Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

ELEVEN

“Not Bloody Likely!”

IN JUNE 1970, HAROLD WILSON CALLED A GENERAL ELECTION ON the assumption that he could bolster Labour’s majority in Parliament. But he misread the opinion polls as well as public dissatisfaction over rising prices and an increase in unemployment. The Conservatives won decisively in a surprising upset. Fifty-three-year-old Edward Heath came to Buckingham Palace on the 19th to kiss hands, the first Tory premier to be elected by his party rather than appointed by the Queen.

That night Elizabeth II gave a grand ball at Windsor Castle to celebrate the seventieth birthdays of the Queen Mother; the Queen’s cousin Dickie Mountbatten; her uncle Harry, the Duke of Gloucester; and Henry Somerset, the 10th Duke of Beaufort, who had been her ceremonial Master of the Horse since the beginning of her reign.

The ball was a Patrick Plunket production, with the castle floodlit and fuchsias in pots lining the Gothic entrance hall. Many of the guests were celebrating the Tory victory. “We had been expecting to put up with Wilson and his loathsome mob for another five years,” wrote Cecil Beaton, “and quite dramatically all was changed.” When the new prime minister arrived like a conquering hero, the guests cheered. “I was told that he blushed to his collar,” Beaton recorded.

Yet Heath, who was Wilson’s exact contemporary, proved to be heavy going for the Queen, who was ten years his junior. Like his Labour predecessor, his origins were modest. He had excelled in the grammar school system and earned his degree at Oxford. Heath’s provincialism had a cultured gloss from his expertise in classical music and skill as a yachtsman, although neither was a fruitful source of small talk with Elizabeth II. A confirmed bachelor described as “celibate” by Philip Ziegler, his official biographer, Heath was at best indifferent to women and at worst contemptuous of them.

The Queen’s sixth prime minister had a reputation for being brusque, even rude. Wilson described him as “cold and uncompassionate.” He lacked Wilson’s bonhomie and instinctive deference. Even worse, from the Queen’s standpoint, he was humorless and remote. She could find traits to admire: certainly his political talent and accomplishments as well as his determination and his honesty. But given his personality, Heath’s unfailing courtesy to his sovereign could be cloying at times.

Heath learned quickly to appreciate the Queen’s value and found their audiences rewarding, especially since he had no spouse in whom to confide or share his frustrations. He described her as a patient listener when he unburdened himself “a good deal” beyond the agenda drawn up by their private secretaries that she kept on a card placed on a nearby table. “The fact that she has all these years of experience and is imperturbable is a source of encouragement in itself,” he said. Heath also found that extensive correspondence with foreign leaders made her “very useful … particularly on overseas stuff.”

He did not, however, share her passion for the Commonwealth, which led to tensions between them. From the moment of his election, Heath was determined to pick up Macmillan’s quest for admission to the Common Market after French president Charles de Gaulle had twice rebuffed Britain’s application. Heath applied a messianic zeal to the task of persuading French president Georges Pompidou, who continued to hold the veto power. To demonstrate to France that his country was truly European, Heath downplayed the importance of the Commonwealth. He also antagonized a number of its African members when he dropped the arms embargo against South Africa enacted by Wilson in 1967 and resumed weapons sales to the apartheid regime. Both Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania threatened to leave the Commonwealth.

Fearing confrontations at the Commonwealth leaders’ meeting in Singapore in January 1971, Heath banned the Queen from attending. As he expected, the Africans pummeled him, but nobody bolted. According to Heath biographer John Campbell, the Queen was “deeply unhappy with Heath’s undisguised disrespect” for her beloved Commonwealth and “greatly upset by the rows which disfigured” the 1971 meeting. Martin Charteris said that if she had been allowed to attend, the acrimony would have been reduced if not eliminated. “It’s like Nanny being there,” he said. “She demands that they behave properly in her presence.… She knows them all and they like her.” She resented being excluded and “she was determined it was not going to happen again.”

The United States was also given short shrift by Heath in his pursuit of stronger European connections. Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, wrote that not only did the prime minister fail to cultivate the “special relationship,” he “actively sought to downgrade it.” Nixon did everything he could to establish good rapport with Heath, and to please the Queen as well. On the heels of his dinner for Philip, the president invited Charles and Anne to the White House in July 1970—their first trip to America and the fourth such visit by a Prince of Wales since 1860.

