Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

FIFTEEN

Family Fractures

AMID THE WEDDING CELEBRATIONS, THE QUEEN HAD TO CONFRONT news reports that raised serious questions about her professional conduct. On Sunday, July 20, 1986, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times splashed a sensational page-one story claiming that Elizabeth II was dismayed by the policies of Margaret Thatcher. The Queen purportedly took issue with her prime minister’s opposition to the Commonwealth’s advocacy of economic sanctions against South Africa to bring an end to apartheid, her tough tactics to break the miners’ union during a long and violent strike in 1984 and 1985, her granting the United States permission to refuel at British airbases before launching a bombing mission against Libya the previous April, and her assaults on entitlement programs that had been supported by a “consensus” of Tories and Labour since the end of World War II. According to the Sunday Times report, the Queen not only regarded Thatcher’s approach to governing as “uncaring, confrontational and divisive,” she had become an “astute political infighter who is quite prepared to take on Downing Street when provoked.”

Elizabeth II’s senior advisers were dining at Boodle’s, the men’s club on St. James’s Street, with the private secretaries to sovereigns of eight countries on Saturday night when a call came through that the story was breaking. The courtiers dispatched an assistant press secretary to Victoria Station to grab copies of the newspaper as the truck delivered them at eleven o’clock. “It was like a scene out of Trollope,” said one of the courtiers. “This serene dinner with dignitaries was going on, and at the other end of the room one private secretary was on the phone with Buckingham Palace, another with The Sunday Times, and another with Downing Street trying to defuse the story.”

“Margaret Thatcher was very upset,” said Charles Powell. “She was furious that someone put that in the papers, but she didn’t think it was the Queen.” More than anything, the prime minister worried that “ordinary people” would be offended that she could be “upsetting the Queen.” Elizabeth II was angry as well. She called Thatcher on Sunday from Windsor Castle to say that the allegations were completely untrue, and the two women “commiserated with each other,” according to a senior courtier.

Palace press secretary Michael Shea issued a swift denial. He was more distraught than his colleagues, and they began to suspect that he had been indiscreet. A graduate of Gordonstoun with a doctorate in economics from the University of Edinburgh, he had served for fifteen years as a diplomat before joining the Palace in 1978 to run the press office—an appointment that raised eyebrows at the time because he was said to have a skeptical view of the monarchy.

There had been press reports in previous weeks speculating that Elizabeth II was concerned that some members could leave the Commonwealth over Thatcher’s South Africa policy. At the October 1985 meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Nassau, Thatcher had vigorously opposed a package of harshly punitive economic sanctions, arguing that they would lead to black unemployment in South Africa, harm the exports of British businesses, and push the white minority government headed by P. W. Botha even further to the right. The Queen had encouraged Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who was serving as chairman of the Commonwealth, to work with the other leaders to find a unified position in their efforts to end apartheid.

Elizabeth II offered no opinion about sanctions. But as in Lusaka six years earlier, she dispelled tensions in her individual meetings with the leaders, this time in her stateroom on Britannia, emphasizing the “moral obligation” to keep talking. Thatcher eventually compromised by signing the group’s communiqué denouncing apartheid, calling for curbs on bank loans and trade missions, and establishing a group of seven leaders to meet in London the following August to consider further actions. The Sunday Times article landed only days before the so-called mini-summit was scheduled to begin.

The newspaper’s sweeping claims about domestic as well as foreign policy ran counter to the Queen’s ironclad rule, which she had followed for the thirty-four years of her reign, to be utterly discreet about political matters. “She never expressed her views on sensitive topics,” said one of her senior advisers. Nor did she have any foreknowledge of the Sunday Times article, which her private secretary, William Heseltine, emphatically denounced as false. The question became not only who would leak such an account, but why.

To shield its informant, The Sunday Times had misleadingly said it had multiple sources, but by the end of the week the culprit was unmasked as Shea. He admitted that he had spoken to reporter Simon Freeman on a background basis several times by telephone, thinking he was briefing him for a speculative story on the monarchy in the twenty-first century. Shea said he talked in general terms and that Freeman and the newspaper’s political editor, Michael Jones, had “misinterpreted” his words. Freeman insisted that Shea had specifically attributed left-of-center opinions on a range of issues to the Queen, and that the story had been cleared by the press secretary before publication. Shea countered that Freeman had withheld “crucial parts” when he read back the story.

