The Queen Mother (160 page)

The injury of the fire was at once followed by insult. The Castle is Crown property and the fire damaged parts of the State Apartments and other reception rooms, not the Queen’s private rooms. The fabric of the Castle is maintained at government expense, and the building was being rewired under this arrangement at the time when the fire broke out. Like other Crown or national properties, it is covered by government indemnity rather than commercial insurance. It was therefore not obviously unreasonable when the Minister responsible immediately announced that the government would pay for the restoration.

To the astonishment and embarrassment of the Prime Minister, John Major, who had succeeded Mrs Thatcher in 1990, there was a storm of protest led by the
Daily Mail
, ostensibly a Conservative and monarchist paper. The
Mail
published a front-page editorial under the headline ‘Why the Queen Must Listen’, asking ‘Why should the populace, many of whom have had to make huge sacrifices during the bitter recession, have to pay the total bill for Windsor Castle, when
the Queen, who pays no taxes, contributes next to nothing?’ The
Mail
’s line was followed by other parts of the media. The matter was resolved by the Queen’s decision to open the State Rooms of Buckingham Palace to the public during late summer from then on. The £37 million of repairs were carried out without any additional contribution from the public purse.

Four days after the fire, the Queen made a remarkable speech at Guildhall. She had flu and a temperature of 101, but she refused to cancel the engagement. Her voice hoarse, she used a phrase that became instantly famous – 1992, she said, ‘is not a year on which I will look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an
annus horribilis.
’ (Her correspondent was Sir Edward Ford, the former Assistant Private Secretary to King George VI and then to the Queen.) She declared also that she understood that no institution – ‘City, Monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t’. The Queen’s lunchtime audience at Guildhall was touched and responded with a standing ovation.

On 26 November it became clear that the speech had been a prologue. John Major announced that the Queen and Prince Charles had agreed to pay tax on their private incomes and that £900,000 worth of Civil List payments that went to five members of the Royal Family would end. From now on only the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother would continue to receive direct Parliamentary annuities; the Queen would reimburse the government for the allowances given to her children under the Civil List.

Before the decision on tax had been announced, the Queen asked her Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, to break the news to Queen Elizabeth. He knew that she would not be pleased. The Queen Mother understood that the country was changing so much that monarchy had, as always, to change to retain consent.
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But, according to members of the family, she was concerned lest acceptance of such
reform should imply criticism of the Queen and her predecessors, particularly the King, for not having paid tax earlier.

Fellowes made an appointment to see her at Clarence House one evening at 6 o’clock. ‘The drawing room was in shadow with very few lights on. She gazed into the distance as I talked. When I finished there was a long pause and then she said, “I think we’ll have a drink.” ’ He was relieved. ‘In other words, she thought it was completely wrong, but she did not want to take it out on me. She didn’t want to hear about it or dwell upon it.’ He asked for a whisky and water; Queen Elizabeth had a martini.
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The tax-reform plan had been almost completely ready when the fire forced a premature announcement. Many newspapers were ungracious.
⁶⁰

On 7 December the Prince of Wales dined with his grandmother and gave her the draft statement to be made by the Prime Minister on the separation between him and the Princess.
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The announcement came on 9 December – ‘a sad day at Clarence House’, wrote the lady in waiting.
⁶²

Four days later there was a moment of pleasure to offset the gloom of the year. On Saturday 12 December the Princess Royal was married in Crathie Church to her second husband, Commander Tim Laurence, a naval officer and a former equerry to the Queen. The wedding clashed with one of Queen Elizabeth’s house parties at Royal Lodge. But she left her guests to fly to Scotland for the ceremony, and after the reception at Balmoral she flew back in the evening for dinner at Royal Lodge.

