Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

EIGHT

Refuge in Routines

IF HAROLD WILSON’S PREMIERSHIP MARKED THE TURNING OF A page, an epochal event three months later closed an important chapter in the life of the Queen. On January 24, 1965, Winston Churchill died at age ninety. Instantly the wheels began turning for a full state funeral, the first with such panoply for a nonroyal since the death of the Duke of Wellington in 1852.

The preparations, code-named “Operation Hope Not,” had begun in 1958 when the former prime minister nearly died from a sudden attack of pneumonia and the Queen decided that he should be given the supreme honor, overseen by her ceremonial expert, the 16th Duke of Norfolk. “It was entirely owing to the Queen that it was a state funeral,” recalled Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames. “She indicated that to him several years before he died, and he was gratified.”

President Lyndon Johnson was supposed to represent the United States, but he was bedridden at Bethesda Naval Hospital with acute bronchitis, and his doctors resisted. The president was eager to attend, not least because Churchill was confidently Anglo-American and regarded the bond between the countries as a “living entity to be fostered and prized.” Johnson desperately pressed for three days to obtain special accommodations including bringing his own chair to the funeral, arranging shelter from inclement weather, and gaining permission to sit while others were standing. He also secured an agreement from the Queen to receive him privately in Buckingham Palace after the funeral.

In the end, his physicians prevailed. Johnson not only lost his chance to participate in a grand occasion, but he would never again have a chance to meet the Queen. The president’s designated replacement, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, fell ill with influenza and had to bow out as well, reducing the official American delegation to only Chief Justice Earl Warren and David Bruce. Dwight Eisenhower attended as a private citizen and issued his own tribute hailing Churchill as “a great maker of history” who was the “embodiment of British defiance to threat, her courage in adversity, her calmness in danger, her moderation in success … the leader to whom the entire body of free men owes so much.”

By Elizabeth II’s decree, Churchill lay in state in Westminster Hall for three days, followed by a funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday, January 30, to “acknowledge our debt of gratitude … for the life and example of a national hero.” It was one of the most magnificent spectacles of the twentieth century, with 120 slow-marching naval ratings (noncommissioned officers) pulling the coffin on the gun carriage used at the funerals of Queen Victoria and Kings George V and VI, detachments from all branches of the armed services, nine military bands, and guns fired ninety times, once a minute for each year of his life. The male members of the Churchill family walked behind the coffin, followed by Churchill’s widow and daughters in a carriage provided by the Queen, who equipped it with rugs and hot-water bottles to help them ward off the cold. Hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the roads to watch the procession from Westminster to St. Paul’s, which took a full hour.

At the cathedral, the Queen arrived before the procession to join the congregation of three thousand (including leaders of 110 nations) and sit with her husband and mother in three red upholstered gilt chairs in front of the catafalque under the 365-foot dome. “Waiving all custom and precedence,” noted Mary Soames, the Queen “waited the arrival of her greatest subject.” Elizabeth II also told the Churchill family “we were not to curtsy or bow as we passed her, because it would have held everything up.”

The service lasted a half hour, with neither sermon nor eulogies, only prayers, scriptures, and three of Churchill’s favorite hymns. The second, Julia Ward Howe’s stirring “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” paid homage to his American roots (his mother was a New Yorker, Jennie Jerome), previously sung at St. Paul’s just over a year earlier at the memorial service for John F. Kennedy. At Churchill’s service, it was the hymn “most enthusiastically rendered,” wrote David Bruce.

Once a trumpeter had sounded the “Last Post” and a bugler had played “Reveille,” the Queen again broke precedent and left after the Churchill family had followed the coffin, borne by eight Grenadier guardsmen. The royal family stood silently on the cathedral steps with the other world leaders, “the clouds of cold coming from the Queen’s mouth” as the funeral cortege departed amid muffled drums for Tower pier. From there, the coffin, escorted by the family, was transported by launch up the Thames, and by train for burial in a churchyard near Churchill’s birthplace at Blenheim Palace.

In another unprecedented gesture, the Queen hosted a buffet luncheon at Buckingham Palace for all the chief mourners and foreign dignitaries. “It hit between wind and water,” David Bruce recorded, “restrained but informal.” Rather than greet her guests in a receiving line, the Queen circulated among them, her introductions managed by members of the household. Prince Charles, Princess Anne, and Prince Andrew “wandered casually about,” ten-month-old Prince Edward “was brought in for a speedy tour,” and the Queen left just before two o’clock.

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OF ALL THE striking scenes of the day, one of the most memorable was of Churchill’s coffin draped in the Union Jack, its only adornment a black pillow holding the insignia of the Most Noble Order of the Garter: the elaborate chain known as the Collar of the Order, with the enameled emblem of St. George and the dragon attached, and the badge with the cross of St. George and the Garter motto, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Shame on him who thinks evil of this). The Nobel laureate and recipient of countless other awards considered the Garter in a class by itself because, Churchill said, “only the Queen decides.” With a maximum twenty-four recipients—“Companions” they are called—at any given time, plus members of the royal family and foreign sovereigns, the Garter knights are probably the most exclusive club in the world. The Order was founded in 1348 by King Edward III, and the members serve until their death.

In June 1965, the Queen assembled her knights for their annual gathering, which included the installation of two new Companions, Basil Brooke, the former prime minister of Northern Ireland, and Edward Bridges, the former head of the Civil Service. Elizabeth II gives no specific reason for conferring her unique “mark of Royal favour,” but she has included eight of her prime ministers and other distinguished figures from politics, the law, business, the military, diplomacy, and the judiciary as well as hereditary peers, a number of whom she has chosen for serving her personally. With the exception of the royal members, women weren’t allowed in the Order until 1987, when the Queen decided to create full-fledged “Lady Companions,” the first of whom was Lavinia Fitzalan-Howard, the Duchess of Norfolk, who had been the Queen’s stand-in during rehearsals for the coronation, and who had regularly hosted Elizabeth II and Philip at her ancestral home, Arundel Castle, during the summertime Goodwood races. Intriguingly, Elizabeth II never honored her sister, Princess Margaret, although she appointed Princess Anne in 1994 and her cousin Princess Alexandra in 2003, both widely admired for their dedicated royal service.