The press secretary’s colleagues, none of whom had known about Shea’s dealings with the Sunday Times reporter, concluded that Andrew Neil, the newspaper’s editor, had cooked up a provocative story line, that Freeman had used a combination of cajolery and flattery, and that Shea had gone overboard in a burst of ego and vanity. Even Rupert Murdoch told Times and News of the World columnist Woodrow Wyatt, “I think he has megalomania.” Shea was also venting his own liberal views that friends had heard him express at dinner parties. “He personally didn’t go for Margaret Thatcher,” said Elizabeth II’s friend Angela Oswald. “He put words in the Queen’s mouth that she never said. She was brought up never to get involved in party politics. She would never imply that she favored one politician over another.”

A week after the story was published, the Queen and her prime minister were at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, where Shea was seated between them at a luncheon. He apologized to Thatcher, who simply said, “Don’t worry, dear.” Later that day in a phone conversation, Woodrow Wyatt told Thatcher that the Queen should fire Shea or force him to resign. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” she said. “It’s up to her. But we will have to see whether new arrangements are made to prevent such a thing happening again. I think they will be.” In a matter of months Shea left his job at the Palace to work in private industry.

On August 4, 1986, Elizabeth II hosted the first “working dinner” of her reign when she gathered the seven Commonwealth leaders at Buckingham Palace after their first round of mini-summit meetings at 10 Downing Street. Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe called it a “deliberate act by the Queen … to remind us all of our commitment to get on with each other.” Earlier that day, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda had strenuously attacked Thatcher, unfairly accusing her of sympathizing with apartheid. Deploying remarkable sangfroid, Thatcher calmed him by taking his arm and saying, “Now Kenneth, we must get ourselves lunch before we have another vigorous discussion this afternoon.” That night at dinner, the Queen glanced at Kaunda and said with a twinkle to Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, “How is the emotional one?”

“There was no doubt that Her Majesty sided with the Commonwealth,” said Brian Mulroney. “But she couldn’t speak out. You had to understand the nuances and body language. She did it by allusion and by indirection. At the dinner she was a great moderating influence on everyone. She led us through an elevated discussion of human rights. I don’t know how much opinion she expressed, but she would nudge everyone in a certain direction.” By the end of the conference, Thatcher joined the other six leaders on a set of recommendations to be presented later to all forty-nine Commonwealth members. “What saved the day,” recalled Brian Mulroney, “was that Margaret was aware Her Majesty certainly wanted some kind of resolution. So we were able to put in three or four financial things that Margaret accepted, which allowed us to move on to the next meeting without rupture.”

AFTER THEIR ANNUAL Balmoral holiday, the Queen and Prince Philip traveled to the People’s Republic of China in mid-October, the first time a British monarch had visited the Chinese mainland. The planning had begun several years earlier. The Queen read extensive briefs on history and culture, as well as on the habits of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s eighty-two-year-old leader, including his bridge playing and incessant smoking. The royal couple’s itinerary took them from Beijing to Shanghai, Kunming, and the ancient city of X’ian, where they walked among the vast army of life-size terra-cotta warriors that had recently been unearthed by archaeologists.

Elizabeth II charmed Deng when they were having lunch and she detected that he was becoming restless. Turning to Geoffrey Howe, she said, “I think Mr. Deng would be rather happier if he was told he was allowed to smoke.” Recalled Howe, “I’ve never seen a man light up more cheerfully. It was a very human touch and he appreciated it.” When the Chinese leader let fly into a spittoon several feet away, the Queen “didn’t move a muscle,” said Michael Shea.

The trip was going smoothly until Philip encountered a group of British students in X’ian and cautioned them that they would get “slitty eyes” if they stayed in China much longer. The tabloid pack howled with glee and filed stories about the duke’s insult to the entire Chinese nation, sweeping aside all the positive coverage of the Queen’s diplomatic bridge building.

“The British press went nuts,” said one of the Queen’s advisers, “but we couldn’t figure out why after the slitty-eyed remark there was no comment in China.” The courtiers assumed their hosts didn’t want to spoil the visit, but senior officials in the Chinese government said later that they had scarcely noticed because they used the term privately among themselves.

For Philip, it was the latest in a long line of gaffes attributed to him by the press when he was trying, in the view of his friend Sir David Attenborough, to “puncture the balloon” during earnest royal rounds. “I don’t know why he has the gift of trying to think of something funny that ends up offending,” said one of the Queen’s former private secretaries. “There is a degree of insensitivity, and once the press gets hold, it looks for further examples and ignores everything else.”

