Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

FOURTEEN

A Very Special Relationship

WHEN THE NEW YEAR BEGAN, THE FOCUS ON DIANA DIMINISHED AS the public and the royal family faced the prospect of war in the South Atlantic between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. On Friday, April 2, 1982, Argentine forces invaded the islands, which had been a British colony since the eighteenth century, claiming that what they called the Malvinas really belonged to them. On the grounds that British sovereign territory had been violated, Margaret Thatcher immediately ordered a military expedition to retake the islands. The Queen wholeheartedly supported her prime minister’s action, not only in her role as monarch of the invaded country, but as head of the Commonwealth.

She was also in the unusual position of considering whether her twenty-two-year-old son, Andrew, second in line to the throne, should be deployed into the war zone. In his brusque manner Andrew resembled his father, whose path he had followed to Gordonstoun. Unlike Charles, Andrew’s more macho personality adapted easily to the rigors of the school. He spent six months in an exchange program at Lakefield College in Ontario, Canada, but on his graduation from Gordonstoun in 1979 he skipped university and went directly into the Royal Navy after training at Dartmouth like his father. By the time of the Falklands War, Andrew was a fully accredited helicopter pilot.

The government expressed concern about the dangers of combat, but when Andrew insisted he go with his squadron on the HMS Invincible aircraft carrier, Elizabeth II backed him up. Her decision “brought into stark focus the responsibilities of being a mother and also being the sovereign,” Andrew recalled. “The Queen and the Duke for that matter were entirely happy with me going. It was a straightforward decision.” His participation “gave the country the feeling that actually the Queen was sharing in this whole dramatic expedition. [She] was going through the same thing that other parents were going through.”

The war resulted in 255 British and 650 Argentine deaths before Argentina surrendered on June 14. Andrew was never involved in direct combat, although he flew a Sea King helicopter in a number of diversionary actions, transported troops, and conducted search and rescue operations—any of which could have put him in harm’s way. He lost friends and colleagues, and once was on deck when Exocet missiles were fired at the ship. “I definitely went there a boy and came back a man,” he said.

Margaret Thatcher’s decisiveness in prosecuting the Falklands War greatly enhanced her image as “the Iron Lady” and Britain’s reputation as a muscular and effective military power a quarter century after the Suez debacle. “We have ceased to be a nation in retreat,” she said. Her staunch ally in the fight was Ronald Reagan, whose administration imposed economic sanctions on Argentina and supplied intelligence and key military equipment to the British forces, at the risk of alienating allies in South America. The bond between the two leaders, who had strong personal and ideological affinities, brought the British-American “special relationship” to its highest point since Churchill’s time as prime minister. The Queen later rewarded Reagan and his secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, by investing them as honorary Knights Commander of the British Empire.

As it happened, President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were scheduled to stay with the Queen and Prince Philip that June, an invitation that had come the previous July when the first lady was in London for the royal wedding. It was not a state visit arranged by the government. Rather, the Reagans were personal guests of the Queen for a “quiet two days between summit meetings” in France and Germany, and they were the first American presidential couple to stay overnight at Windsor Castle. The most anticipated element of the trip was a ride on horseback by the Queen and the president, the result of numerous meetings in Washington and London that began early in the year. British ambassador Nicholas Henderson noted that Reagan’s key image maker, deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, “invariably lit up at the prospect” of the ride. “Carter couldn’t have done a thing like that,” said Deaver. “Think of the photo opportunity.”

Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had met the Queen only twice, during her stop in Washington for the Bicentennial, and on his inaugural foreign trip as president to “the first country that I have visited outside my own” on May 5, 1977. He was in England for economic and foreign policy meetings, followed by a black-tie dinner for NATO leaders at Buckingham Palace. When Carter (wearing a bow tie three times the size of Philip’s) greeted the Queen’s seventy-six-year-old mother, he tried to flatter her by comparing her to his own beloved mother, “Miz Lillian,” and in a burst of enthusiasm kissed her on the lips. “I took a sharp step backwards,” the Queen Mother recalled, “not quite far enough.” She commented afterward that she hadn’t been kissed that way since the death of her husband twenty-five years earlier.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan arrived at Windsor Castle by helicopter on Monday, June 7, 1982. They were assigned the seven-room suite 240 in the Lancaster Tower—two bedrooms, two dressing rooms, two bathrooms, and a main sitting room with portraits of the Queen’s ancestors by Hans Holbein—all with the sweeping view of the Long Walk. The Queen had arranged for a dedicated White House telephone line, as well as the installation of the first shower in Windsor Castle because her advisers were told “that was what he needed.”

In the afternoon the royal couple took the Reagans on a tour of the gardens, and in the evening, the president and first lady, along with top officials and their spouses staying at the castle—Michael Deaver, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Chief of Staff James Baker, and National Security Adviser William Clark—joined the royal family for a private black-tie dinner in the Crimson Room, the small dining room in the private apartments, preceded by drinks in the Green Drawing Room.

