Elizabeth the Queen (67 page)

The Queen has long taken a keen interest in her jewelry and knows the history of the pieces in her extensive private collection. She enjoys displaying her beautiful jewelry whether in public or private, sometimes at dinner parties wearing multiple rings, even on her index fingers. Once, when she was introduced to Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the American creator of JAR jewelers, at a Winfield House dinner, she said, “I have heard that Damien Hirst has been using diamonds to make a jeweled skull, but I prefer the diamonds around my neck.”

Angela Kelly has built on her boss’s expertise by developing computerized inventories so she can have the most up-to-date facts at her fingertips when she sets out a tray with pieces for the Queen’s selection. “Angela will come up with something she has found God knows where,” said a lady-in-waiting. “If the brooch is from Mexico, she will say where the stones are from. She is interested in it, and she makes it fun.”

O
N
W
EDNESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
19, 2003, the Queen and her courtiers awoke to a “World Exclusive” in the
Daily Mirror
: a page-one photograph of a footman on the famous Buckingham Palace balcony with INTRUDER emblazoned above his head. Another headline explained: “As Bush arrives, we reveal Mirrorman has been a Palace footman for TWO MONTHS in the biggest royal security scandal ever.” Inside the paper were fourteen pages of surreptitiously snapped photographs and descriptions of royal family routines and private quarters, punctuated by equally sensational headlines (“I COULD HAVE POISONED THE QUEEN”). It was all the handiwork of twenty-six-year-old
Mirror
reporter Ryan Parry, who lied his way into a job as a footman and bolted with his story, violating the confidentiality agreement he signed when he was hired.

The newspaper tried to frame the stunt as a public service, but it was mainly a peek into the private lives of the Queen and her family. The most talked-about photograph was of the breakfast table laid for the Queen and Prince Philip with white linen, a floral centerpiece, silver cutlery, and bone china, along with an inexpensive transistor radio and three perfectly aligned Tupperware boxes containing cornflakes and porridge oats. Parry wrote that the Queen preferred her toast “with light marmalade,” but she ended up feeding most of it to the corgis under the table.

He reported that each royal tea tray had its own map, that Prince Andrew was a teetotaler who sometimes swore at his footman, and that Princess Anne required her breakfast bowl to “contain a very black banana and ripe kiwi fruit,” and went about her business “without a fuss.” Parry described Sophie Wessex as “kind and grateful,” and the Queen came across as chatty and congenial—“not nearly haughty enough for the job,” observed
The Sunday Times
.

Photographs and descriptions of the private apartments highlighted Andrew’s penchant for stuffed toys and pillows embroidered with messages such as “Eat, Sleep, and Remarry,” Anne’s sitting room where “every surface is covered with books, ornaments, piles of paper and magazines,” and Edward and Sophie Wessex’s modern decor and tidy housekeeping. Parry even snapped a picture of the carpeted Wessex bathroom adorned with a cartoon showing the Queen speaking to a group of penguins in “royal garments.”

The next day the
Mirror
struck again, with “our man’s exposé of Windsor,” showing Parry on page one petting two of the Queen’s corgis in front of the castle, followed by eleven pages of photographs and descriptions of his weekend working for the Queen. His picture of her breakfast table included her lineup of morning newspapers: as always, the
Racing Post
was on top, followed by the
Daily Mail, Express
, and
Mirror
(with its revelation of the day, an excerpt from Paul Burrell’s tell-all book about the royal family), then the
Daily Telegraph
and
The Times
.

Parry recounted that the Queen dined alone while watching her surprisingly lowbrow choice of television programs:
The Bill
, a popular police drama (“I don’t like ‘The Bill,’ ” she told Parry as he poured her coffee, “but I just can’t help watching it”), the long-running soap opera
EastEnders
, and, somewhat improbably,
Kirsty’s Home Videos
, a comedy show featuring footage of ordinary people that included “a fair share of bare bottoms.” There was also a photo spread of the castle’s luxurious Victorian summerhouse, with its potted plants, sculptures, swimming pool, indoor badminton court, table tennis, and netted cage surrounding Philip’s wooden polo practice horse.