Philip’s wisecracks masked the considerable intellect and surprising dimensions behind his brusque personality, as well as the substantive role he played at the Palace. As chancellor of both Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, he encouraged innovation, especially in technology. “My only claim to fame is that I’m the most experienced visitor of technological facilities,” he once said. “I’ve been doing it professionally for forty years. I can claim to have petted the first microchip on the head.” The thousands of books in his library included substantial collections devoted to religion, wildlife (with a particular passion for ornithology), conservation, sports, and horses as well as poetry and art. His little recognized artistic talent ranged from his oil painting to a flair for designing jewelry, including a gold bracelet entwined with E and P and set with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires that he had given to his wife on their fifth wedding anniversary.

By 1984 he had written nine books—anthologies of speeches, essays on religion, philosophy, science, and conservation, as well as the complete rules for competition carriage driving. He had also appeared on the documentary series Nature to plea for the preservation of rain forests in Brazil—a cause his son Charles would take up decades later. In 1982 he began driving a Bedford Smith electric van around the Sandringham estate, and the solar panels he installed there were among the first to be used in Britain—an “energy saving,” he conceded, rather than a replacement for other sources.

“Sometimes I would take an idea to the Queen—not a constitutional issue, because she would ask her private secretary for that,” recalled one of her former courtiers. “She would say, ‘What does Philip think?’ She would make it clear that she wanted you to take the idea to him first, rather than clutter her time with him talking about routine business.”

In his discussions with his wife’s advisers, “Prince Philip would ask for lots of lines of inquiries,” the courtier said. “She might say, ‘Have you thought of x or y?’ It would not be the same way you would engage with Prince Philip. It is not that the Queen does not have the mind for it, but there is a lot that comes across her desk, and she is not the sort to zero in and peel the skin of the onion away every time until you get to the heart of it. He has a sort of Defence Staff rigor, the ability to pull an idea to bits, find the good parts and the parts that need work. You take it back to the Queen once you know that Prince Philip’s view is there, and then you go over it. You know if he is happy with the idea, she will probably be too.”

A crucial issue facing the Queen in the mid-1980s was an unprecedented top-to-bottom review of the administration and expenses at Buckingham Palace conducted by David Airlie, who became her Lord Chamberlain on December 1, 1984, at age fifty-nine after retiring as chairman of Schroders, the venerable merchant banking firm. As a lifelong friend, he was a known quantity. One of his favorite photographs shows Airlie with five-year-old Princess Elizabeth on his fifth birthday after his parents had given him a shiny pedal car. When his father suggested he let the princess ride in it, David resisted mightily until he finally yielded. In the picture, she is happily steering the car while the future 13th Earl of Airlie is pushing it with a furious scowl on his face.

The Queen knew that Airlie was due to retire from banking at the end of November, the same time that Chips Maclean was retiring from the Lord Chamberlain post after thirteen years running the household at Buckingham Palace. Maclean, who had served in the Scots Guards with Airlie, asked if he would consider taking on the job. Soon afterward Airlie was at Sandringham on a shoot when the Queen said, “Do you really want to be Lord Chamberlain?” That was the extent of his job interview with his future boss, but in fact a good deal of thought had been given to his recruitment.

Airlie was known as a tough and highly successful businessman as well as a debonair aristocrat—just the sort who had the credibility and expertise to bring a fresh eye to Palace operations. He was struck immediately that Elizabeth II was “enormously practical” and “extremely businesslike.” If he wrote her a memorandum requiring an answer, she would invariably return it within twenty-four hours. If not, he would know that she hadn’t made up her mind and wanted “to sit on it and think about it.” Although he had been in her company socially for years, Airlie discerned for the first time her powers of observation during public engagements. “The reason why she moves slowly is that she wants to absorb what’s going on in the room and the people in the room,” he said. “You can see her looking around the room as she walks in and taking it all in and my goodness me what she takes in never ceases to amaze me.”

After he had spent six months looking and listening, he advised her to hire an outside consultant for an internal review, to ensure that the result would be evenhanded and unassailably professional. With the Queen’s backing, he brought in thirty-five-year-old Michael Peat, a fellow Old Etonian who had graduated from Oxford and received an MBA from the prestigious INSEAD business school in France. Peat had worked for more than a decade at his family’s accounting firm, KPMG, the auditor of the Palace books, and Airlie had gotten to know him while he was at Schroders.

Under Airlie’s supervision, Peat spent more than a year preparing a 1,393-page report with 188 recommendations for streamlining the household and instituting the “best practices” that were being adopted by many businesses. These included setting up a more professional personnel department and creating the Royal Collection Department to oversee the monarchy’s artistic holdings as well as the retail shops and other commercial enterprises. Among the suggestions were personnel cutbacks, but at the Lord Chamberlain’s insistence to be achieved only by natural attrition rather than by actually firing people.