“We had the feeling we had come into a family dinner,” said Carolyn Deaver. “They banter effortlessly in front of a stranger. They sort of make you feel a part, but you never are.” Princess Anne and Mark Phillips were on hand, along with Charles and Diana, eight months pregnant and visibly miserable. “She was wearing a red dress and she had her head down,” said Carolyn Deaver. “She was seated toward the end of the table and talked only a little to the people on either side.”

The next morning Elizabeth II and Philip invited the Reagans to breakfast on a small terrace outside their bedroom. “It was surprisingly informal,” Nancy Reagan recalled. “We had to walk through their bedroom, and lined up on a table were boxes of cereal. I said to Prince Charles, ‘What do I do?’ He said, ‘Just help yourself.’ It wasn’t anything like what I had imagined.”

At 9:30 it was time for the much heralded ride. The fifty-six-year-old Queen rode Burmese and wore tan jodhpurs, a checked woolen jacket, beige gloves, and a head scarf. The seventy-one-year-old president sported an open-collared shirt and light tweed jacket. He rode an eight-year-old stallion named Centennial and used an English saddle, “bobbing when he should have remained still.” Neither of them wore a hard hat, which caused predictable criticism.

Before they headed into the mist of the 655-acre Home Park, Reagan joked with the swarm of 150 reporters shouting questions from behind a barrier. “Does it ride well?” yelled one. “Yes,” replied Reagan with a grin. “If you stand still I’ll take it over the top.” The Queen, who never responds to such queries, glared, pulled at her reins, and trotted off, prompting Reagan to hastily catch up. They were followed by two of the Queen’s equerries, two security men on horseback, and a Range Rover filled with Secret Service agents and British protection officers. Nancy Reagan rode in a four-in-hand carriage driven by Philip, who took her on her own tour around the park. Philip, who had given up polo in 1971 because of arthritis, had become a champion in competitive carriage driving marathons, and offered the first lady a running commentary on the finer points of the sport as well as the surrounding scenery.

For an hour, Elizabeth II and Reagan walked, trotted, and cantered on their eight-mile ride, stopping once to greet farmers in the middle of a field of cattle. As they followed a canal adjacent to the Thames, Reagan was waving so much to onlookers that the Queen worried he might ride straight into the water, and at one point took his reins and led his horse in the right direction. They finished at the top of Long Walk in Windsor Great Park, where protection agents lurked behind nearly every tree and bush, and reporters again shouted questions, prompting another flash of displeasure from the Queen when the president stopped to chat. He described her as “charming” and “down-to-earth,” and observed that “she was in charge of that animal!”

Several hours later, Reagan praised Britain’s Falklands campaign during a televised speech before both houses of Parliament, the first American president given that privilege. The Queen busied herself at Windsor with her boxes in her private sitting room. Carolyn Deaver spent the afternoon touring the castle, wandering along the Grand Corridor and marveling at the Canalettos. “Are you enjoying yourself?” piped a familiar voice from one of the doorways. “These paintings are just beautiful,” the wide-eyed guest replied. “Take your time,” said the Queen. “I’m glad you are enjoying it.”

Carolyn Deaver was equally transfixed by the exacting day-long preparations in St. George’s Hall for the evening’s white-tie banquet. The 175-foot-long mahogany table was so wide (eight feet) that under-butlers strapped pillowlike dusters to their feet as they walked down the middle to set up the silver gilt candelabra and put flower arrangements in gold bowls.

At the banquet for 158 guests, the Queen told Reagan she was “much impressed by the way in which you coped so professionally with a strange horse and a saddle that must have seemed even stranger,” adding in a more serious vein, “the conflict on the Falkland islands was thrust on us by naked aggression.… Throughout the crisis we have drawn comfort from the understanding of our position shown by the American people. We have admired the honesty, patience and skill with which you have performed your dual roles as ally and intermediary.”

After dinner the Reagans and the royal couple walked down an aisle between the table and the chairs that footmen had pulled away, led by the sixty-six-year-old Lord Chamberlain, Lord Charles “Chips” Maclean, 27th chief of Clan Maclean, who walked backward. With growing alarm, Reagan glanced toward the Queen for reassurance about one of the monarchy’s time-honored rituals. “I suddenly saw this tiny figure beside me walking along waving her hand,” the president recalled. The Queen was steering Maclean, as she explained to Reagan, because “you know, we don’t get those chairs even, and he could fall over one and hurt himself.”

Diana had felt too ill to attend the banquet, but two weeks later she did her duty in providing a male heir, giving birth on June 21 to William Arthur Philip Louis. “It was a great relief because it was all peaceful again,” she later recalled. “And I was well for a time.” The Queen was among the first to visit St. Mary’s Hospital and see the newborn prince, now second in line to the throne.

SCARCELY A YEAR after she had been targeted by Marcus Sarjeant, Elizabeth II had an even more unnerving jolt when she was awakened at 7:15 on the morning of Friday, July 9, by the slam of a door, something her staff never did. She knew Philip had left the Palace at 6 A.M. for an engagement outside the city. When she looked up, she saw a barefoot stranger in a T-shirt and jeans opening her curtains, then sitting at the foot of her bed with a shard of glass from a shattered ashtray, blood dripping from his right thumb onto her bedclothes.

