Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

THIRTEEN

Iron Lady and English Rose

THE QUEEN’S SILVER JUBILEE SUCCEEDED IN LIFTING THE NATION’S spirits during a troubled time, much as her wedding had done during the postwar gloom. Prime Minister James Callaghan had been struggling to jump-start Britain’s stagnant economy from the moment of his election at age sixty-four in 1976. That year his government was forced to stave off bankruptcy with a loan of $3.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund. The money came with the sort of conditions—curbs on government spending and wage increases in the public sector—that were customarily imposed on developing countries.

The prime minister—nicknamed “Sunny Jim”—was an avuncular presence in his weekly meetings with the Queen, who was fourteen years his junior. The son of a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy and a schoolteacher, he had entered the civil service as a tax collector when he was unable to afford a university education. An unabashed monarchist, he enjoyed his meetings with the Queen, relieved to be in a setting where “conversation flowed easily and could roam anywhere over a wide range of social as well as political and international topics.” After spending fifteen minutes or so on three prearranged agenda items, their talk over the next hour might touch on their families or perhaps the price of hay in Sussex, where he had a farm, compared to Norfolk or Scotland. Callaghan learned to respond adroitly to the Queen’s fascination with political personalities, and he came to admire her oblique way of getting across her points: how she “weighs up” the problems of her prime minister, hinting at her thoughts in a “pretty detached” manner, and avoiding direct advice.

At six foot one, he was the tallest of the Queen’s prime ministers, handsome, easygoing, ready with compliments and even mildly flirtatious. One week she memorably took him for a stroll in the Buckingham Palace gardens and coquettishly placed a sprig of lily of the valley in his buttonhole. Callaghan correctly summarized her evenhanded approach to all her prime ministers, with the exception of Winston Churchill, who was sui generis. “What one gets,” Callaghan said, “is friendliness but not friendship.”

For “poor old Jim Callaghan,” as the Queen Mother referred to him, the Tuesday evening interludes offered a brief moment of tranquillity amid political strife. Despite the compelling need for austerity, the unions plunged ahead in 1978 with demands for fat wage increases, which meant higher government spending to placate public employees. Throughout what became known as the “Winter of Discontent”—one of the coldest on record—the country was crippled by a series of strikes by truck drivers, hospital orderlies, trash collectors, ambulance drivers, school janitors, and gravediggers. Piles of refuse filled the streets, a symbol of a nation that had lost its way.

On March 28, 1979, the Conservatives in the House of Commons introduced a vote of no confidence in the government, which is required under the constitution to have the support of a majority of the legislature. The Labour government lost the confidence motion by one vote (thanks mainly to the Liberal Party’s backing of the Tory initiative), and a general election was called for May 3. The Conservative Party, led by fifty-three-year-old Margaret Thatcher, swept to power, winning 339 seats to 268 for Labour and 11 for Liberals. Thatcher’s arrival at Buckingham Palace the next day to kiss hands as the first female prime minister was a historic moment for the ambitious young politician who had written twenty-seven years earlier that the accession of Elizabeth II could help remove “the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places.” When thoroughbred trainer Ian Balding called the Queen shortly afterward, she said, “What do you think about Margaret Thatcher getting in?” “Ma’am,” he replied, “I’m not sure I can get my head around a woman running the country.” The Queen fell silent. “You know what I mean?” he said. This time she laughed, and said nothing in reply.

The two women were only six months apart in age. Impeccably dressed and meticulously coiffed, they were equally professional and hardworking, but they differed markedly in background and temperament. Margaret Roberts was the daughter of a successful grocer in Grantham, Linconshire, who lived above the store. She earned her Oxford degree in chemistry on a scholarship, married Denis Thatcher, a prosperous divorced businessman, and worked as a lawyer before being elected to Parliament in 1959.

She oversaw housing and education policy for the various Conservative prime ministers, and in 1975 the party elected her as its leader, deposing Edward Heath. She was determined to reverse the country’s economic decline by loosening the grip of organized labor, dramatically cutting public spending, reducing the dependence of citizens on their government, deregulating business to promote growth, and, along the way, raising Britain’s stature on the world stage.

