Elizabeth the Queen (52 page)

Authors: Sally Bedell Smith

BOOK: Elizabeth the Queen

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The sovereign and the cowboy struck up a fast friendship, connected by their compatible view of equine psychology and their prodigious memories for racehorse pedigrees. Speaking precisely and slowly, his voice gentle but strong, Roberts answered her numerous questions over lunch in the castle gardens. “I saw a mind open up that through decades of training and interest had been encapsulated in the traditional approach,” recalled Roberts. “She saw it was a better way.”

He was struck that she “knew every move, knew why it was there and why it was executed.” When he told her something she didn’t know, she sat on the edge of her chair “with a humility like a first grader.” He was equally surprised that she offered him ideas on how to present his concepts to an English audience. “You need to ease up,” she said, “so you don’t appear to be too competitive.” Her advice showed “an incredible ability to read intention, just like a horse does.”

His friendship with the Queen changed Monty Roberts’s life. Not only did she adopt his approach for many of her own horses, she encouraged him to write an autobiography that would incorporate his training techniques. She critiqued his drafts, urged him to make major revisions, and introduced him to publishers. When
The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer
was published in 1997, it sold more than two million copies. The Queen praised him not only for producing the book but for “getting it right.” He has gone on to establish training centers around the world, teaching his methods to some 1,500 students a year. All along the way, the Queen has tracked his progress and received updates during his visits to Windsor twice a year. In 2011 she rewarded Roberts by making him an honorary Member of the Royal Victorian Order.

* * *

H
ORSE RACING HAD
always been a source of unalloyed joy for the Queen, but in 1989 the pleasure of making a new friendship with Monty Roberts and discovering the possibilities of his teachings was marred by controversy and disappointment, both on and off the track. A central character was a long-striding colt called Nashwan, the offspring of Height of Fashion, a prize mare the Queen had bred a decade earlier.

As a filly, Height of Fashion had won five of her seven races in 1981 and 1982, catching the eye of Sheikh Hamdan al Maktoum of the Dubai royal family. He offered to buy the horse for more than £1 million—at the time an extravagant amount for an untested “maiden” broodmare. Acting on Henry Porchester’s advice, Elizabeth II decided to sell, using the proceeds to buy the West Ilsley stables in Berkshire. Her highly regarded trainer, Major Dick Hern, who was living in a nearby rectory, also purchased by the Queen, then signed a seven-year lease on the stable.

Hern had worked for Elizabeth II since 1966 and also trained for other prominent owners, including the Maktoum family. He had trained two of the Queen’s most successful horses, Highclere and Dunfermline, and had been part of the group that celebrated the Prix de Diane victory at Windsor Castle.

In 1984, Hern broke his neck in a hunting accident. He was paralyzed below the waist but valiantly continued training from a wheelchair and turning out winners. Four years later he had another setback when he underwent major heart surgery. As Hern was recuperating in the hospital in August 1988, the Queen’s veteran racing manager—now known as the 7th Earl of Carnarvon after inheriting the title on his father’s death the previous year—informed the sixty-seven-year-old trainer that he would have to leave West Ilsley at the end of his lease the following year. Porchey’s insensitivity provoked an outcry in the racing world.

Hern briefly resumed training for Elizabeth II, but she announced in March 1989 that he would be replaced by William Hastings-Bass, the future Earl of Huntington. The anger at Henry Carnarvon turned toward the Queen, not only for firing her trainer, but for evicting him from the rectory where he had lived since 1962. Ian Balding, a good friend of Hern, told Robert Fellowes, “If you don’t make some sort of arrangement for Dick Hern, it will be the most unpopular thing the Queen has ever done, and she risks having her horses booed in the winners’ enclosure.”

That never happened, but something close occurred when Nashwan won at Newmarket in May, and the crowd greeted Hern, who had trained the horse for Maktoum, with “loud and sustained applause” as he “swept off his Panama” to welcome the horse into the winners’ enclosure. “The Queen has done something I thought was impossible,” Woodrow Wyatt told the 18th Earl of Derby’s wife, Isabel. “She is turning the Jockey Club and the racing world into republicans.”

The worst, at least for a competitive owner like the Queen, was yet to come. On June 7, Elizabeth II attended the Epsom Derby, the race she most wanted to win. None other than Nashwan, the horse who could have been hers, galloped to a dramatic, five-length victory.

By then, she had countermanded Carnarvon’s advice and arranged to let Hern remain at the West Ilsley stables through 1990, sharing the training with Hastings-Bass for a year. Even more significant, she allowed Hern to stay in his home for as long as he wanted. The Maktoum family bought and renovated a new stable for the veteran trainer, and he worked successfully for them until he retired in 1997. Elizabeth II was forgiven the biggest blunder of her career as a thoroughbred breeder, in large measure due to the magnanimity of Hern, who greeted her cordially after his Derby win and never spoke ill of her.

T
HE NEW YEAR
brought a welcome resolution of one of the most troubling problems of the Queen’s reign. South Africa’s newly elected white president, Frederik Willem de Klerk, made the stunning announcement on Feburary 2, 1990, that he would free Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, who had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years for resisting apartheid policies. Nine days later Mandela walked through the prison gates as a free man. De Klerk legalized the ANC and set in motion the dismantling of apartheid and establishment of universal democratic elections.

