Elizabeth the Queen (27 page)

The pattern of the dine-and-sleeps has varied little from the days of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who revived them after World War II. Each couple arrives between six and seven o’clock, to be greeted by an equerry and lady-in-waiting and escorted to their suite in the Lancaster, York, or King Edward III tower. The customary accommodation includes two large bedrooms and bathrooms, a ladies’ dressing room and commodious sitting room furnished with desks equipped with writing paper and pens, tables laden with mineral water, decanters of whisky, sherry, and gin, cornucopias of fruit, bowls of peppermint candies, jars of biscuits, and vases of fresh flowers.

She assigns a footman and housemaid to serve as each guest’s valet or ladies’ maid. Their job is to unpack the suitcases, fold underwear in gauzy organza bags, line up cosmetics and perfume bottles in perfect order, whisk away clothing for washing and ironing (“better than any dry cleaner in London,” said the wife of a Commonwealth diplomat), draw the bath at the guest’s requested temperature, drape a large bath towel over a nearby chair, lay out clothes, and before departure time repack everything with tissue paper. The size of the staff and level of pampering are unequaled, although museum director Roy Strong found it “unnerving to be descended upon by so many.”

The houseguests meet in one of the castle’s vast drawing rooms, where the Queen and Prince Philip, accompanied by the inevitable scuffling corgis, join them, along with a half dozen courtiers, for a round of drinks. The Queen tells stories about previous visitors, slipping into personalities and accents, and laughs about her misbehaving corgis. “It is always amusing to see when dogs fail to obey a royal command,” recalled one former courtier. Everybody is then escorted back to their rooms off the 550-foot, red-carpeted Grand Corridor curving along the east and south sides of the castle quadrangle.

Racing the clock, the guests have less than a half hour to change for dinner in the State Dining Room, which begins with drinks at 8:15 before the prompt arrival of the Queen and Prince Philip fifteen minutes later. Elizabeth II wears a long gown and glitters with large diamonds at her neck, ears, and wrists. Philip appears in a dinner jacket of his own design, a black-tie version of the “Windsor Uniform” originally created by George III for gentlemen at court: dark blue velvet, with brass buttons, scarlet collar, and cuffs.

The Queen doesn’t believe in general or even three-way conversation at meals, so everyone follows her lead. When she turns first to the left everyone follows suit, and all heads swivel suddenly when she turns to the right for the second half of the meal. She expects her dinner partners to know the protocol, although she sometimes offers practical tips. “I need to explain about the napkins,” she once told a guest. “Look over there. They’re doing it all wrong. They’ve got the starched side down. The napkin will slip off their knees. You do it like this, the unstarched side on your lap and then you tuck it under your bottom.”

Her conversation is congenial, but she never engages deeply, preferring to move from one topic to another. At the end of the meal, she has the somewhat outré habit of opening her evening bag, pulling out a compact, and reapplying her lipstick. When First Lady Laura Bush made a similar cosmetic fix during a Washington ladies’ luncheon, she cheerily commented, “The Queen told me it was all right to do it.”

Hewing to an upper-class ritual long after the advent of feminism in the 1970s, Elizabeth II and the women withdraw from the dining room after dinner, leaving the men to enjoy port and cigars at the table. “She never batted an eye,” recalled Jean Carnarvon, the widow of her longtime racing manager. “It was just expected.” Conversation in these vestigial female groupings might touch on harmless personal matters while yielding little about the Queen’s views.

The next stop is always the castle library, where the Queen has arranged to have objects of particular interest to each guest on display. “The selections are to entertain rather than inform,” said Oliver Everett, the Royal Librarian for nearly two decades. In the days preceding the dinner, the librarian sends her a note describing the proposed items and their importance. For an American official there could be correspondence from George Washington, or Mrs. Lincoln’s reply to Queen Victoria’s condolence note after her husband was assassinated, while the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum could be shown the original letter from the 8th Duke of Devonshire to Queen Victoria suggesting the museum’s name. “It gives people something to talk about,” said Jean Seaton, the widow of writer Ben Pimlott. “It is a good mechanism for the Queen, who is a fundamentally shy person.”

