Elizabeth the Queen (57 page)

The Russians were eager to receive her in 1994. “The monarchy is unshakeable,” said the Russian newspaper
Izvestia
. “No matter what happens in the country, the British know that there is an institution that will survive any difficulty.” Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, was as enraptured by the Queen as Khrushchev had been, confiding to her how difficult it was to promote democracy after so many years of totalitarian rule. When he tried to draw out her opinions, she referred him to her foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd.

At a performance of
Giselle
by the Bolshoi ballet, Elizabeth II wore her spectacular diamond and sapphire tiara, necklace, and bracelet and received a ten-minute standing ovation. “I thought the jewels were too much,” she fretted afterward to David Thomas, the Crown Jeweler. “No, Ma’am, everyone loved it,” said Thomas, who felt it was important to “fly the flag.” Douglas Hurd said that “the Queen evoked a sort of nostalgia” among the Russians, who “were groping for their own past.”

Back home, the new year got off to a rocky start when Martin Charteris offered an unintentionally candid glimpse of the Queen’s scandal-plagued family when he gave an interview to
The Spectator
magazine. He later confessed he had been lulled by the “attractive” reporter and thought he was speaking on background—“very conceited of me, I know.” He said out loud what many in royal circles had been saying sotto voce: that Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar” and that Charles and Diana would “likely divorce,” an outcome that would “clear the air” and would not prevent Charles from someday becoming king.

The retired courtier also put the Queen in perspective, describing her as a realist “far more than you would imagine.” He said she was determined to “sit it out,” knowing that the monarchy goes through “phases.” When asked about the comments several months later, the Queen Mother assured her friend Woodrow Wyatt that she and the rest of the family weren’t cross with Charteris in the least. “He’s got such a lot of wisdom,” she said.

Elizabeth II had “one of the outstanding experiences of my life” in March 1995 when she stepped foot on South African soil for the first time in nearly five decades. She was greeted as “Elizabeth” by Nelson Mandela, her host for a state visit. (He and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia were the only world leaders to call her by her Christian name, without causing offense.) She had initially met him in 1991 during a conference of Commonwealth heads of government in Zimbabwe. As leader of the ANC, Mandela had been invited only as an observer, and South Africa still remained outside the Commonwealth. Lacking head of government status, he technically couldn’t be included in the Queen’s traditional banquet. But Robert Fellowes urged the Queen to make an exception. “Let’s have him,” she responded instantly. At the time, her decision was potentially controversial; just four years earlier Margaret Thatcher had branded Mandela a terrorist.

In April 1994, he was elected president of South Africa in the country’s first democratic election open to all races. The Commonwealth welcomed the former rogue nation as a member soon afterward, and the Queen attended a special service in Westminster Abbey to mark the occasion that July. Her South Africa visit eight months later attracted large and enthusiastic crowds, notably in the black townships where people held up signs saying, “THANK YOU FOR COMING BACK.” It was “a huge emotional charge for everybody,” said Douglas Hurd.

Elizabeth II was less reassured about her standing in her own country, where she continued to be overshadowed by Diana’s exploits—news reports about the princess’s telephone stalking of Oliver Hoare, a book detailing her affair with James Hewitt, derided by the tabloid press as the “love rat,” the Andrew Morton sequel that included gruesome specifics of Diana’s self-mutilation, and headline-grabbing accounts of what she characterized as her “re-launched” life as a global charity worker—less than a year after her vow to retire.

With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe on May 8, 1995, the Queen was uncharacteristically hesitant about what to do. “She was nervous about the fact that the monarchy was not doing well in the public’s esteem,” recalled Robert Salisbury, the Tory leader in the House of Lords who was in charge of organizing the celebration. “I wanted to reproduce the crowds at Buckingham Palace. She was afraid they would not turn out, so she wanted to have it in the Horse Guards Parade, where crowds would be smaller. I said, ‘No, I can fill it.’ I was extremely nervous. If I had called it wrong I would have felt an awful idiot.”

