Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

TWELVE

Feeling the Love

PATRICK PLUNKET’S PASSING WAS THE QUEEN’S FIRST MAJOR LOSS since the death of her father twenty-three years earlier, and she dealt with it by drawing on what one of her longtime friends calls her “profound religious existence,” dating to her childhood, and reinforced by her consecration in 1953.

As the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the monarch is the defender of the faith—the official religion of the country, established by law and respected by sentiment. Yet when the Queen travels to Scotland, she becomes a member of the Church of Scotland, which governs itself and tolerates no supervision by the state. She doesn’t abandon the Anglican faith when she crosses the border, but rather doubles up, although no Anglican bishop ever comes to preach at Balmoral.

Elizabeth II has always embraced what former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey called the “sacramental manner in which she views her own office.” She regards her faith as a duty, “not in the sense of a burden, but of glad service” to her subjects. Her faith is also part of the rhythm of her daily life. “She has a comfortable relationship with God,” said Carey. “She’s got a capacity because of her faith to take anything the world throws at her. Her faith comes from a theology of life that everything is ordered.”

She worships unfailingly each Sunday, whether in a tiny chapel in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec or a wooden hut on Essequibo in Guyana after a two-hour boat ride. But “she doesn’t parade her faith,” said Canon John Andrew, who saw her frequently during the 1960s when he worked for Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey. On holidays she attends services at the parish church in Sandringham, and at Crathie outside the Balmoral gates.

Her habit is to take Communion three or four times a year—at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and the occasional special service—“an old-fashioned way of being an Anglican, something she was brought up to do,” said John Andrew. She enjoys plain, traditional hymns and short, straightforward sermons. George Carey regards her as “middle of the road. She treasures Anglicanism. She loves the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is always used at Sandringham. She would disapprove of modern services, but wouldn’t make that view known. The Bible she prefers is the old King James version. She has a great love of the English language and enjoys the beauty of words. The scriptures are soaked into her.” The Queen has called the King James Bible “a masterpiece of English prose.”

Because visiting clergymen preach at Sandringham and Balmoral, she often has them as houseguests. “The royal family treat clergy differently,” said a minister in the Church of Scotland. “They tend to relax with us. It can get pretty perky. They say what they think in front of us.” Once while visiting Sandringham, George Carey heard the Queen say to Princess Margaret, “Oh you silly woman.” “It wasn’t offensive,” Carey recalled. “It was part of the family banter, but there was still deep affection.” Occasionally the Queen’s itinerant pastors have offered inadvertent comic relief. “For the delicious meal we are about to receive, and for the intercourse afterwards, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” said a minister from Aberdeen before one dinner at Balmoral, which the Queen later recounted with perfect Scottish inflections for her friends.

In her role as head of state, Elizabeth II has known clergy high and low, from popes to parish priests. The American evangelist Billy Graham came several times to Windsor Castle to worship with her privately. She admired Graham, although when he asked her to sit in the royal box for his crusade at Wembley Stadium with a congregation of 100,000 people, she politely declined, drawing the line at such a public display.

She sees the Archbishop of Canterbury in regular audiences a half dozen times a year, and as needed when important spiritual matters come up. She is friendly with the other top Anglican prelates as well, but is probably closest to the Dean of Windsor, who “takes the place of a family confessor,” said Margaret Rhodes. “He has contact with the Queen reasonably regularly because he is beside Windsor Castle. If she has things she would like to discuss, she can talk to him. She knows he can talk that kind of language.”

Religion infuses Elizabeth II’s public duties, not only through her Christmas message, but her attendance at high-profile observances such as Remembrance Sunday (the only time she wears black during the year), the second weekend in November. Held at the Cenotaph in London, the commemoration honors the war dead of the nation and the Commonwealth.

Three days before Easter, she also marks Maundy Thursday, a modern ritual signifying humility that is based on Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper. In past centuries monarchs actually cleansed the feet of the poor, a practice that ended in 1685 with James II. Instead, they distributed alms, and in the Queen’s reign, the recipients of “Maundy Money” have been elderly subjects chosen for their service to the community. At Philip’s suggestion, she changed the location of the service in 1957 to a cathedral outside London for the first time, and since then she has traveled around the country. The pageantry is intricately orchestrated, with her white-ruffed and scarlet-coated Yeomen of the Guard carrying silver trays holding purses filled with specially minted silver coins. The Queen moves along a line of men and women in equal number based on the monarch’s age, and hands each of them a purse, often adding a word of congratulations for their good work.

The Queen’s primary role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England is appointing archbishops, bishops, and deans recommended by the prime minister. She can’t reject his advice, but she can, as in her dealings on secular matters, raise questions and ask for more information. “It’s a very clever subtle way of making the prime minister think again,” said historian Kenneth Rose. “If the next week he comes back and says ‘I still want that archbishop,’ that is the end of it. The Queen will not imperil the constitution over something like that.”