Forty years after her father’s death, Mary Soames was appointed to the Order. When she came to Buckingham Palace, the Queen had laid out the insignia on a grand piano. “Well, here it is,” said Elizabeth II. As she pointed toward the collar, she said, “That is your father’s chain!” “Oh, Ma’am,” replied Mary, “that can’t be.” Feeling slightly abashed at contradicting the monarch, she explained that the collar was in a display case at Chartwell, the Churchill home in Kent. “I caused it to be retrieved,” said the Queen with a twinkle, explaining that she had arranged for a replica to go on display.

Garter Day, which is held on the Monday after Trooping the Colour in June, is a particularly enjoyable fixed point on the Queen’s yearly calendar. The Garter knights meet at Windsor Castle to witness the installation of new members in the Garter Throne Room. Conjuring a medieval tableau, they wear their gleaming chains and badges over heavy dark blue velvet robes embellished with white satin bows on the shoulders. “Whoever invented these robes wasn’t very practical,” the Queen once remarked, “even in the days when somebody wore clothes like these.” As she administers the oath and exhorts the knights in their faith, “she is highly practical, quick & neat,” noted Deborah Devonshire when her husband, Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, was invested. “The language is thrilling, ancient & rather frightening, nothing but battling with things & people.”

The Queen treats the knights to luncheon in the Waterloo Chamber, a long gallery with an intricately carved ceiling and clerestory windows resembling a man-o’-war ship from the nineteenth century. The table is splendidly set with silver gilt and flowers. Like other royal banquets, there is “no hanging about for a slow eater,” Deborah Devonshire recalled.

Following the luncheon, the knights ready themselves for a colorful procession, fastening their robes and adjusting their badges, collars, and flat black velvet hats with waving ostrich plumes. They walk from the main part of the castle down a cobbled street to St. George’s Chapel, preceded by regimental bands in gold tunics, the Military Knights of Windsor in scarlet uniforms, and Officers of Arms in scarlet and gold tabards and black knee breeches, passing by dismounted members of the Household Cavalry lining the route. Many of the Garter knights are elderly, and some shuffle unsteadily under the weight and volume of their robes. “The Queen is always very concerned for their well-being,” said Lieutenant Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, former Comptroller for the Queen. “She will say, ‘Pay attention to this one. Make sure he is not puffed,’ so I would take him by a shortcut.”

Garter Day is one of the monarchy’s popular tourist attractions, with eight thousand spectators each year, and a thousand more filling St. George’s Chapel for the service of thanksgiving, where the Garter knights are tucked away in the choir stalls. Afterward, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and knights ride in carriages and cars back to the castle. “It’s always very lucky to plod downhill and not uphill,” the Queen observed. Once the royal family members take their leave, the Companions meet in the Waterloo Chamber for tea, a happy atmosphere of “hats off, hair down, and general relaxation,” recalled Deborah Devonshire.

IT WOULD BE more than a decade before Harold Wilson, the Queen’s first socialist prime minister, would participate in the rarefied rituals of the Garter—pageantry he embraced with enthusiasm. In the meantime, he pursued an agenda of wide-ranging social reforms and increased government spending on housing, pensions, health, and welfare subsidies. Once a government captures a working majority in Parliament, however slender, the ruling party has virtually untrammeled power, with no prospect of compromise with the opposition. The postwar Conservative governments had done little to reduce the welfare state constructed by the Attlee government, and Wilson significantly broadened the reach of those programs.

Starting in 1965, his Labour majority pushed through laws abolishing capital punishment, ending government censorship, liberalizing abortion, lowering the voting age to eighteen, reforming divorce, and decriminalizing homosexuality. Wilson’s government nearly doubled the number of universities, significantly expanding free higher education (a practice that would end thirty-three years later with the introduction of means-tested tuition fees). At the same time, he eroded the quality of secondary education by eliminating the publicly funded selective grammar schools that had educated not only Wilson but other prominent British leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath. Those academically rigorous schools were replaced by egalitarian comprehensive schools with lower scholastic standards. To pay for the expanded government programs, the Labour Party binged on borrowing and raised taxes.

The prime minister shared his plans in the Tuesday evening audiences at Buckingham Palace. Wilson felt the Queen “had very good views on everything,” Marcia Falkender recalled. “She didn’t tender it in a way of saying, ‘This is my advice and you should take it.’ She knew she was not there to give advice, but she was there, if possible, to discuss it in a decent way.” Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines said that the Queen’s Socratic approach forced the prime minister to “justify any proposals to her, which was good discipline. It meant he had to have his arguments very clear in his own mind.” In the larger sense, however, she doesn’t appear to have slowed the march of socialist policies, although Harold Macmillan, for one, believed she had a “restraining influence.”

Like Macmillan, Wilson catered to the Queen’s fascination with political gossip. Among other things, he told her about French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s alleged penchant for trolling the streets of Paris for women. “The fact that she was Queen, she could take it all in, and nothing would shock her,” said Marcia Falkender. “She has a very good understanding of people and reading them.… She is a highly intelligent raconteur of the political scene.” Wilson also relied on the Queen’s confidentiality. When he was worried about fellow cabinet members undercutting him, she gave him a shoulder to weep on.

While her relationship with Wilson was warm from the outset, Elizabeth II knew that most of his class-conscious colleagues took a dim view of the monarchy and the Queen. Yet she managed over time to win over some of the hardest cases, among them Barbara Castle, the flame-haired firebrand known as Labour’s Red Queen, and Richard Crossman, described by historian A. N. Wilson as a “large, shambolic bisexual.” When Harold Wilson’s cabinet first met with Elizabeth II to be sworn in as members of the Privy Council, they grudgingly went along with what Wedgwood Benn, an outspoken socialist, called a “terribly degrading” ritual of kneeling, swearing on the Bible, taking the Queen’s hand, and walking backward. He petulantly offered “the most miniature bow ever seen.”