Elizabeth II’s two older children were being introduced to the round of royal duties, much as she had been instructed during her childhood. “I learnt the way a monkey learns—by watching its parents,” Charles once said. During Anne’s trip to New Zealand with her mother and father in March 1970, royal image maker William Heseltine modernized the Queen’s regular routine by adding the “walkabout”—taking a casual stroll to chat and shake hands with ordinary people. Her daughter was expected to follow suit. “At nineteen years old suddenly being dropped in the middle of the street,” Anne recalled. “Suddenly being told to pick someone and talk to them. Fun? No I don’t think so. A challenge.”

Nixon laid on an ambitious program for Charles and Anne’s two days in Washington: lunch on the presidential yacht Sequoia and a cruise to Mount Vernon, a steak cookout at the presidential retreat at Camp David, a dinner dance for seven hundred on the White House lawn, a Washington Senators baseball game, and visits to monuments and museums. Their socializing included the Nixons’ twenty-four-year-old daughter, Tricia, who had attended Charles’s investiture in Wales the previous year, as well as her younger sister, Julie, and Julie’s husband, David Eisenhower, the grandson of the former president. More than three decades later, when Charles and his new wife, Camilla, visited George W. and Laura Bush at the White House, he joked that the Bushes had better not try to fix up their twin daughters with his sons William and Harry the way Nixon had worked to set him up with Tricia.

Nixon set aside a half hour to meet Charles in the Oval Office. In a briefing paper, Kissinger advised him to solicit the twenty-one-year-old prince’s views on the Commonwealth, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, his impression of Canada, and of the “hopes and aspirations of his generation.” They ended up talking for ninety minutes on a wide range of topics. When Nixon urged Charles to be a “presence” while not completely avoiding controversy, the prince “pointed out one must not become controversial too often otherwise people don’t take you seriously.” Charles added in his diary afterward, “to be just a presence would be fatal.… A presence alone can be swept away so easily.”

The following October, Nixon was back in Britain for consultations with Heath. The Queen, who was on vacation at Balmoral, expressed concern that she would seem discourteous if she did not see the American president during his brief stay. Her advisers considered an invitation to Windsor or Buckingham Palace, but decided that neither place would be “suitable for entertaining a large party at short notice.” Instead, she accepted Heath’s invitation to fly down from Scotland and join Nixon for luncheon at Chequers—her first visit to the prime minister’s country residence. It was an opportunity, said Heath’s principal private secretary, Robert Armstong, for the Queen to meet Nixon “during his four-hour stay … without formality and without undue inroads into the time available for official discussions between the President and the Prime Minister.” Nixon was grateful for the Queen’s “signal kindness,” and the visit was a success.

For all his impatience with the pomp and ceremony that Wilson had found thrilling, Heath had been brought up a royalist, and he was eager to do what was necessary to support an institution that worked well. The Civil List inquiry into royal finances promised by Wilson took shape under his successor as a select committee with a Tory majority that met a half dozen times in 1971. Michael Adeane gave detailed testimony about the Queen’s official duties, the first comprehensive justification of her value to the government and the nation. He also revealed the concentration and care behind her seemingly uncomplicated daily rounds. “Taking a lively interest in everything, saying a kind word here and asking a question there,” he said, “always smiling and acknowledging cheers when driving in her car, sometimes for hours, had to be experienced to be properly appreciated.”

Labour critics questioned why the Queen was immune from taxation and demanded to know the size of her private fortune. William Hamilton, a strident republican member of the committee, called Princess Margaret—who had an admittedly light schedule of official engagements, including just thirty-one outside London in 1970—an “expensive kept woman.” The Palace pointed out that estimates of the Queen’s net worth as high as 100 million pounds were overblown, since most of her assets—her art collection, the Crown Jewels, the contents of the three state-owned palaces—were held in trust for the monarchy, yielded no income, and could not be sold.

The committee issued its report on December 2, and Parliament passed the Civil List Act of 1972, which gave the Queen what she wanted: a rise in the Civil List payment to £980,000 a year for ten years, and increased disbursements for the other members of the royal family to cover their performance of public duties. (Princess Margaret’s rose from £15,000 annually to £35,000.) Elizabeth II’s Privy Purse, which covers personal as well as some public expenses such as staff pensions, would no longer receive a stipend from the Civil List and would be funded only by her Duchy of Lancaster income. For the first time, there would also be annual reviews. The press now had a way to raise such matters as taxation as well as support of peripheral members of the royal family in the years to come.