Both leaders yielded to internal and external pressures, and their successful reconciliation earned them the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Mandela believed that the Commonwealth’s anti-apartheid stance had been vital, as was the Queen’s role in keeping the organization unified. “Sonny Ramphal [secretary-general of the Commonwealth] was sitting in London with [Thabo] Mbeki and [Oliver] Tambo from the ANC,” recalled Canada’s Brian Mulroney. “He would pass on everything that went on in the Commonwealth, and they would pass it on to Mandela. In the area of moral leadership, Mandela would say that the Commonwealth saved South Africa.”

The South African denouement came as a relief to Margaret Thatcher as she began her eleventh year as prime minister after leading the Tory party to victory three times—in 1979, 1983, and 1987. Britain’s difficult years of stringent monetary policy, high unemployment, and union busting had been eclipsed by an economic boom in the late 1980s. Thatcher had broken the back of inflation, encouraged entrepreneurs, expanded the number of homeowners, privatized state industries, reduced the size of government, and opened London’s financial markets to foreign investment. Internationally, she had bolstered the country’s image with her strong anticommunist stance (in concert with Ronald Reagan), and her economic policies offered a model to the rising Eastern European countries that had elected noncommunist governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union that began in 1989.

In July 1990, David Airlie presented the prime minister with a new proposal to fund the Civil List. Having instituted most of the Peat Report reforms, he was able to show the government that Palace officials could be “in charge of our own destiny.” His presentation called for returning to the ten-year funding set by the Civil List Act of 1972, a formula that the Labour government had superseded in 1975 with a law reverting to annual requests for increases. Thatcher agreed to raise the annual Civil List payment from £5.1 million to £7.9 million through 2000.

Persuaded by the professionalism and efficiency of the Queen’s advisers, the prime minister also shifted the job of managing the finances of the occupied royal palaces—Buckingham, St. James’s, Kensington, Marlborough House, Clarence House, Windsor Castle, and assorted properties in Windsor Great Park and the Home Park—from the Department of the Environment to the royal household, with Michael Peat serving in the new position of director of finance and property services. Thatcher defended the Civil List plan by emphasizing that it would “give much more dignity and continuity to the Crown,” adding that “an overwhelming number of people in the nation regard the royal family as the greatest asset that the United Kingdom has and greatly admire everything that it does.”

Despite Thatcher’s numerous successes, she faced growing opposition in the electorate as well as within the Conservative Party. To raise revenue for local services such as education and trash collection, she had abolished property taxes and created instead a poll tax. Every adult was required to pay the same amount, but local authorities used the new system to impose rates that caused many low-income people to pay considerably more than they had previously. The widespread unpopularity of the poll tax threatened the prospects for a Tory victory in the 1991 general election.

Inside Tory ranks, liberal members objected to Thatcher’s increasingly “Euro-skeptic” position as the European Economic Community moved toward greater integration in the post–Cold War period. She emphatically opposed abandoning the pound sterling to join a single European currency, a policy advocated by several of her senior ministers. One of them, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, resigned in protest on November 1, 1990. Two weeks later, Michael Heseltine, who had left Thatcher’s cabinet in 1986, challenged her leadership.

Although she won a majority in the first ballot on Tuesday, November 20, she needed a wider margin under party rules to win decisively. She was in Paris at the time and returned to London Wednesday morning, determined to prevail in the second ballot. But after meeting with her principal supporters, she decided to consult each of her cabinet ministers individually. One by one, her erstwhile liege men told her she would lose the vote. By that evening, Thatcher decided to withdraw her name from the second ballot rather than face defeat. On Thursday morning she went to Buckingham Palace to inform the Queen she would be resigning. “She’s a very understanding person,” Thatcher said later. “She understood … the rightness of the decision I was taking.… It was very sad to know that was the last time I’d go to the Palace as prime minister after eleven-and-a-half years.”

When the second ballot took place on the 27th, Thatcher’s nemesis, Michael Heseltine, was defeated by John Major, the chancellor of the exchequer and her preferred candidate. The next morning Margaret Thatcher submitted her resignation to the Queen, and forty-five minutes later Major arrived at the Palace to accept the sovereign’s invitation to form a government. At age forty-seven, he was the youngest prime minister in more than a century.

The Queen showed her esteem for Thatcher by quickly awarding her the sovereign’s two most prestigious personal honors, the Order of the Garter and the Order of Merit. Founded in 1902 by King Edward VII for distinction in the military, arts, and sciences, the Order of Merit, like the Garter, only has twenty-four members at a time and has included just three previous prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Macmillan. “The Garter tends to go to all ex–prime ministers in time, but the Order of Merit is mostly scientists and academics. That really mattered to her,” said her longtime adviser Charles Powell.

The Queen Mother was deeply upset by Thatcher’s departure, calling her “very patriotic” and expressing the hope that she would come to stay at Balmoral after she left office. “She said they [meaning the royal family] think it is desperately unfair and an appalling way to do things,” her friend Woodrow Wyatt recorded in his diary two days after Thatcher stepped down. “They admire her, they think she was wonderful, and she did so much for Britain, not only at home but in the world at large.” According to Wyatt, any stories about the Queen disliking Thatcher were “pure invention.”