Crossman, like so many others, appreciated how the Queen put him at ease, noting that she had a “lovely laugh” and was “a really very spontaneous person.” The Queen felt relaxed enough with Crossman to unburden herself on a variety of topics in their audiences, and he came to pride himself on being an astute observer of her nuances. When Crossman mentioned Dame Evelyn Sharp, an intimidating civil servant in charge of urban renewal, the Queen snapped, “Oh that woman. I can tell you I don’t like her.” As for her Privy Council ritual, she said, “Philip always said it was a waste of time.” Unbeknownst to Elizabeth II, her interlocutor was busily recording her comments in his copious diaries. When after his death in 1974 his literary executors planned to publish his observations, Martin Charteris dissuaded them from including the “most objectionable passages” involving the Queen’s comments.

Barbara Castle, who had a spiky sense of humor and a vivacious personality, was taken with the Queen’s wit and “natural charm” and established an easy camaraderie with the Queen. After a state banquet in 1965, Castle was standing with Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret as they chatted about Prince Charles’s anxiety over taking his university admission examination. “You and I would never have got into university,” the Queen suddenly said to her sister, as the Labour politician hastened to reassure the monarch that it “wasn’t as formidable as it seemed.” Castle was impressed that Elizabeth II could shift quickly between politicians of opposing viewpoints by remembering as many biographical details as possible, “which kept the conversation going in a perfectly safe, politically neutral way.”

Benn, however, remained unrepentantly opposed to the Queen and all she stood for—an attitude unsoftened by his marriage to a wealthy American with a large house in fashionable Holland Park. As postmaster general in the Wilson cabinet, he even launched a quixotic campaign to remove the image of Elizabeth II from postage stamps. She patiently listened to his proposal and examined sketches of his suggested alternatives. He left his forty-minute audience convinced she had agreed to the scheme. “She took him for a mug,” said historian Kenneth Rose. “He thought he had wrapped her round his finger.” Privately, she let Wilson know her displeasure, and the prime minister squelched the matter. When Benn later came to the Palace to be sworn in after Wilson had switched him to minister of technology, the Queen couldn’t resist saying, “I’m sure you’ll miss your stamps.” He thanked her for her “kindness and encouragement in helping me to tackle them,” before obediently bowing and walking backward from the audience room.

One of her other detractors was Labour Party foreign secretary Michael Stewart. During a dine-and-sleep visit to Windsor Castle in 1968, he announced to Lydia Katzenbach, wife of the U.S. attorney general, that “except in knowledge of horse flesh,” the Queen was “a stupid woman.” When Katzenbach recounted the criticism afterward, David Bruce expressed his surprise, “in view of the common understanding that the Prime Minister finds the Queen remarkably well informed on international problems. That she prefers, if given a choice—which she is not—horses to affairs of state, may well be the case, but no one can accuse her of neglecting her interminable and I should imagine often boring duties of an official character.”

AS ELIZABETH II entered middle age, horses were indeed both her passion and her refuge. Over the years she has seldom purchased horses, preferring them to be “home-bred,” a tradition stretching back to Queen Elizabeth I. By the 1960s, she had been supervising the royal equine enterprise for more than a decade, with breeding operations located at Sandringham and nearby Wolferton as well as Hampton Court, along with Polhampton Lodge Stud in Berkshire, which she began leasing in 1962. Ten years later she bought Polhampton to use as a bucolic camp for recently weaned yearlings and runners needing a rest—what her veteran stud manager Michael Oswald calls the “walking wounded.”

In her private as well as public life, the Queen is a woman of predictable routines, which, in the case of her racehorses, are timed to their rhythms of mating, birth, weaning, training, and racing. She typically visits the mares and stallions at the Sandringham stud farm twice in the first six weeks of each year when the breeding season begins, and again in April and July to see the foals resulting from the previous season’s mating. With her trusty old-fashioned camera, she methodically photographs the mares and their offspring.

In the early spring as well as the fall she inspects her yearlings at Polhampton, and whenever possible in the spring and summer she observes more than a score of her young thoroughbreds in training at stables in Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Berkshire. She follows their progress at races throughout the year, only a small number of which she sees in person because of the demands of her job. The Derby in early June and Royal Ascot later that month are indelible dates in her calendar, and she attends other major race meetings when she can.

The Royal Stud at Sandringham is a picturesque late-nineteenth-century complex of red-brick and native brown carrstone stables topped by chimneys and cupolas. The mares inhabit roomy boxes that can easily accommodate newborn foals, but each stallion lives like a king in his considerably larger box with tiled walls, ten inches of wood chips on the floor, high windows, a pitched roof of wood and Norfolk reed, and infrared lights for drying off. There are four paddocks of two acres apiece for the stallions, enclosed by brick walls and hedges, with nearby gardens and fountains.

The main business of the stud takes place in the covering shed, a cavernous structure with a sandy floor. The Queen’s breeding and racing advisers make suggestions about mating, but unlike her role as sovereign, where she follows the guidance of others, she often takes the initiative, based on her observations as well as her extensive knowledge of bloodlines. She knows which horses are good for stamina, which for speed, and which possess the ineffable trait of courage. She is an astute judge of conformation—whether, as Henry Porchester observed, “a horse had a good shoulder, short cannon bones, good feet, flat feet, bent or straight hocks, good quarters, a nice eye or quality head.” She famously discovered that a stable had mixed up two of her yearlings, Doutelle and Agreement, that she had only previously seen once as foals. “She reads a lot, and she knows a lot,” said Michael Oswald. “If you want to discuss a sales catalogue you should do your homework, because she’ll know who a horse’s great-great-grandmother was.” The final decision “rests always with the Queen,” wrote Arthur FitzGerald in his official history of the Royal studs.

Oswald jocularly refers to the Sandringham Stud as the “Maternity Help and Marriage Guidance Center for Horses.” But the act of live cover—breeding a multimillion-dollar prize-winning stallion with one of the Queen’s valuable mares—is not for the faint of heart. Rather, it is a serious exercise in controlled lust between two powerful and highly strung creatures, each weighing nearly a ton. As a measure of her earthy nature as a countrywoman, the Queen has witnessed the raw reality of thoroughbred matchmaking any number of times. The otherwise prim and proper Queen would stand in a corner of the covering shed with her stud manager and grooms, wearing a hard hat for protection before the health and safety authorities required her to build an elevated viewing stand. “She is very matter-of-fact,” said Michael Oswald. “She knows how it works.”