Thatcher was fearless and nimble in debate, and passionate about her principles of bedrock conservatism shaped by such intellectuals as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. The conservative historian Paul Johnson admiringly called her “the eternal scholarship girl. She loved learning, swotting things up, being tested, passing with honours.” Her zest for combat was antithetical to the Queen’s nonconfrontational nature. Nor could the Queen share with her prime minister something like the irony of her conversation with Ian Balding, because Thatcher’s sense of humor was barely discernible. For the next eleven years, there would be none of the lively banter that Elizabeth II enjoyed with James Callaghan, whatever she might have thought of his policies. Conversations would no longer be divided equally, since Thatcher had a habit of lecturing. “The Queen found that irritating,” said a top army general close to Elizabeth II.

Their audiences were formal and businesslike. “The agenda included major topical events,” said Charles Powell, who was the prime minister’s senior foreign policy adviser. “It was not a trivial agenda. Lady Thatcher wouldn’t prepare. She would be fully up to speed anyway. She would want to know what the Queen would want to talk about, and what she might say to the Queen, who was working on the same information base. Lady Thatcher didn’t need anything to impose discipline, because she was disciplined enough.”

Afterward, the prime minister would join the Queen’s private secretaries for a whisky. “She chatted with us,” said a former courtier. “She was quite relaxed, which was rare for her. I think the audience was something like a tranquilizer.” On returning to Downing Street, Thatcher might carry a request from the Queen, usually something to do with an army regiment. “She seemed to come back in a cheerful frame of mind,” recalled Charles Powell. “She genuinely enjoyed the meetings. Her demeanor on returning did not say, ‘Oh God, what a waste of time that was.’ In fact it was the opposite.”

After giving birth in 1953 to twins, Thatcher, like the Queen, had been an exception in her generation as a working mother, and had likewise relied on nannies for her children’s upbringing. Both women had trouble discussing their feelings, which prevented them from venturing into personal topics that might have formed a bond—the push and pull of combining professional life and motherhood, and the challenges of having a husband in a subordinate position. One exception was the time the Queen ended an audience by offering wardrobe tips before the prime minister visited Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, the two women avoided any hint of “girl talk.” “Mrs. Thatcher would have thought it impudent to have tried to establish a close relationship and would have expected the Queen to make the first move,” said a former government adviser. Although no such move was forthcoming, the Queen treated her prime minister with courtesy and thoughtfulness. Whenever the Thatchers came to Windsor for a dine-and-sleep, Elizabeth II took care to choose items for the library exhibit with particular meaning: one year a selection of antique fans, another time a manuscript written by Mozart when he was ten years old.

Queen and prime minister thrived in a masculine world, but in different ways. Elizabeth II “was reserved but she could give you not quite a come-hither look, but one which was so friendly as to be encouraging,” said her long-serving courtier Edward Ford. “She made us feel like men.” Thatcher, who had just one woman in her cabinet, asserted her position with an intimidating firmness—earning the nickname “the Iron Lady”—that the Queen would have considered unnecessary if not unseemly for herself. Spitting Image, the satirical television show featuring large puppets that caricatured politicians, the royal family, and a slew of celebrities, famously presented a skit in 1984 showing the prime minister and her cabinet sharing a meal. “Would you like to order, sir?” the waitress asked Thatcher (dressed in a man’s suit and tie, holding a cigar in her left hand). “Yes, I will have a steak,” she replied. Waitress: “How’d you like it?” Thatcher: “Oh, raw please.” Waitress: “And what about the vegetables?” Thatcher: “Oh, they’ll have the same as me.”

Princess Michael of Kent, the wife of one of the Queen’s cousins, came up with a surprisingly apt description of the division of labor between Britain’s two female leaders, each of whom had a powerful aura: “The Queen is the mother of the country,” she explained to her children. “She sends you to school.” Margaret Thatcher was “the headmistress who makes the rules you have to obey.”

Yet the prime minister was scrupulously deferential to her sovereign. “No one could curtsy lower than Margaret Thatcher,” said Charles Powell. “If I did it you would need a crane to pull me up. She came from a very patriotic lower middle class family who had huge respect for the royal family and the Queen, so as a result she would have been slightly formal.” Thatcher once said that if she were a visitor from Mars required to create a constitutional system, “I would set up … a hereditary monarchy, wonderfully trained, in duty and in leadership, which understands example, which is always there, which is above politics, for which the whole nation has an affection and which is a symbol of patriotism.”

