Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

SEVEN

New Beginnings

ELIZABETH II WAS TWO MONTHS FROM HER THIRTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY when she gave birth for the third time. Unlike the arrivals of Charles and Anne in the early years of her marriage, she now had the sovereign’s obligations competing for her postpartum time. “Nothing, but nothing deflected her from duty,” recalled assistant private secretary Sir Edward Ford. “She’d go into labor and have a baby, so we knew we weren’t going to see her for a while. But within a very short time, twenty-four or forty-eight hours at most, she’d be asking whether there were any papers and would we care to send them up?”

Andrew Albert Christian Edward, second in the line of succession, was barely a week old when twenty-nine-year-old Princess Margaret seized the limelight by announcing her engagement to the prominent photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, also twenty-nine. Since the bitter disappointment of her dashed romance with Peter Townsend more than four years earlier, the Queen’s sister had cut a showy figure among London’s smart set. Her hairstyles changed with her moods, and she displayed her curvy figure in flamboyant outfits featuring vivid colors and leg-revealing skirts. (Dismayed by her un-aristocratic open-toed shoes, Nancy Mitford called her “Pigmy-Peep-a-toes.”) A heavy smoker, Margaret was known for her ten-inch cigarette holders, and for drinking Famous Grouse whisky, often to excess.

While the Queen would engage people in conversation, Princess Margaret would address them in what museum director Roy Strong described as a “slightly explosive drawl.” She was more insistent on formalities than the sovereign, rebuking friends when they unwittingly violated protocol with a word or a gesture. “If you missed the ‘royal’ in ‘Your Royal Highness,’ she would rip you to shreds,” said one of her friends. “She would say, ‘There are members of Arab states who are highnesses. I am a royal one.” One slyly believable moment in the film The Queen had Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II remarking, “I don’t measure the depth of a curtsy.… I leave that to my sister.”

Since 1953 Princess Margaret had been enjoying a prolonged adolescence while living with her mother at Clarence House, where she often slept late after long evenings at parties—frequently exhausting the other guests, who knew it was impolite to leave before a member of the royal family. To the embarrassment of their friends, Margaret could be cavalier with her mother, walking into the room where she was watching television, for example, and changing the channel, or criticizing her food at a luncheon party. “You mustn’t worry,” the Queen Mother said to her friend Prudence Penn, who expressed concern about Margaret’s rude treatment. “I’m quite used to it.”

The Queen adopted a similarly phlegmatic approach, even when Margaret was an hour and a half late to her tenth anniversary party at Buckingham Palace. “I felt the Queen was not served well by her sister, who was not a good advertisement for the monarchy,” said Patricia Brabourne. “The Queen dealt with it by acting in private as the sister giving support she needed and probably giving the hard advice that probably wasn’t followed.”

Margaret could also be affectionate and warmhearted—the “rare softness” that Peter Townsend had observed—as well as caring and kind, notably to those who were ill. She had a keen interest in theater and the performing arts, principally ballet. She enchanted her loyal friends with her quick wit and vivacity, enhanced by a sharp intelligence.

When Margaret fell in love with Tony Armstrong-Jones, it came as a relief to the Queen, who wanted above all for her sister to be happy. He was not an aristocrat but his background was privileged. His father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a barrister with deep roots in Wales, and his beautiful mother, Anne Messel, came from a family of wealthy bankers who had made their original fortune in Germany before converting from Judaism to Christianity in London, a genealogical fact that the royal family chose to disregard. The Armstrong-Joneses had divorced when Tony was just five, and his mother had acquired aristocratic cachet when she married the Earl of Rosse. An education at Eton and Cambridge gave Tony entrée into upper-class circles where he found clients for his growing photography business.

He was several inches taller than tiny Margaret, and good-looking, with a dazzling smile and a hint of vulnerability from a slight limp caused by polio that he contracted at sixteen. Sophisticated and charming, he moved easily from the raffish world of artists and writers to the rarefied atmosphere of the Queen’s court. Equally important, he could match wits with Margaret, and he shared her taste for the high life. He also captivated both the Queen Mother and the Queen, who offered him an earldom before the wedding. He initially declined the title, only to accept it the following year when he became the Earl of Snowdon (after the highest mountain in Wales) before Margaret gave birth to their first child, David, ensuring that the Queen’s nephew would receive his own title—Viscount Linley—rather than being known as Mr. Armstrong-Jones.

Elizabeth II provided generously for the couple. Two days before their marriage, she and Prince Philip hosted a sumptuous court ball at Buckingham Palace, where the “whole atmosphere,” wrote Noel Coward, conveyed “supreme grandeur without pomposity.”

The wedding day on Friday, May 6, 1960, sparkled with sunshine. White banners bearing the initials A and M woven in gold fluttered over the Mall, where an estimated 100,000 people crowded the route to Westminster Abbey, resembling “endless, vivid herbaceous borders,” wrote Coward. “The police were smiling, the Guards beaming, and the air tingled with excitement and the magic of spring.”

Margaret was the image of a fairytale princess, dressed in an artfully simple gown of white silk organza, nominally a Norman Hartnell creation but in fact designed by Tony. The three-inch-high Poltimore diamond tiara encircled her chignon and anchored her long silk tulle veil. Prince Philip walked his sister-in-law to the altar, where Tony waited, looking “pale” and “a bit tremulous.” Eight bridesmaids aged six to twelve, led by nine-year-old Princess Anne, followed in floor-length white silk dresses.

Noel Coward watched the Queen, elegant in a pale blue gown and matching long-sleeved bolero jacket, “scowl a good deal,” and wondered whether this “concealed sadness or bad temper.” Close observers of Elizabeth II understood her expression meant she was straining to contain powerful emotions. “When she is deeply moved and tries to control it she looks like an angry thunder-cloud,” wrote Labour politician Richard Crossman.