At the beginning of 1972, Michael Adeane decided to leave his post three years before his scheduled retirement, and Martin Charteris was named private secretary. “Martin was given his chance, and he blossomed,” said Gay Charteris. “He said, ‘The only thing I want to do is show the public what she is really like.’ I think he helped do that.” By way of reinforcement, Charteris used to say to Elizabeth II, “Your job is to spread a carpet of happiness.” Once he took the number one spot, the Queen’s speeches showed his deft touch, with dashes of humor that had previously been absent. He also got along well with William Heseltine, who became an assistant private secretary, and Ronald Allison, the new press secretary, who had worked on Fleet Street and understood the thinking of reporters.

THE QUEEN AT age forty-five was brimming with energy and blessed with a robust constitution. In November 1971 she somewhat improbably caught chicken pox—not even, she said, from one of her own children. She called it a “ridiculous disease” and submitted to confinement during her contagion. Once she was free of infection but still “covered in spots,” she resumed her duties inside the Palace, including receiving the prime minister at the Tuesday audience. After Heath sent her a rather stiff note “to commiserate with you” about the illness, she replied in a lighthearted tone thanking him for his kindness, and expressing her frustration that she couldn’t yet go out into crowds for fear she could be reinfected “from them—one can’t win from a virus!”

It was a rare moment of ill health for the Queen. She was always a great believer in the virtues of fresh air and exercise, including her regular riding and daily walking. Wearing gloves on her public rounds and avoiding people with coughs and sniffles was also part of her routine. During her thirties and forties she nevertheless suffered from occasional colds, laryngitis, and bouts of sinusitis, which seldom prompted complaints or slowed her down. “She has a theory that you carry on working and your cold gets better,” said a cousin of the Queen. One exception was after Charles’s investiture, when a severe cold forced her to cancel engagements for four days.

Her ear, nose, and throat specialist for many years, Sir Cecil Hogg, used to make house calls at the various royal residences. After his first visit to Buckingham Palace, he reported “how unnerving it was to get under the bedclothes with the Queen in her nightie to test her chest and listen to bubbles inside,” said Min Hogg, his daughter. “He said she was quite good at putting him at ease. When he was under the bedclothes she would say, ‘I’m as nervous as you are.’ ”

While Elizabeth II has a full complement of doctors, including specialists, she also put great faith in homeopathic remedies long before such nostrums were commonplace in the culture. Her belief, shared with her mother, is that they “can do no harm and may well do you good,” explained Lady Angela Oswald, a Norfolk neighbor and friend. Homeopathy—taking diluted substances that would induce symptoms of illness if used in larger doses—was embraced by Queen Victoria, and in 1923 Sir John Weir, a Scottish doctor, began administering such treatments to members of the royal family. On Weir’s retirement in 1968, the Queen appointed her first female court physician, Dr. Margery Blackie, another homeopathic expert. Among Blackie’s more exotic treatments was Malvern water with a trace of arsenic for sinus infections.

The homeopaths would come “for whatever was wrong with them,” said Min Hogg. “The real physicians and surgeons would put their eyes to heaven.” Still, Elizabeth II has always respected the professionalism of her medical specialists. When Sir Cecil turned seventy in 1971 and had to retire—a mandatory rule imposed by the Queen’s medical advisers—she told him, “I am sorry, because you have such a steady hand.”

IN THE THIRD decade of the Queen’s reign, she stepped up the pace of her foreign travels—fifteen Commonwealth trips, including six lengthy tours of Pacific countries, designed to reinforce their standing with Britain, along with state visits to seventeen non-Commonwealth countries. One of the most significant of these was a goodwill trip to France in May 1972 that set the stage for Parliament’s ratification of a treaty allowing Britain to join the Common Market, which Heath had negotiated after intensively wooing a skeptical Georges Pompidou.

