The Queen Mother (155 page)

Two days later she met many friends and admirers at a celebratory afternoon garden party at the Palace – she seemed untiring and did not leave until 6 p.m. There was a birthday carnival at her childhood home, St Paul’s Walden Bury, dinner with the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House, and then on 24 July she attended the Royal Tournament. This was a special birthday edition of the then annual military tattoo and embraced all of the many units of the armed forces with which she was associated. That evening she gave a party at Clarence House for the colonels of all those regiments and other organizations which had taken part.

She loved and was touched by it all. Almost all. The only birthday celebration she did not much enjoy was one which was repeated rather too often across the country – planting the first of a group of eighty rose trees in her honour. It seemed to her that she had to do it ‘all over the place, & if I ever get to 81, there won’t be room anywhere in England & Scotland for any more
Roses
, thank goodness.’
⁷¹

At the end of July she went, as usual, to Sandringham for the Flower Show and the King’s Lynn Festival. It was the centenary year of the show and she was presented with a cheque for plants from the Committee; she then returned to London where she received a deluge of letters, cards, telegrams, birthday cakes and bouquets of flowers. At Clarence House her staff had reckoned on some 20,000 messages, on the basis that Winston Churchill had received 23,000 for his eightieth birthday. In the event there were more than 30,000 for Queen Elizabeth, and extra staff had to be brought in, some of whom worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week for a month, to reply to all well-wishers.
⁷²

On the morning of her birthday she went out of the gate of Clarence House to wave to the large crowd; there was a fly-past of ten Jet Provosts in E formation at noon, her daughters and four of her grandchildren came to lunch and that evening she went with Prince Charles to a gala at the Royal Opera House. Her grandson was again much moved by the enthusiasm expressed for her.
⁷³

Parliament was well represented in tributes. On 5 August the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, George Thomas (two of the parliamentarians closest to her), came to present messages of congratulation along with eight members of each House. She entertained them to drinks in the garden.

Finally, on 6 August she was able to get away from it all and fly to Mey where, she told Prince Charles, she would ‘sink back into obscurity’. ‘Some obscurity …!’ he commented.
⁷⁴
Before leaving, she wrote to thank her daughter the Queen for all the celebrations – ‘such happy affairs, & enjoyed by everyone who was there’.
⁷⁵
The Queen replied with an emotional thank-you letter to her mother: she said that the family had loved it all and ‘rejoiced in the huge and loving feeling of thanksgiving for all that your life represents which has come from all walks of the people who make up this country and Commonwealth, and especially your own family. I only hope you have been buoyed up by knowing what people feel. From your very loving Lilibet’.
⁷⁶

A few days later the Queen, Prince Charles and other members of the family sailed in
Britannia
through bad weather up the west coast of Scotland for their annual Western Isles cruise culminating in lunch at Mey. In preparation, the day before, Queen Elizabeth and Ruth Fermoy spent an hour shelling peas. On 14 August a happy day was had with the usual picnic lunch and much cheer.

At the end of her Mey holiday that year Queen Elizabeth flew south for the traditional family weekend at Balmoral, before moving on to Birkhall. She was always slightly saddened to forsake the family at Balmoral to drive down the road to Birkhall alone. Now she found that the cabin eased that annual move. Leaving Balmoral at lunch time and breaking the journey at the Bull and Bush, in a spot that she loved, made the transition much less painful.
⁷⁷

*

T
HAT SUMMER
Queen Elizabeth enjoyed the arrival not only of her new picnic place, but also of her future granddaughter-in-law. This
was something to which she had long been looking forward. She had sat near her three grandsons in church at Crathie on a previous summer Sunday, admiring them in their kilts, and thinking how proud their mother the Queen must be of them – ‘so good looking & gay and clever. And such good company! How I hope that they will all find dear, charming, pretty, intelligent, kind, & GOOD girls to marry!’
⁷⁸

In the media, if not within the family, most speculation at this stage inevitably centred on the Prince of Wales and his possible choice of bride and thus of the future Queen. The Prince often took his girl friends to meet his grandmother. After she had invited him and one young woman to the opera in early 1980, he wrote to Queen Elizabeth, ‘She so enjoyed it and I do hope you approved of her in that short time.’
⁷⁹
The Prince knew that, to win Queen Elizabeth’s approval, a young woman would have to have a clear sense of duty alongside her other qualities.