HAROLD WILSON TOOK particular pleasure in making such appointments. “He found his ecclesiastical duties a peaceful oasis in the desert that most prime ministers inexorably make of their garden,” wrote biographer Elizabeth Longford. The problems plaguing Britain weighed more heavily on Wilson than during his first government, and his stamina seemed diminished. Sensing his difficulties, the Queen was solicitous when she entertained the Wilsons at Balmoral. “They used to fetch us by car from Aberdeen, wrapping us tenderly in rugs,” recalled Mary Wilson. “We went into the hall, and the Queen and Philip came to greet us. There were bowls on the floor, and corgis running around, and she put a vase of gentians in my room. The lady-in-waiting said the Queen thought I might like those. She gave a lot of thought to things like that.”

During their September 1975 visit, Elizabeth II drove the Wilsons to a cabin, where she served them tea and cooked them dropped scones. Afterward, as she and Mary were washing the dishes, Wilson surprised the Queen by confiding that he intended to resign around his sixtieth birthday the following March. Since he later suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, there has been speculation that he had recognized signs of his slipping cognitive powers and decided to leave before his ability to govern was affected. But Marcia Falkender said that as early as March 1974, “when he first got to Number 10, he said it would not be for long.” In addition to his wife and Falkender, only Martin Charteris was informed, and he kept the prime minister’s secret along with the Queen.

As the Wilsons were leaving Balmoral for the last time, Elizabeth II had some photographs taken. One shows her in a head scarf, smiling tentatively from under the hood of her macintosh, with Wilson at her side, dressed in a handsome tweed suit and holding a pipe in his hand, looking every inch the country gentleman. Wilson so treasured the image that he carried it in his wallet for years.

Gough Whitlam, the Labour prime minister of Australia, posed a different sort of challenge for the Queen that November. As Queen of Australia, Elizabeth II had an abiding affection for the distant realm she had visited five times since her coronation. When Whitlam was first elected in 1972, she was eager to win over the man who spoke frankly about wanting to eliminate the monarchy in his country. She invited him to stay at Windsor Castle in April 1973 on the night of her forty-seventh birthday, along with his wife, the “too-tall” and “ungainly” (in her own words) Margaret, nicknamed “Big Marge” by the Queen’s courtiers. The royal household pulled out the stops to entertain the Whitlams, installing them in a suite overlooking the Long Walk that stretches two and a half miles through Windsor Great Park to the giant equestrian statue of George III on Snow Hill.

After dinner, Whitlam gave the Queen a birthday present: a “deep-piled cream sheepskin rug,” which she and her sister flirtatiously sat upon after it had been spread on the floor of the drawing room. “That evening she was quite determined to catch her man,” Martin Charteris told author Graham Turner. “A lot of her sexuality has been suppressed, but that night, she used it like a weapon. She wrapped Gough Whitlam round her little finger, knocked him sideways. She sat on that rug in front of him, stroked it and said how lovely it was. It was an arrant use of sexuality. I was absolutely flabbergasted.” Whitlam later said to Charteris, “Well, if she’s like that, it’s all right by me!”

The royal couple built on that rapport during two subsequent trips to Australia. When the Whitlams bade them goodbye after their visit in October 1973, Margaret wrote that it was “almost too much and too moving for us all.” But on November 11, 1975, good feelings counted for little when Whitlam was deadlocked with the Australian Senate over passage of his budget, raising the prospect of financial default by the government.

In each of her fifteen realms outside Britain, the Queen is represented by a governor-general whom she appoints on the advice of the country’s prime minister and whose role and functions are comparable to those of the sovereign in the United Kingdom. Her governor-general in Australia at the time of the budget crisis was Sir John Kerr, a respected former judge. To break the legislative impasse, Kerr took the extraordinary step of exercising his “reserve power” to dismiss Whitlam and install Liberal Party leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister pending the election that Whitlam had refused to call. The Queen had been briefed on events as they were unfolding, but Kerr purposely did not inform her before he took action because he wished to keep her out of the imbroglio—and above a political dispute. Kerr had consulted with Australia’s chief justice, who confirmed that under the Australian constitution he had the right to use the reserve power to dismiss ministers.

An infuriated Whitlam and the Labour Party tried to get the Queen to fire her governor-general for overreaching, to no avail. She could terminate her representative only on the advice of the sitting Australian prime minister. Kerr’s actions were legal. The new election swept in a coalition led by the Liberals; the government passed a budget and got down to business. Whitlam maintained a congenial relationship with the Queen, but he never forgave Kerr. The governor-general stepped down in 1977, when he was honored with the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, a personal gift of the Queen. In 1986 the Australian parliament passed a law withdrawing the power of the governor-general to intervene as Kerr had done, although two thirds of the population still wanted to keep Elizabeth II as their Queen.

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A CRISIS BREWING within Elizabeth II’s own family caused her great distress in the autumn of 1975 when the marriage of Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon collapsed. For the first five years after their wedding, they had been the toast of London—beautiful, magnetic, and stylish, celebrated for their lively parties with scintillating guests drawn from the arts and society. They had two children, David in 1961 and Sarah in 1964, and Tony was achieving even greater success through his photographic commissions and his work as artistic adviser to the Sunday Times magazine as well as an unpaid consultant to the Council of Industrial Design.