As with other royal spectaculars, the Duke of Norfolk organized the day’s pageantry, and the BBC presented the first televised royal wedding ceremony. The Glass Coach—the traditional conveyance for royal brides for the previous five decades—transported the smiling couple back to Buckingham Palace, where they had a wedding breakfast for just 120 of the two thousand Abbey guests. The Queen gave her sister and brother-in-law Britannia for their six-week honeymoon. The £26,000 cost of the wedding was paid by the Queen Mother, who was in turn heavily subsidized by the Queen, although the Macmillan government picked up the £60,000 tab for the honeymoon. On their return to London, Margaret and Tony moved into a twenty-room apartment on four floors of Kensington Palace provided by the Queen and refurbished at a cost of £85,000, £50,000 of which was allocated by the government’s Ministry of Public Works to repair structural damage caused by bombs during the war.

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ELIZABETH II CURTAILED her foreign travel during her third child’s first year in 1960 but otherwise remained fully engaged in affairs of state as Macmillan sent her a stream of letters and memos, mainly on foreign policy. For their weekly audiences, Macmillan provided clear agendas that gave her “an opportunity to consider the issues involved, and frame her own views (by custom, generally put in the form of questions) on them,” wrote his biographer Alistair Horne. Macmillan’s respect for the Queen deepened with time as he observed the consistent “assiduity with which she absorbed the vast mass of documents passed to her, and—even after so few years on the throne—her remarkable accumulation of political experience.”

On his trip through Africa early in 1960, Macmillan had told the white South African parliament that “the wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” Scarcely a month later, South African police killed sixty-seven protesters in Sharpeville, and the biennial Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London threatened to fracture over apartheid.

After ten days of wrangling, Macmillan engineered a communiqué that mollified both black and white African leaders. “The official text is weak,” he confided to the Queen, “but has the advantage of being agreed.… It does at least keep the Commonwealth for the time being from being broken up.” But South Africa continued on its separatist path, and in October 1960 the white population voted overwhelmingly to abolish the monarchy in South Africa and establish a white-dominated republic.

One of the cornerstones of Macmillan’s foreign policy was his campaign to secure Britain’s admission to the Common Market, the European free trade zone consisting of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, which he believed was essential for Britain’s economic progress. The main power broker was French president Charles de Gaulle, who needed to be persuaded that the United Kingdom intended to be a full-fledged partner, since he suspected that the British had stronger affinities with the Commonwealth and the United States. To help with the sales pitch, Macmillan enlisted the Queen, who presided over a lavish three-day state visit for de Gaulle and his wife.

Twice a year since the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth II had been entertaining heads of state at Buckingham Palace according to strict protocol and unchanging rituals. (Later in the 1960s she would add Windsor Castle as an alternative setting.) These state visits were an essential part of her portfolio of duties, and she extended her legendary hospitality with the same care and attention to leaders of nations large and small. The British government would choose the head of state to be honored, but only the Queen could extend the invitation.

The visits typically lasted three days, and the head of state would stay in the most opulent accommodations in Buckingham Palace—the six-room Belgian Suite on the ground floor, overlooking the gardens. The set routine began with a ceremonial welcome (usually on a Tuesday) with a military guard of honor and marching bands followed by a carriage procession to the Palace for a luncheon with the royal family. After an exchange of gifts, the Queen presented an exhibit in the Picture Gallery featuring royal memorabilia of interest to the visiting head of state. In the evening she would host a white-tie state banquet for around 160 in the Palace ballroom. Over the next two days, the visiting leader would meet with officials in government and business, and on the second evening would host a “return” dinner in honor of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

For the French president, the British government added an extra layer of magnificence to the usual pomp and pageantry “to appeal to de Gaulle’s sense of grandeur—and vanity.” In addition to his impressive arrival on April 5 in an open carriage with the Queen and the state banquet including her effusive toast, he was heralded by trumpeters from the Household Cavalry before his address to the House of Lords and House of Commons in Westminster Hall, and he was treated to a gala at Covent Garden as well as a nighttime fireworks spectacular outside the Palace. De Gaulle, who could be a difficult dinner partner prone to speaking elliptically, later wrote that Elizabeth II was “well informed about everything, that her judgments on people and events were as clear-cut as they were thoughtful, that no one was more preoccupied by the cares and problems of our storm-tossed age.” As for Britain and the Common Market, he remained coyly noncommittal.

Shortly after the turn of 1961, the Queen resumed her travels, embarking with Philip on a five-week tour of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Iran, Cyprus, and Italy, missing the first birthday of Prince Andrew. Not long after her return in early March, Macmillan gave her his insights into America’s new first couple, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his glamorous young wife, Jacqueline. Jack Kennedy had been a familiar presence in England in the years before World War II when his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had served as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (the official title of the American envoy to Britain). No modern American president before or since had such close connections to Britain as Jack Kennedy.

Nearly a decade older than Elizabeth II, Jack had been a college student in the late 1930s while she was still a child, so they hadn’t known each other. But she had seen Joe Kennedy and his wife, Rose, on their visits to Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace. The Queen revealed to Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney the affection she had for JFK’s mother, mentioning a time when a relative had died and she and Margaret had been confined to a small room while their parents received dignitaries. “Only Rose Kennedy came into the room and chatted with them,” Mulroney recalled. “They were ignored by the other guests—and she remembered it some forty years later!”

Joe Kennedy had failed as ambassador, serving only two years before Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled him in November 1940. Kennedy had urged appeasing the Nazis and drew the scorn of the British for his cowardice when he retreated to an estate in the country during the Blitz. The humiliating performance of his father had “eaten into [JFK’s] soul,” in the view of the president’s friend, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. But rather than creating resentment, Kennedy’s experiences in England as a young man deepened his affection for the country and its leaders, above all Winston Churchill, whom he regarded as “the greatest man he ever met.”