The principal apprehension before the trip was the precarious health of the Queen’s uncle, the seventy-seven-year-old Duke of Windsor, who was suffering from terminal throat cancer. After excluding him from her wedding and her coronation, the Queen had extended an olive branch seven years earlier when the duke came to London for eye surgery. She cheered him considerably by visiting him twice during his convalescence, and, for the first time since the Windsors went into exile, she met with the duchess. Two years later the duke and duchess joined the rest of the family to unveil a plaque in honor of his mother, although the couple were not invited to the Queen’s luncheon afterward, just as he had been excluded from the family dinner following Queen Mary’s funeral. But in 1968 the Queen complied graciously when the duke asked for permission to be buried with the duchess in the royal family’s cemetery at Frogmore in Windsor Home Park and pay a modest allowance for his wife if she were to survive him.

When doctors diagnosed his cancer in November 1971 and unsuccessfully treated him with radiation, the Queen alerted the Foreign Office that she wished to see him during her five-day state visit. In a confidential memo, British ambassador to France Sir Christopher Soames starkly laid out the high-stakes connection between the duke’s health and Anglo-French relations. “If the Duke of Windsor were to die on 12, 13 or 14 May or on the morning of 15 May before the Queen leaves for Paris, the visit would have to be cancelled,” Soames wrote. “I must emphasize that Pompidou clearly attaches the greatest importance to at least this part of the visit taking place, and I fear that a total cancellation though rationally understood would be taken amiss and would rankle him.”

The duke survived, and after touring Provence and attending the races at Longchamp on the afternoon of May 18, the Queen, Philip, and Prince Charles, along with Martin Charteris and Fortune Grafton, arrived at the Windsors’ home in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The duchess nervously served them tea in the drawing room before taking Elizabeth II upstairs to her uncle David’s sitting room. The old duke did his courtly best, rising from his wheelchair with great difficulty to bow to his niece and kiss her on both cheeks, despite being attached to an intravenous tube. He had shrunk to eighty-five pounds, yet, always the fashion plate, wore a smart blue blazer. They talked for about fifteen minutes, and as the Queen left, the duke’s physician, Jean Thin, saw tears in her eyes.

Accompanied by an entourage of thirty-six, the Queen followed a full program in France, traveling in an open car with Pompidou, and in the evenings appearing at the banquets at Versailles and the British embassy in one dazzling tiara after another. “We may drive on different sides of the road, but we are going the same way,” Elizabeth II declared at her banquet for the French president, with a nod toward an era of closer cooperation between Britain and Western Europe.

She left the country with a spectacular flourish, driving to Rouen at the mouth of the Seine to sail off on Britannia. It was a romantic setting, not least because Rouen is the capital of Normandy, home of William the Conqueror. “She went on board Britannia in the early evening,” recalled Mary Soames, the wife of the British ambassador. “The rooftops were crowded with people. Almost to the mouth of the Seine people had driven their cars to the riverbank with their headlights on. The Queen stood for hours while people were waving her off.”

The trip was a diplomatic success, and Pompidou was well pleased. Britain’s Observer described “a conspicuous demonstration of political goodwill after a decade of coolness.” The Queen “had seduced and conquered by her simplicity and charm,” said Le Figaro, which proclaimed the visit “a consecration—of the beginning of a new era of Franco-British cooperation.” “With the Queen’s visit Britain seemed all but signed, sealed and delivered into the Common Market,” declared Time.

On May 28, just ten days after the Queen’s visit, the Duke of Windsor died. Back in England, Elizabeth II directed Patrick Plunket to arrange a dignified but muted funeral on Monday, June 5. Her one conundrum was how to handle Trooping the Colour two days earlier. Rather than cancel her annual birthday parade, she had bagpipers and drummers of the Scots Guards play a lament in memory of the former King, a compromise devised by Charteris. The duke’s body lay in state for two days at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the half hour service took place, followed by his burial at Frogmore. Four senior clergymen—the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and the Dean of Windsor—officiated, and all the adult members of the royal family attended except the duke’s only surviving sibling, the Duke of Gloucester, who was ailing.

The seventy-five-year-old duchess stayed at Buckingham Palace, and during dinner the first night with the Queen and Prince Charles she oddly “prattled away,” seemingly oblivious to her husband’s death. The following evening she visited St. George’s Chapel, where she repeated, “He gave up so much for so little,” and pointed at herself “with a strange grin,” Charles recalled. She was heavily sedated on the day of the funeral, and conspicuously disoriented as she sat in the choir with the Queen, who “showed a motherly and nanny-like tenderness and kept putting her hand on the Duchess’s arm and glove,” Clarissa Eden reported.