One obligation the prime minister regarded as burdensome was the annual autumn pilgrimage to Balmoral, which she did “out of loyalty,” said Charles Powell. She invariably arrived in a tweed suit and heels, utterly ill-equipped for country life. “Does the prime minister like to walk in the hills?” asked one frequent guest. “The hills?” replied the Queen. “The hills? She walks on the road!” Elizabeth II also knew that Thatcher never accepted the custom of withdrawing with the other women after dinner. “The Queen finessed it by always inviting the Thatchers to a barbeque, which was more informal than a dinner in the castle, so didn’t follow the convention of having the ladies withdraw,” explained a fellow guest. An equerry was assigned to play golf with Denis Thatcher, and the Queen routinely took the prime minister for tea at Birkhall, since the Queen Mother was an enthusiastic admirer of Thatcher. On the final day, the prime minister and her husband usually left at dawn.

Only three months after taking office, Margaret Thatcher encountered a surprisingly assertive Queen in her role as head of the Commonwealth. The cause was the outcast white minority government in Rhodesia led by Ian Smith that had been worn down by persistent attacks by black guerrillas. In late July and early August 1979, the Commonwealth leaders were set to meet in Lusaka, the capital of neighboring Zambia, to endorse a proposed conference in London between Smith and all factions including black guerrilla leaders Robert Mugabe (an avowed Marxist) and Joshua Nkomo to end the Rhodesian conflict and prepare for free and fair elections. The British prime minister regarded the guerrilla leaders as terrorists and favored a power-sharing agreement that Smith had already negotiated with a more moderate black party.

Because the guerrilla forces were operating out of bases in Zambia, Thatcher tried to prevent the Queen from attending the Commonwealth meeting on the grounds that she might be at risk. But Elizabeth II well remembered being banned by Heath from the Singapore meeting eight years earlier, and she insisted on traveling to Africa. Before arriving in Lusaka, the Queen set aside nine days for state visits to Tanzania, Malawi, Botswana, and Zambia. What she heard made her increasingly concerned that a number of African countries could leave the Commonwealth unless the black majority took charge of governing Rhodesia. During the Malawi state banquet she was so engrossed by Dr. Hastings Banda, the country’s “President for Life,” that she let her manners slip and kept her elbows on the table as they talked at length. Little wonder, since Banda was one of Africa’s most idiosyncratic leaders—a repressive dictator educated in the United States and Scotland who had practiced medicine in the United Kingdom, where he took to wearing Homburg hats and three-piece suits.

Elizabeth II arrived in Lusaka on July 27, 1979, two days before Thatcher, for meetings with Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda in which she urged him to subdue the anti-British rhetoric in the local press. During the four-day Commonwealth conference she followed her customary routine as the organization’s symbolic head by hosting a reception and banquet for all forty-two leaders. That evening she uncharacteristically stayed until nearly midnight, “quartering the room and talking to the various heads of governments,” recalled Chief Emeka Anyaoku of Nigeria. “I am convinced that the intervention spurred the organization—which was on the point of possibly splitting up—on to compromise.”

Her informal role continued behind the scenes, when she received each leader in a private audience for fifteen to twenty minutes in her bungalow. In those sessions, particularly with the Africans, she conveyed sympathy for their position without explicitly stating her own, and they came away impressed by her knowledge of their problems. By bringing down the temperature, the Queen made it easier for Thatcher to move toward the Commonwealth position, which others, notably her own foreign secretary, Peter Carrington, and Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser, had openly urged her to do. The African leaders yielded as well, agreeing to consider a formula for some white representation in Rhodesia’s new parliament.

No one could pinpoint what exactly the Queen had done beyond playing what Carrington called “an enormous role in calming everything down.” By the end of the meetings, Thatcher signed the Lusaka Accord calling for a constitutional conference at London’s Lancaster House in September. The Queen “talked to Mrs. Thatcher and to Kaunda,” said Sonny Ramphal of Guyana, the Commonwealth’s secretary-general at the time. “The fact that she was there made it happen.”

Britain’s prime minister enthusiastically embraced the peace process, which led to an agreement on December 21 calling for a cease-fire, free elections, and Rhodesia’s independence in April 1980 as the Republic of Zimbabwe, the forty-third member of the Commonwealth, with Robert Mugabe as prime minister. Only in time did Thatcher’s initial misgivings about Mugabe prove prescient, as he set himself up as an egregiously corrupt dictator, brutally crushed his political rivals, drove the white farmers from their land, and destroyed what had been Africa’s most vibrant agricultural economy. In 2002 the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe’s membership, and Mugabe permanently withdrew the following year.

