Elizabeth the Queen (31 page)

It was a delicate journey of reconciliation as well, marking the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II. For the Queen it offered the prospect of exploring her German roots, and for Philip it marked a sentimental return to his family’s homeland, to show his wife places where he had spent happy times with his sisters before World War II. After being excluded from the wedding of Elizabeth II and Philip because of bitter postwar feelings, his surviving three sisters—Theodora, Sophie (nicknamed “Aunt Tiny”), and Margarita, all princesses who married into German royalty—had been given prominent places in the royal box at Westminster Abbey during the coronation. They had also been quietly entertained by the Queen and Philip, particularly each spring at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, an extravaganza of equestrian competitions, military displays, and fireworks.

An emotional high point came in West Berlin, when cheering throngs packed John F. Kennedy Square and ecstatically chanted “Elizabeth!” Yet the Queen, who spoke of her German ancestry in her remarks, seemed discomfited by the passionate reaction. “I think she thought this was a bit too much of a good thing—too reminiscent of ritual Nazi shouting,” recalled Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart. “That was the only time I saw her perhaps at all put out.”

The moment Elizabeth II seemed to savor most occurred in Hanover, where she scrutinized the letter that launched her family’s dynasty. Written in 1714 by British noblemen to George the Elector of Hanover—the future King George I—it said, “Queen Anne’s dying. Come quick, certain persons want a Jacobite heir and not you.”

In the autumn of 1965 the Queen’s attention shifted to Africa, where she became embroiled in the British government’s struggle with its colony of Southern Rhodesia. Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain and set up a white minority government mirroring the apartheid policies of neighboring South Africa. Since Britain’s policy was to grant independence only to colonies that established majority rule, Harold Wilson responded by persuading the United Nations to impose economic sanctions. To attract support in Britain, Smith insisted that the Queen would remain as his country’s head of state. Wilson countered by enlisting Elizabeth II to tell Smith directly that she would not preside as sovereign over a regime that failed to provide for black majority participation. She even sent a handwritten letter to the Rhodesian leader urging him to compromise.

Critics argued that such partisan involvement violated the Queen’s neutrality. Smith continued to maintain the illusion that his country remained a monarchy despite the British government’s contention that his country’s government was illegitimate. He eventually dropped that pretense, and Rhodesia declared itself a republic, triggering a debilitating guerrilla war conducted by black militants.

A year later the Queen faced another round of criticism when her instincts lost touch with shifting public expectations. On October 21, 1966, an avalanche of water, mud, and debris cascaded down a mountain above the South Wales mining village of Aberfan, engulfing an elementary school and killing 116 children and 28 adults. Driven by an impulse to help his fellow Welshmen, Tony Snowdon left London without consulting the royal household and arrived at 2
A.M.
to console grieving family members and visit survivors. He was followed by Prince Philip the next day, and the two men watched the rescue and recovery efforts. But despite urgings from her advisers, the Queen resisted visiting the scene. “People will be looking after me,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll miss some poor child that might have been found under the wreckage.”

Her response reflected thoughtfulness as well as instinctive caution. Finally, after the last bodies had been recovered just over a week later, she and Philip went to Aberfan and spent more than two hours talking to relatives of the deceased, walking up the mound covering the school, and laying a wreath in the cemetery where eighty-one children had been buried in rows. A compelling circumstance had pulled her out of her bubble into direct and spontaneous contact with her subjects, who showed their appreciation. “As a mother, I’m trying to understand what your feelings must be,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry I can give you nothing at present except sympathy.”

For someone who worked so hard to control her feelings in public, it was a difficult if heartfelt moment, a recognition that the villagers needed her soothing presence and that at such times a public display of emotion was now expected. But her tardy reaction to the crisis showed an unyielding side to her nature that would cause problems in the years to come.