Even an
annus horribilis
comes to an end. The family spent Christmas and New Year together at Sandringham. In her thank-you letter to her elder daughter, the Queen Mother said, ‘I do hope that you feel rested and relaxed after all the ghastly happenings of last (& this) year. I do think that you have been marvellous, & so does everybody.’
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E
ARLY IN THE
New Year Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales together went to the Royal College of Music where she officially handed over to him the presidency of the institution which she had assisted diligently and with great pleasure for so many years. Then they went together to see the new apartment into which he was moving at St James’s Palace; the Princess of Wales continued to live in
their home at Kensington Palace. A few weeks later, after taking his boys back to their preparatory school, Ludgrove, the Prince went to supper with Queen Elizabeth at Clarence House – it was just the tonic he needed, he told her. ‘It very nearly finished me off completely, seeing those two, pathetic little figures standing in the drive waving forlornly as I drove away.’
⁶⁴

Queen Elizabeth had another great anxiety. Martin Gilliat, still her Private Secretary, had been diagnosed with cancer; he was now very ill. Queen Elizabeth gave a dinner party to celebrate his eightieth birthday; there were about thirty guests, and Martin Charteris, the Queen’s former Private Secretary and one of the few courtiers whose joie de vivre matched that of Gilliat, made a short speech praising his beloved colleague. After dinner they all had a singsong around the piano. They were as merry as they could be given the appearance of their friend.

Even now Gilliat did not feel he could leave Queen Elizabeth. He soldiered on for more than three months and, in the words of Martin Charteris, he was ‘run to a shadow, visibly dying, jaundiced as a yellow guinea, scarcely able to walk’, but still ‘courageous, humorous and of wonderful morale until the end’.
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Over the last weekend of his life, he worked from his flat in St James’s Palace. On Monday 24 May he was at his desk when he said he felt more than usually unwell; he went into hospital that afternoon. Three days later he died.

Queen Elizabeth was suddenly without the much loved man (‘dear, indomitable Martin’, Ted Hughes called him)
⁶⁶
who, with wit and good cheer, had organized both her public life and her private engagements, shared her racing interests, and protected her from the outside world for nearly forty years. The Queen wrote to her with sympathy: ‘Darling Mummy, I have just heard about Martin’s death – I am so very sorry. I know how much you will miss him after such a long time of relying on him – I felt much the same when my Martin left, only he was still around if I needed to ask anything difficult.’
⁶⁷

Queen Elizabeth felt Gilliat’s death as keenly as that of Arthur Penn three decades earlier. Like Penn, Gilliat had been an essential stimulant in the cocktail of good humour in her Household. ‘He was such a wonderful mixer,’ she said later. ‘One of the kindest of people. He was always helping somebody.’
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Their relationship became second nature to them both. The artist Andrew Festing, who painted her twice in the early 1990s, thought they behaved more like brother and
sister than Queen and courtier. ‘They bickered,’ he said. ‘She would say to me, “When are you coming next?” and I would reply that I would ask Martin. “There’s no point in talking to him. Fix it with me” she would say. Then Martin would tell me, “That’s absurd. She’s bonkers. Talk to me.” ’
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Others observed that Gilliat was able to be tough with her when he felt that she was being wilful or extravagant, and saw to it that she did not always get her way. In his address at Gilliat’s memorial service, Martin Charteris chose P. G. Wodehouse’s words, ‘like a prawn in aspic’, to describe how well his friend had fitted into life at Clarence House.

Gilliat was succeeded as private secretary by Alastair Aird, who had worked for Queen Elizabeth since 1960. The Queen assured her mother that he would be ‘
very good
’,
⁷⁰
and he was, though Aird later recalled that she found it difficult at first to adjust to his different style.
⁷¹
But his courtesy and attention to detail were invaluable to her.

More sadness was to come. A few weeks after Martin Gilliat’s death, Ruth Fermoy was admitted into Edward VII Hospital for tests. Queen Elizabeth visited her there. Lady Fermoy had inoperable cancer and she died in early July. Queen Elizabeth took the Princess of Wales to the funeral of her grandmother in King’s Lynn. Prince Charles came too. After the funeral the Prince and Princess joined the Queen Mother for a picnic at Wood Farm, Sandringham, and the Princess then flew back to London with her. The Princess’s aunt Mary Roche wrote to Queen Elizabeth, grateful that she had been ‘so caring and inclusive’ towards Diana; she was touched to see Prince Charles and her niece ‘so apparently close’ and was filled with a wild hope that they could get back together again.
⁷²