Macmillan actively disliked Joe Kennedy and was initially dubious about his son, worrying that he was a “young cocky Irishman” and a “strange character” who could be “obstinate, sensitive, ruthless and highly sexed.” Yet Dorothy Macmillan’s nephew, Billy, the Marquess of Hartington, had been married to Jack Kennedy’s sister Kathleen (both died in plane crashes in the 1940s), and this sharpened Macmillan’s curiosity.

Following his first two encounters with Kennedy in March and April 1961, the sixty-six-year-old prime minister forged an instant bond with the forty-three-year-old president. “We seemed to be able (when alone) to talk freely and frankly to each other,” Macmillan later wrote, “and to laugh (a vital thing) at our advisers and ourselves.” He reported to the Queen that Kennedy had “surrounded himself with a large retinue of highly intelligent men.”

At Kennedy’s suggestion, Macmillan appointed as British ambassador to the United States forty-two-year-old Sir William David Ormsby Gore, a friend of Jack’s since prewar days, and first cousin to Billy Hartington. Gore’s sister Katharine was also married to Macmillan’s son Maurice, further sealing what became known as the “special relationship within a special relationship.” Kennedy named as his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s sixty-three-year-old David K. E. Bruce, a highly regarded veteran of the diplomatic corps who had previously headed the embassies in France and West Germany. Bruce’s first wife, Ailsa, was the sister of Paul Mellon, the Queen’s closest American friend in horse racing circles. At ease in plus fours on the shooting field and in jodhpurs riding to hounds, Bruce melded perfectly with the Queen’s social set. Known among his peers as a “professional statesman,” he won the confidence of senior members of the royal household as well as top politicians, and would serve for eight years, the longest tenure of an American ambassador in London.

In June 1961 the first couple visited London after they had dazzled the French on a swing through Paris, and JFK had faced a truculent and intransigent Nikita Khrushchev during a sobering two-day meeting in Vienna that put Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in sharp relief. Billed as a private stopover to attend the christening of the daughter of Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, and her husband, Stas, the real purpose was for Jack to unburden himself to Macmillan about his discussions with Khrushchev. The prime minister would later report to the Queen that Kennedy had been “completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian premier.”

The evening after the christening, the Queen and Prince Philip gave a dinner for the Kennedys at Buckingham Palace—the first time an American president had dined there since 1918 when Woodrow Wilson was entertained by King George V. The royal couple “put on a good show in the beautiful reception rooms,” David Bruce wrote afterward. Yet the thirty-one-year-old first lady, who eight years earlier had written with confident insouciance about the coronation, now felt uneasy with the thirty-five-year-old Queen, whom she dismissed as “pretty heavy going.” “I think [she] resented me,” Jackie told author Gore Vidal. “Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.”

The first lady was equally indiscreet with photographer Cecil Beaton. While conceding that “they were all tremendously kind and nice,” Jackie said that she “was not impressed by the flowers or the furnishings of the apartments at Buckingham Palace, or by the Queen’s dark-blue tulle dress and shoulder straps, or her flat hairstyle.” The first lady recounted to Vidal that “the Queen was human only once.” Jackie had complained about the pressures of being on tour in Canada, causing the Queen to throw her a conspiratorial glance and reply cryptically, “One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.”

Later in the year during her rescheduled state visit to Ghana, Elizabeth II proved her worth to the American president in an unanticipated way. Following the African country’s independence from Britain in 1957, newly elected president Kwame Nkrumah had appeared to be an enlightened leader, hospitable to Western political and business interests and committed to multiracialism. He had an Egyptian wife who was a Coptic Christian, and several of his top aides were English, including an army captain as his secretary and a woman who served as his aide and amanuensis.

But in the two years since the Queen’s visit was postponed, Nkrumah had hardened into a dictator presiding over what Winston Churchill characterized as a “corrupt and tyrannical regime,” imprisoning hundreds of members of the opposition without trial, expelling British officers and advisers, and railing against Britain in speeches. Just as ominously, after a visit to Moscow in September 1961, Nkrumah had edged toward an alliance with the Soviet Union and a possible departure from the Commonwealth.

Despite the specter of violence triggered by demonstrations, labor unrest, and death threats against Nkrumah, Macmillan advised the Queen to proceed with her travel plans for mid-November. At the same time, he urged Kennedy to help thwart Soviet designs on Ghana by offering the country millions of dollars for the Volta Dam project, a request the American president held in abeyance. Members of Parliament and some elements in the press pushed for the Queen to cancel the trip. Churchill wrote to Macmillan of the “widespread uneasiness both over the physical safety of the Queen and perhaps more, because the visit would seem to endorse a regime … which is thoroughly authoritarian.” Macmillan replied that day, saying that “her wish is to go. This is natural with so courageous a personality.”

The Queen was profoundly irritated by the pressure from the “fainthearts in Parliament and the press.… How silly I should look if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception.” Even after bombs exploded in Accra five days before her trip was to begin, she refused to waver.

She melted Nkrumah, with whom she was photographed dancing at a state ball, and she charmed the Ghanaian press, who called her “the greatest Socialist monarch in the world.” The people of Ghana “fell for her—went out of their minds for her,” said the BBC’s Audrey Russell. “In that open car … she didn’t bat an eyelid—Nkrumah next to her. You just saw the Queen very calm, very poised—not smiling too much—just right.” Afterward Elizabeth II sized up Nkrumah with uncanny precision in a letter to her friend Henry Porchester, expressing surprise at “how muddled his views on the world seemed to be, and how naïve and vainglorious were his ambitions for himself and his country,” along with her dismay at his “short term perspective” and inability to “look beyond his own lifetime.”

On her return to London in late November, Macmillan called Kennedy and said, “I have risked my Queen. You must risk your money!” JFK responded that he would meet Elizabeth II’s “brave contribution” with his own, and less than two weeks later he announced the U.S. financing of the Volta Dam. With that, the fear of Ghana’s departure from the Commonwealth abated.

