spain to her European list, when she was invited by the Duke and Duchess of Wellington to spend a private weekend at their house near Granada. The trip included a picnic lunch and a drive round one of the estates granted to the first Duke of Wellington by a grateful Spain after the Peninsular Wars. The next day the Wellingtons gave a lunch party to which the King and Queen of Spain came, and on the last evening Queen Elizabeth visited the Alhambra in Granada.

The last of these happy private excursions was to Umbria that same month. The only sadness to the trip was that Johnny Lucinge was not well enough to accompany her. (He died later that year.) On her first evening in Perugia, Queen Elizabeth gave a reception at her hotel, the Brufani, at which the Abbot of St Peter’s Church invited her to come and see his church there and then – which she did.

In Cortona she visited the Museo Diocesano, with its small but exquisite collection of paintings by Fra Angelico, Duccio and Signorelli. In the hot afternoon she walked up the steep cobbled street to the Church of San Nicolò and then drove to Santa Maria del Calcinaio, a beautiful, simple fifteenth-century church with a fine sixteenth-century stained-glass window. The next day the Marchese and Marchesa Antinori gave her an excellent lunch at their fortress-like home, Castello della Sala, with wine from the family vineyard, and she then drove to see the Cathedral in Orvieto – a large crowd in the piazza cheered her. On her final day she visited both basilicas in Assisi, saw the tomb of St Francis, and talked through a grille to members of a silent order of nuns.
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In all the thirty years during which she made her twenty-two private tours in Europe, little changed from year to year. She moved in an exquisitely geared time machine, cocooned against the harsher
realities of the modern world. Her travelling companions remained constant and vigilant; on each occasion she was generously and charmingly entertained by members of the local nobility or even royalty; and each year she saw beautiful churches, castles, palaces, houses, museums, monuments, gardens and landscapes, in two countries which she had loved since she was young. Her hosts went to immense trouble to ensure that she was received everywhere as a dowager queen should be – regally.