But Margaret became bored, petulant, and increasingly possessive. Tony in turn buried himself more deeply in his work, escaping in the evenings to his studio at Kensington Palace and taking frequent assignments overseas. Despite their superficial compatibility—strong sexual attraction, quick wit, love of ballet and theater, and sybaritic enjoyment of parties in the evening and extended holidays in the sun at luxurious resorts—there were seeds of trouble from the outset. Margaret had married on the rebound from Peter Townsend. She had known Tony for only a year when they became secretly engaged late in 1959 shortly after Margaret heard that at age forty-seven Townsend was planning to marry a nineteen-year-old Belgian girl. “I received a letter from Peter in the morning,” she recalled, “and that evening I decided to marry Tony.” The princess was attracted to Tony at least in part because his creativity and uninhibited bohemian ways made him so different from her father’s former equerry.

Margaret could not have known that Tony was a compulsive seducer. Both of them were solipsistic, craved constant entertainment, competed for center stage, and lacked the inclination or the ability to be introspective about their relationship. Tony wanted the freedom to come and go as he pleased. Margaret insisted on unrealistic standards of togetherness, even though he began his work early in the morning and she rarely appeared until close to noon, ready to socialize until the small hours.

As the tensions between them festered, his teasing took on a sadistic edge, and their amusing banter exploded into ugly alcohol-fueled fights in front of their friends. He took to leaving notes around listing “things I hate about you,” while she loathed the cottage in the country that he had fastidiously restored. Each of them was repeatedly unfaithful. Among his dalliances was with the daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of Reading, neighbors near his house in Sussex. Margaret’s lovers included one of Tony’s best friends, Anthony Barton.

Publicly Tony was diligent about his role accompanying her on royal engagements, walking two steps behind and always allowing her to speak first. They were at their best on royal tours abroad, smiling amiably during endless meet-and-greet receptions. In November 1965 they conducted a charm offensive during a three-week tour of five cities in the United States that included a formal dinner at the White House. President Lyndon Johnson called the princess “little lady” and offered a prescription for a happy marriage that couldn’t have been more inappropriate for the royal pair: “First, let her think she’s having her way. Second, let her have it.”

The Snowdons lived increasingly separate lives, especially after Margaret began escaping to a villa on the Caribbean island of Mustique given to her by her friend Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconner). Although Margaret talked to her sister and her mother nearly every day, she was circumspect about her marriage. As the Queen Mother said to one of Margaret’s confidants, “I didn’t bring up my daughter to discuss her husband with me!” Both the Queen and the Queen Mother were dazzled by Tony’s artistry and ingenuity, not to mention his charm. In their company, he was always on his best behavior. “He pulled the wool over their eyes,” said Anne Glenconner. “The Queen probably didn’t realize what Tony was up to. It was not the sort of thing the Queen would talk about. She doesn’t gossip.”

The Queen did see Margaret behaving badly—when she took out her frustrations in rude remarks to the Queen Mother, or when she flouted protocol by refusing to turn when her sister did during meals, leaving the Queen to stare at the back of her dinner partner’s head. She knew Margaret was drinking heavily; when her cousin Pamela Hicks had to cancel a party because of her husband’s problems with alcohol, the Queen said, “I understand. I’ve been through it with Margaret.” But as was her habit, the Queen avoided confronting the princess. “How’s Margaret’s mood?” she asked a friend of her sister before lunch at Royal Lodge. “Shall I venture out on the terrace?”

In 1973 Margaret fell for Roddy Llewellyn, an attractive and pliant dilettante nearly eighteen years her junior. The liaison infuriated Tony, and the Queen was upset by her sister’s indiscretions, above all when Margaret began staying with Roddy at his bohemian upper-class commune in Wiltshire. By November 1975 the Snowdons had reached the breaking point. Tony sent a letter to the Queen telling her that “the atmosphere is appalling for all concerned,” and they needed to separate. Several weeks later the Queen replied, saying that Tony’s letter “had been devastating,” wrote Snowdon biographer Anne de Courcy. “She intimated that she was aware of how bad their relationship had become before saying that she realized the situation was now intolerable for both of them.” She asked only that they wait until after Christmas, and following discussions at the Palace, she advised that they make the separation announcement during the Easter holidays when their children could be with them. The Palace intended to say only that the Snowdons would “live apart” and that “there are no plans for divorce proceedings.”

The Palace game plan blew up in late February 1976 when a tabloid photographer snapped a picture of Margaret and Roddy in their bathing suits, sitting together at a table in Mustique. Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World splashed the suggestive image of the Princess and her toy boy, prompting Tony to move out. Although he had his own inamorata, Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, Tony managed to seize the moral high ground. He leaked the news of the separation to the Daily Express, which published it on March 17, two days before the planned announcement by the Palace. In the process, he eclipsed Harold Wilson’s resignation announcement on the 19th—which, ironically, the prime minister had timed in part to deflect attention from the simmering Snowdon scandal.