The Queen did not see Jack Kennedy again, although Jackie and Lee came through London in March 1962 on the way home from India and Pakistan. This time Elizabeth II gave the American sisters a Buckingham Palace luncheon with the Macmillans, Andrew Devonshire (the 11th Duke), Michael Adeane, Master of the Household Patrick Plunket, and other guests. Unlike the previous visit, the first lady and the Queen seemed to click. “It was a great pleasure to meet Mrs. Kennedy again,” Elizabeth II wrote to JFK. “I hope her Pakistan horse [a bay gelding named Sardar given her by President Mohammad Ayub Khan] will be a success—please tell her that mine became very excited by jumping with the children’s ponies in the holidays, so I hope hers will be calmer!”

THAT SPRING IT was time for Prince Charles to take the next step in his education after his final year at Cheam. In April he was dispatched at age fifteen to Gordonstoun. If anything, Philip had become even more convinced that the rigors of his alma mater were vital to strengthening his timid and introspective son and making him more resilient. He felt it was important that a boy should be shown “the stuff he is made of, to find himself, or become even dimly aware of his own possibilities.” After a young man had overcome physical challenges, Philip could see “a light in his eye, and a look about him that distinguishes him from his fellows.” The reason such young men looked different, he said, was their discovery that “they can take it,” that “they were only frightened of themselves to begin with and now they know they have no cause to be frightened of themselves or of anything else either.”

Yet as with Cheam, Philip transmuted his own successful experience at Gordonstoun into wishful thinking about his son, and neither Elizabeth II nor her mother could dissuade him. The Queen Mother had advocated Eton as an easier fit, a place where Charles could find familiar companionship with the sons of aristocrats. But Philip argued against its proximity to Windsor Castle and London, where tabloid journalists were lurking. The modernist in Philip also saw advantages in exposing his son to a more egalitarian and diverse environment than Eton, with its deeply rooted upper-class traditions.

Charles suffered what he later called his “prison sentence” of five years in northeastern Scotland under conditions even worse than at Cheam. More than the short pants in frigid weather, the early morning runs, the cold showers, and open windows in all seasons, Charles found the constant bullying intolerable. He wrote to his parents of the “hell … especially at night,” when his dorm mates would throw slippers and pillows at him or “rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can.” He pleaded to come home, but his father responded that Charles should find strength in the adversity.

The only respite for Charles came from visits to Balmoral, and particularly Birkhall, where he could be pampered by his grandmother and share her interest in art and music. But even then, “an awful cloud came down three or four days before he had to return,” recalled David Ogilvy, the 13th Earl of Airlie, a family friend. “He hated returning to Gordonstoun.”

Following the royal family’s annual Balmoral holiday that year, the world stood still for thirteen days in October when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba and narrowly averted a nuclear war. The Queen was kept informed throughout the crisis by Macmillan, who was in frequent contact with Kennedy. The missile crisis further solidified British-American ties. Kennedy had relied on David Ormsby Gore’s counsel for some crucial tactical decisions, most importantly the size of the blockade perimeter, and Macmillan had served as a useful sounding board.

By the Queen’s seventh and final year with Macmillan as her prime minister, they had settled into an amiable relationship of mutual understanding and respect. He had his own sense of grandeur, yet he treated her with a courtly deference in the spirit of Churchill. “She loves her duty and means to be Queen and not a puppet,” he wrote. He had particularly earned her admiration with his conscientious efforts to stabilize the Commonwealth. She in turn knew how to offer him levity, strength, compassion, or admiration as his mood required, and in 1963 she would deploy her entire range of reactions.

In January she commiserated over his disappointment when de Gaulle condescendingly vetoed British membership in the Common Market. Shortly afterward she and Philip left on Britannia for another major tour of Commonwealth nations in the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. On her return to Britain that March, she learned of a disturbing sex scandal that threatened to topple Macmillan’s government. His secretary of state for war, John Profumo, had been having an affair with a “fashionable London call girl” named Christine Keeler, who in turn was the mistress of a Soviet military attaché, leading to suspicions of espionage by Keeler and an impression of “political squalor” in a “frivolous and decadent” government, in the words of Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger.

Profumo initially denied his sexual intimacy with Keeler both to Macmillan and to the House of Commons, but in June he was forced to resign in disgrace after admitting he had lied. Macmillan was compelled to tell Parliament that he had been “grossly deceived”—which David Bruce called “pitiable and extremely damaging.” Bruce feared that confidence in Macmillan had been “greatly undermined.”

To the Queen, the prime minister wrote a letter expressing his “deep regret at the development of recent affairs” and offering his apology for “the undoubted injury done by the terrible behavior of one of Your Majesty’s Secretaries of State,” adding that he had “of course no idea of the strange underworld” of Profumo and his coterie. Elizabeth II replied with what Alistair Horne described as a “charmingly consoling letter … sympathizing with her prime minister over the horrible time he had been experiencing.”

Profumo withdrew from the public stage and devoted the rest of his life to working quietly on behalf of the poor and homeless. Years later he was discreetly befriended by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who so admired his dignified and responsible service that for her seventieth birthday party at Claridge’s in 1995 she seated him next to Elizabeth II. The Palace approved his place of honor, reflecting the Queen’s tolerance and capacity for forgiveness. She shared Thatcher’s respect for Profumo’s dedication to good works, and that evening she was seen “in animated conversation with him,” recalled Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, one of Thatcher’s senior advisers.

As David Bruce feared, Profumo’s conduct had seriously damaged Macmillan, who told the Queen in September 1963 that he planned to relinquish his party’s leadership before the next general election the following year. Less than a month later he was stricken with severe pain from an inflamed and enlarged prostate and was rushed into surgery on October 10 to remove what was thought to be a malignant tumor. The operation was successful and the tumor benign. Yet in a panic not unlike Eden’s, Macmillan nevertheless decided to resign immediately, and the Queen interrupted her annual summer holiday in Balmoral to return to London.