Airlie kept both Elizabeth II and Philip informed as the review was under way, although not in detail. The Lord Chamberlain understood that the Queen distrusted change for change’s sake, but was open to well-reasoned argument. By the time the report was issued in December 1986, the Queen accepted everything, and within three years, 162 of the reforms were put into effect.

WHILE THE MODERNIZERS at the Palace were making progress, they were incapable of controlling the antics of the Queen’s children, three of whom made fools of themselves when they participated in a television game show. The idea came from twenty-three-year-old Prince Edward, who was trying to make his mark in the entertainment business. After graduating from Gordonstoun and earning a degree at Cambridge, he had obediently followed his family’s military tradition by enlisting with the Royal Marines. He was a keen athlete who competed vigorously at court tennis, but temperamentally was shy and sensitive.

Shortly before finishing the Marines’ six-month training course in January 1987, he unexpectedly announced that he was resigning his commission. His reservations about a military career were more mental than physical, and the press reported that his father had reacted angrily to Edward’s decision. But a letter to the Marine commandant—later leaked to The Sun—showed that Philip had in fact been understanding and sympathetic. “They always try to make him out as a brute,” the Queen Mother told Woodrow Wyatt. “In fact he’s extremely kind to his children and always has been.”

Edward instead decided to pursue his interest in theater and television. For his first project he proposed a variation on a popular show called It’s a Knockout that pitted contestants dressed in silly costumes against each other in equally ludicrous games. His idea, titled It’s a Royal Knockout, was to raise money for royal charities by featuring his siblings vying with celebrities. Charles declined to participate, and vetoed his wife’s appearance as well, but Anne, Andrew, and Fergie signed on.

Because of the proposed involvement of family members, Edward needed the approval of his mother. She was dubious. William Heseltine expressed concern that the show could cast the royal family in a poor light, and he and her other top advisers urged her to veto the project. But she succumbed to her impulse to indulge her children and gave Edward her permission. The only caveat was that her children appear as “team captains” rather than participants in the games.

Televised live on June 19, 1987, the program featured Edward, Anne, Andrew, and Fergie dressed in faux royal costumes. They hopped around shouting on the sidelines while an assortment of British and American actors including John Travolta, Michael Palin, Rowan Atkinson, Jane Seymour, and Margot Kidder engaged in mortifying stunts such as pelting each other with fake hams. During interviews with the royal participants, the show’s hosts lampooned deference with exaggerated bows that made the group look even sillier. The spectacle was more undignified than the courtiers feared, eclipsing the £1 million raised for the World Wildlife Fund, Save the Children Fund, Shelter for the Homeless, and the Duke of Edinburgh International Award for Young People.

Princess Anne in particular should have known better, having spent the better part of a decade rehabilitating her public image. When she began taking on more royal duties in the early 1970s she had appeared supercilious and short-tempered, particularly with journalists, whom she couldn’t abide. While she was riding in the Badminton Horse Trials, she famously told reporters to “Naff off!” They responded with the nickname “Her Royal Rudeness.” She couldn’t shed her prickly temperament, but she eventually earned widespread respect if not affection for her tireless efforts on behalf of her charities, particularly Save the Children. Just six days before the Knockout program, the Queen had rewarded her daughter’s hard work and professionalism by designating her “The Princess Royal,” a title reserved only for the eldest daughter of the monarch.

Edward compounded the embarrassment at a press conference after the show. “Well, what did you think?” he asked, prompting laughter among the more than fifty reporters. He was so annoyed by their reaction that he stalked out, and the press called him arrogant as well as foolish. The show not only managed to trivialize the participants, but the institution of the monarchy itself. The consensus at the Palace and among the Queen’s friends was, in the words of Michael Oswald, “It was a disaster and should never have been allowed.”

Given the family tensions that summer, it was probably a blessing that Britannia was out for a complete refit and unavailable for the annual Western Isles cruise. Instead, the Queen traveled north to spend two nights at the Castle of Mey—the only time she ever stayed overnight—for some quiet time with her eighty-seven-year-old mother. The Queen Mother relinquished her own bedroom, with its views of her prize Aberdeen Angus cattle and North Country Cheviot sheep out in the pastures, and moved into “Princess Margaret’s Bedroom,” which had never actually been slept in by her younger daughter, who dismissed Mey as “cold, drafty, and expensive.”

The two queens took walks through the nearby woods and down to the sea, and attended the village of Mey’s version of the Highland games on a muddy football field. In the evenings, the Queen Mother hosted jolly dinner parties with friends from the area, including the local minister, who brought his guitar. After dinner he played Scottish songs and everyone, including the Queen, sang along with gusto.

