Elizabeth the Queen (51 page)

W
HILE THE MODERNIZERS
at the Palace were making progress, they were incapable of controlling the antics of the Queen’s children, three of whom made fools of themselves when they participated in a television game show. The idea came from twenty-three-year-old Prince Edward, who was trying to make his mark in the entertainment business. After graduating from Gordonstoun and earning a degree at Cambridge, he had obediently followed his family’s military tradition by enlisting with the Royal Marines. He was a keen athlete who competed vigorously at court tennis, but temperamentally was shy and sensitive.

Shortly before finishing the Marines’ six-month training course in January 1987, he unexpectedly announced that he was resigning his commission. His reservations about a military career were more mental than physical, and the press reported that his father had reacted angrily to Edward’s decision. But a letter to the Marine commandant—later leaked to
The Sun
—showed that Philip had in fact been understanding and sympathetic. “They always try to make him out as a brute,” the Queen Mother told Woodrow Wyatt. “In fact he’s extremely kind to his children and always has been.”

Edward instead decided to pursue his interest in theater and television. For his first project he proposed a variation on a popular show called
It’s a Knockout
that pitted contestants dressed in silly costumes against each other in equally ludicrous games. His idea, titled
It’s a Royal Knockout
, was to raise money for royal charities by featuring his siblings vying with celebrities. Charles declined to participate, and vetoed his wife’s appearance as well, but Anne, Andrew, and Fergie signed on.

Because of the proposed involvement of family members, Edward needed the approval of his mother. She was dubious. William Heseltine expressed concern that the show could cast the royal family in a poor light, and he and her other top advisers urged her to veto the project. But she succumbed to her impulse to indulge her children and gave Edward her permission. The only caveat was that her children appear as “team captains” rather than participants in the games.

Televised live on June 19, 1987, the program featured Edward, Anne, Andrew, and Fergie dressed in faux royal costumes. They hopped around shouting on the sidelines while an assortment of British and American actors including John Travolta, Michael Palin, Rowan Atkinson, Jane Seymour, and Margot Kidder engaged in mortifying stunts such as pelting each other with fake hams. During interviews with the royal participants, the show’s hosts lampooned deference with exaggerated bows that made the group look even sillier. The spectacle was more undignified than the courtiers feared, eclipsing the £1 million raised for the World Wildlife Fund, Save the Children Fund, Shelter for the Homeless, and the Duke of Edinburgh International Award for Young People.

Princess Anne in particular should have known better, having spent the better part of a decade rehabilitating her public image. When she began taking on more royal duties in the early 1970s she had appeared supercilious and short-tempered, particularly with journalists, whom she couldn’t abide. While she was riding in the Badminton Horse Trials, she famously told reporters to “Naff off!” They responded with the nickname “Her Royal Rudeness.” She couldn’t shed her prickly temperament, but she eventually earned widespread respect if not affection for her tireless efforts on behalf of her charities, particularly Save the Children. Just six days before the
Knockout
program, the Queen had rewarded her daughter’s hard work and professionalism by designating her “The Princess Royal,” a title reserved only for the eldest daughter of the monarch.

Edward compounded the embarrassment at a press conference after the show. “Well, what did you think?” he asked, prompting laughter among the more than fifty reporters. He was so annoyed by their reaction that he stalked out, and the press called him arrogant as well as foolish. The show not only managed to trivialize the participants, but the institution of the monarchy itself. The consensus at the Palace and among the Queen’s friends was, in the words of Michael Oswald, “It was a disaster and should never have been allowed.”

Given the family tensions that summer, it was probably a blessing that
Britannia
was out for a complete refit and unavailable for the annual Western Isles cruise. Instead, the Queen traveled north to spend two nights at the Castle of Mey—the only time she ever stayed overnight—for some quiet time with her eighty-seven-year-old mother. The Queen Mother relinquished her own bedroom, with its views of her prize Aberdeen Angus cattle and North Country Cheviot sheep out in the pastures, and moved into “Princess Margaret’s Bedroom,” which had never actually been slept in by her younger daughter, who dismissed Mey as “cold, drafty, and expensive.”