The drama that unfolded over the following week cast Elizabeth II in an unnecessarily bad light as Macmillan schemed to prevent his deputy, Rab Butler, from succeeding him. Through an extraordinary series of maneuvers, Macmillan set himself up as the ultimate arbiter by interviewing all four candidates from his sickbed at King Edward VII Hospital. He chose his sixty-year-old foreign secretary, the 14th Earl of Home, as the leader who would attract the most Conservative Party support. Macmillan buttressed his case with a poll of the cabinet showing ten ministers in Home’s favor, three for Butler, and three each for the other two candidates. However, the backing of the party rank and file was not as clear-cut.

Because of his post-operative confinement, Macmillan sent his letter of resignation to the Palace and arranged with private secretary Michael Adeane for the Queen to visit him in the hospital for their final audience. On the morning of October 18, 1963, the Palace announced that Macmillan had resigned. Shortly afterward the Queen, dressed in a peacock green coat and hat, set out for the hospital. Macmillan awaited her in his bed, which had been wheeled into the boardroom. He wore an old brown sweater over a white silk shirt, and he was tethered to a tube draining bile into a pail under the bed, with a bottle nearby in case he had an accident of incontinence.

As Elizabeth II entered the room, Macmillan was enchanted by her “firm step, and those brightly shining eyes which are her chief beauty.” The prime minister’s physician, Sir John Richardson, recorded that “there were in fact tears in her eyes.” Seated in a tall chair at his bedside, the Queen “seemed moved,” Macmillan later wrote, and said “how sorry she had been to get my letter of resignation.” From that moment, he was a former prime minister, and she had no constitutional necessity to heed his advice. In fact, in the two previous situations in which she had used her prerogative to select a leader for the Tory party, Churchill and Eden had specifically withheld any official guidance following their resignations.

Yet according to Macmillan, “the Queen asked for my advice as to what she should do,” and he obliged by reading aloud his memorandum arguing the case for Lord Home, adding that she should send for him “immediately.” Macmillan also urged her to refrain from appointing Home directly as prime minister. Instead, she should instruct him to “take his soundings” and report whether he had sufficient support from his party to form a government.

The Queen followed her former prime minister’s counsel to the letter. Home received the backing of the cabinet, including Butler, for whom refusing to serve as one of Home’s ministers would have been an act of disloyalty. The next morning, Home renounced his peerage and traveled to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands—the act of being officially received as the head of government, which requires picking up the Queen’s hand and brushing it lightly with the lips—as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, her fourth prime minister.

The selection process was criticized in the press and among politicians in both parties. Despite his oft-professed concern for constitutional propriety, Macmillan had boxed in the Queen, critics agreed, by virtually compelling her to take his advice after he had resigned. And for all his insistence on guarding her prerogatives, his actions effectively ended her role in naming the leader of the Tories. Not long afterward, the party adopted new Labour-style rules for choosing its leader through an election.

Critics blamed Macmillan and the familiar “magic circle” of aristocratic men for shaping a decision that should have been based on wider soundings. But Elizabeth II could be faulted as well for failing to organize her own independent canvassing beyond the cabinet—especially after being accused of consulting too narrowly for her selections in 1955 and 1957—and for yielding to Macmillan’s anti-Butler agenda. It was her most controversial decision to date, a curious abandonment of the astute political judgment she had developed in the twelve years of her reign.

Palace aides pointed out that Douglas-Home happened to be her personal preference as well. She reportedly regarded Butler as “too remote” and “too complex,” while Douglas-Home was another Old Etonian—also taught by the eccentric Sir Henry Marten—and a longtime family friend with whom she enjoyed country pursuits on their Scottish estates. Thin to the point of frailty, her new prime minister was a consummate gentleman with a fondness for flower arranging. David Bruce considered him “excruciatingly amusing.”

He was a familiar presence in the Queen’s official life as well, not only as a member of Macmillan’s cabinet, but also the highly dignified peer who carried the Cap of Maintenance on a stick at the Opening of Parliament. He took a progressive stance when he introduced the Life Peerages bill in the House of Lords in 1957, adding mischievously that “taking women into a parliamentary embrace seemed to be only a modest extension of the normal functions of a peer.” Further to his credit, he was an experienced hand in foreign policy with knowledge that included a year spent reading Marxist works including Das Kapital during his youth when he was afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine. He regarded the Queen as a “friendly headmaster receiving the head prefect in his study,” always listening intently, quizzing him astutely, and expressing concern about his problems.

Macmillan was sixty-nine when he retired, and he would lead an active life for twenty-three more years. The Queen wrote him a long and heartfelt letter while he was still recuperating, thanking him for being her “guide and supporter through the mazes of international affairs and my instructor in many vital matters relating to our constitution and to the political and social life of my people.” She offered him an earldom so he might “continue to take part in public life from the benches of the Upper House,” as well as the Order of the Garter, both of which he rather imperiously declined. More than two decades later, on his ninetieth birthday, he would finally relent, accepting the title of Earl of Stockton, conferred personally by the Queen as one of the rare hereditary peerages in the late twentieth century.

WHEN THE TRANSFER of Conservative power took place in October 1963, Elizabeth II was four months pregnant. Her nest was already two thirds empty, with Charles at Gordonstoun, and Anne off to boarding school at Benenden that September. By November the Queen had essentially retired from public appearances, although in mid-month she came to a black-tie dinner party given by Ambassador David Bruce and his second wife, Evangeline, at Winfield House, their residence in Regent’s Park. Because of her condition, the Queen asked that it be a small party, with just sixteen guests, all of whom she approved after discussions between Bruce and Michael Adeane.

“It is almost incredible how much detailed planning is involved in a dinner for the Queen,” Bruce wrote in his diary. The Polish butler, Russian chef, four footmen, and countless maids prepared “as if for a mammoth carnival,” including chasing down unfounded rumors that the Queen disliked soup and would only drink tomato juice while pregnant. The one admonition to the chef from the Palace was not to garnish his pastry with Amorini, the small Italian chocolate heart-shaped candies coated in bright colors or edible silver. When asked, the Queen said she was indifferent whether women wore long or short dresses.