The fast, furious, and potentially dangerous mating act begins when a mare in heat is brought into the covering shed. Her rear legs are encased in heavy leather boots to prevent her from kicking the stallion, and a thick leather “false mane” is strapped across her neck and withers so she is not bitten during the frenzy of coitus.

The mare is first brought to one side of the shed, a padded wall with a large opening where she and a “teaser” stallion engage in equine foreplay, and if she is sufficiently aroused—an unmistakable reaction known as clitoral “winking”—the veterinarian will examine her by palpation and ultrasound to determine whether she is about to ovulate. If so, she returns to the covering shed, where she stands in a slight hollow in the middle. One groom holds her bridle and another has a “twitch,” a pole with a loop of rope that sedates the mare when twisted around the end of her nose. The highly excited stallion of choice is held by four men as he strains, snorts, whinnies, and rears before mounting the mare, his violent exertions guided by a stud groom standing near her tail.

Once conception has been confirmed by ultrasound, the Queen tracks the eleven-month gestation, and occasionally she watches the mare foaling, which usually occurs at night. Typically she is sent a photograph of the foal, which she sometimes will name even before birth, and she follows its development until it is weaned and shipped out as a yearling to Polhampton.

During one of the Queen’s visits to Polhampton, she accompanied Henry Porchester, her stud groom Sean Norris, her trainer Ian Balding and his wife, Emma, into a field to have a better look at six colts about to be broken in. Suddenly the colts started galloping around in a circle and “dive bombing,” rearing up and kicking out. Only Balding and the Queen stayed in place, while their three companions bolted for the gate. Elizabeth II and her trainer knew that if they remained motionless, the young horses would not attack them and would eventually settle down.

“Oh, that was scary,” the Queen said afterward. “She was completely unruffled,” Balding recalled, having witnessed an unflinching physical courage that is one of her defining traits. “She has the ability to get calmer in the face of problems rather than allowing herself to get her adrenaline up and to panic,” said Monty Roberts, the California horse trainer known as the “horse whisperer,” who was to become her close friend.

Preparing her yearlings for the racetrack occupies nearly as much of the Queen’s attention as breeding. Her expertise is such that, as Henry Porchester said, “talking to her is almost like talking to a trainer.” “If she had been a normal person, she probably would have become a trainer,” observed Ian Balding. “She loves it so much.” She has always divided her horses among several trainers, mainly because she wants to see their different approaches. “Some trainers suit a particular horse better than others,” said Oswald. “It’s rather like deciding on schools for your children.” She can stand for hours in the early morning mist on the gallops, wearing a head scarf, tweed coat, and Wellington boots, binoculars fixed on the horses streaking across the rolling downs. “She would watch how her horses moved, how they would stretch out,” said Ian Balding. “She could see how they run.”

She revisits her horses in their boxes during “evening stables,” when she takes the time to inspect them one by one, offering each a carrot or a bunch of clover with an affectionate pat, and chatting with its groom. She knows all the stable hands and grooms, and she respects their expertise. Their world is one of the very few places where the barriers of protocol disappear, where she can talk to people on the same level. She knows about their problems and concerns just as much as those of their four-legged charges.

While touring Balding’s stables at Kingsclere, she inquired about the ventilation system, knowing that since horses can breathe only through their noses, they are susceptible to respiratory infections. Back at the house for a drink, she blew her nose and startled her trainer by handing him her handkerchief so he could see the dark mucus. “I had a feeling that it was incredibly dusty in there, and there was no air,” she said. It was her dramatic and no-nonsense way of showing that his horses were suffering. Balding knocked some holes in the rear of the stalls, covered them with screens, and added a vent in the roof to increase the air circulation.

While staying at one of her country residences, the Queen finds time to ride nearly every day, even in the rain, both as an escape and a physical fitness regimen. Since childhood she has ridden well, with a fine seat, light rein, and confident control. Although she is always accompanied by a groom and detective, when she hacks out across the countryside she is as alone as she can possibly be—a rarity for a queen.

She was never interested in jumping, and she knew how to avoid danger. But her prudence has always excluded wearing a hard hat while riding, even in her younger days when tearing down the racecourse with her sister and her daughter, her head scarf flying in the wind during the family’s private morning race each year on Gold Cup Day during Royal Ascot. Jean Carnarvon recalled that her husband “used to be bananas about it. He would talk to her about it. She wasn’t going to do it.” Once when Ian Balding was hacking with her in Windsor Home Park, he took her to task. “I really think it is ridiculous that you above all others do not wear a crash helmet,” he said. Replied the Queen, “I never have, and you don’t have to have your hair done like I do”—an expression less of vanity than the practical need to be ready for her appointments.

Unlike his wife, Philip was not brought up on horseback. He took up polo in 1950 while living on Malta because he enjoyed the sport’s vigorous physical challenge. From the start he rode aggressively, “keen to win at all costs,” said Major Ronald Ferguson, who played frequently with Philip. Ferguson believed that Philip “needed to play polo to get rid of all his pent-up frustrations. He would arrive … with steam coming out of his ears and after a few games he would be a different man—the frustration gone.”

To the duke, a polo pony is like a dirt bike. “He drives it, and he wants a machine out in front of him so when he steps on the throttle it goes, when he brakes, it stops, and it goes fast left or right,” said Monty Roberts. “He is not interested in the why, but how to get it done.” Horses are incomprehensible to Philip, who cares little how one differs from another.

Elizabeth II takes a more intuitive and inquisitive view, and appreciates how horses react. “She has an ability to get horses psychologically attuned to what she wants and then to persuade them to enjoy it,” observed Sir John Miller, for many years the Crown Equerry and Horsemaster to the Queen. “She gets into it and investigates the innate tendencies,” said Roberts.