Always deft with the media, Snowdon held his own press conference on the 17th in which he wished his wife well, asked for the understanding of their children, and professed his undying admiration and love for the royal family. His clever spin reinforced the view of Margaret as the guilty party, a self-indulgent and outré princess. “The Queen and the Queen Mother never took sides with Tony Snowdon over the separation,” said one of the Queen’s relatives, “but they never made an enemy of him. They realized their daughter and sister could be impossible to live with.” Snowdon kept in the good graces of the Queen and her mother by never saying another unkind word about Margaret, and by remaining forever silent about the rest of the royal family.

Harold Wilson’s retirement came as a surprise, not only to the public, but to members of his own party, which elected as its leader Foreign Secretary James Callaghan. The new prime minister, who kissed hands on April 5, 1976, had also served as chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, so he was a known quantity in the corridors of Buckingham Palace. To honor the retiring premier, the Queen agreed to attend Wilson’s farewell dinner at 10 Downing Street, the first time she had done so since Churchill left office twenty-one years earlier. The inspiration came from Charteris, and Wilson was flattered by the gesture. The sly wit of the Queen’s private secretary was unmistakable as well, when she referred in her speech to herself and Wilson as the tenants of tied cottages at either end of the Mall.

THE QUEEN HIT her fiftieth birthday on April 21, 1976. She looked enviably youthful, a combination of good genes, healthy living, and an unfussy beauty regimen. “She doesn’t sit in the sun and she doesn’t hunt, which is very weathering,” said one of her good friends. Her brown hair, which now showed some gray strands, was tended by her longtime hairdresser, Charles Martyn. Facing forward rather than the usual bending backward, she rested her chin inside a sink equipped with a large sprayer to have her hair washed with egg and lemon shampoo. Between setting and drying, Martyn would spend an hour and a half creating her unvarying hairstyle as she reviewed a stack of correspondence in her lap, scarcely glancing up to check her reflection in the mirror. For her skin she used an assortment of Cyclax products including milk of roses moisturizer, and she washed with milk and honey cleanser. She spent little time applying makeup, with just a dusting of powder, and she used bright red lipstick because it was more visible in public.

That June she hosted French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing for a state visit and shrewdly orchestrated a public show of support for the supersonic Concorde airplane, an Anglo-French venture that French officials regarded as a useful collaboration, despite concerns about its high cost. Giscard was apprehensive about the Concorde because he had heard the British had lost enthusiasm for it. Before the state banquet at Buckingham Palace, the Queen instructed Martin Charteris to depart from protocol and applaud loudly when she mentioned the airplane in her speech. Charteris clapped on cue, and because of his senior position as the Queen’s private secretary, he was joined resoundingly by the other British guests. At a press conference the next day, the French president said that after hearing the “spontaneous and loud applause,” he was reassured of Britain’s wholehearted support. Nicholas Henderson, a seasoned diplomat who watched the scheme unfold, considered it “a tribute to the Queen’s understanding of the workings of guided democracy.”

The following month, she returned to the United States for the first time in seventeen years. The idea of a state visit around the Bicentennial of American independence had been broached by President Nixon in early 1973, eighteen months before his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. British officials thought the timing needed “careful consideration.” As Robert Armstrong, Heath’s principal private secretary, wrote to Martin Charteris at the time, “One would wish to consider whether it was right for The Queen to be associated in this way with the celebration of a rebellion from the British Crown.” He added that the British Ambassador in Washington, Rowland Baring, the 3rd Earl of Cromer (husband of the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Esme Cromer), “has some feeling that there may be a certain degree of uninhibited zest about the American celebrations of the Declaration of Independence with which it might not be entirely desirable that The Queen should be associated.… A certain amount of ballyhoo is inseparable from this sort of celebration in America, which would conspicuously lack dignity.”

Despite those initial misgivings, a grand six-day state visit was arranged, beginning on July 6 with a stop in Philadephia. “July 4th was really pushing it,” said David Walker of the British embassy. “Forgiveness can go so far.” Among the Queen’s entourage would be her good friend Virginia (Ginny) Airlie, the forty-three-year-old wife of the 13th Earl, who was her first American lady-in-waiting. Diminutive like the Queen, and described by Cecil Beaton as “a paragon of gaiety & dignity,” Ginny Airlie had been appointed in 1973. She had initially demurred, saying she was an American subject with six children, the youngest only two years old, and suggested that the Queen “should get someone more steeped in it all.” But the Queen had insisted. The unpretentious peer’s wife fitted well with the royal household and adapted readily to the royal ways she had observed at parties and during shooting weekends at Sandringham and Balmoral. Even so, Woman of the Bedchamber Susan Hussey couldn’t resist calling her “the American.”

The royal party of twenty flew to Bermuda, where they embarked on Britannia for the three-day crossing to the United States. On the first night, they were hit with a force nine gale. Susan Crosland, the Baltimore-born wife of Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland, noticed that during drinks before dinner amid the lurching seas, the Queen looked “philosophical, almost merry, twenty yards of chiffon scarf flung over one shoulder.” Naval officer Philip, however, was “ashen and drawn,” much as he had looked in 1951 when he had been seasick during their stormy voyage across the North Atlantic. Now, as then, the Queen was the only one to resist the nausea.