Several months later, Martin Charteris told Roy Strong that the younger generation of the royal family had been “stripped naked” and needed to “put the mystery back.” The faithful former courtier couldn’t have anticipated how much worse the Queen’s problems with her children would get.

BY THE LATE 1980s, all three marriages were showing signs of strain. In 1985 Diana had taken up with one of her bodyguards, Barry Mannakee, who had a wife and two children, and in November of the following year, over dinner at Kensington Palace, she began an intense romance with Captain James Hewitt of the Life Guards, who had been her riding instructor. Charles, meantime, had resumed his affair with Camilla in 1986 for her “warmth … understanding and steadiness.”

The tabloids didn’t yet know about these infidelities, but they periodically reported rumors about troubles in the Wales marriage after they stayed in separate bedrooms during a state visit to Portugal and then took a number of holidays apart, even on their sixth anniversary. While the Queen was unaware of the extent of their estrangement, the tension was obvious enough in the autumn of 1987 that she invited them to meet with her one evening in Buckingham Palace shortly before they were due to leave for an official tour of West Germany. She urged them to pull themselves together, and for a time thereafter they seemed to heed her advice.

They had not in fact reconciled. Rather, they were giving each other “civilized space,” with Charles operating mainly out of Highgrove in Gloucestershire, and Diana out of their London home at Kensington Palace, an arrangement that allowed them to maintain a more harmonious public facade in the following months. The press proclaimed a “new Diana” who was more attentive to her charities and royal duties, with 250 engagements in 1988 compared to 153 for Fergie and 665 for the indefatigable Anne.

By early 1988 Fergie was pregnant with the first of two daughters, Princess Beatrice, yet she was increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage to Andrew. His naval career meant he was home only forty-two days a year, leaving her behind in their unstylish and surprisingly modest three-bedroom apartment at Buckingham Palace. Beyond the availability of servants and other perquisites, Sarah was expected to live on Andrew’s £35,000 ($55,000) annual salary, but her extravagant tastes plunged her into debt that began an inexorable climb into six figures.

Her spending sprees were fueled in part by her competition with Diana, who had access to her husband’s Duchy of Cornwall annual income of around £1 million ($1.5 million). The sisters-in-law vacillated between rivalrous sniping and juvenile behavior—capering like schoolgirls on the ski slopes and poking rolled umbrellas into the backside of a friend at Ascot. Tabloid reporters who had previously hailed Fergie for being refreshingly approachable declared her to be the “bad royal … crass, rude, raucous, and bereft of all dignity.” Even her father fit the new stereotype when he was discovered frequenting a London massage and sex parlor.

For a number of years there had been rumblings around dinner tables in London and at house parties in the country that Anne and her husband, Mark Phillips, had both been having affairs and were leading separate lives. She was linked to Peter Cross, one of her security officers, as well as Camilla’s husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, whom Anne had dated before meeting Phillips. The definitive story emerged in April 1989 when the tabloids revealed four purloined love letters to the thirty-eight-year-old princess from Commander Timothy Laurence, the Queen’s thirty-four-year-old equerry.

In an echo of Princess Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsend, Anne had grown close to Laurence after he joined the royal household in 1986. The letters, written over eighteen months, called her “darling” and were written in “affectionate terms” without specifically suggesting intimacy. The Palace confirmed the authenticity of the letters, which The Sun turned over to Scotland Yard. Soon afterward, Anne and her husband announced their separation, while in a tacit show of support for her popular equerry the Queen kept Laurence on her staff. The public responded sympathetically but witnessing her daughter’s marital unhappiness was a blow to the Queen.

ELIZABETH II FOUND escape from her family travails in her equine pursuits. At the end of 1988 she had been reading in two American magazines, Blood Horse and Florida Horse, about a new technique for “starting” horses developed by a fifty-three-year-old California cowboy named Monty Roberts. Rather than “breaking” yearlings to accept human riders by tying their legs and heads with ropes, Roberts had devised a method based on “advance-and-retreat” body language, eye contact, and subtle signals that appeal to a horse’s herd instinct. He had grown up observing wild mustangs discipline their difficult colts, and after receiving a degree in psychology and animal science from California Polytechnic State University in 1955, he began his career training thoroughbreds, determined to avoid the violent tactics that his father had used.