Elizabeth II’s Christmas broadcast that year took note of the silver wedding anniversary she and Philip had celebrated the previous month, connecting the tolerance and understanding necessary for a successful marriage to the need for such values in achieving harmony among nations. Her main message was meant to reassure the countries of the Commonwealth on the eve of Britain’s official entry into the European Economic Community, as the Common Market was now called, in January 1973. “The new links with Europe will not replace those with the Commonwealth,” she said. “Old friends will not be lost; Britain will take her Commonwealth links into Europe with her.” The goal, she added, was “to create a wider family of Nations.”

The Christmas message now had an updated format that she had adopted following the success of the Royal Family documentary. In 1969 she had issued a written statement instead of her usual broadcast, while she and her advisers, as Philip put it, paused to “scratch our heads and see whether we can do something better.” Instead of a static image of the Queen reading from a TelePrompTer, Richard Cawston injected a contemporary feel by juxtaposing her words with film footage from events of the previous year. There were images from royal tours overseas, of the Queen and her children, and scenes from the silver wedding anniversary festivities. As with the 1969 documentary, these revitalized year-end productions emphasized the wholesome happiness of the Queen and her family.

At the same time, the British tabloid press was beginning to take a more aggressive and sensational approach to the royal family. In the lead were The Sun and News of the World, which had been acquired in 1969 by Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch, an avowed republican who saw the monarchy as the apex of a “pyramid of snobbery.” The Queen was his country’s head of state; those who shared Murdoch’s wish for a republic numbered around a quarter of the Australian population, including the Labour government that took power in December 1972, with Gough Whitlam as prime minister. In Britain, Murdoch saw an opportunity to scrutinize the behavior of the royal family and expose them if they misbehaved, a formula designed to drive up his newsstand sales while chipping away at the monarchy’s standing.

PERHAPS INEVITABLY, THE British media turned its attention in the 1970s to the younger generation of the royal family, Charles and Anne in particular. After his graduation from Cambridge in 1970, Charles had faithfully followed his family’s plan and entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth a year later. In the eyes of the press he became an adventuresome figure called “Action Man.” As he began his naval career, he met Camilla Shand, a pretty and sporty debutante one year his senior. She had a “slightly sexy, ginny voice,” and above all she knew how to make the Prince of Wales relax and laugh. Their quiet romance lasted some six months before he left for a long tour at sea. While he was away, Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles, a Household Cavalry officer, news that gave Charles a “feeling of emptiness.”

Andrew Parker Bowles had also briefly dated Princess Anne, but as a Roman Catholic he was unsuitable for marriage to a member of the royal family. To her older brother’s “shock and amazement,” twenty-two-year-old Anne announced her engagement in May 1973 to twenty-four-year-old Mark Phillips, a handsome army captain and accomplished equestrian who had won a gold medal at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. They had met at a party for the British team after the games, although they conceded it hadn’t been love at first sight. “We had to be told that we’d met in 1968 before we remembered,” Anne recalled. Charles initially dismissed Mark as dull and dim, but quickly sympathized with his future brother-in-law’s abrupt introduction to the “interest, fascination (plus boorishness) shown by the press.” The Queen and Philip considered Mark suitable enough. Like Tony Snowdon, he was a commoner. Although unprepossessing, Mark shared Anne’s passion for horses and eventing.

They were married on Wednesday, November 14, Charles’s twenty-fifth birthday, at Westminster Abbey before 1,500 guests in a ceremony presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Queen, in a bright blue coat and dress, smiled as Anne and her husband climbed into the famous Glass Coach for the trip back to Buckingham Palace for the wedding breakfast with family members. When they made the ritual appearance on the Palace balcony, a crowd of fifteen thousand cheered.

The day had been declared a national holiday, allowing tens of thousands of spectators to line the route of the procession. Hundreds of millions more in sixteen countries watched on television. As at the wedding of the Queen and Philip a quarter century earlier, the pageantry of their daughter’s celebration—the coaches, the military bands, the sixteen trumpeters playing the fanfares, the guard of honor—struck a bright spark at a particularly bleak moment for Britain.