In the second half of 1980 he became close to Lady Diana Spencer, the pretty nineteen-year-old daughter of Viscount Althorp, later Lord Spencer, by his wife Frances, the daughter of Lord Fermoy. The Spencers had a long history of service at Court and both Lady Diana’s grandmothers, Cynthia Spencer and Ruth Fermoy, had served Queen Elizabeth as ladies in waiting; indeed, Ruth Fermoy was one of her oldest friends. It has been alleged that Queen Elizabeth and Lady Fermoy had somehow contrived to bring about the marriage of their grandchildren. There is no evidence of this but, like others in the Royal Family, Queen Elizabeth seems to have been pleased with the Prince’s choice.

From the start, the relationship between the two young people was crowded by the media. As soon as her name was linked to that of the Prince, Lady Diana became a star of the world’s press, the face that would sell millions of magazines and newspapers for years to come. Journalists now observed fewer and fewer boundaries; members of the Royal Family – now known as ‘the royals’ – became more and more the subjects of front-page speculation, innuendo, pursuit and attack. The obsession of the press with Lady Diana was sometimes welcome to her, but it was often invasive if not brutal. It made any pretence at normal life impossible.

The couple’s engagement was announced on Tuesday 24 February 1981. ‘Great excitement at the happy news,’ the Queen Mother’s lady in waiting wrote in the diary. That day Lady Diana arrived to stay for
a few days at Clarence House and the Queen Mother gave a dinner party for her and Prince Charles. As an engagement present for Lady Diana she had chosen a sapphire and diamond brooch. Lady Diana thought it was a ‘staggering’ gift, and told her, ‘I have never owned a piece of jewellery like that & will be proud to wear it when I’m with Charles – I only hope that I’ll be able to do it justice!’ She added, ‘I could not have been happier at Clarence House, & to me it was the ideal place to escape to after all the excitement. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity of living there. One of the nicest things of being married to Charles is that I will be able to see more of you!’
⁸⁰

Prince Charles was evidently delighted with his fiancée. In one letter to friends quoted by his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, he wrote, ‘I do believe I am very lucky that someone so special as Diana seems to love me so much … Other people’s happiness and enthusiasm at the whole thing is also a most “encouraging” element and it makes me so proud that so many people have such admiration and affection for Diana.’
⁸¹

In early March 1981 Prince Charles brought his fiancée to spend the weekend at Royal Lodge with his grandmother; they all attended one of the Queen Mother’s favourite race meetings, the Grand Military Meeting at Sandown Park. Prince Charles rode Good Prospect in the Gold Cup race; the horse fell but no harm came to either horse or rider. The Prince thanked his grandmother for a lovely weekend: ‘it was particularly special that Diana was there too.’
⁸²
After another such visit to Royal Lodge a few weeks later, the Prince told his grandmother, ‘Diana, I know, adored every minute of our stay.’
⁸³

The prospect of the royal wedding – the marriage of the future king of England and the first time a prince of Wales had married since the reign of Queen Victoria – fast became a subject of national and indeed international fascination. It was a welcome diversion from the economic and political difficulties of the time. Nineteen-eighty-one was a hard year. The Thatcher government’s radical, monetarist attempt to address Britain’s structural and financial problems was leading to a large rise in unemployment. Discontent grew and there were riots in London, Liverpool and other towns in protest against what seemed to many to be harsh economic measures.

Fairy tale usurped reality, at least for a time. Hundreds of pages of newspaper supplements and magazine articles covered every aspect of the event. Thousands of items of memorabilia were launched with
enthusiasm upon the market. ‘Charles & Di’ was emblazoned on everything. It was not just marketing, though that certainly was no barrier. Prince Charles was one of the most popular figures in the Royal Family at the time; he was regarded as a serious and decent young man, who worked hard and enjoyed pleasing the myriad people whom he had to meet. And Lady Diana seemed to be the perfect young bride, an exquisite future queen of the United Kingdom.