Although no fan of the turf, Prince Philip dutifully accompanies his wife to Royal Ascot, the centerpiece of her racing life and one of the royal family’s popular rituals going back to Queen Anne, who began it in 1711. For four days in June, starting the Tuesday after Garter Day (called by some “the Ascot Vigil,” in which the knights “kneel in prayer for a winner later in the week”), the Queen entertains friends, mainly from the racing world, at Windsor Castle with a combination of graciousness and military precision. Everyone dresses to the teeth, the men in morning coats and top hats, the women in “formal day wear” and their best hats—required attire for the Royal Enclosure at the racecourse.

Elizabeth II hosts a sumptuous luncheon, and at the appointed hour she rises, usually followed by her platoon of corgis and dorgis who have been resting under the table. The royal party is driven in cars through Windsor Great Park to the Ascot Gate, where they climb into landaus, each drawn by a team of four horses ridden by two scarlet-coated postillions, with footmen in red livery and black top hats seated at the back. After a drive along two miles of country lanes, the Royal Procession, which had its origins in the 1820s during the reign of King George IV, enters the racecourse’s Golden Gates at 2 P.M. for the traditional ride up the grassy straight mile.

Once in the royal box, the Queen’s guests are free to entertain themselves while she focuses on the afternoon races, finding welcome relief even with the tension of having a runner. “The great thing about racing is she can get deeply immersed for two or three hours at a stretch, and it is completely different from her everyday work, a switch out from what is going on in the world that is worrying or unhappy,” said Michael Oswald. “One of her private secretaries told me it has a very good therapeutic effect.”

When she has a winner, she jumps up and down like a little girl, whooping and grinning, throwing off the inhibitions that usually restrain her in public. She does not, however, place bets. She is acknowledged to be unusually observant at reading a race, as she leans forward in her chair, her eyes transfixed. “Look, it’s on the wrong leg,” she would say. “No wonder it can’t go round the corner.… I don’t think that horse stayed.… Did you see it swerve? I didn’t like the way its ears went back. I like the way it accelerated.… I think it will be better on a left-handed than a right-handed course.”

With a television in the back and a line of big chairs behind a curving glass window at the front, her generously appointed box was designed to provide the best view of the course. After the fourth race, the Queen invites her guests, including various dignitaries summoned from the Royal Enclosure, for tea in her private room at the back of the box as footmen circulate and serve sandwiches, scones, strawberries and cream, and pastries. She sits for a while, making conversation, but leaps up at the start of the next race, lest she miss a moment. “As a human being one always has hope,” the Queen once said when asked about her fascination with the turf, “and one always has perhaps the gambling instinct, that one’s horse is going to be better than the next man’s horse, and that’s why one goes on doing it.”

The Queen pays for her breeding and racing out of her private funds, offsetting some of the expenditure with prize money, stud fees for her stallions, and sales of selected winners to other breeders, with a net cost, by one estimate, of a half million pounds a year. The 1950s brought her a string of winners led by Aureole, her sentimental favorite who after losing the Derby won other top races including the prestigious King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot. In 1954 and 1957 the Queen was the top money winner in Britain.

MORE THAN ANYONE, Elizabeth II shared the ups and downs of breeding and racing with her mother. They first owned a horse together in 1949, a steeplechaser named Monaveen. But after he broke a leg on a jump during a race at Hurst Park and had to be put down, the Queen decided to concentrate on flat racing, while her mother devoted herself to jumpers. Because she had so much more free time, the Queen Mother attended many more races than the Queen and could more frequently feel the thrill of watching her own horses run.

The Queen Mother took a keen interest in her daughter’s thoroughbred enterprise, and Elizabeth II transferred horses to her mother if they seemed better suited for going over jumps than running on a flat track. The two women found much in common based on their extensive knowledge of horseflesh. During daily phone calls, their chat about the turf ran the gamut from gossip about jockeys, trainers, winners, and losers to the latest news on injuries, breeding, foaling, and naming. When either was traveling they exchanged long letters sharing their experiences and offering advice. “Racing is incredible out here,” the Queen wrote from New Zealand. “They all bet like mad and like their marathons of eight races at a dose.”

Elizabeth II happily subsidized her mother’s passion for racing, which she knew gave her great pleasure. One year when the jumpers had done badly, the Queen proposed paying the trainer’s bill. “The Queen Mother accepted gratefully,” wrote her biographer William Shawcross, “signed the bill and wrote underneath the total, ‘Oh dear.’ ”

In her sixties and very much a blithe spirit, the “Queen Mum,” an affectionate term coined by the tabloid press, was easy to indulge. She had become pleasingly plump, and was regarded as a “great gastronome,” although her family teased her about her large appetite for food and drink. She had one serious health scare, a diagnosis of colon cancer in December 1966 that the family kept secret. Surgeons removed the tumor, no further treatment was needed, and the Queen Mother never had a recurrence of the malignancy. After a quiet recuperation at Sandringham, all her vitality returned.

She continued her rounds of official duties—one hundred or more events in most years—effectively and enthusiastically. Her enjoyment was infectious, notably when she threw up her hands in a theatrical outburst of delight. Deborah Devonshire nicknamed her “Cake” after observing her at a wedding reception. On hearing that the bride and groom were about to cut the cake, the Queen Mother exclaimed “Oh, the Cake!” as if seeing the ritual for the first time. “She really is superb at her own type of superbery,” the Duchess wrote to her sister Diana in 1965. At a dinner party given by John Profumo at his home in Regent’s Park a year before his fall from grace, the Queen Mother even joined Ted Heath, David Bruce, and several aristocrats in practicing the twist, the latest dance craze, late into the night.

She loved to entertain her friends with extravagant black-tie dinners at her various homes, and al fresco luncheons served by a half dozen liveried footmen on tables set with white cloths and fine silver under a canopy of trees in the garden of Clarence House. The crowd was more eclectic than at the monarch’s table, since she could invite anybody she pleased, including dancers, artists, writers, and actors who amused her and could make bright conversation. The food was beautifully presented, and the claret flowed freely, along with her piquant opinions—outspoken criticisms of politicians, most of them Labour, her hatred of “the Japs,” and suspicious view of the Germans and the French (“so nice & so nasty.… How can one trust them?”). Recalling an encounter with Dinka tribesmen in the Sudan, she declared, “They were naked, but they were so black it didn’t matter!”