SHORTLY AFTER RETURNING to England from Africa on August 4, 1979, the Queen headed to Balmoral for her annual holiday. Whenever she and Philip are having lunch together in the castle, courtiers are forbidden from disturbing them except in an emergency. So at midday on Thursday, August 27, when Robert Fellowes, her assistant private secretary, entered the dining room, Elizabeth II knew he bore bad news. That morning, during a holiday at the Mountbatten vacation home at Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, a twenty-seven-foot fishing boat carrying six members of their family and a local boy had been blown up by an IRA bomb. Philip’s uncle and the Queen’s cousin, seventy-nine-year-old Dickie Mountbatten; John Brabourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother, Doreen; Nicholas Knatchbull, one of the Brabournes’ fourteen-year-old twin sons; and Paul Maxwell, the fifteen-year-old Irish boy, had been killed. Patricia and John Brabourne and their surviving son, Timothy, were critically injured.

The Queen and her family were grief-stricken. Prince Charles considered Mountbatten “his closest confidant and the greatest single influence.” Writing in his diary, Charles described his great-uncle as “someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism.… Life will never be the same now that he has gone.”

The Queen called the hospital and had a long conversation with family members, but only Philip wrote a condolence letter. As a Red Cross doctor explained to Patricia Brabourne, “That kind of private person has strong feelings but doesn’t want to convey them. She would feel what she might say would be totally inadequate, so why try.” By contrast when her sister Pamela Hicks once wrote a note about the death of one of the royal corgis, the Queen replied with a six-page letter. “A dog isn’t important,” Hicks figured, “so she can express the really deep feelings she can’t get out otherwise.”

The royal family traveled to London for a full ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 5, with massed military bands and 122 naval ratings pulling the gun carriage holding Mountbattten’s coffin. The earl had planned every detail of his commemorative ceremony, and there had been numerous rehearsals in the previous week. When the family boarded the train to Romsey for the burial, the Queen said to her cousin Pamela, “Please sit with me and tell me everything that happened.” “She hardly made any remark,” Pamela Hicks recalled. “But she absolutely listened to every word.” After the interment, the family gathered at Broadlands. In the absence of her parents, who were still hospitalized, Joanna Knatchbull, the eldest of the Brabournes’ daughters, served as hostess, waiting at the front door. Elizabeth II stepped out of the car, her eyes reddened from crying. “Ma’am, would you like to go upstairs?” Joanna inquired. “Yes I think I would,” replied the Queen.

A month later, Elizabeth II made her most meaningful gesture when she invited fourteen-year-old Timothy Knatchbull to stay at Balmoral after his release from the hospital. He arrived at the castle late at night with his older sister Amanda, when he spotted the Queen “striding down the corridor” like “a mother duck gathering in lost young.” She greeted Timothy and his sister with kisses, served them soup and sandwiches, took them to their rooms, and started to unpack until Amanda persuaded her that she should go to bed. “She was in almost unstoppable mothering mode,” Timothy recalled.

In the following days, the Queen monitored Timothy’s bedtimes, suggested when he shouldn’t attempt going out onto the grouse moor, and took care to ensure that her own doctor came to dress his wounds. “She was caring and sensitive and intuitive,” he said. Seated next to him at lunch, she seemed to sense his need to talk about the terror attack. “She didn’t probe. She has a brilliant way of using her ears as magnets and getting people to talk. I spoke to her in a way I hadn’t spoken, articulating things other people hadn’t drawn out of me.”

When Prince Charles pondered the manner of his Uncle Dickie’s death, he wrote, “I fear it will take me a very long time to forgive those people.” Princess Margaret reacted even more harshly. During a visit to Chicago that autumn, when someone expressed sympathy over the attack, she said the Irish were pigs. Elizabeth II kept her own counsel. “She had all the feelings of hurt and shock one could expect,” said Timothy Knatchbull. “I would be surprised if she hadn’t had flashes of anger and incredulity. But never has she departed from her high standards: a caring dignified stance, and a recognition that the peoples of both the United Kingdom and Ireland have sufferings and wounds of their own.” In their many conversations, he saw “no evidence whatsoever” that she had hardened her views of Ireland.