In an egregious breach of security, thirty-one-year-old Michael Fagan had climbed over a fourteen-foot wall, entered the Palace through an open window, and walked freely along the corridors until he slipped undetected into the Queen’s bedroom suite. It turned out he was an experienced Palace intruder, having broken in previously on June 7, when he amused himself by consuming a half bottle of wine.

“Get out of here at once!” the Queen said, but Fagan ignored her and started to pour out his personal troubles. Once she realized he meant no harm, she shifted gears quickly. For ten minutes, she listened patiently, finding common ground in talking about their children and interjecting sympathetic comments even as she tried several times to summon help by pushing her emergency button and twice calling the Palace switchboard. Fagan later commented that she had shown no sign of nerves. The situation uncannily recalled an incident at Windsor Castle in February 1941 when a mentally disturbed man emerged from behind the curtains of her mother’s bedroom and grabbed her ankles. The Queen Mother refrained from screaming, saying instead, “Tell me about it,” which he did as she eased across the room to sound the alarm bell.

Elizabeth II reacted similarly to Fagan, in part, she told friends, because “I am used to talking to people on street corners.” But her preternaturally calm demeanor came into play as well, along with her physical courage and common sense. She seized an opening when he asked for a cigarette, and she directed him to a nearby pantry, which had a supply.

Out in the corridor they encountered chambermaid Elizabeth Andrew, who exclaimed, “Bloody ’ell, Ma’am, what’s ’e doing ’ere?” (a reaction the Queen later recounted to friends with perfect mimicry of the girl’s Yorkshire accent). Paul Whybrew, a six-foot-four-inch senior footman, arrived with the Queen’s pack of corgis that he had been walking in the garden. As the dogs barked furiously, the footman gave Fagan a drink to steady him. Moments later, a contingent of police finally arrived. “Oh come on, get a bloody move on,” said the Queen as one officer paused to straighten his tie.

“I wasn’t scared,” she later told her mother’s equerry, Colin Burgess. “The whole thing was so surreal. He just came in, we chatted and then he went without incident, and that was that.” Her response, according to one of her relatives, was “mostly shock and disbelief.” The Queen appeared as scheduled at an 11 A.M. investiture and asked her advisers to keep the incident quiet while the government investigated the security failure. But the Express broke the story the following Monday with the headline “INTRUDER AT THE QUEEN’S BEDSIDE.” That evening Margaret Thatcher came to her weekly audience a day early to apologize, and her home secretary, William Whitelaw, faced a barrage of questions in the House of Commons and offered to resign.

A week later, the IRA savagely bombed two groups of soldiers in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, killing eight members of the Household Cavalry and musicians of the Royal Green Jackets and injuring forty-seven others—a tragedy in the heart of London and a sobering reminder of the mayhem a terrorist could have caused inside the Palace. At public events the Queen’s demeanor seemed subdued, and her doctors advised her to take some time off. Fagan was charged with stealing her wine but acquitted by a jury in September. Although he was confined to a mental hospital for five months, he effectively avoided any penalty and enjoyed a brief period of celebrity.

One happy interlude during these fraught times was the christening of Prince William on August 4, the Queen Mother’s eighty-second birthday. The Queen yielded center stage to the youngest and oldest members of the royal family, allowing her mother to hold the baby in her stead. Diana put on a good show that day, but in fact she had sunk into postnatal depression that she later called her “dark ages.” She had also resumed her secret bulimic bingeing and purging, and intensified her accusations about Camilla, refusing to believe that her husband had in fact broken off their affair. In September, while Diana and Charles were staying at Craigowan, a cottage on the Balmoral estate, she tried to cut herself with sharp objects, an alarming escalation of her erratic behavior that Charles did not share with his parents. Again he took Diana to London, where she underwent therapy with two different professionals before giving up after three months.

Her range of symptoms—depression, fear of rejection and abandonment, volatile moods, impulsive and self-destructive acts, and persistent feelings of loneliness and emptiness—suggested that she could have been suffering from borderline personality disorder, which is notoriously difficult to treat. But aside from the occasional glimpse—Diana arriving late to the royal box at Albert Hall in November 1982 for the annual Festival of Remembrance, her demeanor tense and flustered after she and Charles had fought in front of their family—the public remained unaware of Diana’s emotional turmoil and the misery of the Wales marriage.

That autumn Andrew returned from the Falklands on HMS Invincible after more than five months away. The Queen, Prince Philip, and Princess Anne flew to Portsmouth from Balmoral to be on hand for the homecoming. As cheering crowds along the shore held banners and waved flags, Elizabeth II appeared to wipe tears from her eyes. “It was actually very emotional,” recalled Andrew, who lightened the atmosphere by greeting his mother with a red rose between his teeth.

IN FEBRUARY 1983 the Queen realized her decades-long dream of visiting the West Coast of the United States, a trip that had been cut “for reasons of time and protocol” from her itinerary back in 1957. She had raised the matter with Nicholas Henderson before he took his post in Washington in 1979, so she was thrilled when Ronald and Nancy Reagan invited her during their visit to Windsor Castle. “What better time,” she said, “than when the President is a Californian!” She expressly asked if she could see the Reagans’ Rancho del Cielo on a mountaintop near Santa Barbara, where the president promised a Western-style ride on horseback.