Since Heath took office, the economy had been ravaged by inflation and high unemployment. His attempt to restrain wage demands by the powerful miners’ union had foundered after a crippling strike, and his efforts to freeze pay, prices, rents, and dividends late in 1972 proved ineffective as well. A perfect storm of crises in the autumn of 1973 nearly brought the country to a standstill. OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, had raised the price of oil by 12 percent early in 1973, and the Yom Kippur War in October after Egypt and Syria invaded Israel led to an outright oil embargo against the United States and Western Europe. Fuel supplies dwindled and costs quadrupled, even as the coal miners threatened yet another strike. On December 13, Heath announced he would impose a three-day workweek and mandatory power cuts to conserve energy.

The Queen felt it would be appropriate to inject a note of sympathy about her country’s plight into her Christmas broadcast that year. Although her message was purely personal, and not written on advice from the government, she asked Martin Charteris to notify Heath that she wished to conclude her remarks with a “few sentences” about the crisis: “I cannot let Christmas pass without speaking to you directly of these difficulties because they are of deep concern to all of us as individuals and as a nation. Different people have different views, deeply and sincerely felt, about our problems and how they should be solved. Let us remember, however, that what we have in common is more important than what divides us.”

The next day in their audience, Heath informed the Queen that she could not mention the crisis. Undaunted by his censorship—which was not revealed to the press—she tried again. Charteris wrote Heath to propose a shortened but no less anodyne single sentence, this time for the beginning of the broadcast: “I cannot let Christmas pass without speaking to you directly of the hardship and difficulties with which so many are faced because they are of deep concern to all of us as individuals and as a nation.” But again Heath rebuffed the Queen’s efforts, instructing his private secretary to tell her she had to omit any reference because of the country’s “altogether exceptional circumstances.” She had no choice but to comply.

In the new year, the miners went on strike, and the three-day week conjured up images of the dire postwar period of rationing and economic stagnation. Power was cut, candles illuminated offices, and workers bundled in overcoats at their desks. While Elizabeth II and Philip were on a Commonwealth tour of the Pacific, Heath suddenly called an election for February 28. The Queen flew back from Australia to receive Heath or kiss hands again with Harold Wilson.

Labour won 301 seats, the Conservatives 297, the Liberal Party 14, and a grab bag of minor parties held 23 seats. Neither of the major parties had enough votes in Parliament to allow them to easily put through legislation. Rather than tendering his resignation on Friday, March 1, Heath went to Buckingham Palace to tell the Queen he wanted to try to form a coalition with Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe.

Elizabeth II was dealing with a hung Parliament for the first time in her reign, and she trod cautiously. “The Queen could only await events,” wrote Robert Armstong. “She would not be called upon to take action unless and until Mr. Heath tendered his resignation.” So she waited for four days while Heath negotiated, until he gave up on Monday, March 4, and submitted his resignation. Wilson arrived at Buckingham Palace to become prime minister for the second time at age fifty-eight, and, he recalled, “our relaxed intimacy was immediately restored.”

With its tiny majority, Labour could have put Elizabeth II in a problematic position if Wilson had asked her to dissolve Parliament so he could call a quick second election in hopes of increasing his party’s seats. She had the power to refuse such a request if she thought it would be bad for the nation at a time of economic instability, but she was loath to exercise that little used constitutional prerogative. Wilson never forced the issue, however. Martin Charteris said that when the prime minister had talked about an immediate election, “the Queen … let it be known she did not approve.” Instead, Labour waited until October, when a second election gave them a decent working majority of three more seats.

Wilson yielded to the miners and disbanded the three-day week, but the malaise persisted—stagnating industrial production along with 15 percent inflation. By the mid-1970s, fully half of British adults were on government benefits. Yet Wilson charged ahead with increases in a host of social security programs. He also acquiesced when rapidly rising costs forced the Queen to request a further increase in the Civil List payment to £1.4 million annually.