W
HEN DISASTER STRUCK
at Aberfan, the Queen had recently returned from her two-month holiday at Balmoral, the most prolonged and restorative yearly retreat among her seasonal rituals. Her winter break at Sandringham from before Christmas until early February affords plenty of time for country pursuits, but genuine privacy is difficult because the twenty-thousand-acre Norfolk estate is crisscrossed with public roads and dotted with a half dozen villages. Only at Balmoral, where public roads border the estate, can the Queen truly get away from it all—except for her daily boxes. “It’s nice to hibernate for a bit when one leads such a very moveable life,” she once said.

The long drive from the gates to the castle through an enveloping forest of evergreen conifers casts an instant spell of privacy and tranquillity. In the style of a centuries-old summertime royal progress, trucks filled with clothing in trunks and wardrobes as well as moving vans containing household goods are driven up from London by soldiers a week before the Queen’s arrival in early August. Horses are transported from Windsor and dogs from Sandringham. As soon as the Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, the furniture in the private quarters is covered in dust sheets, although the offices continue to run, albeit at a slower pace. Maids, cooks, housekeepers, footmen, security officers, and other household workers go northward in two contingents, each group of eighty spending a month in the staff quarters at Balmoral.

“There is a certain fascination in keeping the place as Queen Victoria had it,” the Queen has remarked. The decor is remarkably unchanged, except for the welcome elimination of the potted palms. “The furniture has barely been moved,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. “The pictures are the same too.” Queen Victoria’s favorite chair in the drawing room is so sacred that no one is allowed to sit in it. “Every new person goes for it, and everyone screams,” said Jean Carnarvon.

Elizabeth II follows a timeless routine firmly rooted in the late nineteenth century, with some modern variations, and everyone falls into line. The atmosphere recalls summer camp, with boarding-school-style schedules. After the bagpiper does his 9
A.M.
march, the Queen typically devotes several hours to her boxes, delivered on a trolley to her first floor study—the same room chosen by Queen Victoria for its view up the valley of the Dee. She also attends to developments on the fifty-thousand-acre estate. Although Balmoral is directly overseen by her husband, “Her Majesty is aware of everything,” said Martin Leslie, for sixteen years the factor, or estate manager. She reads the factor’s regular reports and checks on the status of the Highland Cattle she breeds, but she also questions the ghillies, gamekeepers, and stalkers she has known for decades. Her knowledge emerges in surprising ways. While driving a Scottish cleric on a tour of the estate, she suddenly shouted “Hooray!” as they passed one of her gamekeepers walking on the hills with a young woman. The Queen explained that his wife had left him, and she was delighted that he was out with a new girlfriend.

Following her morning obligations, she tries to spend as much time outdoors as possible—often horseback riding or walking with her dogs through the great stands of fir trees, up the hills ablaze with purple heather and across the burns, tiny streams bubbling up from beneath the rocky soil. She can inhale the pine-scented air and gaze at the snow-capped North Cairngorns in the distance and what Byron called the “steep frowning glories” of Lochnagar, rising more than three thousand feet above nearby Loch Muick. “At Balmoral, she knows every inch,” said Malcolm Ross, for many years a senior member of her household. “She can enjoy being a countrywoman.”

From the age of sixteen, when she learned to expertly shoot a rifle, she developed a passion for stalking the indigenous Red Deer, and many days she would slip on her macintosh trousers and ride out on one of her home-bred Garron or Fell ponies, or drive one of the estate’s dark green Range Rovers to a beat on a high ridge above the treeline. She and one of her stalkers would patiently track the stags from late morning until late afternoon, sometimes climbing as high as two thousand feet, and pausing only for a lunch of cold meat, fruit, and a slice of plum pudding retrieved from a canvas bag. Moving in for the kill, she would crawl through the undergrowth until the stag was within range. “It was always fun to see a new stalker out for the first time with the Queen,” recalled Margaret Rhodes, who began stalking with her cousin when they were teenagers. “She would be crawling on her stomach with her nose up to the soles of the stalker’s boots, which would be a surprise to the stalker.” She shot her last stag in 1983, in a little glen near the Spittal of Glenmuick, a place subsequently called “The Queen’s Corry.”