After coffee in the drawing room, the Queen grabbed the handle of a sliding door when a swell heaved the ship. As the door slid shut, the Queen exclaimed “Wheeeeee!” her chiffon scarf flying. The door slid open with another pitch of the waves, and again she cried, “Wheeeeee!” before turning to say “Good night.” The next morning at breakfast she announced, “I have never seen so many grey and grim faces round a dinner table.” Then a pause: “Philip was not well.” Another pause, this time with a giggle: “I’m glad to say.”

A crowd of five thousand greeeted the Queen as Britannia docked at the same spot where William Penn had landed in 1681. It was a scorching day in Philadelphia as she walked from one historic spot to another among an estimated 75,000 well-wishers waving American flags and Union Jacks. Reporters were surprised by “her apparent eagerness to work a crowd.”

At Independence National Park, she presented the six-and-one-half-ton commemorative Bicentennial Bell manufactured by London’s Whitechapel Foundry, which had cast the original Liberty Bell in 1752. “I speak to you as the direct descendant of King George III,” she said, noting that the Fourth of July “should be celebrated as much in Britain as in America … in sincere gratitude to the Founding Fathers … for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson. We lost the American colonies because we lacked that statesmanship ‘to know the right time, and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.’ … We learned to respect the right of others to govern themselves in their own ways.… Without that great act in the cause of liberty, performed in Independence Hall 200 years ago, we could never have transformed an empire into a commonwealth.”

That evening she endured the casual protocol violations of Frank Rizzo, the beefy mayor of Philadelphia and former policeman who had campaigned on the slogan “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” During an elegant dinner for four hundred at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rizzo left her side to cruise the other tables and “press the flesh.” “What a fascinating man he is,” the Queen deadpanned. She escaped to the ladies’ room—euphemistically known in royal circles as an “opportunity to tidy” or a “health break”—before a reception for yet another six hundred guests.

The temperature in Washington pushed one hundred degrees, but the Queen “never faltered in the day’s walk-about under a remorseless sun,” wrote Susan Crosland, who politely declined a revivifying pinch of snuff from Martin Charteris. After a welcoming ceremony on the White House South Lawn, President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, threw a white-tie dinner for 224 under a big tent in the Rose Garden hung with Japanese lanterns. Public television broadcast the banquet live, prohibited only from showing the Queen eating or dancing. In her yellow organza gown, diamond tiara, necklace, and earrings, Elizabeth II did not disappoint.

Henry Kissinger’s wife, Nancy, smoked through the entire meal, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller’s wife, Happy, asked Philip about his German background. He retorted that he was Danish, prompting Happy to tell Tony Crosland, “Prince Philip is renouncing his German origins!” The East Room entertainment featured Bob Hope, followed by pop stars the Captain & Tennille, who sang their hit single “Muskrat Love” about a pair of rodents romancing by candlelight. Afterward, the Queen and Gerald Ford danced to “The Lady Is a Tramp,” the iconic Rodgers and Hart tune popularized by Frank Sinatra. The Queen and Philip didn’t leave for their quarters at Blair House until shortly before 1 A.M.

After another nonstop day of appearances, Elizabeth II reciprocated the next evening with her own white-tie, four-course dinner for eighty-four at the British embassy, preceded by a reception for 1,600 on the lawn, where she was trailed by television teams carrying high-powered lights. Suddenly the cameras and lights disappeared. Elizabeth Taylor had arrived “to make her grand entrance,” recalled Michael Shea, then director of the British Information Services in New York. British ambassador Sir Peter Ramsbotham was fuming, but the Queen “was merely amused, seeing, for once, someone else at the center of media attention.”

As she had in 1957, the Queen reached Manhattan by water, this time on the air-conditioned Royal Barge from Britannia. A hundredyard walkabout in lower Manhattan turned chaotic as crowds pressed to get near her and the police “were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm,” said Michael Shea. Not for the first time, she appeared cool amid the sweating multitude. “Luckily, I don’t mind the heat,” she said cheerfully.

She again met with the Pilgrims and the English-Speaking Union, this time over luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria. As the Queen and Philip were driven uptown in an open car to visit the eighteenth-century Morris-Jumel mansion in Harlem—Manhattan’s oldest house—she spotted a friend on the corner of Park Avenue and 61st Street. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “There’s John Andrew!” The Anglican cleric waved and shouted back, “Hello, hello. I’ll see you tonight.” After she passed by, he thought to himself, “What a bloody fool. What a thing to say to the Queen.”

The high point of her packed schedule that day was a visit to Bloomingdale’s, which was highly orchestrated, unlike her stop at a supermarket nineteen years earlier. This time store officials swept her from one exhibition to another on three floors. She saw reproduction Chippendale chairs, noting that the seats were wider than in Britain, and she marveled at the Calvin Klein models wearing trendy tweed midi-skirts. “Gracious, do you really wear skirts that long here?” she asked. Philip had his own jovial tour that included a pet rock and talking calculator in a display of best-selling novelties.