It was a high-powered but lively British-American group: Mollie and Robert Cranborne (the future 6th Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury); Conservative politician Ian Gilmour and his wife, Caroline (a daughter of the 8th Duke of Buccleuch); American journalist Walter Lippmann and his wife, Helen; Lee and Stas Radziwill; the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire; Michael Adeane; Tory cabinet minister and future prime minister Edward Heath; and Katharine Macmillan (the wife of the former prime minister’s son, Maurice). The Queen knew everyone except the Lippmanns, and she was pleased to greet the Bruces’ spaniels as well.

“All went with a swing,” Bruce recalled. “The Queen appeared to like all the dishes and wines, she was ready and gay in conversation, as was her husband.… She blends openness with dignity, has a dazzling complexion, and cordial, sympathetic, unaffected manners.” After dinner she talked first to Walter Lippmann, then moved on to each of the men, while Philip conversed with the women. It was nearly midnight when the royal couple left.

Just ten days later, on the 22nd of November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “The unprecedented intensity of that wave of grief mixed with something akin to disaster swept over our people,” Elizabeth II recalled. Prince Philip and Alec Douglas-Home flew to Washington for the funeral, but because of her pregnancy, the Queen’s doctors advised her against attending the memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. She insisted on having her own service at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, to which she invited nearly four hundred American servicemen stationed in England.

Some eighteen months later, on May 14, 1965, she would preside over the dedication of a unique memorial to the fallen president: an acre of land at Runnymede, the site where King John sealed the Magna Carta in 1215, given by the British people to the United States in perpetuity. Marking the ground was a plinth with Kennedy’s birth and death dates along with an inscription from his inaugural address: “Let every Nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” A committee chaired by David Ormsby Gore oversaw the fund-raising, design, and construction of the memorial, all of which the Queen followed with marked interest.

At the dedication, Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh accompanied Jackie Kennedy and her children up a woodland path to the memorial site. Four-year-old John Kennedy Jr. gave the Queen a small bow, and his seven-year-old sister, Caroline, dropped a quick curtsy. As they climbed the hill, Prince Philip tenderly held John’s hand.

During the ceremony, Macmillan spoke sentimentally of his late friend and ally, and Elizabeth II’s graceful remarks showed “generosity, sympathy and understanding,” recalled David Bruce. She touched on JFK’s many ties to Britain—his life in England during the “doom laden period” before World War II, the death of his elder brother, Joe, “on a hazardous mission” during the war, and his “dearly loved sister” Kathleen, who lay “buried in an English churchyard.” The Queen talked of Kennedy’s “wit and style,” adding that “with all our hearts, my people shared his triumphs, grieved at his reverses, and wept at his death.” Jackie did not speak, but issued a statement of thanks to the British people, saying “you share with me thoughts that lie too deep for tears.”

ON MARCH 10, 1964, the thirty-seven-year-old Queen gave birth to her fourth child, Edward Antony Richard Louis, in the Belgian Suite at Buckingham Palace. She remained out of the public eye until May, but she kept up with her office work. When her baby was barely a month old, her government boxes revealed a disquieting secret she would be compelled to keep until its unmasking fifteen years later. Sir Anthony Blunt, since 1945 the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the man responsible for the art collections in her palaces, was a spy for the Soviet Union. In exchange for “immensely valuable” information about Soviet collaborators, the British intelligence service gave Blunt immunity. “The Queen knew for years that this man was a spy,” said Peter Rawlinson, Baron Rawlinson of Ewell, the government’s solicitor-general, who arranged the immunity deal. “It was essential to keep him in his position at Buckingham Palace looking after the Queen’s pictures. Otherwise Russia would have realized that his cover had been blown.”

If she was unnerved by the revelation of Blunt’s treachery, she gave no sign. “I find that I can often put things out of my mind which are disagreeable,” she told one courtier. Partly from training, but also her instinctive discretion, Elizabeth II had accustomed herself to absorbing information from so many different sources—intelligence reports, cabinet papers on proposed government reforms, a conversation with a judge on problems in the courts—that she learned how to seal off sensitive information. “She has a compartmentalized brain, with lots of boxes,” said Margaret Rhodes. “She can appear frightfully jolly while a constitutional question is going on in another part of her mind.”

Less than a week after Blunt made his shocking confession, Elizabeth II was hosting one of her springtime series of “dine-and-sleep” gatherings at Windsor Castle. “She talked of all sorts of things,” David Bruce recalled, “including such political questions as Laos, Cyprus, and Zanzibar, revealing extensive briefing and reading. On lighter topics she was humorous and communicative.”

These periodic entertainments, which Queen Victoria began in the nineteenth century when the court was officially in residence at Windsor each April, bring together eight to ten prominent guests drawn from the arts, diplomacy, the clergy, business, the military, academia, the judiciary, and politics for a leisurely evening of dinner and conversation. Although formal in structure, the Windsor dinners are more relaxed than the Buckingham Palace luncheons organized for a similar purpose. “She regards Windsor as her home,” said Alec Douglas-Home, “just like anyone else’s home. It’s hard for us to realize.” In addition to the Easter season, Elizabeth spends every possible weekend at Windsor and takes pride in being its chatelaine. She inspects the guest rooms before the visitors’ arrivals and selects reading material for their enjoyment.

The pattern of the dine-and-sleeps has varied little from the days of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who revived them after World War II. Each couple arrives between six and seven o’clock, to be greeted by an equerry and lady-in-waiting and escorted to their suite in the Lancaster, York, or King Edward III tower. The customary accommodation includes two large bedrooms and bathrooms, a ladies’ dressing room and commodious sitting room furnished with desks equipped with writing paper and pens, tables laden with mineral water, decanters of whisky, sherry, and gin, cornucopias of fruit, bowls of peppermint candies, jars of biscuits, and vases of fresh flowers.