One unlikely source of consolation for Prince Charles was his long-ago love, Camilla Parker Bowles, by then the mother of two children with a husband who was openly unfaithful. In 1979, after the birth of her second child, she and Charles had resumed their romance, a development noted by Andrew Parker Bowles’s fellow officers in the Household Cavalry. One of them reported the affair to the Queen, who took it in but said nothing to her son.

AT THE SAME time, Charles had become acquainted with Lady Diana Spencer, the granddaughter of the Queen Mother’s longtime friend and Woman of the Bedchamber, Ruth Fermoy (widow of the 4th Baron Fermoy), and the daughter of the Queen’s former equerry Johnnie Spencer, the 8th Earl and scion of one of the great landed Whig families, with a fortune dating from the Middle Ages. The Spencers had been part of the group of English noblemen that had saved Britain from Catholic rule by bringing the Protestant Hanovers to England in 1714, a legacy that gave Diana a feeling of superiority over the royal family. Much later, after her marriage to Charles had fractured, she told her divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius, that she regretted marrying into a “German family.”

Johnnie Spencer had been with the Queen and Prince Philip on their six-month Commonwealth tour after the coronation. Before they departed in November 1953, he had proposed to Frances Roche, the daughter of Ruth Fermoy, but he left the tour—highly unusual for a courtier—after only two months to return to England. “By the time we reached Australia, he was so love struck with Frances that the Queen said, ‘Johnnie you have to go back,’ ” recalled Pamela Hicks, then a lady-in-waiting.

The Spencers lived at Park House in Norfolk, which they rented from the Queen, and had three daughters—Sarah, Jane, and Diana—and a son, Charles. But while they lived only a stone’s throw from Sandringham, the family only had occasional contact with their royal neighbors after Johnnie resigned from the Queen’s household to make his living as a gentleman farmer. In September 1967, when Diana was six, Frances left her husband for her lover, Peter Shand Kydd, which led to an acrimonious divorce followed by Frances’s marriage to Shand Kydd. Sarah and Jane Spencer were away at boarding school, so Diana and her three-year-old brother felt the brunt of the bitterness—an experience that marked Diana deeply and contributed to her lifelong emotional instability. At age nine she went to the first of two boarding schools, both of which provided a nurturing environment, although she was a poor student, twice failing all of her O-level exams. After an unhappy six weeks at a Swiss finishing school, Diana returned to England in 1978, and a year later took a job as an assistant at the Young England Kindergarten in London.

When Prince Charles finished his five years in the Royal Navy at the end of 1976, the tabloid press dedicated itself to chronicling his romantic pursuits, a campaign that intensified in November 1978 when he turned thirty, the benchmark he had set three years earlier as “a good age for a man to get married.” One of his passing fancies was Sarah Spencer, but Diana caught his eye during a pheasant shoot at Althorp, the thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Northamptonshire that Johnnie Spencer inherited when his father died in 1975. Charles was twelve years older, but Diana at age sixteen shamelessly flirted with her sister’s beau and developed a full-fledged crush on the heir to the throne. Over the next several years their paths crossed periodically, but it wasn’t until July 1980, when they were guests at a house party in Sussex, that their romance began. Diana was alluringly pretty, with big and expressive blue eyes and a becoming blush to her cheeks, an “easy and open manner,” and an apparent love of the country life Charles cherished. He was particularly moved by her compassion over his loss of Dickie Mountbatten the previous year.

A fast-paced courtship followed, with invitations to the Cowes races and Balmoral, where Diana had visited twice previously to stay with her sister Jane, who had married the Queen’s adviser Robert Fellowes in 1978. But this time she was a guest of Elizabeth II, and when a tabloid reporter spotted the “perfect English rose,” The Sun blared “LADY DI IS THE NEW GIRL.” Over the following months, Charles vacillated about whether to propose, and two of his friends, Nicholas Soames and Penny Romsey, the wife of Mountbatten’s grandson Norton Knatchbull, expressed doubts about Diana. Penny Romsey worried that she had seemingly “fallen in love with an idea rather than an individual.” Soames bluntly dismissed her as “childish and very unformed” and said she and Charles were “too completely unalike.”

Meanwhile the tabloids and paparazzi pursued Diana so relentlessly that in January 1981 Philip wrote his son a letter saying that he would damage her reputation unless he either proposed or quietly cut off the relationship. In his role as paterfamilias, Philip was presumably also expressing his wife’s opinion, but she did not directly comment on Diana’s fitness to be wife of the heir to the throne. After returning from a ski holiday, thirty-one-year-old Charles proposed to nineteen-year-old Diana at Windsor Castle on February 6, and the engagement was announced on February 24.

