Elizabeth the Queen (71 page)

It is a thoroughly fanciful plot, given the Queen’s deep-seated sense of duty and practical turn of mind. But as in
A Question of Attribution
twenty years earlier, Bennett zeroes in on the Queen’s underestimated qualities and depicts a shrewd, observant, and inquisitive character whose sly wit (“Oh do get on!” she mutters while reading Henry James at teatime) is a believable facsimile of Elizabeth II’s tart asides.

The book was a runaway bestseller in Britain and the United States, propelled by word of mouth and rave reviews. After
The Queen
, wrote Jeremy McCarter in
The New York Times Book Review
, the book “offered yet another reason to think warmly of Her Majesty, another reminder that marble has veins.” Like the film, Bennett’s book tapped into a yearning for Elizabeth II to break out of the royal cocoon, and to show some of her repressed mischief. The most touching aspect of Bennett’s depiction is his character’s discovery of egalitarian anonymity when immersed in a book: “It was shared, it was common.… Between these covers she could go unrecognized.”

The real Queen keeps her views of literature well guarded, but she does take a special interest in the annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a competition for authors around the world. She reads the winning novels for pleasure intermingled with obligation. Most of them are historical fiction, and in recent years she has enjoyed
The Secret River
by Kate Grenville, on the early colonization of Australia;
Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones, about Papua New Guinea; and
The Book of Negroes
by Lawrence Hill, on the slave trade with Canada. Each summer she invites the winner to Buckingham Palace for an audience. “It’s very informal,” said Mark Collins, director of the Commonwealth Foundation, who accompanies the authors. “It’s upstairs in her private apartments, and we’re knee-deep in corgis running around.” For twenty minutes she conducts an earnest discussion touching on the writer’s roots, the source of inspiration, and how the book developed. “She asks how the locations came to be selected, and the characters, and any reflections on the country that the author might have,” recalled Collins. “The discussion rattles along tidily.”

E
LIZABETH
II
IS
not the sort to brood about mortality, but in the early years of her ninth decade she almost seemed to be making her way down a sort of royal bucket list, checking off things she hadn’t done before, and places she hadn’t seen. In June 2008, she attended her first luncheon at Pratt’s, an exclusive men’s club in St. James’s owned by the Duke of Devonshire. At the invitation of a conservation group called the Shikar Club, she joined her husband and ten other members for drinks in front of a large fireplace, followed by a robust meal of smoked salmon, lamb cutlet, and treacle tart. The following July she watched the annual Swan Upping, a ritual dating to the twelfth century when the swans on the Thames (which belong to the sovereign) are officially counted. She even started taking a regular commuter train to and from King’s Lynn in Norfolk for her annual winter break at Sandringham. She didn’t sit with the regular passengers, however; for security reasons, she and her small party took over a first-class compartment.

For shooting, stalking, and fishing weekends at Sandringham and Balmoral she began including more guests a generation younger. “We have seen less of them,” said a woman who had been a regular guest of Elizabeth II and Philip since the 1950s. “They don’t just see the old fogies.”

The children of her longtime friends found that she responded readily when they invited her to informal dinners, where she took time to chat with their own teenage children, asking them questions and listening intently. When one of her bridesmaids, Lady Elizabeth Longman (known to her friends as “Smith”), turned eighty, Elizabeth II went to a cocktail party in her honor in a small flat. While a female protection officer waited in the car, a guest escorted the Queen up in a rickety elevator. She stayed for more than an hour and spent a full fifteen minutes talking to Smith’s grandson, Freddy Van Zevenbergen, a designer who built scale models of grand houses.

For the first time in nine years, the Queen had a winner on the final day of Royal Ascot in June 2008. Her two-year-old colt Free Agent was running behind what John Warren called “a wall” of ten other horses with only three furlongs to go in the Chesham Stakes. But Free Agent, ridden by Richard Hughes, broke through and won by two and a quarter lengths. “I’ve done it!” the Queen shouted. Seated between Warren and her husband, she jumped up and punched the air with her fist—an unusual public display captured by BBC cameras for the evening newscasts. “It was a moment of real joy,” said John Warren. Afterward, “she raced to the paddock like she was 20,” said her fifty-two-year-old bloodstock adviser. “We were struggling to keep up with her. The jockey was trying to explain what had happened but all the Queen wanted to do was touch her horse.”