The crowds ended up even larger than they had been in 1945. Looking across the sea of people from the balcony with her sister and ninety-four-year-old mother—the very trio who had stood in the same spot with King George VI fifty years earlier—she wore the stony-faced expression she used to suppress strong feelings. “The Queen’s eyes were brimming,” said one of her ladies-in-waiting. “But she was absolutely determined that nobody should see when they got back inside. She quickly took a large gin and tonic and knocked it back.”

A
S WAS SO
often the case in those years, the benefits of the touching royal tableau were only temporary. On November 14—quite intentionally, the forty-seventh birthday of Prince Charles—Diana informed officials at Buckingham Palace that she would be appearing shortly on the BBC’s respected public affairs program
Panorama
. Unbeknownst even to her private secretary or press secretary, she had already taped the fifty-five-minute interview in her apartment at Kensington Palace with Martin Bashir, a little known reporter and producer for the network.

The program aired on November 20, the forty-eighth wedding anniversary of Elizabeth II and Philip. It was Diana’s ultimate revenge against her estranged husband. No longer shielded by an intermediary, she had been furnished the questions in advance and had rehearsed the answers. Barbara Walters, who later talked to Diana about the interview, called it a “superb performance.” The princess spoke unflinchingly about her emotional torment, her romance with Hewitt, and her shattered marriage, and she portrayed the royal family as insensitive to her problems, preferring to dismiss her as “unstable.”

She reserved her most withering fire for Charles, whose fitness for the throne she undermined by saying he would find the role of king “suffocating.” The “top job,” she said, “would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that.” As for his affair with Camilla, Diana memorably said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She conveniently ignored the fact that during the time referred to—from 1986 onward—there were in fact four in the marriage, including James Hewitt. The other line that resonated with the fifteen million TV viewers in Britain and millions more overseas was her wish to be “a queen of people’s hearts.”

Her close friend Rosa Monckton later wrote that the performance was “Diana at her worst.” Charles’s friend Nicholas Soames said the interview showed “advanced stages of paranoia.” The damage, both self-inflicted and to the royal family, was far greater than that caused by the Morton book, although a Gallup survey registered an initial positive response for the princess, with 77 percent saying she had a right to present her side of the story. More worrying for the Queen, 46 percent of respondents believed Charles was unfit to be king, an increase of 13 percent in two years. Over lunch in Mayfair, Martin Charteris told Woodrow Wyatt that Diana was “very dangerous” as well as “unbalanced,” and that a divorce was now “inescapable.”

The Queen did not watch Diana’s interview. Charles Anson, her press secretary, made it clear to the media on her authority that she “never watched
Panorama
,” an unusual expression of her personal preference that “took the BBC aback,” said one courtier. Her advisers did tune in and briefed her on the salient points. After consulting further with John Major and George Carey, she informed the prime minister on December 12 that she would write to Charles and Diana individually asking them to agree to an “early divorce … in the best interests of the country.” Since they had been officially separated for more than two years, Charles could file for an uncontested divorce if Diana concurred. The Queen signed her precisely phrased instructions—in effect, a royal command—to her daughter-in-law, “with love from Mama.”

The biggest controversy over the divorce had nothing to do with money or child custody or perquisites, but with Diana’s title. In a meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace on February 15, 1996, attended by deputy private secretary Robin Janvrin, who took notes, Diana volunteered to give up “Her Royal Highness.” Elizabeth II remained predictably noncommittal, but she urged Diana to sit down with Charles for a detailed discussion of all the issues. Afterward, Diana told Paul Burrell that her mother-in-law had shown her “sensitivity and kindness.”

When Charles and Diana finally met at St. James’s Palace on February 28, Diana agreed to a divorce. They would share the upbringing of their two sons, and she would be known simply as Diana, Princess of Wales, relinquishing “Her Royal Highness.” But Diana again overreached by immediately revealing the confidential details of the discussion to the press, along with her own particularly damaging spin (transmitted to her ally at the
Daily Mail
, Richard Kay) that the Queen and Charles had pressured her to drop her royal title. That assertion was false, and Elizabeth II had the notes from her meeting with the princess to prove it. She authorized Charles Anson to make an unusually direct statement: “The decision to drop the title is the Princess’s and the Princess’s alone. It is wrong that the Queen or the Prince asked her. I am saying categorically that is not true. The Palace does not say something specific on a point like this unless we are absolutely sure of the facts.”