Charles would later say that his father’s letter had wounded him and subjected him to undue pressure. “Prince Philip and the Queen felt responsible for Diana, particularly since Johnnie had been an equerry,” said Pamela Hicks. “Prince Philip wrote a very helpful letter, but Prince Charles read it differently. He saw it as saying he must make a sacrifice now, and make up his mind. He kept the letter on him and would bring it out and read it.”

In Charles’s headlong rush into marriage to a young woman who satisfied the prevailing requirements of noble birth and virginal innocence, he and his parents focused on Diana’s appealing traits—her charisma and humor, her warmth, her shy and winsome manner, her seemingly biddable nature. They knew that her parents had been divorced but they reckoned that she would welcome being part of the royal family. They also thought that since she had grown up in proximity to royal life, she would take to its demands effortlessly—a leap of faith, as it turned out. “There is a difference between being neighbors and being married and living in a palace, going to garden parties and banquets, knowing who the people are and what you say to them,” said one of Diana’s school friends in Norfolk.

If the royal family had taken the time to probe Diana’s friends and relatives, they would have come across elements of Diana’s character and background that would have given them pause: nagging insecurities that had been intensified by a troubled childhood, lack of discipline, shifting moods, signs of obsessive behavior, and difficulty telling the truth. Of these Ruth Fermoy was well aware, but as she later explained to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, she felt unable to voice her misgivings. “If I’d said to him, ‘You’re making a very great mistake,’ ” she said, “he probably wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention because he was being driven.”

ON JUNE 13, only weeks before her eldest son’s marriage, the Queen led her birthday parade up the Mall on Burmese, a nineteen-year-old black mare that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had given her in 1969. Every day for the previous two weeks she had practiced her sidesaddle technique in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, and early that June morning she had taken her favorite mount for a canter around the Palace gardens.

Riding on Burmese for the thirteenth time amid the cheering crowds on the Mall, she was dressed in the scarlet tunic of the Welsh Guards and her navy blue riding skirt. Her posture perfectly erect, she faced squarely ahead in the saddle, with both legs on the left side of Burmese as she held the reins lightly in her left hand and a crop in her right. She rode in front of Charles and Philip, in their red tunics and bearskins, as well as several members of the Household Cavalry.

Shortly before 11 A.M., as she turned right toward Horse Guards Parade for the start of Trooping the Colour, six shots rang out from the crowd. The Queen’s startled horse cantered forward, and she instinctively pulled the reins with both hands, focusing completely on settling him. Her husband and son watched as guardsmen and onlookers immediately tackled the man with the gun, policemen streaked across the parade route to assist, and one of the cavalrymen spurred his horse and cantered to the Queen’s side. She proceeded calmly at a walk, leaned down to pat Burmese with her left hand, smiled at the crowd, and continued with the ceremony. The shots were blanks, and the gunman, seventeen-year-old Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison for “intent to alarm” the sovereign. The Queen later told friends and family that in a split-second glance she had seen Sarjeant in the crowd pointing the gun but couldn’t believe her eyes.

The Queen’s reaction was not only an impressive display of expert horsemanship, but the first time the public had witnessed so vividly the unflinching physical courage and equilibrium that friends and courtiers had seen privately: standing quietly while surrounded by “dive bombing” colts, or sitting calmly when a ball crashed into an adjacent chair at a cricket match and everyone else jumped to their feet. “I never saw her scared in any way,” recalled Sir Edward Ford, her assistant private secretary for fifteen years, even when a madman dropped a rock on her car during one of her early visits to Belfast and “she drove on as if nothing had happened.”

Elizabeth II always understood the risks of appearing on horseback or in an open carriage, and she refused to accept protection that would intrude on her ability to be seen by the public. Her fatalistic attitude about the possibility of assassination was reinforced by the reassuring knowledge that an orderly succession was in place. Nevertheless, in 1982 the army instituted new procedures requiring two members of the household to flank the Queen in her birthday parade. “You know why you’re there,” she cheerily announced to Malcolm Ross as he took position beside her one year. “You’re the one to get shot, not me.” Periodically as they rode down the Mall, she would look over and say, in the manner of a strict riding instructor, “Left leg straight! Left leg straight!” The Queen continued to ride until 1986, when Burmese had to retire at age twenty-four. Rather than train a new mount, she switched to her horse-drawn Ivory Phaeton.

