The Queen Mother (166 page)

But there was an elegiac note to her days. She said that she wanted to see her old ghillie, Charlie Wright, who had fished with her for decades. Wright, now eighty-two, had been captured with the 51st Highland Division at Saint-Valery, covering the retreat at Dunkirk in
June 1940; as a result, he had spent five years as a prisoner of war. His father had been a stalker for the King, and Charlie Wright had himself worked at Balmoral first as a stalker and then as a river ghillie. After he retired from the river he still turned out for Queen Elizabeth’s spring fishing parties.

She insisted on going to his home rather than asking him to hers. She was driven on a track along the bank of the Dee to the little humpbacked stone bridge, the Brig O’Dee,
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which led across the river to his cottage. There is a photograph of Queen Elizabeth pulling herself on her sticks across the bridge by sheer will power. She took tea with Wright and his daughter Jane. Then she forced herself back across the bridge to the car. Charlie and Jane Wright were touched by her determination and her courtesy.
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One of the happiest occasions at Birkhall that year was a convivial picnic lunch at Loch Callater. Her guests and Household were all worried that she was too frail and should not go. As usual, she insisted. It was a blithe gathering and she enjoyed herself immensely. Many times in the months to come, as she grew weaker, she would say, ‘I wish I was at Loch Callater.’

In November 2001, just before the annual Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph, she was strong enough to make her customary visit to the Garden of Remembrance at St Margaret’s, Westminster. The Duke of Kent accompanied her and he was struck by the fact that, despite the cold, she spent an hour in the open air, greeting and talking to old soldiers.
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A few days later she watched the Remembrance Day Parade from a window of the Home Office looking over Whitehall.

On 22 November she made an extraordinary trip – another visit to the aircraft carrier HMS
Ark Royal
, which she had launched in 1981 and which was now being recommissioned and rededicated after an extensive refit. She flew by helicopter to Portsmouth, landed on the carrier and was lowered into the ship’s great hangar. It was a touching spectacle: 1,200 people were there to greet her and to take part in the rededication service. She summoned the strength to make a short speech and then, to the pleasure of the audience, she said to Captain David Snelson, ‘Captain, splice the mainbrace.’
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Before Christmas she felt strong enough to give interviews to two authors – one writing a PhD thesis on Dr Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the abdication, and the other the biographer of the Grand Duchess Xenia of Russia, who had spent forty years in exile in Britain and whom Queen Elizabeth had liked.
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And still she went on and on: she attended the Middle Temple Family Night dinner on 5 December and the next day she went to lunch with the Trustees of the Injured Jockeys Fund at the Goring Hotel. She went racing, for the last time, at Sandown Park on 9 December and to her great pleasure she saw her own horse First Love win – she delighted the crowd by going to the winner’s enclosure to congratulate the jockey. She had had seventy-five winners at Sandown Park over her racing career – more than at any other racecourse.
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She had another fall before Christmas but, as usual, she refused to admit she was in pain. She carried out the engagements to which she had agreed; the last was the staff Christmas party in St James’s Palace. There were about 200 people there; she consented to be wheeled around but whenever she stopped to talk to a group of people she insisted on standing up out of the chair. She did this some twenty times.
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Christmas, of course, was with her family at Sandringham. She and Princess Margaret flew there together by helicopter and landed in a blizzard. After her two strokes, Princess Margaret was now in a wheelchair. Queen Elizabeth was not well either; she developed a cough over Christmas and had to spend much of the holiday in her room. By early January 2002 she was better and able to come down and mingle with her family, but then she caught another virus which she could not shake off and she stayed in Norfolk when the Queen returned to Buckingham Palace. Princess Margaret was, if anything, in worse pain than her mother; she barely spoke. When the Princess left for London Queen Elizabeth carried out the family tradition of waving a white handkerchief in farewell as her daughter was wheeled out of the saloon to the car. It was their final parting.

The 6th of February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the King, but Queen Elizabeth was not well enough to go to Royal Lodge for her customary service in the Royal Chapel. Instead, Canon John Ovenden, the chaplain there, drove up to Norfolk. He and Canon George Hall conducted the service in a small sitting room at Sandringham.