The Queen sent Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, who had recently retired after twenty-six years as her Crown Equerry—the man in charge of all her horses except racehorses—to Roberts’s ranch north of Santa Barbara for a demonstration. After Miller reported that he found the new approach compelling, the Queen invited Roberts to Windsor Castle so she could judge for herself. He agreed to conduct demonstrations over five days starting on April 10, 1989. She invited some two hundred guests to watch him start sixteen horses, although she said she would be present only for an hour on the first day. If she found his technique useful, she promised to send him on a twenty-one-city tour throughout the United Kingdom to educate others in the horse world.

On the Saturday before the trials, Roberts went with Miller to the indoor riding school at the castle to inspect the newly installed fifty-foot round pen where he would work with the horses. Into the riding hall strode the Queen, dressed in jodhpurs and a handsome hacking jacket, moving quickly to speak to Miller. She was “confident, in a hurry, with things to do,” recalled Roberts. Her presence was at odds with the “indelibly engraved image” he had from sightings at Ascot, Epsom, and Newmarket—“always in a dress, a strolling lady, purse over her arm, a smile for everyone, a tranquil lady, never in a hurry in public, everything lined up for her.”

A suddenly attentive Miller made the introduction as Elizabeth II extended her hand to the stocky horseman with a deep tan and alert blue eyes. “Come show me this lions’ cage of yours,” she said. “Do I need a whip and a chair?” “She said it not only with a twinkle, but her method of addressing me—clearly her talent—was to put me at ease,” Roberts recalled.

The following Monday morning at nine, he faced not only the Queen, but Prince Philip and the Queen Mother, whose filly was first into the pen. The royal group, along with Miller, Michael Clayton, the editor of Horse and Hound magazine—the only journalist Elizabeth II ever befriended—and Lieutenant Colonel Seymour Gilbart-Denham, the new Crown Equerry, sat in a glass-enclosed viewing platform at one end of the high-ceilinged hall with arched Gothicstyle windows. The grooms stood along the walls, gazing suspiciously.

Roberts went through his paces, tossing a light cotton line toward the horse, who responded by trotting around the perimeter of the pen. Over the next fifteen minutes the filly shifted from fear to trust, encouraged by Roberts’s glances and gestures, including turning his back on the horse, until she began following him. After ten more minutes, she first accepted his touch—“joining up” in his nomenclature—then a bridle and saddle. Moments later Roberts’s assistant was riding the filly around the pen. “That was beautiful,” the Queen said to Roberts, impressed by his gentle but effective approach. Philip gave him a hard handshake and asked if Roberts could work with his carriage ponies. With tears in her eyes, the Queen Mother said, “That was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Roberts watched in amazement as the Queen began issuing orders. “That surprised me,” he said. “You don’t see the Queen doing that in real life.” Several of the girl grooms had told her they suspected Roberts of tranquilizing the filly by throwing powder into her nose. In response, Elizabeth II asked for a more rigorous test in the afternoon with two raw three-year-old stallions to be transported from the stables at Hampton Court. She had changed her plans and would be returning after lunch.

That afternoon, nearly a hundred guests were on hand. The Queen stood directly by the pen, arms folded, watching intently with her girl grooms nearby. Both of the stallions were “riled up, big, moving and sweating,” but Roberts started each of them after a half hour of training. To his surprise, the Queen’s schedule miraculously cleared and she came to the morning and afternoon demonstrations every day that week to watch him work with twenty-two horses. She called the top trainers around the country to encourage them to attend the demonstrations she had set up, and she arranged for Michael Clayton to chronicle the tour for his magazine. She even supplied a bulletproof Ford Scorpio for Roberts to drive.

The sovereign and the cowboy struck up a fast friendship, connected by their compatible view of equine psychology and their prodigious memories for racehorse pedigrees. Speaking precisely and slowly, his voice gentle but strong, Roberts answered her numerous questions over lunch in the castle gardens. “I saw a mind open up that through decades of training and interest had been encapsulated in the traditional approach,” recalled Roberts. “She saw it was a better way.”

He was struck that she “knew every move, knew why it was there and why it was executed.” When he told her something she didn’t know, she sat on the edge of her chair “with a humility like a first grader.” He was equally surprised that she offered him ideas on how to present his concepts to an English audience. “You need to ease up,” she said, “so you don’t appear to be too competitive.” Her advice showed “an incredible ability to read intention, just like a horse does.”

His friendship with the Queen changed Monty Roberts’s life. Not only did she adopt his approach for many of her own horses, she encouraged him to write an autobiography that would incorporate his training techniques. She critiqued his drafts, urged him to make major revisions, and introduced him to publishers. When The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer was published in 1997, it sold more than two million copies. The Queen praised him not only for producing the book but for “getting it right.” He has gone on to establish training centers around the world, teaching his methods to some 1,500 students a year. All along the way, the Queen has tracked his progress and received updates during his visits to Windsor twice a year. In 2011 she rewarded Roberts by making him an honorary Member of the Royal Victorian Order.