The press and public praised the Queen’s handling of the shooting. “In every pub and club throughout the land the verdict is the same,” wrote the Daily Express. “Her Majesty showed guts, courage, pluck, bravery and bottle.” The admiration mingled with the growing excitement over Charles and Diana’s wedding to create a surge of pro-royalist sentiment. A poll in July 1981 showed 86 percent support for the monarchy, compared to the consistent 80 percent since polling on the royal family began twelve years earlier.

* * *

ONE OF THE prominent guests at the wedding festivities was Nancy Reagan. The first lady had met Charles years earlier through Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s envoy to Britain, and his wife, Lee, during a visit to California while the prince was serving in the Royal Navy. Nancy Reagan also endeared herself to the royal family by treating Charles to dinner in the private quarters of the White House the previous May, with a collection of guests that included Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, William F. Buckley, and Diana Vreeland. “I have fallen in love with Mrs. Reagan,” Charles told Mary Henderson, wife of British ambassador Nicholas Henderson. “I wanted to kiss her!”

While the Queen couldn’t entertain the new first lady herself, busy as she was with wedding preparations, she arranged for her cousin Jean Wills to host a luncheon in her honor on Tuesday, July 28, followed by coffee with the Queen Mother at Royal Lodge and a polo match at Smith’s Lawn. Nancy Reagan and Josephine Louis, the wife of John Louis, the newly appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, dressed “in our best bib and tucker,” as Josephine Louis recalled. “We were probably overdressed for polo.” They were also surrounded by swarms of security that had been stepped up after an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan the previous March.

The match was already under way when a Land Rover appeared, and out popped the Queen from the driver’s side, informally dressed in a tweed skirt and brogues, making her way through the crowd to the royal box, her protection officers virtually invisible. “She was wonderful that day,” recalled Josephine Louis, “so warm and friendly.” Nancy Reagan also clicked with the Queen Mother, who sent her a cordial note later that afternoon with a box of Bittermints as a reminder of the visit to the “little house in Windsor Great Park!”

The wedding the next day at St. Paul’s Cathedral was yet another royal tonic at a time when Britain was plagued by urban race riots and rising unemployment. The atmosphere was exultant among the estimated 600,000 people who lined the London streets, and television viewership around the world exceeded 750 million. Diana looked dazzling in her voluminous silk taffeta wedding dress and twenty-five-foot train as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie memorably proclaimed to the congregation, “Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made.” Runcie later admitted he knew Charles and Diana were a misalliance, although he believed she would “grow into it.”

Family, close friends, and royal guests went to the wedding breakfast for 180 at Buckingham Palace, while nonroyal heads of state attended a luncheon hosted by Margaret Thatcher at the Bank of England. That evening after Charles and Diana had left for their honeymoon, the Queen’s cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson hosted a party at Claridge’s for five hundred guests, including the Queen and Prince Philip. It was a high-spirited occasion, with television screens playing video loops of the wedding. The Queen perched on an ottoman, martini in hand, to watch what she had participated in hours earlier. “Oh Philip, do look!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got my Miss Piggy face on!”

The Queen invited Nancy Reagan, escorted by John Louis, and Princess Grace of Monaco to sit at her table for the buffet supper, while Philip presided nearby and fifty-year-old Princess Margaret sat on the floor eating scrambled eggs. The ballroom was decked out with a canopy of multicolored ribbons tied at the ends with apples, one of which hit Philip in the eye. The royal couple frequently took to the dance floor, although the Queen looked slightly uncomfortable dancing with the American ambassador, who at six foot four towered over her. Everybody danced to Lester Lanin’s orchestra until nearly 1:30 in the morning, many of the revelers wearing Lanin’s signature party beanies in every conceivable color, as well as boaters and bowlers with hatbands saying “Charles and Diana.”

Finally the Queen regretfully prepared to leave, declaring, “I’d love to stay and dance all night!” John and Josephine Louis followed Elizabeth II and Prince Philip as they made for the exit, while Nancy Reagan ducked into a phone booth to call her husband at the White House and give him a full report on the evening. “The Queen was so mad at Philip because he wouldn’t take off his beanie,” Josephine Louis recalled. “She didn’t think it was proper. She kept asking him, and he finally took it off. But as soon as they got in the car he slapped the beanie back on.”