In April 1981 the Prince made an official visit to Australia and New Zealand, Venezuela and the United States. In a long letter to his grandmother he wrote that people had been very kind and welcoming. He continued, ‘I must say, I am missing Diana a great deal & she seems to be missing me! She has written lots of letters that get better & better & funnier & funnier & seems to be doing
wonderfully
at home.’
⁸⁴
But in fact Lady Diana was finding it difficult to adjust to the pressures of her new life and Queen Elizabeth – who had once been in a similar position herself – was concerned. She told Sir John Johnston, who as comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was in charge of the protocol for the wedding, ‘I think she’s having difficulty finding her way.’
⁸⁵

That summer, as the family and the country prepared for the royal wedding, Queen Elizabeth continued with her usual blend of duties and pleasures. In May she made one of her private trips to France and on 2 June she much enjoyed launching the new aircraft carrier
Ark Royal
at the Swan Hunter yard at Wallsend. Next day she attended the Derby which was won by Shergar, the superb horse owned by the Aga Khan which was later stolen and killed by the IRA. A few days later she opened the physiotherapy department and swimming pool at King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers, familiarly known as Sister Agnes. The money for the pool had been raised in part by the Royal Warrant Holders Association as their eightieth-birthday present to the Queen Mother, who had then selected the hospital to receive their gift.

The Queen’s Birthday Parade on 13 June 1981 was marred by two incidents. The public and dangerous one occurred when someone in the crowd fired shots near the Queen as she rode down the Mall, and frightened her much loved horse, Burmese. Fortunately both horse and rider were experienced (this was their eighteenth Trooping together) and neither was hurt. The Queen continued almost as if nothing had happened. It emerged that the gunman was firing only blanks, but that was not evident at the time – the Queen’s skill, her
sangfroid and her courage were impressive and led to a new surge of monarchist fervour and patriotism just before the wedding.

Unseen that same day was an accident which befell the Queen Mother – as she was leaving Horse Guards Parade, she slipped and hurt her leg. It took a very long time to heal. Despite her injury, she insisted on going ahead with a planned visit to Canada in early July – Canada was a leitmotif of her eighties. She made four trips there during the decade. But she was hobbling badly throughout the trip and when she returned she was in such pain that she had to cancel a number of engagements. She was nevertheless determined to recover in time for the wedding of her grandson on 29 July.

On 28 July, the eve of the wedding, there was much coming and going at Clarence House. Bridesmaids dresses and pages uniforms arrived. That night a huge firework display was to be staged in Hyde Park, attended by the Royal Family and their principal guests. Half a million people were expected to line the streets and fill the park to see the Prince of Wales light the first in a chain of beacons to blaze across the country, and to hear Handel’s
Music for the Royal Fireworks
played in front of a specially constructed pyrotechnic Palace in the Park.

Queen Elizabeth had invited the bride, together with her sister Lady Jane, the wife of Robert Fellowes, Assistant Private Secretary to the Queen, to stay at Clarence House that night. It was a low-key evening with no dinner party. In fact the generations separated early. The two young women had supper alone together in their upstairs sitting room, while the two grandmothers, Queen Elizabeth and Lady Fermoy, had theirs in front of the television in the main drawing room on the first floor. Frances Campbell-Preston, who was in waiting, joined them and, in her private record of the evening, noted that the Queen Mother was in excellent spirits. They watched
Dad’s Army
and then the news which was followed by an interview with Prince Charles and Lady Diana. ‘Diana is awfully good,’
⁸⁶
said Queen Elizabeth. Then came the fireworks and Queen Elizabeth provided good-natured commentary on all the important guests appearing on the screen. All in all, Frances Campbell-Preston concluded, it was a joyful evening – ‘the Queen Mother in the most marvellous form’.
⁸⁷

Next day, vast crowds – perhaps over half a million people – gathered along the route between Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral. Queen Elizabeth drove to the Palace with the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn, her Mistress of the Robes, in attendance on her,
to join the Queen’s procession. She took her place with other members of the Royal Family under the dome of Wren’s magnificent Cathedral and greatly enjoyed the service. Back at the Palace, the family appeared on the balcony and the Prince kissed his bride to roars of approval from the crowds in the Mall. Then they set off, as his father and mother had done almost thirty-three years before, to start their honeymoon at the Mountbatten home, Broadlands, in Hampshire, and completed it in the royal yacht
Britannia
.