Earlier in the week at Ascot, Helen Mirren was in attendance to present a trophy, and the Queen asked her cinematic alter ego to the royal box for tea. “I wouldn’t have been invited to tea if she had hated the film,” said Mirren. “I was very touched to be invited.” The Queen said, “Hello, it’s lovely to meet you,” followed by some “horsey chat.” It was only the second time Elizabeth II had met an actress who played her. Some years earlier she had encountered Prunella Scales, who portrayed the Queen in
A Question of Attribution
. When Scales bowed to Elizabeth II in a receiving line, the Queen said, “I expect you think I should be doing that to you.”

E
LIZABETH
II’
S ELDEST
son celebrated his sixtieth birthday in November 2008, making him the oldest Prince of Wales in history, passing King Edward VII, who was fifty-nine when he succeeded Queen Victoria on her death in 1901. Elizabeth II hosted a black-tie reception, orchestral concert, and dinner in Charles’s honor at Buckingham Palace on the eve of his birthday on the 14th. More noteworthy was the visit she and Philip made a day earlier to the headquarters of his signature charity, the Prince’s Trust, which since its founding in 1976 had helped more than a half million disadvantaged youths learn skills and find jobs.

Throughout his life Charles has craved the approval of his parents, and the Queen’s remarks that day represented a rare public expression of support for his philanthropic work with his twenty charities and as patron or president of 350 other organizations. “For Prince Philip and me there can be no greater pleasure or comfort than to know that into his care are safely entrusted the guiding principles of public service and duty to others,” the Queen said.

Charles overtook his sister, Anne’s, record as “hardest working royal,” with 560 official engagements in 2008. (She came close with 534.) His mother logged 417 visits in the U.K. and overseas that year—down only slightly from 440 in 2007. At age eighty-two—seventeen years past Britain’s mandatory retirement age at the time—she had no intention of slowing down. The previous December she had become the oldest-ever monarch when she passed Queen Victoria, who lived eighty-one years and 243 days.

She continued to carry out her duties as she had since her accession, serving as head of state—representing her government officially at home and abroad—as well as head of nation, connecting with people to reward their achievements and remain in touch. But while in the early years of her reign she presided over twenty-six investitures a year, that number was gradually pared to fifteen, with Prince Charles and Princess Anne splitting the rest.

“All her programs are done with great cleverness,” said Malcolm Ross, her former comptroller. “They have reduced the pace for her without it showing.” But whenever her advisers try to sneak something too obvious into her schedule to give her a rest, “she instantly spots it and asks why she is not doing more,” said a source close to the Palace household. “She doesn’t miss anything.”

Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s private secretary and leading advocate of modernizing, retired in 2007. Janvrin was replaced by forty-six-year-old Christopher Geidt, a like-minded veteran of the Foreign Office with degrees from King’s College London and Cambridge University. He made a smooth transition, setting the tone with brisk efficiency and easy humor.

The all-important Palace communications apparatus was now run by two women in their late thirties, both mothers of small children. Samantha Cohen, communications and press secretary to the Queen, had written for regional newspapers in her native Australia, and before joining the royal household had been head of communications for National Grid, the international electricity and gas company. Deputy press secretary Ailsa Anderson came out of regional newspapers in Essex to work in the civil service. She served as press officer for Conservative Nicholas Soames at the Ministry of Defence and for Labour politician Margaret Beckett when she served in Tony Blair’s cabinet. Bright, skillful, straightforward, and tough, Cohen and Anderson managed to protect the Queen’s private life while boldly projecting her image as a symbol of modernity.