Queen Elizabeth would probably have stayed on in Norfolk, but three days later, on 9 February, the Queen telephoned her mother to say that Princess Margaret had died. The Princess had suffered another stroke the previous afternoon and then developed cardiac problems. She was taken to King Edward VII Hospital during the night and she had died there on Saturday morning. She was seventy-one. The death of a child is an intolerable burden to a parent, whatever their respective ages. But Queen Elizabeth knew her daughter had been suffering with no hope of respite.
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Prince Charles immediately went to Sandringham to comfort his grandmother. She told him that ‘Margot’s’ death had probably been a merciful release. He agreed and shortly afterwards he sent her a letter in which he related that Anne Glenconner, one of the Princess’s ladies in waiting and a good friend, ‘told me that she had seen Margot on Wednesday last week and that she had said to Anne that she felt so ill that she longed “to join Papa” ’. He added, ‘I thought that this was so incredibly touching.’
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A few days after the Princess’s death Queen Elizabeth fell again; she damaged her arm, which had to be carefully dressed by Dr Campbell. But she insisted on attending her daughter’s funeral in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. She was flown there by helicopter and manoeuvred with difficulty into a car to be taken to the Chapel. The service was tranquil; the melancholy but reassuring words of the 23rd Psalm – ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord’ – seemed to many in the congregation to be apposite to the life and death of the devout, talented but troubled Princess, whose greatest joy was to be a loving mother to her two children. As the coffin was borne out of the Chapel, Queen Elizabeth struggled to her feet. Princess Margaret was cremated; she had asked that her ashes be interred in the King George VI Memorial Chapel in St George’s. After the funeral, Queen Elizabeth went home to Royal Lodge for the last time.

This year was the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne. The Golden Jubilee celebrations were due to begin with official visits by the Queen to Jamaica, New Zealand and Australia. Members of Queen Elizabeth’s Household felt that she was determined not to cause any disruption to these tours and was intent on husbanding her remaining strength a little longer. The Queen telephoned her mother every day she was away and when she returned to Britain on
3 March she went straight from Heathrow Airport to Royal Lodge to see her.

Still Queen Elizabeth carried on and still she saw people; on 5 March she held a lawn meet and lunch for the Eton Beagles and discussed future dates with them. Then, as usual, she held her house party for the Grand Military Race Meeting at Sandown Park. On this occasion the Queen had arranged to receive her mother’s guests. But at the last minute Queen Elizabeth appeared and greeted them herself. Her horse First Love distinguished himself by winning again at the race meeting – her last ever runner. She could not attend the Cheltenham races but she watched them on television. As luck would have it, the Gold Cup on 14 March was won by Best Mate, trained by Henrietta Knight, daughter of her great friend of many years, Guy Knight. She was ecstatic, her lady in waiting Angela Oswald recorded.
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Easter fell early that year, on 31 March, and by the week before Easter Queen Elizabeth was weakening further. She was visited regularly by her local doctor, Jonathan Holliday, the Apothecary to the Household at Windsor; and Gill Frampton, the nursing sister at the Castle, came every afternoon to change the bandages on her legs and to give her a light massage if she wished. She was not eating much now but she might take a small glass of champagne with scrambled eggs in the evening – this reminded her of late-night suppers with the Duke in the early days of her marriage, she said.
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She had decided not to have a lady in waiting with her now, but her niece Margaret Rhodes came regularly to Royal Lodge from her own house a few hundred yards away in the Great Park. On Palm Sunday, Canon Ovenden held a service for her in the Saloon, the room in which she had entertained so many friends over so many years.

That week she made many telephone calls from her bedroom. Michael Oswald was pleased to hear her, but it was clear to him that she was saying goodbye; she gave him a list of things to do and people to thank for all that they had done for her. She rang Johnny Perkins, her faithful neighbour in Norfolk and frequent visitor to Mey, to thank him for freesias that he had sent her. She telephoned the Princess Royal and asked her to take some of her horses.