When someone shoots a stag, it is gutted on the hillside, and its disemboweled carcass is strapped on the back of a rugged and sure-footed deer pony, which carries it down the boulder-strewn hills to the castle, where it is hung in the deer larder for skinning. (Even after she stopped stalking, the Queen continued to visit the larder at the end of the day.) Every part of the deer is used, from heads and antlers for trophies and meat for meals, to the hooves and the eyeballs, which are sold for export. The white Garron ponies are so streaked with blood that they need to be scrubbed each night.

Such carnage is second nature to the Queen, who is equally matter-of-fact about her other favorite country pursuit, picking up fallen grouse during shooting parties on the moors above the castle—a practice she was forced to stop at age eighty-five due to persistent pain in one of her knees. Shotguns never interested her, so while the men in her family—all attired smartly in tweed shooting suits and Barbours—joined the line of butts, their guns aimed at the unpredictable birds whizzing and swooping overhead, she would stand behind, dressed in a skirt, sturdy jacket, and head scarf, with two or three of her gun dogs, usually cocker spaniels (nicknamed “the hoovers”) or Labradors. Using an impressive repertoire of whistles, hand signals, and calls, she would send out the dogs to retrieve the birds, sometimes at a distance of nearly a thousand yards, directing them from one point to another in search of the downed prey. If the bird wasn’t dead, she would put it out of its misery by swiftly dispatching it with a stick. Once when a particularly versatile display of her “picker-up” skill prompted applause from the guns, ghillies, and beaters, she said, “If I’d known you were all watching, I’d never have tried it.”

The shooting and stalking guests at Balmoral generally come on weekends, but most of the time the castle is filled with friends and relatives. The Queen issues all invitations to stay overnight, and she takes her hostess role seriously, often greeting guests at the side door where visitors enter the castle. “She shows you to your room,” said one frequent guest. “She knows what books are there and she will make a reference to them. They change every year. It is a peculiar combination of relaxed formality or formal relaxation.” To Malcolm Ross, being her guest in Scotland is “as if a switch has flipped. She is still the Queen, but she is a wonderful hostess in her own house. You are extremely privileged to see how relaxed she can be.”

After a day on the hills, the guests change out of their shooting kit, and the Queen makes tea for everyone, measuring the leaves into a pot and pouring hot water from a silver urn. After another change of clothes, it’s time for drinks in the drawing room, where Elizabeth II sits at a table playing patience, a vision from Victorian times. “She is conversing as she is playing,” recalled a guest. “Everyone is sitting around. Some talk among themselves, others are at the table where she is playing. She is turning the cards and chatting, in her element, clearly very relaxed.”

The prime minister visits for an obligatory weekend each September, and the Privy Counsellors come for a day, spending only a few minutes on formal business. Mostly there is a relentless round of socializing, which often includes picnic lunches and candlelit barbecues in lodges or cabins on the banks of lakes and rivers, deep in the Old Caledonian forest, or up in the hills. Frequently the guests don’t learn until the last minute whether dinner will be black tie and gowns indoors or sweaters with trousers or skirts outdoors. By that time they will have already gone through three changes of clothing.

The Queen and Prince Philip organize the picnic ritual like a military drill. Chefs at the castle do the preliminary work, and all the food, plates, cutlery, and cooking equipment are loaded onto a trailer pulled by a Land Rover. Designed with a naval officer’s efficiency by Philip, the trailer has compartments for every item. Household staff are conspicuously absent, allowing the Queen to almost gleefully undertake their chores. She always lays the table, and “she has to have it absolutely right,” said Anne Glenconner, who was often invited by Princess Margaret. Philip does the grilling, wreathed in smoke. He is known as a creative cook, improvising recipes he has seen on television—from sausages to roast pig.

Once the Queen Mother and some friends staying at Birkhall ended up dining at the other end of the same bothy where the Queen was entertaining. “Our lunch was over before [the Queen Mother’s] group had finished their drinks,” said a guest. When the Queen puts on her yellow Marigold gloves to wash the dishes, everybody pitches in to clear the table, and the cleanup is rapid. Each item must be returned to the trailer exactly as it was packed. “Woe betide if you put the cutlery in the wrong place,” said one veteran guest.