As Charles and Diana’s complicated negotiations proceeded, Andrew and Fergie’s divorce became final on May 30, a decade after their wedding. Along the lines of Diana’s agreement, Fergie gave up “Her Royal Highness” and was called Sarah, Duchess of York. But unlike the Waleses, the Yorks parted amicably despite Fergie’s frequent misbehavior. In bringing up their daughters, they described themselves as “co-parents,” and Fergie said they were in fact the “happiest unmarried couple.”

Charles’s generous divorce settlement for Diana was disclosed that summer: a £17 million lump sum along with more than £385,000 annually for Diana’s office expenses. She would live and work out of Kensington Palace, and Charles would do the same at St. James’s Palace. She would conduct her charity activities separately from the royal family, but she would need to secure permission from the Queen as well as the Foreign Office for any overseas travel in the line of work. The state apartments at St. James’s Palace would be available to her for entertaining, and she could use royal transport for her official engagements. Diana tried at the last minute to hang on to her “HRH,” but she finally yielded when fourteen-year-old William told her it didn’t matter to him. To bolster her status as a semiroyal, the Palace took pains to say that she would still be “regarded as a member of the royal family.” Whenever she attended state or national occasions she would rank as an “HRH.”

T
HE
Q
UEEN FOUND
blessed relief from her family travails when Nelson Mandela arrived for a triumphant four-day state visit on Tuesday, July 9. Tens of thousands of spectators—the biggest crowd for a foreign visitor in decades—turned out to cheer the African leader as he and Elizabeth II were driven by carriage to Buckingham Palace after the ceremonial welcome on Horse Guards Parade. At the state banquet that evening, the seventy-year-old monarch paid tribute to the seventy-seven-year-old South African leader as the savior of a country that “has a special place in my heart and in the hearts of the British people.” Her praise for his wisdom and understanding after suffering twenty-seven years in prison was borne out three days later when he met for twenty minutes with his former adversary, Margaret Thatcher—in the spirit, he said, of “let bygones be bygones.”

Instead of the traditional “return” dinner at South Africa House on Thursday night, Mandela chose to bend protocol by hosting a “Two Nations” concert at Royal Albert Hall. Prince Charles helped organize the event starring Phil Collins, Tony Bennett, and Quincy Jones along with Hugh Masekela and other prominent South African musicians. Mandela, who was well known for dancing to the toe-tapping rhythms of South African music, sat with the Queen, Philip, Charles, and other members of the royal family in the royal box. At intermission he took aside Robin Renwick (Baron Renwick of Clifton), who had served as British ambassador to South Africa. “Should I dance?” Mandela asked. “By all means,” said Renwick. “What about the Queen?” said Mandela. “You should do it,” replied Renwick. “Don’t worry.”

When the all-male a cappella singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo began performing, Mandela, dressed in a black silk shirt, stood up in the royal box and started to dance. Philip tentatively rose to join him, followed by Charles, swaying and clapping along with the music. “To everyone’s surprise,” said Robin Renwick, “the Queen stood up and did a little side by side movement too.” As the
Daily Telegraph
noted the next day, Elizabeth II “has seldom been known to boogie in public.”

O
N
A
UGUST
28, the Wales divorce became final, to the enormous relief of the royal family. But they had not anticipated that Diana had every intention of staying in the limelight. She forged a strategic new alliance with Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party and candidate for the general election to be held in 1997. Early in the new year they met quietly at several private dinner parties where the dynamic young politician took Diana’s measure. He was mesmerized by her beauty and charisma, and she offered him advice on photo opportunities for his political campaign, speaking in “fairly calculating terms of how she had ‘gone for the caring angle.’ ”