The two queens took walks through the nearby woods and down to the sea, and attended the village of Mey’s version of the Highland games on a muddy football field. In the evenings, the Queen Mother hosted jolly dinner parties with friends from the area, including the local minister, who brought his guitar. After dinner he played Scottish songs and everyone, including the Queen, sang along with gusto.

Several months later, Martin Charteris told Roy Strong that the younger generation of the royal family had been “stripped naked” and needed to “put the mystery back.” The faithful former courtier couldn’t have anticipated how much worse the Queen’s problems with her children would get.

B
Y THE LATE
1980s, all three marriages were showing signs of strain. In 1985 Diana had taken up with one of her bodyguards, Barry Mannakee, who had a wife and two children, and in November of the following year, over dinner at Kensington Palace, she began an intense romance with Captain James Hewitt of the Life Guards, who had been her riding instructor. Charles, meantime, had resumed his affair with Camilla in 1986 for her “warmth … understanding and steadiness.”

The tabloids didn’t yet know about these infidelities, but they periodically reported rumors about troubles in the Wales marriage after they stayed in separate bedrooms during a state visit to Portugal and then took a number of holidays apart, even on their sixth anniversary. While the Queen was unaware of the extent of their estrangement, the tension was obvious enough in the autumn of 1987 that she invited them to meet with her one evening in Buckingham Palace shortly before they were due to leave for an official tour of West Germany. She urged them to pull themselves together, and for a time thereafter they seemed to heed her advice.

They had not in fact reconciled. Rather, they were giving each other “civilized space,” with Charles operating mainly out of Highgrove in Gloucestershire, and Diana out of their London home at Kensington Palace, an arrangement that allowed them to maintain a more harmonious public facade in the following months. The press proclaimed a “new Diana” who was more attentive to her charities and royal duties, with 250 engagements in 1988 compared to 153 for Fergie and 665 for the indefatigable Anne.

By early 1988 Fergie was pregnant with the first of two daughters, Princess Beatrice, yet she was increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage to Andrew. His naval career meant he was home only forty-two days a year, leaving her behind in their unstylish and surprisingly modest three-bedroom apartment at Buckingham Palace. Beyond the availability of servants and other perquisites, Sarah was expected to live on Andrew’s £35,000 ($55,000) annual salary, but her extravagant tastes plunged her into debt that began an inexorable climb into six figures.

Her spending sprees were fueled in part by her competition with Diana, who had access to her husband’s Duchy of Cornwall annual income of around £1 million ($1.5 million). The sisters-in-law vacillated between rivalrous sniping and juvenile behavior—capering like schoolgirls on the ski slopes and poking rolled umbrellas into the backside of a friend at Ascot. Tabloid reporters who had previously hailed Fergie for being refreshingly approachable declared her to be the “bad royal … crass, rude, raucous, and bereft of all dignity.” Even her father fit the new stereotype when he was discovered frequenting a London massage and sex parlor.

For a number of years there had been rumblings around dinner tables in London and at house parties in the country that Anne and her husband, Mark Phillips, had both been having affairs and were leading separate lives. She was linked to Peter Cross, one of her security officers, as well as Camilla’s husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, whom Anne had dated before meeting Phillips. The definitive story emerged in April 1989 when the tabloids revealed four purloined love letters to the thirty-eight-year-old princess from Commander Timothy Laurence, the Queen’s thirty-four-year-old equerry.

In an echo of Princess Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsend, Anne had grown close to Laurence after he joined the royal household in 1986. The letters, written over eighteen months, called her “darling” and were written in “affectionate terms” without specifically suggesting intimacy. The Palace confirmed the authenticity of the letters, which
The Sun
turned over to Scotland Yard. Soon afterward, Anne and her husband announced their separation, while in a tacit show of support for her popular equerry the Queen kept Laurence on her staff. The public responded sympathetically but witnessing her daughter’s marital unhappiness was a blow to the Queen.