The Edwardian world of the Queen Mother had a certain air of unreality. When her longtime friend Tortor Gilmour moved to a smaller house in her village, the Queen Mother came to tea and lamented the mundane view from the front windows. “Darling,” she said, “you must have them close the petrol station and move that school.” Surveying the scene during one of her elegant luncheons at Clarence House, the Queen Mother and former Queen said, “Look at us. We are just ordinary people—look at us around this table—having an ordinary lunch.”

THE LIVES OF the real ordinary people were changing rapidly in the 1960s. In tandem with the far-reaching social reforms of the Labour Party, British culture underwent seismic shifts. Rock ’n’ roll music loosened inhibitions, the birth control pill gave women new sexual freedom, and depictions of sexuality in film and the theater became more explicit. In 1967 even seventeen-year-old Princess Anne attended a performance of the musical Hair, with its full-frontal nudity.

At the apex of popular culture were the Beatles. Harold Wilson sought to signal his modernity by recommending that the Queen award each of the “Fab Four” with the MBE—Member of the Most Honourable Order of the British Empire—in October 1965. Only four years earlier the group had been playing in a Liverpool cellar, but their infectious tunes and mop-haired style had exploded into Beatlemania, with legions of screaming fans, and sales of their records in the millions. There was an outcry from the Establishment that the government had debased the award by giving it to pop stars, and some war heroes protested by returning their medals. Noel Coward called it a “major blunder on the part of the Prime Minister … I don’t think the Queen should have agreed.”

The Beatles had first met her when they played at the Royal Variety Show in 1963. After they had bowed respectfully during their introductions, she asked when they were next performing. “Tomorrow night, Ma’am,” said Paul McCartney. “Oh, where is it?” she replied. “Slough, Ma’am,” he replied. “Oh,” she said brightly. “That’s near us!” “She meant of course Windsor Castle,” McCartney recalled. “It was funny and so unassuming.”

Two years later she presented them with their honors at Buckingham Palace while police restrained crowds of shrieking girls trying to storm the gates. During their investiture in the opulent white and gold ballroom, the Queen was “lovely,” said McCartney. “She was like a mum to us.” But John Lennon’s delight with the honor soon soured, and he returned it in 1969 as a protest against the Vietnam War.

He was not alone. The Wilson government supported the escalating U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, but the prime minister refused Lyndon Johnson’s request for troops—not even, the president complained, a “platoon of bagpipers.” An embittered Johnson dismissed Wilson as a “little creep” even as the war provoked large-scale protests and riots on university campuses and in the streets of both Britain and the United States.

A different sort of violence exploded when “The Troubles” began in Northern Ireland where the Catholic minority—which suffered widespread discrimination—pressed for an independent union with the Republic of Ireland to the south. In the late 1960s the militant Irish Republican Army took the lead in the Catholic cause. As Protestants committed to the status quo clashed with Catholics, British troops were deployed to keep the peace. The IRA escalated the conflict with terrorist bombings and general mayhem, the beginning of three decades of bloodshed.

The convulsions of the 1960s unleashed a wave of antiestablishment feeling in Britain, and the monarchy became a prime target. By the middle of the decade, Private Eye, the satirical magazine that helped take down Alec Douglas-Home, began aiming its barbs at the royal family for being out of touch, pompous, and bound by outdated traditions. Prince Philip became known as “Phil the Greek.” The magazine also lampooned the mainstream press for its sycophantic approach to the monarchy. Newspapers responded with more questioning and irreverent coverage of the Queen and her family, along with a steady drumbeat for greater access to information than the Palace had been accustomed to offering.

The Queen kept track of events by reading the newspapers, watching television newscasts, and studying the confidential documents in her boxes. David Bruce was struck, when he sat with her in the royal box at the Goodwood race meeting in 1968—the year of widespread student rioting against university authorities as well as the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, and other activist causes—that “the Queen talked at some length about violence, especially amongst young people throughout the world.”

Elizabeth II held to her familiar routines as she carried out her own duties throughout the social changes of the turbulent 1960s, appearing mostly as a figure waving from a carriage or a maroon Rolls-Royce topped by her royal shield. In addition to her regular tours to Commonwealth countries in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and North America, she made a dozen state visits around the globe. Her ten days in the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1965 marked the first time a member of the British royal family had been there officially since 1913. The planning had begun two years earlier during the Macmillan government, but the new political subtext was Labour’s expected reapplication for Common Market membership.

It was a delicate journey of reconciliation as well, marking the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II. For the Queen it offered the prospect of exploring her German roots, and for Philip it marked a sentimental return to his family’s homeland, to show his wife places where he had spent happy times with his sisters before World War II. After being excluded from the wedding of Elizabeth II and Philip because of bitter postwar feelings, his surviving three sisters—Theodora, Sophie (nicknamed “Aunt Tiny”), and Margarita, all princesses who married into German royalty—had been given prominent places in the royal box at Westminster Abbey during the coronation. They had also been quietly entertained by the Queen and Philip, particularly each spring at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, an extravaganza of equestrian competitions, military displays, and fireworks.

An emotional high point came in West Berlin, when cheering throngs packed John F. Kennedy Square and ecstatically chanted “Elizabeth!” Yet the Queen, who spoke of her German ancestry in her remarks, seemed discomfited by the passionate reaction. “I think she thought this was a bit too much of a good thing—too reminiscent of ritual Nazi shouting,” recalled Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart. “That was the only time I saw her perhaps at all put out.”

The moment Elizabeth II seemed to savor most occurred in Hanover, where she scrutinized the letter that launched her family’s dynasty. Written in 1714 by British noblemen to George the Elector of Hanover—the future King George I—it said, “Queen Anne’s dying. Come quick, certain persons want a Jacobite heir and not you.”

In the autumn of 1965 the Queen’s attention shifted to Africa, where she became embroiled in the British government’s struggle with its colony of Southern Rhodesia. Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain and set up a white minority government mirroring the apartheid policies of neighboring South Africa. Since Britain’s policy was to grant independence only to colonies that established majority rule, Harold Wilson responded by persuading the United Nations to impose economic sanctions. To attract support in Britain, Smith insisted that the Queen would remain as his country’s head of state. Wilson countered by enlisting Elizabeth II to tell Smith directly that she would not preside as sovereign over a regime that failed to provide for black majority participation. She even sent a handwritten letter to the Rhodesian leader urging him to compromise.