The culmination of the evening is the world’s most exclusive guided tour led by the Queen and duke through the priceless collections of the castle’s state rooms. “I suppose landscape is quite nice,” she said when asked her favorite style of painting. The equestrian scenes by George Stubbs give her the most pleasure, and it distresses her, she once said, that “he experimented terribly with his canvases, and we’ve got one which is flaking off and you can’t stop it.” She is also known to dislike most modern art. When she opened the Tate Modern gallery, “she was steered away from the unmade bed and the bits of animals preserved in tanks of brine and allowed to look at a few bright abstracts,” Diana Mitford, Lady Mosley wrote to her sister Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire.

Yet the Queen’s commentary on the Windsor Castle masterpieces by the likes of van Dyck, Holbein, and Rubens often surprises guests as she reels off the date painted, the subject, and a brief story about each artwork. “Her assessment of a picture is invariably honest and often shrewd,” said a former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. “She has a good visual memory. She will never pretend to appreciate something she doesn’t like or understand.” Unlike Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II is not a passionate collector who scours the sale catalogues for new finds. “She is neither an art historian nor a connoisseur,” said Oliver Everett. “But she knows what she has and the significance of it.” Her preference is for “beauty in nature,” as one of her former advisers put it. But she takes seriously her role as custodian of the royal collection, which includes some seven thousand paintings.

After coffee in one of the drawing rooms, the Queen and Prince Philip say their goodbyes, and are not seen again. Breakfast is served early in the individual suites, where printed cards ask guests to “refrain from offering presents of money to the Servants of Her Majesty’s establishment,” although tips are permitted for the acting valets and ladies’ maids. Some people take time to wander once more through the state rooms before being escorted out by a senior member of the household, who reminds them to sign the visitor’s book with its pages of heavy white cards. “What surprised me was not how many, but how few people ever stayed here,” observed Roy Strong.

B
Y THE SUMMER
of 1964 the Queen had resumed her full public program. Once again she led her annual birthday parade in June riding sidesaddle, and she hosted a succession of garden parties in July at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Scotland. Queen Victoria began the parties in the 1860s for her aristocratic court, and Queen Elizabeth II democratized them in the 1960s after she abolished debutante presentations. With a guest list of around eight thousand for each, the garden parties are intended to reward people across the socioeconomic spectrum for their contributions to British life.

Personalized invitations of white pasteboard embossed in gold with the Queen’s crown and cypher announce that “the Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty” to invite the individual on the designated day. (The Lord Chamberlain, distinct from the ceremonial Lord Great Chamberlain, is the senior official at Buckingham Palace who supervises more than eight hundred staff.) When the Palace doors open at 3
P.M.
, the men in morning suits and the women in hats and afternoon dresses, along with members of the military in uniform and clergy in their vestments, wander through the gardens and rolling lawns. They patiently line up at the four-hundred-foot buffet in the enormous green and white striped tea tent for a cup of the Queen’s blend of Darjeeling and Assam and a selection of sandwiches, cakes, and pastries—all of which have been inspected earlier by the Queen. Two military bands play sprightly tunes, while the crowd is organized into lanes by the Yeomen of the Guard wearing scarlet and gold tunics, white ruffs, and red, white, and blue beribboned black velvet hats.

At the stroke of 4
P.M.
, the Queen, Prince Philip, and assorted other members of the royal family arrive on the terrace for the national anthem and fan out to the various lanes. The Gentlemen Ushers, retired military officers in morning dress and top hats, select around a hundred guests to be introduced to the Queen by the Lord Chamberlain, seeking as wide a cross section as possible. She spends an hour moving along the line, an expert in the art of fleeting but unhurried concentration on each of her interlocutors, and ends up at the Royal Tent emblazoned with a large gleaming crown.

A footman serves her a cup of tea from a tray as she takes a break for ten minutes before moving to the adjacent Diplomatic Tent to greet dignitaries and then returning to the Palace at 6
P.M.
One year a diplomat’s wife was riveted as the Queen “drank her tea, kicked off her shoes and stood in her stockings with one hand on her hip. She was drinking and laughing and chatting with her butler.” Elizabeth II shows no sign of weariness at the familiar routine and understands the sense of occasion for the thousands of guests. As Cecil Beaton once watched her “standing talking quietly to a very moth-eaten couple,” he mused that “these people were all so admirable, the salt of the earth. They had done good deeds, worked for their country. They were the country’s backbone, and I feel the Queen knew this well.”