Thus in a very short time two of the people to whom Queen Elizabeth had been closest for decades had gone. Their deaths, coming as they did on top of all her family’s problems, left her feeling bereft. She wrote to Ted Hughes to say, ‘We have lately been battered by tragic happenings and I found it hard to put pen to paper.’
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Hughes’s friendship was a continued pleasure. He had come fishing at Birkhall again and, as usual, he kept the party entertained. The weather was wild – there was snow one morning, but the trees were venturing into bud. He wrote the Queen Mother another whimsical poem which invented a life for a young woman they had seen near their picnic place on the hill. Hughes called her Miss Dimsdale and
Queen Elizabeth loved the fantasy.
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She even suggested a marriage between Miss Dimsdale and another of Hughes’s imagined characters, the Rev. Cedric Potter. ‘As they are both dream people could a dream wedding be a possibility?’ she wrote to him. ‘I can see the announcement in the Daily Telegraph –
A wedding has been arranged and will shortly take place between Julia eldest daughter of Doctor Dimsdale and Rev. Cedric Potter, Rector of Knoware
. I wonder where the happy union will take place. Possibly on the steep frowning glories of dark Lochnagar. Forgive all this nonsense, and with a thousand thanks, I am ever yours, Elizabeth R.’
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Later in summer 1993, during the traditional visit of
Britannia
to the Castle of Mey, the family set itself a special task: they gathered to build a cairn in memory of Martin Gilliat and Ruth Fermoy. Mikie Strathmore, Queen Elizabeth’s great-nephew, whose idea the project had been, had brought with him from Glamis a stone block carved with the two friends’ initials and dates, to be fitted into the cairn. It was an emotional day. Under a brilliantly clear Scottish sky, Queen Elizabeth supervised the construction while the Queen led the party in gathering nearby stones and piecing them together. The Queen’s Press Secretary, Robin Janvrin, a former naval officer and diplomat, recalled that it was ‘a real labour of love, a hugely symbolic moment in which all of the family there paid homage to two great old friends’.
⁷⁶

Nineteen-ninety-three was, in every way, hard for Queen Elizabeth. She was lame, her skin was in places as thin as tissue, and her legs bruised easily. But little or none of this was apparent to anyone but her personal maids and her doctor and nurses; she never complained and she rarely sought medical treatment. Her homeopathic doctor, Dr Anita Davies, prescribed propolis for her lesions. The Prince of Wales arranged for his Australian physiotherapist, Sarah Key, to treat her legs.

Notwithstanding such assistance, the Queen became increasingly worried about her mother’s health as the decade went on, and thought that, with the infirmities of age, life was less fun and less easy for her. One constant risk was that she might fall, and the Queen sent her mother a special stick: ‘Darling Mummy, Your daughters and your nieces would very much like you to TRY this walking stick! It has a magic handle which fits one’s hand like a glove and therefore gives one confidence in movement, especially when feeling dizzy! Just at this
moment, it would make the two Margarets, Jean
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and me very happy and relieved if you would rely on its support!’
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Queen Elizabeth never warmed to such aids, and what she did not like she stubbornly resisted. One year at Mey, while she was at church, her staff installed handrails either side of the stairs down to the front door. She stared at them angrily for days before she agreed to use them. She still used the lift only to ride downstairs, and walked back upstairs. She did eventually make much use of another aid which the Queen provided – the golf buggy which her chauffeur John Collings had suggested would be useful. She did not like it at first, but when it was painted in her racing colours she used it at race courses and elsewhere. But not everywhere. On one occasion the Queen had the buggy sent up to Mey. It was returned next day.

Losing her eyesight was in some ways even harder. From the mid-1990s she was less and less able to recognize people who came into the room, though she disguised the fact well. She still liked to have her menu handwritten in French for every meal, but she could not read it. Nor could she read her speeches. She could still write cheerful letters, but it was more difficult. Thus ‘please forgive my horrid hand writing but something has gone wrong with the focus of my eye so I hope that it is legible.’
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