The royal couple hosted a small dinner for three dozen guests on Britannia, which The New York Times likened to the “homey patched-elbow chic of an English country house, with flowered chintz slipcovers, family photographs, and rattan settees, interspersed with the occasional relic of Empire—shark’s teeth from the Solomon Islands here, a golden urn commemorating Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar there.” An indiscreet crew member confessed to the Times reporter, “We have fabulous parties when the Queen’s away and the Duke’s on board.” In fact, the evenings were often exuberant when Elizabeth II was there as well, with witty skits written by Martin Charteris and starring members of the family and household dressed in costume, singing and dancing to tunes played on the bolted-down piano.

Following the dinner, there was a reception for two hundred more guests, one of whom was Canon John Andrew. He was escorting Sharman Douglas, who had been a friend of the Queen since the late 1940s when Sharman’s father, Lewis Douglas, served as U.S. ambassador to Britain. As soon as Elizabeth II saw Andrew, she threw back her head and laughed: “You looked so funny standing all alone on the corner of the street!” After she and Sharman Douglas had kissed hello, Philip came over, the lapel of his dinner jacket sporting one of the “Big Apple” cloth stickers featured in a popular promotional campaign for New York City. “What the hell is that?” asked John Andrew. The duke removed it and stuck it on the cleric’s forehead. “There!” he said, which started the Queen laughing again.

Over the next two days, Elizabeth II traveled up and down the East Coast, first to visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia, then to Newport, Rhode Island, where she entertained the Fords at a dinner on Britannia. She wrapped up her journey in Boston, “moving from one reminder of 1776 to another.” In a speech at the old State House, she remarked that she was in the city where “it all began.” Sailing out of Boston harbor on Britannia, for Halifax, Nova Scotia, the ship’s band played “Auld Lang Syne.” “I was reminded of the good that can flow from a friendship that is mended,” Elizabeth II later reflected. “Who would have thought 200 years ago that a descendant of King George III could have taken part in these celebrations?”

The Queen continued at the same pace for another two weeks in Canada, where she opened the Olympic Games in Montreal and watched her daughter compete as a member of the British equestrian team. During the cross-country event, Anne’s horse hit a fence and threw her to the ground as the Queen stared intently, biting her nails and squinting with anxiety. Very much her mother’s daughter, Anne climbed back on and continued the race, even after suffering bruises and a mild concussion that erased her memory of the competition.

The Queen’s endurance, as always, was striking. Some years earlier, while she was touring Saskatchewan, Alvin Hamilton, then Canada’s minister of northern affairs and national resources, had said to the Queen’s private secretary, “I noticed, we’ve been going all day, and Her Majesty never requested even a health break.” “You need not worry,” the private secretary replied. “Her Majesty is trained for eight hours.”

Whatever the setting, Elizabeth II appeared relaxed while carrying out her public duties. Onlookers were taken aback a few months later after a dinner during a royal tour in Luxembourg when the high-spirited Queen took to playing the drums, “keeping the rhythm and shaking her head.” During a benefit for the Venice in Peril Fund featuring a screening of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, the evening’s host, John Julius Norwich (the 2nd Viscount), was seated between the Queen and Princess Anne. He heard the monarch begin to sigh only a few minutes into the more than two-hour film. “I heard her sigh again,” recalled Norwich. “It was a long sigh. I was in agony as the sighs continued throughout the film and I wondered what to say when the lights came up.” But as the movie ended, she simply turned, flashed a bright smile, and said, “Well, that was a bit gloomy, wasn’t it?” “She was trying to put me at ease,” Norwich explained. “She could sense my discomfort.”

IN HER 1976 Christmas message, the Queen spoke for the first time about her coming Silver Jubilee marking twenty-five years on the throne. “Next year is a rather special one for me,” she said. “The gift I would most value … is that reconciliation should be found wherever it is needed.” The Callaghan government initially opposed a Silver Jubilee celebration because of Britain’s economic woes, but Charteris and his Palace colleagues successfully argued that it would provide a morale boost, and that the Queen should not only tour the country, but all her Commonwealth realms. She emphasized, however, her “express wish” that there should be “no undue expenditure.” The press was predictably skeptical, with the pro-republican Guardian proclaiming on Sunday, February 6, that “apathy hits plans for Jubilee.”

Although the Queen reached her landmark that Accession Day, she did not want to celebrate the moment her father died, so she spent the weekend quietly at Windsor Castle with her family. Four days later she embarked on the first of her two overseas jubilee tours, spending seven weeks traveling on Britannia to Western Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Australia. Her reception gave the lie to The Guardian’s grim prediction. “Harbour entrances would be just packed with people everywhere,” recalled Commodore Anthony Morrow. In Fiji a roof collapsed during a demonstration of native dances, although nobody was injured. One reporter noted that as the crowds headed to the scene, the Queen “seized the moment to whip out a lipstick and add another streak of red.” On her return to England, Elizabeth II watched the three-year-old filly Dunfermline, her second great runner of the 1970s, win two of Britain’s classic races, first the Oaks at Epsom and later in the summer the St. Leger at Doncaster.