She assigns a footman and housemaid to serve as each guest’s valet or ladies’ maid. Their job is to unpack the suitcases, fold underwear in gauzy organza bags, line up cosmetics and perfume bottles in perfect order, whisk away clothing for washing and ironing (“better than any dry cleaner in London,” said the wife of a Commonwealth diplomat), draw the bath at the guest’s requested temperature, drape a large bath towel over a nearby chair, lay out clothes, and before departure time repack everything with tissue paper. The size of the staff and level of pampering are unequaled, although museum director Roy Strong found it “unnerving to be descended upon by so many.”

The houseguests meet in one of the castle’s vast drawing rooms, where the Queen and Prince Philip, accompanied by the inevitable scuffling corgis, join them, along with a half dozen courtiers, for a round of drinks. The Queen tells stories about previous visitors, slipping into personalities and accents, and laughs about her misbehaving corgis. “It is always amusing to see when dogs fail to obey a royal command,” recalled one former courtier. Everybody is then escorted back to their rooms off the 550-foot, red-carpeted Grand Corridor curving along the east and south sides of the castle quadrangle.

Racing the clock, the guests have less than a half hour to change for dinner in the State Dining Room, which begins with drinks at 8:15 before the prompt arrival of the Queen and Prince Philip fifteen minutes later. Elizabeth II wears a long gown and glitters with large diamonds at her neck, ears, and wrists. Philip appears in a dinner jacket of his own design, a black-tie version of the “Windsor Uniform” originally created by George III for gentlemen at court: dark blue velvet, with brass buttons, scarlet collar, and cuffs.

The Queen doesn’t believe in general or even three-way conversation at meals, so everyone follows her lead. When she turns first to the left everyone follows suit, and all heads swivel suddenly when she turns to the right for the second half of the meal. She expects her dinner partners to know the protocol, although she sometimes offers practical tips. “I need to explain about the napkins,” she once told a guest. “Look over there. They’re doing it all wrong. They’ve got the starched side down. The napkin will slip off their knees. You do it like this, the unstarched side on your lap and then you tuck it under your bottom.”

Her conversation is congenial, but she never engages deeply, preferring to move from one topic to another. At the end of the meal, she has the somewhat outré habit of opening her evening bag, pulling out a compact, and reapplying her lipstick. When First Lady Laura Bush made a similar cosmetic fix during a Washington ladies’ luncheon, she cheerily commented, “The Queen told me it was all right to do it.”

Hewing to an upper-class ritual long after the advent of feminism in the 1970s, Elizabeth II and the women withdraw from the dining room after dinner, leaving the men to enjoy port and cigars at the table. “She never batted an eye,” recalled Jean Carnarvon, the widow of her longtime racing manager. “It was just expected.” Conversation in these vestigial female groupings might touch on harmless personal matters while yielding little about the Queen’s views.

The next stop is always the castle library, where the Queen has arranged to have objects of particular interest to each guest on display. “The selections are to entertain rather than inform,” said Oliver Everett, the Royal Librarian for nearly two decades. In the days preceding the dinner, the librarian sends her a note describing the proposed items and their importance. For an American official there could be correspondence from George Washington, or Mrs. Lincoln’s reply to Queen Victoria’s condolence note after her husband was assassinated, while the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum could be shown the original letter from the 8th Duke of Devonshire to Queen Victoria suggesting the museum’s name. “It gives people something to talk about,” said Jean Seaton, the widow of writer Ben Pimlott. “It is a good mechanism for the Queen, who is a fundamentally shy person.”

The culmination of the evening is the world’s most exclusive guided tour led by the Queen and duke through the priceless collections of the castle’s state rooms. “I suppose landscape is quite nice,” she said when asked her favorite style of painting. The equestrian scenes by George Stubbs give her the most pleasure, and it distresses her, she once said, that “he experimented terribly with his canvases, and we’ve got one which is flaking off and you can’t stop it.” She is also known to dislike most modern art. When she opened the Tate Modern gallery, “she was steered away from the unmade bed and the bits of animals preserved in tanks of brine and allowed to look at a few bright abstracts,” Diana Mitford, Lady Mosley wrote to her sister Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire.

Yet the Queen’s commentary on the Windsor Castle masterpieces by the likes of van Dyck, Holbein, and Rubens often surprises guests as she reels off the date painted, the subject, and a brief story about each artwork. “Her assessment of a picture is invariably honest and often shrewd,” said a former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. “She has a good visual memory. She will never pretend to appreciate something she doesn’t like or understand.” Unlike Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II is not a passionate collector who scours the sale catalogues for new finds. “She is neither an art historian nor a connoisseur,” said Oliver Everett. “But she knows what she has and the significance of it.” Her preference is for “beauty in nature,” as one of her former advisers put it. But she takes seriously her role as custodian of the royal collection, which includes some seven thousand paintings.

After coffee in one of the drawing rooms, the Queen and Prince Philip say their goodbyes, and are not seen again. Breakfast is served early in the individual suites, where printed cards ask guests to “refrain from offering presents of money to the Servants of Her Majesty’s establishment,” although tips are permitted for the acting valets and ladies’ maids. Some people take time to wander once more through the state rooms before being escorted out by a senior member of the household, who reminds them to sign the visitor’s book with its pages of heavy white cards. “What surprised me was not how many, but how few people ever stayed here,” observed Roy Strong.

BY THE SUMMER of 1964 the Queen had resumed her full public program. Once again she led her annual birthday parade in June riding sidesaddle, and she hosted a succession of garden parties in July at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Scotland. Queen Victoria began the parties in the 1860s for her aristocratic court, and Queen Elizabeth II democratized them in the 1960s after she abolished debutante presentations. With a guest list of around eight thousand for each, the garden parties are intended to reward people across the socioeconomic spectrum for their contributions to British life.