Elizabeth II began responding more quickly to crises, and showing more emotion in public. She had her portrait done as a hologram. She chatted comfortably with pop singer Lady Gaga without flinching at the performer’s shiny red latex outfit, and cheerfully welcomed to Buckingham Palace fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who sported a pink wig, and photographer David Bailey, who wore ratty jeans. When the world financial meltdown hit in the fall of 2008, the Queen made a trip to the London School of Economics. After listening to a presentation on the origin of the credit crisis, she asked the one essential question: “Why did no one see it coming?” “The general feeling is she is more approachable, human, empathetic, and in touch,” said a Palace official.

Although the Queen had received her first computer twenty-five years earlier from Ronald Reagan, she had lagged behind her husband in adapting to technology. Philip began writing letters on a computer in the 1980s and became an avid user of email and the Internet, especially while researching his speeches. Elizabeth II eventually took up cell phones to send text messages to her grandchildren, and computers to keep track of her horses. At the suggestion of Prince Andrew, she acquired an iPod in 2005. While firmly committed to paper and pen, she began exchanging emails with family members. Ten years after launching the royal website in 1997, the Queen got her own channel on YouTube in December 2007, with a million hits in the first week.

There was no better indicator of her embrace of the new than her visit to the London headquarters of Google in the fall of 2008. The dynamic young company honored Elizabeth II by incorporating her image and a crown into the “Google doodle” logo on its U.K. home page on the day of her visit. The Queen and Philip (“a great googler,” said one of the Queen’s senior advisers. “He is always googling, and sharing it with the Queen”) spent more than an hour in the company’s offices, meeting a predominantly youthful and casually dressed group of employees. “Just come back from jogging?” Philip inquired when he met marketing executive Matthew Trewhella, who was wearing a hooded top, chinos, and sneakers.

During her visit, Elizabeth II uploaded onto her Royal Channel a video of a reception at Buckingham Palace in 1968 for Olympic athletes, delicately guiding the mouse with her black-gloved right hand. When she and Philip were shown the famous “laughing baby” on YouTube, they caught the contagion and started to giggle. “Lovely little thing isn’t it?” she said to her husband. “Amazing a child would laugh like that.”

E
VEN AS SHE
kept her focus on the here and now, in various ways, publicly and privately, the Queen honored her late mother, whose memory she kept close. During a shooting weekend at Sandringham in January 2009, she lost an important link with the death of Emma, the last of the Queen Mother’s corgis. A visibly saddened Queen went around the room before dinner and gave the news to each of the guests as Philip tried to console her.

The following month the family and a throng of friends were out in force on the terrace below Carlton House to unveil a bronze statue more than nine feet tall of a faintly smiling Queen Mother in her Garter robes. She was portrayed at age fifty-one because the memorial stood below a bronze statue of George VI, also in Garter attire, at age fifty-six, the year of his death. “At long last my grandparents are reunited,” said Prince Charles after his mother had pulled a cord to remove the blue satin cover. The £2 million memorial, paid for by the sale of coins commemorating Elizabeth II’s eightieth birthday, also featured two eleven-foot-long bronze friezes that captured the Queen Mother’s spirit by depicting her comforting homeless families in London’s East End during World War II, being applauded with one of her winning racehorses, and sitting with two of her corgis in the garden at the Castle of Mey.

Several months later the Queen turned up as a surprise guest at a fund-raising reception for the Castle of Mey Foundation. The Queen Mother’s favorite residence had been opened to the public in August 2002, and private funds helped maintain both castle and gardens. Elizabeth II was only scheduled to make a brief appearance at the Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace. Instead, she spent ninety minutes circulating through the room and conversing with patrons and potential donors. One British businessman was so taken by his encounter that he later wrote a £20,000 check to the foundation.

A
N ADVANTAGE
E
LIZABETH
II has had over all her prime ministers is her vast knowledge of the United Kingdom that she gathers in visits called “awaydays” to cities as well as tiny hamlets. “She knows every inch of this country in a way that no one else does,” said Charles Powell, who came to appreciate the Queen’s expertise when he worked as private secretary to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. “She spends so much time meeting people that she has an understanding of what other people’s lives are like in Britain. I think she understands what the normal human condition is.”