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HORSE RACING HAD always been a source of unalloyed joy for the Queen, but in 1989 the pleasure of making a new friendship with Monty Roberts and discovering the possibilities of his teachings was marred by controversy and disappointment, both on and off the track. A central character was a long-striding colt called Nashwan, the offspring of Height of Fashion, a prize mare the Queen had bred a decade earlier.

As a filly, Height of Fashion had won five of her seven races in 1981 and 1982, catching the eye of Sheikh Hamdan al Maktoum of the Dubai royal family. He offered to buy the horse for more than £1 million—at the time an extravagant amount for an untested “maiden” broodmare. Acting on Henry Porchester’s advice, Elizabeth II decided to sell, using the proceeds to buy the West Ilsley stables in Berkshire. Her highly regarded trainer, Major Dick Hern, who was living in a nearby rectory, also purchased by the Queen, then signed a seven-year lease on the stable.

Hern had worked for Elizabeth II since 1966 and also trained for other prominent owners, including the Maktoum family. He had trained two of the Queen’s most successful horses, Highclere and Dunfermline, and had been part of the group that celebrated the Prix de Diane victory at Windsor Castle.

In 1984, Hern broke his neck in a hunting accident. He was paralyzed below the waist but valiantly continued training from a wheelchair and turning out winners. Four years later he had another setback when he underwent major heart surgery. As Hern was recuperating in the hospital in August 1988, the Queen’s veteran racing manager—now known as the 7th Earl of Carnarvon after inheriting the title on his father’s death the previous year—informed the sixty-seven-year-old trainer that he would have to leave West Ilsley at the end of his lease the following year. Porchey’s insensitivity provoked an outcry in the racing world.

Hern briefly resumed training for Elizabeth II, but she announced in March 1989 that he would be replaced by William Hastings-Bass, the future Earl of Huntington. The anger at Henry Carnarvon turned toward the Queen, not only for firing her trainer, but for evicting him from the rectory where he had lived since 1962. Ian Balding, a good friend of Hern, told Robert Fellowes, “If you don’t make some sort of arrangement for Dick Hern, it will be the most unpopular thing the Queen has ever done, and she risks having her horses booed in the winners’ enclosure.”

That never happened, but something close occurred when Nashwan won at Newmarket in May, and the crowd greeted Hern, who had trained the horse for Maktoum, with “loud and sustained applause” as he “swept off his Panama” to welcome the horse into the winners’ enclosure. “The Queen has done something I thought was impossible,” Woodrow Wyatt told the 18th Earl of Derby’s wife, Isabel. “She is turning the Jockey Club and the racing world into republicans.”

The worst, at least for a competitive owner like the Queen, was yet to come. On June 7, Elizabeth II attended the Epsom Derby, the race she most wanted to win. None other than Nashwan, the horse who could have been hers, galloped to a dramatic, five-length victory.

By then, she had countermanded Carnarvon’s advice and arranged to let Hern remain at the West Ilsley stables through 1990, sharing the training with Hastings-Bass for a year. Even more significant, she allowed Hern to stay in his home for as long as he wanted. The Maktoum family bought and renovated a new stable for the veteran trainer, and he worked successfully for them until he retired in 1997. Elizabeth II was forgiven the biggest blunder of her career as a thoroughbred breeder, in large measure due to the magnanimity of Hern, who greeted her cordially after his Derby win and never spoke ill of her.

THE NEW YEAR brought a welcome resolution of one of the most troubling problems of the Queen’s reign. South Africa’s newly elected white president, Frederik Willem de Klerk, made the stunning announcement on Feburary 2, 1990, that he would free Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, who had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years for resisting apartheid policies. Nine days later Mandela walked through the prison gates as a free man. De Klerk legalized the ANC and set in motion the dismantling of apartheid and establishment of universal democratic elections.

Both leaders yielded to internal and external pressures, and their successful reconciliation earned them the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Mandela believed that the Commonwealth’s anti-apartheid stance had been vital, as was the Queen’s role in keeping the organization unified. “Sonny Ramphal [secretary-general of the Commonwealth] was sitting in London with [Thabo] Mbeki and [Oliver] Tambo from the ANC,” recalled Canada’s Brian Mulroney. “He would pass on everything that went on in the Commonwealth, and they would pass it on to Mandela. In the area of moral leadership, Mandela would say that the Commonwealth saved South Africa.”