Personalized invitations of white pasteboard embossed in gold with the Queen’s crown and cypher announce that “the Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty” to invite the individual on the designated day. (The Lord Chamberlain, distinct from the ceremonial Lord Great Chamberlain, is the senior official at Buckingham Palace who supervises more than eight hundred staff.) When the Palace doors open at 3 P.M., the men in morning suits and the women in hats and afternoon dresses, along with members of the military in uniform and clergy in their vestments, wander through the gardens and rolling lawns. They patiently line up at the four-hundred-foot buffet in the enormous green and white striped tea tent for a cup of the Queen’s blend of Darjeeling and Assam and a selection of sandwiches, cakes, and pastries—all of which have been inspected earlier by the Queen. Two military bands play sprightly tunes, while the crowd is organized into lanes by the Yeomen of the Guard wearing scarlet and gold tunics, white ruffs, and red, white, and blue beribboned black velvet hats.

At the stroke of 4 P.M., the Queen, Prince Philip, and assorted other members of the royal family arrive on the terrace for the national anthem and fan out to the various lanes. The Gentlemen Ushers, retired military officers in morning dress and top hats, select around a hundred guests to be introduced to the Queen by the Lord Chamberlain, seeking as wide a cross section as possible. She spends an hour moving along the line, an expert in the art of fleeting but unhurried concentration on each of her interlocutors, and ends up at the Royal Tent emblazoned with a large gleaming crown.

A footman serves her a cup of tea from a tray as she takes a break for ten minutes before moving to the adjacent Diplomatic Tent to greet dignitaries and then returning to the Palace at 6 P.M. One year a diplomat’s wife was riveted as the Queen “drank her tea, kicked off her shoes and stood in her stockings with one hand on her hip. She was drinking and laughing and chatting with her butler.” Elizabeth II shows no sign of weariness at the familiar routine and understands the sense of occasion for the thousands of guests. As Cecil Beaton once watched her “standing talking quietly to a very moth-eaten couple,” he mused that “these people were all so admirable, the salt of the earth. They had done good deeds, worked for their country. They were the country’s backbone, and I feel the Queen knew this well.”

IN THE AUTUMN of 1964, the Queen and Prince Philip traveled to Canada for a nine-day state visit. They returned to London two days before a general election on October 15. Throughout Alec Douglas-Home’s year as prime minister, the media, primarily two new satirical outcroppings of 1960s popular culture, the magazine Private Eye and the television revue That Was the Week That Was, had mercilessly mocked him as an out-of-touch toff. Labour leader Harold Wilson had piled on, repeatedly referring to him by his hereditary title, the 14th Earl of Home. “I suppose,” Douglas-Home responded, “that Mr. Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr. Wilson”—a nickname that stuck.

In fact, Douglas-Home had acquitted himself well, and he was popular with the electorate. But an impulse for change pushed the Labour Party ahead by a small margin—44.1 percent of the vote and 317 seats to 43.4 percent and 303 seats for the Tories. Harold Wilson became the first Labour prime minister since Attlee took office in 1945. It was also the first time the Queen had not been involved in choosing the premier, since the party had already elected Wilson as their leader.

While Attlee, who counted three Old Etonians in his cabinet, had been a predictable sort of Labour politician, Wilson was an unfamiliar breed to the Queen: a lower-middle-class product of the academically selective English grammar schools who rose to attain top honors at Oxford, where he taught economics for nearly a decade. He was proudly provincial, with a pronounced Yorkshire accent, although he was passionately fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, and cultivated the donnish habit of pipe smoking. Still, his simple tastes, reflexive geniality, and quick wit made him good company.

When he arrived at Buckingham Palace on October 16 to kiss hands, he not only brought his wife, Mary, but his two sons, his father, and his political secretary and confidante, Marcia Williams. Rather than full morning dress, the pudgy new leader made a democratic statement by pairing his striped trousers incongruously with an ordinary suit jacket. The courtiers took it in stride, offering the family sherry in the Equerry’s Room while Wilson met with the Queen.

One of her obligations is to disregard her first minister’s political leanings, and Wilson’s certainly diverged from the Tory line of the previous dozen years. After Wilson accommodated labor unions with a “Social Contract,” Sir Michael Oswald, the manager of the Queen’s stud at Sandringham, suggested she give that name to one of her foals. “I got a bleak look from the monarch,” Oswald recalled.

Elizabeth II taught her fifth prime minister at once to take her seriously; when he came to his first audience expecting a general chat, she drilled him with specific questions about his views on shoring up the pound and addressing the balance of payments deficit. Like Churchill at a similar moment, Wilson was embarrassed to be “caught out,” and years later advised his successor to “read all his telegrams and cabinet committee papers in time” lest he “feel like an unprepared schoolboy.”

“We have to work very hard on him,” the Queen said to one of her ladies-in-waiting with a giggle after the first audience. “Within three months he would have died for her,” recalled the lady-in-waiting. “She is savvy in knowing what you have to work on.” The unabashedly Tory Queen Mother found Wilson “a bit touchy … uncomfortable to talk to,” so she was pleased that her daughter had “tamed him.” He was, in fact, more than amenable. “Harold was never a republican,” said Marcia Williams, later Baroness Falkender. “His family were very pro the Queen.” He admired the “real ceremonies of the monarchy,” he once said. “I have a great respect for tradition.”

It also helped that at age forty-eight, Wilson was only a decade older than Elizabeth II. “She started with Winston Churchill, who treated her in a fatherly way, but with Harold it was sort of an equal thing,” said his wife, Mary. Wilson found he could relax with the Queen in a way he hadn’t anticipated. “He was surprised that she used to sit this way,” said Marcia Falkender, leaning forward and grasping her wrists attentively. “She would sit down with him not like a lady does it, not sitting in a prim way. Her very stance gave him to believe she was interested.” Before long, added his loyal political secretary, “nobody came between Harold and the Queen. He had his audience once a week at 6:30 in the evening on Tuesdays. We would meet him in the hall and we would know where he was going. He would suck on his pipe, make a quip, and off he would go. And when he returned, you’d know he’d had a good time.”