While the Queen and Prince Philip were on a state visit to Indonesia on March 20, 1974, Princess Anne and her husband were the victims of a shocking kidnap attempt. An armed assailant named Ian Ball blocked their Rolls-Royce with his car on the Mall as the royal couple were returning to Buckingham Palace after a charity event. Ball opened fire and wounded Jim Beaton, Anne’s lone bodyguard (who took three bullets in his efforts to protect her and was later rewarded with the George Cross, Britain’s highest honor for bravery by civilians), as well as her chauffeur, a passer-by, and a policeman. But when Ball ordered Anne to leave the car she shouted, “Not bloody likely!” She continued to resist as Ball tried to drag her out while her husband held her other arm, until Ball was overpowered by police and arrested. Anne recounted the incident to Charles on the telephone “as if it were a perfectly normal occurrence. Her bravery and superb obstinacy were unbelievable.” The Queen and Philip were immediately notified of the incident, but they kept to their schedule and returned to London on the 22nd.

By then Anne and Mark had already left for his home village of Great Somerford in Wiltshire to plant a commemorative tree as scheduled, both brushing off their violent encounter. “It wouldn’t have been much good sitting and brooding about it,” Anne said to the villagers. “We got back to life so quickly, we’ve practically forgotten it.” The couple returned to Oak Grove, their five-bedroom house on the grounds of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where Mark worked as an instructor. Horses remained the center of their lives as they trained together and competed in cross-country jumping events, to all appearances a contented couple.

THE QUEEN’S OWN equine pursuits took a fortunate turn in 1974, although she mourned the death of her treasured stallion, Aureole, whose grave she marked with a copper beech in the paddock where he died. By then she had some fifty horses in training, and more than a score old enough to race. After middling success with her breeding and racing in the 1960s, she had applied a more systematic approach to the business in 1970 when she officially appointed Henry Porchester (later Carnarvon) as her first racing manager, and Sir Michael Oswald as her stud manager. “Henry was the Queen’s closest personal friend, and a very influential adviser,” said her longtime trainer Ian Balding. “One day he said to her, ‘You don’t have enough winners. Your horses are not well enough managed.’ She said, ‘You can be my manager. You can bloody well do it!’ ”

Her breeding operation at Sandringham became more complicated as she expanded it to include stallions owned by syndicates in which she had purchased shares. They would cover not only her own horses, but as many as one hundred visiting mares each year. Oswald, who lived nearby, became the on-site manager of the stallions and mares. At the same time, Porchester worked with her trainers, helped decide which races to run, advised her on buying and selling her thoroughbreds, consulted on mating, and represented her at the many races she was unable to attend because of her obligations as Queen.

Elizabeth II stayed in constant contact with her top advisers, talking to Oswald two or three times a week and Porchey nearly every day. Porchester made a strategic decision to send more of Elizabeth II’s mares to the United States for breeding “to bring in new blood,” said Michael Oswald. During the 1960s, she had sent some of her horses to France and several to the United States, but by 1970 it was clear that the best stallions were in Kentucky. Porchester advised the Queen to ship at least a half dozen mares across the Atlantic to several stud farms where they could be covered by such champions as Nijinsky. After weaning, the foals would then be transported back to England for training.

The Queen’s prize horse in 1974 was a “long-striding filly” born to Highlight, a direct descendant of Feola—the great royal broodmare who had not only run well in the 1930s but had bred a string of winners in the following decades—and sired by Queen’s Hussar, a stallion owned by Porchester’s father, the 6th Earl of Carnarvon. The Queen named the filly Highclere, after the Carnarvon stud farm. Having captured the first classic title for the Queen in eighteen years by winning the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket, Highclere was shipped to Chantilly in June to run in the prestigious Prix de Diane, also known as the French Oaks.

Accompanied by Henry Porchester, his wife, Jean, Michael Oswald, and Martin Charteris, the Queen flew from Windsor Castle to France on the 16th for lunch before the big race. France’s newly elected president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, sent a big bowl of red roses, and Elizabeth II and her party drove down the racecourse in an open car against the backdrop of the Prince of Condé’s château. The Queen knew from talking to the stable girl in the paddock that Highclere was in a “fiery mood,” but as she watched the final furlongs from the royal box, she sat smiling, hands in prayerful position, while Porchester and Oswald jumped and shouted the filly home. “I’m very excitable on the race course,” Porchester recalled, “too enthusiastic, not very British. I remember going mad and slapping the Queen on the back when Highclere won the Prix de Diane.” It was the first victory for a British monarch in a French classic race.