The ten-day trip was planned to follow several weeks of state visits to Caribbean countries on Britannia, and the royal couple looked forward to a mixture of official events and sightseeing in the fabled California sunshine. But they arrived on Saturday, February 26, in a downpour that followed them up the coast—the worst weather in two decades—and all the Queen’s colorful silk day dresses went unseen as she donned her daily uniform of Burberry mackintosh and black boots. At one point Princess Margaret called from England to suggest her sister buy a new coat.

The roads in San Diego, their first stop, were so flooded that the royal couple had to be transported in a big U.S. Navy bus—a development that astonished the pack of London reporters traveling with the royal entourage. “We said, ‘But she’s never been on a bus!’ ” recalled Peter McKay of the Daily Mail.

“They sat on the first two seats, and I thought they looked like two kids on an adventure,” said Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, Reagan’s chief of protocol. San Diego’s acting mayor, William Cleaton, committed the ultimate faux pas during the Queen’s harbor tour by guiding her with his palm on her back. “The Queen was visibly bothered and frowned her disapproval,” according to the Daily Express, although she made no complaint to U.S. officials, and poor Cleaton was mortified. As they walked along a retaining wall, Philip suffered his own indignity when a seal jumped up and splashed him. The Queen burst out laughing, but the duke was not amused.

Philip played his consort role expertly, with occasional bursts of political incorrectness and pique over what he considered overzealous security. “Are you expecting trouble?” he barked at Pete Metzger, Reagan’s military attaché, who was assigned to shadow him during their tour of the USS Ranger aircraft carrier. “No, sir,” replied Metzger. “Then back off!” said Philip. After shaking hands with five women from an official delegation in San Francisco, he asked, “Aren’t there any male supervisors? This is a nanny city!” When he and Lucky Roosevelt were driving back to Britannia, he snapped at the Secret Service agents who asked him to turn off the light in the limousine, which they said made him a target. “Damned if I’ll turn off the light,” he said. “People came to see us.” On arriving at the pier, he jumped out of the car and slammed the heavy armored door in the protocol chief’s face. Halfway to the yacht, he realized what he had done, turned around, walked back, kissed Lucky Roosevelt’s hand and said, “I am very sorry.”

On Sunday after church, the Queen and Philip flew to Palm Springs for a luncheon at Sunnylands, the gated 208-acre estate of Walter and Lee Annenberg, where the table was set with a stunning array of Flora Danica china. “The Annenbergs have more than the Queen!” muttered one of the ladies-in-waiting. It was even raining in the desert, so after lunch Lee Annenberg took the group on a series of tours around the vast house (covering nearly an acre), which was filled with their collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces—a private museum including van Goghs, Manets, Monets, Vuillards, and Corots. The Queen insisted on braving the elements to tour the grounds and the nine-hole golf course as well, so Mike Deaver rounded up five golf carts. They sped off under umbrellas, with the Queen and the ambassador in the maintenance cart filled with brooms and mops.

In the evening the Queen and Philip were honored at a dinner on Sound Stage 9 at 20th Century Fox for five hundred guests including such British and American film stars as Julie Andrews, Dudley Moore, Fred Astaire, and Bette Davis, with entertainment by George Burns, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como and a menu that featured Ronald Reagan’s favorite chicken pot pie from Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood.

The unrelenting downpour forced the royal party to travel to Santa Barbara on Tuesday by Air Force Two rather than Britannia for the long-promised trip to the Reagan ranch. They had to abandon their limousines at the base of the mountain and transfer to a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles. “There was a lot of talk at the time about whether we should try going up that road to the ranch,” said Lucky Roosevelt, “but the Queen was game.” “She said, ‘If we can get there, let’s go,’ ” recalled Charles Anson, the press attaché at the British embassy. Wearing black rubber boots, Elizabeth II clambered into a jeep, with Josephine Louis wedged beside her. “I don’t know how happy she was being squeezed like that,” said the ambassadress. “It was hard not to touch her and lean on her. I offered to put her purse aside. ‘Oh no!’ she said, and held it tightly.”

Even on the clearest day, the 2,400-foot ascent on the intermittently paved seven miles of hairpin turns up Refugio Road is a terrifying prospect, intensified by sheer drops and a scarcity of guardrails. For the Queen’s journey, the road was cut in a half dozen places by torrents, and there was nearly zero visibility. She said little during the dangerous climb, but she appeared unfazed.

The ranch was shrouded in fog, causing the Reagans to apologize profusely that the weather had not only washed out the ride on horseback but obliterated the panoramic views. “Don’t be silly,” replied the Queen. “This is an adventure!” The foursome dined on Tex-Mex fare including tacos, enchiladas, and refried beans. “Mr. Deaver,” the Queen said afterward. “That was so enjoyable, especially the used beans.” As the royal couple and their entourage drove back down the mountain, the sun came out. “Damn it,” said Reagan. “I told them it was going to clear.”