Critics argued that such partisan involvement violated the Queen’s neutrality. Smith continued to maintain the illusion that his country remained a monarchy despite the British government’s contention that his country’s government was illegitimate. He eventually dropped that pretense, and Rhodesia declared itself a republic, triggering a debilitating guerrilla war conducted by black militants.

A year later the Queen faced another round of criticism when her instincts lost touch with shifting public expectations. On October 21, 1966, an avalanche of water, mud, and debris cascaded down a mountain above the South Wales mining village of Aberfan, engulfing an elementary school and killing 116 children and 28 adults. Driven by an impulse to help his fellow Welshmen, Tony Snowdon left London without consulting the royal household and arrived at 2 A.M. to console grieving family members and visit survivors. He was followed by Prince Philip the next day, and the two men watched the rescue and recovery efforts. But despite urgings from her advisers, the Queen resisted visiting the scene. “People will be looking after me,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll miss some poor child that might have been found under the wreckage.”

Her response reflected thoughtfulness as well as instinctive caution. Finally, after the last bodies had been recovered just over a week later, she and Philip went to Aberfan and spent more than two hours talking to relatives of the deceased, walking up the mound covering the school, and laying a wreath in the cemetery where eighty-one children had been buried in rows. A compelling circumstance had pulled her out of her bubble into direct and spontaneous contact with her subjects, who showed their appreciation. “As a mother, I’m trying to understand what your feelings must be,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry I can give you nothing at present except sympathy.”

For someone who worked so hard to control her feelings in public, it was a difficult if heartfelt moment, a recognition that the villagers needed her soothing presence and that at such times a public display of emotion was now expected. But her tardy reaction to the crisis showed an unyielding side to her nature that would cause problems in the years to come.

WHEN DISASTER STRUCK at Aberfan, the Queen had recently returned from her two-month holiday at Balmoral, the most prolonged and restorative yearly retreat among her seasonal rituals. Her winter break at Sandringham from before Christmas until early February affords plenty of time for country pursuits, but genuine privacy is difficult because the twenty-thousand-acre Norfolk estate is crisscrossed with public roads and dotted with a half dozen villages. Only at Balmoral, where public roads border the estate, can the Queen truly get away from it all—except for her daily boxes. “It’s nice to hibernate for a bit when one leads such a very moveable life,” she once said.

The long drive from the gates to the castle through an enveloping forest of evergreen conifers casts an instant spell of privacy and tranquillity. In the style of a centuries-old summertime royal progress, trucks filled with clothing in trunks and wardrobes as well as moving vans containing household goods are driven up from London by soldiers a week before the Queen’s arrival in early August. Horses are transported from Windsor and dogs from Sandringham. As soon as the Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, the furniture in the private quarters is covered in dust sheets, although the offices continue to run, albeit at a slower pace. Maids, cooks, housekeepers, footmen, security officers, and other household workers go northward in two contingents, each group of eighty spending a month in the staff quarters at Balmoral.

“There is a certain fascination in keeping the place as Queen Victoria had it,” the Queen has remarked. The decor is remarkably unchanged, except for the welcome elimination of the potted palms. “The furniture has barely been moved,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. “The pictures are the same too.” Queen Victoria’s favorite chair in the drawing room is so sacred that no one is allowed to sit in it. “Every new person goes for it, and everyone screams,” said Jean Carnarvon.

Elizabeth II follows a timeless routine firmly rooted in the late nineteenth century, with some modern variations, and everyone falls into line. The atmosphere recalls summer camp, with boarding-school-style schedules. After the bagpiper does his 9 A.M. march, the Queen typically devotes several hours to her boxes, delivered on a trolley to her first floor study—the same room chosen by Queen Victoria for its view up the valley of the Dee. She also attends to developments on the fifty-thousand-acre estate. Although Balmoral is directly overseen by her husband, “Her Majesty is aware of everything,” said Martin Leslie, for sixteen years the factor, or estate manager. She reads the factor’s regular reports and checks on the status of the Highland Cattle she breeds, but she also questions the ghillies, gamekeepers, and stalkers she has known for decades. Her knowledge emerges in surprising ways. While driving a Scottish cleric on a tour of the estate, she suddenly shouted “Hooray!” as they passed one of her gamekeepers walking on the hills with a young woman. The Queen explained that his wife had left him, and she was delighted that he was out with a new girlfriend.

Following her morning obligations, she tries to spend as much time outdoors as possible—often horseback riding or walking with her dogs through the great stands of fir trees, up the hills ablaze with purple heather and across the burns, tiny streams bubbling up from beneath the rocky soil. She can inhale the pine-scented air and gaze at the snow-capped North Cairngorns in the distance and what Byron called the “steep frowning glories” of Lochnagar, rising more than three thousand feet above nearby Loch Muick. “At Balmoral, she knows every inch,” said Malcolm Ross, for many years a senior member of her household. “She can enjoy being a countrywoman.”

From the age of sixteen, when she learned to expertly shoot a rifle, she developed a passion for stalking the indigenous Red Deer, and many days she would slip on her macintosh trousers and ride out on one of her home-bred Garron or Fell ponies, or drive one of the estate’s dark green Range Rovers to a beat on a high ridge above the treeline. She and one of her stalkers would patiently track the stags from late morning until late afternoon, sometimes climbing as high as two thousand feet, and pausing only for a lunch of cold meat, fruit, and a slice of plum pudding retrieved from a canvas bag. Moving in for the kill, she would crawl through the undergrowth until the stag was within range. “It was always fun to see a new stalker out for the first time with the Queen,” recalled Margaret Rhodes, who began stalking with her cousin when they were teenagers. “She would be crawling on her stomach with her nose up to the soles of the stalker’s boots, which would be a surprise to the stalker.” She shot her last stag in 1983, in a little glen near the Spittal of Glenmuick, a place subsequently called “The Queen’s Corry.”