The South African denouement came as a relief to Margaret Thatcher as she began her eleventh year as prime minister after leading the Tory party to victory three times—in 1979, 1983, and 1987. Britain’s difficult years of stringent monetary policy, high unemployment, and union busting had been eclipsed by an economic boom in the late 1980s. Thatcher had broken the back of inflation, encouraged entrepreneurs, expanded the number of homeowners, privatized state industries, reduced the size of government, and opened London’s financial markets to foreign investment. Internationally, she had bolstered the country’s image with her strong anticommunist stance (in concert with Ronald Reagan), and her economic policies offered a model to the rising Eastern European countries that had elected noncommunist governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union that began in 1989.

In July 1990, David Airlie presented the prime minister with a new proposal to fund the Civil List. Having instituted most of the Peat Report reforms, he was able to show the government that Palace officials could be “in charge of our own destiny.” His presentation called for returning to the ten-year funding set by the Civil List Act of 1972, a formula that the Labour government had superseded in 1975 with a law reverting to annual requests for increases. Thatcher agreed to raise the annual Civil List payment from £5.1 million to £7.9 million through 2000.

Persuaded by the professionalism and efficiency of the Queen’s advisers, the prime minister also shifted the job of managing the finances of the occupied royal palaces—Buckingham, St. James’s, Kensington, Marlborough House, Clarence House, Windsor Castle, and assorted properties in Windsor Great Park and the Home Park—from the Department of the Environment to the royal household, with Michael Peat serving in the new position of director of finance and property services. Thatcher defended the Civil List plan by emphasizing that it would “give much more dignity and continuity to the Crown,” adding that “an overwhelming number of people in the nation regard the royal family as the greatest asset that the United Kingdom has and greatly admire everything that it does.”

Despite Thatcher’s numerous successes, she faced growing opposition in the electorate as well as within the Conservative Party. To raise revenue for local services such as education and trash collection, she had abolished property taxes and created instead a poll tax. Every adult was required to pay the same amount, but local authorities used the new system to impose rates that caused many low-income people to pay considerably more than they had previously. The widespread unpopularity of the poll tax threatened the prospects for a Tory victory in the 1991 general election.

Inside Tory ranks, liberal members objected to Thatcher’s increasingly “Euro-skeptic” position as the European Economic Community moved toward greater integration in the post–Cold War period. She emphatically opposed abandoning the pound sterling to join a single European currency, a policy advocated by several of her senior ministers. One of them, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, resigned in protest on November 1, 1990. Two weeks later, Michael Heseltine, who had left Thatcher’s cabinet in 1986, challenged her leadership.

Although she won a majority in the first ballot on Tuesday, November 20, she needed a wider margin under party rules to win decisively. She was in Paris at the time and returned to London Wednesday morning, determined to prevail in the second ballot. But after meeting with her principal supporters, she decided to consult each of her cabinet ministers individually. One by one, her erstwhile liege men told her she would lose the vote. By that evening, Thatcher decided to withdraw her name from the second ballot rather than face defeat. On Thursday morning she went to Buckingham Palace to inform the Queen she would be resigning. “She’s a very understanding person,” Thatcher said later. “She understood … the rightness of the decision I was taking.… It was very sad to know that was the last time I’d go to the Palace as prime minister after eleven-and-a-half years.”

When the second ballot took place on the 27th, Thatcher’s nemesis, Michael Heseltine, was defeated by John Major, the chancellor of the exchequer and her preferred candidate. The next morning Margaret Thatcher submitted her resignation to the Queen, and forty-five minutes later Major arrived at the Palace to accept the sovereign’s invitation to form a government. At age forty-seven, he was the youngest prime minister in more than a century.

The Queen showed her esteem for Thatcher by quickly awarding her the sovereign’s two most prestigious personal honors, the Order of the Garter and the Order of Merit. Founded in 1902 by King Edward VII for distinction in the military, arts, and sciences, the Order of Merit, like the Garter, only has twenty-four members at a time and has included just three previous prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Macmillan. “The Garter tends to go to all ex–prime ministers in time, but the Order of Merit is mostly scientists and academics. That really mattered to her,” said her longtime adviser Charles Powell.

The Queen Mother was deeply upset by Thatcher’s departure, calling her “very patriotic” and expressing the hope that she would come to stay at Balmoral after she left office. “She said they [meaning the royal family] think it is desperately unfair and an appalling way to do things,” her friend Woodrow Wyatt recorded in his diary two days after Thatcher stepped down. “They admire her, they think she was wonderful, and she did so much for Britain, not only at home but in the world at large.” According to Wyatt, any stories about the Queen disliking Thatcher were “pure invention.”