It was obvious that she would not be able to join the rest of the family for Easter at Windsor Castle. On Wednesday 27 March her Private Secretary, Sir Alastair Aird, went down to Royal Lodge to talk
to her staff and to wish them a happy Easter. When Queen Elizabeth heard he was there she asked to see him. ‘I found her in the Saloon sitting in a winged chair with her feet up and covered by a rug. I took a chair and sat immediately opposite her for her eyesight was very bad and she had very limited lateral vision. We discussed a few things and I told Queen Elizabeth whom I had seen recently – she always liked to be kept up to date with news of her Household and friends. She had a smile on her face and I suddenly had the feeling that this was the last time we would meet and that she was in her own way saying goodbye to me.’
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Over the next two days Queen Elizabeth weakened further; by Good Friday she was unable to lift her head from the pillow, but she remained in complete control. She asked Leslie Chappell to take a box from the drawer of her desk. In it he found a pair of cufflinks for himself and a brooch with her ‘ER’ cypher for Jacqui Meakin, a token of affection for their care.

On Saturday morning Dr Richard Thompson, Physician to the Queen, and Dr Jonathan Holliday came to see her. They realized she would not last the day. Dr Thompson called first the Queen and then the Prince of Wales, who was dismayed because he was in Switzerland and would not be able to return in time to be with his grandmother. The Queen, who was riding in the Park, went at once to Royal Lodge and Queen Elizabeth was able to say goodbye to her daughter.

Canon Ovenden arrived as Queen Elizabeth lapsed into unconsciousness. He held her hand, prayed aloud and read her a Highland lament:

Queen Elizabeth died at 3.15 in the afternoon of 30 March 2002, Holy Saturday, a contemplative day for Christians anticipating the resurrection. At her bedside were her daughter the Queen and her grandchildren, Sarah Chatto and David Linley.

The following afternoon her oak coffin was borne to the Royal Chapel and in the evening Canon Ovenden celebrated Evensong for all the members of her family who could be there.

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funeral was to be the most solemn state occasion since the funeral of her husband the King, half a century before. She had been diligent in planning it herself and Operation Tay Bridge, as it was codenamed, was regularly updated. On Tuesday 2 April her coffin was driven from Windsor to the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace, where her family, friends and Household were able to pay their respects in private.

The public part of the ceremonies began on the morning of Friday 5 April. The coffin was placed on the same gun carriage that had borne the remains of her husband the King fifty years before, to be carried from St James’s Palace to lie in state in Westminster Hall. The coffin was draped in her personal Standard and on it lay the crown made for her Coronation in 1937. The Koh-i-nûr diamond, given to Queen Victoria, the first Empress of India, and now set in the crown of Queen Elizabeth, the last Empress, flashed in the sunlight. Next to the crown lay one wreath – the card read simply, ‘In Loving Memory, Lilibet’. The procession began to the sounds of Mendelssohn’s Funeral March played by the bands of the Scots Guards and the Irish Guards. As it moved off, the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery started a twenty-eight-gun salute in Green Park. The boom of the guns echoed once every minute until the procession reached Westminster Hall.

In bright spring sunshine a quarter of a million people lined the streets. More than 1,600 servicemen took part, marching slowly to the beat of a muffled drum as the coffin was taken down the Mall and across Horse Guards Parade and thence past the Cenotaph on Whitehall to Westminster. There were contingents from all the regiments associated with her, from both Britain and the Commonwealth. They included the Witwatersrand Rifles, the Transvaal Scottish, the Cape Town Highlanders, the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps, the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, the Toronto Scottish and the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada. Walking beside the coffin were ten pallbearers, eight of them colonels of her British regiments – the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Black Watch, the Light Infantry, the Royal Anglian Regiment, the King’s Regiment, 9th/12th
Royal Lancers, the Queen’s Royal Hussars, 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards, the Royal Army Medical Corps – together with the Captain of HMS
Ark Royal
and the Commandant of the Central Flying School of the Royal Air Force.