The Queen was furious, and her lawyers took immediate legal action against the newspaper, citing “a highly objectionable invasion of privacy, devoid of any legitimate interest.” She obtained a permanent injunction that prevented the
Mirror
from publishing anything further and restrained the newspaper’s ability to reprint many of the photographs. The newspaper paid £25,000 toward the Queen’s legal costs, gave the Palace all unused photographs, and destroyed its unpublished stories.

But the
Mirror
’s editor, Piers Morgan, who went on to become a television personality in the United States, had succeeded in his mission. Not only did he embarrass the royal family, he timed publication—with its predictable cascade of coverage in the other newspapers—to coincide with the arrival of George and Laura Bush for the second state visit by a United States president. The only other American leader to be entertained on the same scale at Buckingham Palace over several days was Woodrow Wilson in December 1918.

The Bushes’ historic trip was already clouded by security concerns and the prospect of thousands of protesters marching against the war in Iraq. As a result, the Queen was forced to shelve the traditional welcoming ceremony in Horse Guards Parade followed by a procession of carriages along the Mall to Buckingham Palace. Instead, there was a truncated version in the forecourt behind the railings where the Changing of the Guard usually took place. The Bushes were driven from the rear of the Palace (where they had spent the night) around to the front. They walked up the red-carpeted stairs into a specially built pavilion to greet the Queen and a line of dignitaries. The Household Cavalry trotted past, the president and the Duke of Edinburgh inspected the guard of honor, and everyone then walked inside for lunch—all of which had an improvised feel that the press roundly mocked.

The Bushes, however, were delighted, and the Queen, who already had an easygoing relationship with the first couple, made them feel welcome. “She was unruffled by the protests,” George Bush recalled. “She had seen a lot during her life, and it didn’t seem to faze her. Nor did it faze me.”

That evening the Queen hosted a white-tie state banquet for 160 guests. The following night George and Laura Bush returned the hospitality with a smaller and less formal dinner hosted by Will and Sarah Farish at Winfield House. Among the sixty guests were prominent Americans in Britain such as U.S. senator George Mitchell and Rose Marie Bravo, the CEO of Burberry. “It was like old friends week,” said Catherine Fenton, the White House social secretary. “The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh greeted the Farishes affectionately, and there was lots of laughter.”

There were protesters in the streets that week heckling Blair as well as Bush, but in the prime minister’s case, they were objecting to the protracted campaign by the Labour Party to ban fox hunting. When Blair tried to explain the issue, Bush said, “Whatever did you do that for, man?” The president, Blair observed, was “as ever getting right to the point.”

The proposed ban united animal rights activists concerned about the well-being of the foxes (typically killed by a pack of hounds at the end of each hunt) with a populist assault on the aristocracy. Blair embraced the measure as a purely political ploy to assuage the left wing of his party. Debate over the ban consumed more than seven hundred hours in Parliament—the largest amount for any piece of legislation during the Blair era. It also galvanized a series of protests by a “countryside alliance” in London that attracted vast peaceful crowds ranging from landed peers to humble countrymen dependent on the sport for their livelihood. Although the Prince of Wales didn’t join the protest, he and his sons were avid hunters, and he openly defended the sport, telling Tony Blair the ban was “absurd.” Blair, in turn, warned Charles against trying to “play politics with him.” Sophie Wessex reflected the prevailing view in the royal family when she said, “Fox hunting is just vermin control but people think it’s the aristocracy running round doing what the hell they like.” She added that Blair was “ignorant of the countryside,” which he later acknowledged was correct.

Elizabeth II necessarily had to remain neutral. But as her cousin Margaret Rhodes observed, “She is a countrywoman at heart. She would defend hunting as one of the glues to keep the countryside together.” In her own quiet way, the Queen lobbied Blair during a weekend at Balmoral several years before the ban came to a vote. She patiently explained to him over dinner that hunting was an activity not only for the upper class but for regular people as well. Some of the riders, she said, were far from well-off and rented their horses from livery stables. She naturally assumed that Blair knew about these facilities, which were a staple of rural areas, but he had never heard of them.