When someone shoots a stag, it is gutted on the hillside, and its disemboweled carcass is strapped on the back of a rugged and sure-footed deer pony, which carries it down the boulder-strewn hills to the castle, where it is hung in the deer larder for skinning. (Even after she stopped stalking, the Queen continued to visit the larder at the end of the day.) Every part of the deer is used, from heads and antlers for trophies and meat for meals, to the hooves and the eyeballs, which are sold for export. The white Garron ponies are so streaked with blood that they need to be scrubbed each night.

Such carnage is second nature to the Queen, who is equally matter-of-fact about her other favorite country pursuit, picking up fallen grouse during shooting parties on the moors above the castle—a practice she was forced to stop at age eighty-five due to persistent pain in one of her knees. Shotguns never interested her, so while the men in her family—all attired smartly in tweed shooting suits and Barbours—joined the line of butts, their guns aimed at the unpredictable birds whizzing and swooping overhead, she would stand behind, dressed in a skirt, sturdy jacket, and head scarf, with two or three of her gun dogs, usually cocker spaniels (nicknamed “the hoovers”) or Labradors. Using an impressive repertoire of whistles, hand signals, and calls, she would send out the dogs to retrieve the birds, sometimes at a distance of nearly a thousand yards, directing them from one point to another in search of the downed prey. If the bird wasn’t dead, she would put it out of its misery by swiftly dispatching it with a stick. Once when a particularly versatile display of her “picker-up” skill prompted applause from the guns, ghillies, and beaters, she said, “If I’d known you were all watching, I’d never have tried it.”

The shooting and stalking guests at Balmoral generally come on weekends, but most of the time the castle is filled with friends and relatives. The Queen issues all invitations to stay overnight, and she takes her hostess role seriously, often greeting guests at the side door where visitors enter the castle. “She shows you to your room,” said one frequent guest. “She knows what books are there and she will make a reference to them. They change every year. It is a peculiar combination of relaxed formality or formal relaxation.” To Malcolm Ross, being her guest in Scotland is “as if a switch has flipped. She is still the Queen, but she is a wonderful hostess in her own house. You are extremely privileged to see how relaxed she can be.”

After a day on the hills, the guests change out of their shooting kit, and the Queen makes tea for everyone, measuring the leaves into a pot and pouring hot water from a silver urn. After another change of clothes, it’s time for drinks in the drawing room, where Elizabeth II sits at a table playing patience, a vision from Victorian times. “She is conversing as she is playing,” recalled a guest. “Everyone is sitting around. Some talk among themselves, others are at the table where she is playing. She is turning the cards and chatting, in her element, clearly very relaxed.”

The prime minister visits for an obligatory weekend each September, and the Privy Counsellors come for a day, spending only a few minutes on formal business. Mostly there is a relentless round of socializing, which often includes picnic lunches and candlelit barbecues in lodges or cabins on the banks of lakes and rivers, deep in the Old Caledonian forest, or up in the hills. Frequently the guests don’t learn until the last minute whether dinner will be black tie and gowns indoors or sweaters with trousers or skirts outdoors. By that time they will have already gone through three changes of clothing.

The Queen and Prince Philip organize the picnic ritual like a military drill. Chefs at the castle do the preliminary work, and all the food, plates, cutlery, and cooking equipment are loaded onto a trailer pulled by a Land Rover. Designed with a naval officer’s efficiency by Philip, the trailer has compartments for every item. Household staff are conspicuously absent, allowing the Queen to almost gleefully undertake their chores. She always lays the table, and “she has to have it absolutely right,” said Anne Glenconner, who was often invited by Princess Margaret. Philip does the grilling, wreathed in smoke. He is known as a creative cook, improvising recipes he has seen on television—from sausages to roast pig.

Once the Queen Mother and some friends staying at Birkhall ended up dining at the other end of the same bothy where the Queen was entertaining. “Our lunch was over before [the Queen Mother’s] group had finished their drinks,” said a guest. When the Queen puts on her yellow Marigold gloves to wash the dishes, everybody pitches in to clear the table, and the cleanup is rapid. Each item must be returned to the trailer exactly as it was packed. “Woe betide if you put the cutlery in the wrong place,” said one veteran guest.

In the evenings, the family has a long tradition of playing vigorous games such as “Kick the Can” and “Stone,” with guests as well as members of the household. Twice each autumn they gather in the castle ballroom for the Ghillies’ Ball, where the men wear black tie and kilts, and the women dress in tiaras, long gowns, and tartan sashes fastened with diamond brooches. As military musicians play their tunes, the Queen and her family whirl through intricate reels and veletas with gamekeepers, ghillies, footmen, and maids—a montage of sights and sounds from an earlier century.

Balmoral echoes personal memories for Elizabeth II—of childhood, the war, Philip’s proposal—and it represents a continuum back to Queen Victoria, even a connection to the Bavarian landscapes of her ancestors, which are conjured up by Prince Albert’s adaptations of architectural styles from Germany. “At Balmoral, she never forgets she is Queen,” said a Scottish cleric who visited there often. “You never forget she is Queen.” All guests, including relatives who call her Lilibet and longtime friends, bow and curtsy when they greet her in the morning, and when she retires at night.

Yet her life in the Highlands offers her a taste of normality, and a sense of freedom. She goes into the nearby village of Ballater and stands in line at the local shops. She does household chores in remote cabins. She dresses unpretentiously in well-worn clothes—always the tartan skirts (never pants except for riding or field sports), but also plain black shoes with low socks, a buttoned-up cardigan with another sweater layered on top, and her ubiquitous strand of pearls. When she has downtime, she reads for pleasure, particularly historical novels—not, to anyone’s knowledge, the seven volumes of Proust, “engrossed in the sufferings of Swann … while in the wet butts on the hills the guns cracked out their empty tattoo,” as imagined by Alan Bennett in The Uncommon Reader, his droll novel about the Queen. For many years she would choose from a batch of volumes recommended by the Book Trust, a British charity founded in 1921 to promote books and reading. But the principal escape is through her primal communion with the countryside. “You can go out for miles and never see anybody,” she has said. “There are endless possibilities.” It is a world where she can live life “to the fullest.”