The swarm of racegoers shouted “Vive la Reine,” and when the Queen went to see Highclere, she was nearly mobbed by the crowds, protected only by Porchester, Oswald, and some gendarmes. That evening she invited the royal party, including her trainer Dick Hern and the winning jockey, Joe Mercer, to dinner at Windsor Castle with the Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Princess Anne, and Dickie Mountbatten. In the place of honor at the table’s center was the Queen’s new gold trophy. Highclere went on to win the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at Ascot, and contributed to most of the Queen’s £140,000 in winnings that year.

The Queen’s triumph in France came on the eve of Royal Ascot, which in those days involved more elaborate entertainment than in later years. As many as sixty guests would be invited for the entire week at the castle. “I was assigned a valet, and every day we would be given a program with several options for activities,” recalled a man who attended when he was in his early twenties. “I had to have morning dress for lunch and Ascot, and white tie for dinner every night. No one could ever be late, and the valets ensured that we were dressed correctly and showed up on time.”

The Queen typically did her boxes in the morning while her friends opted for more vigorous pursuits such as riding, tennis, swimming, and swatting balls into nets from Philip’s wooden polo pony (set up in a cage near the castle’s indoor swimming pool). Others stayed indoors to read, do jigsaw puzzles, or play scrabble. Sometimes she would invite several young male guests to ride with her for an hour before the luncheon, where she would appear looking thoroughly refreshed and pulled together after only a half hour in which to change. Every afternoon was devoted to the races. On Wednesday night there was a big formal dinner for 150 in the Waterloo Chamber, and on another night guests would be taken to a nearby theater followed by dinner. As with her dine-and-sleeps, the Queen devoted one evening to tours of the library and the royal art collection. Patrick Plunket organized everything to the minute.

Early in 1975, the Queen’s great friend and consummate impresario was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. Plunket was admitted to King Edward VII hospital in mid-March, but after several days he insisted on leaving to attend an important reception at Buckingham Palace, saying, “I have to put on my white tie and medals.” His pain dulled by morphine, he was driven to the Palace, where he retrieved his evening clothes from his room and announced all the guests. He finally returned to the hospital at 2 A.M. Hours later he found a letter on his breakfast tray from the Queen saying, “Patrick, I’m deeply grateful for what you did last night, Yours sincerely, Elizabeth R.”

Patrick Plunket died ten days later on Easter Sunday at age fifty-one. The Queen honored him with a funeral in the Chapel Royal inside St. James’s Palace, with plangent music sung by boy choristers. It was a small group—just members of the Plunket family along with the Queen and Philip. The royal couple also attended the standing-room-only memorial service in the Guards’ Chapel across St. James’s Park, where Philip read the lesson. At the funeral, Annabel Goldsmith glanced at the Queen and “caught a look of deep sadness.”

According to Plunket’s brother Shaun, the Queen had a hand in the Times obituary. “She certainly helped,” he said. “It was quite light. There was a quotation that referred very much to his service.” But she sent no condolence note, as is her custom. “I don’t think we would have expected her to write,” said Shaun Plunket. “We knew she missed him and that we missed him. She didn’t have to put it on paper.” His will designated that one of his favorite possessions, a seascape by the nineteenth-century English artist Richard Parkes Bonington, be given to the Queen. After his brothers presented it to her in her study at Buckingham Palace, she wrote them a gracious note of thanks.

She further expressed her gratitude by approving a distinctive memorial, a white pavilion atop a hill above the Valley Gardens in Windsor Great Park, with an engraved plaque saying, “In memory of Patrick Plunket for his service to the Royal Family.” It was built with funds from his relatives and friends, including the Queen, Philip, and the Queen Mother. Elizabeth II took an interest in the design as well as the landscaping. “I’m sure I told the gardener I don’t care for variegated hostas,” she told Shaun Plunket on one inspection tour. “I can’t think of why he put those there.” Since the memorial is only minutes away from Smith’s Lawn, where the Queen often comes to watch polo, she has walked over occasionally to sit on the bench and reflect.

With Plunket’s death, the Queen lost not only a confidant but the sprightly tone he brought to court life. Her entertainments seemed more conventional, her guest lists less venturesome. Some even believe that if he had lived, he could have managed Diana, Princess of Wales, more effectively than anyone else in the royal household. A year after his death, someone asked the Queen, “Have you given some thought to who will replace Patrick Plunket?” Replied the Queen, “No one will ever replace him.”