Her briefing helped him understand the economic as well as social significance of hunting for rural communities, and he later admitted that the ban was “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret.” He claimed he could do nothing to stop the momentum toward eventual passage of the Hunting Act of 2004. In fact, he “allowed a compromise proposal to be overruled by his own party,” wrote Charles Moore in
The Spectator
, permitting a bill “to be invoked … to force through a total ban.” As a practical matter, fox hunting with hounds continued as clever huntsmen found various loopholes, and the anticipated widespread arrests never happened. Still, all members of the royal family had to stop fox hunting since it had become technically illegal.

* * *

O
N
S
ATURDAY
, A
PRIL
9, 2005, the Prince of Wales finally married the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles, thirty-four years after they first met, and nearly two decades after they resumed their romance in the mid-1980s. He was fifty-six and she fifty-seven.

Camilla and her first husband had divorced in 1995, and she had been gradually brought into the fold in the years since Diana’s death. Her appearance at the two Golden Jubilee concerts in the Buckingham Palace gardens was the first time she had been seen in public with the Queen and the rest of the royal family. Although Camilla’s love affair with Charles had aggravated his problems with Diana, the Queen recognized her good qualities—salty humor, resilience, warmth, common sense, and above all devotion to Charles. Camilla enjoyed the field sports so important to the royal family, and she embraced all their traditions. Through years of vilification, Camilla maintained a discreet silence, which also impressed the Queen. “Camilla never whines,” said one of her longtime friends. “She takes things as they come and tries to turn them into something humorous.” When the tabloids were stirring up trouble in the weeks before the wedding, Camilla joked, “It’s just two old people getting hitched.”

Under liberalized Church of England guidelines, the two divorcés could have been married in a religious ceremony, but church leaders agreed that given the couple’s well-known adultery, such a service would have offended too many priests and parishioners. Instead, they exchanged their vows at the Windsor Guildhall.

As Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the Queen decided it would be inappropriate to attend the civil service at the Guildhall, which was witnessed by twenty-eight family members. “Her decision assuredly had nothing to do with her private feelings but everything to do with her public role,” wrote Jonathan Dimbleby at the time. “Much as they might have wished otherwise, her advisers knew that they had no chance of persuading her otherwise—however un-motherly or even out of date it may have made her appear.” The Queen and Philip did attend the “Service of Prayer and Dedication” afterward at St. George’s Chapel.

The congregation of 720 guests that filled St. George’s Chapel included the Blairs and other political leaders as well as representatives from royal houses in Europe and the Middle East, numerous titled aristocrats, and television and film stars such as Kenneth Branagh and Prunella Scales. The traditional service conducted by Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, used the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which Charles preferred to the more modern version. In contrast to the elaborate naval commander’s uniform he wore in Westminster Abbey a quarter century earlier, Charles was dressed in a morning suit, and Camilla chose an elegant floor-length pale blue silk coat dress with gold embroidery. When they emerged from the West Door of the chapel, they declined to kiss before two thousand well-wishers who had been admitted by ticket to the castle grounds, although Charles and Camilla, now known as the Duchess of Cornwall, did a five-minute walkabout, shaking hands and accepting congratulations.

Everyone was in high spirits at the reception hosted by the prince’s mother in the state apartments at the castle. “I have two very important announcements to make,” said the Queen. “I know you will want to know who was the winner of the Grand National. It was Hedgehunter.” After the applause died down, she turned to Charles and Camilla, and said, “Having cleared Becher’s Brook and the Chair [the most dangerous and highest fences on the steeplechase course] the happy couple are now in the winners’ enclosure.” “There was a huge roar of approval, very un-monarchical,” wrote veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, who was thrilled to be among “the great gangs of England” celebrating the marriage. Charles paid tribute to “my darling Camilla,” thanking her for “taking on the task of being married to me.” When Joan Rivers, a friend of the couple, was introduced to the Queen, the comedian said, “I’m going on Larry King tonight, and I’m going to tell him how beautiful your pin is.” “Thank you,” replied the slightly puzzled Queen.