The festivities began in earnest on May 4, 1977, with the Queen’s appearance in Westminster Hall for “Loyal Addresses” from the Houses of Commons and Lords, followed by her reply. Like the Christmas broadcast, her message was personal and therefore noteworthy. As would be expected, she spoke glowingly of the Commonwealth, but she also said that Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community was “one of the most significant decisions during my reign.” Even more surprisingly, she frankly responded to the growing pressure to devolve power to Scotland and Wales. “I can readily understand these aspirations,” she said, “but I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this Jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”

“That was significant, because it was the only political thing she has said, and all the more powerful because it was unique,” said Simon Walker, who served as the Queen’s communication and press secretary from 2000 to 2002. Nationalists in Scotland recognized the primacy of the union as her bedrock principle, and duly protested. But the Queen had been determined to speak her mind.

On Monday, June 6, Elizabeth II stood atop Snow Hill in Windsor Great Park, her hair shielded from the elements by her signature head scarf, poised to ignite a bonfire that would signal others around the country to light their own in celebration of their Queen. Unfortunately, a skittish soldier beat her to it, a glitch that amused rather than annoyed her. “Your Majesty, I’m afraid everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong,” said Major Sir Michael Parker, an impresario for royal events with an expertise in pyrotechnics. “Oh good, what fun!” she replied with a smile.

The apex of the festivities came the following day, when the Queen and Prince Philip rode in the Gold State Coach, accompanied by Household Cavalry, Yeomen of the Guard, and Prince Charles on horseback in a bearskin and the red uniform of Colonel-in-Chief of the Welsh Guards. It was the first time since the coronation that she had ridden in the freshly gilded and dizzyingly ornate carriage. “I had forgotten how uncomfortable that ride could be,” the Queen later confided to a friend.

The carriage procession—which also featured the Irish State Coach, Queen Alexandra’s State Coach, and the Glass Coach carrying other members of the royal family—wended its way from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral, passing more than a million people, many of whom had camped out overnight in the rain. At the cathedral, a congregation of 2,700 guests included all of her six living prime ministers and an array of world leaders. Donald Coggan, the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury, praised the Queen as “an example of service untiringly done, of duty faithfully fulfilled, and of a home life stable and wonderfully happy,” as the television camera panned across a row of her relatives. Princess Margaret, separated from Tony Snowdon for more than a year and still grabbing headlines for her escapades with Roddy Llewellyn, sat with her two children.

The Queen, wearing a bright pink shift dress, matching coat, and cloche hat trimmed with twenty-five small fabric bells, walked with her husband through the streets near the cathedral, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries along the crowded barriers. At a luncheon in the Guildhall, she restated the pledge of lifelong service that she had made on her twenty-first birthday “in my salad days when I was green in judgment,” adding, “I do not regret or retract a word of it.”

As the Queen and Philip rode in an open carriage to Buckingham Palace, the roar of the vast crowd was so loud that her coachman couldn’t even hear the horses’ hooves hitting the pavement. The royal family fanned out on the famous Palace balcony, the men in uniform, the women like a pastel rainbow: the Queen in pink, the Queen Mother in daffodil, Margaret in slightly darker pink, and Anne visibly pregnant in aquamarine. Elizabeth II looked jubilant—laughing, talking, and waving, taking in a mass of humanity she had seen on numerous occasions stretching back to her father’s coronation in 1937. But this time, more than any other, the crowds were genuinely cheering for her, for what she symbolized and what she had achieved. The Duchess of Kent, wife of the Queen’s first cousin Edward the Duke of Kent, got so carried away she threw her arms around Elizabeth II and kissed her, exclaiming, “They really love you.” Katharine Kent later explained that the Queen had been “totally bewildered and overwhelmed by this huge flood of affection directed towards her.” An estimated 500 million television viewers around the world watched the spectacle.

Two days later the celebration topped itself with a barge procession down the Thames from Greenwich to Lambeth that was meant to evoke the majestic convoys of Tudor times. After dark, fireworks exploded across the sky, and another enormous crowd gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and along the Mall to catch the parade of illuminated carriages carrying the Queen and her family back to Buckingham Palace. Roy Strong, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was among the multitude—“basically middle class British. Educated voices could be heard,” he recalled. “Men in suits passed by with Union Jacks tied to the end of their umbrellas.” Clusters of onlookers spontaneously burst into “God Save the Queen” and “Rule Britannia.” When the coaches clattered by, Strong felt a communal “surge of emotion.” Elizabeth II and her family appeared on the Palace balcony, then reappeared after midnight, when Princess Margaret “more or less had to push them out as they failed to grasp the fervor of the crowd.”

There were four thousand Silver Jubilee street parties in London alone, and an estimated twelve thousand in cities, towns, and villages around the country. The punk rock group Sex Pistols sounded one blatantly harsh note with their nihilistic take on “God Save the Queen,” calling her the fascist leader of a country with no future. Although the BBC loyally refused to play the song, it nevertheless raced to number two in the charts.