E
LIZABETH
II
FOUND
escape from her family travails in her equine pursuits. At the end of 1988 she had been reading in two American magazines,
Blood Horse
and
Florida Horse
, about a new technique for “starting” horses developed by a fifty-three-year-old California cowboy named Monty Roberts. Rather than “breaking” yearlings to accept human riders by tying their legs and heads with ropes, Roberts had devised a method based on “advance-and-retreat” body language, eye contact, and subtle signals that appeal to a horse’s herd instinct. He had grown up observing wild mustangs discipline their difficult colts, and after receiving a degree in psychology and animal science from California Polytechnic State University in 1955, he began his career training thoroughbreds, determined to avoid the violent tactics that his father had used.

The Queen sent Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, who had recently retired after twenty-six years as her Crown Equerry—the man in charge of all her horses except racehorses—to Roberts’s ranch north of Santa Barbara for a demonstration. After Miller reported that he found the new approach compelling, the Queen invited Roberts to Windsor Castle so she could judge for herself. He agreed to conduct demonstrations over five days starting on April 10, 1989. She invited some two hundred guests to watch him start sixteen horses, although she said she would be present only for an hour on the first day. If she found his technique useful, she promised to send him on a twenty-one-city tour throughout the United Kingdom to educate others in the horse world.

On the Saturday before the trials, Roberts went with Miller to the indoor riding school at the castle to inspect the newly installed fifty-foot round pen where he would work with the horses. Into the riding hall strode the Queen, dressed in jodhpurs and a handsome hacking jacket, moving quickly to speak to Miller. She was “confident, in a hurry, with things to do,” recalled Roberts. Her presence was at odds with the “indelibly engraved image” he had from sightings at Ascot, Epsom, and Newmarket—“always in a dress, a strolling lady, purse over her arm, a smile for everyone, a tranquil lady, never in a hurry in public, everything lined up for her.”

A suddenly attentive Miller made the introduction as Elizabeth II extended her hand to the stocky horseman with a deep tan and alert blue eyes. “Come show me this lions’ cage of yours,” she said. “Do I need a whip and a chair?” “She said it not only with a twinkle, but her method of addressing me—clearly her talent—was to put me at ease,” Roberts recalled.

The following Monday morning at nine, he faced not only the Queen, but Prince Philip and the Queen Mother, whose filly was first into the pen. The royal group, along with Miller, Michael Clayton, the editor of
Horse and Hound
magazine—the only journalist Elizabeth II ever befriended—and Lieutenant Colonel Seymour Gilbart-Denham, the new Crown Equerry, sat in a glass-enclosed viewing platform at one end of the high-ceilinged hall with arched Gothicstyle windows. The grooms stood along the walls, gazing suspiciously.

Roberts went through his paces, tossing a light cotton line toward the horse, who responded by trotting around the perimeter of the pen. Over the next fifteen minutes the filly shifted from fear to trust, encouraged by Roberts’s glances and gestures, including turning his back on the horse, until she began following him. After ten more minutes, she first accepted his touch—“joining up” in his nomenclature—then a bridle and saddle. Moments later Roberts’s assistant was riding the filly around the pen. “That was beautiful,” the Queen said to Roberts, impressed by his gentle but effective approach. Philip gave him a hard handshake and asked if Roberts could work with his carriage ponies. With tears in her eyes, the Queen Mother said, “That was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Roberts watched in amazement as the Queen began issuing orders. “That surprised me,” he said. “You don’t see the Queen doing that in real life.” Several of the girl grooms had told her they suspected Roberts of tranquilizing the filly by throwing powder into her nose. In response, Elizabeth II asked for a more rigorous test in the afternoon with two raw three-year-old stallions to be transported from the stables at Hampton Court. She had changed her plans and would be returning after lunch.

That afternoon, nearly a hundred guests were on hand. The Queen stood directly by the pen, arms folded, watching intently with her girl grooms nearby. Both of the stallions were “riled up, big, moving and sweating,” but Roberts started each of them after a half hour of training. To his surprise, the Queen’s schedule miraculously cleared and she came to the morning and afternoon demonstrations every day that week to watch him work with twenty-two horses. She called the top trainers around the country to encourage them to attend the demonstrations she had set up, and she arranged for Michael Clayton to chronicle the tour for his magazine. She even supplied a bulletproof Ford Scorpio for Roberts to drive.