Everyone flew back to Long Beach for dinner on Britannia. Mike Deaver played the piano for an after-dinner sing-along, and Nancy Reagan stayed overnight. “We talked at length,” she recalled. “It was not the Queen and first lady but two mothers and wives talking about their lives, mostly our children. She was beginning to be concerned about Diana.”

Rough seas prevented the royal couple from sailing to San Francisco, so with thirty staff and officials in tow, they flew instead on Air Force Two. As they made their approach, the pilot flew low over the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Queen excitedly joined the group on one side of the airplane to catch her first glimpse of the fabled span. The presidential and royal parties took over forty-six rooms on four floors at the St. Francis Hotel. The Queen and Philip stayed in the $1,200 a night Presidential Suite, which Nancy Reagan’s interior designer Ted Graber hurriedly dressed up with paintings and objects from local art museums.

On the spur of the moment, the Anglo-American group decided to have dinner in the Trafalgar Room at Trader Vic’s. The Queen at first resisted, but her husband persuaded her. “I learned that night that she listened to him, and it wasn’t completely ‘my way or no way,’ ” said Carolyn Deaver. “I got the feeling he was a little more adventurous, and he wanted her to be too.” Elizabeth II told the Deavers she hadn’t dined in a restaurant in more than fifteen years, but when she got there, she laughed and tried the exotic rum punches. At the end of the meal, she cracked open her fortune cookie, read the fortune, showed it to Philip, and tucked it into her handbag.

On Thursday, March 3, the Queen and Philip were honored at a black-tie dinner at the de Young Memorial Museum. When Mike Deaver asked Philip Moore why the monarch took so long to prepare for the evening, the private secretary replied, “The Queen needs her tiara time!” Moore explained that she has a kit with tools that she uses to decorate certain diamond tiaras by hooking on pearl or gemstone drops, a pastime she much enjoys, according to former Crown Jeweler David Thomas.

For the banquet she chose pearls, but she detracted from the tiara, with its matching necklace and large drop earrings, by wearing an overdone evening gown of champagne-colored taffeta with “puff sleeves decorated with ‘ruched’ bands of lace edged with gold” and large bows on her shoulders. Peering through her reading glasses, she addressed the 260 guests in the vaulted Hearst Court: “I knew before we came that we have exported many of our traditions to the United States,” she said, “but I had not realized before that weather was one of them.” As she deadpanned, Reagan threw his head back with a mighty guffaw, inadvertently creating a hilarious juxtaposition with the sober and bespectacled queen in her ruffles and jewels.

The weather finally lived up to California’s reputation on Friday when the royal couple flew to Sacramento for the day. The Queen’s final dinner on Britannia honored the Reagans’ thirty-first wedding anniversary. “I know I promised Nancy a lot when we were married,” said the president, “but how can I ever top this?” Reagan expressed his fondness for the Queen by giving her a $24,000 Hewlett-Packard 250 business computer system. In no time she had it installed in Buckingham Palace to track her horse breeding, training, and racing activities.

THE QUEEN AND the Reagans had developed a genuine friendship that included other members of her family—Charles most prominently, but Princess Margaret as well. On October 1, 1983, the president and first lady entertained Margaret and a group of her friends at a dinner upstairs at the White House. She thanked the Reagans effusively for a “sparkling” evening and proclaimed her “abiding love for your country.”

At age fifty-three, the Queen’s sister was difficult to please: unattached, often unhappy, smoking heavily and drinking so much that she had to be hospitalized once for alcoholic hepatitis. She and Tony had divorced in July 1978, followed within months by his remarriage to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. Roddy Llewellyn stayed in the picture for a while, although the Queen drew the line at inviting him to Margaret’s fiftieth birthday party at the Ritz in August 1980.

The next year Llewellyn married fashion designer Tania Soskin, and Margaret wisely remained on good terms with her former lover and his new wife, who maintained a discreet silence about their royal friend. The princess continued to do the minimum of royal duties, but was more often photographed on her holidays in Mustique, or on the arm of a passing love interest. She was an attentive mother, however, ensuring that her son, David, and daughter, Sarah, grew up out of the limelight, and encouraging their artistic talents. “It is a curious irony that Margaret had such a messy life but produced two normal and nice children,” said one of the Queen’s former private secretaries.

Only weeks after Margaret’s red-carpet treatment by the president, Reagan managed to profoundly offend the Queen when he ordered the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada by American forces. The island was a member of the Commonwealth and recognized the Queen as its head of state, but had been ruled by a Marxist dictator since 1979. In mid-October a more radical leftist group murdered the prime minister, Maurice Bishop, and a junta took power. Reagan believed the violent coup would destabilize the region and possibly endanger a group of American medical students on the island, so he responded sympathetically when other Caribbean nations asked for help from the United States. The president told Margaret Thatcher he was considering an invasion, and she warned him against such a measure. But without further consulting his most reliable ally, he ordered a military operation on October 25 and informed Thatcher only after the leaders of the coup had been captured and the safety of the American students secured.