Still, that dubious success didn’t dim jubilee enthusiasm. Over the next several months, the Queen toured thirty-six counties in the United Kingdom. As the celebratory momentum grew, the crowds swelled to the point that over a million people came out on a single day in Lancashire. The Queen’s last stop on her domestic itinerary was Northern Ireland, which she visited for the first time in eleven years.

Palace officials and government ministers had debated whether she should risk the trip. The conflict in Ulster since the beginning of the Troubles had been a continuing source of concern for the Queen. Following their deployment to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, the British troops originally intended to protect the Catholic minority had become the targets of IRA bombs and snipers amid escalating tensions. In August 1971, the authorities began imprisoning Catholic militants without trial in an effort to control the violence.

“The Queen received me at one of my regular audiences after she had been watching the coverage of riots in Belfast on the television, and was obviously shaken by the ferocity of the events in a part of her Kingdom,” Edward Heath recalled. “In particular, she was horrified by the film of women’s faces contorted with hate as they clung to the high wired fences protecting British troops. Whenever the Queen is accused of remoteness or indifference towards the tribulations of her subjects, I think back to that moment.”

To protest the new internment policy, some ten thousand Catholic demonstrators had defied a ban on large gatherings to march through the streets of Londonderry on January 30, 1972. A British paratrooper regiment was dispatched to the scene, and after being assaulted by rocks and other objects, the forces opened fire in the panicky melee, killing thirteen and injuring fourteen, one of whom died later. There were armed IRA operatives in the crowd, but all those killed were unarmed Catholics, many of them cut down as they were fleeing.

The killings became known as Bloody Sunday, a turning point that rapidly escalated the IRA’s battle to force a unification of Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. In the immediate aftermath, mobs burned down the British embassy in Dublin. The IRA boosted its membership with radicalized young recruits and intensified its campaign of terror against the British army and English civilians, along with Protestants in Northern Ireland, leading to thousands of casualties.

In several of her Christmas broadcasts after Bloody Sunday, the Queen had touched on what she called “our own particular sorrows in Northern Ireland,” extending prayers and sympathy to those who were suffering, and encouraging Protestants and Catholics working together for peace “to keep humanity and common sense alive.” She predictably bridled when officials had second thoughts in the summer of 1977 about her planned trip to Northern Ireland, just as she had resisted in 1961 when her trip to Ghana was nearly canceled. “Martin, we said we’re going to Ulster,” she told her private secretary. “It would be a great pity not to.”

On August 10, she landed on the grounds of Hillsborough Castle outside Belfast by helicopter—judged by her security advisers to be “the safest way for the Queen to travel.” It was her first trip on a helicopter, a means of transportation that had long made her nervous, despite her usual physical courage.

She was protected by extraordinary security during her two days in Ulster, with some 32,000 troops and police on alert. About seven thousand people were invited to her receptions, garden party, and investiture, all of which were broadcast on television. After visiting the New University of Ulster at Coleraine, she joined her family on Britannia for their annual Western Isles cruise and a two-month retreat at Balmoral. Her trip to Northern Ireland, she said in that year’s Christmas broadcast, reminded her that “nowhere is reconciliation more desperately needed.” Her ability to travel there allowed “people of goodwill” to be “greatly heartened by the chance they had to share the celebrations.”

The second Commonwealth tour took her to Canada and the Caribbean for nearly three weeks. She returned from Barbados on November 2 by Concorde, the distinctive beak-nosed supersonic jetliner that had gone into service in January 1976. Her three-hour-and-forty-five-minute trip gave a futuristic flourish to the end of her 56,000 miles of jubilee travels.

On November 15 at 10:46 A.M., she became a grandmother at age fifty-one with the arrival of Anne’s first child, Peter Phillips. He was the first baby in the royal family to be born a commoner in five hundred years, since Mark Phillips had declined to take a title when he married Anne. They intended to raise their son—and his sister, Zara, born four years later—apart from the pressures of royal obligations, a decision that both children later welcomed.

That month Martin Charteris retired at age sixty-four after twenty-seven years of serving the Queen. Aside from Bobo MacDonald, no one in the royal household knew her better, had worked more intimately with her, or had seen her through so many stages of her life, from her formative years as a working princess through her grief over her father’s early death to her evolution as a confident and capable sovereign. He had in every respect lightened her load, not only with his keen judgment but with the verve he brought to her speeches and his gentle prodding to open her mind to new approaches.

They said farewell at a brief audience in Buckingham Palace. To help keep her emotions in check, Elizabeth II brought along her flinty daughter, who wouldn’t tolerate tears from her mother. “The Queen knew Martin would cry, and he did,” said Gay Charteris. “He was not inhibited by his emotions. She didn’t cry, and in her view, the least said, the better.” Some years later, Elizabeth II confided to her mother that when “my Martin” left, she missed him but she knew “he was still around if I needed to ask anything difficult.” All she said that morning at the Palace was, “Martin, thank you for a lifetime,” as she presented him with a silver tray inscribed with the same sentiment. When his tears abated, he mustered his customary levity. “The next time you see this,” he said. “It will have a gin and tonic on it.”