I
N THE AUTUMN
of 1964, the Queen and Prince Philip traveled to Canada for a nine-day state visit. They returned to London two days before a general election on October 15. Throughout Alec Douglas-Home’s year as prime minister, the media, primarily two new satirical outcroppings of 1960s popular culture, the magazine
Private Eye
and the television revue
That Was the Week That Was
, had mercilessly mocked him as an out-of-touch toff. Labour leader Harold Wilson had piled on, repeatedly referring to him by his hereditary title, the 14th Earl of Home. “I suppose,” Douglas-Home responded, “that Mr. Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr. Wilson”—a nickname that stuck.

In fact, Douglas-Home had acquitted himself well, and he was popular with the electorate. But an impulse for change pushed the Labour Party ahead by a small margin—44.1 percent of the vote and 317 seats to 43.4 percent and 303 seats for the Tories. Harold Wilson became the first Labour prime minister since Attlee took office in 1945. It was also the first time the Queen had not been involved in choosing the premier, since the party had already elected Wilson as their leader.

While Attlee, who counted three Old Etonians in his cabinet, had been a predictable sort of Labour politician, Wilson was an unfamiliar breed to the Queen: a lower-middle-class product of the academically selective English grammar schools who rose to attain top honors at Oxford, where he taught economics for nearly a decade. He was proudly provincial, with a pronounced Yorkshire accent, although he was passionately fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, and cultivated the donnish habit of pipe smoking. Still, his simple tastes, reflexive geniality, and quick wit made him good company.

When he arrived at Buckingham Palace on October 16 to kiss hands, he not only brought his wife, Mary, but his two sons, his father, and his political secretary and confidante, Marcia Williams. Rather than full morning dress, the pudgy new leader made a democratic statement by pairing his striped trousers incongruously with an ordinary suit jacket. The courtiers took it in stride, offering the family sherry in the Equerry’s Room while Wilson met with the Queen.

One of her obligations is to disregard her first minister’s political leanings, and Wilson’s certainly diverged from the Tory line of the previous dozen years. After Wilson accommodated labor unions with a “Social Contract,” Sir Michael Oswald, the manager of the Queen’s stud at Sandringham, suggested she give that name to one of her foals. “I got a bleak look from the monarch,” Oswald recalled.

Elizabeth II taught her fifth prime minister at once to take her seriously; when he came to his first audience expecting a general chat, she drilled him with specific questions about his views on shoring up the pound and addressing the balance of payments deficit. Like Churchill at a similar moment, Wilson was embarrassed to be “caught out,” and years later advised his successor to “read all his telegrams and cabinet committee papers in time” lest he “feel like an unprepared schoolboy.”

“We have to work very hard on him,” the Queen said to one of her ladies-in-waiting with a giggle after the first audience. “Within three months he would have died for her,” recalled the lady-in-waiting. “She is savvy in knowing what you have to work on.” The unabashedly Tory Queen Mother found Wilson “a bit touchy … uncomfortable to talk to,” so she was pleased that her daughter had “tamed him.” He was, in fact, more than amenable. “Harold was never a republican,” said Marcia Williams, later Baroness Falkender. “His family were very pro the Queen.” He admired the “real ceremonies of the monarchy,” he once said. “I have a great respect for tradition.”

It also helped that at age forty-eight, Wilson was only a decade older than Elizabeth II. “She started with Winston Churchill, who treated her in a fatherly way, but with Harold it was sort of an equal thing,” said his wife, Mary. Wilson found he could relax with the Queen in a way he hadn’t anticipated. “He was surprised that she used to sit this way,” said Marcia Falkender, leaning forward and grasping her wrists attentively. “She would sit down with him not like a lady does it, not sitting in a prim way. Her very stance gave him to believe she was interested.” Before long, added his loyal political secretary, “nobody came between Harold and the Queen. He had his audience once a week at 6:30 in the evening on Tuesdays. We would meet him in the hall and we would know where he was going. He would suck on his pipe, make a quip, and off he would go. And when he returned, you’d know he’d had a good time.”