Both the prime minister and the Queen were furious that Reagan had been so cavalier about intervening in the internal affairs of a Commonwealth nation, not to mention keeping them both in the dark. Elizabeth II was particularly indignant that her American friend had violated her role as the island’s head of state. Yet the anger soon subsided, and at the Commonwealth leaders’ conference in New Delhi that November, the emphasis was less on “debating about the past,” as Thatcher put it, and more about doing “everything we can between us to help Grenada come to democracy.” The following June, Reagan was in Europe to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of D-Day and attend a summit meeting in London. At a black-tie dinner at Buckingham Palace, he had the place of honor between the Queen and the Queen Mother.

ELIZABETH II’S 1984 foreign travel called for a state visit to Jordan in the spring, and two weeks in the western provinces of Canada in the autumn. As part of the second tour, she decided to have her first private holiday in the United States: five days in the legendary bluegrass horse country of Kentucky, followed by three days in Wyoming at a ranch owned by Henry and Jean Porchester. On the final weekend of their West Coast trip the previous year, Elizabeth II and Philip had explored the majestic mountains and pine forests of Yosemite National Park, which whetted her appetite to see more of the American West. A visit to the Porchesters’ Canyon Ranch below the rugged Big Horn Mountains offered the perfect opportunity. Philip had already stayed at the ranch for five days of hunting and fishing in 1969 and had little interest in visiting stud farms, so after accompanying his wife to Canada, he planned to fly to the Middle East.

The Queen’s trip reflected her equine interests as well as her close relationship with the United States. Over six decades on the throne, she would visit America eleven times, five of those for private holidays—the most vacation time in any one place except Balmoral and Sandringham. By contrast, she would travel to Australia, one of her major realms, sixteen times.

While technically private, the visit to Kentucky was arranged with the same minute-by-minute precision as a state visit. The Queen wanted to take in the beauty of Kentucky, but her first priority was to visit the stud farms where her mares had boarded for nearly two decades, and to inspect more than sixty stallions for possible mating. To take advantage of the superior American breeding stock, she and Henry Porchester planned to send as many as five of her twenty-three broodmares to Kentucky in 1985.

At the suggestion of thoroughbred breeder Paul Mellon, Elizabeth II arranged to stay with forty-five-year-old William Stamps Farish III and his wife, Sarah, at their 1,400-acre Lane’s End Farm near Lexington. Mellon had been a trusted and generous friend of the Queen. He gave her a nomination every year to Mill Reef, the champion sire that he kept at the National Stud at Newmarket, waiving the usual stud fee of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Queen had met Will Farish only fleetingly in 1973 during a polo match at Smith’s Lawn, but Mellon assured her that the Kentucky couple were low-key, unpretentious, and completely discreet. Their early-nineteenth-century brick home was beautifully appointed and architecturally distinctive—a long house only one room deep, with a row of arches and columns at the front entrance. Yet the interiors were becomingly modest, with a country kitchen under oak beams, an airy yellow sitting room lined with bookshelves, and a painting of jockeys by George Munnings on the dining room wall.

Will Farish was a multimillionaire from Houston who inherited family fortunes from Humble Oil (later Exxon) and Sears Roebuck, and Sarah was a du Pont heiress. For more than two decades, they had also been close friends of George H. W. and Barbara Bush, and Farish managed the vice president’s blind trust during his time in office. Farish began breeding horses in Kentucky in 1963 and by 1984 had built Lane’s End into one of the country’s top thoroughbred operations.

When Elizabeth II landed in Lexington on Sunday, October 7, a woman from customs and immigration would not admit her without a passport. Catherine Murdock, a State Department protocol officer assigned to the Queen, explained that the sovereign doesn’t carry one, but the official resisted until a call to Washington provided the necessary clearance. Arriving at Lane’s End, the Queen immediately changed into her brogues, put on her raincoat and head scarf, and headed out for a walk in the wet grass. At teatime the Farishes brought out their new puppy, who promptly defecated in front of the Queen. “It put everyone totally at ease,” said Catherine Murdock. “She has so many dogs she knows what to expect, but that was her introduction to the Farish household.”

Each day the Queen moved in a caravan of cars from one storied farm to the next. At every stop, stable boys would lead out the stallions as trainers and breeders briefed the Queen and her advisers, who commented on the fine points of conformation and discussed bloodlines. The parade of champion horseflesh included Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew, Affirmed, and Secretariat, whose spirited antics delighted the Queen. At John Galbreath’s Darby Dan Farm she visited Round Tower, her only broodmare then boarding in Kentucky. Having recently produced a foal, the mare was already expecting another.

Several owners entertained Elizabeth II at lunch and tea, but the pace allowed for little downtime. She attended the races at Keeneland, where she presented the winner of the Queen Elizabeth II Challenge cup for three-year-old fillies with a Georgian-style silver trophy that she had commissioned from a London jeweler. At Bloodstock Research Information Services, Henry Porchester’s twenty-five-year-old son, Harry Herbert, showed her how to search for mating combinations within ten seconds on state-of-the-art computers, a program she intended to use on her recently installed computer system at Buckingham Palace. The directors of Keeneland also staged a mock auction in the large wood-paneled pavilion, re-creating the record-breaking sales of recent years as an equine quiz show in which the spectators had to guess the identity of the yearlings based on the description of their pedigrees.

