The Queen Mother (162 page)

The summer was punctuated by her usual engagements, including her annual visit to the Cinque Ports, but in mid-July she quietly went into King Edward VII’s Hospital for the removal of a cataract in her left eye.
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No engagements were cancelled, and the operation did help a little to improve her vision. For her ninety-fifth birthday, Queen Elizabeth used the golf buggy to move among the usual crowd of well-wishers at Clarence House. She then had lunch and dinner with family and friends and next day flew to Scotland. Ted Hughes sent her another birthday poem. ‘How fortunate I am to have a friend who is a great poet!’ she thanked him. ‘Lucky lucky me!’
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By November that year both hips were giving her considerable pain. On 15 November she calmly went to lunch with friends at the Ritz, and then was driven to King Edward VII’s Hospital. She had decided to have a right hip replacement. The operation was performed successfully, though not without difficulty, by Roger Vickers the next morning, assisted by the anaesthetist Dr Di Davis. Vickers, who had taken over as the orthopaedic surgeon to the Queen in 1993, had been reluctant to carry out the operation until it became essential. In the event he found her to be a good patient. She stayed longer than most patients in hospital, because she wanted to be able to walk unaided
down the steps when she left. Afterwards she invited all the doctors and nurses and their spouses, and the cleaners of her room, to a party at Clarence House. They were moved and delighted.
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While she was at Sandringham after Christmas another member of her family, Rachel, widow of her much loved brother David, died. The roads around Sandringham were impassable with snow and ice and Queen Elizabeth was distressed that she could not get to St Paul’s Walden for the funeral. She sent a tender letter to her nephew Simon, talking of his mother’s brave spirit, her courage, her humour and ‘her great loving kindness. I know that when my heart fails me I shall hear Rachel saying come on now, don’t give up.’
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On 6 February, the anniversary of the King’s death, Queen Elizabeth celebrated Holy Communion as usual at the Royal Chapel in Windsor Great Park. She received a heartening letter from the former chaplain of the Royal Chapel, the Rev. Anthony Harbottle, a devout and kindly man who had served with the Royal Marines during the war and was also a distinguished lepidopterist, the first person in Britain to breed the New Pale Clouded Yellow butterfly. He had become close to many members of the Royal Family, but particularly the Queen Mother, throughout his time as chaplain from 1968 to 1981. In 1972, on the twentieth anniversary of the King’s death, she wrote to tell him that the family had all thought his sermon was ‘
perfect
’. In February 1982, the first year after he had ceased to be chaplain, she wrote to tell him how much they missed his ‘sympathy and understanding’ at the service.
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Every year thereafter Harbottle would write to her on the anniversary of the King’s death, and every year she would reply. Queen Elizabeth took comfort in his vivid statements of belief in an all-encompassing, loving God, the resurrection of the dead and the reunion of souls. Her faith was traditional and uncomplicated and she derived a great deal of support from it. She was more interested in liturgical tradition than in theological subtleties. She preferred, to put it mildly, the 1662 version of the Prayer Book and the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible. Her friend Lord St John of Fawsley, a regular guest at her home, said, ‘It was the Prayer Book that she loved.’
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She did not like such new-fangled ideas as ‘the kiss of peace’
or even the handshake. ‘When she saw it winging its way towards her, she stiffened and took evasive action. Her religion was loving kindness.’
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Her devotion to the truths of the Christian gospel sustained her through sadness and nourished her sense of commitment to others.

Another friend and lady in waiting, Lady Elizabeth Basset, put it thus: ‘In LIVING, her faith shines out almost unconsciously and speaks through her dedication to her country, in her tremendous sense of duty, and her endurance, her courage, and last but not least her sense of humour and enjoyment of life.’
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I
N
1996 Q
UEEN
E
LIZABETH
was cheered by the state visit of President Nelson Mandela to London, following South Africa’s readmission to the Commonwealth. He came to tea with her at Clarence House on 9 July and she then attended the state banquet in his honour. She marvelled in the change that Mandela had peacefully brought about, and dared for the first time in decades to be hopeful about the beloved country.
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It was the summer of heroes. On 18 July she received the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. The meeting took place at a complex time, just one year before Hong Kong was due to revert from British rule to China. The Chinese government was always sensitive to criticism of its human rights record in Tibet. The day before Chinese officials had attacked a cross-party group of British politicians for inviting the Dalai Lama to address members of the Lords and Commons. Their actions, said a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, ‘will have an adverse affect on the Sino-British relationship’.

This was the first time that the exiled Tibetan leader had been received by a member of the Royal Family. It was a moving encounter and the Tibetan spiritual leader explained to the Queen Mother that as a boy in Tibet he had seen newsreel and pictures of her and the King in bombed-out London and had wanted to meet her ever since. The Dalai Lama seemed, in the words of Robert Ford, the Foreign Office official with him, to be ‘captivated by the charm of Her Majesty’. This was very clear when he left her – he took her hand and placed it to
his bowed forehead, a mark of sincere respect and affection.
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For years afterwards the Dalai Lama referred to this meeting in speeches and interviews, saying how impressed he had been by Queen Elizabeth’s optimistic view of the world and of improvements that she had witnessed during the twentieth century. ‘I was deeply impressed and inspired’ by her, he said. Her optimism reinforced his own and he was further encouraged when Prince Charles inherited and expanded his grandmother’s interest in the plight of Tibet.
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At the Sandringham Flower Show, in late July that year, Queen Elizabeth arrived in a carriage with Prince Charles; they then toured the stalls together in her golf buggy. Ted Hughes, who was again among her guests, captured it all in another poem, called ‘The Prince and His Granny’. The second of the five verses ran:

She was ‘thrilled and delighted’ by it, she told him. First, she said, the Prince himself read it to his granny ‘(Very nicely)’ and then she had read it herself ‘again and again’. He had evoked lovely memories, she said, and she ended by sending ‘an immense amount of gratitude from the Prince’s Granny, Elizabeth R’.
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A disagreeable occurrence for her in 1996 was publicity over the size of her overdraft which suddenly hit the headlines – £4 million, the papers said. That she was extravagant and lived beyond her means had always been assumed – how could any retired person, even a queen, pay for so many homes, horses, staff and dresses? Her finances were managed by Ralph Anstruther until he fell ill and was replaced as Treasurer by Nicholas Assheton, the former deputy chairman of Coutts. She had a passbook from Coutts that would be brought by hand every quarter, written up by hand and detailing all her personal cheques. Most of them were to dressmakers and those close friends whom she helped. Her racing account was still looked after by Michael Oswald. There were inevitable financial shortfalls, even after her Civil
List annuity rose, eventually, to £643,000 to cover her official expenses. As we have seen, the Queen had elected always to cover her mother’s racing losses and other expenses, and thus enable her to continue the style of life to which she was both accustomed and suited.

Her expenditure would doubtless have been much reduced had she not been so determined, despite her age, to continue leading a remarkably active public and private life. In 1997 she carried out fifty-four public engagements and many private ones. In early February there was an enjoyable family weekend at Royal Lodge for the christening of her great-grandson, Samuel Chatto, the son of Princess Margaret’s daughter Sarah and her husband Daniel. Lord Snowdon was there for the christening and lunch and she made sure that he sat next to her.

Later that month she gave tea to the President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, and his wife during their state visit, and attended the banquet for them at Buckingham Palace on 25 February. Over the next two days she inspected the Royal Yeomanry, of which she was honorary colonel, in Chelsea, and paid a visit to the National Headquarters of the British Red Cross Society. March followed the usual pattern, with race meetings at Sandown and Cheltenham and the presentation of shamrock to the Irish Guards at Pirbright on 17 March. So it continued throughout the year, with almost all her true and tried engagements, public and personal.

She had her usual fishing fortnight at Birkhall, and Ted Hughes came. He was recovering from an operation and Queen Elizabeth invited Carol Hughes to come too, although wives did not usually accompany their husbands on these occasions. As always he entered into the spirit of the place and loved his ‘deeply restful and richly happy’ days there.
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As lord warden of the Cinque Ports, she visited Walmer Castle from 18 to 21 July and went to Sandringham for the King’s Lynn Festival a week later. Prince Charles was there as usual and wrote to her afterwards, ‘I still can’t believe that another year has passed and that, once again, we have walked round the flower & vegetable tent at Sandringham, talked to all those hardy annual people in the crowd and sung Cole Porter songs after dinner with Raymond Leppard.
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As
always,
everything
was a very special treat because it was with
you.
’
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She was at Clarence House for her birthday lunch, before which the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery paraded by in her honour. This year she invited Prince William and Prince Harry and their father wrote to her afterwards that his boys ‘adored it’.
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She then left as usual for the Castle of Mey on 7 August. There was a sad moment at Mey that summer:
Britannia
made her last visit. The Conservative government of John Major had decided to decommission the royal yacht and this decision was confirmed by the new Labour government, led by Tony Blair. The yacht had been an effective seaborne embassy and trade platform for Britain for over forty years, as well as being the family’s floating haven both when they were promoting Britain and when they were taking holidays.
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Britannia
anchored off Caithness for the last time on 16 August 1997. The Queen came ashore to Mey leading a large family party which included Prince Andrew and his daughters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Princess Anne and her husband, her children Peter and Zara, Prince Edward and his friend Sophie Rhys-Jones (whom he married in June 1999), and Princess Margaret’s son and daughter, David Linley and Sarah Chatto, with their spouses.

Lunch that day was fun but somewhat melancholy. Conscious that without their resident muse, Martin Gilliat, their collective writing skills were much diminished, Queen Elizabeth’s Household had gone for the best – they secretly asked Ted Hughes to come up with some lines to be sent to the Queen as she sailed away for the last time. His verse ended:

The reply from the yacht was similar in spirit:

That autumn, the Queen and many members of the family attended the decommissioning of
Britannia
at Portsmouth. Queen Elizabeth did not go. As with other aspects of life she considered disagreeable, she turned away from the subject. Her friends and Household knew not to mention the yacht to her again.

On her departure from Mey, she spent the last weekend of August as usual at Balmoral before moving on to Birkhall. That weekend, on the night of 30–31 August 1997, came disaster. The Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash in Paris. Her drunken driver had been speeding to escape an insistent swarm of press photographers.

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I
N THE EARLY
hours of Sunday morning, 31 August, the Queen wrote her mother a note to be given her when she awoke, telling her of the tragedy.

At Balmoral everyone’s first concern was for the Princess’s sons, William and Harry. Fortunately they were there with their father and the rest of the family, all of whom rallied to help them in different ways. But time to cope with shock and loss were not permitted to any of them. This at once became a national tragedy and the tone was set by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who a few hours after her death eulogized the Princess of Wales as ‘the People’s Princess’.

There was an extraordinary outpouring of grief across the country which grew more intense throughout the week. This was a remarkable testimony to the Princess’s popularity, but some of it was self-indulgent and passions were inflamed by non-stop broadcasting of events and shrill demands from tabloid newspapers. ‘SHOW US YOU CARE’ one front page screamed at the Queen. Whether intentionally or not, such attacks upon the monarch helped deflect public attention from the fact that the Princess had died in a flight from press harassment.