None of the guests at the party could have known that Charles and Diana’s marriage was already beginning to unravel. The problems had begun when she was living in Buckingham Palace during their engagement and feeling isolated while Charles went about his royal duties. Secretly afflicted by bulimia, she rapidly lost weight, causing designer Elizabeth Emanuel to take in her wedding gown several times. Charles was thrown by his fiancée’s mood swings, alarming dependence, and accusations about Camilla Parker Bowles, with whom he had broken off his affair. (She and her husband, Andrew, were among the 3,500 guests at the service but had been excluded from the reception by Diana.) By the time the newlyweds reached Balmoral for their honeymoon after a two-week cruise on Britannia, Diana was tearful and angry, down to a mere 110 pounds on her five foot, ten inch frame.

The princess made clear how much she hated Royal Deeside and all it represented—the rituals of life in the castle and on the grouse moors, especially the shooting. “It was just impossible,” Philip recalled. “She didn’t appear for breakfast. At lunch she sat with her headphones on, listening to music, and then she would disappear for a walk or a run.” Nobody had ever flouted protocol as Diana did, or shown such disrespect to the Queen. Charles tried to cajole his wife, to no avail. He was ill equipped to deal with her demands so he either lost his temper or withdrew, dismayed by the “other side” of the “jolly girl” who had enchanted him with her sweetness. Finally, with his mother’s agreement, Charles had Diana flown to London for psychiatric counseling, a gesture that she resented rather than welcomed.

The Queen couldn’t avoid Diana’s disquieting behavior, but she preferred to blame it on the stresses of her new life rather than more deep-seated problems. She didn’t understand Diana—how for example she could be simultaneously empathetic and egocentric—in part because “the Queen is the least self-absorbed person you could ever meet,” said one of her former top advisers. “She doesn’t tend to talk about herself, and she is not interested in other people’s efforts to dwell too much on themselves.” Nor was she inclined to interfere in the lives of her family. “Regardless of how rude Princess Margaret is to her, she never says anything,” said one of the Queen Mother’s closest friends. “That is her policy. She never says anything to her children. She is a very decent person, but she won’t intervene with anyone.”

Underlying the Queen’s aversion to confrontation is a high degree of tolerance. Back in London, Elizabeth II let her daughter-in-law know that she could call upon her any time. In the beginning, Diana, who called her “mama,” visited her when she went to Buckingham Palace for a swim in the pool. “The Queen was always kind to Diana,” said Lúcia Flecha de Lima, a confidante of the princess. “The Queen always received her.” But even after she had spent time in her mother-in-law’s company, Diana remained “terrified” of her, according to Robert Runcie.

The Queen also assigned forty-two-year-old Lady Susan Hussey, her youngest lady-in-waiting, to guide Diana in royal ways. Hussey was somewhat formidable, and she was conscientious in carrying out the Queen’s instructions. Known for her sharp sense of humor and for having “the briskest, deepest, most correct curtsy,” she had helped Charles and Anne learn the ropes during their adolescence. But as a stickler for protocol, she may have been too exacting for Diana’s haphazard temperament and insufficiently sympathetic to Diana’s obvious frailties. Although Diana wrote letters of gratitude at the time, telling her she was like a wonderful older sister, the princess later said she mistrusted the lady-in-waiting’s longtime friendship with Charles. One woman close to the royal family thought the Queen should have delegated her American Lady of the Bedchamber, Virginia Airlie, instead. Although six years older, she could have established better rapport. “She is pretty, soft and amusing,” said the friend. “She would have given Diana honest advice and jollied her along.” Perhaps inevitably, Diana had a major falling-out with Susan Hussey, telling friends she felt “betrayed” by her unquestioning loyalty to Charles.

Diana became pregnant during the honeymoon, but her condition put her even more on edge. Harassment by the tabloids so unnerved her that the Queen took the extraordinary step of meeting with twenty-one editors in Buckingham Palace in December 1981. Her press secretary, Michael Shea, told the group from Fleet Street that their intrusiveness was making Diana so “despondent” that she feared leaving home. When Barry Askew, editor of the sensational News of the World, wondered why the princess went out to buy candy at a shop rather than sending a servant, the Queen couldn’t resist saying, “That’s the most pompous thing I have ever heard.”