Each night the Farishes had dinner parties for ten, where Elizabeth II unwound to an extent her advisers had not seen before. The guests were all from the horse world, many of whom the Queen already knew, and the conversation rarely strayed from thoroughbred topics. “She felt very much at home in Kentucky,” said a courtier. “I saw an atmosphere of informality and gaiety that I never saw in England. No one was calling her Ma’am or Your Majesty. She was laughing and joking and having fun. She has a great soft spot for the United States.”

SHORTLY BEFORE HER departure on Friday, October 12, the Queen learned that a powerful IRA bomb had exploded during the Conservative Party conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Margaret Thatcher, the prime target of the terror attack, had escaped injury, but five died and thirty-four were injured, including two of the prime minister’s valued colleagues, Norman Tebbit and government chief whip John Wakeham. Thatcher had taken a hard line against prison hunger strikes in Northern Ireland four years earlier, and after the Conservatives increased their majority in the June 1983 general election, she had redoubled her resistance to the political demands of the IRA. The morning after the attack, she convened the conference at 9:30 A.M. as scheduled and gave a defiant speech announcing that “all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”

Elizabeth II immediately sent a message of “sympathy and deep concern” to the prime minister, and Palace press secretary Michael Shea denounced the bombing as a “dreadful outrage.” When she arrived in Wyoming, she called Thatcher, whose first words were, “Are you having a lovely time?” Elizabeth II’s support “boosted one’s morale,” Thatcher recalled. The Queen then called Ronald Reagan, who shared his “deep regret,” a sentiment underlined by the earlier attempt on his own life.

Despite the shadow of events in England, her weekend in Wyoming gave the Queen her first total relaxation in nearly a month as she settled into the Porchesters’ two-story stone-and-clapboard house with dramatic views of the aspenglow, the golden foliage of autumn aspens on the slopes of the Big Horn Mountains. Her only annoyance was the proliferation of Secret Service agents, who scared off the elk and deer. But she took five-mile walks on the four-thousand-acre property, had several picnics along Little Goose Creek, and joined a morning shooting party, watching with the dogs as the guns brought down pheasants, partridges, and grouse. Meals were simple American fare such as rainbow trout, chicken pot pie, apple pie, ice cream, and cookies.

She made a couple of public forays to the Bradford Brinton Museum of Western and Indian Art in Big Horn, and Main Street in the town of Sheridan, where she did a walkabout against the advice of the Secret Service but to the delight of the one thousand local residents who had gathered to see her.

The Queen hosted a dinner on Saturday night for her staff and a dozen friends of the Porchesters at the Maverick Supper Club. It was the second time she was called upon to order from a restaurant menu in two years, and she seemed no more at ease with the process. She focused on the filet mignon, but puzzled over the king-sized and queen-sized cuts. “Queen sized-fillette cut, that’s what I’ll be having,” she said, adding hash-brown potatoes with onions “because I have never tasted them.” “What kind of salad dressing would you like?” asked the waitress. “Ya got French. Ya got Italian, ranch, honey mustard, or house.” Genuinely perplexed, Elizabeth II diplomatically asked for a recommendation and chose the house dressing.

Before leaving on Monday, she handed out gifts to those who had helped her stateside—signed and dated photographs for all, and for the women, Halcyon Days enamel boxes monogrammed with her cypher. She also wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan to describe the time she had spent doing what she liked best—“looking at beautiful thoroughbreds” and “walking in the wide open spaces by the mountains.”

BACK HOME SHE had a new grandchild to welcome her. Charles and Diana’s second son, Henry Charles Albert David, had been born on September 15 while the Queen was at Balmoral. She had seen Prince Harry (as he would be known) only once, on a visit to Highgrove, her son’s Gloucestershire estate, two days before her departure to Canada. Twenty-three-year-old Diana was in better spirits generally than she had been after the arrival of William, balancing motherhood, public engagements, and a fitness regimen. But by her own account, she had “closed off” from her husband and was disaffected with almost everything about him.

In addition to overseeing his charities, notably the Prince’s Trust, which provided job training for youth in poor urban areas, Charles was attracting attention—and generating controversy—with his public stands on preserving the environment and resisting brutalist architecture. His speech in May 1984 denouncing a proposed new wing of the National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend” created an outcry in the architectural establishment but resulted in a far more congenial and traditional redesign.

Although he tried not to show it, Charles resented the adulation Diana received when they went out together. He had also become fed up with her moodiness and fixation on Camilla despite his repeated denials that he had even talked to his former lover much less seen her. Princess Michael of Kent, the wife of Charles’s cousin Prince Michael, told Roy Strong that Diana was a “catastrophe” and a “time bomb,” and that Charles’s unhappiness had deepened since his wife had become a “media queen.”

To help boost Diana’s confidence, Elizabeth II had earlier that year taken the extraordinary step of issuing an official statement of support through a Palace spokesman who said, “The Queen could not be more pleased with her daughter-in-law. She is very proud of the Princess’s activities around the world and at home.” By then Diana had become more conscientious about her royal duties and had signed on as a patron of seven new charities beyond the five she had previously adopted, organizations dedicated to the arts as well as education and medicine. In her public engagements, Diana could be exceptionally effective, connecting with people, particularly the ill and downtrodden, with a warmth and empathy that other members of the royal family did not project. Combined with her celebrated beauty and high style, her egalitarian manner gave her an aura that was powerful—and potentially dangerous when she turned it against her husband.

When Charles and Diana visited Washington in the autumn of 1985, they showed no sign of their private discord. Diana was jealous of anyone close to her husband, including Nancy Reagan, whom he unabashedly adored. Only a year earlier, Diana had confided to Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times, that the president was a “Horlicks”—a boring old man—and that the first lady cared only about being photographed with members of the royal family. Neil found the comments surprisingly “bitter.” But the princess was all smiles at the White House dinner in their honor, where she memorably danced with John Travolta, as well as Neil Diamond and Clint Eastwood.

THREE DAYS AFTER Elizabeth II turned sixty the following spring, the Duchess of Windsor died at age eighty-nine. Led by the Queen, the royal family attended her funeral at St. George’s Chapel and burial at Frogmore next to her husband. Diana Mosley, a friend and fellow expatriate in France, wrote to her sister Debo Devonshire that the Queen “in her clever way gave the best seats to Georges and Ofelia”—the duchess’s French butler and his wife. Surprisingly, Elizabeth II was in tears at the graveside, “touched perhaps by the sadness of those wretched lives,” noted diarist James Lees-Milne.

She was back in the United States less than a month later on her second “working holiday,” this time four days in Kentucky. Once again Will and Sarah Farish offered the Queen their hospitality as she appraised the results of the mating decisions she and Henry Porchester had made eighteen months earlier and inspected a new group of potential sires. Most of the bluegrass breeders who serviced her mares did so without charge, saving the Queen an estimated $800,000 in exchange for claiming a royal pedigree for the offspring of their stallions. By the mid-1980s her horses had won nearly three hundred races and some $2 million in prize money. But Britain’s most prestigious racing event, the Epsom Derby, continued to elude her.

The Derby in early June marked the start of the annual “season” of sporting events, parties, and royal pageantry that on July 23, 1986, culminated with the wedding of the Queen’s second son at age twenty-six. Prince Andrew had chosen a fetching twenty-six-year-old named Sarah Ferguson (popularly known as “Fergie”), a redhead who compensated for her limited education—a second-rate boarding school and secretarial courses—with an open-hearted enthusiasm. Like Diana, she came from a troubled background, although she masked her insecurities more effectively behind her gregarious demeanor.

Fergie’s parents were commoners, but they were respectable country gentry who boasted aristocratic forebears and relatives including the 6th Duke of Buccleuch and Princess Alice, the Duchess of Gloucester. Her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, had given up a career as a cavalry officer in the Life Guards to run his family’s farm in Hampshire, and her mother, the former Susan Wright, had been presented at court during the 1954 debutante season. Both parents were accomplished equestrians who moved easily in the upper echelons of English society.

When Sarah was thirteen years old, her mother bolted to marry Argentine polo player Hector Barrantes and moved to South America, leaving her former husband to raise Sarah and her older sister. Ronald Ferguson played polo with Prince Philip, served as Prince Charles’s polo manager, and ran the Guards Polo Club at Windsor, connections that inevitably brought his daughter together with Andrew.

By the summer of 1985, when their romance began, the tabloids had already named the prince “Randy Andy” for his flamboyant exploits with an assortment of women, including Koo Stark, an American actress who had appeared in a soft-core pornography movie in 1976. Rather than trying to control her second son, the Queen indulged him. One of her ladies-in-waiting recalled a time when she and the Queen were writing letters together under an awning at Sandringham. “Suddenly from the bushes to the left there were screams and giggles,” said the lady-in-waiting. “Around the corner came Andrew dragging the gardener’s daughter, her dress in disarray. The Queen took no notice and kept on dictating the letters.”

Andrew and Sarah delighted in crude jokes and boisterous behavior. Still, Elizabeth II was charmed by Sarah, who loved to stalk, shoot, and fish at Balmoral—all of which gave her an automatic edge over Diana. Fergie regularly rode with the Queen, and “felt favored and blessed.… I was robust and jolly and not too highly strung.” It also helped that Fergie’s cousin was Robert Fellowes, recently promoted to deputy private secretary. “She’s very sharp and clever,” said Princess Michael of Kent, “and she has made very great friends with the Queen.”

On their wedding day, the Queen conferred on Andrew and his wife the titles Duke and Duchess of York. As they stood together on the Buckingham Palace balcony after their service in Westminster Abbey, they thrilled the crowds with a distinctly un-royal and lusty kiss. Three of the Queen’s four children were now married, and she already had four grandchildren, with the expectation of more to come. To all appearances, she was the matriarch of a happy and burgeoning family.